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Good morning! Happy Wednesday.
Two weeks ago, I shared an NBA highlight reel to my Instagram Story. It had been a quick decision: I saw the video—a five-second clip of Dallas Mavericks players Kyrie Irving, Derrick Jones Jr., and Luka Dončić—felt impressed by their play, and posted it. I wasn’t thinking about how I never share sports content to my profile—in fact, it hadn’t even crossed my mind. What I wanted to convey, despite my not being an outspoken basketball fan, was admiration for a skillfully executed feat of professional athleticism—something anyone could recognize regardless of interest, and what Redditor OutlawSundown noted in the r/Mavericks thread as “a beautiful sequence involving multiple players. [It's] team basketball at its finest.” When the Mavericks jointly posted the highlight reel to their Instagram grid (the NBA’s profile received partial authorship), the top commenter even wrote: “I don’t even like basketball, but that was dope.” The video, as a consequence, went viral.
Within hours of sharing it, however, I started receiving messages. Friends questioned whether my posting the highlight reel had been accidental or if I had—in my conscious and right mind—shared the clip voluntarily. My partner, Brandon, even admitted to replaying the Story with the volume raised; perhaps what appeared to be an NBA highlight reel had actually been a comedic voice-over of kittens mewing instead of fans cheering. “You an nba [sic] fan now???” one friend messaged me, while another friend wrote: “I had to swipe back to make sure I saw who posted it.” While I, of course, found the whole situation hilarious, it also made me wonder about what it means to behave uncharacteristically from, or incongruently with, one’s typical self—and more importantly, what constitutes one’s “typical self” to begin with anyway. In manufacturing our online personas, we inevitably dissect ourselves into distinct areas of interest, leaving large parts of our lives unpublished—in essence, who are we if not who we choose to be at any given moment? The onslaught of messages about my most recent NBA activity was as hilarious as it was disheartening: my lane, apparently, is cat videos, and my personal brand shouldn’t stray too far from it. In the midst of this online skewering, I felt compelled to remind everyone that five years ago during Halloween, in 2019, I donned a Transylvania Academy pinafore that I had thrifted and saved for this precise costume: Nosferatu as a player in the NBA. “See?” I wrote beneath the image. “I have always been a fan.”
I think this is the crux of the imposter-syndrome issue most people experience at least once in their lifetime; as a writer, especially, I often grapple with whether I should experiment with voice or style, or if doing so would confuse my readers rather than intrigue them. This is true for any person leaping between artistic or professional disciplines, and perhaps why my mind feels scattered most of the time: do I write academically, creatively, or journalistically? Do I continue honing my voice within the world of grief narratives, or can I try writing humorously? Satirically? Even writing last week’s Process Diary about Shohei Ohtani and sports more generally was an incredibly fun exercise; I never imagined that I might find joy in the analyzing of particular movements or the processing of different strategies. It made me wonder, though, whether the pervasiveness of digital selves and personal brands has in some way impacted our freedom to explore, and perhaps even share, the interests or curiosities that we have in any given moment—that it might be okay to revel in finding something that feels exciting and new. And that it really is okay to just be a fan sometimes.
Thanks for reading,
Rachel