Reposting this old look that I did in September 2018, just to make myself feel bad. It got around 250 likes when I originally posted it two years ago, and I was amazed to see it got to 10.5k when I reposted it in February last year - it was my personal record on a photo. Today I suppose I'm lucky if it gets to 500, as with any of my posts recently. 250 likes is quickly becoming very normal for me again. My account is getting buried deeper and deeper in the depths of instagram and it only gets worse, I only lose followers and my posts don't go anywhere. I know I've occasionally complained about this this past year and maybe you're tired of hearing me, but I can't help but feel frustrated when nothing is going well with my career at the moment, as a makeup artist on social media and in real life. I know I really have nothing to complain about, there are bigger problems in the world right now and everyone is desperate in ways I can't even begin to fathom - and to be honest, there are also bigger problems in my life all around me. But I'm good, I have a great support system that anyone would be lucky to have, and I have no place complaining about numbers on social media. I get an insane amount of support from the few of you who get to see what I post and I'm so very grateful for that. But I can't shake the knowledge that as much as we like to say they don't matter, they do matter for artists. I need the numbers, because I'm someone who depends on my "art" and artists are nothing without an audience in today's world. I feel completely invisible in my career, and I might not be able to do this for much longer because of it. And with that come the questions - is my work worse, is my work too bold, is my work too boring, is my work too commercial, is my work not interesting enough, am I too old, am I out of touch, etc.. Oh well, shit. I'm sorry for whining. It's probably because everything sucks right now that things like this hit deeper and suck even more. I might delete all these feels later because they're going to seem cringe af in 5 minutes so feel free to ignore me idk