I’ve been freelancing full-time since 2016. Come July of next year, I’ll be celebrating a full decade of selling myself aggressively as a Person You Should Hire to Do Your Copywriting. (Reasonable rates, inquire within.) During that time, I’ve been told personal branding is crucial, personal branding is crucial but we’re all doing it wrong, personal branding is dead, personal branding is back, personal branding is back and never left, personal branding is back but we’re all doing it wrong, and personal branding is different in [whatever year this is] and I will teach you how to do it in my $599 course.
Two things have remained consistent over all that time:
1. Whatever it is, you’re doing it wrong.
2. It’s crucial to be yourself, except obviously better than you really are, because it’s important to look good and clearly you are a garbage person.
Sometimes, it’s a whole Thing — a whole aesthetic, a logo, an Instagram filter of choice, a uniform you’ll wear when you’re inevitably invited to deliver a TED talk because your personal brand has become just that powerful. Sometimes, it’s specifically a Not-Thing — an authentic expression of yourself, your passions, your story, your unique and valuable voice, your you, just all neatly polished and packaged so people can find you because the actual authentic, unpolished, unpackaged you is a garbage person.
I’ve never been good at any of it. I’ve worked on campaigns for multimillion-dollar brands, but where my own person and personal business — as in, marketing myself as a professional — are concerned, the cobbler’s kids have no shoes. They barely have feet. Because advertising works best when it’s authentic, and I can’t think of anything more inauthentic than sitting down and trying to distill me into a headline and a tagline and an elevator pitch. I struggle to brand myself because I’m, like, not a brand. I’m a person.
Brands aren’t people — we see this every day in how annoying and desperate it seems when brands swing and miss at a social media trend, when they start getting into conversations with each other long after the actual humans have abandoned said trend, when you can hear the social media person rolling their eyes at themselves as they publish yet another tortured meme because they’re not a regular brand, they’re a cool brand.
And the corollary to that is that people aren’t brands. The whole point of a brand is it’s a unified voice and face an entire company can get behind and communicate for in a cohesive, effective way. A person is a unified voice, and they don’t need a brand book because the person doing the communicating is, by definition, cohered. We don’t establish brand standards to know ourselves, we go to therapy. And any attempt to establish personal brand standards only erodes authenticity.
This push for personal branding is how we ended up with influencers still spending two hours crafting the perfect “woke up like this” shot, just like they’ve been doing for years but now perfectly imperfect because Relatable, and their personal image leaves room for messy hair but not for mascara smudges under the eyes when they were too lazy to take off their makeup the night before.
It’s how we ended up with that obnoxious LinkedIn post style that, I’m sorry, was annoying long before ChatGPT got in on it but everyone uses it because it’s LinkedIn and on LinkedIn, every personal insight has to be presented one sentence per line.
Or less.
With bullet points and emojis.
And a “follow me for” CTA at the end.
Like human beings do in a very human way, when having human thoughts that we just happen to share on social media.
And, yeah, it’s how we ended up using ChatGPT to craft our personal insights, because writing it yourself — writing it in your unique voice, even writing it badly — is for people, and we aren’t those anymore.
It’s the grownup version of trying to fit in as a high schooler, self-consciously tweaking your hair and clothes and interests and musical tastes, trying on identities like Halloween costumes to see which one works. Except when you’re an adult and a brand, we call it “pivoting.”
But people don’t pivot. Brands pivot — they expand or shift into a new segment of their industry, they introduce a new flagship product, they start focusing on a different target market, and they need a new brand to represent the new them. People don’t pivot — they grow, just a little bit every day, changing ship-of-Theseus style with every thought and experience and interaction they have. It’s a constant and continuous process.
And in that way, an established personal brand becomes just the imperceptibly tiniest bit less authentic the day after it’s launched, and even less so every day after that. Your carefully established narrative and carefully rehearsed elevator pitch represent a person you haven’t been for, like, a month and a half now. And the longer you cling to this polished, packaged brand that all the Theys have insisted you need to have in one form or another, the more effort it’s going to take, because the only you that’s going to come easily is the you you are right now.
So here’s my personal brand: I’m someone who utterly lacks chill. (Highly recommend. Life is too short to pretend to not be excited about things you’re exciting about.) I’m someone who clings to new and/or outdated slang when I find it’s fun to say. I’m someone who’s way better at writing than I am at talking, and yet somehow also absolute fire during client pitches. I’m someone who’s apparently not great at being a team player, because apparently your team isn’t actually your team, but no one’s ever explained to me who else my team is supposed to be? I’m someone who’s fiercely protective of baby creatives and absolutely worthless at trying to protect myself. I’m someone who’d probably keep freelancing even if I won the lottery, because I don’t know what else I’d do with my time. (But I’d love to test that theory.)
And not only could all that change at any moment, it has changed in the moments, minutes, months, whatever since I published this post. I’m not the person who wrote the first post on this blog in (good God) September of 2019, and she’s not the person who first stepped out into the unknown in July of 2016. And there hasn’t been a pivot to be found that entire time. Just me growing to be the authentic me I am today and will be for the next, I don’t know, ten minutes and thirty seconds or so, at least.
That’s it. That’s the post.