The Loneliest Part of Becoming

The audience grows. So does the distance.

In 2023, social media appeared to be changing my life. I had decided to invest time into it by treating it like a full-time job. My goal was to maintain a high quality output of work and be consistent about it. Within a few months of doing so, my work was gaining visibility, my audience began growing, and I felt connected to people all around the world. Using social media, I was building an artistic career in a way that wouldn’t have been possible a few decades ago. Photography was already an obsession for me, so to now have an audience forming that actively liked and shared my work not only filled me with excitement but it fueled my journey. I felt accompanied as I was pursuing street photography further.

When I started my Instagram account, I never set out with the intention of growing. I set out with the intention of sharing. Not only photographs but also thoughts, journal entries, and other introspections. Sharing the experience of making my photographs was just as important to me as the photographs themselves. However, as I looked back at my growth over the course of a few years, I had a stark realization. People had celebrated with me when I reached my first 10,000 followers. People were mostly silent when I celebrated my first 100,000.

At the beginning, my audience felt like a community. The work I’d post was met with thoughtful comments, messages, and was widely shared. Their encouragement nurtured a constructive feedback loop in which I too was proactively engaging with them. Names began to feel familiar there, and I began to recognize other people’s work too. It felt as if I was building something with people alongside me. There was a good amount of reciprocity happening.

As time moved forward, my audience kept growing, and so did I. I began to exhibit my work, I was featured in leading photography publications and received a few awards from photography competitions, and the most important to me, I began working on my first photography book. However, when I shared my achievements on social media I seemed to receive increasingly less enthusiasm from my audience. Interestingly, as my art became more established, my perceived sense of community on social media shrank.

More and more, I sensed a growing lack of engagement settle in. In fact, I felt that sharing any glimpse of personal milestones became detrimental to my online presence to the point to which I began questioning the entire purpose of social media. I gradually watched the people who once celebrated my work online disappear as it became more visible and regarded. Here’s where I pose a question: What happens when the people watching you stop simply seeing your work and start seeing themselves in relation to you? An audience can bring growth, but with it comes weight. And the larger the audience gets, the heavier it becomes.

My growth was changing what I represented to the people watching me. From the time I started my account, multiple versions of myself had come to be: the sound engineer who became a photographer, the online photographer exhibiting work outside social media, the photographer that built an audience, the artist who self-published a hardcover book. Each new iteration that developed created a new fork in the road for audience members: a path for those encountering the work at its current point of development and a path for those who had a previous context of it. Someone who meets you for the first time is encountering the person you are at that moment. They’re not comparing the person you are with the person you’re becoming. Meanwhile, someone who knows you before a transformation has an older image of you that may never fully update. The moment this was clear to me was when I launched the Kickstarter campaign to fund the self-publishing of my debut book, Discovering Light. I reached out for support directly to my followers, both strangers and those I was meeting along the path of photography, and to people I knew well before this new journey of mine. My outreach was met with deafening silence. I got more support from people I had met recently than from people I considered friends. It was then that I realized that strangers often see us more clearly than those who have known us for years. Not because strangers know us better. But because they don’t have an outdated version of us competing with the present one.

When audiences grow, expectations accumulate and relationships within become impersonal. At 10,000, I experienced the audience as people standing beside me. At 100,000, it felt more akin to people standing behind glass, watching. Perhaps an audience is there not only because it wants to watch, but because it needs someone to measure itself against. When this happens, a wedge is created between the audience and the creator. The initial forces of attraction begin to fade and the distance starts to grow. Distance brings contemplation with it. Someone in the audience might be asking themselves: what have I done in my life? Is my work good enough? I began asking myself: who is actually here with me? Am I creating for myself, or for an algorithm? The focus had shifted. The space I had created was no longer just about sharing work. It was beginning to reflect something deeper in both the audience and myself. An increasing sense of loneliness. One that becomes heavier when the people who I once felt beside me begin to feel increasingly distant.

What do we do when the people watching you become easier to count than the people standing beside you? What does a creator do when the thing that gave them visibility begins interfering with their ability to feel seen? Scale itself changes relationships. Somewhere along the way the work began to suffer. Growth can become a lonely path to walk. Not because success isolates us, but because every transformation we undergo asks something of the people around us. Some grow with us. Some stay where we met them. This is one of the costs of becoming.