"What do you write?" It's important for me to not have this answer right now.

I don’t want to turn my nature into a niche.

Dear Reader,

Is that okay?

Since my readers went from my friends and family to hundreds of subscribers, I’ve started feeling the pressure to pick a genre and a niche.

At a writers’ conference in May, I was asked, “What do you write?”

Prose. Mostly essays. Some poetic pieces. Articles here and there. A children’s picture book that stayed in second draft form. Honestly, I don’t know.

I even tried to be slick and outsource this question in a survey: “If someone were to ask you what this newsletter is about, what would you say?”

Essays have always held a special place in my heart. After all, I grew up on Chicken Soup for the Soul. When my heart aches, I want to write poetry. When I have some shit to say, I want to write an article. When I have big shit to say, I want to reach out to the powers that be and ask the NYT to publish my shit.

When I want to give my memories a home, there’s memoir. When I want to play pretend, I have fiction.

And you might say choose one. Choose one for now.

But it’s important to not do that right now.

I’ve never had the chance to explore writing the way you get to in a creative writing program—trying different genres, points of view, having peers and teachers engage with my work. I definitely didn’t have the executive functioning to do so on my own.

This is my creative writing program, y’all.

So for now, I’m going to continue exploring.

I want to play with language. To find the words that taste good in my mouth. To build scenes that help us process and imagine.

I’ve been reading a lot.

I’ve been studying craft, starting with sentences. I’m not interested in studying genres—the fundamentals of memoir or the plot beats of fiction. And I’m no longer in the mood to talk about writer’s block or take writing classes that double as therapy. I was interested once and I’ll probably be interested again. Just not right now.

I took a class with The Center for Fiction on verbs, just verbs. The teacher, Sarah L. Kaufman, reflected that emotion is motion inside of us, so there’s a reason why we react strongly to verbs.

And I never thought I’d say this, but I’m revisiting grammar, the grammar I never quite learned in school, on account of my young ADD brain. I want to play with placing the comma in different places and finally learn when the fuck to use a semicolon.

Now that I’m finally not repulsed by metaphors (a story for another day), I too want to sing through my writing.

I’m continuing to share my work with literary journals to bang against other words, to feel the sting of rejection.

I want sentences to feel like a medium I can paint whatever story with, regardless of genre or topic.

And I really want to write about different topics.

I want to archive my people’s stories. I want my writing to help them see themselves differently, the way my father did when he read a piece I wrote about him for publication and said, “I’ve never seen myself this way.” To write about my grandma, the greatest storyteller alive, the one who I often meet when I close my eyes.

I want to write about creativity and software and music and relationships.

Since I started sharing my writing, I’ve exposed my diary, revealing cringey things about me, written about exes and opened up about my workplace and relationships.

Friends have reacted by saying, I could never share like that.

Though part of my values is writing about our society and humanity, I’m more aware of the consequences of doing so through nonfiction.

I still struggle with having a career working for someone else while also writing about raunchier topics that can be easily used against me in this patriarchal world.

And lately, with this administration, I feel I’m being watched more than ever, so I desire to share less about my life, and for the first time, I’m intrigued by the privacy of fiction, though even that thin veil can’t protect me.

Still, in my writing, in life, I need freedom to explore whatever topics I want with honesty.

I’m also trying to identify when words aren’t enough. When the story demands another medium—an image, a color, a pattern across the screen, or a movement in my body.

It’s an honor to have anyone read any word I write. Every text, email or DM I’ve received fills me with joy and connection. But I never expect anyone to read my words.

And now that I have readers, I don’t want the feeling of an audience to dictate what I write. I also don’t want the pressure to grow forever to convince me I need to package my writing.

I promise that by the time I’m 50, I’ll choose. But I already begrudgingly chose one job. Please don’t make me choose one genre.

If it brings you comfort—the way a software engineer turns to a PM and says, what the hell am I working on this year? This month?—I’m leaving you with a list of things I want to explore, some of which I’ll be sharing on Substack, some elsewhere.

Because who isn’t hot for lists?

• Reckoning with the different pieces of me

• How I insisted on a promotion after seeing Yves Klein blue at the MoMA NYC

• My creative process

• Capitalism, my favorite babysitter: A piece about not wanting to let consumerism go

• An article on studying AfroCuban dance for the last two years

• The real real behind being the eldest daughter

• The lessons in software engineering. Who knew there were so many metaphors in tech?

• Poetry that houses the bitter feeling of not going after what you want but then watching others do it

• Using AI as a rumination buddy who never gets tired of listening to the same story.

• History heartbreak—the five stages

• The guilt and fear that come with aging parents (thank you to whoever suggested this)

• A love letter to all the friends I’ve gained and lost along the way

• How I don’t want to be the third guy who was on the moon but didn’t step on it

When all is said and done, maybe they’ll find a thread through what I write, but maybe they won’t. For now, I have some shit to say and stories to tell.