I have twenty years of bought and paid for words out there, but how many can I really, actually, truly say are mine?

There’s me in them, because I don’t know how to write without fistfuls of my own teeth and hair. This TV will distract you from the living situation that is slowly killing you. This espresso machine has a built-in grinder and the coffee reminds me of my grandmother and clay mugs and too much sugar and the smell of cannabis and wet fir and the kind of safe that you can only be when you’re in the shadow of someone who has survived More than they thought they could. It’s $749 on Amazon.

But the words aren’t really mine. They belong to rent and debt and legacy media conglomerates named after Rockefeller-era media men in suits as colonial-white as their family trees. Still, I get away with more than I ever expect to. Which, let’s be real, is why I keep doing this.

An editor will get a draft of a keyboard review or a listicle about anal vibrators, crunchy with spilled Red Bull and flecks of ketchup(?) gone barbecue sauce brown, and they’ll strike a sentence or cut a comma and then just run them as is? My skin and hair and fluids all polished, and printed, and posted by publications with names in ALL CAPS. The ones on supermarket magazine shelves, when supermarkets had magazine shelves? Damn, okay.

Now I’m going to confess something and it’s the kind of thing people who do my job don’t publicly admit, but it’s true for more of us than you’d think: I don’t read websites. Or magazines. I don’t read the kinds of things I write to pay my bills because I know how the rabbit goes into the hat and comes out sausage, I know who gets ground up and who does the grinding, and once you know it you can’t un-know it.

Maybe a couple times a year I’ll read An Article, but even then I skim just enough that I can get on Bluesky and say things like “god what a fuckin idiot,” “this guy’s a fascist,” and “that guy’s a transphobe,” and “that guy has a job I wish I had so I hate him most of all.”

Don’t get me wrong, I wish I was the kind of writer who could read the Atlantic and the New Yorker and Vanity Fair and get all suffused with ideas so urgent they write themselves and notions too big for my body to contain. I want to thoughtfully turn the nature of the American experience over in my mind like a gemstone, wondering at the things I see in its facets.

Instead, I load up their stock-same websites (centered wordmark, half-screen-sized thumbnails, italicized serif font, delicate black on white line dividers, corporate Memphis header illustrations) and I just see the men and women, but let’s be real, mostly men, behind the words and the margins that hold the words — a certain kind of man who went to a certain kind of school and lives a certain kind of life. Men who walk with the comfort and certainty of someone who’s never had to trade their body for shelter. The kind of men with literary societies, and book deals, and grad student girls drunk enough on attention and approval to let them finish inside.

I can’t read those, or honestly most publications without seeing those guys and their perfect teeth and their on-purpose-imperfect hair, and remember the way they’d tell me about their favorite PornHub tags, their fingers hot and lingering on my shoulder while I look out the window at the Portland skyline. I see the intellectual half-smile they practice in the mirror, and hear the kind of compliment that could be about your mind or your body and you wish it was one but it’s definitely the other.

I see taut-skinned HR-woke New-York-media-man in fat-rimmed Elvis Costello glasses firing people over Zoom, with wet, glassy, I’m so sorry eyes. I see a vintage Taylor Acoustic 12-string guitar mounted to a wall over his shoulder, and I wonder what sound it would make broken over those Peter Cushing cheekbones. (Hey thanks for the socks btw.)

So when the machine scolds me for using an ad blocker, rattles its little tin cup, threatens to hold hostage the words I wasn’t going to read, I just stop scrolling.

It knows like I know that they were never mine to begin with.