create something for someone you actually like

I had my phone turned off for tech shabbat that morning, so I didn’t hear the news right away. I went to yoga and then to the place that has the best bagels because they’re real bagels, delivered from New York. It was pouring rain. My husband told me what had happened and we turned on the TV.

I remember everything I did that day. I remember going to an outdoor rummage sale that was a charity event for a social welfare agency, and buying second-hand clothes.

I’ve written before about how hard it is to form memories about events that happen online because there are no sensory details—the internet doesn’t have a signature scent or a weather system. But I remember things that happen online based on a kind of personal emotional weathervane. I remember precisely how it felt to be online at this time. I noticed who was speaking up and who was silent, waiting to see what their friends would say, to gauge which opinion was the correct one to have if they wanted to continue getting invited to parties.

This is catnip for satirists.

If you know me, you know that this is how I cope with a bad mood: by exposing the absurd. So that the absurd does not become normal.

After I heard this week that Osama Bin Laden’s “Letter to America” was going viral and blowing the minds of young adults on TikTok who said they could see where he was coming from, I made this satire of aesthetic BookTok content.

I told two friends in a Twitter DM, “If this makes you two laugh, it will have been worth it.”

What if you thought about creating content in this way?

Instead of trying to please everyone, just create something for one person. Someone you admire. Someone whose laughter you treasure. Someone you respect.

This is not only about “content creation” on social media—the same idea applies to any form of creative writing. Write a novel for your mom. Write an essay for that one person who actually got what you were trying to do in workshop.

This is how I developed my voice as a poet: through an email correspondence with an older mentor. I sent him every single poem I wrote, and he sent me his. There was nothing more gratifying than his attention and feedback. The poems I emailed him became the chapbook that was a finalist for the DIAGRAM prize when I was 23 (they appear in my first collection Dispatch from the Future).

Create something for one person. Someone you actually like and respect.

A few days after I went to the rummage sale, I sent my friend Gila a DM on Instagram to say I was working on a piece of bespoke content just for her. Something that I hoped would give her at least a sixty second holiday from bad news.

If Gila was the only person who watched my reel, it would have been totally worth it. But the comments section is filled with conversation about house coats (!).

What you create to share with one specific person can be the piece of content—or even art!—that resonates with many more.