I Stopped Trying to Sound Like Everyone and Started Sounding Like Me — Here's What Broke Open

There was a version of me who wrote in a very particular way. Carefully. Broadly. With an eye toward making sure nothing I said was too specific, too niche, too me in a way that might exclude someone.

I thought I was being strategic. I thought I was widening my reach, making my work more accessible, thinking about the audience first.

What I was actually doing was sanding down everything that made the work worth reading.

The Relatability Trap

At some point, probably around the time I started paying attention to what "performed well," I absorbed this idea that good creative work is universally relatable. That the goal is to say something in a way that makes the most possible people think yes, that's exactly it.

And on the surface, that sounds right. Connection is the whole point, isn't it?

But here's what I didn't understand for a long time: broad relatability and genuine resonance are not the same thing. In fact, they're often opposites.

The pieces that have hit hardest — for me and for the people reading them — are almost never the ones I wrote to be universally understood. They're the ones where I got so specific that I was a little nervous to publish them. The ones where I thought, this is too particular, too weird, too inside-baseball for anyone else to care about.

Those are the ones people screenshot. Those are the ones that get forwarded to a friend with a note that says "this is literally us."

Specificity is what creates the feeling of being seen. Generality just creates the feeling of being addressed.

What I Was Actually Apologizing For

When I look back at the work I produced during my smooth-it-out phase, I can see exactly what I was doing. I was pre-apologizing.

I'd have a strong, specific take and then I'd immediately soften it. Add a qualifier. Zoom out to something safer. I'd write about a niche interest and then immediately translate it into broader language so no one would feel left out. I'd make a reference and then explain it to death so it landed for everyone.

What I was really doing was assuming that my actual perspective — the specific, particular, somewhat idiosyncratic way I see things — wasn't enough on its own. That it needed to be diluted before it was fit for public consumption.

That's a rough thing to sit with. Because it means I spent a significant chunk of my creative output essentially apologizing for existing as a specific person with specific thoughts, and replacing that person with a blander, more palatable version who might appeal to more people but would mean less to any of them.

The Moment Something Cracked Open

I remember the specific piece where it shifted. I wrote something that referenced a very particular kind of experience — the kind that maybe fifteen percent of people who came across it would immediately recognize. I almost cut the specifics out. I almost translated it into something more general.

I didn't. I left it exactly as it was and posted it feeling mildly exposed.

The response was unlike anything the smoothed-out work had ever gotten. Not in volume — in quality. People weren't just saying "relatable" in the comments. They were writing paragraphs. They were telling me things about their own lives. They were saying I thought I was the only one who experienced it exactly like this.

That's the thing about specificity. When you get it right, you don't just reach fewer people more deeply — you actually reach more people than you expected, because the readers who recognize themselves in the specific detail are so relieved to find it that they become genuinely invested in everything you make.

What 'Ideal Audience' Actually Means

I had to completely reframe what I thought a successful audience looked like.

I'd been operating on the assumption that bigger is better, that reach is the metric, that the goal is to find the common denominator across as many people as possible and make work that hits that note.

But the audience that actually matters to me — the people I'm making things for — isn't a massive, diverse crowd united by a single lowest-common-denominator interest. It's a smaller, more specific group of people who are drawn to the particular combination of things that makes my perspective mine.

They're interested in what I'm interested in. They find the same things funny that I find funny. They recognize the references I make without needing them explained. They're not a demographic — they're more like a sensibility.

And you cannot find those people by making yourself as generic as possible. You find them by being so specifically yourself that they recognize you immediately.

The Permission You Have to Give Yourself

Here's the uncomfortable part: nobody is going to give you permission to be specific. The metrics won't, because broad content often gets more initial clicks. The comments won't, because the people who don't connect with specific work just scroll past instead of telling you why.

The permission has to come from you deciding that the right readers matter more than the most readers.

For me, that meant accepting that some people would bounce off my work. That not every piece I made would be for everyone. That the niche interests and particular references and specific way I process the world are features, not bugs — and that trying to file them down was costing me the thing that made my work worth making in the first place.

I'm still working on this. There are still moments when I catch myself softening something that should stay sharp. But I know what it costs now, and that knowledge changes the math.

Your voice doesn't need to be universally palatable to be worth using. It just needs to be genuinely, unapologetically yours.