You should be an influencer

So they say

RIP favorite gloves

I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve been told that I should be an influencer.

Not because I’m particularly interesting or special or good-looking, but because I live on a farm and, to put it bluntly, people love that shit.

I’ll admit, I’ve thought about giving it a go. If people paid to watch me do chores that I already have to do, I could use that money to post in this Substack more than once in a blue moon. Or to finally finish my nearly complete novel. Or buy new film for my camera. I’ve even gone so far as to try it—I made a video of me breaking the ice in a water trough this winter. But when I played back the footage, what appeared on my tiny screen was a lumpily dressed woman with a bad attitude aggressively stabbing something out of frame for five straight minutes. I sent it to my friend Suleika for feedback. “It’s giving Fargo,” she said.

Another time I made a video of myself cleaning stalls. Upon review, it appeared to be a pair of legs unartfully crisscrossing a manure-strewn stall, dust motes swirling thickly in front of the camera lens like a piece of faceless, nameless and utterly uninteresting performance art.

The majority of the things I do on my farm are not pretty or even interesting. It’s just grunt work, done in the scraps of the day around my actual job, most often in a strange outfit that is a combination of my unwashed workwear and whatever nice top I put on for Zoom calls earlier in the day.

Tonight is a great example. I’ve stared at my computer from 8 am until 5:30 pm, and now I’ve dragged my carcass down to the lower field to remove dead burdock. By hand. With a screen-induced headache.

Should I have done this in the fall? Yes. Is there a better way to do this? Probably. Did I ruin my favorite pair of gloves? Looks likely. Hours of pulling these things from the ground, piling them in the back of the mule (whose tire is going to fall off any minute, by the way), driving them to a distant location that is inaccessible by any grazing animals, and dumping them. Why? Because every time I turn the horses out, they come back with tails and forelocks thickly matted with burdock, which means I spend the time I could be using to film myself attractively and compellingly riding them for my nonexistent “fans” cursing and scraping bendy little needles out of yards of horsehair.

I’m itchy, the light is bruising and here comes my 9-year-old, sprinting down from the house, fresh from a bath, in his pajamas to “help me”. I love him, but I banish him to the mule and add “tick check before bed” to my list of items I must complete before the day is done.

The thing is, I don’t begrudge these tasks. I find pleasure in hard work, even if the work is very annoying (this being tops). But I do begrudge the persistent voice in my head that says, You should be documenting this. You should be posting this. If you were smart, you’d use this to your advantage. It spoils everything, that voice. Makes me live outside of myself, to see my life as a series of potential videos, of uncaptured likes and shares and comments.

I do plenty of beautiful things on the farm. I bake sourdough. I grow a gorgeous, tidy garden. I sometimes go out to harvest wildflowers while wearing a beat-up sun hat and a vintage plaid dress with huge hip pockets. But those beautiful things are for me and me alone. No phones allowed.

I still think about becoming an influencer. I even told my younger sister this week that she should be record herself and posting it online somewhere. She’s currently weaving a willow garden fence out of trees she’s cutting down by hand and dragging out of the forest one at a time. She looked at me and sighed. “I don’t know how to do that,” she said. Then she got back to work.

So I guess I will too. And if I’m wrong, and there are people out there who would like to pay for documentation of me doing the ugliest, most annoying and banal chores by all means, let me know. We have a sheep with an abscess that needs cleaning, if that appeals? I could be an influencer yet.