Becoming My Own Niche: Wellness, Culture, and the New Frontier

Me in all of my millennial glory, adorned in a FUBU shirt, rocking crochet twists, giving early 2000s mall realness, completely unaware of how culture and my understanding of wellness would evolve

Honestly, what’s the purpose of content creation right now? It feels like a massive global stadium where everyone is shouting over each other, not watching the game, and bursting our eardrums in the process. It’s a mess, and that mess feels especially loud from my own slice of the millennial experience: born in ’86, growing up alongside the internet and integrating social media into my formative years.

Mavis Beacon taught me how to type. I spent nights at the family desktop dialing up to AOL to burn CDs and code my BlackPlanet page. Now we’re watching artificial intelligence get unleashed in questionable ways, experiencing relationships crumbling like an island in the movie Inside Out because of rampant “parasociality” and AMC Theater level projection, and seeing toxic sales culture reshape value and consumer behavior. All of this, and yet, I am finally pressing record and publish.

Roles, Grief, and Realizing “it was just a role”

Pressing record now feels like walking onto a movie set with no clear contract, no real expectations, and having to figure it out in front of a live audience. Last summer, with the last few dollars in my account, I went to see “Sinners”. Like most people, I was obsessed, then went down a rabbit hole watching every Michael B. Jordan interview YouTube had to offer.

Interviewers kept asking about the therapy he needed after playing Killmonger in the movie Black Panther. He said the biggest takeaway was being able to tell himself, “It was just a role.” As simple as that seems, that line hit me hard. I was in the middle of scraping off the residue of roles I had worked in my career and roles I had been cast into by people I thought I could trust.

I’ve always known the Shakespearean adage “all the world’s a stage,” but thinking about my timeline as a series of roles in different films helped me detach those roles from the movie that matters most: my life. Being a higher education administrator, a DEI practitioner/consultant, or some archetype of nonprofit and social impact drudgery were roles I played. They became unbearable in the face of grief after my mother’s death and the death of an imaginary life I thought I was building with others.

Those roles were never fully my own, yet somehow they became containers I was clutching instead of writing my own script and directing the plot the way I see fit. Content creation, for me, has become the way to reclaim that script.

Content Creation in a QVC world

Even with this rekindled sense of agency, the reality of creating content online right now is wild. It’s a mix of desperation and hollow repetition as a means of not only entertainment and commerce, but survival. Everyone is becoming their own QVC channel; touting UGC, showcasing brand deals and brand trips, vomiting hot takes in response to every minor headline or algorithm ripple.

On one hand, I get it. I have favorite creators I trust if I want a new mascara or inspo for styling my locs. I love every girlypop thing imaginable and have a visceral reaction to cultural phenomena; I want to share my two cents too. On the other hand, I struggle to flatten my experience and perspective into only that.

I don’t want to turn my healing into a product or my trauma into content. I’m here to stretch myself and practice skills for my next role on my own terms: storytelling, speaking, strategy, and creative expression inside a world that actually feels like mine.

Wellness and Culture as the Lane

If I had to summarize my life up until now, it would be around the themes of wellness and culture. It makes sense that these are the lanes I own.

I define wellness as the ideas, processes, and holistic ways a person is able to remain whole and healthy. It’s your capacity to live fully; to love; and to hold a sustainable sense of self in relation to others and the world. It’s living with grief and pain and the dark sides of life while still being able to see and be light.

I define culture beyond strict academic definitions, mainly because those don’t seem to fully include me. Yes, culture is patterns of language, food, music, clothing, and ways of being, knowing, and doing for a particular group. But one person in the modern world belongs to many groups, with a “culture” attached to each of them. Culture is not one amorphous thing we evoke to sell products or use to talk down on someone’s lived reality. It’s a complex, evolving, multidimensional reality that shapes our worlds.

That’s why you’ll see these two spaces everywhere here. Wellness, because people have a right to be whole. Culture, because we need language for what we’re actually living.

Healing, Faith, and Choosing “POV” over Performance

It’s taken a long time to land on “wellness and culture” as my lane because I didn’t want to talk about it while I was being about it. I didn’t want to publicly document my healing or my transformation. When I tried, of course it was inconsistent. I lacked clarity and conviction. My creativity wasn’t flowing; I was distracted by the rigamarole I described earlier.

Now, though, I can show up on the internet from a place of faith and not fear. Part of that faith is trusting that my story is worth telling and that my point of view is worth standing in.

I refuse to allow the more visible aspects of my social identity—Black woman, approaching 40—to be flattened into a stereotype. Instead, I insist on expressing the fullness, depth, and breadth of my actual lens. That lens has been shaped by grief, study, hard work, spiritual practice, and pattern recognition in rooms where “culture” and “wellness” were treated like side notes instead of structural concerns.

Parasocial Relationships, Privacy, and Why I Still Show Up

Of course, I still have reservations. I had to recognize that many of the relationships I was holding as real were actually parasocial. People were comfortable observing what I posted, even if it was rarely, and often cautiously, and letting that be a proxy for actually being connected to me or invested in my lived experience and wellness.

A major turning point was someone using a version of my sister’s Instagram handle to DM me: “F*ck your dead mother.” That moment solidified for me that some people are living in an alternate reality. If you’re not careful, they will try to pull you into it, where a forced panopticon becomes their livelihood.

I do not consent to that reality. I refuse to have parasocial relationships offline. Even online, I intend to stick to spaces that feel more honest, even if imperfect as the landscape continues to evolve.

Showing up here is not about pretending the internet is safe or wholesome. It’s about deciding how much of myself I offer, on my terms, in service of something I believe in.

What you can expect from me here

On this blog, you’ll find essays on wellness and culture as my lens on society, social justice, faith, work, identity, and more. You’ll find stories about becoming your own niche when the market wants to pigeonhole you, along with reflections on building a portfolio career in a shifting economy.

This is also a place for so-called villains of the old story to unmask, to see the method in their “madness” as magic from the margins. A place where your sensitivity, discernment, and refusal to separate inner work from outer work are treated as data, not defects.

It’s taken me almost 40 years to get here. Pressing record is how I honor that journey. If you’re untangling yourself from roles, healing quietly, and still feeling called to build something, you’re not alone.

This blog and my work are for you.