Molten

The Problem with Personal Brands

Hiiii MC-London,

It was amazing to see you in Phoenix– I missed you. I missed your face. I’ve told everyone who asked me how the trip went that, “I hadn’t seen her for like four years, but I felt like we hadn’t spent a single day apart.”

I was waxing nostalgic on the flight home, thinking about how in the world we made a friendship like this. I guess it was probably because we met when we were still hot mess teenagers. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I’m sure other people knew. I’m sure that’s why our math teacher let us sit in the back and talk through his lessons. I’m sure he knew that we needed the time to help each other through some next level bullshit.

We’ve come a long way from the back of that math class. And a lot of the distance I’ve covered has been because of you. I don’t say that to flatter you, either– it’s just true. I’ve got the receipts. You taught me things no one else did, basic things, about the power of a good manicure, an expensive haircut, and a sleek little pencil dress. You literally took me, at 19 years old, to get fitted for a bra. I might have gone my whole life wearing the wrong size (and not doing the ladies any justice) had it not been for you.

You also had a hand in introducing me to the two great loves of my life– my husband and espresso. Espresso more directly, when you used to make me fancy americanos and iced lattes in your dorm room. My partner more indirectly, when you looked at my languishing dating app profile and then completely revamped it.

I remember exactly where I was in the world, standing in the grass outside the Smithsonian metro stop, when you said to me, on a long distance phone call (and I’m paraphrasing here), “Why don’t you have a pic of you in a bikini?” I remember saying something like, “ew, no one wants to see that,” and I remember you letting out a long sigh. Whether you meant it to or not, that sigh was your hands on my cheeks, pulling me around to look into your eyes for a sober pronouncement. And then you said, “Dude, if you don’t think you’re hot shit, why do you think anyone else would?”

When we were in college was, I think, the very beginning of the “personal brand” era. A lot of my teachers and advisors talked about it. Hell, our high school teachers talked about it when they told us why we shouldn’t post pictures of ourselves drinking, smoking, or awkwardly eating hotdogs online. But damn, did I internalize that shit.

I was late to the social media game– I never had a tumblr or a myspace, I didn’t even really start using twitter till like 2017 or 2018. Instead I started a wordpress blog when I studied abroad, and I kept it going when I got back. It did help me get my first tech internship (and what a terrible internship it was, lol!), but the funny thing was, even though I always loved writing, I don’t know that I ever felt the same about blogging. Sometimes it was fun, but mostly it just felt like, “I have to do this. I have to have a presence on the internet. Obscurity is death.”

Once I’d graduated, established my all-important linkedin page, and moved to California, I discovered a new blogging platform that I liked because it was pretty and I didn’t have to do any of the formatting myself. That was all it took to attract me to medium. I started writing about agriculture there, because I thought I needed to if I wanted to keep working in the field. I had internalized the idea that being an influencer mattered, and that the best way to build an audience was the facebook method– to identify a very small audience, and then dominate it. For me, that tiny audience was young food and farming-curious netizens who had just read The Omnivore’s Dilemma. There, I thought, I would find the market for my brand.

I started writing about agriculture, and I actually did like it. It was a fun challenge most of the time, even though the vast majority of my stuff got like, 100 views. But then one day, I did it. I wrote a story called, “Meat is Dead, Long Live Meat,” and it went viral. Really, by today’s standards, I went proto-viral. It got like 8,000 reads in a day. But holy shit, that was the most validating response I had ever received to a piece of writing. I started writing more and more, and my work started to be a little more widely read in this very small niche. One day, Kimbal Musk reached out to me. This was back when the world still thought Elon was cool, and Kimbal was his eccentric, ag-curious brother. This was more proof that my brand was being established. I was becoming a person of importance in the food and ag world. I was beginning to believe that I just might be hot shit.

____

You want to hear something funny? One time, in the bathroom of my senior year apartment , I wrote a poem. Why? Who can say, I was moved, perhaps, by a movement (hahahahaha). I wrote it on this napkin that I had previously doodled these two little Russian dolls on. Obviously, I’m not that good at drawing, so though I’d lucked into one of them looking like a normal Russian doll, the other one was shorter, lumpy, and disproportionate. For some reason, this doodle reminded me of my apartment-mate, a woman I loved and admired very much. So I penned like, six lines beside the drawing.

I just went to see if I still had it somewhere, but I couldn't find it. The gist of it was: “Why do you have the luck of being made of steel, when I am made of wax.” I actually hung it up in the bathroom there– over the toilet paper dispenser. None of my five roommates ever said anything about it. But I still think about that poem sometimes because it still feels true. I still feel sometimes like I’m not quite made of the right stuff, like my constituents are a little too soft, a little unstable, like a mealy apple that snuck past the sorters on the assembly line.

You’ll enjoy this other thing I found while flipping through my old journals looking for the poem. It’s a photo of you, a high school senior picture. I wrote below it “MC had senior pics still a year after graduation. Why? Lord knows, but the inscription is great. :)”

You want to know what you wrote on the back of the picture of yourself that you gave to me? It says, “Stay Humble. XOXO. <3 4 Eva, MC.”

____

I’ve been thinking about you, and all of this, and I’ve been thinking about the cost of having a personal brand. In part because, for the first time, I recently read a critique of the idea of the personal brand. It was a very short takedown that basically said, the problem with ‘personal brands’ is that people are not brands. Brands are, by definition, consistent, unchanging things that are created for one mission– to sell the thing to which the brand is affixed. But people grow, they change, they get older, they look different, they sound different, they change their minds. The modern, virtual world might encourage us to be selling ourselves all the time, but conflating people with brands is a recipe for disappointment, for the marketers and the buyers alike.

This resonated with me, but it didn’t fully capture my feelings on the subject. There’s something deeper than just “expecting people = brands leads to disappointment.” And I think I’ve traced it all the way back to that advice you gave me about my dating profile all those years ago.

First, we have to set aside the idea that personal brands are about your relationship to other people. Fuck other people, the internet is just bots talking to bots anyways. Pretend for a moment, there’s literally no actual humans on the internet to impress. Now, given this assumption, what is a personal brand? It’s just you, fitting yourself into a slick little logo. Regardless of who it’s for, that’s what you’re doing. It’s me, crafting the dating app that I think will attract the kinds of people that I think I want to be with. And it’s me utterly failing to stop and figure out why I’m hot shit, and then learning how to believe it.

Probably some people (you, maybe?) will think this is splitting a non-existent hair. You’ve always figured out how to win in work spaces that made me feel like a loser. You’d probably say I’m overthinking this– a personal brand is just a palatable online presence that tells would-be employers and collaborators that you're unobjectionable enough to hire. And maybe for some people, that’s true.

But for me, it wasn’t. Part of the problem is that I made the incredibly unwise decision to try and pay rent with words instead of something stable like, I don’t know, drugs or banking or Republican politics. But the other part of the problem is that I think I’m not fully formed yet. I feel like I’m still a little half-baked in the middle, a little molten. And so when I formed that “palatable online presence” and I shoved myself into a tidy little box labeled “food and ag writer,” and then I moved and talked and wrote as that person, I could feel it reshaping me. I could feel my form molding to the box. I was becoming that annoying fucking person who is their job, who’s so occupied by the work and all it’s attendant bullshit that I was barely even in my life anymore. I was acting like a brand, instead of a person. And the problem was that I knew how to do it, and when I did, all the feedback loops, the likes, shares, retweets, comments, they all said, “yes, do this, more of this. More. More More.”

Maybe if I were made of stronger stuff, I wouldn’t be so vulnerable to the deforming power of the internet. But I guess I’ve known for a long time that I am not made of steel. I am made of wax.

____

I’m feeling pretty good, at this point, that I am indeed staying humble (thanks for the advice). I think of all my bad qualities, a lack of humility has been a relatively rare one.

That was, in part, why your advice about my dating profile was such an unlock in my life. This is going to sound melodramatic, but it had never really occurred to me, before you said it, that I had any control over whether or not I could even be hot shit, in the dating world at least. I thought that was like, an inherent part of a person’s identity. I guess I’d concluded that either you’re worthy of love and admiration, or you’re not, and I was just hoping that the right person could make that determination through a phone screen based on a few hundred characters and six pictures.

But part of it was also that I didn’t really believe in dating apps back then. I thought they were so lame and unromantic. I met my husband, actually, because I’d told myself that I had to give the apps a good college try before I wrote them off forever. I’d just turned in my first manuscript to my publisher, and I was like cool, I’m going to go on ten first dates in the next eight weeks so I can cross “dating apps” off my list of things to do before my next draft is due (can you tell how fun and chill I am about work and writing?).

The fun part was, most of the dates were absolutely atrocious. Just every single flavor of jelly bean, from earwax to vomit. One guy told me the only thing he liked to do outside of work was hot tubbing. One guy gave me a twenty minute lecture about how he is “what feminism looks like,” which included him telling me I shouldn’t interrupt. One guy yelled at me in public because I casually mentioned that the Russians played a bigger role than the Americans in winning World War II. One guy actually cried on the date. There was one fun one… with a guy who was just in town to visit. He lived on the other side of the country. And then there was number nine of ten. And he was nice, normal, surprisingly hot (ironically, he had a pretty terrible dating app profile). He asked me about myself, he was funny, and he drove me home, even though it was far.

Meeting him did not derail me from my to-do list though. I went on the tenth first date, and it was the jewel in my horrible-date crown. He revealed in the first fifteen minutes that he’d lied on his profile. He yelled at the waitress. He didn’t ask me a single question about myself. When I stood up to go to the bathroom, he jumped to his feet and tried to dance with me without asking. When I called a car to go home, he insisted that he would ride with me to make sure I “got there safe.” Shouts to the world’s best uber driver, who took one look at my face and told the guy, “Nah, bro, this is her car. Just hers. You gotta call your own.” I texted my future husband about a second date as soon as the car pulled away from the curb.

Unexpectedly, what I did during this hellish journey was exactly what you told me to do. I learned to believe that I had some things going for me. Not only could I get ten dates in eight weeks (a real feat of scheduling at the time), but I went, I engaged 10 strange human beings about their hobbies, their interests, their convictions, and their feelings. Every single one asked for a second date. It was hard data that, at least in some way, reflected the temperature of my shit, and it seemed quite toasty.

But weirdly, that wasn’t all it did for me. What I really learned was about this moment, when I got home after these dates, when I closed and locked the door and took off my heels. I’d take a deep breath, let out a long sigh, and I’d think (and I’m paraphrasing here), “God damn, it’s good to be home and have me all to myself.”

Whether you meant it or not, that was the lesson I took away from what you said to me that day. That before someone else could choose me, I had to choose myself. And honestly, it was also a healthy foundation for a relationship, because I never developed that fear that being unhappily together might be better than being alone.

Maybe you and I were always going to be immune to that fear– given all that bullshit we went through. But still, I’ll never forget that you reminded me to treasure myself, my real self, when I’d almost forgotten how.

____

I don’t know that you’re much for my writing– food and ag were always topics you mostly just humored me on. But seeing you, and all this thinking, it’s made me want to dismantle my virtual personal brand, and its associated online publishing machine. I know, I know, maybe it’s a waste. Maybe I’ll regret it. But I’ve given it a lot of thought, and I don’t think so. I think I’d rather be out there on the edge, doing weird, experimental shit with a rag-tag group of collaborators, co-conspirators, and fellow travelers then be safely in my little box, writing only about the things that drive views and engagement from bots and strangers who will love it if they already agree with it, hate it (and me) if they don’t, and probably forget it by the weekend either way. I’d rather be a whole, unbound person, no brand, no box, and if the cost of that is fewer eyes on screens, fewer listens and downloads then, I guess, so be it.

See the problem is, I do believe that I’m hot shit. And I’d rather be my whole molten self than rich, famous, or influential. I think I’d rather just be me, writing to my best friend from high school, than a bestselling author writing shit I don’t even believe in.

Whether you meant to or not, you taught me this. And seeing you and your beautiful face reminded me it was true. So I just wanted to send you this note to say thank you. Thanks for believing I was worthy even when I didn’t. Thanks for teaching me how to arm myself as a woman in the world, and how to play the game and win. And thanks, more than anything, for being my friend all this time. I couldn’t have made it through high school, or college, or my 20s without you. You’ve had such an amazing and unexpected journey too, and I’m so impressed by the life you’ve built for yourself. I think those two high school girls in the back of that math class would be proud. Okay, probably judgy first (those little bitches) but then proud.

Thanks again for the advice– all of it. And I hope you know that to me you’ve always been, and will always be, absolutely smoking hot shit.

Yours,

EQ-Albuquerque

Assistant: Sarah K. Mock