Post-Mortem Brand Maintenance

Archived from Sep 21, 2023:

I’m currently reading Doppelgänger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein. I’m enjoying it, and she opens it with a chapter discussing the rise of personal branding. Famous for writing No Logo, she documents not only her personal journey with coming to terms that being a public figure means she has a personal brand, even if she doesn’t want one but she acknowledges how young people are raised to be aware of their online selves, generating a publicly appropriate doppelgänger from a very young age. Make sure you only post photos you’d be comfortable with an employer seeing, do the correct extracurricular activities so some ill defined “they” will one day be impressed by you.

The prompts may sound benign, but many [of my] students reported that through these high-stakes writing exercises, they learned to tell stories about their young lives that had less to do with truths as they knew them than with meeting the imagined needs and requirements of an audience of strangers for certain kinds of identities. There were many nods when one student described the process as “packaging up your trauma into a consumable commodity.” It’s not that the traumas they wrote about were fake; it’s that the process required them to label difficult experiences in specifically marketable ways, and to turn them into something fixed, salable, and potentially profitable.

So, in the spirit of marketing, here’s a series of epithets I’m pitching to maintain my personal brand after I have gracefully shuffled off this mortal coil.

• “Meghan, 19XX-20XX, Very Fun At Parties”
  This one is obviously both great and true. I definitely don’t get overly intense about war history or contribute seemingly irrelevant trivia unprompted at parties. Social anxiety? I don’t know her. I’m sure if I met her I would be extremely charming and definitely wouldn’t analyze everything I said on the way home.
• “Meghan, 19XX-20XX, Fun Fact! She’s gone now.”
  Did you know there’s a site specifically for documenting the fun facts I hand out, wholly unprompted? To be known is, frankly, horrifying. But, at least, it puts my Rolodex of nonsense knowledge to some kind of use.
• “Meghan, 19XX-20XX, She Went Out For Eggs”
  I really love eggs, I eat two almost every day. More than once I have gone for groceries, got distracted, spent 50$ and managed to forget eggs (it would have been 60$ with eggs these days). I now have a habit of texting friends random things I need to not forget while I’m out. It’s not always eggs, but it’s often eggs.
• “Meghan, 19XX-20XX, A Perfectly Well Adjusted Cat Lady”
  I tell Kafka she is my best friend every day. Living alone means, statistically, I probably talk to her more than any human person in my life, despite the fact that she’s a mediocre conversationalist at best. But what am I going to do, not inform her that she has so many toes and a tiny head? Ridiculous.
• “Meghan, 19XX-20XX, An Excellent Retiree”
  Since getting laid off, anxiety aside, I have turned into a retiree. I get up early, make my coffee and go read in the storm porch. I putter about the house; I repot plants, bake too much, go for walks, do puzzles and take afternoon naps. I have, of course, also been applying for jobs, spiralling into depressive episodes and hiding in my house for days on end but hey, I’m sure retirees come in options other than Margaritaville!
• “Meghan, 19XX-20XX, Intense and Passionate, Daughter, Sister, Friend.”
  I suppose this one is just sincere. To say my life has been unstable for the last few weeks would be putting it lightly. Introverted as I am, times of extreme anxiety and uncertainty always make me extra grateful for the people in my life. I know I can be a lot, but it is never lost on me how lucky I am to be surrounded by so many kind, loving and understanding people.

I, of course, welcome any suggestions that are funnier than what I presented here. Not like I’ll know, anyway.

Over the years, more people than I care to admit have told me they think I should make (insert social media platform here) content. I know they mean well, that they find me interesting or charismatic, but I usually just think of hyper curated online influencers and cringe. As Klein talks about in both Doppelganger and No Logo, there is a rigidity to a brand, a promise that is meant to be unwavering, even in the face of an obvious need for change. Most days, I barely know who I am to myself, how on earth am I expected to pitch something coherent to other people? Why would I even want to?

I like making things. One of the benefits of the layoff has been having the energy and interest to start making things again; painting, writing, learning to use Blender (very slowly). But I like the variety. I don’t want to be confined to something expected of me or associated to me. I think the relative incongruence of these weekly ramblings speak to that. They’re inconsistent, at best, much like myself. Or rather, the only consistency is what immediately appeals to me, what interests me or what I am feeling. They are as consistent as the human heart, and frankly, I don’t mind that. I don’t dislike the idea of an audience, but I do dislike the idea of being stuck, of solely making for others, rather than considering myself. Perhaps it’s selfish, perhaps it’s terrible marketing but I think I can come to terms with that. We have so much and yet so little time to make things, to fall in love, to make mistakes, I cannot imagine why I would attempt to plan and curate these things to appeal to an algorithm, to some potential audience. I simply wish to be, in all my disorganized and conflicting ways, myself. And I hope to one day be at peace with all of it.

Ah, the one true consistency, a picture of Kafka. This is also maybe some kind of metaphor for my life right now? I don’t know. As always, friends, thank you for being here. I wish I could make a promise about what next week will be about, but I suppose we’ll all find out together. Is there anything in particular you’d be interested in reading?