the performance of a self

creating personal narratives in digital landscapes

It is not likely that the opening scenes of Joan Didion’s The While Album is a space where relatability is the goal. Yet within two pages, I found myself seen, decades apart:

“We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. Or at least we do for a while.”

Here, Didion begins to doubt the stories she tells herself, the sense of self, and the way this can be performed and improvised.

That I opened this book up haphazardly to avoid folding laundry on a Sunday evening was coincidental and kismet. I’ve been performing so many versions of my self the last few months I’ve stopped knowing where one narrative ends and the next one begins. It’s dizzying, particularly as new opportunities unfurl that challenge me more explicitly.

When I arrive on set to my first day of filming an upcoming TV series, the crew asks what options I’ve brought for shirts. I’m being interviewed in the basement of a small hotel on cleaning day. I showed up wearing a full Canadian tuxedo, which was politely shot down as a verifiable option.

Thankfully, I was prepared with other choices. There’s a new silk button-up blouse with abstract pastel cloud-like colours and gold buttons, a beloved chartreuse linen dress, and a cardigan I’ve deemed more academic, for it being grey (though it has bright yellow contrast stripes in it, I’m not good with neutrals). I hold them all up hopefully, nervous.

“The patterned blouse and the green work,” the cinematographer says kindly, while thinking. “Well… who do you want to show up as to the world? Who do you want to be?”

It’s a great question, and one I’ve never so directly considered. Perhaps that was where I should have started, years ago. The last five years have been a slow and ongoing transformation, layers of embodied performance and shifting roles. And with that, the narrative line has to pivot as well. I got so used to being the broke, single mum doing her PhD and serving for restaurant tips that I wasn’t sure how to embrace the version of myself that got married. The version of myself that feels “too much” for my current town, sometimes. The version of myself that doesn’t have a sibling anymore. The version of myself that had a second kid. The version of myself that has a full-time corporate position. These feel like juxtapositions against the fibres of who I was building up to begin with.

podcast

It's easier to get lost in the performance of a self when you’re showing up in calculated or specific ways for different audiences, too. As I wrap up the ninth season of my podcast, I’m full of contentions about it. It was the first year where I added a video component to the interviews. This was done, in part, to make it easier on guests, to read their body language across the digital landscape, to let them know I’m listening and engaging with their ideas.

The other motivation was to align with the broader social pivot toward “video podcasting,” a term I loathe, arguably more than “vegan leather” replacing pleather¹. Rebrands like these signal allegiance to a new time, one that is fixated on personalities drawing viewers, rather than allegiance to a nightly news hour.

It’s significant that podcasts are evolving away from their originally intended mediums. Now that the software has become more accessible and universal (and less restricted to the dinosaur RSS feeds), there are bountiful podcasts ranging significantly in quality, consistency, and validity. That video has been mapped onto audio shows suggests plenty about attention span, personality, and audience preferences. It feels fitting that these pivots take place as YouTube hits its 20 year anniversary. Particularly interesting is that YouTube has overtaken other major podcast platforms in popularity, like Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

These factors translate in celebrities shifting away from disappointing engagement with Spotify Creators programs (like Meghan Markle’s Archetypes, or other platform-exclusive big budget podcasts from 2019-2023) to video platforms. Michelle Obama launched her new video podcast, IMO, on YouTube in March. And Ziwe is picking up the interview microphone again after the (wrongful) cancellation of her Showtime Ziwe show, reconfiguring her original Baited with Ziwe to You’d Be an Iconic Guest on YouTube. This partly feeds into the media ecosystem needs of Gen Z and Gen Alpha, where YouTube is the main viewing source for a variety of shows². But it’s also a platform of consistency and reliability, which is increasingly difficult to find for digital media creators.

As traditional media ecosystems struggle, social media platforms bifurcate. They are challenged with offering both a sense of nostalgia and an updated UX. Here, YouTube remains a steadfast platform that can keep up with the shifting weather. Rebecca Sananès reports about the political pivots to YouTube for Vanity Fair after the 2024 election, where Republicans flocked to The Joe Rogan Experience, and Democrats sought space on Call Her Daddy. Sananès looks at how Ezra Klein’s podcast was refit to match this “post-pandemic media landscape,” where video podcasts offer more intimate spaces, and stripped down film crews. Much of this is led by the younger generation’s desire for more ‘authentic’ conversations where “CEOs, experts, and hosts” occupy “raw, imperfect spaces” for interviews. What does ‘authentic’ mean, though, when it’s still a performance?

In that landscape, I am reckoning with my own performance and what it means to have a podcast. Maybe the online podcast jokes are getting to me, but I am frustrated. Spotify recently revealed their plans to attach total listening numbers per episode for each podcast on their platform—a way to maintain an algorithm and push certain creators, celebrities, and episodes that would already fare well without them. For small creators, it feels like an insurmountable challenge, in ways that it did not back when I started in 2018.

I hate saying I’m a podcaster, because the whole point was always to have a space to interview, to ask questions, and practice anthropology in a more visible and free way.

film

In working with the film crew, I was offered important advice on not being a podcaster for the interviews.

“When you’re podcasting, you’re trying to fill dead air. You don’t need to do that here.”

So who am I when I am not trying to be a good, welcoming, warm host?

When I first auditioned for the show, it was over Zoom with one of the executive producers. I wasn’t anticipating it to become an audition, thinking it was just a call to determine whether we’d be a good collaborative fit. I immediately buckled into myself, wondering how I was going to perform without having anything planned, strategized, plotted out.

The producer suggested I turn on my teaching voice. It was one I shrugged off in 2023 after the simultaneous punches of sessional academic instruction work mixed with the launch of ChatGPT and a teaching assistant strike³. She hit record, and pitched me a question. Immediately, I clicked back “on” to this self I thought I had abandoned. My voice got sturdier, more excited, my hand gestures much wider, my eyes alight with the potential for a new version of communication. Thankfully, it got me the part.

My teaching self was iteratively built over years of babysitting, teaching swimming lessons, tutoring high school students in math and science, holding tutorials for professors, and eventually teaching and running my own classes. It is a self I am most comfortable in. I love teaching, I love lecturing, and I love opening up the classroom to discussions about some of the more applied and relatable elements of what we discuss. It’s where I feel most joyful as an adult⁴.

Turning my teaching self into my film self was like crafting a new recipe. I cut out the dead air reactions, sliced through the verbal tics, held on to the podcasting reactions to ambient sound disruptions (motorcycles, hallway chatter, slamming doors). Finally, I molded the lecturing tilt to be more entertaining and sensational, because that’s showbiz, baby!

To create this new iteration, one I never dreamed of, was endlessly fun. It felt in many ways like an accumulation of many different jobs, many knowledge forms, and many opportunities that I’ve had over the years. To cultivate these into a new position was creatively energizing. It was pure joy to figure out in real time how this self works with a director to get the best wording, how we feed off each other to push through exhaustion after 10 hour shoots.

33

I’ve thought back to how much I struggled to make sense of different versions of myself in real life, and how this has presented in the digital spaces I entertain in. In academia, I was hiding all the small town Peterborough parts of me: the one who grabs a beer bottle by its neck, drops the ‘g’ at the end of words, calls people bud when I’m mad. I’d squish it all into an oversized blazer, to perform for those that wanted elegance and intellectualism. That is, until the end of a conference, when people wanted fun—then the Peterborough part of me took to the bar to order a round of shots, in the hopes that we could leave the jargon behind for the night.

In my 33^rd year, I am reconciling all these selves into one person. I’m exercising the writing muscles through the newsletter and a book proposal, and finding new ways to work in the space between academia and entertainment through television. It’s not a space I expected to find myself in, but it is a space I enjoy, particularly as podcasting becomes more emblematic of the challenges we face with credibility and legitimacy of knowledge in the new media landscape.

At the end of the titular essay, Didion closes out The White Album by saying that writing has not helped her see what it all means, and I feel somewhat the same. I can write myself in circles trying to understand who I want to be and where I’m going, but the reality shows up in the ephemeral, tangible, and visual.

I’m not entirely sure what that means for the future, but I know if I keep getting to create and collaborate with people that are thoughtful, rigorous, and funny, I’ll keep building new selves.

Thank you for reading! AnthroDish Essays come out biweekly on Sunday mornings.

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You can find me on Instagram, Threads, and TikTok, but I can’t promise it’s anything except random thoughts on any of those platforms.

1. I know vegan leather isn’t made of the same materials that pleather of the late 90s/early 2000s are and that a rebrand was needed for people to take it seriously, but I still think pleather works for plant-based leather, okay?

2. Anecdotally, my daughter has known I’ve had a podcast for years and could care less, but found my show on YouTube and SCREAMED at me in excitement. Gen Alpha kids!

3. A picket line I would firmly never cross, your TAs are always underpaid!

4. I think most teachers would agree that the teaching is more fun than the grading part, however!