You are (probably) not Obama

You can risk more exposure, more experimentation and more humiliation than you think.

who do you think you are hiding from

They’ve clipped and tweeted my segment, I am about to be snowed in by online trolls. I will also get new followers. I typed hastily to my high school bestie after a tv appearance. What should I do? Quick, clean up your instagram, anything provocative, involving alcohol or of you looking ridiculous must go. Mate, that’s 80% of my online presence. What’s the point in that?

We all have those friends who don’t want to be in photos, who remove their tags from posts of them holding a glass of wine or looking silly. Whose twitter accounts look like corporate LinkedIn pages. It feels like millennials suffer the most from the fear of being exposed online for being human, perhaps because they are on the cusp of being both digital natives and the last generation to not have instagram at the age of 12, who have seen what tweets from 2007 did to the careers of powerful boomers. If you are into politics and have friends with political aspirations this fear is magnified further. People scrutinise their own online image as if the Mi5 is about to peer over their instagram stories for evidence of dissent from the Labour Party line.

I have had to clean up my online presence a couple of times in the past. The first time was when I run for student council on an overzealous slate. Our ‘campaign organiser’ (i.e. a young Blairite from the university who wanted to play spin doctor) directed me to delete every photo of me looking drunk to get the ISoc (Islamic Society) vote - the biggest block of guaranteed voters in my campus. I was also told to stop dressing like I work a corporate 9-5 to go to my law lectures and go buy a pair of jeans and sneakers like a normal student in London (good advice for all international students to be fair).

The second time was when I started working in Parliament and random journalists started following me and being suspiciously nice and friendly. I struggled enough to get my foot in the door, I knew my stay was not guaranteed so was keen to please. Early on a former spin doctor from the Blair years who I was friends with on Facebook and gave me career guidance told me off for posting something critical of the Labour Party. Another time an older guy I was dating who was better connected and more experienced than me straight up told me I was not cut out for politics because of a similar post on Facebook, before he blew out about my naïveté and ghosted me. I retreated from the guilty pleasures of online posting for a few years after that like a puppy whose new master stepped on its paw.

Licking my wounds in the background I continued consuming other people’s content, their tweets, writing, podcasts, books and finally, the Crème de la crème of online content: their Substacks.

My career moved on, the pandemic hit, I left Parliament, joined in on the global depressive interception the lock down forced upon us and I started going mad. After another dramatic romantic affair I had a manic melt down on instagram. For a few weeks I would post multiple times a day. I look back at my archive now and I was even using those filters that make you look like a manga. I now find them- me- scary. I wasn’t ok, but then again, during the lockdown, who was? It was junk content, but most of it would have passed through the filters of my previous clear outs: it was mostly food related (read: innocent) content and mostly not political (ain’t nobody gonna cancel me). It challenged no one, least of all myself. At the same time I was still spending hours every day consuming other people’s content.And that was my problem, I was making my self look stupid rather than say and write what I actually wanted.

It took a couple more years, but one morning last Christmas after having consumed my weight in other people’s words and Greek Christmas cookies, I sat down on my laptop and did what I should have done ages ago. Started my own blog. Since then I am continuously coming against the fear of what I am writing being seen by people who don’t have my best interest at heart. What if I become a politician or a public figure of shorts and people who have spent years secretly hating me have been keeping receipts of why I am terrible human being, vain and insecure, not idealistic and visionary. The answer is obvious that if my blog was so successful that even people who hate me couldn’t resist the urge to read my thousand word posts then obviously it would be foolish to keep my rare writing talent from the world!!!11!! The other point is that you can’t hide who you really are for long, definitely not now. We live and work and stand for elections at a time when everyone’s lives are public. People find out who you are sooner or later. You can try to hate the part of you that you think is most shameful but to what end? Your shame will only fester and leak into other parts of your personality, making you miserable to be around.

Personally, I never had any ambitions for privacy as I always recognised my desperate need to be known. Known not as in being famous, known as in being understood completely, even by one person. I understand that many, if not most, people believe it is simply not pleasant to be objectively observed. I can’t empathise with that. I am delighted to be objectively observed. It means someone paid me close attention. Those who know me will attest, I never protest when I am being accused with my most obvious vices: vanity, aggressiveness, pomposity, competitiveness, gluttony, impulsivity, contemptuousness, naivety. I almost take pleasure when someone calls me a narcissist (I have done the online test and I score higher than most celebrities) BECAUSE IT’S TRUE!!!!! If I had a kink it would be exposing myself, not sexually, but where it matters, for me, morally and intellectually. Ooooh yes…tell me what I already know, that I am not as talented and virtuous as I dreamed of as a child. LOUDER!

The other thing is this, your career may reach crazy heights and you may live to regret projecting an image that’s not polished or thought through. A future board may reject your stellar application as a CEO because they can’t have a woman who once dressed up as sexy Covid nurse control a multimillion budget, your local CLP (that’s constituency Labour Party for the normies) may reject your application to be their Parliamentary candidate because what if the Daily Mail finds that stand up set you did about your love for Catholic men, your future husband may swipe you left because he googled you and cringed at that speech you gave on a cardboard box in the middle of Parliament square. You may also never get a chance to do any of these things. Maybe the last elected position you will ever hold was being on the executive committee of a Labour adjacent society, maybe the heigh of your leadership ambitions will hit a wall when you become editor of your own Substack, maybe the only male that will stay close to you forever is your cat. What then, will you tell your older self, when you look back to decades of waiting for a limelight that never comes? Was that discipline worth it? The problem is, 99.99% of the population is not Obama. Most of us are not destined for greatness and even if you define greatness liberally (which I need to do to satisfy my narcissistic side) you probably won’t reach it if you live your life through greeted teeth. Your talent, if you have any, needs air to breathe and to see the light of day to flourish. More importantly, it needs to smash against other people’s judgement to sculpt it to a higher level of artistry. You don’t improve alone in the shadows. Other people’s opinions may be tedious but unless you are happy performing on an empty stage you need to start respecting your audience.

I recently started doing political commentating on live tv, a thing I’ve always wanted to do more of for obvious reasons (do I have to spell it out? exposure, influence, platform, money, vanity, access). The first few times I would copiously prepare my notes as soon as I was told of the topics, usually a couple of hours prior to going live. I would give myself strict parameters of what to say, trying to cram in stats and facts to recall and repeat when prompted to sound better read than I felt. The result is I sounded stiff and felt paralysed. I was almost shocked when they continued to call me back on panels because I felt I performed so poorly. My best appearances where the ones where I minimally prepared and responded naturally to whatever was being asked of me in the moment. I was even able to pad out my answers with more facts and knowledge that I had forgotten I had. Obviously I was also angrier and more emotional. I also made a lot more jokes. Because that is who I am in real life too, an angry and emotional person that makes up for it with a lot of jokes but who also probably has experienced and read enough to give you a political opinion.

You cannot and won’t be successful in any job or relationship if you have to be on guard 24/7 and you probably don’t want to either. There is this haunting piece Tim Kreider wrote for the NY times in 2013 where a friend of his describes a set of stairs you have to go down to be truly known:

Years ago a friend of mine had a dream about a strange invention; a staircase you could descend deep underground, in which you heard recordings of all the things anyone had ever said about you, both good and bad. The catch was, you had to pass through all the worst things people had said before you could get to the highest compliments at the very bottom. There is no way I would ever make it more than two and a half steps down such a staircase, but I understand its terrible logic: if we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.

Say you successfully built a career and relationship on the foundations that you are this wonderful person, hard working, honest. Someone who knew to skip the slur when picking a rap song for karaoke in university, who knew the right side of the line in every culture, whose physical bookcase would be a happy accident in the background of any zoom call and whose podcast library is one the Guardian wouldn’t hesitate to list in its recommendation on what to listen next. Would you not be depressed knowing that the person people are responding to is not you but an act? I know people who present like this but wether the image they project is the whole spectrum of their internal darkness is between them and their maker.

There are two types of creators as far as I am concerned. The well-adjusted, the happy, the tame. The ones who speak and write with gracefulness and intention. Then there are the heathens, the brilliant assholes. Both have their space. To subvert the system, someone has to built it first, and I have a lot of respect for the patient and the dedicated souls, truly the giants on whose shoulders we are standing, who have set the rules for acceptable public life. Of course, if I could chose, I would pick to be Obama. But I was born and raised by a mother and in a country where making fart jokes is still considered hilarious so I have to forgive myself when I am more resembling of Donald Trump. Most importantly, I remind myself, they both became President.