The "Etcetera" Creative

A new way to navigate creative identity if you've always been more than one thing at one time.

I have been a lot of things in my lifetime. Myspace Page Designer. SGA President. Yearbook Editor. Marketing Manager. Director of Partnerships. CEO. Founder. And the thing worth noting is that some of those came before I needed them to and before I had any real stakes in the outcome. I was just a girl who wanted to make something and had the freedom to do it purely because it felt good.

That version of me did not know she was building anything. She was just existing. And I think that is actually the most important creative period any of us ever have, because it is the only time we make something with zero contamination from the outside world. I try to hold onto that and preserve that energy as much as I can not for nostalgic purposes but for a checkpoint. A way to measure whether what I am doing right now still has any of that original feeling in it. Because the moment you can no longer access what something felt like to do just for you, you have lost access to the the most important “gear” you have.

And what I know from living through all of those titles, the ones I had before I was ready and the ones I had to grow into is that when you leave one, it leaves you too. But the experience doesn’t. It stacks like you’re playing Jenga. Each title is a block you pulled from somewhere deep and placed on top of everything that came before it, and the tower keeps going up and up. The higher it gets, the more impressive it looks, and the more carefully you have to move. One wrong pull and the whole thing can colla[se.

So when someone asks me what I do now and I take a deep sigh before I answer, it is not because I don’t know. It is because I am looking at the tower. Assessing which blocks are carrying the load. Figuring out how to describe the whole structure without pulling the wrong piece and watching it collapse in real time. I have lived too many lives to make it simple. And at some point, the most honest thing you can put at the end of any answer is et cetera.

The internet doesn’t love that though. It wants a lane. One clean, searchable, algorithm friendly thing that is less than 160 characters. And the pressure to provide that and to collapse everything you are into a title that fits a bio is something a lot of us have just quietly accepted as the cost of being online. But the cost is way higher than it looks.

Words mean things.

And what we’ve done to words like artist, creator, influencer, content creator is sad. The status we’ve attached, the moral weight and the unspoken hierarchy has turned them into something they were never supposed to be. We treat them like horoscopes.

Mikai made a video about this recently :

@mikaimcdermotton the indie black girl - thank u @Soki for speaking about this!!

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Specifically about what that pressure looks like as a Black woman and how exhausting it is to be vast in spaces that keep asking you to be digestible. She named something a lot of “etcetera” creatives hav been carrying and the fascinating thing is that there are more of us than there are of them.

---

I occupy a very unique POV because I have existed on both ends of the spectrum for equal amounts of time. From 2024 - 2025, I led talent partnerships at Topicals. Part of that job was making the case internally for why we were giving money to a particular creator which meant justifying the investment, explaining the value, and translating someone’s work into language a budget meeting could understand. And the hardest pitches were always the nuanced ones. The creators who were doing something genuinely interesting but didn’t fit a clean category.

Over time, that experience left a mark on how I see creators (and myself) online. Because I was on the brand side, I know what it costs to be unexplainable. I know that the people making the most interesting work are often the hardest to pitch, and that the ones who are easiest to pitch are often optimizing for exactly that : legibility over depth. And I realized somewhere in all of it that I am someone who genuinely enjoys nuance. Not everyone has the time or the capacity for it. That’s fine. But I’m not interested in flattening myself for the ones who don’t.

Which is why I posted a video recently about the difference between artists, creators, influencers, and content creators and why the reaction it got made complete sense even though the majority missed the point entirely.

@donye.taylori identify as an artist / content creator hybrid but being able to sell my brand to my audience makes me an influencer technically. which one(s) are you? #creativitytips #personalcreativity #personalbrand

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

The message was about intent. Not ranking. What each mode of making actually requires of you and what relationship it assumes between you and your work. But the comments heard hierarchy. People felt like I was assigning them a lesser sign, questioning their placement, telling them what they were in a way that diminished it. And I get it, because when you’ve staked your identity on a title, any examination of that title feels like an attack.

Here’s what I actually believe: we are all of these things. Not at once and not permanently, but across a creative life, every one of us moves through every one of these modes. The title you’re holding right now is not who you are. It’s where you are. And I want to share a new way of looking at this that’s a lot less limiting if you start thinking about it that way.

The titles are not identities. They’re like gears in an old school car.

---

First gear : Artist

Think about what it actually means to drive a manual. You cannot start in fourth gear. The car will not let you. First gear is what generates the torque to get the whole thing moving from a dead stop. It is slow by design, and the same thing is true for how you show up in your life and your work.

First gear is artist mode and it’s where you make something because it needs to exist. You’re not thinking about an audience right now and you don’t have a strategy. Nothing is optimized. This is where taste forms and instincts develop. In first gear is where your internal compass gets calibrated before the world starts trying to influence it. You can’t skip this gear. Not because artistry is more noble, but because this is where you learn to hear yourself. Every creative who built something real and kept their integrity intact started here, and kept coming back.

Second gear : Creator

Here is where you start thinking about how the work lands for someone who isn’t you. Framing, packaging, language, etc. Adding these elements does not make the work less honest, it just means movement requires different energy than where it was when you first started. This gear is how you learn how to let the work travel without losing what made it worth making in the first place.

Third gear : Content Creator

I hate that this is even a gear, but one thing I will never deny is the truth. Content creation matters. I say all the time that I don’t want to become a Blackberry. It was a great phone, but it refused to evolve.

Volume. Cadence. Distribution as a discipline. This is a real and sustainable mode, but only if you started in first. The taste and the sense of self that keeps high-output from becoming hollow output does not come from strategy. It comes from having made things with no audience at all. The foundation has to already exist before you can build at scale without losing yourself in the process.

Fourth Gear : Influencer

Influence is not making content and it’s not promoting something to someone. It is a byproduct. When you have done something noble enough, long enough, and with enough efficiency that the way you exist becomes desirable to other people. That is influence. You earned it by staying the course through every gear that came before and that is exactly why it cannot be skipped to. You can’t start here. The people who try to without the foundation are the ones who hollow out the fastest, because influence built on performance instead of integrity has no roots. It falls the moment the performance stops.

---

The creator economy burns people out because it teaches everyone to start in fourth. Influence immediately. Visibility right now. Monetization before you even have a point of view. And then it wonders why talented people lose their relationship with the work usually within the first two years of doing it publicly.

Skipping gears doesn’t make you faster. It damages the car.

For the etcetera people especially, the ones who have always been too layered for one lane, the answer was never a better label. It was always knowing which gear you’re in, and having enough clarity about who you are underneath all of it to shift without losing yourself in the process.

Labels tell people what you are. Gears tell you where you are.

You are not a label. You are the etcetera.

And the car you’re driving was built for all of it.

— DonYe