Top 5 Ways I Strategically Engaged With My Extremely Strategic Engagement Strategy 2023

"And it's not what you think!" - Lisette said, laughing at herself out loud.

For most of this year I’ve been “strategically engaging” with social media. This involves no actual strategy other than:

Trying to reclaim some part of my anxious, tired, misused brain cells’ energy and redirect it toward things I know for a fact feel better than scrolling through shit advertisements and people performing happiness amidst a barrage of truly terrifying atrocities…But I haven’t “quit” altogether…

A bunch of other writers and artists and teachers and thinkers and feeling human beings whom I trust have also been talking about this a lot this year, and trying with varying degrees of futility to make their own “boundaries”— so it’s nice to know I’m not alone. But not, like, nice nice. It mostly makes me sad.

Truthfully, I’m sick to death of hearing everyone I love and admire share the same disheartened, frazzled, helpless tech-addiction anecdotes.

Some of it is intriguing—

Like people who share that they stopped consuming the news altogether (Really??? How?? But also…I mean, I get it but also…??). And folks (like, everyone) going on “smart phone cleanses” of hours or days or weeks or months* (*And why they eventually fail.) The classic and definitely-fallible “I delete instagram between strategic posts” tactic (*raises the hand not holding her phone*)…

The advice I’ve repeated to myself the most this year I picked up from somewhere on the internet and, unlike a lot of detritus you pick up from the internet, it was both memorable and oddly helpful:

“Create Before You Consume”

(The internet now tells me, hilariously, that this is echoed around from Marie Forleo— but I most likely caught it while I was, well…scrolling…*ice mouth emoji*)

Trite? Maybe! A helpful thing to remind myself when I roll out of bed and simultaneously grab my phone, my robe, and start the kettle? Yes.

CREATE BEFORE YOU CONSUME, LISETTE!!!! …Ok…Right. Create before I consume. Thanks for the reminder, Lisette-via-the-internet-via-whatever-entrepreneur-side-hustle-guru. Create before I consume…

This is where I could really drop a classic Medium article title on here like, “The One Piece of Advice Every Successful Entrepreneur Needs— It’s not what you think!” But I’m sure AI would have a much-more-viral suggestion for me to regurgitate the Marie Forleo mantra to you. Then dozens more of us could ride that tidy advice all the way to the bank! Creating and consuming in just the right order to make both art and a living while trying not to lose our ever-loving-shit!

In all seriousness, though— when I sit down with my coffee and my phone and remind myself that my first goal is creation, it usually works just long enough to get me to turn to the next blank sketchbook page with a pen in my hand instead of re-downloading instagram. So, not everything you read on the internet is complete trash.

There is another fatigued & resistant muscle engaged in this exercise, though. The Creator Muscle, let’s call it. Part of me (and probably part of you if you Create Content, formerly known as: Art, Writing, Music and Film) is really fucking tired right now of creating, creating, creating...creating………creating………..

But isn’t the creative act why I’m on this earth?? It certainly does seem that way, yes.

Is it also exhausting to be alive here at the end of 2023 with the constant demand to produce more and more and more creative content to stay “relevant”— but, more accurately for a majority of us: literally stay alive? It really is.

IT REALLY IS.

If you’ve read this far hoping I am going to offer you a way out, I apologize.

The truth is that it’s taken me like three hours to get this far because this kitten is trying to eat my computer screen and destroy my banjo and topple my houseplants and murder my foot. He is inexhaustible and capable of choking on stuff that literally didn’t exist thirty seconds ago. Maybe you’ve seen him on my instagram feed this week?

Strategy, baby!

But it’s December, my favorite month. My birthday month! The end of the year. The time of the year when (according to my social media feed) folks are checking all their stats from the last 12 months. Y’know—

Top Things I Consumed in 2023...

But a lot of us are also going over the stuff we accomplished, the commitments we made and managed to keep, the things we allowed ourselves to walk away from— and I love this kind of reflection at this time of year.

So, as I sit here trying to understand what on earth this newsletter is actually about because I’m completely distracted and have been sick with endless-fucking-Covid for a thousand weeks and my brain is, frankly, shot… It did just genuinely occur to me that I’m obviously engaging with my own antidote to all of this right now…

Image Word Mystery— the newsletter, the workshops, the film & audio pieces, my whole organizing principal— has been my primary focus across the last year, and it has been actually-and-not-just-a-thing-you-say life changing for me, honestly. Not because I’m hitting any great metrics or making any sort of sustainable income here— but it’s been life changing because I needed to give myself permission to invest in the thoughts I’m genuinely interested in thinking & the time to make the work I’m genuinely interested in making— with people who connect with me on purpose.

And working on this mutli-dimensional project hasn’t fatigued my creator muscles, surprisingly. In fact, it has taught me so many important lessons about how I work and the natural rhythms of my creative process:

1. Giving myself this space has helped me de-fragment from all the little places I was leaking out in every direction (see: social media) which was making it really hard to see myself clearly.

2. I know so much more about my own creative connective tissue now, how I naturally cycle through ideas and materials and disciplines and processes

3. About the space I actually need around my thoughts and the real time it takes to make real work for which the schedule & the metrics are completely my own— and

4. How that directly affects my output.

5. And, critically, it has given me a focus & clarity that compels me to create before I consume every single day.

So, genuinely: thank you for joining me here.

And you?

What’s your year-end “Wrapped”? But instead of Top 5 Things You Consumed 2023, what about:

Top 5 Things You Committed To Or Left Behind For Your Own Health, Wellbeing, Sanity & Inspiration 2023?

-or-

Top 5 Things That Have Made You a More Radiant Example of Your Awesome Inner Truth 2023?

P.S. I’m also always interested to hear what music you’re listening to! Evidently, I listened to an astonishing amount of Egemen Sanli this year, which… seems true?

xo,