Lessons

The other day after getting fed up with receiving multiple messages from stone sellers, I went through my followers and began blocking every one of those accounts I could find. I sat there for maybe 30 minutes and was amazed to discover just how many there were as I scrolled down the list. When I started to tire of scrolling, I went back to my homepage and realized that I had removed nearly 300 followers from my account. I had an small moment of panic at having deleted so many people from my Instagram, but what followed was a real moment of clarity.

Nearly two years ago I decided to take a break from Instagram. I had recently packed up my studio and wasn't making jewelry at the time, but I found myself glued to my personal page, looking for any reason to post little snippets of my life. Snippets that were (of course) edited, exaggerated, and staged- all to give people the illusion that I had my shit together way more than I actually did. It became such a self-involved habit that I found myself often focusing more on how I was going to share certain parts of my life rather than actually living and experiencing them. (Picture the person at the concert who spends the entire time taking video on their phone rather than actually enjoying the show, and you get the idea.) Anyway, once I became aware of this behavior I decided to put a stop to it and try a year without social media. I made a goodbye post, signed out, and deleted the app from my phone.

Here's the part where I would love to say that my year away from the gram was transformative and enlightening. Nuh-uh. Sure, I had more time for other things without constantly scrolling and taking photos of the mundane, and then posting them in wishfully interesting ways, but the reality is that I just filled in that time with other distractions. And then after visiting Texas and reconnecting with my good friend Stephen (who's a brilliant painter and stained glass artist) and talking about art all night, I realized how much I missed my trade and resolved then and there to get my studio up and running the second I got home.

Unfortunately in the world we currently live in, marketing yourself without social media is virtually impossible. I know somewhere out there, there must be successful artists who don't sell their work online, but I imagine the majority of that particular group are older, well established artists who have built up their clientele over the years and somehow managed to maintain enough of them to keep their dream alive and afloat. Apart from a handful of jewelry I had available for sale in a couple of shops in Ypsilanti, MI, two art fairs, and a few family and friend commissions, I have never sold a piece of jewelry without the help of social media. So back to Instagram I went.

The first thing I noticed when I logged back in and posted the first piece of jewelry I had made in nearly a year, was that my follower count had dropped by about 200 people. Fair enough. I've cleaned house plenty of times by unfollowing accounts that were no longer active on the platform, so I understood why people didn't want to stick around if I wasn't either. And as I continued to post more and more, I gained those followers back and then some. I had this one period last winter where I was steadily gaining followers and getting 1000+ likes on photos (a first for me). I couldn't believe it when I saw people complaining all over the place about how bad the algorithm was and how engagement was at an all time low. I was doing great! I felt sure that I could easily hit 10k and then everything would snowball from there.

Instead, I bought my first home, packed up my studio, and spent nearly a month finishing the floors in the new house, moving in, and slowly unpacking. By the time I came back to Instagram ready to share new work, my lucky streak had fizzled out and I was back to the standard 100ish likes per post accompanied by a handful of new followers a week.

Which brings me back to the stone sellers. (And to clarify, I am not talking about legitimate lapidary artists who treat their work as the art form that it is, but rather the plethora of overseas sellers who mass produce cabochons and overload your inbox with messages and photos of this crap.)

I knew on some level that a lot of the new followers I saw popping up on my page were stone sellers. I got so many messages from accounts sending me photos of poorly cut cabochons photographed in terrible lighting that I just deleted them all as soon as I saw them. But it wasn't until I started going through my followers and actually blocking these accounts that I realized just how many of them were on my page. Like I said, I blocked nearly 300 of them in 30 minutes, but I certainly didn't go through the entire 7300 people on my page, nor is it likely that I will ever manage to block them all (although I do plan on doing another sweep soon). What struck me after realizing that I had removed 300 accounts from my followers was that out of those 300, not one of them would ever be a potential customer of mine. There was also not a single name on that list that I recognized as someone who had ever engaged with any of my posts. So what was the point of keeping any of them around?

I'm no fan of the algorithm. I think it's annoying at best and downright destructive at worst. Instagram likes to showcase people with large followings and bury smaller accounts which makes it incredibly difficult to get ahead or, often, even keep up. But it struck me that all of these large artist accounts that I follow and admire are very likely to a great degree made up of the same kind of followers as mine- accounts that aren't there for you or your art, but rather to try and profit off of you. I realized so much of my jealousy over the years about follower count and likes was all an illusion, and that like everything with Instagram, it's all staged and designed to show us a false reality. And the truth is, I'm so incredibly guilty of that myself. How many selfies do you think it takes me to get one that I think is okay enough to share, and how much editing goes into it before I feel comfortable posting it? One time, I swear it was around a hundred photos. One hundred! We've been so conditioned to post only the best so that we'll get more likes and more followers that it literally makes us waste an entire afternoon. And for what? To have strange men I don't know comment on how beautiful I am followed by "please check out my page"?

Oh hell no.

I have noticed a couple of jewelry accounts with large followings start over from scratch to address the very issue of bots and stone seller accounts making up a large number of their followers. I thought it was incredibly brave and I applauded the move. I considered doing it myself, but I'm still such small potatoes that if I really want to remove all the fake accounts from my following, I can do so without having to start completely over. During that time in winter when my follower account shot up like crazy, I only gained one new customer from it. They're amazing, and I'm so grateful to have them as I am with all my customers, but they're also one out of around 1000 people who started following me during that time. One out of one thousand, three hundred of which I've already blocked. Isn't that interesting?

I know Instagram can feel like a really fake platform a lot of the time with all the advertisements and suggested following and the algorithm. But I have to believe that there is some goodness left to be found, even if you have to create it for yourself. Going forward, I'm done caring about how many followers I have, or how many likes my posts get. I have only to look through my messages to see who really connects to me and my art, and it's there that I find the confidence to keep going. There is so much to be grateful for, so many people showing their support that get overlooked or buried under the pressure and negativity of trying to compete with false numbers and robots. I'm done with all of that. The people who show me their support whether it's in likes or comments or purchases are all that really matters.

So in that spirit, and my continual effort to be more open, transparent, un-edited, and real- here is the first and only selfie I took today.

Easter Sunday, 2022. No editing, no filter.

I may not love everything about this photo, but it’s real, it’s me, and that’s enough.

On a final note I would just like to say that it is never my intention to overly complain about Instagram because honestly, without it, I would struggle much harder to make money with my art. But it is worth recognizing the ways in which social media fuels our confidence level, and contributes to our feelings about ourselves. When I used to be a full time artist, I remember regularly crying in frustration at why some people seemed to have all the luck and why I felt like I would never catch up. There are two realities I wish I had known then:

1) many of those artists were working significantly harder than I was to become successful in their craft and believing that Instagram was responsible for their success was downright insulting.

2) follower count doesn't matter one bit if the people following you don't connect to you or your work. One legitimate customer is worth more than one thousand followers any day. Quality over quantity, always.

It is such human nature to focus on the negative over the positive, and social media drives this pattern like nothing else. But I'm learning that the more layers we peel back, the more truth we can get to, and the truth about social media is that it's never really what it seems. And if it's not what it seems, then all we're doing is wasting time comparing ourselves to others when we could be focused on countless other things- things that actually matter.

In a way, I'm kind of grateful for all the annoying messages from stone sellers and bots filling up my inbox, because without them I never would have snapped and gone on a massive blocking spree and discovered the truth of where all my new followers came from. It might bruise my ego a bit when I do go back and block more of them and my account shrinks even further, but that's how I'll know this lesson was important and necessary for me to learn, which in the end is all that really counts.