Standing Slightly Outside the Frame

On identity and the quiet value of distance

By the time people started asking where the work would land, I already knew I didn’t want the answer to shape it.

That question has a way of arriving early, often dressed up as encouragement. Who’s publishing it. Who’s backing it. Where it will sit once it’s finished. The infrastructure shows up before the thinking has had time to settle, as if legitimacy needs to be secured in advance.

I’ve lived long enough inside systems to recognize that reflex. I’ve also lived long enough to know what it costs.

Twelve years ago, I published a book that came out of illness, Holy Cancer: How A Cow Saved My Life. I chose not to personally profit from it, and just as deliberately, I chose not to turn it into a series. There were easy paths available. A follow-up in the health space would have been legible, fundable, and warmly received. I didn’t take it.
Illness can become a lane very quickly. I wasn’t interested in mining something that had already taken enough.

In the years since, I’ve run an NGO, worked inside institutions, and watched how intention quietly shifts once visibility, funding, and affiliation enter the picture. I’ve seen good work sharpen under constraint, and I’ve seen it soften in the name of access. I’ve watched language change not because anyone demanded it, but because proximity made certain questions feel inconvenient.
None of this makes me allergic to systems. It just makes me attentive to how they edit you long before you realize you’re being edited.

So when I found myself deep into another long project, I noticed the same pattern reappearing. Questions about placement arrived before questions about clarity. Conversations tilted toward outcome before the thinking had finished. The frame began assembling itself around the work while the work was still unsettled.

That project eventually became Celebnomics: How Fame Became the Ultimate Currency, though the name came much later than the noticing.

What mattered more to me than where it would land was whether I could let the thinking finish without negotiating it first.

Whether I could write without preemptively smoothing edges or translating the work into something more comfortable for the systems it was examining.

Standing slightly outside the frame was a way of buying that space.

That distance comes with consequences. Fewer shortcuts. Less amplification. No insulation if the work lands awkwardly. Being read without borrowed authority. I’m not romantic about any of that. I just decided it was a trade I could live with.

There’s a long stretch of ground between selling out and opting out that doesn’t get talked about much, mostly because it isn’t impressive. It doesn’t announce itself as integrity. It doesn’t come with a ready narrative. It’s just a series of quiet decisions not to rush alignment before something has earned its own shape.

That’s the ground I’ve been standing on for a while now.

I saw it when I chose not to keep mining illness after Holy Cancer. I saw it when I resisted turning recovery into a lane. I saw it running an NGO, where good intentions collided daily with optics, funding language, and the subtle pressure to simplify what was actually complex.

Each time, the same question surfaced in different forms. How close do you want to stand to the thing you’re trying to understand.

Closer brings speed. Distance brings friction. It also brings clarity.

What I’ve learned is that systems don’t need to coerce you to shape your work. They just need to reward certain kinds of fluency. Over time, you start pre-editing. You start anticipating comfort. You start smoothing edges without being asked.

Standing slightly outside the frame is a way of interrupting that reflex.

This isn’t a position statement. It’s a working posture. One that accepts slower movement and uneven reception in exchange for being able to stand behind the work without footnotes or apologies.

If the work travels quietly, that’s fine. If it takes time to find its readers, that’s fine too.

I’ve learned, across health, institutions, and long stretches of lived experience, that speed and proximity are not the same as progress.

Sometimes the most honest way to see something clearly is to take a step back and let it finish becoming itself.