For most of my career, I’ve been able to exist as a writer without needing to be seen personally. The work spoke for me. The ideas carried me forward. The connection happened somewhere distant and quiet, between the page and the reader. I didn’t have to perform in order for the work to matter. I didn’t have to turn my life into content. I didn’t have to become a personality or an influencer.
Now it feels like something has shifted in the literary world's zeitgeist. It’s not that writers didn’t have influence before. In many ways, writing has always been a form of influence. But it was a different kind. It wasn’t built on visibility in the same way. It didn’t require constant presence. It didn’t ask you to keep showing up as a version of yourself that could hold attention in a crowded, fast-moving space.
Now it feels like writing alone is no longer enough to sustain a career. It feels like I’m being asked to step forward, to be seen, to speak, to show, to engage, to participate in a kind of visibility that doesn’t come naturally to me. Not because I’m incapable of it, but because it goes against something deeper in how I relate to my work.
I’m not a performer. I’m a writer. I don’t want to be front and center. I don’t want to turn myself into something consumable. I don’t want to feel like I have to package my thoughts into something that performs well. I don’t want to measure the value of what I create based on how it moves through an algorithm or how many likes it gets.
I want to write. I want to sit with an idea long enough for it to become something real. I want to follow a thought into depth, not reduce it into something quick and digestible. I want to create work that meets people where they are, not work that competes for their attention.
And yet, there’s a part of me that knows the world is changing. People are watching more than they’re reading. They’re connecting through faces, voices, and presence. There’s an immediacy to it that writing doesn’t always have. And I can feel how that shift creates a kind of invisibility for those of us who don’t participate in it.
It creates a quiet fear. Not of being unseen in a personal sense, but of losing the ability to continue doing the work in the way that feels true. Because it starts to feel like a choice I don’t want to make. Become something I’m not in order to survive as someone I am. Or stay true to the work, and risk it no longer having a place.
Once upon a time, being a writer felt more private, more contained, more rooted in the work itself. There was a space that used to exist for people who didn’t want to be visible in that way. It was a defining factor, a characteristic trait of being a writer. But now things are changing. And I don’t think this is entirely new. There have always been shifts in how people consume ideas. The introduction of television changed things. The internet changed things. Social media changed things again.
But this feels more personal. Because it’s not just about the medium. It’s about the self. It’s about how much of yourself you’re expected to give in order to participate at all.
Sometimes I wonder how writers from other times would have survived this one. How would someone like Emily Dickinson survive these times? Would she have become who she became if she were constantly asked to show up, speak, and be visible? To turn herself into something public in order for her work to be received? Or would something in her have closed down instead?
And then I wonder how many writers like her exist right now. How many people are writing something honest, something meaningful, something deeply human, but quietly? Without the desire to be seen in that way. Without the capacity or the willingness to step into visibility as it’s currently defined.
How much of that work goes quietly unnoticed, not because it lacks value, but because it doesn’t know how, or doesn’t want to ask for attention in the language this world responds to? And what does that mean for what we end up reading, what actually reaches us, and what never reaches us at all?
I don’t have a clean answer for any of this. I don’t know if the path forward is to adapt, to resist, or to find some middle space that hasn’t fully taken shape yet. I just know that I feel the tension of it within me. The desire to continue as I am, and the quiet awareness that the world may not make space for that in the same way it once did.
Maybe this is where something new has to be created. Not by becoming an influencer, but by redefining what it means to be a writer in a time like this. Not by stepping into visibility in the way it’s currently modeled, but by finding a way to remain present without becoming performative.
Once again, I find myself walking down an unsteady path, unsure of how things will progress or what I will encounter along the way. This might be new territory, but it’s the same mechanism through which I have lived most of my life. The story of my life, as the saying goes. I do things differently, not intentionally, but because I can’t quite seem to fit anywhere neatly.
I don’t know what any of this looks like yet. But I know I’m not the only one standing in this space, trying to figure out how to keep doing the writing work in a world that increasingly rewards big personalities.
So for now, it’s going to continue putting pen to paper, typing something up, and clicking publish. I’ll let my words do the influencing.
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