Sixty people read this. The advice says panic and optimize. I'd rather learn their names.

On villages, feeds, and the refusal to fit in one box.

Villages are great. Everyone knows Uncle Roger. You know which bench gets the sun on a Saturday afternoon, that the baker also runs the post office, and that the grocer reinvents himself as a Christmas-tree salesman every December 20th. A little world where everyone knows everyone else’s qualities and flaws. A small tribe on steroids, human-sized, where everything somehow works and where, for reasons nobody can explain, the narrow streets keep pulling people in. Where glances are not afraid to meet.

The city does the opposite. More people, more places to cross paths, and somehow fewer crossings. Here the baker does not run the post office, and you can walk past the same face three mornings in a row without ever owing it a name. The crowd dilutes you, like a shoal of fish: in one blink, Roger looks like any other guy down the hall.

I started this Substack to put my thoughts in order. At first they were living drafts, wedged between my clients’ design deliverables, filed with no logic and very little respect for these letters to myself. Then I published them, telling myself they might resonate with someone, without quite admitting that what I really want, deep down, is humans to talk to. I posted expecting nothing. Just to recycle the four hours I had spent untangling my own knot of thoughts.

The next morning, 9:30, I get out of bed and… nothing. Not a comment, not a like. Just Tobias demanding his breakfast. It was almost reassuring: nobody was waiting for me. So I kept going, out of habit, because writing your thoughts down is more dignified than spiraling under a Bangkok sun that has clearly taken your presence as a personal offense.

One reader, then five, then thirty, then sixty. The idea of posting into the void evaporated, replaced by sixty small pairs of eyes. In theory? Wonderful. In practice? My old demons.

Back to the performance waltz, a not-especially-romantic dance between me and my chronic need to be productive. So I did more. I studied how other people managed to “perform”, and I did it this entire week, blocking my writing entirely. How to sell myself better, show myself better, get myself read more.
The pleasure of writing gave way to a knot in my stomach that now arrived before Tobias even asked for his dinner.

And then it clicked: social media is exactly the city. A sprawling digital megalopolis where standing out is a content Hunger Games, where the currency is engagement and the cornucopia is virality. Getting noticed becomes a matter of public utility. You try everything: humiliating yourself, talking to your camera, romanticizing your life, swearing you understood nothing or, on the contrary, that you cracked the entire code.

After a rigorous benchmark and a competitive Instagram analysis, I reached two conclusions:

• Either every woman on this platform is, give or take, the same person.

• Or the point is not to express yourself as you are, but to adopt the trends and slot into one of the available frames.

That is where the real anxiety begins. What do I do, when I am literally made of all these facets at once? I am a founder, boss-girl edition, and yet some days I understand nothing about anything, and I own it. I am a clean girl, with a plate that has been fossilizing in the sink since Tuesday. I travel, and some evenings I want nothing more than to go home. I am literary, and I work in crypto. After five hours of intensive scrolling, the verdict is in: I do not fit a box. And I refuse to caricature myself into the next Leila Hormozi, because the things I have to share belong to me.

Individuality has become a rare commodity.
Dare to think sideways and the stake is never far off, 2026 edition: no public square, just a feed and a comments section. The thought of the day is smooth as a newborn’s bottom, and everyone recites it by heart.

Same thoughts, same faces, same content: without quite knowing how, every creator ended up serving the same soup. Rather bland, not very good, and certainly not nutritious.

A village. That is what I want. There, nobody asks you to reduce yourself to a single box: they take you with all your facets at once, because they know your stories. They know who your parents were, where your family comes from. They know that if Roger shouts so much, it is because something hurts. So the village hands him bandages: it listens to him, keeps him busy, gives him things that suit him.

Maybe the solution is to treat writing like a village, not like a city.
So I am choosing to write for sixty neighbors, not sixty metrics.

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I’m Adeline, and I write The Chapter Club, a small corner of the internet for people trying to stay recognizable to themselves while life keeps changing the scenery.

I started writing because I wanted to prove, mostly to myself, that we do not have to become a new person every time we enter a new city, a new circle, a new relationship, or a new chapter. We can be shaped by places and people without being swallowed by them. These essays are my field notes on staying yourself, even when everything around you keeps trying to edit the script.

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Socks, Sandals, and the Self

I Want to Be Rich Again

I don't change my outfit at every airport