I hate your personal brand

Along with your growth mindset and your analytics-hack-strategies. Or whatever you call them.

Photo by Arthur Mazi on Unsplash

I don’t want to build a personal brand.

I don’t want you to put me in a category. A neat little box that limits who I am. I wont allow it.

Because a brand is a reduction. It’s an answer given too early. It’s a category masquerading as clarity. It’s a neat little box you slide a person into so they can be recognized faster, consumed easier, remembered flatter.

“How I gained 3000 subscribers in less than 30 days”

“How I earned 10000 USD with my newsletter”

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But I am not you. And I don’t want to be you.

I am all my complexities and flaws. I’m eternal. I’m unique.

I am not a niche. I am not a promise. I am not a consistent output with a reliable tone and a repeatable value proposition.

I contradict myself. I evolve. I am unfinished and I plan to stay that way.

“But it will attract readers,” you say.
“They need to know who you are and what they’ll get from you.”

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But I’m not a product.

I am a soul, I am a writer. I want to seduce you with my words, make you stay with my charms. And you, dear reader, are supposed to unwrap me, layer by layer. Keep what resonates, discard what doesn’t.

But you’ll never get all of me. Because Im never just one thing.

I am not something you acquire. I am something you encounter.

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I hate the way all of it assumes that a human being is a draft waiting to be optimized.

I am as deep as a thousand seas, and so are you. That’s the part this whole system pretends not to see. Marketing requires amnesia about complexity. It needs people to forget that they, too, are vast, otherwise the trick doesn’t work.

I’m never just one thing.

And neither are you.

But the internet has decided that mystery is a liability. That ambiguity is a flaw. That if you can’t explain yourself in one sentence, you don’t deserve attention. So we compress ourselves. We sand off the strange edges. We rehearse the same three stories until they harden into identity.

We call it clarity.
We call it strategy.
We call it “showing up consistently.”

What it really is, most of the time, is self-betrayal with good metrics.

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Photo by Julia Joppien on Unsplash

The beauty of writing, in my humble opinion, is like the beauty of a rose. Not because it’s pretty, but because it cannot be reduced. Each petal is its own story. Each individual piece, on its own, is only a suggestion of the whole. A glimpse. You wouldn’t recognize it if you hadn’t seen the whole.

And yet the demand is always the same: pick a petal. Become legible. Be easy.

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I don’t want to be easy.

I don’t want to be digestible. I don’t want to be skimmed, summarized, turned into a takeaway. I don’t want to be useful in the way content strategists mean useful. I don’t want to “solve a problem for people.”

Because let’s be honest about that phrase.

“Solving a problem” often means first convincing someone that they are broken. Incomplete. Behind. Missing the one thing you happen to sell. It’s creating a wound and then offering yourself as the bandage. Classic marketing. Old as time. Wrap it in empathy, call it service, and pretend it isn’t manipulation.

I refuse to participate.

I am here to be seen—partially, imperfectly, over time.
I am here to write in a way that resists extraction.
I am here to remain larger than whatever frame you try to put around me.

Because being misunderstood is still more honest than being reduced.