I Think I Figured It Out
Lately I have been trying to understand why social media started feeling like a chore I am always behind on. I think I finally know.
It is not the algorithm, though the algorithm is not helping. It is not even the pressure to show up consistently, though that is exhausting in its own special way. It is the noise. The specific, relentless noise of a thousand people all shouting useful things at the same time until useful stops meaning anything.
Everywhere I look: AI tips. AI hacks. AI-generated captions that are technically correct and somehow completely empty.
I use AI too. I am not above it. It genuinely helps, and anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying or has more hours in their day than I do. But lately I have been noticing something uncomfortable: the more I lean on it, the more I have to double-check that the words coming out still sound like me. That is a strange thing to have to verify about your own sentences.
When you read me, I want you to hear me. Not a cleaner, more optimised version of me. Not me with the pauses edited out and the half-finished thoughts tidied into bullet points. The rhythm of how I actually think. Which is not linear. Which does not always arrive anywhere. And is occasionally derailed by a strong opinion about punctuation.
Speaking of which. Can we talk about the em dash?
I loved it once. Genuinely. I picked up the habit reading Harry Potter as a kid, that particular pause, that breath in the middle of a sentence, and it felt like rhythm. Like a writer leaning slightly forward. I used it constantly. Past tense.
Because now I see it everywhere, and not in a good way. I will be reading a post and three em dashes appear in two sentences and something in me just quietly closes the tab. It has become the typographical equivalent of a production company watermark. The moment I see it, I know a machine was involved, and the warmth drains out of whatever I was reading.
Maybe that is petty. Probably it is. But I think what I am actually reacting to is not the dash itself. It is the feeling of reaching for a human voice and finding a template instead.
So here is what I am trying to do, with no guarantees I will execute it perfectly: less polish. More of the actual thing. More sentences that do not tie themselves up neatly at the end, because real thoughts rarely do. More stories that make you stop and think yes, me too, not because I crafted them to land that way, but because they are actually true.
I do not want to post into the void and hope the algorithm decides you should see it. I want to write something and have you feel like you were actually there for it.
That is the whole goal. I have no idea if I will manage it. But I am going to stop pretending the other way was working.
Less polish. More me.
Jessica Gabrielzyk
✦ ON VOICE · ON WRITING · ON THE DASH THAT GAVE EVERYTHING AWAY ✦
