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A (Love?) Letter To My Audience
This isn’t a breakup but it also kind of is.
I’ve been missing in action for a while and I have something to say. It’s mostly about me, but it’s also about us. What we take in and on without realizing. What we consume and are consumed by.
It’s about my journey as a writer, going in and deeper. It’s about growing in public and it’s about starting over.
So I guess I’ll begin.
Dear Audience,
I missed you. I missed how you made me feel until that feeling soured like every other unwell thing inside of me.
The problem wasn’t you, it was how important you became to me. You loomed monstrous and divine in my head, spreading wide across my skull until there wasn’t room for much else. Not for me. Not for art. Certainly not for the beautiful ridiculous things you and I came here for when I first started sharing my work.
What I really miss is that feeling of not knowing and doing it anyway. The more I learned about algorithms, attention spans, and all that’s required to live off what I love, the less brave I became. The less I wrote. The less I published.
I gave myself up in pursuit of what I thought you wanted. Of perfection. I tried so hard to put myself in a neat little box that I inevitably…