I have recognized that a large percentage of my newsletters start with an ode to coffee so this morning I’ll spare you the composition of my good friend caffeine.
What I’ve been thinking about for some part of the last twelve years is why I feel compelled to share my life on the internet. I was born in the same decade as social media and I have always been someone who posts + shares. Facebook statuses, Instagram stories, sometimes even TikTok videos. Actually, if I think back before social media, I wrote AIM (that’s AOL Instant Messenger for you Gen Z kids) away statuses as if they were novellas. I have always over-shared and I have never been a particularly private person, despite really wanting to be in certain moments. I have tried to be more like my younger brother, the epitome of an introvert. No need to share Instagram photos of his beautiful vacations, no craving to create content for the world to acknowledge. Just him and his band and his piano and he’s happy to play, whether or not anyone hears the music. But not me, no sir-ee. No matter how much I have tried to make myself smaller or quieter or less visible on the world wide web, the desire persists and I continue to scratch the itch, year in and year out.
I have had four blogs, all more or less about the same thing, and with the same level of success, or really, lack thereof. I have constantly wigwagged between sharing food content and lifestyle content, never landing on one niche over the other and likely because of that, never taking any blog to “the next level.” In high school, I shared recipes on my first cooking blog, Caramelized Sarcasm. Home-cook-style photos and sarcastic humor surrounded most of the posts. My mom and her friends read the blogs. My friends read the blogs. A few dozen strangers joined the gravy train and even commented positive things on my recipe posts. But that was it. I went to college and focused on my internships, and eventually I dove straight into full-time work.
Then, a few years later when I was wedding planning and felt consumed by the entire process, I created a new blog called “Be Like Family” to share lifestyle content. I wrote about choosing flowers for said wedding but also how going on morning walks is great for a new marriage. I took overhead photos of rose petals and lattes and it was all very 2016, if you will.
After that, I decided that I needed to do what all the internet gurus told me and “niche down” in order to monetize my content. I closed down Be Like Family and folded it into an eponymous food blog. Then I started cranking out recipes. I bought Replica backdrops and a fancy DSLR camera that I didn’t know how to use and several times a week I would cook and shoot and edit before and after work. I enjoyed the process, but I longed for something more. I wasn’t able to express enough of my own voice in a blog that was purely focused on food, and I wasn’t motivated enough by the promise of money found through this niche because I already had a day job that was paying the bills. So eventually, that fell to the wayside too and I stopped blogging entirely.
I was quiet for a year or two, until my brother got sick and our family relocated to California to be closer to him during his treatment. If anything makes you reflective of how precious and short life is, it is cancer. The word alone is enough to cause reflection. Again, I couldn’t understand why I was doing it, but I started a new medium through which to write. I knew full well that my three prior attempts had ended with more expenses than profit and only a handful of extra readers, but I started the engine up all the same.
I never put pressure on myself to make money from my creative pursuits. I always had a regular office job with health insurance and commuter benefits and pursued my cooking or my writing on the side, in the crevices of each day. I am a classic child of immigrants, prioritizing job security and the path well-paved. I was afraid to take a less pragmatic leap and continued to grow my marketing career. Which is not to say I’m not incredibly happy with my career choices. I am. But no amount of career, personal, or family success thus far has satiated my desire to pound these keys and to share my story with you.
And so this morning, as you guessed it, with my cup of coffee in a quiet apartment, both children sound asleep, I asked myself why I do this if I haven’t made much of a dent in the last decade? I don’t say this in a pessimistic or negative way. This isn’t a woe is me cry. No, it’s simply an observation and a question. Why do some people choose to share their lives in various mediums on the internet, and why do others refrain from doing so? Why do some people maintain what can be referred to as a “side hustle” (a term which now makes everyone born in 1990+ cringe) or a creative pursuit if they haven’t found much external acknowledgement, be it fame or money?
Certainly the growth chart of my trajectory is a bunny slope, nowhere near the black diamond that I’d envisioned at 22. Perhaps part of the reason is that I’ve trained my brain to need that feedback loop, that external validation, those likes and shares and saves and notifications. My drug of choice, alongside caffeine, martinis, and french fries, that I can’t quite give up. Your acknowledgement and support.
Or maybe I continue to document the stories of my life down because ultimately I, like all of us, deep inside, am scared to die. To let the sand sink through the timer and to not make the most of my one very precious life, that I am given back every single morning. I am scared to look back at 120, and wonder: what if? I am scared to lay on my death bed and wish that I had not given up on what makes me tick, money and fame be damned. As I write these sentences, I think of the Jewish morning prayer that my daughter is constantly singing around the house, Modeh Ani. We thank God for restoring our souls to us every day after a night’s sleep. My soul is returned to me day after day, gifted back in good health and good spirits, again and again and again. And who am I to tell that soul to quiet down? To not wish or want for what it seemingly can’t have?
Or is it the tiny little voice in my head, my inner child, who recalls a more innocent time when my dreams exceeded a 401K match and being able to afford childcare? The little Jane who once dreamt of being an actress, who dreamt of a show on The Food Network, who dreamt of writing a cookbook, who dreamt of writing a book. Some dreams have faded and morphed into others, but the dream of writing remains alive and well and despite having no evidence that this road will ever lead anywhere, I walk.
As always, I relate this all back to the stage of my life that I am currently in, to my role as a mother and how this role does tend to at least temporarily subsume all of the little fragments of ourselves that are not the loudest and most demanding. Once upon a time I traveled to the desert in Morocco and drank the sweetest of sweet teas alongside the African morning sun. Once upon a time I wanted to learn how to paint and to learn how to speak fluent Italian. I rolled homemade noodles in my apartment and cooked 36-hour ragu just because. And then I had kids and it all got pushed to the side because how could it not? Diapers and daily walks and playground dates and homework. And, and, and. God pours our souls back into our bodies every morning and we in turn take the potent pitcher of life-force and pour near all of it into our children. We give them our all.
But somewhere between our head and our heart, amidst all of the giving, is a tiny little voice who says: “Keep going, keep writing, keep cooking, keep trying.” Keep the dream alive.
So I do.
And I hope you do too.