Back when blogs were still a thing, I might’ve been called a blogger. That title has since had a glow-up. Now it’s creator. Which is fair, I guess. Given that I’ve certainly created a fair amount of trouble for myself - with hot takes, unsolicited opinions and thoughts that absolutely should’ve stayed in the Notes app. 

I regret nothing.

The internet has become so aggressively curated that authenticity is now its own aesthetic. Actually, now it is a genre. Everyone is ‘being real’ with suspiciously good lighting, three rounds of edits and a quick GPT polish for good measure. So I try to keep it real.

For real. For real, for real. Oversharing, over time, has become my art.

That A.R.T. also happens to be my initials... entirely coincidental. Several reputations, a handful of egos and at least three comment sections were harmed in the making of this person. A damsel with a disclaimer, hot damn. 

The thing I find mildly infuriating is when people call this personal branding. As if I have a logo, a quarterly strategy deck and a crisis communications team. 

Babe. I don’t have the bandwidth. I barely have the budget for a Matcha Latte. I’ve started having the terrible premix kind. It tastes like green Complan. I drink it for the vibes. 
It’s just me and my intrusive thoughts against the algorithm.

Brands are carefully managed things. Humans are not. We’re messy. Contradictory. Occasionally embarrassing. I am pretty sure people take screenshots of what I write and send it to each other with either ‘OMG LOVE’ or ‘EW WTF.’ 

I contradict myself hourly. I change my mind monthly. I delete a post 17 seconds after publishing because only four people liked it and one of them was my aunt. Every Tuesday morning I convince myself I should quit advertising, open a bookstore in the mountains and run it exclusively for cats.

Do you think I’d be in advertising if I possessed a single logical brain cell? Even an iota of... mathemacity?

Exactly.

So I don’t expect people online to arrive shrink-wrapped like a shampoo campaign. If your content calendar knows what you’re posting next Thursday at 11 am., congratulations on your emotional stability. The rest of us are improvising. Remember that show, ‘Whose line is it anyway?’ – we’re that on caffeine and cringe. And somehow we are making it work. 

Maybe that’s why the internet fascinates me.

Instagram and LinkedIn are practically anthropology. Every profile is a case study in becoming. It’s one of the only places where you can watch someone reinvent themselves without ever changing their username. Aditya_roxtar can have an intellectual awakening. SexySunaina can emerge from heartbreak with a pottery hobby and a Substack. I can archive a former personality, upload a new one and announce it via a carousel titled 10 Things I Learnt This Year.

We’re all editing ourselves in public. It’s performance art. Sometimes it’s abstract art. Most of the time it’s just Tuesday.

The irony, of course, is that the harder everyone tries to perform authenticity, the harder the real thing becomes to spot. Which leaves people like me in a peculiar position. I genuinely don’t know how not to overshare.

My life leaks into my writing. My writing leaks into my opinions. My opinions occasionally leak into HR conversations. Which, like I mentioned earlier, gets me in trouble. But never in enough trouble to actually stop me from doing it again. You see the pattern?

Somewhere in all that, I’ve accidentally built an audience that doesn’t expect me to be perfect.

They just expect me to be honest. Or at least honestly trying. And maybe that’s enough.

Because on an internet obsessed with polish, consistency isn’t what people connect with.

Humanity is. 

Messy, contradictory, occasionally regrettable humanity. I’ve built a career writing for brands. But the writing that has stayed with people has almost always been the writing that wasn’t selling them anything.

Adyasha Roy Tomar is senior creative director, Leo India.