Rebuilding Myself in Public
Letting go of audience expectations in writing and the struggle of authenticity
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Election Night Reality Check
This week hit me with a hot slap of red. I was foolishly optimistic, skipping down my rural road to vote at the hamlet’s community center. Being all cutesy. I don’t know what I was thinking, romanticizing the moments before what I thought would be a victory, even making lighthearted TikToks about it. That evening, I rounded up my upstate friends in my dad’s diesel Ford F250. We drove over to the Catskills to watch the returns at a friend’s house deep in the mountains, passing Trump signs one after another. I woke up to the headlines the next morning, and you know the rest.
The days since (3 days) have been disorienting.
Why Writing Feels Exhausting Right Now
In this moment, I’m trying to trust myself again, leaning into what I call a “no-strategy strategy.” It feels like I’m rebuilding myself in public, figuring out what I want to say in real time.
Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, “Authenticity consists in having a true and lucid consciousness of the situation… in accepting it in pride or humiliation, sometimes in horror and hate.” Right now, this whole “Audience-First” mindset is paralyzing. The more I try to cater to expectations, the further I drift from what originally fueled my work: pure curiosity and obsession.
I’ve always followed my 4P method (Passion, People, Product, Profit), which starts with passion. That internal spark is what drives me to create something that resonates. Passion leads, and the right people follow. This has been my guiding principle, but somewhere in the rush, I’ve lost touch with it.
So I’m regrouping, trying to pinpoint my next big passion. I know it’s something about connecting with people online, but the specifics—ideas, offerings—still feel hazy. I want to build something real, but it has to start from what genuinely matters to me, not what I think people want to hear.
The Pull of Personal Obsessions: Finding Inspiration in Archives
To give you an idea of what passion looks like for me, here are a few obsessions I used to follow without a second thought: there was a time I screenshotted every single personal ad from lesbian erotica magazine, On Our Backs, organizing them by month and year. It took hours, but I couldn’t get enough of them.
Another phase was photographing every Xeroxed tee shirt from the Lesbian Herstory Archives. I have binders full of slogans and images from those pieces of history.
And then there’s my scrapbook of polaroids from my “coming out” years—a visual diary of that time. These projects never had a goal or strategy; they were just things I loved. And somehow, they still resonate more deeply than anything I created with an audience in mind.
Do I Want to Be a “Main Character”?
I keep asking myself if I want to go all in on Substack. I don’t see myself as a writer in the traditional sense. I don’t track trends closely or stay glued to one specific topic. But then I read something by Max Read: “You have to be pretty comfortable having a strong voice, offering relatively strong opinions, and just generally ‘being the main character’ in your writing.”
Do I have that in me? I don’t enjoy being the main character in life, but in writing? Somehow, I can do it there. Writing lets me explore these ideas without feeling like I have to fit anyone else’s expectations.
Conclusion: Choosing Curiosity Over Strategy
Maybe that’s what I need to reclaim—a sense of curiosity, a willingness to follow my own voice without worrying if it will “land” with an audience. Every time I’ve created something people connected with, it started with a genuine passion, not a strategy.
So here’s the plan: I’m letting go of what I think others want and writing about what I actually care about. The right people will follow. For now, that’s enough.
Still, I love you. People, the audience, readers.
I like this collage!