The most toxic relationship of my creative life? (spoiler - it’s Instagram!)
Instagram and I have been on a break. Or at least, I chose to spend my time with other content sharing platforms to decide if we still have a future together, and what that might look like.
This week I experimented in posting content again, but with a very different outlook - one that prioritises other platforms (Patreon, YouTube, my mailing list) and longer form content.
So today I thought I’d share a bit about why Instagram can be so difficult for multi-passionate, ADHD creatives and what you might want to try instead. (This probably applies to TikTok too, but to be completely honest with you I used TikTok for 10 minutes and felt immediately overstimulated/ somehow also hollow inside so I can’t really say much about it!)
We all know that Instagram has changed. Gone are the days where you could gain tons of followers snapping a quick WIP and adding a little caption about what you had coming up that week. To succeed on Instagram requires some serious strategy these days, and it requires time and effort.
But Instagram is particularly difficult for those of us who are multi-passionate ADHD creatives, and here are my theories as to why:
We are multilayered and complex creatures
We tend to be deep or innovative thinkers with many passions that interlink. It’s really difficult to compact all of that into a caption or a short video. Since we can’t explain our practice in one piece of short form content, the logical answer is to create bite-sized pieces of content that come together like a jigsaw. Except on Instagram it’s often claimed that on average only 5% - 10% of your followers will see any post in their feed (I'm not sure how true this is, but we know it's not 100% for sure!). So basically you’re trying to build a picture but the people putting together your puzzle only receive a fraction of the pieces.🧩
Instagram rewards consistency, but we love change
Instagram loves consistency not because it’s mean, but because it’s algorithms are attention based. Instagram makes revenue from advertising, therefore it’s ultimate goal is always always to keep you on the app for as long as possible, so you see more ads.
Therefore, if you build a following working in one medium - like I did as a papercutter - when you get bored and do something different a large percentage of your followers just won’t be that in to it. So they will scroll away, IG will see that your engagement was lower, and it won’t push your content out to new people in case it loses their attention too. 📉
It’s essential as a multi-passionate creative to not feel hemmed in or trapped as it flattens our creative energy completely. But thinking we can build an account doing one thing and then pivot to being our multi-passionate selves in probably not going to work out well for us. Most likely you’ll end up doing what I did - shutting down an account you spent years of effort building because it made you feel trapped, and any time you tried to change your work your engagement plummeted (taking your confidence in that new work down with it).
High quality art isn’t always valued
You might make really amazing work in a variety of mediums and hope that will be ‘enough’ to make your account thrive, but it’s still a tough challenge to give yourself. Sometimes the thing you spent weeks working on will flop, and you’ll be left wondering what you did wrong.
Social media shows us incredible things so regularly now we’ve almost become laissez-faire about it. We see reel after reel of a complex, skilled processes cut down to a minute long video and it makes everything seem so…effortless
Ten years ago it was easier to woo the world with impressive artworks (though how that impacted the artists who churned out these pieces at a rapid pace is another thing to question). But now it’s about holding our attention - through visual and verbal hooks, novel concepts people haven’t seen before, storytelling devices, rapid editing, music that inspires an emotion, asking the right Call To Action and more.
Basically the quality of your content now matters more than the quality of your art...and making great content will inevitably take away time from your art...making it harder to make great art.
Rejection sensitivity thrives on IG
ADHDers and neurodivergent creatives often struggle with Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD), defined as ‘an intense emotional pain triggered by perceived or actual rejection, criticism, or failure’.
Instagram triggers us constantly. Low engagement, total silence, a comment that feels critical or passive-aggressive...wowzers, that shit used to leave me anxious or seething for hours.
The truth is, you can’t share your work online without experiencing rejection, criticism or someone misunderstanding you (often it feels, on purpose). So while it’s important to understand you can work on this and develop more resilience and a better support system, you may be able to save yourself a lot of pain by simply choosing a different approach to sharing your work.
It can all change at any moment
Remember when reels came along and Instagram became a video content platform in a matter of weeks? Or when suddenly everyone was making text based carousels? Instagram is always changing, so your strategy has to evolve with it. How about when Musk bought Twitter, or Meta decided to loosen it's misinformation policies? We really have no idea what any platform we use might become.
Plus, it can all disappear. I’m sure we’ve all seen those desperate posts from artists whose entire grid disappeared in a glitch, who had their accounts shut down or who were targeted by hackers and had to start all over again. You don’t own your audience on any of these platforms. So while they can play a useful part in your marketing system, having your entire creative business living on one makes you super vulnerable.
How it can work better for you
I’m not suggesting it can’t work for you of course - there are plenty of examples out there of multi-passionate creatives living the dream on Instagram (or as far as we know!). The approaches with more success tend to be:
Make your account about being a multi-passionate creative, so you attract the people who resonate with this. This is what I do. But the question here is always ‘what are you offering as a product?'. I’m offering coaching for multi-passionate creatives so it works! But if I was offering my art for sale, while I might be making content lots of creatives loved or related to, it wouldn't necessarily translate into people buying my art.
Build a personality brand around how you love making things in lots of different mediums. This pretty much depends upon people loving you, and wanting to support your work. In this case I’d argue you're much better off on YouTube then Instagram these days, because there’s more of an embedded culture of followers financially supporting the creators they love.
Be clear on what you want from Instagram. In my experience as a creativity coach a lot of pain and frustration stems from artists secretly wanting to be an influencer so they can have the dream of ‘be paid for being yourself’, but then actually trying to make their income selling their art. If you want to sell you art, find the people that can afford to pay you for it. If you want to make an impact as an influencer, own it and get really good at making content.
I hope this isn’t too demoralising for you to read! I’ve just seen far too many amazing creatives feel utterly hopeless or burnt out by chasing success on Instagram, and I know you and your work deserve better.
If you want to take a first step on building a more resilient and empowering approach to market your work as a multi-passionate creative then please come and join me on my upcoming workshop ‘Start to Grow Your Multi-Passionate Mailing List’ on Saturday 13th December, 4pm - 5.30pm GMT.
You’ll discover why having your own mailing list is so important for multi-passionate creatives. We'll look at how you can use it to help you build your business, learn the basics of how to set up a simple mailing list that helps your new subscribers get to know you, find out how to bring in subscribers who understand and appreciate your multi-passionate magic and design a sustainable plan for writing emails that are creative and engaging.
✨ Book a space on the workshop! ✨
In the meantime, keep making what matters to you creative whirlwind, and remember that there is always more than one way to share your work with the world.
But what do you think?! Does this resonate with you, or do you have a different opinion? If so please comment and let me know, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this! 😊
Ellie 🌠