Officially.

Who I am, why I'm here, and why I stopped trying to fit into a single lane.

I think it might be time to introduce myself. Officially.

My name is Allison Paige Ratkovich. Yes, that is my full name, which is weird for me too. But my middle name helps explain my publication’s moniker. I know my mom and dad didn’t think they were birthing a writer, an overthinker, a person who would love words so much I would save them.

That’s right, as a little girl, I would write words on little tiny strips of paper, fold them up really tight and small, and hide them throughout my closet. My mom once shared what she found when she cleaned out my closet—little teeny spitballs of words. Dozens of them.

I guess that is what I am still doing, spitballing words out into the world. That is how The Allison Paige started. It wasn’t with a grand plan of having thousands of followers. It’s not a part of a bigger growth strategy. Understanding Substack as an income-producing platform was secondary, not the initial draw. It was all about the words.

Well, the unvarnished truth is that the writer in me lived with clipped wings since those early spitball days. My college majors were journalism, English, and finally mass communications+public relations+marketing. I wrote for PR clients, agencies, and private companies. I wrote for a child advocacy center, for a database technology company, and for too many start-up clients to even mention.

The bottom line is that I have spent my life forcing the words I love into small boxes, lined with rules, client edits, and trending keywords. I definitely lost my childhood zeal somewhere along the way. I carried around a small red typewriter when I was little, always eager to stop and type out a story.

But it wasn’t until I was almost 50 years old that I finally started to write authentically, as me, when I decided to create and launch my own travel brand. I spent a couple of years traveling around the world and writing about it. But unable to make money off of that fast enough, I packed the words up and left them packed for years. I was painfully silent, not understanding that multiple sclerosis had already started its 13-year, untreated march across my brain, causing damage that had far-reaching consequences.

I certainly never thought it would be politics, a betrayal by a most beloved uncle over perceived political differences (read about all of that in my essay The Body Politic), and a progressive neurodegenerative disease diagnosis that would unlock my words again and finally give them wings. But, as they say, stranger things have happened.

See, I got tired of political arguments on Facebook and of writing long tirades that only elicited angry DMs from family members and public divorces from friends. My words were honest, angry, exposed, and vulnerable, and I wanted a more serious place to let them live authentically. Substack’s offering was perfect for a cash-strapped disability retiree like me.

So I hopped on here and just started writing. It’s been a great place to share my political writing. I have gotten dizzily distracted reading so many amazing writers’ work. The Allison Paige on Substack lets me write with the freedom I’ve been searching for. It is also, I’ve come to realize, a place to build something — essays worth sitting with, digital products worth your time, a community worth showing up for. But all of it starts with the words.

There have been challenges, however. The Allison Paige has been a fluid project, having already survived a couple of pivots as I got swayed by the Niche Police, then tried to stuff my words into the little boxes and nooks and crannies of a closet, like I did when I was small. I’ve tried to write like a journalist (not what I want to do), a blogger, a commentator, and an opinion editor. And what that process has done is bring me full circle back around to…me.

The online content world keeps telling people like me — people with decades of real, layered, cross-disciplinary experience — to sand themselves down into a single lane. And it feels wrong because it is wrong for me.

This process has taught me that I am not a one-topic creator. I’m a person with a disability, with a grandson, with a journalism brain, with political fury, with a marketing career behind me. I have a name, a face, a history, a party affiliation I’m honest about, and an MS diagnosis I’ve advocated around publicly.

I have a whole human life pressing up against the page, wanting out. Each essay is all about a woman who has been paying close attention her whole life, who has survived things, who refuses to look away, who has something to say about what it means to be alive right now in this specific body in this specific country with this specific grandson and this complicated, beautiful grief-soaked history.

So my essays will not just be about politics, though I suspect a lot of them will be, as I do my part to meet this moment in my country’s history. Other topics around living life with multiple sclerosis and as the mother of a daughter who lives with it as well, being a Baba and a mother to adult children, what it’s like to be aging into my sixth decade, and the memories I am still metabolizing in this thing called life will take shape in my posts as well.

This space is evolving, and so am I. My promise is simple: I will always be honest — with my position, my beliefs, my mistakes. I will keep learning, keep advocating, and keep writing without the small boxes.

I’m not going to define what this community looks like before it exists. If you find yourself here — in the comments, in the conversation, in the uncomfortable recognition of something you’ve thought but never said out loud — then I think we’ve already found each other. Show up. Share what moves you. That’s how this gets built.

I think my mom and dad would like that I’m calling this space The Allison Paige. I hope they would have been proud of me for the words I write had they lived long enough to read them.

Well, except for the occasional profanity. I’m pretty sure my mom wouldn’t like that.

But my dad would have found it funny as hell.

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