Death to the Bio

we're more than simple syrup, friends

Modern social wisdom has elevated the fine art of bio-writing to such levels of magnitude that now, if you aren’t able to describe yourself [and everything you live for] in one quippy line or less, you might as well kiss your dreams of being seen goodbye.

I have felt this acutely as a writer sharing my words in the digital space. On this platform, for example, I just received a newsletter with the panic-inducing headline, Your Substack Bio and Short Description Are More Important Than Ever! And the savvy people of Instagram have assured me that if I ever want people to visit my profile and tap that hallowed “follow” button, I’ve got to instantly hook ‘em.¹ We’ve got to make them care in 3 seconds or less, folks; that’s the burden of the blurb: it must make people fall in love with you instantly.

To this end, it’s not enough to have a brand anymore—you have to be the brand. The trick is to become a walking, talking simple syrup—distilled to your basest ingredients in order to be easily ingested by others. Last week, I was listening to a bit on the radio about how even some employers are now asking their applicants to describe their personal brand during the interview process. Sure, you might have expertise, education, and skill—but can you describe yourself in three words, and do you have your own color and font scheme?

This past week, my husband and I were in Punta Canta for a long-overdue bit of respite. While we were on the beach one day, we stumbled upon an amateur photoshoot. A gorgeous girl was leading her sock-and-Croc-ed boyfriend around by his iPhone, posing in various locations and positions in order to best capture her stunning backside and what looked to be some recently-filled lips. At one point, she picked up a beach volleyball and turned back to flirt with the camera, and I couldn’t help but wonder if she’d ever actually held a volleyball before that moment. I would wager a thousand dollars to say this was all for the love of the ‘gram, the brand, and her quippy little bio to boot. [Sasha, 📍LA, ✨24, 💅🏻 dreams do come true]. I caught myself judging her—until the Holy Spirit whispered into my humbled little ear, Don’t you do the same, in different ways?

Sigh. I suppose it does work for some people. I can think of a number of creators who’ve found their niche and settled in so nicely: they’re the mom with the relatable reels or the car-chat lawyer with the coffee that’s always spilling or the tea shop owner with the fun hair. But when it comes time to write my own dreaded blurb, I cannot help but ask myself:

But who even am I?

Or harder still, who will I be?

If I can’t share it all [which would require way too much time & patience on the part of the dear reader], then which parts of myself will I hack and which will I hold onto, hoping I’ve chosen wisely and that the strangers of the world will like what they see?

Even as an editor by trade, this mincing of words seems too painful, too costly.

Yes, that’s it: something costly is being asked of us when we are expected to be little more than a pleasant fragrance, just a spritz of recognizable overtones. When we boil ourselves down so willingly, we become little more than a vapor in the air—ethereal beings that are more theoretical than flesh-and-bone.

Though Deidre Braley is currently standing with two feet on the ground [hearing music and birdsong and feeling the hot sun on her back], she also exists somewhere in the digital ether as a presence who’s “Here for the creators, the believers, & the dreamers,” and she feels stifled and enraged within that paltry character count. She feels somehow reduced—somehow less than human.

“I’m not a perfume, I’m a GIRL!” she cries to no one in particular [because people don’t listen to girls without intriguing blurbs].

And even if I’d like to be floral and musk in gorgeous pink glass, what of my undertones of wild strawberry picked from the paddock in the forest of my youth?

What of holding the heft of a shotgun and shouldering its kick, those times when my father taught me to shoot birds I could never bear to kill?

Even if I could be bottled as woodsmoke and lilac and my Labrador’s warm fur, there would still be the notes of worn truck seats and the blue interior of my grandfather’s station wagon, where he would blast big band music and teach me to name the woodwinds and the brass.

I can’t untangle the citrus of Sevilla or the first time I held a hot crying baby to my breast any more than I can cut off one of my own limbs.

In his haunting set of lectures-turned-book—The Abolition of Man—C.S. Lewis says, “It is the magician’s bargain: give up our soul, get power in return. But once our souls, that is, ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls.”

I hardly think Lewis had Instagram on the mind when he wrote this, and yet, it has an eery sense of foreshadowing about it, does it not?

He was talking about moral relativism and we’re talking about blurbs, but perhaps it’s not too dramatic to point out that the burden of the blurb is that it asks us to forfeit part of our humanity—or as Lewis puts it, ourselves or our souls—in return for visibility. We think this will give us power: power to influence, power to make our own decisions, power to live the way we think we want to. But if the cost for being seen is that we can only exist as a less tangible version of ourselves (not to mention one who follows the fancies of the capital-A Algorithm), then we do in fact become slaves and puppets to wherever the winds of social strategy blow us next.

Rather than people with lungs and stretch marks and fingernails cut too short, we become beholden to the blurb, the bio, the brand, and we let them whittle us down into something that hardly resembles a real human at all.

“It is the magician’s bargain: give up our soul, get power in return. But once our souls, that is, ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls.” C.S. Lewis

I guess what I’m saying is that I hate writing bios. To take a fully-bodied, fully-spirited, fully-minded human and boil her down into a handful of words seems like a step away from the type of society I wish to inhabit. Maybe I’m just raging against the machine here, but there is an ember inside of me that revolts against this dehumanization done in 150 characters or less.

And so. I don’t expect to change the course of social media with this essay, but I do wonder—is there a small rebellion to be had yet? Are there others here who wish for the long-winded version of their neighbors, who are spunky and curious and soft enough to get lost in the winding epics of one another’s lives even when they twist and turn in surprising ways? What a delightful unraveling that would be: to embrace the unexpected, to make a pact to be along for the ride, and to spend our days staring into the eyes of the normal people around us—only to realize that they are, in fact, marvelous. Not because they have a clever bio or because they’ve found their niche, but rather because they are human, yes! Fully human. Flesh-and bones. Alive.

P.S…if you were digging this article, check out one of my most popular articles of 2023, I Am Not a Genre.

1. How’d I do? Are you hooked?