Struggling with the Social Media Marketing Machine

An insight about my creative process that may point you to insights about your own creative process:

When I openly acknowledge the hard and I can compassionately witness myself and even the tiniest of suffering, the hard often lifts within a few days.

It is a part of accepting the both/and – of living in the Wild Edges of Being Human.

PS TL/DR people move on. I’m not here for your dopamine hit; my writing is here to help me and then you think differently and change your life.

Current Hard:

In my current facebook memories – are the promos and images for the course I used to teach called

Share Your Heart: Show Your Work

– a delightful and helpful course about authentic marketing on social media. The course was reverse-engineered from what delightfully worked for me in the first 7 years of moving my business online after leaving corporate.

I LOVED and enjoyed my relationship with social media.

And currently -I don’t feel that love. I am aware that my lenses are cloudy and the “lens cleaner” is in my own hand, not outside of me.

Since 2008 I have created and shared prolifically online. Since even before that, if you count my blogspot blog.

I do love to write and to process and share with words.

I did thousands of live videos and have recorded almost 200 Podcast episodes. For the last four years, I have written and then published a book from my heart.

For most of that time, it was effortless – truly 98% spontaneous overflow of my precious yellow heart

And that

Sharing My Heart and Showing My Work

allowed you all to get to know me – and many of you – hundreds – stepped forward to work with me in some way. It never felt like selling.

Recently, I have inner parts that are overwhelmed and irritated, and deeply sad about the extreme parts of crappy capitalism. My brain can’t unsee the patterns of greed. I, like many of you, often feel the burnout of crappy capitalism and the burnout of shitty social media. And yet, here I am, a capitalist, selling a high-fee service – a luxury. And my revenue has become reliant on me “Sharing My Heart and Showing My Work.”

“Content creation” in order to….. SELL has been repulsive to me. I feel like I’m standing in a house of mirrors and can’t escape it. Go viral, get followers, convert in your DMs, do this reel, do that tiktok, get famous on booktok…….

Be in the world, not of the world, became a mandate instead of an opportunity.

Of course, instead of letting it rest, I wrestle and inquire with that repulsion; I judge myself and become hard on myself – not mean, but certainly, I put pressure to come to a conclusion.

My discernment has gotten foggy, and I’ve slipped into full-on waiting for people to ASK to hire me. It’s been easier to judge others for not choosing my credibility and value than it has been to stand in it and make offers.

In writing this and speaking with my friend Jeanine – things are already starting to clear up. It makes perfect sense that those muscles would atrophy after the year I had last year. Grief and a heart attack will do that to you.

The questions I’m tenderly pondering in this content creation marketing kerfuffle:

What do I truly desire?