At some point in every creator’s life—especially the online kind, the ones who have accounts and blogs and mildly unhinged digital spaces—they’re told to niche down. It’s treated like gospel. Branding 101. If you want to be taken seriously, if you want to build a following, if you want to be seen as legit, you need to pick a lane. One topic. One audience. One clean, well-lit room where all your content can live neatly under one title like a well-labeled spice jar.
And look. I tried. I really did. I’ve stared at advice threads, listened to podcasts, watched other creators rise fast and clean on single-topic platforms—people who only talk about writing craft, or slow living, or how to optimize your morning. There’s a tidy appeal to it, that kind of clarity. The kind that says, “You always know what you’re going to get from me.” But that’s not how I function. I don’t live in a tidy lane. I live in an open intersection, surrounded by noise and color and a deeply overstimulated emotional GPS. And that’s not changing any time soon.
Because here’s the truth: I don’t have a niche. I have passions. Plural. I have grief that needs articulating and strange little joys that demand attention. I have hyperfixations that bloom like wildflowers and burn out just as fast. I have fiction, essays, lists, breakdowns, breakthroughs. Some days I want to talk about the visceral release of horror writing; other days, I’m up at 3am re-categorizing my notes app because that’s the only thing keeping my brain from melting down. I can’t box that up into one thing—and I’ve stopped trying.
People love to say that if you want to grow, you have to specialize. But what they really mean is: make yourself easier to consume. Easier to follow. Easier to forget. Because once you become too much, too sprawling, too hard to define, they don’t know where to put you. And in a world obsessed with clarity and consistency, “too much” reads like a threat. But I would rather be a little bit threatening than shrink myself into something I no longer recognize.
I don’t niche down. I expand. I take up space in the places that need my voice, even if that voice shifts depending on the season, the weather, the story I’m living through at the time. I don’t want to be pinned down like a butterfly behind glass. I want to move, to change, to create things that feel alive. If that means someone clicks into my page expecting writing advice and finds a breakdown about neurodivergence or a deep-dive into grief or joy or obsession—good. That’s the full experience. That’s the whole ecosystem.
I’m not a content creator building a brand. I’m a writer building a body of work. And that work includes chaos. It includes emotion. It includes contradiction. I’d rather be complicated and honest than polished and forgettable. I’d rather be someone’s “I didn’t expect to love this but now I can’t look away” than another algorithm-friendly echo of something we’ve all already scrolled past.
This little corner of the internet? It’s mine. It’s weird, it’s layered, it’s full of sharp turns and open windows. You don’t have to know what’s coming next. You just have to know that whatever it is, it’s going to be real.
