A friend asked me, over matcha at the kitchen table, what my personal brand was.

The pause was long. Long enough that she looked up. Don’t worry about it, she said, it doesn’t matter what you call it.

But it does matter what I call it. That was the whole problem.

She knew Daniel Priestley too. He had a way of putting language around the kind of work I am trying to do, and most of his sentences fit. The substance was right. The pacing was right. He was kind in the way a teacher is kind when he is genuinely interested in whether you learn. And then there was this one word — personal brand — that he used as if it were neutral, and that I cannot say without feeling something in my chest collapse a little.

I sat at the table with my friend and tried, again, to find what I meant. I could feel it but not name it. The closest I got was: not a brand. A signal.

She nodded as if this made sense and then, gently, but it’s the same thing, isn’t it?

It is not the same thing. That is the essay.

---

I want to be clear about what I am refusing and what I am not refusing.

Daniel Priestley has spent twenty years teaching the same lesson in slightly varying language: that the people who get to do their work in this world are the people who become known for it. He calls them Key People of Influence. He has built a framework — five P’s, pitch, publish, product, profile, partnership — that is honest, repeatable, and useful. He has written books that have helped many people become recognizable in their categories without becoming hollow inside them. He teaches with a warmth that is rare among men who run frameworks. When he talks about visibility, he does not mean attention for its own sake; he means findability by the people who already need what you are doing. I have learned from him.

When I take his work apart in my own notebook, almost everything translates. Publish I already do. Product I am building. Pitch I will be doing as long as anyone is willing to listen. Profile I understand. Partnership I am beginning to see.

But there is the word.

Personal brand.

He uses it a hundred times across his work. He does not seem to feel it as I feel it. To him, it is a neutral container. To me, it is something I cannot put on without changing the work it would describe.

---

A brand, originally, is a mark made by burning — a sign of ownership that does not come off. The word survived into commerce as a way of saying this thing is identifiably ours, and not yours.

When I imagine putting that word on my work — on this essay, on the daily writing, on the thing I am trying to hold for a stretch of years — the image is one of marking something that belongs to a tradition older than me with a sign that says Irina was here.

It feels wrong in a way I have to honor before I move past it.

The deeper trouble is this. Personal brand puts the person in front of the work. The person becomes the subject. The work becomes what the person did. Across years, this accumulates into a particular kind of artistic life — a life centered on the visibility of the maker.

There are teachers for whom this is fine. Daniel is one of them. He moves comfortably as a public figure, and the work is, in some real sense, about him being the person who teaches this. That is honest. He is not pretending.

I do not move that way. I am trying to do something different. I am trying to put a kind of work into the world that comes through me but is not centered on me. If I think about the next twenty years, I do not want to be the famous Irina who teaches Claude to artists. I want to be one of the people who, in this stretch, held a thread that was already moving and is going to keep moving long after I let go.

There is a name for that kind of person. There are many names. I have been using one of them — holder — for months now. The work passes through the holder for a stretch. The holder gives it shape with her hands and her voice for the years she is alive to it, and then hands it on. Each holder performs the song in her own voice. The song is older than any holder, including the most famous ones.

A holder is not a brand.

A holder is not a personal brand.

A holder is something else, with different rules, and the rules matter.

---

I am not refusing visibility. Visibility is part of the work. If no one finds the essay, the essay was not written.

What I am refusing is a framing of the maker.

When I imagine the next twenty years, the picture I want is a flare lit at sea. A signal that helps the people who are already sailing toward something find each other. The flare burns for as long as the work needs it. The flare is not the boat. The flare is not the captain. The flare is a single point of light in a particular stretch of water, and what it does is make finding possible.

I have been calling this the flare. Sometimes the signal flare. Sometimes — when I am thinking about it as a stretch of years rather than a single piece — the holder. These words behave differently from personal brand in three ways I can name.

First, they do not center the person. The flare is a thing in the world; the holder is a function in a tradition. Both presume the work matters more than the maker.

Second, they are temporary. A flare burns out. A holder hands on. Personal brand implies something permanent — a name that travels with you across decades, a recognizable self. Flare and holder both assume the role is for a stretch and then ends. That assumption is important. It means I am not building toward a permanent self. I am building toward a stretch of useful holding, and then a quiet handoff.

Third, they refuse a sales register. Personal brand converts cleanly into pitches: let me help you build your personal brand. Flare does not convert that way. Holder even less. The vocabulary itself does not lend itself to upsell. This is, for me, a feature.

---

When you study a teacher who is genuinely useful, two things happen. You inherit their mechanics — frameworks, structures, sequences. And you risk inheriting their words.

The mechanics are usually safe. Five P’s are five P’s. The structure of pitch, publish, product, profile, partnership works whether you call yourself a brand or a flare. Mechanics travel.

Words do not travel as easily. Words shape what the work becomes. If you spend ten years saying personal brand, you will, at the end of ten years, have built a personal brand. If you spend ten years saying the work passing through me for this stretch, you will have built something else. Both might be valuable. They will not be the same thing.

The discipline of studying a teacher is, in part, the discipline of separating the mechanics from the words. Take the framework. Notice the vocabulary. Ask whether the vocabulary belongs to your tradition or to theirs. If it belongs to theirs and not yours, name what your tradition calls the same thing, and use that instead.

This is not pedantry. It is not preciousness. It is the protection of a different artistic life from being slowly converted into the teacher’s life by language osmosis.

I have inherited words from teachers before. Bright Shiny Objects is one I now use without quotation marks, because Molly Gordon used it more than a decade ago and it traveled cleanly into the work I am doing now. Holder came from her too. Words can be inherited. The decision is which ones.

Personal brand is one I cannot inherit and remain the person I am trying to be in this work.

---

If you have been studying a teacher and finding that almost everything they teach works for you, except one or two words that make your chest tighten — pay attention to the chest tightening.

The body knows when a word does not belong in the work you are doing, even before the mind can explain it. The friend who asked me about my personal brand was not wrong to ask. She was asking the question the culture asks. The body’s answer — the long pause, the small collapse — was the data.

You are not obliged to use the words your favorite teachers use. You are not obliged to flinch from those words either. You are obliged, as far as I can see, to know which words belong in your work and which do not, and to find or make the ones that do.

Daniel Priestley taught me, this year, that visibility is part of the work and not a betrayal of it. I am grateful. I will keep studying him. I will keep recommending his books to anyone who is trying to become findable for the right reasons.

I will not say personal brand. I will say flare. I will say holder. I will say the work for this stretch.

If you find your own word for it, send it to me. I have a feeling there are more of us than the teachers know.