Self Promotion Monsters

So on Fri­day, I announced that I’m doing a thing – a live paint­ing marathon and auc­tion. Which on the one hand, I’m totally excited for. And on the other hand – oh my god. So nervous!

It’s just trig­gered all of my fears and all of my monsters.

Self pro­mo­tion

It kinda makes me want to throw up. Even those words – the pro­mo­tion of my self. Ick. Ew. Ugh.

And I feel so ridicu­lous for doing this. All of my per­sonal mon­sters and demons are yelling. Loudly.

“No one wants your art! Stop both­er­ing peo­ple! No one’s gonna come and sure as hell nobody’s gonna bid on that paint­ing! Stop annoy­ing peo­ple with your stu­pid self promotion!”

Yeah. Friendly, right?

It’s hard not to lis­ten to them as well. I woke up this morn­ing in a ner­vous sweat, going, “What on earth am I doing? No one’s gonna show up for this!”

The worst part is that some­times the mon­sters are right. I mean, they have a point. Maybe no one will show up. Maybe no one will bid on the paint­ing. It’s per­fectly plausible.

Ter­ri­fy­ing. But plausible.

How do I deal with it?

I ask myself what the worst pos­si­ble out­come is. What is the absolute worst thing that could hap­pen here? And can I live with it?

For this sit­u­a­tion, the worst that could hap­pen is no one watches, I talk to myself for 3 hours straight, no one bids on the paint­ing and every­one is so annoyed and mad at me for even dar­ing to think I could do some­thing and assume other peo­ple might care, that all of my sub­scribers unsub­scribe and all of my Twit­ter fol­low­ers unfol­low and my busi­ness dis­in­te­grates into the ground. (That last bit might be a tad extreme.)

Can I live with that? Can I live with no one watch­ing? Can I live with no one buy­ing the paint­ing? I think so. I mean, it’s mor­ti­fy­ing to be talk­ing to just your­self for 3 hours. Painful even. But I can live with it. And while there’s always a part of you that’s sad and maybe a tiny bit ashamed if no one buys the paint­ing, but at least I get to keep it and look at it myself every day. So not all bad.

And I don’t think every sin­gle sub­scriber I have would leave because I decided to hold a day long live paint­ing show, auc­tion off a paint­ing and tell them about it. Even though the mon­sters yell that they prob­a­bly would. And that I’m hor­ri­bly self­ish for tak­ing up people’s time, for think­ing that any­one even gives a shit about my art.

And you know what? Some­one did unsub­scribe when I sent out an email to my newslet­ter list telling them about it. Oof.

To be com­pletely hon­est with myself though…

I suck at mar­ket­ing myself. I mean, I’m not com­pletely awful. But I get so tripped up by my own fears, that I lose that con­nec­tion to myself. And I stum­ble over words and what to do because I’m just so embar­rassed about pro­mot­ing myself. I think in the end, I just make it worse.

I don’t really have any con­clu­sions here. Just think­ing out loud.

If you wanna join me on Wednes­day, that’d be super nice. Make me feel a lit­tle bit better.

The link to all of the info is here.

About the Author:

Sarah Lacy will be one of our fea­tured artists in the com­ing weeks and she will also be a reg­u­lar con­tributer here on the blog. She is an amaz­ing young artist who drips wis­dom and pas­sion, for life and art, so much that she clearly is an old soul. She is rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the energy, self insight and pas­sion we des­per­ately need in the gen­er­a­tion of artists and cre­atives who will replace us.

Sarah makes “art that reminds you to dream, to breathe, to laugh breath­lessly in the rain”, in doing so she hopes to help peo­ple learn “to feel again”.

Sarah’s pas­sion and love for what she does has been chal­lenged by the her con­stant com­pan­ion of Chronic Fatigue Syn­drome. As a per­son who knows all to well the chal­lenges of liv­ing with a debil­i­tat­ing chronic dis­ease I was impressed with her courage, open­ness and unwill­ing­ness to sur­ren­der. She has a lot to tell us not only of art but also of life…

You can find Sarah here:

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