Come To Me For Stories, Not Self-Help
Since 17, I've been living like I'm running out of time. I can show you what that looks like...but I have no more advice to give.
Is it just me or is the internet overflowing with self-help experts lately?
I’m guilty of it.
I wrote my first blog at only 17 to chronicle my time in chemo so my dad, brothers, and friends could keep up. The blog was built for me by an actual developer. Yes, it was that long ago. Wordpress didn’t even exist. I had to email her my posts and pictures, and she’d put them up for me.
My next blog was an interview series I started in Seattle, at the behest of my boss and mentor, a swimwear designer for whom I did PR. The series was discovered by the Editor in Chief of The Seattle Times (a regular at the coffee shop I worked at). He offered me a syndicate spot in which the paper published my articles every week in their Lifestyle section, becoming their only designer fashion coverage at the time. It also won Blog of the Year at Metropolitan Fashion Week.
Later, in my mid-20’s while living in New York, I started a self-help blog for women after cancer. But I found quickly that my readers weren’t just women, nor just survivors of cancer.
They were people from all over the world, asking all the same questions I was post-trauma:
Do I matter?
Is there a reason I was born? That I’m still alive?
Am I meant to accomplish something before I die? If so, what?
Does some higher force know me? See me? Care about me?
Is there purpose to all this struggle?
Big, existential questions.
Divorcees, people who had lost their jobs, or lost their loved ones. Survivors of more than just cancer: abuse, betrayal, more pains. They found the site, and wrote me the most beautiful letters when a post would resonate with them. The site was found by Huffington Post and I became a contributor to their Third Metric section, a personnel development corner of the Post.
My momentum unraveled when I moved back to Los Angeles just before turning 30. I fell into a deep depression, so heavy my own self-help articles did nothing to soothe the dark cave I was living in. I wasn’t able to take my own advice, from my own site. For that, and other personal reasons, I disbanded the blog. That was about six years ago.
Today, I find the internet is absolutely covered, totally dripping, completely saturated with self-help blogs, Substacks, instagrams, tik toks. Don’t get me wrong, I’m following them all, I’m taking all the advice and doing all the work. But after writing that kind of content myself (IE: 6 Statements More Empowering Than ‘It’s Not Fair’) I can honestly say:
I don’t have the answers for you.
But I’m asking the right questions.
So this Substack will no longer have any self-help advice. For now, my right-question is: am I interesting enough, worthy enough, to be my own subject? Does writing about myself make me selfish or self-centered? (And if so, can I get over it?) Does being a cancer survivor and person who had to start womanhood from scratch - with no hair and no connection to her body - make me deserving of telling my story? Can I overcome my fear of being seen?
Can the way I live:
in full knowledge of life’s precious brevity,
help others embrace their own fleeting time more compassionately?
For the first time, I’m not sharing someone else’s story through interviews, or the world news as a journalist like I once was early in my career. Nor am I building a beautiful world of language to tell the story of a major fashion brand, like I’ve done as a copywriter for ten years.
This is just an unfiltered place; I rarely even edit before I post. I’m sharing my life, my story, my questions. Sometimes I don’t even find the answers.
And that’s ok. Often, that’s the magic of it all.