Interesting is not interested

A woman in Maadi starts selling stuffed vine leaves from her kitchen. She rolls them the way her grandmother did, tight and small, with a sourness she will not explain. Her photographs are good. The story is true. Everyone who tastes them asks for more.

And her posts are mostly met with silence.

It is tempting to conclude that she is not interesting enough. That the story needs to be sharper, the pictures brighter, the recipe more unusual. Most people in her position start fixing the thing they made.

But the thing she made is fine. She is interesting. That has never been the question.

The question is whether anyone is interested, and that depends on something she does not control. The person scrolling past her post at lunchtime is thinking about a child's exam, a rent increase, a sister who has not called back. Their attention was spoken for long before her post appeared. What they care about this week was decided without her.

So the attention she gets says very little about how good her vine leaves are. It says a great deal about how the people she hopes to feed have already arranged their days.

That is less flattering than believing the work is the problem, and more useful. It moves the effort away from polishing the story and towards finding the moments, and the people, where there is room for it.

Being worth noticing is the part she has already done. Being noticed depends on what was there before she arrived.