The Algorithm Won't Know What to Do with Me
That's exactly the point.
Online life has felt awful to me for well over a decade. I’ve spent most of that time trying to figure out why. I think I finally have a coherent answer.
It wasn’t the content. Okay, maybe it was. It wasn’t even the platforms, exactly, though they didn’t keep the worst parts of society from taking root. But it definitely wasn’t the people I chose to engage with.
It was the architecture itself. The expectation of a single right way to exist online, which requires bowing to the algorithm to be seen. The way being online required me to present myself in pieces. The CPA self in one place. The writer self in another. The autistic intellectual self somewhere else entirely, or nowhere at all. The self itself, the one that holds everything, had no home.
That’s not a social media problem. That’s a coherence problem. And I’ve been living inside it, somewhat dissociated, for longer than I’d like to admit.
The whole must be restored.
The refusal
I’m not sure it was a decision, exactly. It felt more like a refusal. At some point, first gradually, then all at once, I became unwilling to keep fragmenting myself to fit into systems that weren’t built for how I’m wired. The cost had become too high, and the return too low.
So I built something different.
This is what it looks like.
The inventory
The website. crstephens.com is live. It holds everything—the consulting work, the writing, the novel, the podcast, the tools. All of it is visible now, and all of it is mine, connected by the same through-line: integrity, systems thinking, and genuine care for the human beings within every structure I touch.
The writing. Almost Structured has been my thinking-out-loud space for nearly a year now. Eighty-eight essays and counting. Still Processing: Notes on Being Human—this section—is where I name things before they’re fully resolved and try to offer support and care to the neurocomplex community through resonance and truth. Work, Lately is where the professional thinking takes applied form. Memoir in Essays is where I go all the way into my story. The writing that helps you survive is free. The work that invites you into my interior is not. That’s an ethical position, not a marketing strategy.
The novel. Bewitched Moon: Emergence has been out for three years. I wrote it before I had the language to describe what I was doing. Reading it after my autism diagnosis was one of the stranger experiences of my life, as I found evidence of a perceptual style that had been hiding in plain sight. It’s a novel about staying coherent while feeling everything. I didn’t know that was what I was writing at the time. I do now.
The podcast. Candorland is coming. Co-hosted with my husband Jason. Candor as harm reduction, with a twist of humor. We operate by CHIEF: Candor, Humor, Integrity, Empathy, Facts. We do not punch down. We will change our minds with a well-reasoned argument. More soon.
The collaborations. Two in the works with writers I respect. A dual essay with The Divergent Talent Alchemist—two perspectives on a shared question, written in parallel. And an asynchronous podcast conversation with Lately Found, which I’m genuinely looking forward to. Neither of these is a promotional exercise. They’re what happens when people who think carefully find each other.
The consulting work. I’ve been a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) for twenty-three years. I help solopreneurs and small businesses get their financial infrastructure up and running. I help organizations think through complex decisions at the intersection of finance, operations, and people. I offer facilitation for agreements and partnerships that need alignment before legal drafting begins. This is not separate from the writing. It never was. It’s the same work: finding where something broke and helping restore coherence.
Coherence, for me, is not a destination. It’s a practice. It’s the ongoing work of ensuring that what I say, what I do, and who I am point in the same direction. It’s noticing when they drift—they always do—and finding my way back.
The fragmented parts of my online life weren’t separate selves. They were the same self, split across containers that couldn’t hold it all at once. The CPA, the writer, the autistic person, the facilitator, the mother, the partner, and the person who will absolutely stop everything to tell you about a fascinating systems failure she noticed at the grocery store. These are not different people. They are one person with many expressions of the same underlying orientation.
I think in wholes. I notice incoherence before I can name it. I connect what others keep separate. That’s not a skill I developed. It’s how I’m built. For years, I tried to use it in only one room at a time, closing the doors between them, hoping no one would notice the whole house.
I’m done closing doors.
The algorithm
The system-disruptor in me loves that the algorithm can’t decide which category to place me in. I’m a CPA who writes literary fiction, will soon co-host a podcast about candor, facilitates business agreements, and publishes essays on autistic cognition. Sometimes I just need to tell you that the way most organizations handle their chart of accounts is a coherence failure masquerading as a formatting preference.
I don’t fit into a category. I never have. I spent a long time believing it was a problem to solve.
And now? I’m proud to say with confidence that it never was.
The people who need someone who holds the whole picture—in finance, writing, facilitation, and thought—will find me. They always have. They’re usually the ones who’ve been told they’re too much, too varied, or too hard to categorize. I know what that costs. I also know what it’s worth.
If that’s you: you’re in the right place.
Metanoia
There's a word I keep coming back to. Metanoia. A Greek word. The turning around. Walking back toward what was broken. Making it right on terms defined by what the harmed person needs, not what makes the one doing harm feel clean.
Building this ecosystem has been an act of metanoia. Walking back toward the parts of myself I was told to keep separate. Turning to face the fragmentation instead of managing it. Deciding that wholeness, mine and yours, is worth the exposure of being fully visible.
I know who finds their way here to Almost Structured. People who are pattern-sensitive. People whose nervous systems have been conditioned to brace. People who are rebuilding themselves, their work, and their sense of what’s possible, and who need a space where the thinking is careful and the honesty is consistent.
You’re welcome here. All of you, not just the parts that are easy.
A word about language: it’s imperfect. I know this better than most. I’m language-delayed in spoken language, which means I’ve spent my life translating what I know into what I can say, watching meaning arrive before the words do. I extend that grace freely. I ask only that you extend it in return.
What I will not extend is tolerance for abuse. Not toward me, not toward anyone who has found safety in this space. That goes for everyone, without exception, regardless of how right you think you are or how wrong you think someone else is. This house is open. It is not undefended.
Welcome to the whole house.
crstephens.com · Almost Structured on Substack · @author_crstephens