I essentially run three businesses. Fireflower Cottage, my e-commerce store. Studio Cerissa, my witch mentoring and education, and my hairstylist business. Each one has its own social presence, across multiple platforms, all of which apparently need content constantly or the algorithm decides you don't exist anymore. I write two newsletters every week (thanks for reading!). I show up live. I create multiple pieces of content daily. I respond to comments and messages and DMs, and somewhere in the middle of all of it I'm supposed to also be living a life interesting enough to post about.
And even doing all of that, putting in the hours, showing up consistently, it still doesn't feel like enough. There's always another platform, another format, another thing everyone says you need to be doing. The hustle doesn't have an end point. It just has more hustle.
On top of that there's the noise. WitchTok drama. Everyone with an opinion about everyone else's path, everyone's business, everyone's choices. AI generating content faster than any human can keep up with. The constant low hum of everyone watching everyone, judging everyone, performing for everyone.
And I found myself thinking, not for the first time, I miss being bored.
I miss being a kid and having entire afternoons with nothing to do and nobody watching. I miss not knowing what anyone thought about anything unless they told you directly, to your face, because that was the only way information traveled. I miss the version of life where your business was just your business, and nobody expected you to narrate it.
I don't think this is as simple as the internet is bad, and before life was good. The internet has given me incredibly beautiful things. I've connected with people who think like me, who get it, scattered all over the world, people I never would have found otherwise. I have more information at my fingertips than entire libraries used to hold. I can run so much of my businesses from my home and can be there when my family needs me. Those are not small things. I don't want to pretend they aren't important.
But there's a cost running underneath all of it that I think we've collectively stopped noticing because it's just the water we swim in now. The cost of being available. The cost of being seen all the time, by everyone, with no real boundary around it. The cost of every part of your life becoming potential content, which means some part of you is always slightly outside the moment, thinking about how it would look from the outside.
I don't think most of us signed up for that consciously. It just happened gradually, the way most big shifts do, until one day you realize you can't remember the last time you did something just for yourself with absolutely no thought about whether anyone else would see it.
So here's what I'm sitting with this week.
What would I do today if nobody could see it?
Not in a secretive way. Just in the sense of, what would my day actually look like if the performance layer got switched off completely. What would I make, what would I think about, how would I move through my day if the only person I needed to answer to was myself.
I don't have an answer. But asking the question feels like it's already doing something. Like it's carving out a tiny bit of space that belongs only to me, in a world that mostly wants every bit of me accounted for.
Maybe that's enough for now. A few minutes a day that are just yours. Unposted. Unphotographed. Unwatched.
Boring, even. In the best possible way.
With love,
Cerissa