Got an Instagram audit done. The consultant well-meaning and seemingly algorithm-literate, told me I needed to pick a niche. One topic, tone and content that the platform could classify and serve to the right people.
I kind of understood the logic but I just can't identify the box.
Was I a just another creative person? Did it matter that I was North African? Was I the oracle deck maker, the incense burner in rented apartments across four continents? The woman who thinks in metaphors and sells them as books, as cards, as posters and soon as sound? The one who turns North African wisdom into things you can hold, and then has to price them? The one who believes reflection is a product, and that a product can carry a soul?
Which one gets the account?
The pressure to be one legible thing is not a social media invention. It goes back further... to the industrial logic that shaped our modern world. Factories needed workers who did one thing reliably and repeatedly. Schools even sorted children into tracks. The whole architecture of modern life was built on the premise that a person should be classifiable.
Specialization meant efficiency, and efficiency became the highest virtue.
Then the internet arrived and perfected it. Algorithms are, at their core, classification machines. The more clearly you answer the question what is this account about, the more the machine rewards you. The more you resist it, the more you disappear. So millions of people (people who are genuinely and irreducibly multiple) sit down and perform "surgery" on themselves. They pick a lane and decide which part of them should die down.
You know, my grandmother never left our oasis in the Sahara desert, yet she was the widest person I've ever known. She knew which plants healed and which made us sick or how silence changed when people grieved. She read the sky and people with the same soft and grounded attention. She counted the knots in her carpet, a grid of a thousand tiny boxes, better than an architect. Nobody asked her to niche down. It was just her living the width of a life with all her senses open.
And to be honest, the most interesting thinkers, makers, and builders I've encountered in twenty years of working across four continents share something with her: they're all, in some way, hard to categorize. Their work lives at intersections and their best ideas came from taking something from one field into another where it didn't belong, and watching what happened.
Width is not the consolation prize for people who couldn't commit to depth.
I think it is its own form of intelligence and where new things come from.
It's like a connective tissue between disciplines.
Maktoub Studio was born from a simple belief: that destiny is not "written", it is created by choices, and those choices are born from experimentations. From following a pull before it makes sense, like letting an oracle deck teach us about history, a poster help us manage our emotions, a book guide us through one year of life's ebbs and flows. That is exactly what makes me live life's full width.
Maybe the point was never to fit in a box, case in point this quote attributed to Rumi: "you are not a drop in the ocean, you are the entire ocean in a drop". Maybe the point was always to keep moving through every life I've lived inside this one, until the trail I leave behind -the decks, the books, the half-finished ideas- becomes its own kind of map.
In the meantime, I'll just keep creating uncategorizable content whether I get one follow or ten. Those who are meant to find it will and those who are meant to resonate with it will!
Fiercely,
Ratiba
