Going "Viral" And What It Means To Me

The past three days have been… overwhelming, to say the least. And it’s all because I decided to make this tweet.

On the evening of October 3rd, I made a tweet showing the various paintings that I had made over the course of my girlfriend and I’s relationship because we had just celebrated a few days before. I just thought that it would be a nice way to commemorate it. So as always, I posted the tweet, forgot about it and went about my night doing whatever it is that I usually do on Sunday nights – which is probably just to put on a movie with my girlfriend and fall asleep halfway through.

And that’s when it happened. I woke up the next day without any idea of what had happened while I was asleep. I checked my phone to see that I received a message from my friend saying that my tweet was doing numbers. And it continued to do numbers for two more days, which meant that I got to see a myriad of angry girlfriends tagging their boyfriends asking them where their paintings were and a vast number of annoyed boyfriends telling me to take the tweet down because of that very reason. In addition to that, I also got a sea of people telling me that the “bar” has been raised, that I gave them hope to believe in love, that I’ve “set a new standard,” which I thought were all funny and nice. But amidst all those comments, I also got a large number of people that noticed how my paintings improved with every year.

As of this moment, as my fingers glide across my keyboard to form a catharsis of words on the computer screen, the tweet currently has 30.2K retweets and 319K likes, with about 16 million views on Twitter. And on Tik Tok, it has 876K views and 264.8K likes.

I mean… !!!! HOW!?

I know that I do not only speak for myself when I say that being an artist can often feel like our work is unseen and unappreciated. And lately, I’ve been feeling like this a lot. I believe it is a consequence when we equate our personal selves into the work that we do, and as someone that places so much of themselves into their art, it can sometimes feel disheartening when the times come when you start doubting the validity of your craft.

My friends can attest to the fact that just a few days before, I had been venting to them about feeling unseen. I remember being in bed just a few nights ago, staring at the ceiling and wishing that if it couldn’t be this one, that there was a universe in which my art could be seen and loved by many. And then this happened.

The only emotion that I can really feel is appreciation. That even though not much will come out of this, that even if it doesn’t really mean anything besides numbers at the end of the day, there was a time in my life when my paintings were seen by millions across the world.

And if a tweet was going to go viral, it couldn’t have been the most perfect one – I’m happy that they were the portraits of the person I love.