Ahem!

Is This Thing Still On?

Another year, another platform.

That’s what it’s felt like to be a content creator for the last 10 years. I remember in 2015, I was laying in bed with my then boyfriend, now husband, Michael, and I turned over and said: “I want to be a blogger and I need you to help me take it seriously”. And to his credit and mine, we did.

I started with The Nines, a blog about fashion and beauty. I hired a girl, Lauren, that I met on Instagram for $100 to take photos of me for my first post. I wrote about how fashion should be fun, like wearing a tutu with a vintage flannel shirt (I still believe in that, btw). We paraded all over downtown Detroit snapping photos and doing outfit changes in the back of my 2001 Saturn station wagon. I loved taking outfit photos, but my favorite part was the writing. I found I could use humor to make something as daunting as fashion, accessible.

Fall 2015, my first ever blog shoot. Iced out in the Michael Kors watch to boot!!

Then came the Instagram boom. No one wanted to “read all that” anymore, they wanted a nice, aesthetic photo to like, something you hoped would go viral. So I dove into taking pictures, then video content as the app evolved. The likes and comments were like a drug to me. It gave me a false sense of self-worth, and actually magnified that some of my self-worth may have come from a fake place all along.

Growing up with a disability, you are often idolized for…existing. You’re inspirational just because you are alive, which can be condescending tbh, but as a kid, the praise is intoxicating. You’re amazing! You’re a hero! All because I sat in a wheelchair. I have been idealized my entire life. So when my disability became not-as-obvious to naked eye as I got older, being idealized on the internet took its place.

In 2020, I found live streaming. another bright new shiny way to make content and get famous, damnnit! I was an early adopter to a beauty live streaming platform, and quickly fell in love. I loved having a weekly show, a consistent community that watched and chatted. Michael built me a studio in our house and produced the show, and I thought this was it for me, this would be my big break. For years I had tried my hardest to amass a following, get to 3k followers, no 5k! No 10k! I made videos and content and took photos, clawing my way to internet fame and love. Live streaming though, would set me apart- it was new and fresh and allowed me to stand out with what I do best, entertaining and oversharing.

Then one day, the virtual rug was pulled out from under me, and the platform decided to cut live streaming for us normal, sad little streamers and focus only on big names getting air time. It absolutely broke me. I felt like I had given my time, heart, and dedication to this new wave of content, all for it to be shut down overnight.

Well I wasn’t ready to stop yapping yet, so hello, podcast! I’ve gotta say, marrying someone who produces live shows and content really gives you a lot of options. Michael produced and edited my podcast, “Alex’s Fun Little Podcast” for over a year, and again I found myself clawing for listeners, one by one. 100 was great, but what do I have to do to get 1,000, 10,000, a million, EVERYONE IN THE WORLD?! I had such high hopes for our little show- and that’s when I had my first miscarriage.

And then another. Two miscarriages later and I was empty. I had nothing else to talk about, nothing joyous to share, no humor to give. It felt like everything lost meaning, like the color had been sucked out of my skin and my personality. When I finally did get pregnant again with our daughter, I was terrified. If I’m being honest, I was terrified the entire 9 months. That’s probably why she already has 6 teeth, some scarily accurate study found babies with mothers that had high cortisol levels during pregnancy got teeth faster than cooler, chiller moms. Called my ass out.

When I had our daughter, Violet, I quietly decided I would “retire” from content creating, maybe from the internet as a whole. For ten years I tried to make it big. Call it trying to be famous, or making influencing my career, whatever. I churned out content and counted followers and declared “this is it!” each time something went ViRaL for nearly a decade. But it never was. It had its moments of success, don’t get me wrong. But despite my best efforts and immense caring, it never became the thing I wanted it to be.

April 2025: Deadass me sitting on my front porch 8 days after giving birth, feeling utterly lost, sobbing and listening to Cynthia Erivo “I’m Still Here”. I do love to be dramatic.

I lost myself as the person I had written myself to be in my head (I have to be someone!), and then I lost myself in postpartum. I had no idea who I was, I felt like a failure, a fraud, a classic case of a woman who gave up on her dreams to be a mom. I don’t think any woman goes into motherhood thinking they’re going to abandon any identity or dreams they had. But what I’ve learned in the last 9 months, is you do have to succumb to it to be happy. You have to let go of who you were, your expectations, and just…be. Let it swallow you whole. I have to let go of who I thought I was going to be, so I can open the door for the woman who is waiting for me on the other side. The one who loves being a mom but has complex feelings about it, who has abandoned all rules about what I am supposed to be doing or what it’s supposed to look like.

And that leads us here- which really is just back to the beginning- writing. Ahem! is a very simple concept. What do you do when you have something to say? You clear your throat and start talking. I’ll write when I want to, not on a schedule or timeline. It could be every week, twice a week, or once a month. If you’re brand new here, or been with me since The Nines, thank you for supporting and believing in me. It’s actually the only thing that ever kept me going through my different eras of creating. I’ve created a blog, a podcast, a live show, countless videos, and now LITERAL LIFE. I figure, why stop now?

xx Alex

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