Everybody starts with a goal when they blog. Some people are parents and they write about things that they can relate to regarding parenthood, some people are avid cooks and enjoy sharing their recipes. It seems like everywhere you turn you can find a blog for something. Anything from sports opinion pieces to celebrity fashion watches; most writers have a knack for niches. Finding my niche was extremely hard because I feel like I’m such a multi-faceted individual. During 2020 and most of 2021 I found myself missing in action in the wonderful world of blogging because I just didn’t know what to say.

Being a writer, I’m sure you can imagine my horror at the idea of not knowing what to write about. As a child, one of my favorite Disney movies was Bambi. I would call down the hallway, like clockwork at 2 1/2 to 3 years old “Mother!” and we’d spend at least some of our day watching either that or the Little Mermaid. There are two things these movies have in common: Thumper making a statement that: “if you don’t have anything nice to say; don’t say nothing at all” and Ursula telling Ariel that while she won’t have her voice she’ll have her “pretty face and don’t forget the importance of body language”. We live in a world where (even as kids) we’re taught to speak less, to focus on our appearances, and as a Disney adult at aged 33 now; I couldn’t help but wonder: Did I have a greater purpose in the blogging world without a niche?

I turned to my friends by posting what I called a social experiment on my wall: how would you describe me? My friend Kate weighed in about this eternal conundrum in a writer’s mind when she said very simply she’d describe me as multi-faceted. I was used to hearing the normal, at times safe, adjectives from the people I often refer to as my chosen family. Multifaceted with something I had never even considered when I looked for adjectives to describe who I am and yet it made sense. Still, what place did a multifaceted person even have in the writing world?

As human beings, there is a natural need to be accepted for who we are. We may or may not keep up with the latest trends, television shows, and actors/actresses. We may or may not put more emphasis on our outward appearances than we do on nurturing our souls but at the core of it: we’re all crawling around this thing called life looking for love and acceptance. Inauthenticity, it’s a big word and it’s also a loaded word. Did I mention it is also a word that is completely rampant in this day and age?

So many people in this world stay in situations that no longer serve them personally, professionally, and yes, even spiritually. In many ways, these individuals are forcing themselves into niches that they have no business in and not because they don’t belong there but because they’re not being true to themselves by being there.

As writers, we often throttle up on power in the form of subscriptions, likes, and shares, but do we ever stop and think about what made us write in the first place? Think about the first thing you wrote that you felt proud of. Does your blog and brand reflect who you genuinely are? Do they highlight the complexities of being an authentic person in an inauthentic world? There’s an old saying, that happens to be one of my favorites, “only dead fish go with the flow”. The real question was not whether or not I belonged blogging as a writer without a niche but rather: did I have the courage to swim upstream against the current called niches in blogging? Now that was a question nobody could answer for me except for myself.

When we honor the things in our lives that bring us joy, we are living our best life. We are also living authentically when we are honest about what we can or cannot be capable of. On June 30, 2022, at about 12:30 AM I decided that forcing myself to write about things I thought my audience wanted rather than what I wanted put too much unnecessary pressure on me, it took the passion out of what I did, and was not going to work if I wanted to have success. I decided at that moment: I am a multifaceted writer with no niche and that’s okay. Salmon spend their entire lives swimming against the current, if they could be programmed to go against the grain, couldn’t I as well? In the words of Mr. Big from Sex in the City, ‘abso-fucking-lutely’.

Some posts will be longer than others and some will be brief. However, I can honestly say that there will never be a weekly post that won’t be brutally honest and authentic. A snapshot of what is going on in my mind. A slice of life without necessarily being branded as a “slice of life”. My brand is that there is no brand. I don’t want to share recipes with you, although if I have a particularly good one I’m happy to pass it on, I want to feed your souls. I want to have deep conversations with strangers on the Internet in the comment section. I want to change the way you think about certain topics in society at large. My moon is in Pisces, which means I am a constant and ever-evolving whirlpool of emotions and ideas about the world around us. Writers, who fit into niches, are often stuck in that box of their design but I don’t want that to be me. For me, living authentically means not limiting myself to one box. Much like The Verve in ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ ‘I’m a million different people from one day to the next and I can’t change my mold’.

That being said, I hope you still like this blog in the format it will be in going forward but even if you don’t that’s OK too. Being a blogger in a world of niches is not for me. I am a multifaceted, multi-niched, incredibly straightforward person and I will be writing about whatever sets my soul on fire from now on.