Steal My Work

Someone screenshots [my poem about the grocery store at 2 AM](https://bkpoetry.com/post/799990443002806272/late-night), where I wrote about the cashier timekeeping her way toward morning resurrection. My name is stripped off, added to a TikTok montage with city lights bleeding through rain-streaked windows, slow-motion footage of lonely third-shift workers, that Cigarettes After Sex song everyone uses.

## Take My Words. Crop My Name. Make It Yours. Here’s Why.

Five hundred thousand views in four days. No credit. No link back. No tag. Just my words floating over someone else’s aesthetic, someone else’s curated melancholy.

My ego wanted to comment *“I wrote this, actually.”* Wanted the recognition, the followers, the validation. But my purpose sat quietly, watching all those strangers find comfort in words I wrote onto a page.

Steal my work. Please. I’m begging you.

Put it on TikTok. Slap it over Instagram reels. Make it the text in your hopecore montages, your sadcore compilations, your corecore whatever-the-fuck. Crop my name out if you want. I don’t care. Ego doesn’t serve anybody.

## Arithmetic of Influence

I’ve published 170+ articles on Medium over ten years. [Built 700 followers](https://blog.brennan.day/). My recent “viral” posts hit 10,000 views, and that feels massive here. It IS massive here. That article about [Gen-Z reclaiming analog living](https://blog.brennan.day/gen-z-love-dumb-phones-the-analog-e-ink-screens-slow-living-community-and-longform-work-) and dumb phones? 2,100 views. I was thrilled.

But what if someone took the best paragraph from that piece—about how [46% of Gen Z are actively limiting screen time](https://www.fastcompany.com/91350185/gen-z-is-embracing-a-digital-detox-and-the-martha-stewart-summer), about brick phone purchases [surging 148% among 18-to-24-year-olds](https://stacker.com/stories/art-culture/flip-phone-renaissance-9-retro-phones-gen-z-obsessed-2025)—and built a hopecore video around it? Scrolling text over footage of someone actually smashing their smartphone, switching to a Nokia 3310, walking through an autumn park without checking anything. Captioned “*life is beautiful.”* [#hopecore boasts over 8 million likes](https://www.nssgclub.com/en/lifestyle/36145/hopecore-trend-tiktok). My name nowhere. But the information, the hope, and the evidence that we’re not all doomed? Reaches people. Or my name stays attached, the post stays on Medium, and 2,100 people see it.

Which serves the work?

I know what I’m supposed to say. Attribution matters. Credit matters. Especially for marginalized voices. Writers like me who’ve spent fifteen years trying to be seen in predominantly white literary spaces. Visibility is political. Erasure is violence. The message always matters more than the messenger.

## The Dea