Here's the question for today:
If I have 1,085 "friends", why do most of my posts get 5 comments and my stats show 25 page views a day?
I have fallen into the Internet hole, friends.
I believed and it swallowed me whole.
I cannot keep up; I cannot compete: I don't want to.
I don't have it in me to brand myself; write and pitch a book; put up online courses; publicize my classes; post a piece of artwork a day; and participate in the hundreds of charity art groups, auctions, etc that are sent to me by my "friends".
I don't read books; I buy them after I read about them on other people's blogs.
I don't read the magazines sitting on my night table; I look at the photos from online ones.
I don't make art; I look at the blogs of other artists.
I don't hang out with my friends; I "like" their statuses.
I am the wrong generation for today's in crowd.
_________________________
I just spent the weekend with a lot of "older" artists. We were around when the Internet was Prodigy and email lists where we wrote passionate posts about art and creativity and writing. I've known some of these women since the mid-90's.
We're all tired. We don't want to do class samples because no one signs up for our classes. We don't want to be told that we need to write a book or we'll get bumped for a teacher who has one. We don't want to travel the country and appear at the trade shows and come up with a line of product.
We want to make art, to write, to craft. We want to plunge into our work for our work. We want to unplug and go back to the old days.
But we're not crazy. We know there's no such thing as going back. Life is what it is. The choice is whether we want to do it anymore.
And by do it I mean remain current, topical, viable, known.
Or do we just want to fall into our work and soak it all up and lift our head in a few years and have people say, Loretta who?
I've got to get the monkey off my back. I've lost my goals, my personal enthusiasm for what I make and write and read. I will never get it back unless I unplug this laptop and hide it away. I feel like my brain has become rewired and I can't fix it.
So I am pushing "publish" and not even uploading a photo to make my post attractive for the social networks.
It's just me.
Read it or not. Leave a comment or not. This is what I have to give.
