October 26, 2025

Learning to be cringe (in public)

I don't think I have any natural affinity for public speaking or performance. When I was a kid, I attended school-sponsored speech therapy as a result of being labelled a so-called "mumbler". I was diagnosed with ADHD (and more recently, autism) early on and unsurprisingly, for years continually struggled with bullying.

None of this made it easy to feel confident about the way I communicate.

Now as an adult, I still struggle with low self-esteem and social anxiety. And if I let all that anxiety and doubt and internalized ablism color my perspective of reality, it feels really easy to tell myself that perhaps any professional role or hobby that depends on storytelling is not for me.

But today I want to call bullshit on that.

Because I know I love telling stories, and I always have. When I was a kid, my parents were historical re-enactors and instead of placing me in child care or in summer school they simply dressed me up and took me along with them to work. I volunteered there for nearly two decades and over that time telling stories to strangers slowly became much more natural to me than any other form of communication. It certainly felt much more second nature than trying to navigate small talk.

And I know that it's simply not true that there is nobody neurodivergent or, more broadly — struggling with social anxiety — making a name for themselves telling stories online.

My friend Chris Ferdinandi prolifically writes about topics such as gardening and mental health alongside helpful how-to content focused on frontend web development. He's an ongoing inspiration that you don't have to separate who you are — and the non-tech-related topics you care about — from any sort of tech-driven content that you also want to professionally write about.

And beyond my own social circle, there's plenty of other people who aren't exactly the bog standard stereotype of a design advocate, an educator, or an influencer.

One of my favorite people making things online is Amelia Dimoldenberg. If you haven't already heard of Dimoldenberg's work, she's spent a decade interviewing celebrities for a Youtube series called Chicken Shop Date. The show features — as you may have guessed — a series of fake first dates with exceptionally famous people. But it doesn't carry the vapid, manicured production of an Architectural Digest home tour.

Because while Dimoldenberg may have begun to gain notoriety on the basis of her celebrity gets, the viral appeal of the show feels much more nurtured by how incredibly fun is to watch Dimoldenberg simply make shit weird.

Another person making shit weird (in the most impossibly, delightful way imaginable) is Blind Boy Boatclub. It's a little hard to describe Blindboy succinctly.

It would be entirely correct to call him a podcaster and a musician — he rose to fame as one half of the comedic rap duo the Rubber Bandits. But he's also a storyteller, a mental health advocate, an artist, and a bestselling author. And quite famous for wearing a plastic bag on his face. And while the plastic bag originated as a facet of the satire of the Rubber Bandits, Blindboy is outspoken that he continues to wear it because it empowers him to speak frankly on topics (such as autistic burnout) that he wouldn't feel confident to otherwise.

Each of these people demonstrate that developing a point of view about culture isn't an all-or-nothing game that requires you to be either wildly perfect or perfectly ordinary; Dimoldenberg feels captivating precisely because of how incredibly weird she lets herself be.

This should be evidence enough for my anxious brain to just get on with it. That plenty of people are commenting on culture in weird fantastical ways and that I can too. But somehow it isn't.

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I've regularly joked that a blog I write called Ephemeral Atlas is read by "5 indifferent ghosts". I think I do this because it feels a lot funnier to joke that only non-corporeal beings read my blog rather than admit I don't know how to get other real-life humans to read it.

I also don't even know how to get myself to regularly write for it. There's probably less than 5 stories total that I've ever finished and published to the blog — not least of which because I often use perfection as a not-so-subtle way to avoid rejection.

My writing process usually relies on treating every single word like an imperfect ruby that needs to be run polished a million times before I can even consider publishing it. Which makes it feel impossible to casually write anything and publish it on a whim.

I have no idea how anyone casually writes and publishes a daily blog. I have no idea how to do anything at all imperfectly or at all casually, without fear of being cringe.

But at 37, as a nonbinary disabled queer weird human with sensitive emotions, I also want to see more representation of people like me online. I want to see more representation of people like myself in tech. I want to see more representation of disabled people making dumb jokes and laughing at their own ridiculous puns.

So I think I am going to work on learning to be okay with being cringe in public.