Time to attach my phone to the tripod and work on some illustrations.

I have a little window of time. A space. Some art supplies. A tripod.

It’s a new day.

Time to give it another go.

Some days this feels like I’m not moving forward

The mock up has taken weeks and still isn’t printed. Another Friday with another reason why it’s not. The last email from them was confusing until I realized they didn’t read the instructions I sent off weeks ago. They are closed on the weekend.

Social media has me wondering. After several ‘Learn more’ clicks, I’m convinced that everyone just wants my email address and to sell me something that promises things it can’t possibly deliver. Want to lose weight? I need to eat more food?! For only $37 or $97 or $199 I can learn how to grow my business, write a blog, publish a book, sell my art, tone my muscles, become an affiliate marketer. It’s easy! So easy that I’m stupid not to be doing it. Only a few cicks and I can make thousands while I sleep, lose weight and tone up with a 12 minute workout once a week. One woman just said Im not eating enough carbs, vegetables don’t count, what I need is to eat bagels or muffins along with more fat in order to gain muscle. Another said if I’m craving sugar, it’s because I need to eat more sugar. Uh. My deep dive into trying to learn about this, is leaving me conflicted. And confused. And distracted. Does anyone wonder if any of this is factual? I guess no one cares about that.

What do they care about? I can’t tell. I don’t even know what I don’t know. My BS meter is getting a work out anyway.

I wrote Beatrix Betterfly after hearing about teens and preteens getting caught up in the filtered frenzy of trying to measure themselves against people they saw online. Many were discovering the magic of looking better than real and everyone else was buying it. This got worse during Covid because actual interactions were few and far between. How can anyone compare to a filtered well lit, carefully posed version of someone they see for five seconds online? Lots of kids were comparing their real faces with perfected almost cartoon versions of online faces. Eyelashes alone were out of control.

I wonder if anything on the internet is what it appears to be. There must be a few things. I need to sidestep this whole subject because I’m losing time worrying, when what I ought to be doing is brainstorming a new way, a new approach. Im not the first person to be deterred by the internet. Do I want to let it make me quit?

No I do not.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CVFC4DXT?ref_=cm_sw_r_apin_dp_8S5GX5BDHKXMS1BFWY1R&language=en-US

Why am I letting this get to me? How can I shake it off? I think what I have here today is a perfect opportunity to practice using my own tools.

What will make me feel just a tiny bit better? Have I meditated? Am I breathing consciously? Maybe I’m hungry…

Hmmm

I walked away and I fixed myself an egg on buttered toast and a cup of tea. Everyone has their comfort foods. This is a bit more than comfort for me, I used to make for my kids. Maybe you’ve seen it with the hole in the bread, they always loved the little toasted cutout piece. When I was a kid it was more no nonsence. Regular buttered toast with a poached or coddled egg. You actually eat it cut up as if you are still a toddler, too young to cut your own food. I’m acting like a baby (waaaa why do people keep unfollowing me…) I might as well eat like one.

After a fun trip to find something called ‘Guanciale’ and stopping at a new ice cream place. I’m enjoying another cup of tea and some painting time.

I’m already feeling better. I’m not sure why this one thing is so discouraging for me. I’m not sure about any of it right now, but it’s okay. I’ll take a little step back and do some things that are more fun and helpful, because regulation is important, and man, was I dysregulated!

One of the nice things about being old and out of school and not even having kids in school, is not having to care if I am liked or not. It has been years since I worried about if I was going to be rejected. I don’t know. I have a comfortable friend base and I’m fairly confident I can make friends easy enough.

That is until recently. When I was a kid we moved a lot. My dad’s career path involved a fair amount of transfers, so I found myself as the new kid at a new school in a completely new town enough times to recall that feeling easily. It didn’t help that I had a terrible sense of direction.

I spent a good chunk of my childhood lost. which is a little like how I feel on instagram. As a new kid, I didn’t ‘get’ things about the new school, sometimes, for weeks. Teachers cared about different things, Basic subjects were taught differently, desks were different, kids were different, lunch was different, recess was a nightmare. Even ‘cool’ was redefined in every new place. Always there was a core group who led the pack and just seemed to effortlessly confidently crack the like-ability code, or maybe they wrote it.

I haven’t lost my school girl admiration for whatever that quality or mastery is. One thing I remember is that making friends in our neighborhoods was way easier. School had so many rules or norms or things you had to understand. Kind of like hashtags and algorithms. No one in the neighborhoods seemed to care about what was trending, we just made up what we wanted to be into. If I stumbled into a school and managed to figure it out quickly enough, I made friends, if not, I just had to hang in there until the next move At least I had friends in the neighborhood .

I didn’t come away from any of this with good skills or even enough experience to help me out in adulthood, (or Facebook , clearly) It’s possible I have the tiniest bit of PTSD instead. I’m fine now, or at least I was, but my present baffling experiences with social media has me wondering.

Do I HAVE to do this? Is there no other way?

Once, I moved to a new school and was asigned a very strict teacher. On one of my first days, as I was scrambling to get an assignment right, my pencil lead broke. I needed to sharpen it to continue working. The teacher had left the room and when she came back, many hands went up. Apparently there was a rule about getting out of your seat when the teacher left the room (even to sharpen your pencil) and apparently these new kids enjoyed ratting me out. The new teacher showed no mercy, she gave me, shy new kid that I was, a punishment I had never heard of before. I had to copy dictionary pages. The kids seemed oddly glad. There I was thinking I was doing the right thing, only to find out I was not. I had trouble fitting in at that school, it wasn’t a good fit for me. It might be that social media and I are not a good fit either.

I didn’t get to choose if I wanted to quit school in the fifth grade. I wonder if it’s not optional to quit trying to do Instagram or Facebook if I want to get a book or an idea out into the world either…

Social media, man. It’s a whole thing. Kudos to everyone making and recording and posting content! It’s, well, wow, a LOT!

Here’s an embarrassing confession. I have, as of a few hours ago, finally figured out how to make and post a reel on Instagram. Everyone said it would be easy and actually it kind of is. At least the basic of the basics. I’ve always been the last one to catch on to things, so I know to be patient and keep trying, but it’s been years! I always wondered why when I tapped on Reel, my own squinting face popped up in a horror movie like surprising kind of a way. This was never the case with others it seemed, and truly it was part of my resistance with each time I decided to try. (You probably know it’s one small swish to change that).

When I first started with Insta, I was Facebook phobic, only because it seemed like no matter what I posted, a well meaning someone would give me very constructive, not so comfortable criticism. I get plenty of that outside friend circles in the art arena, plus I didnt love the embarrassment, or the added stress over family photos, so I pretty much left Facebook to the people who were good at it. The photogenic ones with really awesome relationships and award winning offspring. I had to just love my awkward life and Facebook didn’t help me personally with that at all.

So the day before we started out on my ‘book tour’ for Peaceful Hearts’, knowing I was supposed to have an ‘online presence’, I signed up with Instagram and went on to post. a lot, but only with the basic thing. A friend schooled me on hashtags, which I sort of understood, but not really. I never made it past 498 followers. Not once, and when people unfollowed me , I was like a third grader being unfriended on the playground, devastation with so many questions…

I learned things. I learned that a person such as myself, Canadian decent, can not quote Martin Luther King even on his holiday. I learned that only a very small handful of people care even slightly about me or my quest or even my inspired book(s). We can thank social media for taking over where my parents left off. I have remained humble and have not gotten big headed over any part of any of it.

Today, I made three reels! Yes. 3. I hope I can remember how I did it tomorrow. I think I may have linked Facebook and even my website. Likely not, but I am getting closer. If something happens and I somehow manage to acquire 500 followers, I can not promise anything about my swelling head, did I mention that I figured out how to make AND post a reel?! Yep, I did that.