This isn’t going to be clever or trimmed down for attention.
There’s no punchy thesis waiting at the end, no tidy bow, no careful branding tucked between the lines. If you came here looking for the curated version, the filtered bite-sized inspiration, the clever repackaging of pain—this probably isn’t for you.
And that’s fine. Really.
Because I’m tired.
Not the kind of tired a nap fixes. Not even the kind you can soothe with silence and soft light and a day off. This is marrow-tired. This is the exhaustion that settles in when you’ve poured pieces of yourself into a thing—something real, something with breath—and then watched people measure its worth based on whether it could be more.
More marketable. More accessible. More bite-sized. More clean.
As if the value of my work lies in how easily it can be digested by someone scrolling past it with one thumb and half a second of attention. As if I need to dull the edges of what I do to make it easier to swallow.
It’s the tone that gets me. The “I’m only trying to help” advice that feels like a hand on your shoulder and a shove between your shoulder blades at the same time. The way they say, “This is good—but have you thought about doing it bigger?” Or “What if you tried something more universally relatable?”
As if truth isn’t enough unless it fits in a template.
As if I haven’t already been carving myself down to the bone just to say something that feels honest.
But fine. Let’s talk about it.
Let’s talk about what it means to make something real in a world obsessed with spectacle. To write from a place that isn’t neat or loud or easy to translate. To bleed onto the page and be told, kindly of course, that it might resonate more if you just… didn’t make it so much.
They want you to be raw, but not messy.
They want you to be deep, but not uncomfortable.
They want your truth—but only if it fits their vision of what art is supposed to look like.
And when you don’t give them that, when you hand over something wild or small or quietly devastating, they smile and say, “It’s good. But it could be great if it were just a little more polished. A little more something.”
Bigger. Louder. Smoother. Cleaner.
I’m not trying to be great by those metrics. I’m not building a brand—I’m writing to breathe. I’m building a home out of broken sentences and nerve endings. I’m telling stories I need to tell, not stories someone else needs to monetize.
But god, isn’t it exhausting to always feel like you have to defend that? To keep showing up, to keep creating from the tenderest parts of yourself, knowing there’s always going to be someone standing just outside the frame asking if you’ve thought about making it more palatable?
No. I haven’t.
And maybe that’s the point.
I’m not interested in building for scale. I’m not interested in repackaging the sharpness into something soft just so it plays better on a feed. I’m not here to produce endlessly in pursuit of being seen.
Sometimes I write in whispers. Sometimes in screams. Sometimes in fragments. Sometimes it’s weird and offbeat and emotionally lopsided. And if that’s not what you want—if you read it and think, “What even is this?”—then good.
Maybe this one wasn’t for you.
Maybe it was for the people who’ve been quietly choking on expectations, who are told their work is good but—always with the but. Maybe it’s for the ones who create strange, sad, beautiful things that don’t win awards but last. The ones who don’t apologize when their art doesn’t explain itself. The ones who keep writing anyway, even after someone tried to shrink them down to size.
We’re not here to impress. We’re here to endure.
And if you can’t feel the fire in that, then you were never meant to stand in the warmth of it.
