People Are Actually Reading This

There are people reading this.

I realize that is technically the entire point of publishing things on the internet, but somehow I remain surprised. I think part of me still imagines Wild Poise as this strange little corner I built for myself where I can wander around talking about life, beauty, trauma, culture, Roger, identity, grocery stores, existential crises, and whatever else my brain decides is urgent before breakfast.

Then I look at the traffic. Oh. Hello, everyone.

This is slightly embarrassing. Please ignore the emotional debris.

The thing about writing publicly is that there is a comfortable distance between knowing people can read something and realizing people actually are. Thousands of strangers have now wandered through pieces of my life. That is objectively weird. Beautiful. But weird.

Writing feels private when you are doing it. Even when you know it will eventually be published, there is still this little bubble around the process. It is just you and the screen and the sentence that refuses to behave.

Then you click publish.

Suddenly the thought that existed inside your head twenty minutes ago is hanging around on the internet wearing shoes. Good luck out there, little buddy.

I wonder sometimes what people take from all of this. Not in a panicked please like me way. Although I am a human being, so obviously there is at least seventeen percent of that. Mostly I am curious. Do people recognize themselves in it? Do they laugh? Do they disagree? Do they read a sentence and stop for a second because it reminds them of something they have never said out loud? Do they skim directly past the line I spent forty five minutes rewriting and become obsessed with the sentence I almost deleted?

Probably.

But they are also the reason writing becomes something different once it leaves you. I can know what I meant. I cannot control what it means to somebody else. That used to make me nervous. Now I think I love it. Because maybe that is the whole thing. I put something true on the page from where I am standing. Someone else reads it from wherever they are standing. For a second, the distance between those places gets smaller.

That is pretty fucking cool when you really think about it.

Especially now.

We live in a time when everybody seems to be yelling constantly. Every opinion is apparently an emergency. Every disagreement must become a war. Every person is expected to pick a side, build a bunker, and prepare seventeen slides explaining why everyone else is morally defective. It gets exhausting.

Writing feels different.

At least the kind I want to do does. I do not want to tell people what to think. I want to hand them something worth thinking about. That distinction matters to me. I want Wild Poise to be a place where curiosity is allowed to survive contact with certainty. Where something can be funny and serious. Beautiful and messy. Personal and universal.

Where we can say, I do not know, but this is interesting. The internet needs considerably more “this is interesting” and considerably less “everyone gather around while I announce the final correct opinion.” Maybe that is part of what I am building without having fully realized it.

A place for interesting. That sounds simple. It is not. Interesting requires leaving room for contradiction. For discomfort. For questions without immediate answers. For people who are not exactly like you. For stories that do not wrap themselves neatly. For changing your mind. For saying something and then six months later thinking, wow, that bitch was confident.

Growth.

I have been thinking more seriously about what Wild Poise could become, and the audience changes that conversation. Not because I want to chase numbers. Numbers are useful, but numbers are not people. A thousand pageviews cannot tell me who cried. A traffic graph cannot tell me who laughed. Analytics cannot tell me who texted a link to their friend at midnight and said, “Read this.”

Those are the things I care about.

Connection. Recognition. That weird little moment where somebody you will probably never meet feels slightly less alone because you happened to put the right collection of words in the right order.

Maybe that sounds sentimental. Fine. I contain sentiment. I also contain profanity and very strong opinions about typography, so it balances out. What I know is that I am no longer writing into an empty room. People are here. And I want to take that seriously without becoming serious about myself.

There is a difference.

Taking the work seriously means making it better. Being intentional. Building the site properly. Thinking about what belongs here. Thinking about who else might belong here. Imagining collaborations. Writers. Partnerships. More voices. More ideas.

Taking myself too seriously would ruin everything. So absolutely not. I still intend to write about waffles when necessary. It is becoming clearer to me that Wild Poise might be capable of becoming something much larger than the place where I originally came to put myself back together.

That does not erase why it started. It expands what it can become. And I think I am finally ready to let it. Which is terrifying. Exciting. Slightly ridiculous. Basically all my favorite things.

Chaos in one hand. Grace in the other.

And apparently an audience in the room.