the quiet milestone | musing no. 25

25 musings later, the lesson is simple: truth can’t survive if it becomes a product.

when i posted the first musing in early june, it felt like tossing a bottle into the ocean. no one knew it was there. no one was waiting for it. i told myself that was a luxury — no eyes, no pressure, just the freedom to tell the truth.

now we’re here: twenty-four straight musings later. the streak isn’t the point. the point is that i followed through. that i kept showing up. that i didn’t stop when the initial excitement wore off, or when a post fell flat, or when the noise of social media threatened to drown out the signal.

the first thing i learned: brutal honesty can’t survive if it becomes dependent on the wrong kind of money. if *cuffed* is ever going to be full-time, the model can’t be dictated by advertisers, or even overly reliant on subscriber dollars. the minute you tie survival to clicks, you start letting analytics drive the work. and once you do that, the truth becomes a product.

i don’t want *cuffed* to compete in the same arena as every other brand screaming for attention. i want people to come here because something we wrote spoke to them — not because we tricked them into pausing their scroll. that’s why the focus stays on independence: support through the *cuffed* toolkit, not through selling space in the margins.

the second thing i learned came from staring at the numbers. from june 1 to mid-august, people didn’t just stumble in, skim, and leave. they stayed. they read almost three musings per visit. that’s not casual interest — that’s trust. and yet, those same people rarely “like,” repost, or comment.

it’s not because they don’t feel it. it’s because they do. deeply. this is personal ground for them. publicly engaging with it would expose something they’d rather keep quiet. in a way, that’s the biggest compliment we could get. the work hits hard enough that they guard it.

the third thing i learned is less flattering: i don’t understand most of the platforms we use. tiktok, instagram — their algorithms, their tricks, their endless fight for that sliver of your daily attention. it’s terrifying how precise they are. how they can manipulate in seconds. and it’s worse watching what it’s done to attention spans — especially in our kids. seven seconds here. ten there. always onto the next thing.

that’s why *cuffed* will never play that game the way others do. i don’t want to make content for a window measured in heartbeats. i want to make something that lingers. something you can walk away from, and still feel an hour later.

this project has been cathartic for me. but i also hope it’s been a lifeline for some of you — the proof that you’re not alone in how you think, or feel, or carry your history. we’ve just been willing to say the quiet thing out loud.

the next step? keep going. keep telling the truth. keep making it impossible to confuse what we’re building here with anything else in your feed. and maybe turn some of these lessons into deeper dives — podcast episodes (finally launching next week) that unpack what’s behind the musings, and where they came from.

twenty-five musings in, and we’re just getting started.

— author

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