When I was in college my sister’s boyfriend at the time crashed his bike. He skinned his knee badly. Not knowing what to do he called me, and my roommate and I hustled him into our dorm room to apply basic first aid. We were a little shocked that he didn’t seem to know the first thing about administering first aid to himself. The man was brilliant, but much like many other gifted people, he had somehow missed some childhood common sense training. When I told my sister what had happened, she sort of shook her head as if she wasn’t surprised and said, “that’s on brand.”
Brands mark ownership and have been around for a while.
The word brand comes from old German origins and means burning. Think of the word “firebrand”, which describes a sort of torch. In the Middle Ages people would scorch marks on wine barrels with an image that noted where the wine came from and ownership. Moving to the American Old West in the 1800s, this was how cattle were marked, branded with a hot iron, the scar would mark ownership. Drive through areas of Texas today and you will still see brands on ranch gates.
The concept of a brand has been around much longer than social media. But social media, and the mass media that came before it, have popularized the idea to the point where people expect that they need to create an individual “brand” for themselves. When I was growing up the only people who had brands were celebrities not individuals. I’m not sure what this says: have our minds have been colonized by corporate concepts? Or that we are denoting ownership of ourselves? I’m more inclined to say the former. Because what I see going on with personal branding is not so much leaning into the intersections of who we are and claiming ourselves, but more as paring away and curating of who we are to fit standards and norms.
We are all doing marketing spin doctoring on our personal lives.
And this is one of the issues with social media. We are looking at people we know (and people we don’t know) through these carefully curated lenses. We are comparing ourselves with unrealistic models and finding ourselves wanting. With social media we have more control over how others see of us than we do running into someone in the grocery store with wild hair wearing pajama pants when you just need some milk. We see fabulous vacation pictures without any mention of missed flights, upset stomachs, getting on the wrong bus, or accidentally buying sweet bean bread for ham and cheese sandwiches (true story—very surprising).
Ugh, standards and norms cause Neurodivergent masking.
Us neurodivergent people already know how much trauma there is in trying to curate yourself to fit standards and norms. We call this masking, and it has had devastating effects. Ultimately masking to fit in has a detrimental effect on your relationship with yourself. You banish parts of yourself that don’t fit the mold. But these parts frequently won’t stay hidden (and often are some of the most beautiful and creative parts of ourselves as well) and will pop out at unexpected times. This causes a vicious cycle of needing to be more vigilant and double down on our curated image. Which also leads to a sort of anxiety, if they find out who I really am… (It is the premise behind blackmail too—secret knowledge about parts that don’t fit social norms can destroy someone’s carefully curated career.)
And sometimes masking is protective.
The flip side of this is that there are parts that could cause additional trauma if they were revealed. This is especially true for elements that are way outside social norms. LGBTQ+ people must constantly think about where to come out and where to keep that identity hidden. “High functioning” Autistics must think about whether revealing the diagnosis would be helpful or harmful in a work environment. Even neurotypical people are constantly paying attention to what to reveal and what not to reveal about themselves. Because the reality is we are all a little divergent when it comes to social norms… There are skeletons in the closets.
Do I have to do marketing?
As a therapist in private practice, I must do marketing. One part of me is a small business owner. In order to serve the clients who would benefit from working with me, they need to know I exist and how to get in contact with me. But prospective clients also need a sense of who I am as a person, because while I have lots of professional training, in the end the most important aspect of the healing space is the relationship with me. This is one of the reasons I put personal stories into my blog. The other is that brains just relate better to stories.
But I need novelty!
According to an article on social media branding I’m supposed to develop a color scheme, a specific voice and above all else be consistent with these as well as posting. Consistency is where I fall down as a neurodivergent person. Being a creative is one of my strong neurodivergences. Along with my ADHD traits (or VAST as Dr. Edward Hallowell calls it: Variable Attention Stimulus Trait), novelty is very important to me. I love to experiment with design, and color, and technique, and media. When I was working on breaking into the children’s book illustration industry this was what was difficult for me. I couldn’t develop a recognizable “style” that I could keep doing over and over again. I had some things I liked to do more than others, but I couldn’t turn myself into a “consistent predictable product.” Certainly not one that fits with capitalist colonial rules of being a “plug and play” type illustrator. If you have followed my blog for any length of time you will probably notice that my blog illustrations don’t follow just one style.
My brand, my “style” as it were, is more about being eclectic. It is rooted in the creative process of bringing unlike or unrelated things into a new context. Creative and eclectic (quirky?) are two of my root values. They very much define who I am as a person, and as a therapist.
Tune in next time for Part 2!