I swear it’s only a coincidence that I’m posting this around the new year. Reinvention and restarts can happen any old time!
I was a blogger for YEARS–Livejournal has sent me 20th anniversary emails; I have a career in publishing owing in large part to being involved in book blogging; I’ve always loved sharing my inner-most secrets with strangers while being a total introvert and not sharing anything with people IRL…yet now I want to start blogging again and I literally don’t know HOW. Everybody is on Tiktok and the gram, and here I am just mad at Elon Musk for destroying the one platform that was good for word people, and at the same time here I am on another platform designed for word people and I don’t know how to make the words come.
I think the problem is that influencer culture has turned writing as an art and an outlet into a thing called “content,” which I am very much not a fan of, because I am a writer, not a content producer. I don’t like the tone and voice of “content,” which feels extremely inorganic and fake as fuck. I also hate a lot of people in the fitness and wellness verticals because they are either also extremely fake sounding or very Christian, even if they don’t think they are because Christian hegemony makes people think that that particular Pentecostal-ish, inspirational bent is just a neutral and secular way of being when it is decidedly not secular at all, and I am decidedly Jewish and just can’t roll with that sort of prosperity gospel, self-flagellation-to-achieve-best-selfness garbage. I hate that I can’t get the fitness instruction jobs or the brand partner gigs I could kick ass at simply because I will not employ a fakeass, inspirational tone and talk about “my journey” and shit. That is not my way. I go for the intellectual bent, for the metrics, and for the humanities.
I can still love fitness without engaging in that type of hegemony, but the question is whether I can successfully write about it and whether I can successfully…influence about it, which I shouldn’t care about but I do, because who wants to write without an audience and who doesn’t want to be famous?
Here’s what I’d like to talk about on this blog this year: my ongoing recovery from my car accident, which seems to have triggered hyperadrenergic POTS; my eating disorder recovery, which I just started last month after choosing to ignore the fact that I had an eating disorder for years; my new interest in rock climbing; my new interest in lifting; attempts at cardio in the face of hyperPOTS and disordered eating (not to mention having a full-time job and needing to finish my dissertation); my curiosity about bodybuilding culture while also being grossed out by it; trying out tons of new fitness apps and streamers because that’s what I do; the podcasts in the wellness space that I like to listen to; trying to find a Jewish connection to all of this; trying to find a woman of color connection to all of this…
Stay tuned.
bookish girl fit 