The path to authenticity is rife with vulnerability.

Prose on how being yourself on the internet is fraught with dangers.

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As of late, I’ve absolutely had no desire in the slightest to swim through the textual channels of marketing this, design that, or other assorted topical obsessions.

Despite this being my main mode of lead creation, despite it being the very service I offer and am offering to many, and despite it being a general fascination of mine.

The fascination in question being how to create better “content”, that of which is such a nebulous, paltry term to even offer the act of which many like myself do, and live in, and crumble within, daily.

As I am extending so many services in this area of “marketing”, my own summations of marketing, design, emotional appeal to products and services, and the like, my voice is being directed and rerouted to fit the brand, tone, and specificity of other entities.

Suffice to say, when you speak enough times on the same topic — one you may even like — it can create a hindrance to your own observations and keyboard prattlings.

You’ve said it before, why say it again?

Furthermore, the token snarl of your’s truly — the completely irreverent disregard for conventions — gets tired like an old sweater I’ve worn too many times.

It was cute, at some point. It’s no longer a look I endear myself to.

And so this time, I’m going to discuss something vulnerable, often times beautiful, and perhaps penultimately tragic. 

In the tone of voice I’d rather employ and really never get to, much like a spindling luke-warm derivative copy of some other, older, wiser, better wielder of the written word.

I don’t pretend to be the best at writing prose, nor can I even claim I’m a writer of enough merit to wield it confidently. 

As my voice is more typically the bemused scratchings of a barely salient marketing-parasite, who inevitably knows much, but shirks all, in favor of awe and camaraderie. 

Because if you play the role of a fool — and actually quite much like it — and it amuses others to no end, and that is how you create wealth, well then…would you stop?

No, I don’t think you would.

Especially if you enjoy the pulp and all that goes with it, and it’s a part of you, so effortlessly entangled. The joy of being yourself on the internet, and the joy of succeeding from it, and caring for others who receive joy from your core personhood.

So let’s talk instead about the avatar of your online self, of maybe a tale of woe, or perhaps just a tale to flex something inside of myself that is pushed down all too much.

The beauty of words, outlining the scene, like a watercolor horizon. Because I miss that feeling, and I realize I’ll never be paid for a sliver of the dulcet things I know I have in my fingers at any given time.

And yet, I have to produce it. Or it’ll be crushed. As dramatic as that sounds, it’s a more fitting term than any the world could offer the act of creating a brand around something you, perhaps, are not entirely. 

But just in part, in a large way maybe…as indicated by anything I write online that isn’t this post. But that’s not the only spectacle to see, and it’s not the only spectacle I am, nor do I wish it to be.

Let’s begin.

Being yourself is rife with pitfalls. 

Even moreso in the age of technology where anything can and will be used against you in a court of public outcries and warbling onlookers. 

Who, voyeuristic in their strange obsessions, will trumpet your successes until you slide into a territory distasteful to whomever and whatever creates the new social currency at the time.

Or whoever decides to make a monster of you, based on nothing but conjecture or assumptions, instead of having adult conversations about difficult topics.

That of which I think we’ve forgotten how to do as a species, with the advent of technology that allows us to keep an arm’s length from every other human ever in the world of anything.

It’s comfortable to make men, women, and others into monsters when you never see their faces.

Vulnerability. I talk about being this way to get people to pay attention. Now I want to talk about how this can go awry.

I had the completely unprecedented misfortune of experiencing this recently.

To the point where I’m sure the color drained from my face, and I’m sure the joy of screaming into the void and speaking what others cannot and enjoy reading feverishly, like an unplanned cult of personality that I’ll never be able to get my hands around, died.

Quiet simply, it’s dead.

That thought of getting up, creating sentences upon sentences, to prove again that I am entertaining, that I am worth employing to entertain, that my thoughts and skills are quantifiable in merely the role of the fool, and that I am enough.

On a platform like LinkedIn, or perhaps Reddit of all things, or perhaps anywhere else I stick my snarky, flippant digits.

I, frankly, lost the spark in my step to speak loudly and proudly in a way I feel comfortable doing most.

Because it took just one act, one small strike upon my person, to feel that whoever I was for the past forever was a shamble. A lie. A deceit.

I know this isn’t true. But now, I’m questioning it all. And questioning the level of trust, of overshare, of love, of commiseration that I’ve employed for my entire persona as “snarky marketing woman”.

Which is me, to be plain. I do love the rants and sarcasm.

I know in my heart of hearts, that bleeds for everyone, hates all injustice, despises all the inefficiencies, wants so purely to be silly, type like a buffoon, act like a fool, and make everyone laugh, that I am not this thing of monsters and ill-intent.

People come to me sometimes and point out that I cannot be this way. That I am just some thing, some convoluted creation, some disembodied entity that rolls in the filth of emotional manipulation, in order to get my fiat currency, pay my bills, and lie with a straight face.

Somehow, they think I even have the capacity to do this, despite now writing something so tragic and vulnerable — albeit prettied with the toned words I’ve wished to use for a literal year — that I somehow am not just a giant nerd.

A stupid giant nerd, at that. Who isn’t always very clear on what it is I’m explaining. Not for lack of trying, truthfully. But perhaps for lack of finesse or fitness of word.

In this, you realize, you can never make mistakes. Ever. 

Let me explain:

I type like a flippant, screeing child, because I am, in many cases, just that.

And by saying I’d rather be this conjured thing, the thing right now you are reading, is because it’s in there. And it misses being let free.

This does not contradict who I am at my basest level. And I in no way, ever, pretend to be something I am not.

What you are seeing in this story is a piece of a whole. As we are varied people. I am surely going to surprise some of you, who have talked to me as friends do in the panes of text. 

Where every word is spelled improperly, and plenty of internet vernacular is swung around like a big blanket of silly.

Because I am silly. Because I am emotional. Because I am vulnerable in that silliness, but also it’s an armor. If you expect less, get more, I can feel useful in that. In being underestimated.

The responsibility of performing competency is lessened, for when it is performed, and put into pejorative terms that make sense to everyone, then the realness of actually understanding what I’m doing is realized.

The comfort of personhood brings that capacity. 

She’s safe. She gets it. She’s normal. She talks like a human.

I read once, on Reddit of all places, that if you can’t explain something simply, then you don’t know enough about the thing you’re explaining.

And I take that measure to my grave. If it’s too complex, it’s just stupidity masquerading as intellect. This is my truest reason for being allergic to the marketing buzzwords that float around like pollen.

Perhaps, maybe, I am an idiot savant.

But perhaps I am just an idiot. Who loves so greatly, and puts so much trust in other people, and puts trust in knowing that they know what they’re doing, or trust that I even know what I’m doing which is apparently rarely the case, or that they understand my simplest, simplistic, silly ramblings, that there’s no possible way I can be misunderstood.

And yet, it has happened. Strongly enough so to pull every wind out of possibly every sail I will ever enact on any boat I am ever trying to traverse any ocean with, ever.

It’s on me, one million percent, a mistake I made, a misunderstanding filled with assumptions, that tore out the entertaining, the silly, the funny, and replaced it with this perhaps droll approximation of how I’m feeling.

And that perhaps this droll approximation is really just a barrier, even one so sweet that I feel cathartic placing on my unblooded face, because to say the real words down to the bare bones is just too painful.

We need to talk to people. Like people. Like humans.

No one on the internet, aside from the coded creations of bored Twitterians, is a fake person. We are all humans of varying interests, skills, and personalities.

The being behind the screen, this me, I have written this. I beg you remember that when you run on a keyboard crusade, wherever that may be. 

A platform like the incredibly anonymous Reddit may be one such exception because it is inherently filled to the brim with the rantings and ravings of identifiable trolls and persons of malintent — self proclaimed malintent, at that — and everyone there is a shark-toothed, snark-teethed, often unintelligible child.

But, and here’s the big but: you can still treat them with some modicum of decency. I myself have raged and wailed, but it never goes so far as to create in a person such distress they’d feel pale as I’ve paled. 

Because I know what it feels like to have it done to you, relentlessly as is the way of the internet and apparently Gamergate was so tragic a thing I tried to wiggle into, and wiggle out of, I'm inclined not to do that.

I have stories about that, but this is a topic for another time, and I’ve already bored everyone with these dry words that are, as I’m seeing I’m writing it, a buffer from boiling a complex situation into something simple.

Because the simple thing, as easy to understand as it is, maybe it still perplexes me. And maybe, as I’ve intimated, I must not know enough about the fallout between me and another person, to really rightfully know how to explain it with competency.

When you know what it feels like, you won’t step back in time, to ever enact it again. No matter how unblooded, or bloodied, toothed or toothless, you may be.

I have done that before, being in a place long ago so ill it was a moment in life I’d rather forget. I speak this lightly, and tenderly, as it is still an open wound of me thinking myself a monster of my own creation. 

I own whatever past things and trespasses I’ve ever created, and yet others you find, will never extend to you the understanding you will try to extend to them. Never.

Ever.

The people who do create catastrophe, and do not understand in their core that they do this, those are the ones that are really tricky.

Because, as I’ve tried to intimate, I love people. Perhaps far too deeply, and with too much vigor of trust, and in too many assumptions of who I think they are or what they understand. 

So I try to understand, as best I can. Even when paled like I am now, even when wrapping word upon word upon myself to soothe a pain I didn’t ever expect coming.

I try to understand the hurt of others. Because I can paint anonymous Redditors as mostly frothing worded demons, but I cannot paint people close to me as that.

Even if “close to me” is some ignorant attempt at knowing someone else, and trying to help them know me. Insofar as the internet makes us into close associates, while also giving us a football field’s worth of space when something goes awry.

As the lonely thing I am, too extroverted for perhaps my lifestyle, too niche in perhaps my interests, I will cling to anyone who can produce a little glimmer of: I get you. You get me. We’re in this together.

Your vulnerable heart, your soft soul, can easily falter so expertly. Please be careful, and more clear, with those you speak with.

People assuming something of you, the worst of you, that you intended pain and intended heartbreak, intended snide or sneaky, intended something in yourself that you can’t see, would never employ even knowing you could — quite easily, honestly — use with abundance, insofar as you have the polymath in you to wield it like a saber, it is common.

It is so, so, so common. To think a big corporation is just filled with automatons, that a medium corporation is filled with business sharks, that a small entity is filled with liars and cheats. That any one person who does any one wrong is somehow out for blood.

Sometimes, as humans, we're just objectively ignorant.

We forget, always, always, that there has to be at least one person — at the very least, it is quite certainly never this low a figure — that has a beating, bleeding heart.

And when you decide in yourself to make a call of judgement, you forget that behind the walls of code that construct the news stories, the opinion-pieces, the chatrooms, the tweets, the back-and-forth conversations, is a real live, human person.

Who deserves a bit of dignity for that of which should be assumed ignorance, and not always malice.

I guess, in the best way I can explain this, as simply as is afforded to me as bloodless as I am currently, as raw and scathed, as completely perplexed as I am, is that we are all human beings.

And that being a vulnerable thought leader — as it is the only true and authentic way you can do this, sadly to say for anyone thinking otherwise — as I am employed to make other people and companies — is rife with problems.

There will always be problems with communication with every human you ever meet. 

At any company you work within, at any company you own. With anyone you may meet and greet in this digital landscape where tone cannot be objectively always read, and misunderstandings are possibly quite a bit deal worse than speaking face to face.

There will always be a time where you think, as well, that someone has vitally wronged you. Wounded you in some way that is completely irredeemable.

A tremor perhaps, or a misstep, or perhaps even a flat out bungling stupidity. Because we are all humans at the end of the day.

I want to perhaps warn you maybe, or perhaps more than that, let you see a side of a human you are maybe endeared to, that you don’t quite know exists beyond the misspelled words and terrible chatspeak.

Beyond all these sorts of lovely bits that actually put food on my table, within sometimes breezy 20 hour workweeks and more often 14 hour workdays, within all this snark, within all this, that I am a person.

And to please, as you are gearing up — brand or company or person — to not wear your heart on your sleeve.

And to please, as you are priming to fight a war with keystrokes — at least know that there is even a war to begin with.

When deep down, humans are fallible, stupid, ignorant.

Even one such as myself, who makes light of the complex in favor of the stupidly simple. Even one such as myself, who seemingly doesn’t know when to sew her own mouth shut, or speak pin-pointedly clearly, as I assume I am understood.

Please, let’s not assume. That there are monsters lurking in the dark where there are simply people blind as bats, stumbling our ways towards some kind of life, contentedness, solvency, friendship, or otherwise.

And please, let’s talk to each other like in the time before text replaced voice, and meme replaced honest familialty. 

Because if the internet is not the place to be yourself and hope you are understood in some small or large way, or are afforded understanding and empathy, then there is no other democratic pulpit, no other meeting place, no other public forum, that we now do this within.

And so it remains insolvent. And it will continue to remain a place where some Tweet someone regurgitated eons ago will be unearthed to stand in for a character-witness in the court of outrage.

When there is so much more to the people behind the screens.

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Special thanks to Renato P. dos Santos for his continued support.

Kira Leigh is a writer, gamer, digital creative, and small business owner.

Send her a line or catch her on LinkedIn if you want to work together.

Or join her on Discord like the giant nerd you are: windows95toasteroven#3745