The Death of Creativity

The Genocide Funded By The Creator Economy

Photo by Falling Further on Unsplash

Even as I write this I feel the aches and tensions of my body, twisted and contorted from the anxiety that riddles and pains my body. I feel the pressure to perform daily. Not just as the eldest daughter, not just as a wife, but as an artist, a black femme artist. I feel driven by an economy that has turned creativity into mindless minstrel shows, predicated and preying on black creators. Creativity no longer feels like an art form it feels like a form of prison, ushering people in and out of a system built on inequality, stripping people of their identity, reducing their names down to a series of numbers and locking them away, only releasing them to perform action and the cycle repeats.

I’ve been dancing with this anxiety, neither one of us sure who is supposed to take the lead, a consistent battle for control and dominance. I don’t want to be a starving artist, I don’t want to pimp and prostitute my talent in order to turn tricks for profit. I’m no magician. But I want to eat. I want to be afforded the luxury of being able to support myself while doing what I love, while existing in my skin. My existence should be enough of a qualifier in order to live well.

I understand that creativity and art at some level is still a business and a business has costs to operations, but my sanity, my well-being is too great of an expense. This body is expensive and to treat it like a mule seems cheap. There is this endless cycle of performing for validation in the form of likes and comments, performing in order to secure brand deals and brand trips, the need to perform and shuck and jive, hiding behind, no romanticizing modern slavery. Working for pennies on the dollar for the profit that gain from you labor, your ideas. Going viral just to fill viles so that you can shoot veins with the ecstasy of being seen and garnering attention. Just to find out that virality is no longer a golden ticket, but instead a virus that never goes dormant, it just lies. It tells you over and over the same lie, that you need to be seen in order to be authentic. Authenticity is not the ability to be you, to be in your skin, to show up in all your fullness, but authenticity is now scripted lines, hooks, and gimmicks.

Photo by Randy Jacob on Unsplash

Now the idea of showing up makes me sick. It used to be I was intimidated by the idea of showing up as the fat girl. I was intimidated by the post Y2K era that called Raven Symone fat. The era that made me feel like being compared to her was a back handed comment about my weight. Their way of saying that I was pretty and funny for a black fat girl. Then I felt lost not knowing what I would show up to say, what ways did I want to share about my life, what interests did I actually have? What I did know about was being the eldest daughter and being an overachieving perfectionist. I knew what it was like to be a parentified child of a workaholic and an addict. I was an expert in ensuring that I had a stellar record with the right mix of extracurricular activities so that I could get into my “dream” school just to find out I couldn’t afford it. But this was all before talking about our trauma on the internet was cool. Now I feel overwhelmed by the thought of my creativity being yet another job. Social media being a place of work not a platform to share that which is sacred to me—my voice, my words, my art.

Social media no longer feels like an escape. It feels like a magnifying glass shining a piercing light on my anxieties, and yet I still show up anyway. Trying to learn to tango with my fears, and take the lead. I was told that fear is an indication of desire. I desire to be seen, I desire for my work to be consumed. I desire to commune with like souls, and gather in lush, hush places on and off the internet. I desire to live a romantic life, not just one romanticized for the sake of aesthetics. I desire to overconsume community and to under consume that which does not serve me. I desire to get off the timeline and get busy writing the lines of my own story, documenting and annotating the testament of my life. I desire to be remembered, to leave something behind to be cherished so that my name does not faded once I depart this earth. I desire for creativity to be creative again.