It caught me off guard because it was a simple question.
A bartender, wiping down the bar, not pitching me anything, not framing it as content or branding or audience. Just a straight question, the kind that doesn’t give you time to hide behind a rehearsed answer.
“What do you write about?” she said.. and for a second I didn’t know what to say.
Not because I don’t know what to say, but because I don’t write that kind of thing that I’m supposed to say that I’m writing. It’s not self-help. It’s not motivation. It’s not a system, or a program, or a ten-step promise. I stood there realizing how often we learn to describe ourselves in ways that are palatable instead of true. “Dim your shine” so they don’t think you’re crazy, and all that. Package what you are creating into some boring category so the normies won’t get offended.
I’m writing about the meaning of words. Definitions, essays, poems… because word meanings can be lost when lost people keep pretending. It’s a dirty dictionary for the downtrodden. It’s a reality check for words that need essays to really feel them, not just get to the sound bites.
The truth is messier. I’m sort of anti-self help. I don’t write about fixing people. I don’t write about becoming better versions of yourself by Tuesday. There are plenty of paths for that. I write about words. About what they’ve been bent into. About how meaning gets sanded down into slogans and sold back to us shiny and hollow. I write about what happens when words like faith, resilience, purpose, discipline, freedom, even hope, HOPE, stop meaning anything because they’ve been used too much and listened to too little. I’m interested in what’s underneath the language, in what’s still breathing after the sound bites burn off.
So, standing there at the bar, I realized most people expect a genre label because that’s how we file things away, right, like oh it’s a murder mystery or a fiction novella. Motivation books go over here. Therapy-adjacent over books go over there. Productivity books are on the endcap next to the business nerds. What I write doesn’t sit cleanly on those shelves. It fits better in your pocket or in your bedside drawer or in a glove compartment.
Words… Because it’s important for noticing nuances again.. what a word means, and how it feels, relating to this or that circumstance and emotion. To stand still long enough to hear your own thoughts again. To saying the quiet part out loud without turning it into advice. I’m not trying to move anyone forward. I’m trying to slow things down enough so people can see what’s been dragging them in the first place.
So if I had another shot at that moment, I’d say this: I write about meaning before it gets hacked and packaged. It’s clarity without polish. About the space between words where real things still live.
I write for people who feel the language slipping, who know something true keeps trying to surface, and who are tired of being told what it’s supposed to look like. And I do that because that’s what I’m trying to do and that’s what I see happening.
And maybe that’s why the question landed so hard.
