Becoming Me

RIP Pluripotent. Thoughts on my identity, Dior, & wasted time.

This is the most honest piece of feedback I’ve ever received:

“Your blog doesn’t sound like who you really are, in a bad way. You’re so much more interesting in real life. Usually, people use a pseudonym to become their alter ego online — first of all, you don’t use a pseudonym, and second, I don’t understand why you choose to be more boring online.”

And it hurt at first. It hurt because there’s some truth to it.

I’m not the stuffy conservative academic people think I am, which is what my writing often comes off as. I’m very guarded here. I write from observation but tend to philosophize my observations without telling you what actually happened because it’s terrifying being personal online.

When asked to describe myself, it’s hard for me to capture who that really is. I play Polish waltzes on the piano at the bookstore. I swing katanas in a polo dress. I was in the top 0.1% of Future listeners on Spotify last year. I make the perfect sunny-side-up eggs every time. I’m a professional amateur at many things. And when people ask how I got to where I am, I say, “I don’t know.”

I think I’m all over the place, which was why I named my blog “Pluripotent”, which means to have the potential to become anything. This blog was meant to be my corner of the Internet, where I could be a self-made expert on any topic I wanted to talk about.

But I can’t stay pluripotent forever. I can’t be a bundle of potential forever. It’s time to become something. It’s time to become me.

You can silly goose your way through many things

Everything comes back to you. You can travel, move to a foreign city, remake your entire wardrobe, learn another language, get another fifty units of Botox, find a new job, schedule thirty coffee chats, see a psychoanalyst, and so on, and still, everywhere you go, there you are. If there is one lesson I learned in the past two-ish years, it’s that you cannot run away from yourself. You cannot hide from yourself. You cannot fake the core — who you are on the inside…well, you know who you are.

Over the past month, I’ve been interviewing friends to describe my brand. My work has been described as the “Aston Martin of blogs,” a “luxury good for the heart and soul,” “classy, elegant, borderline opulent,” and having “a fascination with the old world.” I make my writing a much-needed dose of beauty and quality I think the modern world lacks. These are things that I truly stand for and will continue to do forever. But, most importantly, I realized that my readers read my blog FOR ME. They want to follow me, know more about me and my life, and see the world through my gaze.

This has always been the Sherry show. I’ve only just started leaning into that. So, it’s time to figure out who I am. Come along on the journey. 🚀 🛼 🚂 🛸