Patreon: I Will Fail To Start With, That’s Fine (also, I Did The Show!)

So I HAVE DONE MY ONE WOMAN SHOW OH MY GOD.

Deep breath, now.

It’s awesome. The turnout was good (I feel incredibly privileged there, recently saw an Edinburgh preview that was EMPTY….) and the feedback better. There are messages on my phone from people who really wanted to come and couldn’t – whether politeness or genuine desire, I’ll find out next time I do the show!

There WILL be a next time. Meanwhile, I used the fact that I was already doing something scary and attached another scary thing to it: a Patreon account.

You might not know about Patreon. It is basically an online patronage system when you regularly support an artist – not like a one-off Kickstarter, more like… a coffee per month.

So, I  launched my Patreon. And… nothing happened.

Yet.

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The thing with Patreon is that it is extremely deliberate. It requires a vision of yourself as an artist, a business, a service-provider – but also a person in a relationship with other peple. It humanises the business – you are in touch with nice people who want to personally support you – but it also makes your art something worthy of payment and attention. If you have hang-ups anywhere in this process, whether subconsciously fearing attention or struggling with the business model, the Patreon might not work.

For me the problem is being consistent (I switch media all the time, which doesn’t offer an overarching artistic narrative!) as well as business-related. But at the same time, it is so fun to figure out all the ways to be genuinely nice to people who want to support you, your art and message! And so I’m really, really okay with failing to begin with. Patreon gives me a medium, through which I can sort out my relationship with both art and audience. And eventually, it will give me a way of creating independent art, without fighting for commissions. It’s worth failing, worth putting the work in. I’m
looking forward to that… .

Getting It Together For The Purpose Of Focusing

I have to be brief.

I have to be relatively brief or at least write quickly, because even though I’ve planned this blogpost for months, I’m in something of a rush.

Looks like I keep failing my own perfectionism lesson. Some months ago, I started thinking of making Good Enough Diary my main webpage. My “brand”. Consequently, I stopped writing in it. Nothing wrong with having a brand, I just struggle with commitment; that’s why I have this blog in the first place.

The second reason I stopped writing was embarking upon a jobsearching adventure without an actual plan. I was ashamed of my lack of success. I stopped writing, because I didn’t believe I had anything to say – I wanted to inspire people, not drag them down with my lack of planning. I forgot that it’s vulnerability and story that inspires, not only success itself.

Essentially, I quit my job assuming that I was a different person that I really am. I wasn’t all wrong. I am capable of having adventures, I’m capable of tremendous effort and making leaps of faith. But I forgot that next to those qualities I’m prone to anxiety, which makes it a struggle to leave the house – which makes anxiety worse – which makes me want to read all the time – and at the end of the process, I had to rebuild my worth as a person. I had to drag myself out by my ears.

Newly-discovered nostalgia for Poland and eating my body weight in cheesecake certainly didn’t help.

And here I am. It’s been a fruitful year, even if I didn’t write in here much. I was in Vagina Monologues. I wrote plays, poems, played a one woman show in Polish, directed and edited a music video. I worked out regularly and started a stand-up comedy habit. I’ve done a lot of stuff for an anxiety-ridden, unemployed and occasionally depressed person.

And now? I’m about to turn thirty and I’m doing a one woman show tomorrow. It’s called Fuck It, I’m Thirty. It’s free entry and maybe the scariest thing I’ll have done so far.

So I’m tying up that loose end that itched at me – wanting to write on the blog – and going away, so I can stop distracting myself with the wrong kind of writing and get freaking ready for my freaking show.