Farewell might be too strong of a word, granted, I sort of wish it was a well-and-true cut-and-dry farewell. But life doesn’t exist in the black and white, it exists in the grey. So a “farewell to social media” for me means… something much more grey.

The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020/2021 was a nightmare hellscape apocalypse disaster that was either a party for some (get vaccinated) or a chance to hibernate for others… or again, something in between. It was a year I started off so excited for – my mom finishing her cancer treatments, my biggest book release, a book tour, a wedding, a honeymoon, and hopefully the year my health finally made a tangible recovery. That all came crashing down and thank God, my mom did make a good recovery from her cancer treatments, but basically nothing else went according to plan. A book tour cancelled, a wedding postponed, and my health… got so much worse.

Life exists in the shades of grey and unfortunately nuance is often lost online. You can make blog posts, long videos, huge captions, TLDR breakdowns of said huge captions, but what we so often fail to do is approach our world with the nuance it deserves because we are all flawed people with limited time and black and white thinking is, frankly, easy. Humans are flawed by nature – we are fraught with inconsistencies and hypocrisies that the internet can put under a microscope. No matter how much we try to do our best and be some definition of “good” everyday, or achieve a positive impact on this world, we are still going to have a past, moments of things we look back upon with shame, or even years of behavior we find embarrassing and disagree with our ways of thinking and behaving.

I do. You’d be lying if you said you didn’t.

As people we should be striving to be better, to learn from our mistakes and the world around us, to surround ourselves with people who better ourselves. I want to say “always striving to be better”, but honestly you need a break and need to live in those pauses because “always” is just another way to express black and white thinking… and the concept of overworking yourself. So ultimately we should hopefully feel that we are growing and each year learning to live within the grey of what it means to be human… but hopefully a better human than we once were.

Artists do this. The process of growing and bettering oneself feels so intrinsic to being an artist in the same vein that being an artist is so intrinsic to understanding humanity – we work hard to better our craft and better our skills to achieve some sort of intangible “greatness”. Art exists in the grey, because what is “Good Art™”? If you ask any person, it means something different. Good Art™ to you could mean Wes Anderson and Michelangelo. Good Art™ to me might mean Hannah Gadsby and Albert Bierstadt. It’s why we, as a collective people, can look at Matisse and Ava DuVernay and Mary Blair and Deborah Butterfield and and say “look at this Good Art™”. Good Art™ rarely becomes what it is because of performing the act of growth in front of others. It usually happens in private with time and space, in the moments of pause where clarity is observed and the understanding of life just suddenly hits differently than it previously had. That is where growth happens, where stories are breathed life into, and where artistic leaps come from. At least for me, a lack of nuanced thinking would be me saying that this is 100% true, because many need performance to persevere and feedback go grow. I, however, can only handle so much of that. Contrary to how I think I might come off, I can barely handle an unasked for stream of feedback whether it be good or bad, or something in between.

Nuanced thinking deserves time too. We cannot achieve a nuanced view of the world when we are so ready to proclaim things as good or bad at the drop of a tweet. Yes… somethings are just bad and I don’t need to reference what things those things are, but some things are simply bad with no argument to it. However between the bad and good, we have this grey space and that grey space takes time to understand in order to live in it. I certainly don’t do this with any sort of perfection to be preaching, but I try. I practice and in the quiet of life, I think in a much more grey nuanced way than I often project online or even in my art. That nuance is something I am practicing more regularly to incorporate into my life and art… for while I am an artist, my life is more than my art.

I am more than what I create.

As you grow older or have had hardships in life, it is easy to become less nuanced and to see the world with a more jaded black and white view. I feel like maybe that’s where I was going, but I knew I didn’t want to head there. I wasn’t living for the pauses within the grey space of life – the valleys that come after the peaks where the air is full of grey, so still, both silent and loud… and the world feels so expansive. I was living for the peaks and when I crashed into the valleys, instead of looking at the horizon and taking my time to experience the grey, I was rushing to get back to those peaks for fear of what my brain would let me feel. I was doing everything to be a Good Person™ without realizing being a Good Person™ is so damn nuanced and subjective, just like Good Art™.

Social Media is not to blame for any way I was living my life, but what I noticed was that it encouraged me to not have to pause in the valleys because I could distract myself with other people’s lives and watching what felt like all these people excel at being a Good Person™. It filled my head with noise and made it feel easier to manage when life was otherwise full of that uncomfortable creeping grey pause. When I hit another health hardship, something that for me has no official diagnosis and is currently in the grey, I realized my life needed to change. I needed to breathe in the grey and live in it. I needed to learn that some days were great followed by a crash and other days… just… are. But mostly, I needed to not numb myself out by endlessly scrolling and feeling my anxiety rise with the “I should make this art”, “I should post more often”, “I should talk on this”, “I wish I had a cool studio like that artist”, “I want to be more financially secure like that person”, “I wish I was more of a Good Person™”. The shoulds, wants, and wishes that present themselves to you on social media are so hard to not see with a good or bad lens: them Good Person™, me Bad Person™.

I am fucking flawed. I am human. I am messy and imperfect. I have shame in who I was and who I have been. I regret many past actions and some of the things I have shared online.

I regret sharing my endometriosis story. I helped thousands of people get help with that story, but I edited part of it after a doctor complained to the editors at The Lily, who made me either change it or risk not having it published. I compromised and changed it so it got published and… I regret compromising. I also don’t like that people repost that art edited with their infertility stories. Infertility stories that I don’t relate to, that the comic is not about… stories that scare me and upset me using my body as example of something I have not experienced. I don’t like that people post it without credit with simple captions, when the story is fraught with pain. 14 years of pain, humiliation, bad doctors experiences, and general upset… all to get a diagnosis that took so long, my body is still healing and going through pain years later (my endometriosis is believed not to have grown back, phew). Many days I wish that I had just shut up and not felt like my art was the only way to help people find help. But I did. And because of that, I did tangibly help many. At what cost? I don’t know.

While I have regrets about this, it also gave me a question I have pondered now deeply for two years with no detectable answer – sorry, the answer lives in the grey. The question in question is: why do we share things online? When I share art online, I am making free content. I have never gotten paid to post on instagram and I am not an influencer. All the things I post that aren’t about my books or other projects that paid me, I post for free. I use my free time to make something to share it. In the words of April Ludgate, “Come on, time is money, money is power, power is pizza, pizza is knowledge, let’s go.” Sure, on one hand posting online is a form of promotion, and I know that better than anyone because I was discovered online and got a book deal from a viral infographic. But I don’t owe anything to the internet just because I my career took off from a viral post and I also don’t owe the people that follow me just because I have a small platform to follow. I have made a lot of educational content for free including infographics, short films, and deeply personal stories about my own upsets. While not everything I need to post online needs to be an advertisement for you to buy something from me, I do wonder about that time. I could spend time doing that, or I could use my time where I need to… to pause and do other things to fulfill other parts of me so that I can be a well rounded person… and learn to be a better artist.

To me, the pauses are overall much more rewarding than spending that time making free content. Again though, this is a grey area… sometimes I will post something online that I have made but I usually ask myself what the point is before I do it. I make art often, even in the pauses of my life… but not much of that art needs to be shared because pauses in life are like pauses in art – sometimes it’s just you working through something. Not everyone needs to see you work through how you feel about something or work through your next breakthrough. You don’t see my outlines and notebooks full of notes for my future books or stories, you don’t see my sketch books or pages of watercolors. For me, not sharing can be really good, because I need to figure out how I feel about myself and my art… in a pauses of life… before I share things.

The pandemic afforded me space to exist in a pause. The world paused, and so did all my plans. It was devastating and in that silence, I had the privacy to deal with health setbacks that otherwise, I might have had to deal with more publicly. I am not thankful to this deadly virus – don’t twist my words. It is far more nuanced than that… when the world paused, I had to also. I had to exist in the pauses and uncomfortable grey spaces that normally I would have done anything to avoid. So because of that, I pulled back from being online. I pulled back from numbing myself and feeling badly about myself because of other Good Person™(s) on the internet. I limited my sharing to be about books and sometimes, a sketch or painting here or there. But mostly, I want the pauses of life to be my own and feel honest to how I feel. I want to be able to breathe in the grey spaces and feel uncomfortable with how loud and quiet they can be. I need to be allowed to just exist in the world, listening to the trees rustle in the wind, relearning how to use my body, and sometimes struggling to do things physically… all in the privacy of my own grey spaces.

This is all to say something I wonder if anyone even needs to hear. You don’t need another think piece on the pandemic, a lecture about extending grace to others, or even another proclamation about someone taking a break from the internet. But here is mine, I have been adjusting and will continue to adjust what, where, and how much I post online. Please know that it isn’t for a lack of caring or any sort of unbridled apathy… but much more instead a path of caring for myself. Maybe somedays I will post sketches from my sketch book or more personal thoughts, but also maybe I will just post some things about my books and that could be all for a while. I don’t know. The answer isn’t being 100% offline or 100% online, it isn’t black and white, the answer exists in the pauses and grey space. I will be where I want to be when I want to be, which sometimes might be more or less. I will allow myself to grow and let that growth be imperfect and flawed.

Hopefully in the process of this, I will continue to strive to be a better person and more well rounded creator. For that is all I can truly hope for all of us.

Love,

Lily

P.S. This has only been edited by me on purpose. I am a critically acclaimed published author, which is no excuse to shit on if I have bad spelling or grammar… because I am fucking flawed as both a human and creator and I felt like this post was best left… with it’s flaws. Just like me. Just like the things I create.

artist flawed person professional artist social media social media hiatus