stripes are my favorite color: on releasing the caricature of myself

Woven: Reflections on the Wonderfully Weird Web, Part 6

Hello gentle-people,

In case you haven’t heard, I am giving away 75 complimentary subscriptions which means access to the full archive of A Gentle Landing. This offer is for you if you are a Black person seeking affirmations of your softness, someone who works in vocational discernment, a seminary student or a poet. These are all identities that have shaped me vocationally, as I have responded to the call to softness. If any of those identities sound like you or someone you know, please direct them to this post:

celebrating 3 years of writing on substack

[Woven: Reflections on the Wonderfully Weird Web is a series that weaves together stories of how I have been shaped by the internet. This series comes with reflective questions to help us think critically about our engagement with digital media and develop better practices of care for ourselves and others we are in community with online. You can explore more in this series here.]

behind the lines

The summer of 2016, five white fellow students and I traveled in a van together for seven weeks of the summer. We were a team representing our Christian school at various Christian family and teen camps along the East Coast.

If you find it hard to imagine me playing camp games with teenagers, trust me, I struggle to imagine it and I was there. In my interview for the job, I explicitly said I didn’t really like being outside and that I didn’t know how to talk to kids. I felt like an imposter the whole summer except for when I was on stage, which was what I was certainly chosen for.

I also felt like an imposter because most of the places we went that summer were the whitest places I have ever been to this day. I felt like a Black spot on a white sheet.

Back in our training for that summer, we all had to work on our introductions—of ourselves as a team and individually. I had no idea what was in store for me. I didn’t know how to brace myself, but I had a little introduction worked out:

“My name is Rose, and stripes are my favorite color.”

I had no idea that I would want to quit and go home after the first week of intense culture shock. I had no idea that for the third week, when Alton Sterling and Philandro Castile were killed by police, I’d be in a camp where I experienced overt racism. One day, I might tell that story in its fullness here, but for now, I want to fast forward to the end of the summer—because now I can—thank God.

The summer was over, the semester had begun again. In the fishbowl that was my predominantly white school, I made a name for myself playing the Magical Negro.¹ I was frequently in conversations about race and racism with white classmates, teachers and staff. Back then, I would have said I was comfortable in white spaces, but I now see how restricted I was as I moved within them. I now see a desire to be seen and loved, masked by the impulse to educate.

I had yet to read Austin Channing Brown’s I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness. That book made me feel like I could wear my blackness more comfortably. “Pre-I’m Still Here Rose” slipped into the mammy role that was carved out for her like she slipped into a striped dress she bought with the money she made that summer. She let the color slowly drain from her wardrobe and let stripes “become her personality.”

“So you’re really going to commit to this caricature of yourself?”

These words came from one of my professors. A Black professor. He was chuckling as he said it. I remember I was walking down the stairs from the cafeteria, one of my many stages. He was on his way up. As we passed each other, I don’t remember what performance I put on for him, but he wasn’t having it.

And I didn’t have a good response. Who could say yes or no to a question like that?

The stripes could not hide me.

Photo by Tayla Brand on Unsplash

branding

I have been growing a little notegarden. The thoughts and ideas I come up with live there, starting as seeds before they sprout roots, stalks and flowers. As a practice of archival devotion, this process helps me come up with ideas for my writing. All it demands is that I am willing to let the notes grow even if I don’t know what I need them for right now. I devote a little bit of time in this process to looking back on old notes. Sometimes, I am looking back on notes from past lives.

Here are some notes I took titled, “how to do well on Instagram”²

1. Create and optimize your profile.

2. Designate a content creator.

3. Follow photography and editing best practices.

4. Set a regular posting schedule.

5. Curate some of your content.

6. Use a consistent, platform-specific brand voice.

7. Write engaging, shareable captions.

8. Optimize posts with relevant hashtags.

Seeing this list made me cringe a little. My notes remind me that there was once a time when I cared about how well I was doing on Instagram. I have to send tender thoughts back to that Rose who had a toxic relationship with growth online.

What stands out to me now in these notes is point #6 —“Use a consistent, platform-specific brand voice.”

This is something those of us who have ever searched the internet for advice on how to grow your social media accounts have come across over and over. Sometimes it comes accompanied by the call to “niche down,” and focus on sharing within one subject area.

There is a direct relationship between what we know as branding in the marketing world and the process of burning a mark on someone or something to signify ownership. The history of branding also points back to the fact that at one time in this country, human beings, enslaved Black people, were branded like livestock. There is also an element of branding that has to do with using language to limit access or expand it: Some of us are branded in, while others are branded out.

find on Pinterest

the ampersand

While we were in Maine that summer, accompanied by one of my teammates, I got an ampersand tattoo on my left inner forearm. I had no idea what words I wanted around them, but I left space for them. I got the idea for an ampersand tattoo from Pinterest. I had saved many different styles of ampersand tattoos to a board I called “think in ink.” Pinterest was where I went to develop a lot of my style back then. Pinning an idea to a board didn’t make it permanent, but returning to it for a few times after seemed to give it merit.

I was just beginning to fall in love with typography. My calligraphy practice was one of the ways I grounded myself that summer. I liked the meaning of ampersands, so I knew I would be comfortable with one on my arm until the words came. I liked that the ampersand symbolized possibility, something forthcoming. The ongoing development of me, as I pull together various parts of myself to be held.

Plus, there was the promise of more tattoos.

the unknown

“The world of branding calls for clean, simple, and straightforward messages voiced by a caricature of yourself. The call to wholeness often invites the messy, nuanced, and incommunicable within/around you. You're not doing it wrong. You (and your world) are beautifully complex.”

—Rose J Percy, from Twitter, 7/11/22

Imagine I said God is Love and we all agreed this is true of God. Then I said “God is not love because love has limits and God has no limits.”

Imagine I said God is Good and we all agreed this was true of God. Then I said “God is not good, because goodness does not go as far as great, and ‘great’ is also not enough.”

Imagine we went down the list of common names and attributes of God in this way, until we end up finding nothing that could be said of God that can’t be unsaid. There is a stream of mysticism that deals with saying and unsaying in this way. It is often called the via negativa, or the negative way. One of the purposes is to point to the limitation of words, which can draws us into a kind of awe.

Some of us who long to know the divine through the names—and genders—we’ve chosen might wonder, “How can I know God if you keep taking things away that anchor me?” Those who practice the via negativa will say you know God through “unknowing” and the surrender that comes with it.

In other words, you can come to know a God who cannot be branded. For me this is good news, since God has had a branding issue for as long as humans have been on this earth.

There is something for me so deeply beautiful and human about coming to a point where you can say “I don’t know.” There is much too much pretending to know that is so deeply dehumanizing.

At the heart of a brand voice is a knowing that often cannot be unknown. A certainty that must be sold off. If anyone is going to buy what you’re selling, it better come from “a consistent, platform-specific brand voice.” In branding, anything too adaptive and context-responsive must not be authentic. How will we know it’s you?

on brand

I know people who struggle with shifting what they share online because they are afraid of shifting their brand voice. They’ve amassed s following sharing a particular kind of content and are afraid they will lose followers.

It is even possible to grow addicted to the caricatured version of yourself online because of the validation loops and the ease of predictability. You can feel trapped by the expectations that come with maintaining a particular image. You might even edit yourself in real life to reflect the online version of you.

Branding has gone from a form of brutalization, to a marketing term to something we use in casual conversations to say something of someone’s identity: that is so on brand for you. I am fascinated by the journey of this word, but even more fascinated by how so many of us, whether we’re selling something or not, can curate content online that signals something we want others to know about us.

It can feel like we are seen when someone recognizes “our brand” out in the wild unfiltered world. “I thought you might like this,” or “this seems like something you might do or say” is communicated without words, through the sharing of other content.

More and more these days I am questioning what is “on brand” for me, especially if it comes through social media and any place that an algorithm curates. So often these websites give us the experience that they know us better than we know ourselves because of their ability to use probability to suggest what we might consume next. Shoshana Zuboff called this surveillance capitalism, which is shaped by websites collecting information on us as we search the web and interact with its elements—If you feel “seen” it is because you are literally being watched.

Every feather softens the fall.

fully known & deeply loved

For now we see only a reflection, as in a mirror, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.

— 1 Corinthians 13: 12

The girl in the striped dress with the ampersand tattoo was longing to be seen and loved. I know because sometimes, I am still that girl. She was trying to pull herself together—through a summer where she broke down and ugly-cried on stage while singing,

"I surrender
I surrender, 
I want to know you more
I want to know you more
I surrender"

When she lifted her eyes, the entire room of people, mostly teenagers were surrounding her with their hands reaching out in prayer. The group of people she thought she couldn’t speak to were reaching out to her.

And after seven weeks on the road and months into the semester she processed the devastating results of the 2016 presidential election with the some of her teammates. No words were exchanged, they simply saw each other in the same room and came together to hold one another.

The experience I had that summer was mostly off brand, except when I was singing and playing guitar. I could not have imagined either of these events. They were only possible because I leaned into an experience that pushed me to my limits—in some beautiful and painful ways. I do not wish the pain on anyone, but I certainly wish I could multiply the beauty.

I found the words I wanted tattooed around my ampersand a couple years later. It now reads as “fully known and deeply loved.” I would have this as an affirmation as I navigated a world of unknowns, which included the unknown person I was becoming:

I’ve decided not to let my planning and future forecasting keep me from seeing who I am in this second as fully known and deeply loved. Meaning despite not being the fully actualized version of myself that society is pressuring me to be—or the person various communities I am a part of want me to be and even the idealistic version I want to be—God knows who I am and who I will be.

— Rose J Percy, June 2018

I hid my tattoo from my parents for a long time, because a “good Haitian girl” doesn’t have tattoos. So when I was around them, I was restricted, wearing clothes that covered my tattoo, or intentionally angling away from them when it was more exposed. I hid it like this successfully for years. I did not want to shatter the illusion my life created for them—through their eyes, there was a brand identity I wanted to protect.

So was I Rose with tattoos and Rose without tattoos simultaneously? No. I was just Rose with the tattoos, who couldn’t lift her arms in their presence. At the heart of my deceit was a fear: would they love me the same if they knew I had tattoos? If I revealed that some part of going off to college and expanding my worldview had made me into someone who now thought tattoos were an acceptable form of self-expression? How will they know that I am still me?

Behind my questions was another question: Am I allowed to change?

branding tracing lightly

I am conscious now of the ways I move carefully around change in this space. I am habituated in believing I can keep whole worlds behind clean lines. Yes, some of the restrictions that exist are the ones I’ve created because some part of me struggles to release the advice to use “a consistent, platform-specific brand voice.”

So I am going to keep making changes, lifting my restrictions as I see fit. Some of the changes I want to make no one would care to challenge. For now, they have been on the Pinterest board of my mind. But I want to choose the version of me that can move unrestricted by branding norms.

If branding is about visibility, I want to tend to what is often invisible to me, the unmeasurable impact of this work. Instead of selling a product and seeing you all as consumers, I want to build genuine connections that move at the speed of trust.³ Instead of using language that caters to an exclusivity, I want my words to be the roundest invitations possible. Branding tells me to prioritize attraction and engagement, but I want true hospitality that shows you where you can put your feet up. In a world of counting likes, restacks and comments, I want to reject a focus on performance and embrace the slow and quiet impact of this work.

I don’t want a caricature of myself—I want the me I am still getting to know. I don’t want to live behind solid lines I’ve decided not to cross; I want to smudge, erase, and trace them lightly. I don’t want unparalleled stripes marking my distinction—I want them to cross yours, to be woven together.

I want these things because I am weary. If you’re reading this, you might be weary, too.⁴ Maybe an algorithm brought you here, maybe the brand aesthetics made you pause, but I hope the call to softness is why you stay.

Landing Tracks

1. Trace lightly: In what ways have you traced solid lines around your identity in ways that resist the truth of change? How can you trace those lines more lightly, allowing for the unknown to reflect in how you think about yourself?

2. Embrace inconsistency: Whether you are selling something online or not, there is an algorithm at work, rewarding your repetition. Break up the pattern with small changes. Move on to bigger changes as you grow comfortable. Experiment with change in your day to day life offline.

3. Is this me?: Ask this question in a space where the only one who can respond is you. Ask yourself if your preferences are driven by a need to hold onto a version of yourself that no longer fits. Give yourself permission to choose options that might not be “on brand” but invite curiosity instead of confinement.

4. Get beyond labels: With a companion, practice recognizing qualities in each other that don’t start with content you found online. Instead of using that TikTok video to say “this is you,” tell a story about who you are to each other. List some qualities you can affirm.

5. This isn’t me: With the same companion or a different one, reflect on moments when you felt the need to present yourself in a way that didn’t quite fit. Share a time when you performed an identity—online or offline—that wasn’t fully you. What would it have looked like to show up differently? What parts of yourself did you set aside?

1. I explained the term loosely in this paragraph, but for a defining comedic example, please see this video from Key and Peele.

2. I don’t remember where this came from, but I know I was taking notes from something.

3. This comes from adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy, which, for awhile now, I have been wanting to bring into this series. I’ve been toying with the idea of emergent strategy as social media strategy. I might explore it in a future post. If you’re reading this and this sounds interesting to you, comment and let me know?

4. Some might call it “our brand.”