The Social Dilemma

The Social Dilemma: Better Late than Never?

When I told my friends and family I was going to write for a blog, they laughed. As a career performing artist, playwright and director, my aversion to all things tech was no secret. “I embrace the live, the real,” I would snap at anyone who dared suggest I give social media another chance.

A year ago, the COVID-19 virus struck Colorado one week before my latest show was supposed to open. We postponed, hoping maybe by the summer . . . well, we all know how that played out. “Two weeks to flatten the curve” became the unfunniest joke of 2020. Faced with the choice between presenting bits of the show online and delaying again, perhaps indefinitely, the majority of my actors chose to wait, not yet ready to give up on the possibility that things might be normal again soon. We cited valid enough reasons for our decision: the show was a musical, and several of our singers had suffered through Zoom rehearsals and performances with other groups, only to be sabotaged by poor sound-quality and unstable internet connections. Now, a year later, I think we made a mistake. Not by choosing to delay, but by refusing to speak the truth, even to each other, about why we made that choice. The real reason we decided not to adapt our show to the circumstances was because we were afraid, and we lacked the emotional bandwidth to process that fear and put on a worthy performance simultaneously.

The same could be said of my decision to stay away from social media for so long. It was the right decision for me, but I wish I would have been more honest, with myself and others, about why I made the choice. After several high school experiences I’ve only recently found the freedom to classify as traumatic, I wanted nothing to do with that toxic environment. The thought of staying in touch with anyone except a handful of true friends, through fledgling social media platforms like MySpace or by any other means, gave me hives. In college, I was too busy living my big moment in the Big Apple to think much about what anyone might be doing online. Around the time I got married and had my first daughter, Facebook was just taking off, and even then I was satisfied to watch from a safe distance as my husband set up an account to share baby pictures with our distant relatives. As time went on, though, I felt more pressured to participate. Fellow writers and performers started throwing out words like “brand” and “platform.” I’d shudder, feeling like some kind of cross between toilet paper and a politician. My whole career had been built upon the ability to slip into different personas, and now I was supposed to package, label and sell myself, as just me? Most days—between working a  full-time-plus job as an arts administrator, educator, director and performer, attending graduate school and raising kids thousands of miles away from family support—I didn’t even know who that “me” was anymore.

Flash forward to last year: my shows cancelled, no way to safely visit friends and family even in the same city. I finally felt like I’d run out of excuses. I got on Instagram and instantly found a world of people just like me, scared and seeking connection. I Zoomed (that’s a verb now, right?) with friends, and friends of friends, that I hadn’t seen in months, or years. As soon as I realized we were all figuring out this new way of life together, and that like the “real” world, the online world is much smaller than it seems at times, I felt a lot less intimidated.  

For me, the decision to finally participate in social media was better late than never, but also better late than too early. I know now that I was right about not having strong enough boundaries and coping techniques to face the deluge before. I had to be honest with myself about the fear behind my reluctance to engage before I could show up in an authentic way. And like any good writer, I had to do my research first. Over the past couple of years, I’ve attended workshops, listened to seminars and interviewed other writers about what social media can and can’t do for us. Here are my two biggest take-aways:

1. Take care of yourself. Feel free to unfollow, block or take a break any time you feel triggered, overwhelmed, or otherwise yucky. Social media is supposed to serve you, not the other way around.
2. Follow your heroes, mentors and mentees. But most importantly, follow each other, your RMFW pals. If every member of RMFW followed every other member, we’d all have enough connections to push back the FOMO complex. Only engaging big names perpetuates the cycle of market exclusivity. Together, we have the power to shift the landscape of marginalization.

For more of my (and others’ more expert) advice and resources on how to use social media in a healthy, productive way, you can tune in to the RMFW podcast with Mark Stevens next month. In the meantime, please reach out in the comments below or on social media. Or both. And if you still don’t feel inspired to build a big online presence, that’s ok, too. As I tell my actors, sometimes a standing ovation from one person you respect means more than a full house of blank stares.