The "yourself" video trend, introduce yourself with zero branding, just what's actually true, showed up on my For You page about two weeks ago and I've been thinking about it since. I made a version of it for @vixenraefr and it went over well but I kept the video version short because TikTok is TikTok. The longer version, the real answer to the question "who are you without the package," is this post. Consider this the director's cut.
What I find genuinely useful about the "yourself" trend as a prompt is this: it exposes the gap between persona and person. Not in a dramatic "I've been lying to you all along" way. More in the way that any role you inhabit for long enough starts to have its own momentum, its own grooves and expectations, and the person underneath is slightly different in ways that are interesting rather than scandalous. The persona is made of real material. It's just edited.
So: me, unedited. Let's do this.
The Logistics First (the boring part that isn't)
My name is Vixen Rae. That's a real name in the sense that it's what I go by and have gone by for years now and it's the name that feels like mine. My legal name is different and I'm not going to put it here because it's not relevant and also because I've worked hard to have a name that fits me rather than one I was assigned in a small Southern town by parents who could not have predicted who I was going to become.
I'm in my late twenties. I live in an apartment in a city I chose specifically because it is not the place I grew up and I wake up grateful for that choice on a regular basis. The apartment is, factually, small. I have described it as cozy in photos and that is technically true but also doing a lot of work. I have a studio setup in what used to be a closet, the closet is now fully dedicated to recording which means my actual clothes are on a rack in the corner of the bedroom that I've been meaning to address for two years. Lazarus, my pothos, lives on the windowsill and has died approximately three times and come back each time, hence the name. He's doing fine currently. I watered him yesterday and he responded with cautious optimism.
I have a neighbor's dog named Biscuit who I dog-sit regularly. Biscuit is a medium-sized golden mutt with one ear that flops and one that stands up and a worldview that consists mostly of "what are we eating next and also can I sit on your feet." I love him with an embarrassing intensity. He visits when the neighbor travels and during those visits I talk to him like a peer, which he seems to find appropriate.
What Vixen Rae Is and What She Isn't
Vixen Rae is an artist name, a public-facing identity, a compressed version of me. She's braver in some ways, more consistently sure of herself, more ready with the perfect line. She is never just tired. She doesn't have days where she watches four episodes of a show she's seen before because she can't make herself do anything more ambitious. She doesn't run out of milk and spend twenty minutes deciding whether to go to the store or just have black coffee again.
I do all of those things. I'm having a black coffee right now in fact because I did not go to the store. The real me is also the Vixen Rae me, it's not like the persona is a fabrication built over something hollow. But the persona is the highlight reel of a person, even when that highlight reel includes the bad days and the messy stuff, which mine does more than most. The real version has more uneventful Tuesdays in it.
The things that are absolutely the same in both versions: the politics, the theology (or lack thereof), the music, the voice. Those are not a brand. Those are just what's true. I didn't develop opinions about purity culture as a content angle. I developed them because they were imposed on me as a teenager and they were wrong and I've spent years undoing the damage. That's not persona. that's just the situation.
The Weird Reality of Existing as Both Person and Brand
I am in some sense a one-woman business. I write the music, I record a lot of it myself, I run the social media, I manage the correspondence, I make the creative decisions. There's no team, there's me, my closet studio, my secondhand acoustic Sunday, my interface, and whatever degree of technical competence I've assembled over years of necessity. When something goes well I feel it directly. When something falls flat or a session goes nowhere or a post gets ignored I feel that directly too.
This means that the line between "this project is struggling" and "I am struggling" is extremely blurry. When you're the only person in the building there's no buffer between the work and the self. I've talked to enough artist friends to know this is both a common experience and one that most people who consume content don't think about when they're scrolling. The person who made the thing you're watching or listening to took it personally in a way that a large organization cannot.
I've gotten better at the separation over time, understanding that a song not landing doesn't mean I'm not a real musician, understanding that a slow week on metrics doesn't mean the work is bad, understanding that the record I'm currently making has value whether or not anyone receives it exactly the way I intended. That's a practice though. Not a solved problem. I have to remind myself of it regularly.
What I Actually Want, Honestly
Here's the unedited version of the goals: I want to finish this record and have it be the thing I know it can be, not perfect, but true. True in the specific way where somebody hears it and recognizes something they've felt but couldn't name, and they feel less alone in it. That's the only metric that matters to me when I'm clear-headed about it.
I want to play shows. I want the specific experience of being in a room with people who came specifically for the music and feeling what happens when the song exists between you. I've had that in small doses and it is unlike anything else. Not fame, I'm not chasing fame as a concept. I'm chasing that room. I want to be in that room a lot.
I want to keep building a life that belongs to me. Financially stable enough to make choices based on values rather than survival. Creative enough to keep making things that surprise me. Connected enough to the people I love to not let the solo artist thing turn into actual isolation, which is a real risk when your studio is a closet and your work is mostly solitary.
I want Lazarus to continue his improbable survival streak. I want more Biscuit visits. I want to call Aunt Deb more than I do. I want the lyric I'm wrestling with right now to come clear in the next week because it's the last piece of a song that's almost ready and I can feel it wanting to be finished.
That's me. No branding required. Thanks for asking, and thanks for being here for the real version. I love you guys a lot, I genuinely do.
I want to say one more thing about the persona/person gap because I think it's something anyone who puts themselves online in any capacity deals with, not just artists. When you have a public presence, even a small one, even just a social media account where people know your name, you start to exist in people's minds as a fixed thing. They have a version of you. It's made of real material but it's static, it doesn't update the way you do. And sometimes you say or do something that conflicts with the version they have and people get genuinely confused or upset, not because you did something wrong but because you changed and the image didn't. The gap between the person and the persona is that space. The persona is the last several photos, the person is everything that happened since. I try to keep them close, to not let the image calcify too far from the reality. Posts like this one help. They're maintenance work on the gap. I hope they land as real because that's what they are. And if you've made it to the end of this particular post, you've seen more of the actual person than most content lets you see. That's intentional. That's the deal I want to have with you, not audience and performer, but two people who actually know each other a little bit. You've shown up for this. I notice it. Thank you.