An interview with Aiden Rata, the meme queen of depression Instagram

Welcome to Small Talk, a series where we catch up with the internet’s favorite Extremely Online individuals offline.

Guided meditation: You’re sitting at your desk waiting to talk to the person behind the four most recent memes sent in your group chat on Instagram. You have your questions ready. You aren’t nervous. You interview people for your job all the time, but this one you’re actually excited about. One artist talking to another in order to boost visibility — this isn’t a metaphor about late stage capitalism.

That’s how I’d write one of Aiden Rata’s guided meditations about the morning I spent talking with her on the phone. Rata creates memes and videos that she describes as modern folk art on her Instagram page @aidenarata out of her Los Angeles home. She started her personal account in 2013, but it shifted into an art and meme page accidentally about four years later. When reels started taking over Instagram, she really found her niche: memes in video format.

Rata embraces the chaos and absurdity of the modern internet in a way not many others can. In an effort to find out how, I called her to chat about her creation process, finding inspiration, choosing optimism, and walking the line between faux vulnerability and toxic positivity.

Mashable: In 2017, you started posting more art and memes on your personal Instagram page. Why the shift?

Aiden Rata: It felt really cathartic to something really low stakes. I’m a writer by trade. And as a writer, it can feel really frustrating to work on a project for a really long time and not know if it’s good or not have feedback. So it feels really nice to be able to put content out and have it be part of the conversation right away. It was a way to not lean into perfectionist tendencies, basically. It’s not going to be perfect every time, but you can just make another one. It’s out there. It’s done.

Right, you were giving yourself another creative outlet that’s not the one that you have to do, but the one that’s fun to do that was a little bit lower stakes at first?

Yeah, exactly. I wanted to do something that [had] less pressure on it. Even then — like 2017 wasn’t that long ago — but content creation is still a weird sort of wild west. And, especially then, people didn’t know what to do with it. As a writer, I grew up taking a lot of ivory tower classes on this is what you read, this is what you write. This is the canon. And it felt really good for me and for my weird perfectionist brain to start doing stuff on the internet because there weren’t any rules around that or there weren’t ways to get it wrong. And of course, ironically, content creation is now the way that I trick people into reading my writing. Because that’s the thing that got big. That’s my day job, that’s where a lot of my creative opportunities have come up, that’s how I found my literary agent. I guess there’s a lesson in there somewhere that when you do something fun and personally fulfilling, it’s probably going to pay off more than pushing yourself to do something that feels like a real slog or a drag. You’re getting your 10,000 hours or whatever the probably fake number is to become an expert in something, if you’re enjoying it. Or you’re going to let yourself fail a little bit, if you’re enjoying it.

You know, the way that you’re describing this — were you ever on Tumblr?

Oh yeah.

The way you’re describing this reminds me a lot of how Tumblr creators talked about their blogs, right? But then you had almost a rebrand where you started introducing those manifestation videos — your mediocre date is in the bathroom, or you’re waiting at planned parenthood. Your page almost became more positive? Was that on purpose?

At that time there was a really interesting auto-fiction movement, particularly among women and girls and queer folks, who [created this work that] was sort of this auto fiction or talking about your experience. I’m pretty sure that the actual aesthetic definition online is like trauma-core, but it was really talking about not being well or talking about mental health or joking about and making it really approachable. And that was what drew me into it. I hadn’t had a space where people were talking about their experiences, and the idea that you’re scrolling through your feed and you could see someone talk about their struggle with addiction or with depression.

And then like the next thing that you see is a shopping post or a joke about something else. In the same seed, they’re rapid cycling through all these feelings. And that really reflects a lot of my interiority about [how] we’re just so overwhelmed with information and experience and data, and we’re having our little intrusive thoughts coming in all the time, sort of like your brain constantly changing the channel on you. You’re like, ‘Oh, that’s really up.’ ‘Oh, look at that.’ So it felt really radical to have this space where people were just really honestly talking about experiences and being their own antihero. So I kind of came into it from there, which is really interesting that now we’re having a conversation about uplifting and like therapy content basically, because there’s like a line somewhere in there where it starts to feel bad at some point. I’m friends with a lot of musicians and we often talk about the trap that you can fall into if you profit off of being unwell and your audience responds positively to you being unwell, I think it’s really easy to get into a cycle of pigeon-holding yourself. And that’s your niche.

And I think that’s not, for me at least, healthy. Like at some point I’m like, well, I want to go to therapy and grow. Maybe that’s like a really dystopian way of thinking about it is rebranding to better yourself. It starts to feel disingenuous at some point. I’m grateful to have a space to talk about like a full spectrum of human experience. And also at some point I think it didn’t feel good to only focus on feelings that weren’t it. I don’t want to go into toxic positivity, because I certainly don’t believe in that either, but I think acknowledging the full spectrum of human experience as best as we can on the internet is also the most interesting things about that for me, or what I’m wanting to explore now is like the ways in which we’re like trying to be better and trying to like sort of find solace. I think I am kind of an optimistic person. We’re all doing our best because like it’s the apocalypse, like, what are we doing?

I think that’s really interesting — sort of like toeing that line between toxic positivity and this weird faux vulnerability that we can also fall into online. And I think that is one part of what’s so attractive about your page and pages like yours is that you investigate it, but not in this emotionally taxing way, but in a way that can actually be fun and laugh at yourself a little bit. And I noticed a lot of that content came when you started posting more videos. Am I making that connection up?

Just from an aesthetic or content level, I’m doing a lot more video stuff right now, which I think is really just fun and a good expression. Instagram started doing Reels and they basically just allowed us to do that, which is nice. There’s something about making something that feels a little bit more dynamic or present or getting to put my voice into something that is just interesting as someone who just wants to try new stuff. It’s also incredibly labor intensive. I’m not formally trained in Adobe at all. Everything that I’ve learned, I’ve learned from YouTube and like asking friends. So everything is really hard. But just in terms of like content, I think [comparing this to] journaling is a good exercise because it’s The Artist’s Way thing of if you write something down every day, it’s really hard to not address it finally. And that was sort of this exercise in talking about my feelings in a really open public record way. And at some point, it’s hard to talk about your demons and not deal with them. To be like, ‘oh, I’m sad again?’

And of course, that’s not to blame anyone who is sad, my brain chemistry makes me sad a lot…I talk a lot about wanting to be a happy person or a healed person in the world and wanting to have strong connections with people and not perpetuate harm in the world, which is really hard to do. And that’s a lot of pressure. That’s a really tough thing to do. And sometimes it’s nice to be able to trick myself into thinking that I can do that, but in a very low stakes way. So maybe when I make little videos or meditations, I’m talking to myself and I’m trying to trick myself into wellness maybe. I also don’t think that the point at which you’re like, ‘oh, I’m helping all these people and healing.’ That’s kind of some cult leader mentality. I don’t think that that’s what’s happening. What I view is, ideally, like, you know when you leave your pet at home and you can put cat TV on for them? I want to give people’s brains a cat TV. I want to [give] a 30-second space where you can have a simulation of comfort and you don’t feel alone right now. That’s what I want.

What are some of your favorite posts that you’ve done? I, personally, love your meditation series.

Yeah, that’s probably my favorite one right now. It’s really fun to see what resonates with people, because, again, everything feels really specific. Do you know who Louise Hay is? She is like the queen of the original affirmations. She wrote all these books of affirmations and I have a page of her affirmations taped to my bathroom mirror that my cat keeps scratching down, which is really sinister. But it’s one of those things like, ‘look in the mirror and look yourself in the eyes and say I love you and say I forgive you.’ And this stuff feels really corny, but it’s also terrifying to do that.

We should be kinder to ourselves. Really. It’s not that hard.

And it’s a really interesting experience to make things, especially because I’m not a performer, so I’m not used to listening to my own voice and I have made myself cry by just listening to my own audio recordings of myself saying soothing things to me, which is really fucked up. We should be kinder to ourselves. Really. It’s not that hard. I like the one about being home after school. I like the one about being in Planned Parenthood and you’re waiting for the doctor to come in. It’s kind of just exploring all of these liminal spaces where your mind can wander a little bit and it’s big and it’s small at the same time. It’s interesting to capture something like you’re experiencing it, but in real time, you maybe wouldn’t remember being there even? I don’t know if I remember the specifics of the last time that I was at the supermarket, but whenever I’m there, I’m feeling some kind of way. The guided meditations are my favorite to do because some deep inner child part of me has a very strong response to hearing my own voice say nice things to me.

I love the way that meditation series has zoned in on your style. How did you create that?

I wanted it to be a little bit overwhelming or more atmospheric and the details line up. If you want to watch something a couple of times, everything fits together and makes sense. But it’s also OK to just listen to it once and catch a little bit of it. Just working with the form of the internet, which is this deluge of data and information, it kind of just has to wash over you whenever you open your phone. As we talk about touching some grass, we’re not going to go to the commune, we’re not going to log off. From a realistic perspective, what do you do in terms of internet harm reduction? Is it possible to like work with the internet? I don’t know. This is a thing that I am, in my personal life and in my creative life, really interested in exploring. And it’s something that I think about a lot. I’ll get back to you on that. But, yeah, this is part of it.

Your tone is so specific, too. How did you curate and cultivate it?

A lot of that comes from just conversations with friends. Like you’re talking about a really traumatic or scary or violent experience and you kind of have to laugh about it? You’re sharing information, but the way that you make it safe and the way that you make it feel like something that you can actually manage in your life is by being like, OK, this is really ridiculous, right? It’s so fucked up, but it’s also just patently hilarious. It’s a circus. Taking it to a place that’s kind of absurdist, but also really emotional and caring, is a way to bait and switch with vulnerability, and I think that can be really effective. I genuinely am just like a big, soft baby of a person. But also stuff is funny. I don’t know what to make of it. It’s both at the same time and it’s very confusing. Also that level of like self-awareness or detachment from it, is just from the fact that the tradition that I started making memes in was not self-help content but was, like, ‘I’m a very damaged person, haha,’ content. It was depression Instagram. And so that’s maybe a little different from someone just coming in just straight posi.

How would you describe this to your parents?

I have no idea. They have no idea. They’re abstractly proud of me, but they have no idea what I do. I guess it’s art? As a kid, I always wanted to be an artist and then you are taught for a really long time that that’s just not a thing that people do. And then sort of ironically, I’ve come full circle and now I’m an artist and that’s what I do. So I would call it video art or new media. If I wanted to get pretentious about it, it’s sort of metabolizing internet culture and wellness culture and late capitalist apocalypse culture into these weird little meditation videos. I’m super interested in spirituality and wellness. I’m super interested in being online, obviously. I always think that memes are folk art. It’s a way that we process pop culture and create this strange internalized commentary on it that feels really human… Just people making things for themselves and each other, I don’t know, maybe that’s like an idealistic view of it. I also enjoy getting paid for things, we live in a society, and it’s really hard for anything to exist without becoming commodified or exploited. And I guess I’m just waiting for that to happen.

…it’s sort of metabolizing internet culture and wellness culture and late capitalist apocalypse culture into these weird little meditation videos

But right now we have our little pocket of cat TV time. And that feels really good. And I guess when that happens, I’ll move on to something else. But isn’t that what we’re all doing? Is just like trying to outrun cynicism a little bit?

How do you not get burned out?

The last few weeks I’ve been experiencing immense burnout, actually. I’m so tired. Content is such an interesting thing because it’s really important in that everyone is consuming it and it can be really mind-changing or it can be embedded in our identities and our psyches at this point. And also it’s really undervalued… The answer is yes. And also I think that there is something to be said for like when you have an account online, you have a level of visibility and also accessibility that maybe other quote unquote celebrities wouldn’t have. I just recently got an agent, but it’s not like I have anyone handling my DMs and it’s not like I have a moderator. And I like it. I think my audience is fucking rad. Every person that I’ve interacted with pretty much has just been very cool and good and interesting. And I really like that.

But it’s really hard to talk to 200 people a day and also do work and I have a really deep fear of being a scammer or being disingenuous. I’m probably just not built for the internet, honestly. I have a lot of anxiety about being fake. And the other side of that is having bad boundaries. I just have poor intimacy regulation. So I just turned off Story replies, so no one can reply to my Stories now, which feels really good. I’m sorry to everyone, but I was at a point where I wasn’t responding to anyone, including my friends.

How do you come up with your ideas?

I guess they’re all things that I want to hear. They’re all things that I wish someone would say to me. I studied poetry in college, so I think finding weird connections in places and thinking about language and image is just something that feels really innate to me. And it’s actually kind of nice to have a space for it where people will actually see it… It’s really nice to have a space where your ideas feel amplified or important. Where do I get my ideas? I don’t know. I read a lot. It’s mostly personal. It’s all the spaces that I’ve been in.

Is there anything specific you want people to take away from your work?

I think there is something about having come out of a tradition of talking really honestly about things like my own mental health and experiences. And I have talked really openly about like sexual assault and trauma. Coming from a place of talking about difficult experiences online has really informed the way that I talk about positive experiences and doing well. And it feels really important for me when I make things to be honest about my optimism. I consider myself an optimist, but I think that it’s actually a very hard and informed choice. It’s not a naive toxic positivity or success manifestation. I want to critique those models and I want to unpack them and figure out why we’re drawn to them and what we really are seeking. I also want to validate that that’s not where a lot of people are at nor should they be. And that’s really hard. And if I can make it a little bit easier or if I can make it fun, I’m so stoked to get to share that with someone. Because sometimes therapy sucks.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.