{*Did you know you can write on Elephant? Here’s how—big changes: How to Write & Make Money or at least Be of Benefit on Elephant. ~ Waylon}

We need more loose women.

A few words about SoMe:

(Maybe that’s also your abbreviation for social media?)

I’ve had enough.

Of the berating dressed-up-as-advice I so often get as a woman entrepreneur who does things in public, online.

Often from mansplaining marketing bros who think we all need to be pigeonholed. For the sake of the algorithmising bots.

If you’re “open to everything,” they dictate, “your screws must be loose.”

I’m a loose woman, then!

I want to keep a lot of things unhinged and open—my bilingualism, for example. (And the mystical concept of openness, whether in Rilke’s poetry or the yoga sutras of Patanjali, is the most desirable state anyway.)

I love my German mother tongue, but after a decade in London, writing my PhD thesis there and still existing on a strict diet of British and American books, songs, series, and movies to this day, there are simply things that make my soul sing solely in English. And with which I can only reach others in this same idiom.

Add to that a way of expressing myself that is certainly not understood by twelve-year-olds (at least most of them)…phew!

And bingo: an attitude that makes marketing experts nervous. And, admittedly, it probably also keeps my so-called “audience” smaller than it could be if I stuck to the guru rules.

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The problem:

Just creating content? Doesn’t make me content.

Because I’ve got a few screws loose. I’m that thing to be feared: an unhinged woman.

Or as Rilke described it so wonderfully: I am permeable.

Call it empathy or trauma response; I feel things as they go into me and through me.

Yes, boundaries are important and I even have a t-shirt that reminds me of this: it says DO NO HARM on the front and BUT TAKE NO SHIT on the back.

I can definitely work on my drawbridge into my innermost sanctum and reveal less of myself from time to time, especially less quickly, in my unshakeable, albeit certainly naive, belief in the good in people.

I still believe, though, that this permeability is a quality, even if it sometimes feels like a Qual–German for agony.

At the end of the day, it’s not the one-way street of an “audience” that interests me. It’s the real exchange, the encounter from person to person. And that requires a certain amount of getting naked. To write as you talk—from the heart and mind.

Even if that might sound snooty or cringeworthy or strange to others because, like me, you’ve spent far too long in the British education system, studying dead 19th century poets and mustachioed German philosophers rhyming with lychee!

I want to dare to be true to myself first and foremost more often.

Because as I see it, only then can we be of true benefit in any form of communication. For only then, a line may emerge—rising from the centre of our thoughts—which, when written down, really reaches another person. A line that resonates, with someone who vibrates in a similar way. (Spotted the reference to another Rilke poem there? I salute you! We’d probably get on swimmingly.)

So, especially as a woman working for herself online, I have to keep my heart open, my eyes childlike, and my pen courageous. For a content mind!

And social media that finally feels So Me.

So what about you? Drop me a line, I’m here for all the real convos (including on trash TV like Love is Blind UK, by the way.)

~