“Wanna Be Startin’ Something”: a creative reflection
I get on TikTok and talk a whole heap of shit about artists and their rollouts. But now, having put myself in a position where I’m doing something inherently soul-bearing, I want to make sure I’m creating enough space for myself for my intentions to be understood and felt.
So, this is a creative reflection on what I see as the art of content creation, my evolving relationship with it, and how teenage dream has unlocked the next evolution of who I am - both as an individual and as a creator.
At my core, I’m a very cerebral person. Thinking is a superpower to me, but also a form of artistic expression. So, in that, there is a lot of sensitivity in that. This is, as for me, expressing information isn’t just a joy to me, but it has been my preferred weapon of choice against adversity. Growing up felt like walking through a minefield—filled with explosive misunderstandings and mischaracterisations that my young brain found difficult to reckon with. (The medium of a blog is interesting as I feel like I should paint this out a bit more, and I can… in another blog post.)
Therefore, in a world that I have a deep mistrust of, certainty and rigor of fact is arousing to me. It provides a stability and a comfort that guards my heart and mind. But it also fuels zeal and this righteous anger, which is why I LOVE verbal conflict and debate. It’s like playtime to me; and this is a double enterdre, I did most of my arguing and debating during breaktimes. It was an avenue where I’d get to be my most expressive, confident and calculating. Often purely just to prove my point.
How well do you think this mentality serves me?
In digesting this piece, I hope the answer reveals itself to you.
My lore is not one to played with.
When I say that thinking is like a superpower, what I really mean is that my brain has a very high processing speed. This impacts the speed in which I read and digest information, which has aided me great academically. But in the real world, this makes for quite a disorientating experience as not everyone is working on double time. Therefore, there is a lot of mental gymnastics that I must do to explain anything. Almost like having to catch someone up to speed. I have spent a lot of life just arguing. About why I’m right; about morality, society, religion – you name it. And honestly, the pleasure and joy came in the act of surrender. When I have mentally exhausted my opponent to the point that they have nothing to say or they don’t know what to say. And I think this applies to the way I’ve approached content creation.
For example, teenage dream has been a deep important passion project for me, and it’s that passion that has me writing this post. It began as a series of thought pieces posted on my newly created YouTube channel. One of the ways to describe teenage dream is as product of a deep, long-going internal and existential crisis. How this series got made was a result of the internal conflict between my creativity and my intellect, and the dust is yet to settle.
It was in the early days of my YouTube, and I recently had my viral hit - IN LOVE: A Critical Analysis of Beyoncé’s Discography – which accumulated almost 50,000 views in two weeks. I felt deeply validated by people appreciating the intellect and analysis I presented the video. BUT… but also by those who connected with my vulnerability and self-awareness present in others. It was the glee I found in theorizing about matters of the mind of the heart and culture that makes me love what I do.
After uploading it, there was a great stirring within of what’s next? Can my next video essay get that same amount of views? Because then we can monetise and… so forth and so on. But a second train of thought pulled up, sponsored by Beyoncé. Something constantly watching her career has taught me is her relationship with her audience. To ascend to the heights that she has, she has had to divorce numbers and commercial reception to how she defined success. What she has done, particularly from the start of her postmodern era with Beyoncé (2013), is find her source of inspiration and drive within. I wanted this same feeling. I didn’t want to add up as a slave to the algorithm – where everything people gravitated about me really had nothing to do with me as an individual, but what’s defined as and to me by the algorithm. In my opinion, there are a lot of creators and artists fall into this pipeline, and I didn’t want to. It’s a real fear of mine - building my identity, not just as a content creator but as a human being, in something inauthentic. This feeling is exacerbated with the type of content I make being informational and (pop) cultural – all things which are by definition, bigger than me.
My dilemma then became how do I build success that feels both internally and externally validating, without losing myself? And hell, only time will be able to tell with this but there’s what started teenage dream. It was this articulation of my experiences in combination with theory to express the depth of my own humanity. It was the start of me understanding my content not as content but art – a canvas where I blend my life experiences with intellectual insights to authentically self-express. And it started fairly early – six videos in. A big part of that is an awareness that there was a greater power in expressing fully who I am then just making content. But the thorn in my flesh – which manifests in part as my reckless perfectionism – can and does continue to detour how that’s actualised.
I thought to approach my content from an artful place required precision and meticulousness. With how serious I take being a thought daughter, I am going to make a Picasso out of everything I do or I’ll spend enough hours mulling the structure or the hook or the editing style to feel that way. This perfectionism was partly driven by this desire for success (and survival) – by aiming to make the best content that was possible. With the best editing, the most beautifully articulated point and all these additional refinements. Exercising such “control” over my content felt like I was in control of how people saw me (ha).
I’d love to say I don’t really care what people think about me… and I don’t really. But the lack of care comes in my ability to power through my fear. Exercising control is a way for me to do so. I was finding joy in sharing information and discussing my hobbies, but a part of me was scared of the ways people can see and interpret who I am. In my head, by editing a video to perfection, any negative perception of myself or my content couldn’t hold weight because at the very least… I’m 100% right and 100% right all the time – bringing me myself right back to when I was 14.
My pursuit of perfection often led to delays and reinforced that same constant sense of inadequacy, preventing me from sharing my authentic self. I have had to acknowledge how much my content can act as an extension of this need to prove or validate myself. In my head, being 100% right was my way to fight back from naysayers and mean niggas.
This is pride.
I strive for perfection and to always be right because I’ve always believed that’s the version that people would accept. This thought was reinforced by the mixed and painful results I had felt growing up in trying to be myself. Every social setting required this fight-or-flight mode. So being right was a much easier battle to fight as then the fight to be myself… so I thought.
That defence mechanism that I was stuck in meant experiencing life and myself from the watchtower, stuck in this fight-or-flight. This extends to every part of my existence, however the question I’ve been asking myself as a content creator and specifically with the creation of this series is “how could I start sharing information as a form of expression and connection opposed as a double-edged sword?” What could life look like if I actively engaged in dialogue and connection with other people? A big part of this is fighting back against the need to isolate and exclude myself as a method of survival (for example, I spent most of my lunchtimes in secondary school in the computer room – just wait for the podcast.).
Content creation gave me the opportunity to express myself and realise… “wait, people like you? For you? Oh!” Embracing pop culture as a passion of mine and expressing that was a core part of that. But to experience true growth, I had to grow to embrace and understand myself for who I truly am, beyond the facade of perfection and the need to constantly prove myself. This meant accepting my vulnerabilities, recognizing my unique strengths, and allowing my genuine passions to guide my content creation. And what I have realised is - sharing information is a genuine passion of mine! I have faced consistent challenge and resistance in this area; people do often confuse passion and zeal for something as pride and arrogance – I get it as I’m not 100% immune from my ego. But that fear of being assumed as a bit of an asshole for knowing and doing more does cause me, at times, to dim my light. Wanting to discontinue this cycle does force me to have to assert that my intentions are pure. At times, this feels unnecessary; at times, this feels in poor taste. But I also understand what got me here, and that goes beyond me.
People perish for lack of knowledge; and without understanding the different histories, cultures and ideologies that inform how we see ourselves, we often lack the context to fully understand ourselves with the grace and empathy we deserve. A lot of insecurity I’ve dealt with growing up stems from seeing myself as this problem that needs to be resolved. I then realised much of these challenges aren’t due to some innate problem with myself, but how the different parts of my identity interact and sometimes oppose the things of the world (in a sociological context, this isn’t about secularism I’m afraid). The core of the teenage dream series is about exposing the social and cultural mechanisms that ultimately define our identity. This is so that people don’t feel powerless like they must accept the world around them for what it is – especially when it’s actively hurting them. The process of marrying the academic and personal in understanding society as a constructed reality was a vital step in my journey of self-discovery. The liberation I found was like a contagion - when you got it, you want to spread it… like the fire of Holy Ghost. That’s really and truly what a lot of my content is. Taking the time to reflect on the world and my position in it helped me feel more empowered in myself and I want the same for… everyone? (not my enemies - YOU will crumble.)
Life and particularly your teenage years engineers this version of you that is counter-intuitive to your actual dreams and ambition. Disarming this version of yourself that is actively working against your better will is exhausting work. (I’m annoyed as last blog post featured a mild critique of Romans, and I have now regurgitated that very same scripture back at you.)
And I don’t want it to be. I just want to be myself, and I think it’s crazy that I even need to say that. Which is why starting teenage dream: the series with “hell on earth” was really important. I could have started straight into “the birth of the teenager” but I knew that for my content to become art – something that makes you think and feel more deeply about yourself and the world around you – I’d have to lead with myself. But it has become second nature for me to fear and recoil at who am I; which is why a narrative thread of the series ended up being this tug-and-pull of understanding myself through theory and thought and actually just being. And with the sheer amount of time I put into teenage dream and content creation overall, I have become very conscious to how much me holding onto these formative fears of myself will only prevent me actualising all the things I really want for myself. I want to grow, I want to thrive, I want to gain.
But truth is I’m tired.
Not tired of thinking—that’ll always be the engine behind everything I create. But I’m tired of being in constant conflict with myself. I’ve been so busy being “right”, being “precise”, being “perfect”, that I’ve forgotten how to just be. To live. To rest in the fact that there’s nothing I need to prove in order to be worthy of joy.
teenage dream has been my diary, my thesis, my prayer, and my protest all at once. And any time I get the opportunity to express my passions - to show the world how deeply I care about things - it’s an honor and a privilege. But it’s also been a battlefield. And I think the core lessons I’ve learnt from teenage dream, as an individual, as a creator, as someone who so desperately wants to live as their full self, is to stop fighting for a second. To lay my weapons down. To enjoy Eden a little bit more.
I began talking about how thinking is my superpower. And it is. But what I’ve clocked through the making of this series and the art of reflection is: that any power left unchecked can become its own form of bondage.
So I’m choosing now to step back. To breathe. To let the dust settle on teenage dream… for now. I need to let the work I’ve done be. To let it breathe. To let me breathe. Because at its core, this project has always been an act of labour—but also an act of love. Self-love. And I’m realizing that sometimes, loving yourself means knowing when to stop fighting for yourself and simply start living as yourself.
I want you to know that through this blog post - through everything I’ve created under teenage dream and as a content creator - what you’ve witnessed isn’t all that I am, but it is all that I have been. And I’m proud of that. I stand by every word, every thought, every deep dive, because it’s helped me see my life not just through a lens of panic, survival, and grief… but through a lens of possibility. Of life. Of me.
But I’ve never really let myself feel that. And I think it’s time for me to find out what it feels like to stop proving who I am and what I can do—and to just be. I’m not sure exactly where that leads me yet. And that’s okay.
So, for now… I’m off to the garden.
