Hello, Medium! This Photographer “Hollas At” Her Chronically Ill Community, Talks about Selling Out, and What it Means to be Famous
I have been thinking a lot today about how much photography, and this whole “photographic journey of exploration” has personally, and professionally, helped me.
I also have been thinking a lot about all my multitudinous chronic illnesses, disabilities, and/or conditions.
I usually try to not think about my medical problems, because really…at this point in my life it doesn’t usually help anything.
But.
I finally joined up to a health problem blogging site I had been meaning to contribute to since “forever ago.”
I know the recovery, chronic illness, chronic pain, and mental health disorder communities are some of the fiercest, most robust, most loyal, most understanding (am I buttering them up enough, yet? Will they accept me?!) communities one can be a part of.
I just haven’t (recently) gone out of my way to seek out others in my various communities, because I would rather spend my time playing Animal Crossing and interacting with “normal” people who don’t have the same weight and pressure on themselves as everyone I have ever met who shares even one condition with me.
Although maybe I’m projecting in that last statement.
Maybe I’m only seeing the “weariness” and “hurt” in people’s eyes and overall demeanor when they confess to me that they share a debilitating condition, because that is what I expect to find there.
Sometimes I think I’m just as ableist in my thinking as any old “normal” (I gotta find a better word for people without any diagnosable mental health or physical health conditions) normie named Norm who just wants to hang out and be normal.
I don’t want to look down my nose at the communities I’m a part of, or try to differentiate MY experiences from THEIRS, because at this point in my life, though I have never met anybody quite like myself, I have enough humility (I hope) to realize that my thoughts, feelings, and actions…ain’t that special.
Though I do need to pause for a second and remember all the times people praised me or went out of their way to remind me of just how “special” I am, if I spend too long dwelling on high praise, or past academic accomplishments, I will…cry.
Because life didn’t turn out for me the way it was “supposed” to, according to all my English teachers.
Or maybe it turned out exactly like they expected (a lot of writers ARE known for the alcoholism), and my “big break” is just around the corner.
Or it will come later in life like Frank McCourt, who, along with Bukowski has given me such hope over the years that I can become an “accomplished” writer at any age.
Though I kind of want to push back on myself for the use of the term “accomplished” there, and what I mean by it when I say it. Maybe “accomplished” for me is being good enough at writing that your name is known to people like me?
Speaking of your name “being known,” I have been watching a documentary on HBO called “Fake Famous,” and it is terrifying.
I never thought I wanted to be famous, I just thought it would happen and I would have to deal with the consequences.
Consequences I am dealing with currently as my husband gets annoyed with me for a joke Tweet I wrote. I thought it was “funny,” so of course everyone else thought it was “disturbing.” I gotta work on not talking about my relationship so much on the social media, but what do you want me to do? NOT tell people I have a huge wrestler husband so that even more creeps feel emboldened to send me flirty or gross messages in my DMs?
I know it might seem strange to think that anyone on the internet would stay away from me for fear of my husband…but…the people who are still scared off by strong “alpha” males actually do exist, still.
Insert article here about Dolph Lungren’s wife being held at knifepoint in her own home until the robbers realized whose house they were in…at which point they ran away and didn’t rob anything of value.
I will totally insert that link…when I reorganize my entire blog, and move it to a different platform.
Because I put all my eggs in this JennaOPhoto.com basket…and now these eggs are getting…cramped…
I don’t know how much longer I can continue to post my “articles” as one long thread on a webpage, and not have links I can give for each individual post.
Not that they are all worthy of having their own link, but it’s been a very up and down year for me, okay?!
I am trying to sell out and nobody wants to give me money!
I was literally Googling, “How to make money blogging” right before I started typing up this brain dump so…the sellout journey has begun?
For the younger generation reading this post, “Selling Out” is what old crusty ladies like myself say they are doing so they can appease the 40-something former-hipster dude demographic who worry they might make money from their art, thus deeming it less pure. Or maybe it’s the teenagers who think that way? Whatever the demographic, I’m talking about those individuals who deem “selling out” to be making money from your art in any way.
I remember when Moby because the first artist to license every song of his on his album, “Play,” and people were like, “Whaaaaaaat?!” And he came out with a response to all the “haters” who thought that “good” songs shouldn’t be in commercials and television shows.
Moby said that he could either be the one to take the money the companies were offering him for the song, and do “good” with the money, or at least what he saw as good…donating to causes he believes in and shopping all “ethically.”
(I wish I could shop ethically. Hell, I wish I could shop at all. But lest I get sidetracked by a rant abut how Amazon is bleeding my soul dry one order at a time, let me just get to the point about Moby that I’m trying to make.)
You see, like Moby, I also was a lefty, liberal hipster (need fact check on that nebulous term and my poor job at being a hipster if I ever was one) living in Brooklyn at one time.
Though I never started a tea company, I have listened to my fair share of “Rage Against the Machine” in my youth.
I consider myself fairly “woke,” or at least as woke as one can get when they are getting all their information about the human race from a computer and not like…talking to people in a college setting anymore.
I like to think I’m some punk-rock, “burn it all to the ground,” anti-establishment kind of gal.
Or at least I like to think that now.
I think I embodied the “punk rock” ethos a bit better in my youth, because then I wasn’t actively trying to be cool.
Now I am, and that’s not cool at all.
But.. being in my thirties, I will leave the REAL “coolness” to the younger kids, and try my hardest to present myself as a smart, self-deprecating, hilarious photographer with a smokin’ hot bod and an ass that won’t quit. Note: my ass has, on occasion, quit…in fact that is its default status, so I’m an unreliable narrator in this post, and I’m sorry.
Point is: I recently attracted the attention of a bunch of conservative white dudes from halfway across the world due to a “salacious” joke I made involving the sending of nude photos.
It was a completely made up joke, and thought I worried SOME willfully obtuse trolls would come by and ask to see my “nudes,” I hoped everyone would be respectful enough to keep it in their proverbial pants and not harass me TOO much.
It was just a funny joke to me (one I am not re-telling here, so this might be confusing to explain), and if there is one thing I will do for a funny joke: it’s forget about how it might make others feel if they see it. In my excitement at finding a “nugget of funny” in my brain, I just posted it.
I worry I’m becoming like these people in this documentary on being “Fake Famous,” and though the “game” they describe of gaining followers and people on the social media has not completely tired me out yet (I did have quite a fallow period at the beginning of this year, however…sorry Patrons!) due to its novelty in my life…I fear I will become cynical and jaded about the whole idea of sharing myself and my life with the world …and I don’t know how much more cynical and jaded I can get at this point in my life.
As I said before (in either this blog post or the “about me” I was writing on “The Mighty” before, Geeze my brain is not working) I am a cantankerous old lady…a misanthrope…a cynic!
Just call me Diogenes, ladies, because I, too, want you to “get out of my light.”
Though marketing can feel extremely shallow and inauthentic (or at least researching marketing can be) for a tortured, artistic soul such as myself, I have come to the grim realization that I can’t sustain myself through selling my words and pictures without…an audience for said words and pictures.
Since I’m too terrified to bother my friends who all have real jobs and real lives.
I joke!
But there is a kernel of self-doubt that I fear will always exist in me should I continue to freelance, and not wake up tomorrow in a body that works just fine, and doesn’t prevent me from making it into a regularly scheduled job stacking cans or coal mining or whatever people do.
You know the people I’m talking about.
The people I have called “normal” earlier in this post, who somehow go about their days going to a job they may hate and doing all the things they are supposed to do because that is how adults make it in this big, cruel, capitalist society where we need money just to survive.
This money thing…how does one get it?
And how does one keep it?
I ponder these questions on the regular as I sweatily avoid looking at my latest FICO credit score update from my bank…or toss and turn debating with myself whether I should go against my mother’s wishes and just declare bankruptcy already.
Anyway, this is all to say that ya girl needs money, and is disabled.
Maybe writing about being disabled will somehow connect me to someone who will connect me to someone who will give me that “big break” I need to claw my way out of debt?
With my own boot straps?
I just want to take this moment to remind everyone that if they need help they should ask for it, and that nobody should put themselves above charity unless they absolutely do not need it.
Some of the best things that have happened to me in this life have happened because I was willing to let someone else help me, and for that, I shall be eternally grateful.
But lest I go on another ten pages or more trying to convince the disabled, queer, chronically ill, pain community of “ladies whose parts don’t work too good” that I’m a super awesome person who they should accept and give money to, I wanted to let them all know, that if I take money from conservative white dudes, it is only because in my punk rock soul I imagine I’m being the biggest “bad-ass” by taking their money and helping myself with it.
Though I haven’t felt the need to do anything TOO deplorable or against my fine-tuned moral compass for money, yet…I imagine if I ever get good at this “being an internet bad-ass” thing, I will have all kinds of shady offers come my way.
And so I just wanted to say to my liberal, lefty, godless, Hollywood ELITE crowd that reads this blog (damn I’m really generous with all the labels today!): if I seem like I’m selling out, it’s because I am.
I have had no soul for as long as I can remember, so if anyone wants to buy a piece of it….be my guest.
I can hate you and take your money at the same time.
Though if anyone gives me money I automatically love them these days so…it would seem I will have some conflicting and complicated emotions should some racist windbag ever offer to make all my wildest dreams come true.
Ahhhh, I can’t wait for next year when I’m transferring this article over to my new site (note: I have no plans for a new site, though I was thinking of publishing some of these posts on Medium, and the Mighty.com…they got that traffic, baby!) while taking money from someone deplorable and can look back at a “simpler” time when I didn’t HAVE to “decision” my way out of some moral quandary or another.
Because as the great Biggie Smalls said: “Mo’ Money, Mo Problems,” and yes, Virginia, I fear my problems may just be beginning.
It’s okay though, I’ve had 34 years of living in an agonizing painful anxiety-riddled personal hell no one seems to understand so like…I will take all the training I have had in being miserable and put it to good use!
I will say to myself: well, at least people are giving me opportunities! And money!
Before, they weren’t even giving me the time of day, because I wasn’t putting my invalid, shut-in self “out there” on the social meeds and the internet.
But dear gods I don’t even know what I’m talking about anymore…what is this?
Hypotheticals about some murky future in which my moral clarity gets a little…muddied?
I need to watch the rest of this documentary on getting Fake Famous, and question the very idea of fame.
There are a lot of people out there with millions of followers….I don’t want to be one of them, but I do want a small army of sycophants to talk to every day who will laugh at my jokes, be amazed at my cat photos, and pay me millions of dollars.
Is that too much to ask?
Now…how do I monetize “this?”
Let me watch the rest of the documentary to find out!
Your Photo Friend Who is So Cynical Towards Writers and Filmmakers in General at this Point, that she Rolled Her Eyes at “This Guy” for Coming Up With the Premise for this Movie…Though we all Know I Would Have Made the Same Movie in a Heartbeat if I Could,
Jenna O
