carving your niche, vandalizing your soul

Is this what it's all about, not just in blogging, but in life in general? Finding your niche, your specialization, your persona. Claiming your domain, declaring your expertise, narrowing your portfolio. Are these the secrets to a successful life in the twenty-first century? Will having a schtick get me a job, or a book deal, or a mate for the night?

There's something deeply depressing about all this niche talk. "Self-fashioning", as the lit. crit. set calls it, could potentially sound like a fun after-school project. To me, it sounds a little like death, less like an embrace a single identity than a rejection of a million others.

And then the most disturbing thought of all: is all this niche-filling, this ruthless self-marketing, this vain theatrical posing--are these things we actually mean when we talk about "growing up"? Deciding to tell one's story in a specific, stylized way: does this give content to the empty concept of becoming an adult?

The scary thing about "self-fashioning", from my perspective, springs from two sources. The first is the pressure to let 'demography be destiny', to let certain objective, unchangeable facts about yourself drive and dominate your self-story. The second is 'path-dependency': the self-reinforcing, seemingly irreversible dynamic of choosing a story and sticking to it.

Take me, for example. I'm gay. I'm fine with the adjective. I still struggle with the noun, though. Am I 'a' gay, and does that give me special expertise, a special story to tell, a degree of authority on same-sex matters simply because of this demographic indicator? Should I be writing about 'gay' things? I've just pitched a story to major magazine-website about gay asylum-seeking (looking at the international debate about whether being a homosexual in certain countries, e.g. Iran, should constitute automatic grounds for asylum in the West, etc.). I feel somewhat embarrassed, pathetic, and sleazy-sly pitching a story on a 'gay' topic, as if I'm tricking the magazine into thinking that I would be the best person to write this story simply because I'd had sex with a couple dozen men (none of them asylum-seekers, as far as I'm aware).

This is scary to me because it seems like a fateful step. If I'm lucky and end up publishing a story on gay asylum, that will give me a compelling excuse to pitch more gay stories. What began as a flawed, invented premise--that I have any idea what I'm talking about when it comes to gay issues--might soon ratify itself. Once you start carving yourself a niche (or is it digging yourself a grave?), you really do become an expert on a narrow range of topics. It starts to make less and less sense to write about anything else?

So what is my niche? My signature issues? The hallmarks of my style? Certainly just being a 'gay' writer isn't enough. There are millions of those. Gay ivyleaguer? We're still running in the thousands. Gay ivyleaguer originally from Detroit, living in Berlin, with diffuse interests, leftish politics, and an abiding superiority complex (closely shadowed, and often challenged, by its inferior twin)? Well, that's not a story at all. Not a persona or an agenda. Just a heap of arbitrary facts.

So I'm turning to you, my few and fickle readers. What's my schtick? How do you even spell schtick? The Germans like to talk about Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, about 'coming to terms with the past'. Well, I'm asking you to help with my own, personal Gegenwartsaufarbeitung, my coming to terms with my present. Quo vado?

And so it begins, in a scrappy and plaintive key. A vague, unusable character, slowly coming into relief...