Who Are You, Actually?

Here’s the genuinely strange part of writing in public for years: I know almost nothing about who reads any of it. I’ve put down thoughts about desire, failure, music I’ve loved at the wrong time, people I wanted and didn’t get—pages and pages of it, the kind of confessional inventory that would get me sectioned if I delivered it in person—and on the other end, mostly silence. Consumption without introduction.

A few readers I’ve actually met. Some at parties, a few through the old reciprocal blog-reading economy that used to hold the internet together, one or two through routes I won’t catalogue here. But most of you exist as a kind of informed shadow: you know roughly what kind of disaster I am at relationships and what I think about the last three records that mattered to me, and I don’t know what city you’re in.

The asymmetry doesn’t bother me in principle—it’s basically the arrangement you accept when you decide to write for an audience rather than a locked diary—but it does produce a strange calibration problem. Writing for unknown readers means writing with a kind of double exposure: specific enough to feel true, open enough to land somewhere beyond your own skull. Whether that’s working, I can’t tell. I’m sending these things out more or less blind.

So: who are you? What do you actually want from a place like this? What keeps you coming back, or what would make you? I’m not asking for structured feedback or optimization suggestions. I just want to know who’s in the room.