I have a very distinct memory of discovering Instagram back in middle school: getting on the school bus, sitting down with my friends, and asking, “Have you heard of this new app? You can post pictures!” I said it with so much pride because it felt like I'd discovered a new planet.

Since then, what once felt like a fun, wholesome visual world has expanded into a multi-planetary universe worth $300 billion, projected to reach up to $1.3 trillion by 2030. And somewhere along the way, it became a universe many of us have come to depend on.

As someone who’s worked in arts, entertainment, and digital media throughout my life, I keep thinking about how strange it is to watch a universe take shape while you’re living inside it.

When large numbers of people first started getting on social platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube in the 2010s, we discovered that one person could build an audience beyond the people they knew in real life. Our worldview expanded as we could see, connect, and make meaning of ourselves and others through a wider lens. Our unique creative identities could find a digital home somewhere out there, if not in our physical locations.

Then businesses saw what was possible.

If one person could gather an audience, a business could pay to reach those people through them. And so capitalism took hold, giving rise to “the influencer”—someone who could leverage their audience, image, and influence for profit, access, and status.

The influencer soon gave way to “the creator”. As they gained more power, creators realized they didn’t need to rely solely on big business to sustain themselves; they learned to leverage their audience, image, and, most importantly, their skill sets to sell their own products, services, or talents back to their audiences.

This development expanded who could become a successful creator. Whether you were in education, health care, construction, culinary, finance, or tech, anyone with a product, skill, or talent, plus the ability to create media for an online audience, had a fair shot.

On a large scale, creators like MrBeast have become the extreme version of this, becoming media moguls with multi-level companies. On a smaller scale, more people are thinking about what they can make and sustain under their own name.

Now AI is changing the game once again.

The barriers to creation were already relatively low, with most of us having access to a phone and the internet. But AI has lowered them even further, making it easier than ever to edit, design, or bring an idea to life in a fraction of the time it might have taken just a few years ago.

And there lies the problem:

With the barrier to entry that low and the path of “the creator” available to anyone with a phone, skill, and story, this means even more people have the ability to produce content for consumption → which means even more content is made → which means audiences have even more content to choose from → which means it has become exponentially harder to stand out and therefore harder to build an audience.

I’ve been sitting with what that means for someone starting today.

⟢ TDLR; it takes faith, trust, consistent work, and a little pixie dust.

But I keep coming back to trust. When anyone can use AI to make something polished and predictable, people pay closer attention to whose perspective they care about — whose perspective they trust.

Rather than a focus on your aesthetic alone, people want to connect with who you are. That special something that makes you, you, and mirrors back to them who they are.

They watch and ask:

• What journey are you on?

• What can you offer from your own lived experience?

• What can I learn, feel, or experience more deeply through you?

Sometimes the answer to that is as simple and as complex as showing up as you.

And so, the future belongs to those who stay open to self-discovery, commit to authenticity in their craft, while letting others bear witness to their journeys.

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That’s part of why I’m showing up constantly and practicing visibility.

I’m learning to confront and balance the voices that tell me, “you must constantly produce,” “you must conform,” “you must create with speed,” in order to survive, with the voice that asks me to “create space for discovery,” to “trust the process”, to “show up authentically” so that my creations are a true expression of who I am and offer something of deeper value to a world increasingly full of slop.

I have thoughts about where the industry is going, but I also want to experience what it’s like to build from here.

I admit that I’m still a beginner.

I admit that I will have to test my theories as I go.

I acknowledge that I, too, am a product of the system I am in. I will try to resist its forces, but if I grow weary, I will give myself grace. I will release shame and blame as I figure out how to both survive these precarious times and search for new paths forward.

I want to make things, see what happens, and come back with an embodied understanding that I could never receive from thinking about it alone.

If you’re interested in becoming a creator, I’d ask yourself these questions to determine if you can enjoy the process:

I don’t know exactly where all of this is headed, but I do know things are changing fast. The ways people connected and built online audiences and digital worlds a few years ago won’t work the same way going forward. That excites me, terrifies me, and allows me to practice presence in the uncertain. So I’m going to keep showing up and learning through experience.

If you’re figuring out your place in the creator economy as an artist, creative, or entrepreneur, I’d love to hear what you’re noticing. Tell me in the comments, and subscribe if you want to learn with me along with me.

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Soma is the founder of HyperGround, a studio at the intersection of creativity, strategy, and personal development that supports individuals in moving with clarity as they actualize their visions. ☆ soma@hyperground.co

Hi Friends,

If you’re an artist, solo entrepreneur, or creator, at some point you’ll have to stand up and confront your fear of being seen.

As a creative strategist and coach, I’ve spent my professional life helping individuals share their work on and offline, but over the past few months, I’ve been on a side quest to practice what I teach: stepping into the role of a creator, sharing more of my work online, and confronting my own complicated relationship with visibility.

Visibility is commonly defined as the quality, fact, or degree of being visible; perceptible by the eye; the state of being seen.

I spent roughly three months of my life and over $3,000 getting over my fear of visibility so that you don’t have to. Though I’m proud to say that I’ve reached over 650K views across my platforms over the past month, the most rapid growth has been in my relationship with myself as I’ve started to retrain my brain, create new patterns of behavior, and allow myself to perform on the world’s largest stage…the internet.

Being comfortable with visibility requires practice. It’s a mental, emotional, and physical muscle developed through somatic recalibration, dedication, consistency, and time. And now that we’re deep into summer and the vivaciousness of Leo season, it feels like the perfect moment for this reflection.

Here are six truths from my first few months in the sun...

1. You Can’t Hide and Be Seen

I spent a long time living inside a contradiction. Maybe you are too?

Here’s the litmus test: You want your work to be discovered. But you’re hesitant to share it. You want to live an expansive life, but you’re playing it safe. You want opportunities and recognition, but you keep waiting for those things to arrive without stepping outside of your comfort zone.

At some point, it’s worth questioning if these contradictions are keeping you from taking action. Growth requires you to make a conscious choice, because if you’re not careful, the habits that helped you survive one season of life can quickly become the habits that prevent you from entering the next.

Your ideas, your work, your presence could be someone’s turning point, inspiration, or permission. Don’t block the blessing that your visibility could offer yourself and others.

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2. Fear Is an Outdated System

Fear will have you convinced that visibility = danger.

But this fear is an overly sensitive chemical response happening in the amygdala that you inherited, and it no longer serves the life you’re trying to build.

Fear was designed with an important purpose —to keep you safe. That fight-or-flight response sometimes mistakes being seen for danger and unfamiliarity for risk. It tells you not to share your work, not to speak up, and not to try even when most of the time those things aren’t actual life-or-death threats.

I’ve started overriding that system by asking myself: Is fear qualified to make this decision? Most of the time, the answer is no. Fear should have a place on the dashboard, but it shouldn’t be the only button.

If you want a deep dive into the work of facing fears, taking risks, and entering the unknown, you can start by reading the article below.

3. You’re Not Privileged Enough to Be Invisible

One of the biggest revelations that changed my relationship with visibility is this: I’m not privileged enough to remain invisible.

Here’s some tough love: You are not Solange. You’re not Frank Ocean. You’re not (insert your favorite famously elusive artist here). These artists can delete their socials, disappear for years, and have people waiting for whatever they release next. And while you have the right to dream of quietly making your work behind closed doors, only to emerge when inspiration strikes to millions of viewers. Babyyy, you are not quite there yet! Most of us haven’t earned that luxury because we haven’t built the audience.

If no one knows you exist, how can they experience your work? They can’t recommend you, collaborate with you, hire you, or say yes to you. If people don’t know your work exists, they can’t engage with it or be changed by it. The first step is to become visible, so that the right audience can find you.

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4. Start Where You Are

At the time of writing this, most people would consider me a nobody.

This is HyperGround’s fourth month on Substack, my third article, and it’s sitting at exactly 29 subscribers. I am okay with that. I find no shame in where I’m at because I know where I’m going.

In fact, there’s a certain freedom in anonymity and a certain power in building from the ground up. You get to move quietly through the world, make mistakes without scrutiny, and spend time exploring, creating, and becoming without the pressures of public expectation.

Starting where you are means letting people in on your journey and allowing them to watch you evolve. It means actively and gradually practicing visibility and preparing to hold the success you’re calling in.

Starting where you are takes vulnerability. Vulnerability creates connection. And connection, when it’s genuine, unlocks so many possibilities.

5. You Need Exposure Therapy

Getting over my fear of being visible cost about three months of my life and over $3,000. I’m. So. Serious.

Visibility on its own isn’t expensive, but sometimes moving through resistance is. That time and money reflect the amount of energy I needed to put behind changing my behavior to build a new pattern.

As a social learner (someone who acquires knowledge best through interaction, dialogue, and shared experiences), I decided to invest in a program that would build my creator muscle while giving me the accountability and group momentum I needed. I went for it because I was curious, willing to be a student again, and ready to invest in an environment that made growth feel inevitable. And it did what it needed to do. It was intense. There’s nothing quite like a few months of repeated exposure to make you confront yourself. Every post, performance, and act of sharing became another repetition, another exposure that convinced my body I was safe, another piece of evidence that I had the capacity to handle being perceived.

Sometimes you need an external force to get the motor running—a little push to build momentum.

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6. There’s Only One Way to Know

We’re often taught that it’s cringy to be seen trying, and that putting yourself out there is embarrassing. That if you share your work online, people will judge, won’t take you seriously, and dismiss you as “another influencer.”

Maybe it does. Maybe some people will. But you can only know that for sure through experience.

There’s a profound difference between choosing something because you’ve experienced it and rejecting something because you were too afraid to begin.

Maybe you’ll realize that building publicly isn’t your thing. Maybe you’ll decide you’d rather spend your energy elsewhere. That’s okay. But maybe you’ll love the light. Maybe you’ll touch someone profoundly. Maybe the value will be way more than your initial investment. Whichever way it goes. At least the decision will come from your own lived experience, and you’ll be freed to make an honest choice about where to take things next.

This fiery mid-summer energy invites us into our full self-expression, asks us to stop hiding and step into the sun, and to let ourselves be seen and heard so we can connect with, impact, and transform all those who encounter us.

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Soma is the founder of HyperGround, a studio at the intersections of creativity, strategy, and personal development that supports individuals in moving with clarity as they actualize their visions. ☆ soma@hyperground.co

As someone who comes from communities where spaciousness, safety, and autonomy have historically been denied, I’ve always felt a deep desire to own my time, build wealth on my own terms, and cultivate a life imbued with creative freedom. I’ve always been drawn to wide-open horizons, the feeling of standing at the edge of a vast landscape with nothing between me and possibility.

I believe we all come into the world with that desire. As children, we are naturally drawn toward whatever feels expansive, alive, and free. But with age, it becomes difficult to operate from that place when survival demands the opposite. We grow accustomed to limits, living with the pain of a suppressed self, until we barely recognize the person we've become.

As the systems we’ve been taught to rely on become increasingly unstable, restrictive, and disconnected from our humanity, it’s no surprise that more of us are beginning to question the paths we’ve inherited and wonder if another way of living is possible.

I’ve always identified as an artist because, to me, artists represent the pursuit of a counter way of moving through life: a commitment to imagination over limitation, discovery over conformity, and self-determination over subjugation. The artist’s path has always included the practice of exploring the unknown in search of liberation.

Historically, artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers, and cultural workers have been central to liberation movements because they reshape what people believe is possible for themselves and the world.

And whether you have called yourself an artist out loud or not, your desire for creative self-determination —and your instinct to help people imagine worlds beyond the one in front of them—makes you one.

As Toni Morrison reminds us,

“The function of freedom is to free someone else.”

And so your personal liberation is a necessary part of your artistic contribution, and desiring freedom is your right. It is an act of resistance, a reclamation, and a necessity for us all.

But the work of being an artist is walking the path, not simply representing it. The work is embodying these values in our choices and actions.

Which brings us to something that every artist must confront about their desire for freedom.

Freedom requires effort. Facing fear, taking risks, and entering the unknown.

You’re right there, just a few steps away from all that you want. A few steps from unlocking the time to create the work you truly care about, the resources to bring your vision into reality, and the power to make that possible for others. But you stand there, deeply afraid of the unknown, overwhelmed by the path forward, and comfortable enough to remain stagnant, just a few feet shy of the exit door.

I've been facing this head-on in my own life lately. I’ve spent a little longer than I should’ve in the comfort of my thinking-and-dreaming space, prioritizing what other people thought, avoiding visibility, delaying the work that mattered most, and telling myself that someday, something external would arrive and push me out of paralysis.

But the reality is:

NO ONE IS COMING TO SAVE YOU!!

And the sooner you make peace with that, the sooner you can take back responsibility for your freedom and do the inevitable work of confronting your fears.

Your freedom lies on the other side of your fear.

So, getting where you want to go means acknowledging and welcoming the mental, emotional, and somatic work required to move through your fear. It means taking action to rewrite internal systems, retire outdated operating hardware, and adopt new behavioral patterns that can help you stay the course.

You already know what action would move you closer. Perhaps it’s…

• Publicly sharing the work.

• Launching the project.

• Leaving the job.

• Raising your rates.

• Making the thing you’ve been postponing.

• Divesting from what’s draining you.

• Or slowing things all the way down so you can completely reset.

Whatever it is, you need to acknowledge the fear that surfaces when you imagine taking that step. Feel it fully. It is real, and it deserves your attention. But then you must decide for yourself: Do you desire freedom more than you desire the comfort of staying where you are?

If the answer is yes, commit to quieting those fears, taking action, and allowing yourself to be transformed in the process.

That means doing it scared because the cost of remaining where you are is far greater than the cost of facing your fear.

That means shifting the internal conversation away from “What if I fail?” toward “What am I losing by not acting?”

The cost of staying where you are is never discovering who you were capable of becoming.

It's the cost of living with the knowledge that you chose comfort over possibility.

It means resigning yourself to the life of a spectator rather than a creator.

It means closing a pathway that could have guided countless others toward their own liberation.

But fortunately, life always offers us chances. Another season. And if there is any season that understands the push you need right now, it is summer.

The summer solstice marks the longest day of the year. It’s a reminder that the sun reveals what you’ve been hiding from. It's a mid-year reckoning, a cosmic reset, a moment to examine which fears you’ve allowed to govern you and what possibilities await you when you move into the light.

Summer is giving: peak energy, momentum, and full blooms!

It asks you to step out from the shadows of doubt and into the full spectrum of your abilities. It asks you to stop standing at the threshold. To stop expecting someone else to open the door. And instead, to press the override button and take the leap into the unknown.

If you're ready to stop standing at the threshold, here's where to begin.

The goal isn’t perfection. The goal is to initiate a series of intentional actions that help train your body, mind, and spirit to learn that change is survivable, so you can develop your nervous system to hold the life you want.

☆ May you find the courage to face the door you’ve been standing behind. May you remember that your liberation is not separate from the liberation you wish for others. And when the moment comes, may you press the override button, step through the doorway, and discover the freedom you’ve been longing for.

Need an accountability partner to help you make the leap? Let’s connect.

May arrives as a multisensory meditation. Birdsongs layer the air, comically puffy clouds drift slowly above, pollen dances through the wind and falls like snow, and everywhere I look, something is blooming.

Mid-spring holds a particular kind of energy. It’s a sweet and stretchy midpoint between the Spring Equinox and the Summer Solstice, an invitation to pause and take stock of what’s emerging and a gentle reminder to prepare for what is getting ready to bloom.

Ah, spring, so romantic and beautiful—but the beauty only tells part of the story.

Here’s what people don’t talk about:

Spring brings its own set of challenges (an extremely aggressive pollen count being one of them) and the kind of deep work that asks us to push through dense soil so that something beautiful can finally break through.

What Spring Actually Asks of Us

Spring will ask you to:

• Navigate complex situations and find your own path through

• Bring light to what is no longer sustainable

• Work through fear and anxiety and test our foundations

• Continue moving forward, even in ambiguity

Spring is a transitional season. So friends, that means:

Things are still in process. They haven’t fully stabilized, and not everything has blossomed yet. So while it is a time of frolicking, it’s okay to sit with the friction that this rapid growth asks of us.

Conditions for a Creative SuperBloom

In nature, a desert superbloom is a rare natural phenomenon when an unusually high abundance of desert flowers bloom all at once. For most of the year, the desert is inhospitable, dry, and resistant to growth. But underneath the surface, thousands of seeds lie dormant, waiting for a set of conditions to align just right. With just enough rain and the right temperature window, the landscape transforms quickly, visibly, and all at once.

When I think about the desert superbloom, I begin to imagine what is possible for us. What would it look like to imagine our own “creative superblooms”, moments where growth, visibility, and alignment come together, even within challenging social, political, and economic climates?

It requires tending the conditions. It requires time. And it requires the support of each other.

Because this period—this transitional, in-between space—is not meant to be experienced alone. This season asks us to stay connected even in the harshest of climates.

If you’re building toward a community-level “superbloom”, this is what HyperGround is about—helping you shape the conditions for that kind of emergence to happen.

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The Work You Can’t Always See

In nature, a superbloom can burst forth all at once, in a place you might not expect, but what we’re actually witnessing is the result of sustained, often invisible preparation beneath the surface.

When I visited the superbloom in Death Valley earlier this year, I was amused by how many people drove past these locations completely unaware. They didn’t know what was happening or what to look for because, from a distance, the landscape still held more rocks than flowers.

It’s easy to mistake a lack of visibility for a lack of activity.

Especially when you’re not looking for something, there appears to be nothing to find, but with some attention, you might start to notice that something in the environment has changed.

If you’ve been feeling:

“Something is transforming, but it’s not yet clear,” or “Something is emerging, but not as fast as I expected.”

Remember:

There is an underlying process at work. Something is active and ready and could bloom at any moment if you take a closer look.

You Laid The Groundwork. Now Trust It.

The groundwork is the quiet, foundational work that makes growth possible. It’s all the work you did in your winter season, so let’s acknowledge that.

• Identity being clarified

• Systems being built

• Capacity being expanded

• Relationships being formed or deepened

• Internal alignment being tested

These processes are not separate from the outcome. They are the outcome, in its earliest, most foundational form.

So maybe the truth is you don’t need to know exactly when things will bloom to continue.

What you need is to trust.

Trust that the soil remembers what you planted. Trust that nothing you’ve done is lost. Trust that timing reveals what effort cannot.

Your role now is to stay with it. To remain patient and consistent. To keep breaking through the soil. To nurture what’s already budding and maintain your frequency of trust. You can’t force clarity, recognition, or fulfillment. You can only prepare the conditions for it to fully emerge.

The Bloom Will Come!

And often, it arrives as a short window. A brief moment where the invisible becomes fully visible. And with it a moment to pause, celebrate, inhale, and exhale to truly smell the flowers (!!), because soon Summer will come.

A Late Spring Preparation

If the earlier parts of this resonated, let this be a soft place to land and a moment to turn inward, acknowledge all the work you have done, and notice what’s been unfolding. Not everything needs to be figured out, but something is ready to be acknowledged. The reflections throughout this article are an invitation to make space to meet yourself in this in-between season with a little more presence.

And when you’re ready to move into deeper practice, reach out! We’ll explore where you are in your creative process and how to support your next stage of growth. This is a moment rich with possibilities.

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Hi, I’m Soma! I’m an artist, strategist, and coach; the founder of HyperGround and a self-described creative wanderer guided by creativity and care.

⟢ What We’re About

HyperGround was cultivated to create space for creative work that aligns with who you are, and that pushes us toward who we (individually and collectively) are becoming.

This is a space fo…

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