Visibility Might Be Stunting Your Faves
On struggling to be seen while so visible. Yellow Brick Road.
Welcome to Yellow Brick Road, an exploration of the guided path!!
In the tweet below, Jessica Dore presents some hidden mysteries in the 6 of Wands tarot card by Rider-Waite-Smith. She explores the nuance of visibility represented by this card about triumph and success. What I have gathered from sitting with this card and its medicine is that the caveat to hypervisibility and public acclaim is being perceived by many and known by few. The interest of your audience - what they received by osmosis of witnessing your vitality and determination for any cause or purpose - acts as a pedestal which they are poised to rip you down from at any time. What a long way to fall in order to touch grass again.
Beyond the obvious takeaway of “haters gonna hate,” something else we can extract from this message is that visibility can keep us stunted for fear of having our sins aired out and being swiftly humanized for all to see. The performer, the artist, the creator is beholden to relatability, to the audience’s investment in them as “hometown hero,” to maintaining position as moral compass - but only in a direction that suits public opinion. In this case, can we label visibility success if we define success by that which is most authentic and free?
Michaela Coel’s short but mighty acceptance speech at the Emmy’s reminded us that Black women will find the well from which they derive creativity - the guiding force that can never be taken away because it wasn’t granted by anyone else but themselves - in the quiet. We’re accustom to invisibility - rarely cast, rarely chosen - which is why the false choice to chase visibility as conduit to deliverance is enticing.
It occurs to me, in my limited experience as a public-facing person with several marginalized identities, that the value of visibility is dictated by what exactly the audience cheers for. Many of the audiences consuming Black creation, fat creation, queer creation, are here for the show of hurt. They are here to see us perform suffering, to see us hemorrhage energy to demand respect, and to see us remain stunted in the despair of privileges that will never be. That is not my story. Suffering is not my brave tale.
Black women in hypervisible spaces are an ode to the impossible being within reach, while the visibility itself - the burden of public interest - acts as a ceiling to our proximity to finding peace and comfort in storytelling and creating without being exploited by our audiences. I’ve been thinking about how my career as a multi-hyphenate creative who has placed a lot of trust in public opinion to make the dream work has often been tested by visibility and its traps.
In 2017, I bought a Canon, a tripod, and a hand remote. The rest, well, is happening right now. Thanks for joining me in the future!
Then, I was a confused post-graduate in the trenches of an early life crisis and struggling with the reality that most careers, regardless of how hard I worked, would leave my fate in the hands of how white men perceived me. In an absolutely chaotic but fateful pivot, I decided to start using my strongest resource (Instagram) to break into Big Media in the “body positive” space. I could only dream of partnering with fast fashion brands like FashionNova and Forever21, the few companies willing to take a chance on a fat, Black girl establishing herself in the plus size online community. While I considered it a possibility that my content would gain traction and may eventually lead to my present life, at the time I was just trading content in exchange for fast fashion hauls and visibility.
Visible to who? Visible for what purpose? Visible for how long? All I knew was that for the first time in my life, I was ready to tell the whole truth. The truth about how the world made young women feel. The truth about the war I had been fighting with my body for decades. The truth about being unwilling to accept that the body and identities I was born into were anything but destiny. My content mostly consisted of style inspo and lusty photos with longwinded captions about reclaiming my self-image. I unfollowed the Emrata’s of the world (because no offense, but the fuck that got to do with me?) and started following people with identities and experiences I could relate to, and they related to me, and the numbers started ticking.
My newfound followers, my community, related to the damage of living in a world obsessed with making young, fat girls feel like all of their dreams were waiting for them at the end of a successful weight loss journey. They related to my posts about having loose skin from years of yo-yo dieting, pictures of me poking and prodding at my belly and thighs and deflated breasts. Regularly posting novels about the inner turmoil I’d experienced navigating diet culture and just plain old racism as a child, I ripped my heart out of my chest and wrung it dry in front of the whole world for likes, re-shares, and follows, and it was the closest thing to belonging and community I knew.
I noticed at the very beginning that cute selfies and pictures of me just being hot and fun, content without excessive oversharing of my deepest wounds, received far less engagement. Only when I wore lingerie, when I wrote 3 paragraph long captions about self-hate, when I exploited by vulnerability because I knew it would be the hit of validation we were all looking for, did people take interest in my posts. So I stuck with what worked.
Four years later, and little has changed; my highest performing posts are anger-fueled call outs, heartwrenching recounts of personal trauma, and half-naked photos. After the summer of George Floyd’s death, the stories of Black pain became trendy and many Black women were catapulted into visibility for months while white influencers #AmplifiedMelanatedVoices. Now, none of our joy-inspired and daily work is being shared.
Over time, many of my peers in the body politics space have told the same stories about big bellies and stress marks and hip dips - things I have a hard time believing still need to be “normalized” - and I can’t help but wonder if the need to maintain resonance with their audiences is keeping them stuck in a narrative loop as a human. The stories that scare them - the stories about who they’ve become since moving past childhood hurt - would get fewer likes, would amass fewer reshares and we all know it.
I get it; taking the hit in engagement for sharing work that feels honest as a creative, artist, and performer is tough. The new, changed me - who has become content with not being understood or received by everyone - has started to wonder what visibility really means in a public sphere that only claps when I serve all of me up on a platter for consumption. As exhibited by the unwarranted vitriol Lizzo - someone who opts out of society’s projections of her struggles in favor of simply living her life - has received; marginalized artists, creators, and performers are expected to feign relatability to make themselves palatable. When they don’t, they’re working upstream against biased algorithms and impossible expectations.
“You’re soooo authentic,” I hear daily. And yet their - my audience members who are perhaps fairer, thinner, and more privileged - perception of authenticity seems to only include the half of me which remains wounded and dragging behind me. Not the half of me which rejoices in the glory of having arrived in my own body and peace of mind. In the case of fat, queer, and Black storytellers, visibility often requires exploiting our deepest insecurities, even those we no longer relate to, for the sake of performing “authenticity.” When will society’s idea of authenticity include embodiment of wholeness? When will that be worthy of visibility?
“Write the tale that scares you.” - Michaela Coel
Perhaps it is age, perhaps it is experience, perhaps it is a bit of learned selfishness, but I don’t relate to the hypervisible community leaders who spend the majority of their space and time demanding businesses, authorities, and the powers that be see us. They see us with vision so fragmented, I would barely know myself in reflection. I choose to see myself by allowing many of my “wins” to exist in obscurity. No claps. No champions. By finding what I must in the silence. By trying to find a still and safe place to hear the tale that scares me - the one an audience may not cheer for because it doesn’t accommodate their insatiable taste for my tears without the nuance of my joy. But I will cheer, for the truth was told in its entirety.