Being a person is messy. There are all these scattered fragments of personality, thought, insight, bias, interests, pursuits, and feelings, balled up together and spat out onto the infinitely messier world we live in.

As I write this, one of the buzziest words in the media space is “influencer.” It’s an ever-more-derogatory term for people who are known for being known. An influencer doesn’t have special talents (beyond self-promotion), insights (beyond how to self-promote), or entertainment value (beyond a knack for… well, you get the picture). An influencer is seen as a void of intrinsic value, a center of gravity without any accompanying mass.

When contemplating how to document my presence online, I realized that, as un-vapid as I like to imagine myself, deep down an influencer is what I always wanted to be. I may have fantasized about being a pop star or (slightly more realistically) a famous author, but those were but vehicles. What I really lived for, where my fantasies really became vivid, was when I imagined myself on talk shows or giving blockbuster interviews, pontificating on personal and social issues of great importance, millions of fans hanging on my words and millions others gleaning unexpected value from my sage words and my unique perspective, or a hearty guffaw from a deft turn of phrase.

Years have passed and fame has eluded me. This comes as a shock to no one. But the annoying American individualist in me insists that there is something of value that comes from me, just me, just little ol’ me. Behind the hucksterism and overexposure of social media, I truly believe that this is the earnest refrain that serves as the matting, if not the frame, of the much-derided social influencer. The individual has value, and wants to be heard.

I say all this to both include and exclude myself. What I do may look very much like social influencer behavior, because being an influencer is nothing more at its core than a person trying to be heard and understood above the din of a busy world. At the same time, I aim to be more grounded and deliberate about sharing who I am, and not chase clout, clicks, or cluelessness. I want only to lay out the important parts of me, document the stuff I create now and the stuff I have created in the past, and then walk away, knowing I made an effort to share it.

This site started some years ago as a simple blog, but starting with this post, I want it to evolve into a me page–not just essays and journal entries, but real nuggets of who I am and what’s important to me. I also want it to be interactive, shaping who I am in addition to documenting who I am.