Carina Finn Koeppicus

Because I have a serious case of FOMO, and “living in the moment” is one of the hardest things for me to do, the passing of Halloween and the approach of the holiday season immediately sends my mind towards thoughts of the new year ahead. It was last January, after doing a goal-setting exercise from Beth Kirby’s blog, Local Milk, that I decided to start blogging about food in an effort to push my life in the direction of my  passions.

I told myself that I’d write three times a week, cultivate my social media following, develop wizard-level SEO and Pinterest skills, etc etc etc. Nearly a year and fifteen posts later, it is clear that I  didn’t stick to my goals. Instead,

I got married.

I went to Disney World and drank many lattes in front of my favorite castle.

I opened and operated a pop-up restaurant at the Queens International Night Market.

I started writing a novel, just for fun, without putting enormous amounts of pressure on myself.

I spent most of the summer in the country, caring for an aging family member and learning to farm.

I got so busy that I didn’t cook a thing for most of October, subsisting primarily on takeout Thai food and pastries.

I fell in love with outdoor climbing again.

I realized that in spite of earning decent money and being good at my job (managing a rock climbing gym), my career had stalled.

I accepted that I don’t fit neatly into a hyper-niche Instagram-perfect brand box with an algorithm-friendly visual aesthetic. I have too many varied interests, and am too attached to the idea of being a real person to parse out my life into blocks of scheduled content.

I leveraged the content I made here to get a freelance job in food media, and leveraged *that* experience to get a full-time job in food media.

I’m what the NYT classifies as an “old millennial,” and I’ve had some kind of blog on and off since the early days of Geocities and Livejournal, back when having a blog was about letting people in to your inner life and not about monetization or building a personal brand.

As a social media professional, I get it — in 2019 and beyond, everything (and everyone) is for sale. Writing on the internet is at best an implied if not an explicit sales tactic. But for the next year, I’m going to try something different. You’ll still get recipes, because my husband is tired of me making something delicious and forgetting to write it down. But you’ll also get more of this: vintage blogging, early-aughts style, thoughts from a person cast out unto the internet devoid of a perfectly styled photoshoot against a vinyl marble background.