Officially, I’m a writer, podcaster, and creative director who develops content for companies and brands dedicated to helping people master personal finance.

More unofficially, it’s 2021 and I’m still trying to write a blog — so make of that what you will.

My name is Kali Roberge, and for the past decade I’ve built my career creating content in the financial media space. I used to run a content marketing firm dedicated to serving financial advisors, and I also worked (still do, in fact) as a freelance writer covering personal finance and entrepreneurship. Today, I serve as creative director of Beyond Your Hammock and do most of my professional work over there.

If you would like to engage with Professional Me, feel free to visit the amazing financial planning firm where I work or contact me if you’re interested in hiring a writer or editor.

As for Unprofessional Me? That’s gonna require a lot more than a paragraph summary.

I’d like to start by saying I’m a writer. My identity is strongly tied to that (which makes me lucky indeed that I’ve found a way to make my calling my livelihood, in that my job is to create and a large part of that requires my writing).

The problem with simply saying, “I’m a writer," however — and why we need more than a paragraph to get into all this — is the inevitable follow-up question it invites: “What do you write about?”

I tend to point back to the official party line: I write about finance. I create content for financial brands. I do marketing for financial firms.

But off the record, between you and me? If you needed to search a bookstore for something I wrote outside my job, I fear you’d need to go to the self-help section.

Saying “I write about personal development” instead of “personal finance” does not tend to spark admiration. Reactions tend to range from barely-suppressed eye rolls to various eyebrow gymnastics: from raised if skeptical to furrowed if downright confused.

I don’t blame anyone (or their eyebrows) for that. For years now, we’ve been overrun with influencers and life coaches and lifestyle bloggers and people trying to brand and monetize some aspect of their personality. Every single one has something to sell, promising that if you only copy them exactly you too can be happier, wealthier, healthier as you live your best life.

And if it’s not an influencer, then it’s a self-proclaimed but entirely uncredentialled expert or guru who has the prescription for all the right answers. One need only to attend their webinar, buy their course, hire them as a consultant, bring them to an event as a speaker, to learn the precise secrets to success.

But the stuff that genuinely helps people — that truly helps people grow, evolve, and, yes, develop — is not prescriptive at all.

The best writers in the personal development space are more like philosophers who share a perspective, offered up to others as one potential explanation to what we struggle with and how to reduce the suffering that comes from those struggles.

When I say, I’m a writer, that’s what I mean. Better then, perhaps, to say “I write about philosophy; about how our behavior, mindset, and perception shift and influence our lived experience and reality.”

Fancy. But true! I write about ideas on what the nature of our reality might be, and what that means for our mindset, choices, and behavior in response.

I’ll never set the example for anyone, but what I write about serves as a little proof of one way to be in the world. My work is not intended to say, “this is how to do X,” or “you need to have Y.” In the purest expression of Millennial philosophy, I truly believe in the idea that you do you.

What I write is distilled from a range of sources, from research and scientific studies to personal experience — and the end result is always a suggestion, a sharing of ideas, a small piece of proof that a particular way to be in the world is possible (but not required or “right”).

My writing is not instructive or prescriptive. It simply points to a way — one way — of thinking or being that exists. It is proof of one of many paths that is possible to explore.

Hello! My name is Kali and I’m glad you’re here. I also hope you feel like I look like this picture should we ever meet in person.