no one gives a shit about your wordpress blog

While speaking with my nearest and dearest this weekend, she said this in the context of a different situation, but it really resonated with me. From 1996 through 2001-ish, I maintained a hand-coded blog that I wrote in rather frequently. Then along came the early efforts of social media — MySpace and Livejournal — and what had once been an exercise in smoking a bowl of pot and typing into the inky void of the internet’s early days became performative.

It also sort of coincided with my transition into working as a marketeer and writing for a living, and with the obsession with sounding like the snarkiest girl in the room. A bit of a show off. I moved into Facebook and posted screeds there, and then in the early 2010s, with the arrival of Instagram, etc., of a sudden, we all needed to be our own brand. Hustle and hustle and hustle — and maybe flow if you’re lucky.

By that time, I was neck deep in all forms of digital marketing, but none of it was me. I didn’t have a brand, but I would insert my personality into everything I created. I produced over a thousand videos on YouTube for a coffee equipment shop, and while I never actually appeared physically in any of them, my voice came from behind the camera, making ridiculous jokes and telling the world that I wanted to spread this brand new caramel sauce from Monin all over my body like a lotion.

That weird and gonzo approach to digital media helped that company become a resounding success, but it still wasn’t me. I still had to fit myself into a specific parameter defined by sell shit. I had learned after a few youthful and naive decisions at Speakeasy, expressing my actual opinion to the early geeks and freaks who were unnaturally obsessed with their ping times, that when I was speaking for an entity, I had to put my own assessments aside and playtend that I actually gave a shit about what I considered an incredibly petty situation. My first forays into “voice.”

Then it was years of copyediting and truncating horoscopes, fitting them into a character-count puzzle while maintaining the spirit of their perspective. Then consulting and writing and creating for clients so that they could, well, sell shit. Sometimes successfully, other times not. Honing my ability to fake it fake it fake it, swap tone and style on demand — from a senior housing community to a life coach, a fledgling non-profit in Pontiac to Western Michigan University, a raw juice company trying to capitalize on the internet-driven wellness obsession to a community college in Seattle. All different styles and tones and values. It was an exercise in a nearly cephalopod-level ability to mimic and camouflage, blend in, and pretend as if I belonged there.

All throughout, I had this blog, this hyperpetal, sitting here gathering dust. Random postings, but always grand plans. I need an editorial calendar! I need to write about my travels! I need a systematic writing style and a meaningful ethos for why I’m doing this! What can I contribute to the conversation? What can I do to make a name for myself? How do I create the brand that is Kat and that can sell herself as a writer of all kinds of things, not just copy to sell widgets? How can I sell myself?!?!?!

And, as you can see, the answer was ever elusive, and therefore this blog sat relatively quiet in its dark corner of the internet, occasionally updated with stories I’d written after going back to college to get my degree or in moments of deep desolation.

But lying on my stomach in my little room at the resort in Playa del Carmen a few weeks ago, I pulled up this blog to begin writing something, only to discover that I had written something several months before that I had failed to post. Did I think it was unfinished? Was I judging myself? Why hadn’t I published it?

So I decided then that this space is literally MYSPACE, and I will do whatever the fuck I want with it. I will not crosspost to Substack, I will not have social share buttons. I’ll let people sign up to receive a post via email because that’s just a kindness, but I will not build an email list, or attempt to create a community on this digital plantation. I will not use this as the cornerstone of the KatBrand(tm), or see it as a way of saying important shit for the sake of saying important shit.

Rather, I will have fun. I will write about whatever is on my mind that morning. If I have the inspiration to write about adventures, then dope. I may get a bit morose at times, occasionally inhabit a Pollyanna sphere, and sometimes I will probably not have anything to talk about other than my glorious puppies. And that is totally okay. Because, ultimately, at this time and space, with the internet in a state of slash-and-burn transformation in an effort to create the fertile fields of AI, no one but me gives a shit about my wordpress blog.

And that is freeing.