niching down is bad and inhuman.

promising to be dumber and goofier.

Full Moon in Taurus tomorrow! A Full Moon in one of her favorite parts of the sky, ruled by Venus who has recently entered Capricorn (I’m biased but I love her here, she’s got earthy triplicity power and can witness the Full Moon from a supportive trine angle).

This arrangement translated: it’s a good time to buy a nice piece of art that makes you happy every time you look at it. Alternatively, go pick up some flowers that remind you of springtime and put them in a vase somewhere you’ll see them.

I’m going to see this piece of art later today partially to celebrate and even though I can’t buy it (financially or legally) I will be channeling that happy Moon in Taurus energy while I take it in.

Le bonheur de vivre, Matisse

personality pics from the last 24 hours

More musing about niches and brands.

Quick and off the cuff and a day late (maybe this season of Ask Good Questions is about Thursday email sends? A little Jupiter energy for this post-election moment??), but here are some thoughts I’m having about when we see ourselves as occupying a niche. This is, in some ways, a continuation of last week’s thoughts. 

As I mentioned last week, there’s a funny idea that many of us in a certain generation were raised with where we needed to be able to give our elevator pitch, explain who we are in a concise way on a resume or an Instagram bio, and use that clarity to move forward in life.

This has something to do with being girlbosses from birth, with the consistent practice we have had writing bios for social media and dating apps, and with a growing expectation we have that at some point in our lives we will be perceived by people we don’t know in a mass culture manner. I don’t know for sure and won’t do the research today, but I imagine prior generations weren’t considering very often the idea that they might be seen by countless masses of people who would need to understand “who they are” quick enough for a sound bite. Quick enough for a viral share or a Love Island intro. What’s your Housewives tagline? What’s your deal? Who are you?

One way that this idea hurts us is that we start to segment who gets various parts of ourselves. We have our niche for work, our niche for our friends, our niche for our families. This isn’t completely new, but the way that we self-edit does seem to be modern (post-modern??) and bad.

I’ll be specific because I’m not being very clear: I used to feel some kind of identity crisis when I thought about writing a newsletter because I thought if I wrote about astrology then I couldn’t write about politics then I couldn’t write about food then I couldn’t write about quilting then I couldn’t write about the Enneagram then I couldn’t write about higher education then I couldn’t write about my feelings about growing up in Ingram, Texas. 

Obviously some of this is being young and fearing being misunderstood. This is something that I have mostly just grown out of—I will be misunderstood, it’s one of the only certainties in life, I think. But some other part of this is an ingrained belief that certain things just don’t “go” together. You can’t package all that together, because no one will buy it. Be one thing and sell the shit out of that. If you’re good enough, maybe you can sell one or two more things, but it’s a risk. Be simple.

This is, of course, an irrational way to think about being a person. We usually have many interests and many values and we engage in many communities that are built around those interests and values. We are more complicated than “Democratic voter” or “white cis gay male” or “he/they with a Pisces Moon”. We are much more complicated than the buyer personas that frantic marketing professionals are sketching out and presenting to frantic CEOs who then present them to sociopathic venture capitalists. Sharks, we have found the perfect buyer and it is a single cell organism whose only purpose is to reproduce.

Since complexity doesn’t sell, there is a clear incentive to artificially simplify, as “producer” or “consumer” (labels again).

For you all, I’m supposed to be straight forward. We’re supposed to be slippery smooth and digestible. There’s another blog to be written here, but this is the “writing voice” version of Instagram face. It’s Substack voice or MFA novels and it even shows up in infographic activism. The people (the algorithm) want what is familiar and then it doesn’t take long to forget that there could easily be variety. 

Now I’m really losing the thread, but this also reminds me of when my friend Kelsey read The Faggots and their Friends Between Revolutions and the first thing she told me about it was that she hadn’t read anything like it and it made sense when she realized when it was published. It’s so rare for these kinds of things to be created and digested anymore. It happens, obviously, in small corners of the world and sometimes with big money behind it (arguably Everything Everywhere All At Once hit this chord a few years ago). We are such a tired culture at this point. So tired, so repetitive. I am exhausting myself with what I write half the time.

So, a goal: I’m going to continue trying to break up that monotony and self-restriction. More erratic creation, more exploration, and hopefully I do not sound like someone you have read before. Not to be quirky, exactly, but because I really want to tell you about this book on Mary Magdalene I’m reading and I want to tell you what I think about the new book I got from Pallas K Augustine and what I’m learning about Philly politics and about plugging back into writing poetry. I need to unpack a heated discussion I’ve had recently with two friends about Anne Hathaway because it has to mean something that I get so intense about her and I have to assume it will mean something for you too. Also, of course, there will be astrology.