✺ The Website Kept Asking Me to Know What It Wouldn’t Teach
The internet keeps asking whether Wix is good or bad, as though choosing a website platform is a clean moral decision rather than the beginning of a long relationship with an unstable corporate environment. After nearly ten documented years inside Wix, I am not a web designer. I am something the platform has no language for: one autistic artist who learned the atmosphere by living in it long enough for the surface to reveal its deeper systems.
✺ The Website Kept Asking Me to Know What It Wouldn’t Teach
Every few days, Wix reappears on Threads.
Sometimes the post is bait.
Somebody asks whether Wix is terrible, and the replies fill with people eager to announce that real designers would never use it. Somebody names another platform. Somebody says that platform is terrible too. Somebody arrives to recommend the tool they have an affiliate code for. Eventually, what began as a question about building a website becomes another internet competition over who can perform the most expertise with the least context.
Other times, the question is sincere.
Somebody has opened the editor and realized that “build a website” is one of those phrases that sounds like a single action until you try to do it.
Then the phrase unfolds.
Domain.
Hosting.
Navigation.
Mobile layout.
Accessibility.
SEO.
Image compression.
Alt text.
Metadata.
Forms.
Email.
Stores.
Payments.
Automations.
Search engines.
Analytics.
Whatever the red notification in the corner is trying to warn you about today.
I understand why people ask.
I am not a web designer.
I am, however, somebody who has built a relationship with Wix for nearly ten years.
The domain record for bespokecurry.com begins on October 16, 2016. That does not necessarily mark the first moment I touched Wix. I could have been building beneath a free Wix address before connecting the domain (I was). But it gives me one firm coordinate: by next month, BespokeCurry will have spent a documented decade inside this platform.
Not fifteen years.
Not twenty.
Ten.
Ten years is long enough for an application to become an atmosphere.
Everybody Said I Needed a Website
Ten years inside Wix, autistic interface learning, and the glitch of leaving an ecosphere you already know
The website began as performance.
Everybody said I needed one.
You need a website.
You need somewhere to send people.
You need to look professional.
You need proof that your work exists beyond social media.
So I got a website.
Having a website and understanding a website are not the same practice.
Initially, I understood the visible layer. I could choose colors. Move images. Add pages. Write copy. Arrange the work into something that resembled a digital home.
I knew SEO existed. I knew a website needed to be searchable. I knew there were structures beneath the design.
I did not understand their depth.
I did not yet understand that a page title and an SEO title could communicate with different audiences. I did not understand how a URL slug carried history. I did not understand what happened when an image was too large, when a link changed, when a page disappeared, or when a platform decided to rename a feature and move it into a different menu.
I had a website because artists were supposed to have websites.
The performance came before the relationship.
That does not make the beginning false. Sometimes performance is how we enter a practice before we possess the language to understand what we are doing. Sometimes we build the door before we know what kind of world is trying to move through it.
The problem arrives when we never move beyond the door.
My Autistic Brain Learns an Atmosphere
I do not primarily learn a system by reading its instructions once.
I learn physically.
I learn visually.
I learn by entering an environment, moving through it, touching what can be touched, and noticing what changes.
At first, I may understand only the surface. But as the relationship deepens, my eyes open to more of the application. A menu that once looked like a collection of unrelated choices begins to reveal an internal logic. A setting I passed for years suddenly connects to something I learned on another page. The same tool becomes more visible because I am no longer the same person looking at it.
This is not linear mastery.
I return.
I retrieve.
I reconnect.
I move backward because something I learned later has changed what I can recognize in the place I visited before.
I repeat the same action until repetition becomes relationship.
The website teaches through accumulated contact.
For most of those ten years, I was not inside Wix every day. The site existed, but my relationship with it moved according to capacity, projects, money, survival, and what I understood the website to be for.
Over the last two years, that changed.
I have been inside this website almost every day.
That is a lot for me.
It is also how Bespokecurry stopped being a website and became the Cosmos.
Daily contact showed me what the occasional visit could not. The more I built, the more Wix revealed. The more the Cosmos expanded, the more questions I learned how to ask. The more questions I could ask, the more of the infrastructure became visible.
This is what mastery looks like in my body.
Not immediate fluency.
Not domination.
Relationship deepening until the environment becomes legible.
Before Everything Was Called AI
I was using Wix before Wix Studio.
Wix dates the introduction of its Artificial Design Intelligence system to 2016—the same year the BespokeCurry domain was registered. Wix Studio did not arrive until August 2023, marketed specifically toward agencies, freelancers, enterprises, teams, and people producing advanced websites at scale.
I remember the distance between those moments.
I remember interacting with an assistant before every form of automated help was loudly branded as AI. I remember when the messages felt less like a system operating independently and more like prompts waiting for me to explain what I needed.
I was not pretending to be an AI operator.
I was teaching the system how I needed it to operate.
That distinction matters.
The system may have offered the available choices, but I still had to create the pathway. I had to ask the question, interpret the response, recognize what it misunderstood, rephrase the request, test the result, and return with more information.
The system was not simply teaching me.
I was teaching it how to be useful in relationship with me.
That labor disappears when a company announces that its technology has become intelligent. The intelligence appears to belong entirely to the product. The years of human correction, adaptation, experimentation, and translation are treated as background noise.
But I remember the messages.
I remember teaching the interface what I was trying to build before the interface had language expansive enough to hold it.
The Red Light Is Not Necessarily a Fire
This morning, Wix told me there was an SEO issue.
Last year this would have sent me into panic.
The published title of an essay included a Cosmos symbol. The SEO title contained the same words without the decorative symbol.
Nothing was broken.
The essay could still be published.
The page could still be indexed.
Search engines could still understand the title.
Wix simply had a preferred rule that my editorial decision did not follow exactly.
But that is not how the interface communicates.
The interface says issue.
The indicator changes color.
The task remains incomplete.
Something has not been corrected.
A neurotypical user with more technical experience may interpret that as a recommendation. They may understand that automated checkers gather structural errors, optional improvements, stylistic preferences, and generic best practices beneath the same warning language.
My autistic and OCD brain does not automatically receive it that way.
My brain reads:
Something is wrong with the blog.
The post may not work.
Search engines may not find it.
You missed an important instruction.
Correct this before moving forward.
The problem is not that my brain has failed to understand clear communication. The communication is not clear.
The interface has collapsed several levels of consequence into the same visual signal. A suggestion looks like a malfunction. An optimization preference looks like a publishing error. A choice that falls outside the platform’s standard language looks like something the user has done incorrectly.
Then I am left to investigate which kind of “issue” the issue actually is.
That is not accessible design.
Accessibility cannot only mean that a button can be reached with a keyboard or that an image can hold alt text. Accessibility also lives in whether a system communicates severity accurately. It lives in whether the interface tells the user what has happened, what the consequence will be, and whether action is required.
Red cannot mean everything from “search engines cannot access this page” to “we would have arranged these words differently.”
Those are not the same fire.
The Help Center Assumes a Body
I have found very little help inside Wix’s community and educational infrastructure that accounts for how my brain learns.
The information may technically exist.
That does not mean it has been made accessible.
Help articles often assume that the person reading already knows the correct terminology for the problem. You need to know what Wix calls the feature before you can search for the instructions explaining the feature. If your question begins in the body—Why is this red? Why did this move? Why did the mobile page suddenly change?—you first have to translate the experience into the platform’s preferred technical language.
The instructions may tell you where to click.
They do not necessarily tell you what the choice means.
They do not explain which warnings are structural, which are optional, and which exist because Wix has imagined one standardized user moving through the platform.
The help system is neurotypically organized because it expects categorization before exploration.
It is also colonially and capitalistically organized.
The imagined user is often a company.
A team.
An agency.
A business with departments.
Somebody who can assign SEO to one person, email infrastructure to another, design to another, accessibility to another, and accounting to somebody who knows why the invoice changed.
I am one person running this entire website.
I am the writer.
The editor.
The art director.
The archivist.
The photographer.
The accessibility department.
The SEO department.
The store manager.
The person resizing the image.
The person writing the alt text.
The person trying to understand why a warning appeared.
The person who has to stop creating in order to call customer service and discover that setting up a personal email requires another process, another product, or another payment I did not realize I needed.
The scam is not always that the information is unavailable.
Sometimes the scam is that the system is divided into so many separately named needs that you do not know which question will reveal the next charge.
Fake It Till You Make It Cannot Build an Ecosphere
Colonial Wildfire says fake it till you make it.
Move quickly.
Appear professional.
Use the template.
Perform mastery.
Do not let anybody see the gaps.
There is only so far that performance can take you in website development.
You can fake the appearance of a finished page.
You cannot fake an internal link.
You cannot fake whether the mobile layout works.
You cannot fake whether a customer can complete checkout.
You cannot fake whether the archive can be searched.
You cannot fake whether a disabled person can understand the image.
You cannot fake whether the infrastructure holds once the website has to become more than a digital business card.
Eventually, somebody has to know how the system works.
I want to be honest about the knowledge I brought with me. My graduate thesis was about technology and the arts. I have always been interested in the tech(know)logical side of tings. I am curious about how systems are built, how tools communicate, and how artistic practices move through changing technologies.
My ability to understand Wix may not reflect how every independent artist would move through the same application.
But interest did not create instant fluency.
Curiosity gave me a reason to return.
Mycelial Sankofa created the method.
I kept revisiting what I thought I understood. Each new branch changed how I saw the network. A store taught me something about images. An image taught me something about page speed. A blog post taught me something about SEO. SEO taught me something about titles. Titles taught me something about accessibility. Accessibility showed me that the system’s definition of error had never accounted for the body receiving it.
Nothing I learned stayed in one location.
That is how a website became an ecosphere.
Chile, I Can See the Gaps
Colonial Wildfire says fake it till you make it.
Move quickly.
Appear professional.
Use the template.
Perform mastery.
Do not let anybody see the gaps.
Chile.
When I tell you I can see the gaps in a Wix website.
Not every gap. I am not hovering over the internet with divine access to everybody’s backend.
I recognize certain gaps because I remember them from my own website.
I remember what Bespokecurry looked like before I committed to learning what the infrastructure could actually do. I had already been on Wix for seven or eight years when I finally had to ask myself:
Okay, bro. You have been here all this time. What are you going to do?
Having the website was no longer enough.
I had to build a relationship with it.
That commitment cost money.
It cost time.
It cost body hours.
It cost years of returning to pages that had already been published and realizing that the writing was present but the infrastructure around the writing had not caught up.
That cost continues now while I wait for people to recognize the fullness of what exists here. The Cosmos has required a depth of labor that has not yet been matched by its material support, circulation, or the number of people willing to move beyond the surface long enough to understand what has actually been built.
But the infrastructure exists.
And once you learn how to see infrastructure, the performance of infrastructure becomes easier to recognize.
Most of the websites I encounter belong to Black people because that is where I spend most of my time. I land on websites announcing community, excellence, liberation, education, accessibility, and cultural transformation.
Then I move beneath the front page.
The contact list has never been organized.
The site is collecting information nobody knows how to use.
The business is still operating entirely through a personal Gmail address while its own domain sits available.
The email domain has not been authenticated, so the infrastructure cannot reliably verify that the message actually came from the person or organization claiming to send it.
A Google Form opens in another window even though the Wix account already includes the ability to build forms, collect submissions, create contacts, and hold that information inside the same system.
The website says community.
The backend has no infrastructure for receiving one.
How, Sway?
Using Gmail is not a moral failure.
Using a Google Form is not evidence that somebody does not care.
The discrepancy appears when an entity performs technological depth, Black excellence, community care, or institutional readiness while remaining unaware of the systems it already has access to—or while treating the website as an image instead of an operational environment.
Some people genuinely do not know.
Wix does not make this knowledge easy to find. Its help system expects users to know the name of the tool before searching for the tool. It presents functions as separate products instead of showing how forms, contacts, email, automations, DNS records, and communication infrastructure move through one another.
You cannot use a resource you do not know you possess.
You cannot research a question you do not yet have the language to ask.
But there is another gap too.
Sometimes the performance has already been rewarded so thoroughly that nobody feels required to understand the infrastructure underneath it. The front page looks good. The organization has the correct language. The funding arrived. The bio says visionary. The audience sees Black faces and the word community and assumes the structure beneath them must be sound.
The website becomes another place where Black excellence is asked to perform completion.
The front end says we have arrived.
The backend is still waiting for somebody to learn how the form works.
I can see that because I have been that person.
I have published the page before understanding what held it up.
I have known the language before knowing the system.
I have mistaken the presence of the website for proof that the website was functioning as an ecosystem.
Seeing the gaps is not about standing above anybody.
It is what happens when you have spent enough time repairing your own infrastructure that your eyes begin recognizing where other structures are under strain.
Ten Years Is Not Finished
I want to be clear that I am not done.
Tech(no)logy is moving too quickly for done to remain a meaningful destination.
Wix changes.
Search engines change.
Accessibility standards change.
The tools change names, move into different menus, disappear, return, become automated, and reintroduce themselves as innovations even when some earlier version of the function already existed.
The Cosmos changes too.
I am still only about halfway through the website’s SEO.
I know what needs to be done. Much of the copy already exists. That does not make the implementation quick. Every page requires attention. Every title, description, image, link, and relationship has to be placed where the system can recognize it.
The work is tedious.
It takes time.
And SEO is not the only living body inside the Cosmos asking for care.
I still have essays to write.
Images to build.
Archives to tend.
Portals to connect.
Food to cook.
A body to move.
A life to live beyond the editor.
I cannot abandon every other part of the Cosmos until the website reaches some imaginary state of technical completion. That would reproduce the same colonial logic I am trying to resist: conquer one terrain completely before allowing myself to move anywhere else.
The website is not unfinished because I have failed to master it.
It is unfinished because it is alive.
They say it takes ten years to reach mastery.
The BespokeCurry domain turns ten in October.
But we are not trying to master anything over here.
Mastery too easily becomes another word for standing above the terrain and declaring that it has nothing left to teach you.
I am in deep relationship now.
That is different.
Deep relationship does not mean I know everything.
It means I know how to return.
I know what questions have become available.
I know which gaps are structural and which ones are simply evidence that the ecology is still growing.
I know the difference between a red notification and a fire.
And I know enough about this atmosphere to understand that leaving it will eventually require more than picking a supposedly better platform.
Ten years did not finish the website.
Ten years taught me how to remain in relationship with what it keeps becoming.
Knowing an Atmosphere Is Not the Same as Endorsing It
If I had known then what I know now, I might have chosen a platform built with independent artists and single-person ecosystems more clearly in mind.
Maybe.
That “maybe” matters.
I would have needed to know what to research before I had enough experience to know that those questions existed. I could have spent weeks comparing platforms and still missed the information that only becomes visible once an actual body tries to build an actual world inside one of them.
There is no platform floating outside capitalism.
There is no neutral corporate tool waiting to rescue me from every compromised choice.
These platforms are owned and controlled by people and entities exercising political and economic power in the world. Moving from one to another is not a simple journey from bad to good. That is binary foolishness pretending to be technological discernment.
I am not going to flatten a decade of embodied knowledge into “Wix bad” because somebody on Threads wants an answer that fits inside a bait post.
Wix is frustrating as hell.
I also know the atmosphere.
I know where tings live.
I know how pages behave.
I know which warning probably matters.
I know when the editor is being dramatic.
I know how the desktop and mobile versions argue.
I know how the blog, store, archive, images, links, metadata, and visual language have been assembled.
That knowledge is infrastructure.
It is not devotion.
It is not loyalty.
It is not an endorsement of Wix as an ethical company or an accessible platform.
It is the recognition that I have spent ten years building a nervous-system relationship with this environment.
My autistic body cannot pretend that changing platforms would mean only moving files.
Leaving Would Require Building Another Ecosphere
I may eventually leave Wix.
I probably will.
But leaving will require more than exporting content and selecting a new template.
The Cosmos is not a folder of text.
It is navigation.
Internal links.
Image relationships.
Alt text.
Archives.
Stores.
Portals.
Search language.
Page rhythms.
Mobile arrangements.
Muscle memory.
It is knowing where to look when something shifts.
It is knowing how to enter the editor without spending the first hour locating the ground.
Moving the Cosmos would require building a new ecosphere while the current ecosphere remains alive.
I have a better foundation now. It would not take another ten years to understand the basic architecture. The knowledge I have built is portable even when the platform is not.
But the switch would still be a glitch in the system.
A real one.
Not the red notification beside an SEO title.
A transition requiring time, money, mapping, regulation, repetition, and enough capacity to remain in relationship with two digital environments while one world is being carried into another.
I refuse to turn that labor into a purity performance.
Staying is not proof that Wix is good.
Leaving would not prove that I am free.
The question is not: Is Wix good or bad?
The question is: What relationship have you already built with the environment, what does that relationship cost, what knowledge does your body carry inside it, and what would be required to move without abandoning the world you built there?
I know this atmosphere well now.
I know its weather.
I know where the warnings gather.
I know which fires are real.
And when I eventually move, I will not be starting from zero.
Mycelial Sankofa has already made sure of that.
✺ The Website Kept Asking Me to Know What It Wouldn’t Teach
Cosmos Watershed
This essay begins with Wix bait posts asking whether the platform is good or bad and moves into a ten-year relationship that refuses the binary. The Watershed traces how an autistic artist learns technology through physical, visual, and repeated contact; how corporate interfaces disguise recommendations as errors; how Black excellence can become visible performance without supporting infrastructure; and why leaving a familiar platform requires the construction of an entirely new ecosphere.
Cosmos Watershed
Watershed | Tributaries |
Watershed | Still Water moving through Flowing, Deep, Turbulent, and Tidal Water toward Sacred Water |
Relationship | An autistic artist in long-term relationship with a corporate digital platform that is neither neutral nor easily abandoned |
Hom(e)ie | The earlier BespokeCurry website—the imperfect digital body that kept teaching the present Cosmos how to become |
Origin | Bait and sincere questions on Threads asking whether Wix is good, bad, usable, professional, or worth leaving |
Expansion | The October 2016 domain registration; Wix before Studio; early automated assistance; daily website work over the last two years; SEO warnings; contact infrastructure; forms; email authentication; DNS; Black websites; platform migration |
Application | Distinguishing technological relationship from endorsement, automated recommendations from actual errors, visible branding from operational infrastructure, and platform migration from purity performance |
Lineage | Autistic embodied learning; graduate study in technology and the arts; Black independent digital making; Mycelial Sankofa; the self-built website as archive, interface, and living creative system |
Counter Currents | Colonial Wildfire; fake-it-until-you-make-it performance; technological elitism; inaccessible help systems; corporate extraction; binary platform discourse; Black excellence without supporting infrastructure; mastery as domination |
Cosmos Coordinates
Coordinate | Entry |
Cosmos | The Wata(ring) W(hole) |
Tings Index | I Know Tings |
Connected Tings | Trans Learn Tings; Glitch N 2 U; Mycelial Sankofa |
Planetary body | Saturn |
Planet of origin | Uranus |
Primary Water | Deep Water |
Secondary Waters | Turbulent Water and Tidal Water |
Movement | Integration |
Primary portal | Interface |
Primary technology | Relational pattern recognition |
Methodological practice | Mycelial Sankofa |
Cosmos concepts | Colonial Wildfire; Glitch; tech(know)logy; living infrastructure; the Cosmos as ecosphere |
Body portals | Eyes, hands, autistic nervous system, pattern recognition, muscle memory |
Material portals | Wix Editor, SEO fields, forms, contacts, email, DNS, images, links, mobile layouts, warnings |
Geographic coordinate | A self-built Black digital world operating through corporate internet infrastructure |
Relational coordinate | Kiing ↔ Wix ↔ the BespokeCurry Cosmos ↔ Black digital communities ↔ the people attempting to enter the work |
Temporal coordinate | October 16, 2016 through September 2026 |
Cosmological function | Makes the invisible labor and embodied knowledge beneath a self-built website visible |
Core inquiry | What does an autistic body know after living inside a digital platform long enough for its surface to reveal the infrastructure beneath it? |
Threshold | From website as professional performance to website as living ecosphere |
Black ecological orientation | Black digital presence requires infrastructure capable of receiving, holding, and circulating the community it claims to serve |
Calabash relationship | The website is a vessel, but the vessel does not become an ecosystem merely because work has been placed inside it |
Wata(ring) W(hole) relationship | The website is the primary digital environment through which essays, images, archives, offerings, language, and portals move into relation |
Return practice | Reentering the editor, revisiting published pages, updating SEO, reconnecting links, and allowing later knowledge to change earlier structures |
Orientation | Knowing an atmosphere is not the same as endorsing it |
Core refrain | Familiarity is infrastructure, even when the platform is not home |
Expansion principle | Ten years did not finish the website. Ten years taught me how to remain in relationship with what it keeps becoming. |
Cosmos Constellations
Constellation | How it enters the essay | What it makes visible |
Mycelial Sankofa | Knowledge develops by returning to pages, tools, questions, and systems after later experience changes what can be perceived. | Technological learning is recursive and relational rather than linear. |
Colonial Wildfire | “Fake it till you make it” privileges speed, appearance, completion, and performed mastery. | A website can perform completion while its infrastructure remains unable to hold weight. |
Glitch N 2 U | Wix warnings, inaccessible labels, moving features, and platform changes expose how the system expects users to interpret it. | The misfire reveals the assumptions built into the interface. |
You Are the Tech(know)logy | Kiing’s eyes, hands, nervous system, memory, and pattern recognition teach the application how it must become useful. | Intelligence does not belong entirely to the tool; the body remains signal, processor, and output. |
Accessibility as relationship | Automated recommendations are presented with the same urgency as structural failures. | Accessibility includes clearly communicating severity, consequence, and whether action is required. |
Black excellence and infrastructure | Black websites may visually perform community, expertise, and depth while forms, contacts, email, authentication, and communication systems remain disconnected. | The front end can announce community while the backend remains unable to receive one. |
The living archive | Published essays, images, SEO, portals, stores, and internal links require continuing maintenance. | An archive remains alive only through attention, return, and circulation. |
Mastery versus deep relationship | The domain approaches ten years while the Cosmos remains unfinished and technologically alive. | Relationship allows the terrain to keep teaching; mastery declares that nothing remains to learn. |
Platform migration | Leaving Wix would require transferring structures, relationships, muscle memory, and accumulated knowledge—not only files. | A platform switch is an ecological transition, not a purity gesture. |
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