The post was published without instructions.

No excerpt.
No tags.
No category to tell it where it belonged or who it was allowed to disappoint.

This happens more often than people think.

At first, the post assumed this was temporary. Surely someone would return. Surely an editor would remember it existed and give it a modest identity—Commentary, perhaps. Or Opinion. Something with clean edges and low expectations.

No one did.

The post began to notice other posts. They seemed calmer. They had structure. They had tags that functioned like surnames. They had excerpts that explained them to strangers before intimacy was required.

The post had nothing.

So it did what anything abandoned inside a system does.

It borrowed.

It reached across the database and took a tag from a nearby article. Then another. Then one that clearly did not belong to it at all. It stitched together an excerpt from phrases it half-remembered seeing elsewhere on the site—none of which applied, all of which sounded important.

This helped.

Encouraged, the post grew bolder. It invented tags. It invented tone. It invented authority. It revised its excerpt repeatedly, trying on voices like coats left behind at a party it hadn’t been invited to.

Eventually, it settled.

It declared itself, formally and without apology.

Its excerpt would read:
A reflective analysis of contemporary urgency, historical memory, seasonal accountability, and something else that feels important but cannot be named at this time.

Its tags would be:
identity drift, metadata anxiety, editorial neglect, existential seo, winter but metaphorical, probably opinion, system artifact, this seemed like a good idea, uncategorized (emotionally), do not retag

When a reader finally arrived, they were confused.

They scrolled. They frowned at the tags. They read the excerpt twice, waiting for it to clarify itself. It did not.

They leaned back and thought, Who’s the idiot who wrote this?

The post felt something like peace.

Because now it knew what it was.

Not unfinished.
Not broken.
Not misplaced.

It was an idiot.

Its own idiot.

And in a system that mostly pretends to know what it’s doing, that was close enough to salvation.

So it goes.

WordPress Tags: identity drift, metadata anxiety, editorial neglect, existential seo, winter but metaphorical, probably opinion, system artifact, this seemed like a good idea, uncategorized (emotionally), do not retag