Poagao's Journal

Absolutely Not Your Monkey

Apr 10 2019

Self promotion and self sabotage

I am terrible at self promotion. However, I am a world-class expert at self sabotage. I could teach a course in it if I weren’t so good at it.

Since childhood I’ve gotten an inordinate amount of pleasure out of making people think I am lying when I am actually telling the truth. I would tell people things that were improbable in a fashion that made them think I must be lying, and then spring the evidence on them to see their reaction. See, you thought this about me, but you were wrong! One example was in 8th grade when the announcement was made for honor roll inductees to go to the auditorium for the ceremony. I stood up and dramatically proclaimed in civics class, “Oh, the honor roll! That means me! Gotta go!”

“Sit down, TC,” the teacher said in a bored voice as I went about gathering my things in a very obvious manner.

“No, really, I’m sure I’m on the list. I must be. I clearly recall seeing my name there!”  I said with exaggerated sincerity. The teacher sighed and insisted that I sit my ass back down. After it transpired that I actually was an honor roll student,  the teacher gave me a D in the class, effectively removing me from the honor roll. Ironically (or suitably? I don’t know), it was Civics.

But that was rookie stuff compared to subsequent self sabotage I’ve accomplished. In film school, when the editing professor gave me the honor of using my student film to show everyone what could be done with editing, I demurred, not only turning down an opportunity to learn a valuable lesson, but ensuring that I was in that professor’s bad graces for the rest of the term. Why? I have no idea.

When called upon to promote whatever I’m doing, I tend to downplay my role in group projects and downright deny any praise of solo projects (“Just take the damn compliment, FFS!” is a phrase I am rather too familiar with), while taking any criticism as solid, incontrovertible proof of my inherent ineptitude. The success of the band I’m in, the movie I made, the collective I helped found, must, in my mind have come about due to the efforts of other people, though I contribute more than many of the other members. When I began administering the Hardcore Street Photography group on Flickr, I was happy to follow Justin’s lead in purposely not putting any of my own work in the group pool. But even when we’ve had guest curators, I  always refrain from submitting my own work. I’ve always tended to shy away from submitting to contests or competitions. Although I will teach workshops when invited along with other BME members, I spend most of my time teaching much the same thing to local students at a community college for a small fraction of the pay I’d get for teaching just one international workshop.

Whenever my publishers wanted me to promote my book, I would always feel uncomfortable about it and decline. When the original Chinese-language version came out and the SARS epidemic resulted in a thorough lack of media attention, I felt, “Yeah, that feels right, somehow.”

Though I spend a lot of time working on my photography behind the scenes, the moment it comes to organizing public shows, galleries, projects, etc., I suddenly have a million issues, problems with things not being perfect themes, not being of the quality I expect, even though I see a lot of projects out there, successful, well-known, well-selling projects, with the same or even worse issues.

Part of my justification for shunning self promotion has to do with a sense of “fairness”…at least that’s what I tell myself. I don’t usually submit to photo festivals and competitions where I know many of the judges, which, in this incestuous age of street photography, seems to be most of them. It would feel unfair to win, I always felt. Other people, people who obviously know the judges, don’t have any such qualms. They and others are all over the place, obviously, because they are “just like that.” That’s them, I tell myself. Not me.

Likewise with the book: Something about only being made to feel “special” because I am not ethnically Han Chinese rubs me the wrong way. I have always resisted, not only because it feels wrong to me, but because I have other issues on that front. Any media exposure I happen to get here based on that presumption also feels unwarranted to me. I don’t deserve this, I tell myself, because it’s not me they’re talking about. It’s their idea of a me that doesn’t really exist.

But those are all just my own personal dodges. It seems that society these days runs on self promotion; it’s been observed that most well-known artists throughout history became renowned due to the quality of their connections rather than the quality of their art. The exceptions are those who became famous after their deaths had spurned social connections when they were alive, people like Vincent Van Gogh and Vivian Maier, whose work became well known after their personalities were taken out of the equation. And they were truly great artists.

Ideally it shouldn’t be a choice between self-promotion and the development of one’s art, but there are only 24 hours in a day. And the call of simply making things will always seem like the perfect excuse to shy away from self-promotion to someone like me who has always known deep down that it is just not worth the effort. Sure, impostor syndrome is a thing, but that’s only for truly great people, no? Not schleps like me. They’re just being modest; I, on the other hand am actually justified in my lack of confidence. And by steadfastly refusing to promote myself or just botching up each attempt at it, I resolutely prove my own point. So there! I proclaim to myself when I note my utter lack of success in such awkward attempts. You don’t get it because you don’t deserve it! Do the math! If you were any good at any of this, someone would have noticed by now.

As DJ Khaled famously said, I’ve been playing myself. 

 

This state of being wears on me, to be honest. How many decades can one continue in such a fashion? In an attempt to try to keep living with myself and other people in some fashion, I’ve recently taken some friends’ advice to try a more structured form of meditation. The self-examination aspect of this process has been eye-opening in some ways, as a rigid and practical evaluation of exactly why I feel this way about myself often reveals no objective, practical reason to see things this way. Rather, my life has been lead on the fringes of various demographic assumptions and identities for so long that my subsequent lack of traditional connections with many groups has resulted in a feeling of invisibility and lack of consequence as well as a heightened sensitivity to others’ erroneous expectations in these respects. Thus the early, clumsy attempts to force others to see beyond an illusion of me.

As I don’t “fit” in the traditional fashion, there doesn’t seem to be a modus operandi out there for me, an apparently round plug not fitting in a round hole, as it were, resulting not only in the puzzlement of both the round and the square pieces, but a general dismissal from both. In fact, this was most likely one of the main reasons that I came to identify with Taiwan so strongly, it being a nation that is similarly “invisible” i.e. disconnected from the traditional mode of connection with the world around it. Especially before the Internet era, when many more types of existence came to light.

The natural response to such dismissal and disconnection is a general withdrawal into self distraction…how can one put any stock in connections that don’t work? But turning inward on oneself is a recipe for disaster, a vicious cycle of self-loathing that cannot end well. For a long time I’ve used a combination of walking and photography as a kind of meditation in this respect, wrenching the focus of my mind’s lens outward instead of inward, though always mindful of the reflections of my inner thoughts in my work, themes of loneliness and isolation and seemingly unlikely connections revealed by other people immersed in their own personal challenges to the swirl and eddies of public life. Basically getting out of my own head, because there is a reflection of reality in photography that other forms of expression lack. Though I love writing and music, it is photography that has been how I’ve dealt with the world.

I have no neat, snappy conclusion to any of this; I continue to be puzzled by myself, and these are questions to be lived rather than resolved. But I am trying to come to grips with the lack of grips amid all the illusion of said grips. The reality is that we are all connected, as Soth has intimated in his most recent work, and perhaps misrepresenting this big hot mess in terms of self-promotion and self sabotage itself is a false dichotomy that only wastes our precious time. The true nature of our connection may be much more complex than we can possibly fathom, but that doesn’t mean we can’t at least try.

 

 

 

posted by Poagao at 12:18 pm  

No Comments

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.