We all know deep down that if you create outside the box, chances are high that people will not understand what you are doing and will call your art absolute shit. So many of us don’t create, or do so cautiously.

From my experience, I will tell you those chances are 100%.

But you must do it anyway.

Pandering to algorithms and jumping on trends leads to more of the same old shit.

Obviously, it’s not always a bad thing. For example, I jumped on all of Melania Trump’s Christmas decorations and narrated her video with my satirical take and impression. I jumped on the hashtag frenzy and made something fresh within those constraints.

But I’m not spending my days and nights creating comedy to opens the hearts and minds of my viewers so that I can solely create the same tried-and-true content.

After years of letting the haters make me feel bad about being different, I had to reckon with the fact that I spent my whole life scoffing at people’s tendency to try to be like everyone else. So why am I running my creative life that way?

Every art form imaginable has boxes. The safe places with what people expect. Everything else is a threat to them, so they call it untalented, baseless, stupid, and pointless.

Don’t listen to them and make your weird art anyway. People might not understand it. Although you must do your best at every attempt, what you produce may or may not be your best work, but it will bring you to another place that maybe you never thought of before. Maybe a new form. In my case, a new character.

Remember when you’re getting clobbered that it is the outliers who blaze trails. Everyone else is just jealous.

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When you’re an outlier there’s a good chance that what you make won’t be optimized for what and how people are consuming content.

For example, my web mini-series Melania Speaks. To make it, I downloaded every one of Melania Trump’s Facebook videos and narrated them. I knew her odd videos of ocean waves and Donald’s helicopter flying away, (yes, this is really what she put up on the web pre-2016) would not make for good IG content because they’re visually uninteresting and a voice-over wouldn’t help matters. But I did it anyway. (You can see them and judge me here.)

Yule Log With Friends was another project of mine IN NO WAY OPTIMIZED FOR THE INTERNET. It’s weird, unsellable, and bizarre. I spent 20 minutes in each of my characters having a private moment by a yule log fire. The video is three hours long. For an ADD culture to have a wordless video extend more than 2 seconds is blasphemy. But I did it anyway and presented some of my best acting recorded to date. The fans of this project had my characters enter their lives in a unique way. We all grew from it. It went somewhere no one expected when I put it up in the High Five Gallery and was a finalist for Slamdance DIG.

And it continues to grow.

This year I worked with Sophia Reyes Jones, an editor from Madrid, to optimize the original video. We integrated wacky Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer and Frosty the Snowman animations throughout. It’s a way for the viewer to be more interactive with the experience. Is it bizarre? Absolutely! (You can see it here.)

Then we’re going to have the LIVE versions. The next two Sundays I’m appearing on Instagram and Facebook LIVE as one of my characters for the sequel (times here). Streaming LIVE is a step closer to sharing these private, intimate character moments with my audience.

You think this is bullshit? Crazy? Boring? Stupid? A waste of time? And OMG, Lauren, you should just make memes.

I’ll make myself and my audience happy instead and leave you to the horde.