Create Your Rainbow Issue 16 - Telling Stories

Happy weekend friends 💖 

Welcome to Create Your Rainbow - a newsletter to help unleash your community creativity. 🌈

The first part of each issue is dedicated to educational and informational content. I also share behind-the-scenes with Inner Colors members!

What Is In A Story

This week we’re talking stories.

Why we should tell them, how we tell our own stories, how we consume others’ stories, and the importance of oral histories.

First, a little background on how I got here. See, having this ~obsession~ with connecting people and their stories and creating moments of belonging doesn’t simply spring out of nowhere. Seeds get planted here and there through the many observations of behavior and, frankly, a lot of loneliness.

If you know me at all or have been following me on Twitter for the last nearly year and a half, you have likely heard a few of these stories before. But they’re worth repeating, as all stories are.

In the beginning, there was tension.

The tension rose and rose, until this young person retreats into themselves. She found escape in books, in video games, in quiet, in anything that would remove herself from all the tension, the conflict of it all.

Mine is a troubled story. Like many community builders, I’ve found we are often riddled with some troubled history about us. I spent my entire teens and well into adulthood in a deep depression from mounting stress and anxiety at home that simply would not go away no matter what anti-depressants, drugs, and alcohol I threw at it. Therapy is expensive and my parents didn’t want to be seen with a child who needed therapy when there was church and religion to solve our problems.

Retreating to stories and learning was everything I knew because they kept me just outside of reality enough to become as invisible as I felt. Very much an introvert. Until I discovered this passion for giving people the news and how I felt delivering content to people by hand.

In fifth grade, I started a weekly newsletter for my class and it was a smash hit. My best friend at the time and I would work on it after school in Corel Draw on his dad’s PC. We had so much fun with it that we swore to continue the newsletter into middle school.

So we did that and together, we literally took it upon ourselves to create our middle school’s first newspaper. We got a teacher to sign on and ended up petitioning the school to give us a formal Journalism elective for it. Of course, we continued that into high school as well. But none of that is all too important.

The important part is that I found a deep passion for telling stories, listening to them, and, even more importantly, found it FUN!

There were, of course, many communities I’ve been part of across my time online, but I think they all individually prepared me for actually leading and designing them. From the many mobile game communities (hello Marvel Strike Force) I saw go from 6 members to thousands to the superhero communities (Captain Marvel, Stony fandom), and the fashion community I led for four years, one of the largest Pastel Goth 💜 🖤 communities on Facebook at the time.

I love designing spaces where people gather online. Seeing the connections flourish is an inspiring thing to witness. But as I said, having FUN makes it all worth it.

Since then, I’ve been deeply passionate about telling stories.

Good stories often come with a bit of risk, don’t they?

I love the thrill of risk. I have probably taken a lot more risks in life than most people would advise, but they’ve also landed me a lot of hilarious, alarming, deeply awe-inspiring stories. I remember when I first went to a coworker’s house to hang out. Probably one of my more frightening moments of being 16 and naive as hell. Basically, this guy was in trouble and his “friend” was headed over. At this point, I was shaking. We were just trying to play some golf video game I was clearly terrible at. I was too young to be in this kind of situation, but now when I look back, it’s kind of hilarious.

Anyway, since then, I have tried to level out and explore my love for being inquisitive - asking the deeper questions people might not expect. It’s probably what drew me to being an engineer and problem solver at work because I’m pretty great at probing questions, which is one way of displaying that you really know a subject.

I take fewer risks these days but the ones I do take are more intentional and typically have more planning behind them. I fully admit to my delusions and how risky it is to be a full-time creator, community builder, and startup owner in 2023, but hey, at least if this all works out, I’ll have one hell of a story to tell!

So what am I getting at here?

One of the main reasons why I exist on the Internet is to grab the attention of people who want to hear compelling stories.

We tell stories through memes, aesthetics, art, and writing; it’s all media. When the AI craze kicked into gear last year by Dall-e, Midjourney, and OpenAI, there was rampant speculation that it would destroy media, that the first jobs to go would be entertainers, content creators, and media, in general, was doomed. But in fact, that’s the exact opposite.

The future of content creation and community building is here and if you don’t already have an interest or hobby you’re absolutely obsessed with now is the time to find it.

The incredible thing is that these advancements to tech have made content creation so democratized that you can now run LLMs (large language models) directly on a Google Pixel 6 or a Raspberry Pi ($300 and ~$75 respectively).

The only thing left to do is educate folks on how to tell stories with these new AI models and how we can use them to enhance our stories.

Thank you for reading my story!

I’ve interviewed countless people in my time as a content creator of some sort or another and I’ve learned the importance of telling our oral histories.

When I came out, I began to explore what that adventure would look like for me and how I’d tell the story to people over time. One thing I do know for sure is that the best education one can receive is through a story well told.

If you want to hear more of these stories or if you’d like me to help you craft your story through community building, one way to support me is through sharing this newsletter. Or you could fill out this form.

In the coming weeks, I will explore the unique responsibilities and challenges of being a community builder online in an age of deep experimentation and exploration. I'll explore best practices, share inspiring stories, and provide practical tips for those interested in taking on this exciting leadership position.

🔜 Stay Tuned for More Updates

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Below are all the Twitter Spaces I’ve spoken in, transcripts, and resources pinned to each.

That’s all for this week, friends! I hope you’ve found this issue valuable, and if so, I’d love for you to recommend a friend or two to subscribe. It would mean the world. 🌈 

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