Let Go and Get Going

Take a minute and answer this question before reading the rest of this post. Really think about your answer. What is the one thing you have always wanted to accomplish and what is the one thing or multiple thing(s) standing in your way. Is it fear? Another person? or some imagined failure that’s keeping you from tackling that dream. Now write it down.

Often times before we even start to think of success, thoughts of failure drown out our dreams. These thoughts or feelings can have many different roots. Maybe it was someone telling you your entire life that you won’t amount to anything. Maybe its a significant other discouraging you from your dreams because he/she is already paying all the bills. It may be a failed relationship that’s thrown you into depression and you don’t think you are strong enough to push through. Finally, one of the biggest evils of them all, FEAR.

I ask my four year old daughter, “What do you want to be when you grow up” and she says “a Princess.” Princess Elsa to be exact. Not only does she want to be a Princess, but she believes with all her heart that when she is older, she WILL become Princess Elsa. Why is it that when we are children, we have no sense of fear, no sense of road blocks and no sense of anyone being able to stand in our way? Is it because we know less? Possibly. But is knowing more really a reason to feel defeated and scared of reaching our fullest potential? Now take a look at the list you wrote down earlier. Everything you wrote down is nothing short of fabricated lies and pure excuses we subconsciously feed our minds every day, thus setting ourselves up for failure. The more we focus on the negatives and the “cant’s” the less room we leave for the possibilities and opportunities for our future.

It’s time to let go, get going and take your initial step towards YOUR success. Also keep in mind, that success comes in different forms and there is no universal measurement or formula. We always tend to measure our success by someone else’s achievements. I am guilty of this, as are most of us. For example, if someone is at a certain level of “success” in two years time, we compare our level of “success” in two years and stamp anything short of their reached status as a failure for us. I don’t know about you, but I’ve found myself doing this time and time again, victimizing myself, belittling myself and thinking I will never be “successful.” I don’t want to keep taking a stab at social media, but I have to point the finger one more time, because it is what corrupts about 80-90% of our thought process and molds our belief system.

You can’t deny that we judge someone’s success level based on their social media pages. If they present a page full of brand names and lavish vacations, we automatically categorize them as “successful.” However, someone who is very accomplished in their goals may not even have a social media account. Do yourself a favor and concentrate on your own plan and path, and stay away from comparing, fearing and envying another’s journey. Create your own.

The bottom line is that there is nothing in this world that should ever stop you from your dreams. Yes that sounds cliché and I’m sure you’ve heard this a million times before, but Ill be the one additional person to tell you yet again. Ill leave you with this; I have a degree and I am very well aware that choosing my career in makeup was against all norms for my family and surrounding. I was mocked, criticized and told there are too many makeup artists, and that this is not a career. Also, that going to school was a total waste, since i changed career paths. (When did being educated become a waste anyway?) I could have used those as road blocks, but i CHOSE to use them as ammunition to push me instead. I love what I do. Oh and look, i’m using my degree to write a blog now! You can do anything you set your mind to and reach your version of success, whatever that may be, but the first step is deleting your false beliefs, taking the word impossible out of your vocabulary and learning to write your own damn story.

Instagram: What You Don't Know

So let’s see, where do I even start with this topic! I decided to talk about this, because I always get questions about how I gained followers on Instagram, etc. So about 4 years ago I got on this Instagram bandwagon and hey, I was still considered one of the late comers. I guess I hadn’t gotten the memo years before that and to be completely honest all I knew was Myspace and wasn’t even willing to open up a Facebook account. Finally one day I heard of this App and decided to give it a go and start posting my makeup looks. When i first started, I invested so much money as I still do, in purchasing different brands of makeup just so I could create a look and pray that the company would notice me and repost my work. Let me tell you, at the time when Instagram was “normal” and everyone was given a “fair chance” of being noticed, I got reposted… A LOT! HUDA used to repost me at least once every 2 weeks, and with every repost I would gain over 800-900 followers. Lilly Ghalichi was the first major person who reposted my work and I received a message from Instagram that warned me of unusual/suspicious activity occurring on my page (due to the sudden outpour of followers I was gaining) and I had to authorize the message in order to continue using my page. I mean, seriously THAT is the Instagram I want back!

Working so hard to build a platform for years and then seeing it crumble right before your eyes due to the stupid algorithms and changes Instagram has implemented in its app, is straight out frustrating and heartbreaking. Not only for myself, but other artists who are very talented, are being stripped of opportunities that are simply handed only to those who began their Instagram journey years before and now have over a million followers. What makes you or I any different or any less talented? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!

So with that being said, I am going to give a brief breakdown of how Instagram used to work versus how it works today and where your posts actually end up, in case you were wondering. Backtracking to three years ago, things were much simpler. Particularly pertaining to the beauty world since that is my expertise, one would take a great quality picture, post it to Instagram with a catchy caption and add multiple hashtags. The point of the hashtags used to be to expose the picture posted into those particular pages. For example, a #hudabeauty hashtag would land you on that hashtag page and when she checked her hashtags, your picture using her product would appear. If she liked it, she would repost it and that would bring a storm of new followers, thus making the artists page grow at light speed. Realistically speaking, the only responsibility we as artists had, was to use the company’s makeup, put forth an excellent picture, hashtag them and cross our fingers to be reposted. Thinking back to that and writing this actually makes me reminisce on the good old days. *TEAR* lol

Now lets fast forward to today and to say the least, Instagram has become a battlefield. The ones armed with the most ammunition and years of Instagram experience are winning, and the rest of us are in the distance waiting for someone to throw us a chewed up bone!

Today, you can go bankrupt buying new products, sprain your ankle posing for that perfect picture, strain your neck for the perfect angle to show off that $60 dollar NEW highlighter you bought, although you owned 100 more just like it, and hashtag the crap out of your pictures. If you don’t get enough likes within the first few minutes you post, your hashtags get swallowed up into a place only God knows! This becomes an automatic defeat in itself, as the only pages/pictures that can collect enough likes to stay relevant are the ones who already have around a million followers. Once again, we are all left behind. Moreover, hashtags are actually not on our side anymore, as using a lot of them throws shade (literally) on your post and Instagram thinking it is SPAM, “shadow bans” your page. Shadow banning a page is throwing a page/user into an unknown space in the social community. “Blocking or partially blocking” their content in such a way that isn’t too obvious to them that they have indeed been banned. Too much to soak in? Well there is definitely more! I plan on writing a blog post entirely dedicated to the Do’s and Don’ts of Instagram, so I will only limit this to the basics. To sum it up, Instagram wants to limit your growth, because too many people were making money off of posting (paid by companies to do so) and Instagram was not getting a cut. By limiting people getting noticed, they are limiting everything else in between, hence making it almost impossible for anyone trying to climb the ladder to success in this social community.

Have you ever noticed that when you open your page to see your friend’s posts, they are ever rarely there and instead there are multiple posts from popular pages that were posted hours, even days ago? That is another tactic of making our pages with less followers just a little smaller and practically nonexistent. The popular pages get all the exposure as if they needed more of it, and the rest of us remain vague stragglers, yelling “someone notice me,” except no one hears us! If you’re asking yourself what now? Well, there really is no answer unfortunately.

There are some semi-solutions that can help us slightly, but we have to work as a team and support one another in order to push forward, even a little. How is it that when I post a story, thousands of people see them and yet my pictures get only a hundred or so likes? This sums up everyone’s bitter Instagram reality, not just mine. It’s like Instagram is filled with window shoppers who see, but never buy. We see the story, we think to ourselves thats nice; we make an effort to scroll down to see what the story leads us to and when it comes down to the last second of clicking that “like” button we just decide to pass on it. And we are ALL guilty of that, including myself. Sometimes I have to remind myself to go back to a post I scrolled through and click that like button, because my brain liked it but my finger was to lazy to take action. If more of us gave feedback to one another, supported by “liking” and appreciating one another’s efforts, we too could start our path to social media success. So the next time you find yourself liking every single post of someone with a million followers, stop and sprinkle a little love on the rest of social media artists who actually need your support to shine.

The Plague

I have definitely discussed this topic before on my social media platforms and it has been an ongoing topic of conversation that just seems to keep getting worse by the minute. Social media has definitely evolved into a realm that blurs the lines of reality and fantasy. Like the happily ever after movies we grew up with, where everything is painted in perfect colors and the lead character always comes out victorious, social media replicates that same illusion; might I actually say DELUSION. We are stuck every day behind a screen, vicariously living through the perfect world of those who we follow. Perfect lives, perfect families, perfect bodies, flawless faces and husbands/boyfriends who always send their significant other ten dozen long stemmed roses. Before we know it, hours have passed, and we are entirely lost in someone’s “perfect” make belief life, comparing it with our own REAL life, and depressing over our mishaps. Sound familiar? Well I sure am guilty of falling victim to this more times than I would like to admit, I mean who hasn’t? And if you say “not me” then you are one among none.

I like to refer to this issue as “the plague” because it really is contagious and it is definitely spreading through our generation. Everywhere I look, from toddlers to seniors, people are always on their phone, involved in some form of social media outlet. Human communication has disappeared, as the hours spent on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc. take up most of our time, whether we are on a date, at work or in the bathroom. To think that we spend so much of our day on these platforms that are fabricated is actually pretty disturbing. We miss out on our real lives, because we are too busy admiring or longing for someone else’s reality that doesn’t exist. It is a controlled environment, where Facetune and Photoshop play tricks on our minds, making us feel as though we are less than acceptable since we don’t look like the images we are bombarded with.

My social media platform may be considered big to some and nonexistent to others with over a million followers. But however big or small, I hope to always put out a positive message and empower others rather than to belittle them. We are all guilty of altering our pictures to put out the best “image” for our page, and pick and choose which photo captured our best angle out of thirty others that just didn’t look right. So with that being said, no one posts their failures and no one posts their arguments with their spouse or hardships in their life on social media. Think of it as a happy place, where people fantasize how they would want their life to actually be and they post snippets of moments that replicate the lifestyle they long for. Don’t take it so serious, because IT IS NOT REAL LIFE. So the next time you catch yourself trapped in the social media space, remind yourself that what you are looking at are simply moments captured that had the INTENT of being captured, to then be altered, filtered and published very strategically in order to portray a life that someone imagined having. Now smile, because you are beautiful and your life is beautiful just as it is!