You Feel Like You Know Me—And That's the Part That Gets Complicated

Somebody sent me a DM last spring that I've thought about almost every week since. They'd been following my music for a couple of years, showed up to a handful of livestreams, and had been part of my Discord community since I launched it. The message was warm, genuinely kind, and full of specific references to things I'd shared online—a story about my grandmother, the reason I'd written a particular song, a bad week I'd talked through on a livestream.

At the end of it, they wrote: I feel like we're friends, even though I know we're not. Is that weird?

Honest answer? No. And also, a little bit, yes.

The Distance We Collapsed on Purpose

For a long time, the relationship between musicians and their audiences was defined by distance. You bought the album, you went to the show, maybe you got a poster signed at the merch table. The artist existed in a slightly elevated, slightly separate space—accessible through the music but not through a direct message at 11 PM on a Wednesday.

Then the internet happened. Then social media. Then Instagram Stories and Twitter and TikTok and Discord and Twitch and all of these platforms specifically designed to close that gap. And a lot of us—myself included—leaned into it, because it felt like the right thing to do. More honest. More human. Less of the manufactured celebrity mystique that always felt a little hollow anyway.

I started doing livestreams because I wanted to play new songs for people before they were finished. I started the Discord because I wanted a space where conversations could happen that weren't buried under an algorithm. I started sharing more personal stuff online because, frankly, the personal stuff is where the music comes from, and I wanted people to understand that context.

What I didn't fully anticipate was the way that openness would reshape the nature of the connection itself.

When Familiarity Isn't Mutual

Here's the thing about parasocial relationships—and I want to be careful here, because that term sometimes gets used dismissively, like these connections aren't real or don't matter—they're not fake. The feelings are genuine. The investment is genuine. People who follow an artist closely, who show up consistently, who care about what happens to them, are experiencing something real.

But it's asymmetrical in a way that can create friction nobody intended.

Someone who's watched fifty of my livestreams knows a version of me that's actually pretty accurate. They've seen me tired, seen me excited, heard me talk about things that matter to me. But I don't know them the same way. I might recognize a username. I might remember a specific comment if it was particularly moving. But I'm not carrying their story the way they might be carrying mine.

That gap isn't a moral failure on either side. It's just the math of reach. One person broadcasting, many people receiving. The intimacy is real; the reciprocity has limits.

What I've Had to Figure Out About Boundaries

I've gotten better at this over time, but I won't pretend I handled it perfectly at first. Early on, I responded to almost every DM because it felt rude not to. I said yes to almost every request for advice, for collaboration, for a quick chat, because these were people who cared about my music and I was genuinely grateful for that.

What I learned the hard way is that responsiveness at that level isn't sustainable, and when it stops—because it has to stop eventually—it can feel like a withdrawal to someone who'd come to expect it. That's not fair to them, and it put me in a position where I was either burning out or letting people down.

Setting clearer expectations earlier would have been kinder. Not colder—kinder. Being upfront about what I can and can't offer within this kind of connection is actually more respectful than being inconsistently available.

These days, I try to be genuinely present in the spaces I've created—the Discord, the livestreams, the comments—without creating the impression that I'm accessible in the way a friend would be. It's a line I'm still learning to walk.

The Gifts That Come With the Complications

I want to be clear about something: I'm not complaining. The connected version of this artist-fan relationship has given me things I couldn't have imagined before.

I have listeners who've stuck with me through multiple albums, who show up for every tour date within driving distance, who've introduced my music to people in their lives. I've had conversations in my Discord that genuinely changed the way I thought about a song I was writing. I've done livestreams on nights when I felt creatively stuck and come out of them with a new direction because someone asked exactly the right question.

The community that's formed around this music is something I treasure in a way that's hard to put into words. These aren't just metrics. They're people who found something in what I made and decided it was worth their time and attention. That's the whole reason any of this exists.

Staying Real in a Space Designed for Performance

The challenge—and I think every artist navigating this era is wrestling with it—is how to stay authentic inside platforms that reward performance. Social media has a way of flattening real personalities into content. The temptation is to give people what they respond to rather than what's actually true.

I try to resist that, with varying degrees of success. When I share something personal, it's because I actually want to share it, not because I've calculated that vulnerability drives engagement. When I pull back, it's because I need to, not because I'm manufacturing mystique.

And when someone tells me they feel like they know me—like the person who sent me that DM last spring—I try to honor what they're expressing while being honest about what it is. You know a real part of me. The part that shows up in the music, in the livestreams, in the things I've chosen to share. That's not nothing. In some ways, it might be the most important part.

We're just still figuring out what to call it.