I noticed it last year, when I’d started publishing here.

At first, it struck me as nothing more than profoundly amusing. A funny little observation.

Here was Substack — a platform built for writers and writing itself — with its own text editor insisting that “Substack” was a misspelling. A not-real word.

Every time I typed it, the name appeared with a red squiggly line underneath it, as though the platform itself wasn’t entirely convinced it really existed.

“Somebody tell Substack they’re a real boy!” I’d written with a bemused chuckle in one of my documents, the sort that catches stray thoughts before they’re spirited away by distraction and a growingly unreliable memory.

I forgot about it anyway.

Or rather, I forgot until I didn’t.

Every time I return to the editor to publish something that mentions Substack, there it is again, the red squiggly.

“Substack” is correct. Yet Substack’s editor says it is not.

Who do we believe?

I nearly let it go again when I saw it recently, but something in my temperament must’ve changed that day. Maybe it was the particular gloom of the clouds that morning, or the fact that I took my vitamins before I drank my coffee instead of the other way around.

In any case, after a while, certain observations refuse to stay small. This one in particular became bigger and more bizarre the moment I started to chase it with the seriousness of a detective investigating a murder.

After all, there are questions. Inconsistencies.

It’s not as if Substack is the new kid on the block anymore. The platform is, by my calculations, eight years old. Not old-old, certainly, but old enough that one might reasonably expect it to recognize its own name. The fact that it failed to do so made me curious:

If Substack’s own text editor puts Substack under suspicion, presumably because it thinks we mean to write something else, how would it respond to other startups and company names?

So I typed some out. One by one.

A mixture of older and younger companies, big and small.

Google. Microsoft. Claude. All the way to WriteSonic.

All of these names, none attached to a red squiggly.

All of these names, deemed correct.

Here stood Substack, inexplicably alone, painted red with the equivalent of a giant question mark.

Not even HBO, a company that has reincarnated more times than anyone asked for, is that unsure of itself. Then there are companies like Claude, DeepSeek, and Meshy AI that have been born only in the last few years — and even they have somehow been admitted into the pantheon of Acceptable Words by the editor.

I could understand the impulse to check the spelling against the actual site in case there was an overlooked hyphen or some deliberately butchered spelling, but I assure you that Substack is “Substack.”

For whatever reason, “Substack” seems particularly controversial — on its very own platform!

I wonder what the red squiggly is indicating. Perhaps it’s asking, with a sincerity that comes with genuinely trying to be helpful:

Did you mean “substance”? Did you mean “subpar”? Perhaps simply “stack”?

Surely, someone would know.

Surely, the answer would lie in Substack itself.

“How can I help you with Substack today?” Substack’s chatbot asks.

Oh, Mr. Chatbot. I’m afraid this is no ordinary customer support inquiry.

I carefully lay out the facts of the case: “Substack,” misspelled; on Substack’s own editor; many other company names, fine. I crack my knuckles and wait, my anticipation of its response beginning to match my imagination’s gumption.

I imagine the chatbot letting out the machine equivalent of a gasp, then sounding the alarm at Substack headquarters, prompting all engineers to immediately abandon their posts and march single-file into a conference room, faces grim.

“My god,” one mutters in a gravelly voice, “Substack doesn’t recognize Substack.”

Eyes widen, murmurs erupt, an intern faints, and before long the matter is escalated all the way to the top, where one executive slams a big red panic button and the entire website simply implodes.

“Thanks for bringing this to our attention,” it replies with all the concern of a bored high school kid working a summer job. “The issue is not with Substack.”

It goes on to explain that the issue resides elsewhere: in my browser settings, my browser itself, or my own device.

Wait.

Only me?

No one else sees the squiggly?

I’ve spent the better part of a year observing a phenomenon that, according to one source, was never even a thing?

Unlike the spellchecker, the chatbot seemed so sanguine, so certain. I had to make sure I wasn’t being gaslit by a machine.

Firefox. Safari. Chrome. iPhones. Androids. MacBooks. PCs. Different accounts.

I verify “Substack” across all these, and sure enough, the squiggly squiggles on.

“Would you like me to help you file a bug report?” it asks just as coolly and unperturbed, only now convinced that there is a problem at all.

You smug son of a…

But I couldn’t be bothered with it, as my mind is elsewhere now.

Because if the problem isn’t unique to me, and Substack itself is insisting that the problem originates elsewhere, then who exactly is accusing Substack of not being Substack?

More importantly, why?

Has nobody informed this unseen authority that the platform is eight years old (almost nine!)?

Do they know about the tens of millions of users?

Its “unicorn” status?

The hundreds of millions of dollars?

The best-selling authors? The renowned publications? The writers who have built entire careers here?

By all observable measures of reality, Substack is indeed a real boy!

Perhaps more bewildering still:

Why am I becoming increasingly concerned on behalf of a billion-dollar platform that most definitely has more important things to address?

At this point I begin to suspect that I am not really thinking about the spellchecker anymore.

No.

We’ve long since left the atmosphere, apparently.

Some time over the course of this investigation, the red squiggly no longer struck me as simply amusing. Sometimes when you stare at something long enough, you eventually stop seeing what’s there and start seeing something else. Clouds are only floating droplets of water until they become dinosaurs. A Rorschach test is only ink until someone sees Elvis.

And “Substack” is only a misspelling until even that falls away and in its place something unexpected emerges.

A mirror.

Substack? Are you sure you don’t mean “substantial”? Or “haystack”?

As if this platform has somehow been infected with the same tendency toward self-doubt as the people who use it.

Always hoping to be understood. Frequently wondering if they’re a fraud.

Despite all that they do and have done.

It’s difficult not to notice the resemblance.

To us.

Writers.

Are we not constantly accompanied by our own metaphorical red squigglies?

The writer with less than 100 subscribers.

The writer who quit a respectable career to bet on their passion.

The writer with thousands of words languishing in Apple Notes.

A whole ecosystem of people who live up to their title every day probably being asked the same question the editor seems to be asking about Substack:

Writer?

Are you sure you don’t mean “doctor”? Or “engineer”? Or perhaps “paleobotanist”?

As if being a writer meant moving through the world like a sleepwalker, unconscious of the more sensible alternatives, and sooner or later one might finally wake up and come to one’s senses.

Some version of this question has followed me all my life. Before the internet, before I was old enough to even understand what it meant. Perhaps that’s why this red squiggly stood out to me.

As I’ve gotten older, the question comes up a lot less, though when it does, the words themselves change (of course they do). And every now and then it returns with the uncanny familiarity of a song you might not have heard in years.

“Wow, following your passion is so brave.”

“Oh, you’re still doing that?”

“Maybe have a backup plan.”

It takes only the first few notes before I know exactly how the chorus goes:

Writer? Are you sure?

Because what I know of the word “writer” is what I know of secrets. It is no secret that I am a writer, yet the word has never sat comfortably in my mouth. Looking back through my career, I’ve caught myself performing little acts of linguistic origami around the word “writer.”

Instead of writer, I’ve called myself a journalist.

Instead of writer, I’ve called myself a media strategist.

A columnist. A newsletter operator.

An essayist.

Hell, a professional overthinker.

Anything, apparently, but writer.

As though the plainness of the word by itself carries too much pretension. Too much vulnerability. Too much possibility of it being misunderstood.

Too...naked.

All those other ways to call myself a writer, at least, say something that “writer” doesn’t.

A journalist suggests that the writing itself matters.

An essayist makes the writing sound elevated, literary.

A media strategist conveys Serious Business.

A professional overthinker breaks the ice.

Each word a better disguise, each a better container that carried with it an importance I feared “writer” by itself lacked. But now, I recognize them all for what they really are.

Armor.

And might I add that there’s something deliciously ironic about all this.

Ironic because, for the better part of a decade, I helped other writers with far more subscribers — many with books too — present themselves to the world with the proper adornments attached to their name:

“Best-selling author”

“As seen in...”

“Trusted by...”

“Read by millions”

“New York Times best-seller”

It never occurred to me to question whether those adornments were what made them writers.

Nor, for that matter, did I ever think to ask my doctor to show me his New York Times best-seller. Or my engineer friend to prove that she was indeed trusted by millions.

No.

That level of scrutiny was reserved almost exclusively for me.

Did you mean “content creator”? Or “storyteller”? Or “purveyor of prose and narrative structure”?

It’s unsettling to admit now that I may have inadvertently spent my entire career putting a red squiggly under my own name.

And then proceeded to collect evidence from readers, publishers, clients, and ghosts, acting as though if I collected enough of it an imaginary tribunal of Very Serious Persons would descend from the heavens and settle the matter once and for all.

And then, the red squiggly under my name could finally go.

Who do we believe?

Thinking more deeply about it now, I don’t think this fear I have is about talent. Or originality. Or even accomplishments.

Rather, a fear that I have made a terrible mistake leaving a respectable business to fully embrace what I’ve always loved.

That I am the only one who thinks this is all worth it.

That this magnificent compulsion to arrange words and spend years doing it is regarded as nothing more than a “little passion project.”

The closest word I have for this is legitimacy.

At least, that’s the word I keep returning to.

Because I have this idea stuck in my head that this vocation of mine only counts once I get to tell people “I’m a best-selling author” or “I have a very popular newsletter.” For without the armor or adornments, I fear the whole thing looks like foolishness.

For without armor, without adornments, “writer” is all I have left.

Not long ago, at a friend’s 40th birthday party, I heard it again, that song. Enough time had passed, I suppose, for me to think I’d stopped listening for it. Then someone, presumably making small talk, asked:

“So what do you do?”

Here we go.

“Oh, I’m a writer. I write about personal experiences and things I find fascinating.”

“Cool, like books?”

“No, not quite, they’re essays on a platform called Substack.”

“Oh, Sub—what? I haven’t heard of it... Well, that’s cool.”

Well, that’s cool.

There it was again.

Not the question, not the harmless banality of the conversation. I mean the reflex. The feeling that the word “writer” somehow changed meaning as soon as it left my mouth. Into neither a profession nor a confession.

But an apology.

Nobody had asked for one, and here it was anyway.

Sorry if I’m afraid to sound like yet another overcaffeinated creative who’s posted up in coffee shops around Los Angeles, indiscriminately unloading their finger guns on innocents, still working on the same screenplay for the last six years.

Sorry if I get overly enthusiastic about ideas that don’t exist yet, floating half-formed, because I’m still working them out too.

Sorry if this all sounds like I am just unemployed.

Sorry if I’m the only one who believes this is heading somewhere.

I’m not apologizing merely because I’m sorry.

I’m apologizing because apologizing pays.

Apologizing becomes the price for remaining what I am.

A writer.

Words are funny things.

At some point, enough people use a combination of sounds often enough until the rest of us collectively agree that, yes, this precise arrangement of letters seems real. Then, lagging behind the culture, institutions like dictionaries eventually catch up.

The Oxford English Dictionary added “rizz” in 2023, years after the word had already left everyone over the age of 30 thoroughly stupefied. Merriam-Webster added “doomscroll” in 2025, despite the rest of us having already spent the past decade perfecting the art.

Institutions record the verdict. They do not render it.

That, I later learned, is how Substack’s own spellchecker actually works — assembled piecemeal and added to by everyday users. Substack appears to leave the decision of which words to legitimize up to us, then expects us to manually add those words to our browser’s or built-in device’s dictionary (not everyone does this, apparently).

Recognition, then, doesn’t make something legitimate. It merely catches up to reality.

And if that’s true, then...

Have I spent all this time waiting for someone else to recognize the legitimacy of what I have devoted my life to?

Have I outsourced this verdict of legitimacy to others the same way Substack has?

Who decides that the red squiggly line under my name can finally go anyway?

People have read my work, publications have commissioned me, clients have paid, other writers have lent their trust. I wake up and write, and I have been doing some version of that combination for the last 25 years.

In every observable sense, reality has rung all the bells it can find and shouted, “Stephanie, ya Allah, you’re a legitimate writer!”

And still, against all logic, against the torrent of evidence, I ask in the way only an obstinate squiggly can ask:

Writer? Are you sure?

If the problem were simply recognition, I already have a rather persuasive case in front of me.

No. This feels closer to waiting.

Waiting to be allowed.

For what exactly?

Certainly not to write. That’s clearly already happened.

Then what?

One thing I’ve noticed over and over from writing in the last year is that I rarely know what’s really buried under decades of fears, hopes, and memories until I begin probing a little sideways, with a seemingly unrelated and an inconsequential-looking shovel. This time, that shovel happened to be a spellchecker.

Many thousands of words and at least half a dozen abandoned drafts later, I’ve excavated recognition, legitimacy, and parts of imposter syndrome — none of them quite the thing I’m looking for.

The trouble is they all resemble one another: A lack of recognition looks a lot like a lack of legitimacy, which can feel indistinguishable from imposter syndrome, which in turn sends me back in search of recognition.

Words surrounded by close approximations.

Kind of like a misspelling.

When I think about the birthday party and all the “What do you do?” conversations I’ve ever had, there seems to be another thing hiding underneath.

Recognition doesn’t quite explain it. Legitimacy comes a hair closer, but not entirely. Imposter syndrome felt tempting — even plausible at first — but that too was a near miss, a desperate grasp at an answer that didn’t quite fit.

Because none of those things really explain the apologizing. Or the reflexive need to reach for armor and adornments.

Or why, even now, I still hesitate.

Something else seems to be buried under all of that.

Something so embarrassingly simple.

The permission to just say it.

To say “writer.”

To say it plainly, nakedly, and unflinchingly, out loud, without feeling like there’s an asterisk next to it.

Or worse, a red squiggly.

Tell me...

Can somebody tell me they won’t look at me with pity for saying I’m a writer?

Can somebody tell me they won’t see “little passion project” where I see “life”?

That the life I’ve chosen can itself count as a serious one.

Without me needing to justify it.

Without me needing to earn the right to believe it.

Without me needing to apologize.

Maybe that’s why I most remember the people who believe in me. For even a moment, however briefly, I could borrow their certainty.

In spite of myself, I still wait.

Substack, meanwhile, is Substack, whether or not its own editor acknowledges the fact.

More importantly, I notice that the red squiggly has not actually prevented me — or anyone for that matter — from writing. Nobody thought to actually wait.

In spite of myself, the writing continues.

Now as I prepare to publish in the Substack editor, red squigglies are splashed all over the place thanks to Substack being mentioned, by my count, 40 times. I still have yet to add the word to my browser’s dictionary.

Oh well.

We have reached a sort of understanding, the red squiggly and I.

I know what to expect. I’ll write “Substack,” and the squiggly will faithfully follow. And uncertain as to what exactly I’m supposed to replace it with, I’ve stopped arguing with it and just let it be.

Neither of us entirely convinced one way or another, yet both of us carrying on as we do.

Writer?

Are you sure?

Nine hundred fifty one Green Street sits in a part of greater Los Angeles that sees most of its out-of-towners only once a year, if that. Full of palm trees, historic buildings, and multi-family bungalows, the area is not far from the mountains and streets that, only a year ago, were devastated by wildfires during a brutal stretch of Santa Ana winds.

There’s nothing of particular note here at 951 Green Street, and that is exactly why I mention it.

The day is cloudy and warmer than previously recorded May temperatures, and I happen to be here at this coffee shop, enjoying my usual — a flat white with oat milk — and trying to reclaim my sense of place after having traveled abroad for the last month.

Everything is as I left it: Large plumes of a bird of paradise plant jut from the same corner where jungle drum & bass booms from a speaker. A man in cargo shorts and flip-flops stands waiting for his drink. The sounds of milk steaming, cups clinking, and life hurrying along, none the wiser about my absence or return.

It’s the familiar hum of a life I’d stopped noticing until I re-entered it. And strangely, one that offers very little in the way of comfort at this moment. Because despite the complete normalcy in front of me, something uneasy hangs in the air: a low, prickly dread that settles in the body before thoughts can assemble.

It may be from the headlines reminding us every day that both progress and awful things are happening. From the way each visit to the grocery store and gas pump shows how little is within any of our control. Or it may simply be that I am worried about what comes next.

An essay.

It had been months since the last, and many months before that one. At this point, the instinct to begin another feels increasingly difficult to separate from a blooming fear that if I stopped writing for too long, I might lose some remaining essential part of myself along with it.

I know this is an ordinary writerly concern, but so are: What the hell do I write about next? What if this idea isn’t any good?

What if I disappeared and no one cared?

And well, here we are.

Of course I have inklings of what this essay could be. Writing, I’ve come to realize, is a bit like playing a game of hot and cold. I’d have a go at it with plenty of false starts and a cursor that blinks for minutes at a time and feel around until things get warmer, colder, warmer again, and...I don’t know.

What I do know is that I always have these inklings. An intuition, if you will, of what something wants to be. Just like I did when I published an essay last year about my reinvention, when I dismantled a life driven by status, validation, achievement, and ambitions that were never mine to begin with — and started all over. Not merely to leave, but to return. To finally make good on the promise to return to writing I made to myself so many years ago.

I described the process in over 5,000 words as “a fight, a long drowning,” and before I even finished the writing, I had already been pulled under.

Specifically, I want to call attention to this quote:

And for the first time in my life, I could no longer say yes to the old gods.

Not because I didn’t want ambition, money, status, or recognition. It was because my creative integrity now demanded it. It demanded that I choose silence over spectacle. To choose intention over desperation. And to choose myself over selling my soul for speed.

Even if there was no guarantee anything would come of it.

It’s easy to see the beginnings of things.

It’s easy because you could romanticize the beginnings — without ever seeing the ending. I can remember with stunning clarity the conviction I felt to begin anew, with a different way of creating than I’d allowed myself before: a reinvention all the same. I imagined long mornings at the keyboard, freed from the old dread and bargaining rituals that had governed my work for years.

I imagined myself waking up one day, long after the adrenaline had worn off, and finally feeling lighter and unburdened by the demands of schedules and my own expectations. So certain I would be that I’d recognize an end once I reached it.

I come to you now a year later — with 55,684 total words published (I tallied the word count) across seven written essays and three video essays — to say that I’ve lost track of an ending. If there ever was one.

I remember walking to a coffee shop on a weekday afternoon. There was no one else to meet that day, nor the day after. Nothing pressing needed to be done, not until the next essay. I got my usual espresso drink and watched the baristas move in a blur, serving customers rushing in and out during their work breaks. And in that moment, while calmly sipping my coffee, I knew that I had reached the mirage.

By now I’ve reinvented myself enough times to know every way of living eventually asks something from you, and I figured that I was resourceful enough, tough enough, to absorb whatever this version of life demanded too.

I now wonder how anyone who has seen reinvention’s true cost would let it be so gilded.

The mornings are longer and lighter, yes, but the reality is much less spectacular, much more unending than I imagined. The old dread has simply changed clothes. The bargaining rituals are still there too, smiling like a wolf. “No pressure,” I tell myself, already knowing that there is pressure.

Each time I hit publish on an essay or video, it carried with it the faint hope that it would be the One, the one to make me feel as though I had crossed an imaginary finish line. That my reinvention was nearing its end, and although I had previously written that I knew there was no such thing, I realize now that I still secretly wished there was. Because then this weird, liminal period could just be the load time before my new life could really begin. Was there anyone ever so wrong?

Yes. Yes, there was.

Whereas back in my old ways, there were deadlines to chase, standards and metrics to meet, and people always waiting on the other side of work. For decades, my life had been built around maximizing forward motion: The next milestone, a higher revenue goal, the best version of myself — each always “over there.”

The old ways offered me something: structure, praise, and measurable progress. It also gave me movement, even if it was sometimes poison.

Most of all, it gave me evidence that a life was being lived.

This way gives me something different entirely:

The ordinary, unspectacular daily ache of weightlessness.

Sometimes I find myself caught between the relief of possibilities and all this spaciousness, and a sudden terror that there’s too much of it.

With nowhere urgent to be and no one expecting anything from me, it often feels as if life has been postponed and I’m just playing house in the meantime. Ambition does not seem to fade from the body as easily as it does from the mind.

The days are filled with me, just me alone and my own plodding rhythm, and lots of periods of waiting. Waiting, mainly for the next piece of work to pour out of my head. Oftentimes that means being on the couch, antsy over how long the waiting will last this time, wondering if the plants need to be watered or if stillness means failure.

Isn’t this the form of freedom so many people imagine wanting? The absence of meetings, bosses, deadlines, revenue targets, growth loops, and demands?

What people mention less often is how these make up the vertebrae that prop up your life and, once they’re gone, how disorienting it becomes when Monday feels undifferentiated from Tuesday or Friday, or even the 1st of June. When time marches on regardless.

This, too, was something I had already written about in an essay on productivity withdrawal. In it, I said:

Time feels different in the stillness of nothing.

No matter how precise the systems for excellence and freedom, time remains untamed. It’s neither chaotic nor kind.

It’s just indifferent.

Whether you’re sprinting or stalling, rising or ebbing, it doesn’t wait. It doesn’t care.

And that… that coldness —

Maybe that’s what I’m still learning to live with.

Yes, maybe that’s it: Learning to live with the coldness of time. Even a year later.

How strange.

It’s not as if there’s anything wrong — and that’s just it: Nothing appears wrong from the outside. Groceries are bought, laundry done. The emails and texts are received and answered (though not necessarily when I get them but eventually), and the work continues until the beginning stops feeling like a beginning at all. The days simply pass, one after another.

I set out at the start of my reinvention to be a writer once again. And I did that, I think. Do 10 pieces of work over a year count?

Whether or not I publish enough might just seem trivial, but of course it’s more than that: A year is 12 months, four quarters, and one Super Bowl — a reasonable amount of time to have made enough of something to point to, should anyone ever ask.

I remember being at a friend’s 40th birthday party, trying to answer the dreaded “what do you do?” question, and finding myself searching for loftier phrasing to replace “Writing for myself on a platform called Substack. Oh, you haven’t heard of it...?” As if I had to justify my work’s existence and therefore my ownership of it. If it could even be possible, I feel less writerly now than I did before committing to it full-time. Don’t the 10 pieces of work so far mean anything?

Each piece of work breaks the blur long enough to feel like I still have a place here. Which, in lieu of the more legible markers of adulthood like a recognizable career or business, has become my new proof of aliveness.

No pressure, yeah?

Perhaps it is the old ghosts of productivity that believe a life must constantly produce visible evidence of itself.

Or perhaps it is the whisper of a buried identity that constantly asks, “Are we there yet?”

Ah, the mere mention of this emotionally familiar question stirs a certain déjà vu from my first video essay on fitness.

This video appears on the surface to be a straightforward “before” and “after” transformation story spanning 10 years. But what looms over the video the entire 44 minutes is this growing disillusionment of believing that life begins after the goal is reached. I reflected:

The goal itself wasn’t the problem.

The habits I built weren’t the problem.

The problem was the belief that things like happiness, confidence, self-worth were all things that were waiting for me at the finish line.

That once you get there, the yearning disappears and the search for the end along with it.

What I’m feeling in this reinvention is the stretch of time where I’ve made my choices and named the thing intellectually, but it’s the body that is burdened by the weight of inhabiting every day without anyone confirming I’m doing it right. Or sheepishly reminding me, “Hey, you’ve seen this problem before.”

Because I have.

My essays — on reinvention, on productivity, on fitness — have mapped these exact psychological patterns. And here I am now, feeling slightly embarrassed to wonder yet again if there’s a new “after” to even reach.

Turns out you have to relearn that lesson every time life changes shape. Funny how that works. Funny how prior knowledge doesn’t save you from yourself.

Re-reading them, the essays now seem stranger, more prophetic. I thought I was writing about reinvention, about productivity, about the body. But it’s become clear to me that I had only understood them partially.

When I wrote that reinvention is “the death of clinging to certainty...and who you thought you were,” I don’t think I understood then how long a death could continue dying.

When I said in my fitness video, “I had already won. It just took me 10 years to realize it,” I don’t think I understood then that I carried the very same fantasy of an invisible destination into this reinvention.

And when I wrote that productivity withdrawal was not from productivity itself, but from “the identity that wrapped itself around the output and the schedules full of doing,” I don’t think I understood then that being productive was not the only thing I was trying to give up.

And what I was trying to give up, and failing to do so, was the need for visible proof that a life — one that was acceptable by modern standards — was truly occurring.

How do you recognize a life?

When can I see my work and understand it to mean “living a life” — and not merely the one I left behind?

I could see now that each essay was less interested in transformation than I once thought. All these essays, this one included, keep returning to the same ideas that dominate my current reality: drift, silence, uncertainty, and the ever-present question of how to live now.

How indeed.

Back then, it was obvious: Do more. Make more. Be more. Achievements defined the edges of a life. The chase was the life, and to stop striving felt alien. What else was there to organize your life around?

In the beginning, I did not understand what this essay would be. I thought it would be about art as an act of endurance. Of returning to the writing chair to struggle, again and again, convinced that I’ve got the excess masochistic tendencies to do so. I thought it would be about the fear that nothing in my life has changed, or that everything has changed.

Nothing and everything can both feel true at once.

Most days do not appear transformed. They are still tied to familiar anchors: coffee walks, errands, notes for future essays buried in documents, workouts, dishes in the sink. A montage so unwatchable, so small in increments that it looks nothing like reinvention.

In fact, for a long while I mistook this for the most terrifying affliction of the modern professional: stagnation. For without the structure, validation, and legibility of the old ways, it’s hard to tell if life is sprinting or stalling, rising or ebbing. I mostly just feel off the map here, in this inglorious period after the beginning, where I’m still expecting to go somewhere, still expecting to become someone.

Without the old ways generating momentum, movement feels different. Less measurable, less obvious.

But then, some time ago, I met an Uber driver who had retired from a 37-year career only eight months prior and told me he was “just doing this for fun.” Told me it was better than “sitting at home and doing nothing.” I cannot imagine the psyche of someone who believes spending an hour just to crawl through nine miles of Los Angeles traffic to be “fun,” but I can imagine that driving all over the city may be his way of reclaiming movement in a life that no longer has it but still craves it.

Perhaps I’m not so different from him. Perhaps we’re both trying to outrun the same daily ache of weightlessness. For him, it’s driving strangers through Los Angeles. For me, it’s writing.

I thought leaving the old ways would be freedom, but instead it often feels like becoming unrecognizable to the systems that once reflected back my existence to me. Writing then is one of the remaining ways I know how to perceive the continuity of a life.

And how to avoid disappearing.

Every essay I’ve put out so far has really been a record-keeping of a different kind of existence — long before I saw what they were. Like ideas circling and waiting until the moment they crossed over from the mind to lived experience. Intellectually, I had understood these ideas. I felt them too as I wrote them. But living them — and continuing to — has required something harder than understanding.

Reinvention was not really about becoming someone new, but grieving the person I thought I needed to be.

Productivity withdrawal was not really about work, but discovering how much of my identity had fused itself to output, usefulness, and proof.

And the fitness essay — despite all its talk of goals and transformation — was really about how the fantasy of the “after” is bottomless.

Now as I write this, looking back at the ordinariness of life, I see what this essay has been waiting to tell me all along:

A different life had already arrived.

So imperceptibly I barely noticed.

Life is already here.

I’ve written essays, made work I’m proud of.

I’ve traveled and attended weddings and baby showers.

I’ve gone through cancer treatment. I’ve (on many attempts) changed my relationship to work and ambition with varying degrees of success.

They all felt like drifting so gradually you only realize much, much later that you’re already so far from shore.

Which is precisely the same lesson I’d learned from my fitness transformation — but I’d forgotten. How one year can become 10, and how you can enter a revolving door one way and come out a whole lot different, with a different body, different fears, different desires, without ever remembering the exact moment the change occurred.

It’s awkward to admit that I couldn’t see, until now, that the reinvention had been happening all along. Just slower, stupider, and far less spectacular than anyone ever cares to admit.

When you no longer have movement, you forget how to recognize a life.

In my mind I was always just passing the time for another week or another month, releasing work enough times until a bigger, grander revelation would hit me.

But all along, life had been moving and shifting and accumulating, with me none the wiser. I only knew to recognize the beginning of a life, but was embarrassingly less skilled at recognizing the long middle part of actually living one.

One where I decide to make coffee at home or go to this same coffee shop playing jungle drum & bass (or do both). A life where I tell myself to write and just see what happens, even if no one expects me to.

Where the work may never justify itself in the ways I once hoped it would, and the change I’ve been looking for all this time is sticking with it despite the frightening possibility that there may be no reward or “after.”

A life can already be happening while you’re still waiting for it to begin.

Freedom, it seems, is really the distance between endings and beginnings.

And that distance is perhaps what I’ve been trying to learn how to recognize this whole time.

Oh hell, not again.

I’m awake before I want to be awake. The room is still nearly dark, save for the piss-yellow light streaming in from the street lamps outside. Beside me, a soft snoring. Glad he doesn’t snore so loud, I said to myself when we first met. But here and now at 3 a.m., that same gratitude has become a grating reminder that sleep is happening elsewhere, without me.

Go back to sleep, I tell the body. It does not listen. Stop thinking, I tell the mind. It doubles down in defiance.

It is never clear when it begins. Only that at some point my thoughts start moving faster than my own consciousness can follow. By the time I catch on, my mind is no longer mine to direct.

It abruptly pulls my mom into focus, reminding me that I haven’t called her in some time.

You don’t need to tell me she’s getting older, I already know. I see the evidence of time passing on her face. “Hah? What you say?” she asks. I repeat myself, a little louder, a little slower.

She often asks me to visit, and I say I will. Of course I will. Months have gone by.

I’m a bad daughter.

Will I remember to call in the morning? Should I email myself a note?

Don’t forget. Don’t forget.

Because that’s what bad daughters do: they forget, and then they keep on forgetting.

This is what you woke me up to tell me? Screw this, I’m going back to sleep.

I close my eyes and imagine I could grip sleep by the throat and drag it back into my body. What happens instead is this: the room, the bed, and snoring dissolve, and I’m back at yesterday’s lunch. Only I’m not in it, not really. I’m watching myself, other-me, as she comments on the restaurant’s interior.

“The cutlery is so heavy!” other-me exclaims in amazement as she balances a butter knife on her palm.

It is during this same lunch with weighty cutlery and overly salted Peruvian-Chinese food that my friend confesses she’s still struggling with her book. Even after a creative writing retreat. Even after several drafts. Months of trying and still...

I know what other-me is about to say before she says it. There’s still time to stop it.

“Guess what...” the words start to tumble out.

There isn’t.

“That’s just the creative process!”

As I lie there in bed, watching other-me smile like she’s offered something helpful, the words land heavier. Like a thud of shame that arrives too slow, too late. The regret, too, waits until now to show. Maybe that’s mercy.

A real friend would have listened longer. Asked better questions.

You could have said: Tell me more.

You could have asked: What’s got you stuck?

You could have just shut up.

Instead, you came in hot with…that. How trite. Dismissive. Useless.

She’s never going to talk to you again.

How long have I been awake now? Twenty minutes? An hour? Three?

It matters because then I’ll know how disappointed I should feel about failing to fall back asleep. Fucking sleep, dammit. Did I do it? Did it work? The only problem is, I often cannot tell if I’ve slept unless I’ve dreamt.

They call this insomnia.

I call it a nightly hell loop.

But what do you call it when you lose custody of your own mind between the hours of 2 and 6 a.m.?

When every thought that made perfect sense during the day reanimate as judgment during the night?

I know what to call this: The nightmind.

If I name it, is it mine?

If I could will sleep to come, I would’ve mastered it by now. I would plead with it, negotiate with it. I’d promise it anything: no more late afternoon coffees. No more screen time an hour before bed. I’d be a better daughter. A better friend.

If I could will sleep to come, I’d have my mind intact. It would be my own.

But sleep never comes when I will it or bargain with it, and most nights I find myself stuck between aching for sleep and trying to control it as if it were an on/off switch. It is not.

It is the nightmind that lives here, in the hours no one else sees.

Because I do not sleep, it doesn’t either. Instead, it prepares for events like they’re fire drills. It asks, “Which memory should we be embarrassed about tonight?” It besieges me with a list of concerns that feel, in that moment, of great cosmic importance:

How can someone “do sleep” wrong? Is this my life forever?

Shoot, did I close the garage door?

Why did I say “you too” to the waiter?

Damn, I forgot to call my mom again.

I should wash the towels in the guest bathroom.

I feel like I’m forgetting something else...

It’s not as though the night invents new problems or fears. It reveals all that was already there. The ordinary things and the everyday fragility. Night strips away the luxury of distractions from the day (work, to-dos, eating, TV shows, scrolling), leaving you alone, finally, in the dead quiet with your own mind. With the possibility that the ordinary is not safe.

The nightmind thrives here.

It insists on vigilance. On always knowing and staying in control. And I suppose that’s the problem: vigilance doesn’t sleep. It doesn’t need rest. Yet I do.

I’ve struggled with insomnia for many years, and with it comes the nightmind. Perhaps (un)luckily for me, it comes and goes like a weather system. I had just clawed myself out of the worst of it a few years ago, and now it’s here again. Like an old friend who shows up uninvited, assuring you their stay is “only temporary” but two months later, there they still are — and all your favorite snacks are gone.

There’s supposedly a reason it comes and stays, and that reason usually only reveals itself in hindsight — when you’re somewhere past the bleary daytime delirium but before you stop fearing nighttime.

I’m convinced it has an uncanny instinct for disturbances in your life. It tends to circle the same things: conversations where something slipped out you can’t take back; careers you don’t realize are hollowing you out until it’s too late; relationships that ask for a version of you that’s unsustainable.

Always something just a little off.

The last time it showed up, I was running a business that no longer aligned with me. I wasn’t sure then, but I’m sure of it now: it knew the jig was up before I did. And once I left that life, the worst of my insomnia left too.

This time, I think I know what it came back for.

For what greater disturbance is there than having your own mortality placed right in front of you?

One day in July 2025, I discovered a lump in my left breast.

Not out of vigilance, ironically. It was purely by happenstance, after my partner found a lump of his own (it was nothing). When my fingers landed on that irregularly shaped, almost rubbery mass, I wasn’t sure at first. How could anyone be? I checked my right breast in the same spot, then checked my left, went back to my right, and then back again. There was definitely something different there.

We wanted to believe that my something was nothing. And statistically speaking, given my age, nothing was likely. A quick appointment with Dr. Google informed me it could be tissue expanding and contracting according to hormone fluctuations, an explanation I much preferred over grimmer alternatives.

Except I now know it wasn’t hormone fluctuations. But before that knowledge revealed itself, the question remained: If it wasn’t hormone fluctuations, what else could it be?

It took another four months for medicine to give me answers with any degree of certainty.

Four months for the nightmind to grasp at any morsel of information — an abnormal mammogram, an ambiguous biopsy (“It’s benign but we’re also not sure it’s not malignant”), an MRI that yielded no further information, the anticipation of a looming surgery — and turn them over and over, trying to wring certainty out of incomplete information. Trying to find comfort in the least likely of places to find it.

Biology doesn’t make itself knowable or more certain just because I demanded it, apparently.

I’m so young. It’s nothing, right?

What if it IS something? I’m so young!

Look, there’s nothing else I could do right now, so just sleep. ...Okay?

So, what happens when a mind wired to know — and to solve — encounters something it cannot know and cannot solve (at least not immediately)?

I already know what happens.

The nightmind steps in and prepares for the worst. It keeps one eye open at all times.

It prolongs the standoff between a body that wants rest and a mind that believes rest is negligence.

Could I have done something different?

What if I never found my lump? What if it’s already too late?

I need to sleep. SLEEP!

No matter how many test results arrived or how well I researched my questions, clear answers lingered just beyond reach. Even when there were answers, they came packaged with doubt, with risks, with probabilistic outcomes. Doctors are careful with their language. They always hedge. So many sentences would begin the same way: “There’s a non-zero chance that...”

This wasn’t how modern medicine was supposed to work. I just wanted a yes or no. Cancer or not cancer.

But all I was handed in multi-page stapled reports were likelihoods, “non-zero” maybes, and ambiguity layered onto uncertainty.

What do you do with uncertainty?

Can you measure it? Put it in your calendar? Force it into yes-no binaries?

Twice during these months, I had to fill out medical questionnaires and found myself stumped by one particular question:

“Any recent changes to your health?” these forms would insist on knowing.

“Check Yes or No.”

It was not a difficult question and yet it was.

“No,” I would lie as life all around me kept moving, and I was the one frozen in place, hovering between “benign” and “not benign,” between “nothing” and “non-zero.” Not sick enough to claim catastrophe, not well enough to relax.

What box do you check while you wait?

All of life is uncertain, we’re told. The stock market could crash tomorrow! The house you’d planned to grow old in could burn down in one wildfire season! You could wake at 3 a.m. and not fall back asleep! The body you’ve trusted for decades could silently turn on you.

The future, perpetually unknowable.

We’re to believe that this knowledge makes tragedy bearable. But there is little comfort in the certainty of that uncertainty. Not when the stakes are this high. And certainly not for someone like me who believes that everything can be fixed.

I’m the kind of person who believes that you can brute-force problems with enough deduction and effort. Give me a problem and I will reduce it to its smallest constituents, find a clever solution, and make it more efficient, even if no one asked me to.

I will fix it. I have to.

This instinct has served me well. Until it met insomnia. Then this mystery lump.

Of course I’ve already tried solutions for better sleep: chamomile tea, meditation, cognitive behavioral therapy, magnesium, melatonin, sleep trackers, blue-light blockers, UV light bulbs.

The fact that my insomnia persists despite these interventions feels like a sort of private failure, evidence of some fundamental brokenness. As if poor sleep were a moral flaw. As if it reflected a bad temper. A lack of effort.

Both sleep and lumps, it turns out, are problems that do not improve with effort (paradoxically, the harder you try to “solve” sleep, the further away it gets). They do not bend to great techniques and solutions, nor do they resolve on a timeline that matches your ambition.

I had all of this “problem-solving energy” humming below the surface but nowhere to direct it. If I couldn’t fix something, what was I supposed to do instead?

Oh, I suppose the living room could be transformed into a cozier space with a vinyl player and warmer lights. Why yes, let’s add more plants to the office and rearrange the furniture there too! Excuse me while I purge my closet and sew a crossbody bag from scratch.

The solving energy wants to home in on all the things it could win. Problems that actually yielded to effort, each providing a momentary release valve but never touching the thing that actually mattered.

How much knowing is enough to let a life continue?

Finally, after four long months, after the long stretch of unknowing, certainty — and a problem to solve — arrived.

I was diagnosed with early stage breast cancer.

The benign-not-benign lump turned out to be not nothing, after all.

Unambiguously. Definitively. Not maybe.

I know now. And I wish I didn’t.

Far from feeling relief, the arrival of the cancer diagnosis landed like a judgment for all of the decisions and wrongdoings in my life. The time I stole a packet of pens from the store when I was eight years old. When I yelled at my mom once on her birthday. Or all the homeless people I ever ignored, too many begging for change.

Didn’t I eat enough fruits and vegetables? Avoid smoking? I exercise five to six times per week, for crying out loud!

And yet.

Instead of sound sleep, I spent many nights still in the throes of a now-louder nightmind, not because of a moral flaw, a bad temper, or a lack of effort, but because I had longed for uncertainty to end and was now facing the fallout of that wish.

My mistake was in thinking that certainty would quiet the nightmind. I thought that once the answers arrived, the waiting would end and sleep would finally return.

I can’t believe I have cancer.

I thought I did everything right and still...

How could this happen to me?

During the whole time I was waiting for more results and for my life to resume “as normal,” I latched onto The X-Files. Somehow this beloved show from the ‘90s kept me afloat. I’d hit play, hum the iconic theme song, and let Agents Mulder and Scully argue about aliens or the Chupacabra or the Loch Ness while my own body remained an unresolved case.

In particular, I found myself drawn to Mulder’s obsession with chasing the answers to questions that would ruin him: Is his sister alive? Or dead? Are aliens real?

I now recognize the comfort in having something to chase. Because if he ever truly knew, if his search for certainty ever came to an end...

What would Mulder have left?

As long as there was something to chase, there was still something to do.

For months uncertainty had been propelling me forward — appointments, scans, surgeries, second opinions. At least with ambiguity you can argue with it. You could convince yourself that probability had wiggle room.

As long as the answer wasn’t final, there was still a version of the story where this wasn’t happening to me.

“But why bother with diagnoses at all, if a diagnosis is but a restatement of the problem?” wrote Maggie Nelson in Bluets.

A diagnosis should feel like progress. As if it were a doorway I have been waiting to step through to enter clarity, action, and forward movement.

Except a diagnosis is not a doorway. It is a sign hung slightly askew over what had always been true: The cells were already mutating. The lump was already there. My body already made its decision — years ago, in fact.

Now it just has a formal label.

If anything, the certainty kicked down the last illusion, the illusion that all I was waiting for was an answer. I know now that was only partly true. What I was actually waiting for was the feeling of safety that I believed the answer would bring.

A permission to return to the life I once knew.

For months I have told people that I was working on an essay about insomnia, without writing a single word. I’ve sat at my desk, occasionally opening the same document and just staring at it long enough to prove to myself that I was trying, then closing it before a sentence could expose me. It was my way of clinging to life as it was, before all of this.

But like sleep, creativity doesn’t come just because I’ve willed it. In this way, insomnia and writer’s block are the same because once you’ve been afflicted, you begin to wonder if either will ever return.

“That’s just the creative process!”

I had said it so easily, thinking that naming it would make it survivable. Thinking that, within the creative struggle, I would find the permission I was looking for.

Except no person, diagnosis, or essay could give me that.

I was asking to return to a life that no longer existed, a timeline forever closed to me the moment I found the lump.

And so the anxiety persists.

The illness persists.

The nightmind most of all — talking and talking, never stopping.

“It’s been said that the fear of the unknown is an irrational response to the excesses of the imagination, but our fear of the everyday...is as frightening as any X-File, as real as the acceptance that it could happen to you.”

I had earmarked this quote from Agent Mulder the moment I’d heard it. I didn’t know why at the time — only that it stirred something. I get it now.

It turns out that the nightmind doesn’t fear monsters but the everyday turning against you: how my mom asks me to repeat myself; the way biology reveals itself quietly, slowly, then suddenly; and how simply not writing could keep you frozen in time.

Your own body and mind.

On the worst sleepless nights, when I lie there and let the nightmind run its drills, I can feel the engine of it humming along — scanning, analyzing, anticipating pain and loss. It believes this is how we live.

This is how we prevent ourselves from being blindsided by the inevitable. Always solving, always keeping one eye open.

In other areas of life, that instinct is sound. There is a proportionate relationship between effort and reward. If I worked harder, I’d get more clients, make more money. If I lift heavier, I’d grow stronger. If I mapped all the potential problems, I’d be safer. Analyze, optimize, execute — and outcomes would follow, all of it reinforcing the very idea that effort produces reward. That vigilance pays.

In those areas, it did. Vigilance felt like protection. Like I had control over my sleep, my life, and my body.

That was a core operating belief for most of my life.

And then sleep did what it wanted. And my body did what it wanted. And then creativity did what it wanted.

What did all of the hundreds of sleepless nights amount to? The nightmind never prevented disaster. The constant vigilance and control never reduced uncertainty. Just fear, wide awake.

And I’m the one left exhausted.

I’m the one with cancer.

I understand that, on an intellectual level, so much of life sits outside my axis of influence. No matter how many green juices I drink, cells will still do their thing. Whether I call or don’t call, my parents will still age. And despite my desperation, sleep will still not come on command.

But understanding is not the same thing as accepting.

Because I’m not just trying to sleep, I’m trying to prove I’m still “productive,” still useful in the day-to-day.

I’m not just trying to remember to call my mom, I’m trying to get ahead of the regret I’ll feel when it’s too late.

And I’m not just trying to write an essay, I’m trying to come back to the version of me that existed before the diagnosis. The one who would write her way through. The one who assumed continuity.

Well, I’ve written.

But I am not back.

I am here.

It is morning now. The sky is beginning to lighten, bringing the outlines of the room’s dresser and tower fan back into focus. Beside me, I still hear the sound of soft, steady snoring.

Nothing has been fixed. The body still carries what it carries, and I have not slept. If I did, I cannot remember because I have not dreamt.

The day is coming all the same.

The nightmind will follow.

Author’s note: As of publication, the cancer has been treated and the prognosis is good. At present, I’m cancer-free. I’ll continue publishing here and on YouTube. ✊

I made a new video essay breaking down one of my favorite pieces of TV writing. But for weeks, YouTube’s algorithm refused to let it through.

It blocked my video because, apparently, it thought I was just stealing content. After all, what kind of psycho stretches a single sub-seven-minute scene from the show Frasier into 32 minutes of craft and character analyses and layered meaning?? (…hi!)

But what I was actually doing was this: Peeling back the layers of a scene so stupidly simple — and brilliantly stupid — about a man, alone with a dog in an apartment, just trying to iron out a wrinkle…and failing spectacularly.

By the end of the scene, he’s practically burnt down his living room and lies unconscious by his front door.

Completely pantless. Ha.

Most people would laugh and move on, but I couldn’t.

Instead, I felt the pull of these swirling questions:

Why does a man trying to iron a pair of pants end up feeling so familiar?

How does this seven-minute sitcom gag somehow manage to feel exhausting?

And why, by the end of it, did I stop laughing?

The more times I watched the scene, the more I felt like I was looking at the wrong things.

What starts as one of the funniest sitcom scenes ever filmed reveals something much more tragic.

Hello. How broken do you feel today?

Remember a time when you didn’t feel that way? When scrolling on your phone felt like a window into the world, not a reflection warped to show everything you lack?

I remember when Instagram was less a marketplace and more of a way to stay in touch with friends. YouTube felt like a sacred space where strangers, their video quality sub-par, webcams angled too high, made breathy confessionals from their poorly lit bedrooms. It felt like sitting on the floor with a friend, like actual intimacy — without a sales pitch.

That simple comfort has mutated into something uglier. More grotesque.

The scroll now blurs into a parade of people shapeshifting from “just like you” to “subtly better than you” to “life guru selling you their reality-shifting protocol, cold plunge tub, and six-week blueprint to becoming less of a disappointment.”

We’ve hit critical mass on the mandate to “turn your passions into profit.” Everything sacred — every creative impulse, every version of the self, every morsel of truth — has been commodified, packaged, and sold to us. Then back to each other.

You try reclaiming your time, your mind, your sense of peace — only to find every escape route choked off by another ad, another product, another pitch.

If you’re wondering who profits from this…

Sometimes it’s me. The other me, Shadow Stephanie.

A former sales savant who once lived to monetize, and now built this product for people questioning what it all means.

People like you.

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✅ The simple reason sincerity sells better than strategy — and why things feel like a Black Mirror episode

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You’ll learn about our founder, Shadow Stephanie, who built products and pitches like this, all engineered to pull sales. (But now she’s striving to build for a different reason.)

Skeptical? We thought so.

Cue these genuine, totally not made-up testimonials:

🗣️ “This essay made me rethink my role in the monetization economy. I built a media empire by doing less, and now I charge $20,000 to tell #girlbosses their brands won’t set them free.” — Anonymous

🗣️ “At first I thought this essay was broken — so many words yet no upfront thesis or takeaways, no ‘useful’ lesson. But I kept reading. Now I actually like it when I’m not told what to think or feel.” — @freelancew1zard420

Because guess what?

You’re already inside a Black Mirror episode.

Hello again. Did you even blink at Shadow Stephanie’s fake pitch?

Probably not.

The logic of being sold to has been so deeply braided into our daily lives that none of it is even a surprise. We only feel that ache, that exhaustion, that sense of being relentlessly clobbered like some sort of cash pinata.

Because nothing is sacred anymore. Nothing just is.

Grief? Monetized. Hobbies? Already scaled. Joy? Repurposed into content.

Everyone plays their part. No one is untouched. Not doctors:

Not your favorite pet dog and hedgehog:

Not therapists. Not writers. Not even the people like me calling this stuff out.

No one.

All of us, trapped in the very machine we rail against but are forced to keep feeding.

If you complain, you get told: “Just get off the internet!” or “That’s just the way it is.” Simply bandaid-level reactions to a festering rot.

You tell yourself you’re immune. It doesn’t work on you, and maybe that’s true. The problem isn’t just that you’re being constantly sold to.

The problem is —

It’s not just the influencers, the course creators, the newsletter writers, the coaches, the YouTubers, and the podcasters. It’s also the artists, thinkers, and dissenters trying to resist, all of us using the same tools and internet speak. All of us playing on the same stage. People like…

Me.

Except now I’d like to believe I’m making for a different reason: Not for extraction but for the work itself. But even that can be its own kind of story, can’t it?

Maybe it’s penance, or maybe it’s the only way I know how to make art my way — while feeding the machine.

For years, I was its loyal disciple. It was liberating and seductive. I became proficient in selling, audience and pricing psychology, narrative control, product development — all the tools needed to help others build their 6-, 7-, and 8-figure empires. With them, I nurtured the machine — and in return, it gave me freedom: no commute since 2015, flexibility to do whatever I wanted, and money.

I told myself it was fine because I was growing, I was helping — and I was winning.

That eventually took its toll on me, being the one who was always supposed to “know” and perform that very knowing. I’d wake up realizing my strongest ideas had turned into slogans and headlines, repeated and repurposed. I started to wonder if I even believed in my own messages — or if I was just repeating them because they work, they sell.

Fast forward to now and I look at things very differently.

Where I once urgently crafted the advice, the soundbites, and the content that claimed to “fix” you and weaved the stories to tug on heartstrings, I now can’t hear any “new” methods or advice, even if good, without a reflexive recoil.

Because damn, I’m tired. We all are. This Reddit post says as much:

This struck the collective nerve. The comments are full of people echoing the same sentiment, clearly having been burned too many times, for too long.

It’s easy to rage at the individuals (and the people behind them like me) pushing the “not enoughness” on you while holding their own solutions behind their back. It’s easy to be bitter and paint them as the villains.

They're the ones making the posts!

They’re the ones mining our attention!

They're the ones monetizing pain and pitching the solution!

But having been on the other side, I can tell you that most of us have good intentions. We’re not bad people. Some of us actually DO have things worth saying and teaching.

The truth is, the selling starts from real insight. Something that changed our life. We look around and realize that what’s out there isn’t it, so we share our version. If it lands, we also start to see its impact and how it could actually change other people’s lives — and make money. Sometimes tons of it. That’s the most intoxicating kind of win-win.

But things go way deeper than that. Past the goodwill or the justifications.

If you zoom out, like way out, you start to notice…something else.

Something eerie in its sameness.

You start to see a monetization pattern that looks too consistent and too scripted, across industries, platforms, and personalities, to just be the result of individual actions.

And what you’re left with isn’t any one influencer or creator anymore, but what’s behind them: a web of invisible economic, cultural, and emotional forces. Each thread pulling tighter and tighter until the choice to monetize starts to feel less like gumption and more like something pre-decided.

This isn’t just about greed or ambition gone too far. This is about a system that thrives on keeping everyone stuck.

A confluence of squeezes with no clean way out.

Welcome to the double bind

Take a look at these recent headlines:

When an annual salary of $100,000, a milestone that once signaled middle class wealth and stability, isn’t even enough to live on in major cities…

When the soaring cost of living means choosing between paying for rent or groceries…

When the job(s) we do have both burn us out and underpay us…

…the urge to monetize online isn’t just about seduction or ambition.

It’s survival.

What choices are left when companies are constantly talking about cutting labor costs? When AI erases entire roles? When the old promises of “get a college degree” and “hard work pays off” start to sound like sarcasm?

…do I even need to say it?

Then there’s the other side to it.

We’ve always been a scrappy, resourceful bunch. We’ve always found a way to adapt and survive under any conditions. Some of us way better than others.

There is what appears to be a “loophole.” Look at these headlines:

When you juxtapose these against the economic collapse, the cultural story is saying:

Yes, things are bad, but look, THESE people are fine. Thriving, in fact. And you would be too, if you knew what they knew and did what they did.

The real reason you’re in this situation is because…

Your mindset is bad, you’re unmotivated, you make too many excuses, your discipline is weak. Do you even wake up at 5 a.m.? You’re not hungry enough. Be your own boss. Get out of the rat race. Hustle. Anyone can do it. You have a business inside of you. Grind. You have every tool available to make money while you sleep. Hustle-grind. Look, a homeless guy did it. Even that mommy blogger. You have no excuses. Hell, capybaras go viral every day. The only person holding you back is yourself. Sleep when you’re dead. Skills are cheap, passion is priceless.

HUSTLE!!!

The machine feeds on exactly this: A culture that keeps you squeezed, then tells you it’s your own damn fault and sells you the escape plan. That if you’re still stuck, still complaining, it’s not a problem with the system. It's your failure to rise above it.

And that’s the double bind.

If you sell, you’re complicit. If you don’t, you experience hardship AND you’re gaslit for not “doing everything you can.” Even opting out becomes its own kind of bind.

Damned if you do. Damned if you don’t.

Of course, I believe in personal accountability. Of course, I believe in working for what you want because no one is going to rescue you. But there’s a difference between personal responsibility and constantly being told any struggles are your fault, part of your brokenness — only to also be told the solution is soOoOoo simple:

Turn your hobbies, passions, and knowledge into an income stream!

In other words, pursue the Dream: of “passive” income; of freedom and flexibility; of monetizing exactly what makes you…you.

This is the era of Optimize Everything, where even truth and meaning have to pay rent. Where building a business is building the Self.

And monetization becomes both survival and service to this Dream.

That’s where I come in: As someone who once believed in this story and benefitted from it…

…and helped others tell it better.

Where brokenness is profitable

You know the headlines I showed you earlier?

I’ve also architected stories like these across different publications for different people and businesses. Stories that brought an additional $200,000 in revenue for one client; and landed an HBO crew on the doorstep of another.

Of course, these headlines are true. Freedom is possible. A lot of people really have made it. I’ve seen the dashboards that measure revenue, plus media outlets require tax documentation as proof.

I was never the face of any brand I worked with. Instead, my role was like a ghost, invisibly effective and surgical: I gave away my best ideas, I knew what stories got attention, I made the multimillion-dollar products, and I watched this belief, this Dream, take root in others. Some people got very, very rich. A lot got burned.

I used to think selling your soul made itself obvious.

Like you had to be doing something so truly cruel and malicious that you’d catch yourself before things went too far. But no one ever warns you how quietly and slowly moral decay can sneak up, how it smuggles itself into hundreds of small choices and actions, each one easy to justify in isolation. It doesn’t announce itself. It stacks and stacks and stacks until, finally, it’s revealed not because you caught it but because you don’t recognize yourself anymore.

When everyone’s taught to see themselves as a CEO, as greatness-in-the-making, as one hard effort away from freedom, everyone’s trying to hustle each other.

There’s no one left to just be a person, including myself.

That’s what burned me the most: The gradual erasure of who I was and what I wanted.

A lot of the people selling the passive income dream, as I once helped them do, frame this as empowerment: That not only can you monetize your joy or yourself, you should. That it’s not just possible, it’s your obligation — your goddamn right! — to take back control of your life, build a personal brand, and…

…dream biGgerrrrr.

And if you don’t Dream, you’re leaving money on the table. You’re forfeiting freedom.

I believed that once, too.

I want to be clear that the people I worked with weren’t villains. We all meant well and a lot of us truly helped a lot of people. And like many in this situation, I did what I knew, with the tools I had, inside a system that rewarded certain behaviors more than others. And after enough reps at various levels of success in the system, I started to notice a clear, repeatable pattern.

A self-fed pattern that reveals just how deep the illusion of choice and freedom goes.

If I were still a product-making guru, I might even call it…a flywheel.

Actually, I think I will.

Let me walk you through my patented, proven, industry-recognized —

This flywheel mirrors many course frameworks for growth, but here I am using it to explain how the Dream is injected straight into the cultural and personal bloodstream — and exactly how it metastasizes into a sickness.

Step 1. Paint the Dream

Most people don’t dream of running a business. They don’t automatically have the chutzpah or thought to even start one. That was me at one point. I never thought I’d be an entrepreneur, let alone help sell this Dream.

I was a writer at heart. I wanted to write cool things.

Like most people, what I wanted — really wanted — was to not feel trapped, to not dread Mondays or write another damn “Thanks Jenny, let’s circle back and touch base later!” corporate email.

Most people just want to not feel like suckers because life is wringing them dry.

Good, ethical marketing and copywriting know this already. They name the previously unspoken, stir up emotions, and move us toward something real. Like so:

Picture this: It’s Sunday evening. You’re on the couch, snacks in hand, about to watch your favorite show. No report hanging over your head. No 9 a.m. meeting in sight. Instead of that usual knot in your stomach, you feel…light.

Then — bzzzt!

It’s not a boss pinging you — whew — just an email notification from your own business. You tap: Another $800 in your bank account… while you were kicking back. On a Sunday. Automatically.

It still feels surreal. Just a year ago, your Sundays looked different: You’d stare at the clock, anxiously calculating how much “freedom” was left. That creeping dread growing as the remaining hours of your weekend slipped away. A ritual of mentally bracing yourself for another five days of pretending you were fine — just make it to Friday, you’d tell yourself. And that was life.

But now? You look forward to Mondays. Another week of taking on projects that energize you instead of drain you.

Because now? You’re the boss. You set the terms. You’re in control.

That’s the gist, crafted originally to show as a quick example here. Notice the subtext: Look at how much agency you lost. Your life doesn’t have to be this way. You can take back control.

Nothing you haven’t heard before by this point, sure, but here’s the thing: Effective copywriting taps into raw desire in great specificity, not just vague entrepreneurial fantasy. No one ever became a believer by only being told “you’re broken.” It says “you know this feeling of relief.” Here’s a real example in the wild:

Then there’s the other thing: The marketing may not change your mind immediately. It works slowly, like seeds for belief setting their roots.

Because once something is repeated or seen enough (through posts like the above, headlines, and testimonials), you start to believe it. Like I did. And so it began.

I didn’t just tell these stories. I designed how they would echo and refract through pockets of culture. And I did it well — sometimes too well.

Over time, even if reluctantly, it takes up brain space and sticks. And maybe, just maybe, it becomes the solution you reach for when the next pitch comes around.

That’s the beauty — and the magic.

Step 2. Make lots and lots of content

This is where the hustle gets its oxygen.

The logic goes: Since there’s so much content and so much noise, the only way through is to flood the system. Outdo the noise with more hooks, more urgency, more output. Slice the podcast — hell, turn it into both a full video and clips. Repurpose the repurposed. But also never forget:

Be authentic. Be yourself.

Inundate every channel like your success depends on it. Because actually it does, according to the algorithm (and certain gurus).

It’s easy to forget that influencers didn’t come out of nowhere. There were folks like Oprah and Dr. Phil, who are still around today. Platforms just made visibility more scalable and accessible. And when the algorithms showed up in full force in the mid-2010s, it wasn’t about what you knew anymore, but how clickable you were. The face became the brand, and you became the product.

Sure, you should pay attention to thumbnails, headlines, positioning, narrative structure, SEO keywords, and whatnot, but those matter less until you have an extremely clear strategy. And for some, sheer volume is the strategy.

Most content and even books today are not built to be consumed. The goal isn’t connection. It’s capture.

Every essay, every video, every Note dripping in honey is, more often than not, designed to convert you into a follower, subscriber, and eventually a buyer.

Be generous. Overwhelm with value.

That was the play, and I followed it, telling myself that as long as things were well-crafted and beyond useful I was building goodwill. But I had ulterior motives. My generous content was strategic: Every lesson, insight, or fun story was specifically designed to “nurture” (actual insider term for engineering trust) until you became a customer. I wanted what my knowledge or outcomes were worth — in money.

And it worked.

Substack Notes like this still reinforce that very playbook:

Platforms reward that, especially if you’re consistent. They value the individual because we no longer trust faceless institutions. They favor relatable emotion because it works — it converts — and then they amplify what performs.

That’s what becomes legible. That’s what gets distributed.

So anyone trying to make a living online adapts to these rules, usually by becoming a personal brand. We often have to warp our work to be as “sincere” as possible, but really, it’s a rung in the ladder, leading people toward a means to an end: parasocial intimacy, a sponsorship deal, or a revenue stream.

That’s what makes this feel so wicked: Even generosity and sincere connection become bait and an extractive strategy.

And so we find ourselves straddling this contradictory line of not wanting to treat people only like they’re cash pinatas to break open…

But we’re also the ones holding the stick.

Step 3. Dream, copy, paste

Once anyone dives headfirst into the Dream, very quickly they run into more questions and the need for more tools, more knowledge, more ways to do it bigger, better, and faster.

How do you grow your following? On social media? On Substack? On YouTube? With SEO?

How do you package your insights into premium offers?

How do you build the “CEO mindset”?

For those selling the Dream of passive income or starting an online business, that means even more ways to make money. Which, of course, means graphics like this:

And then, inevitably, this:

All fuel for the Dream to rage on.

But the problem isn’t with one person selling this Dream and the endless infrastructure needed to uphold it.

It’s when everyone else does, regardless of their intentions, and their credentials and track record start to get a little…questionable.

Take this person, for example:

Okay, so let me get this pitch straight.

The ask is to follow them — so THEY could reach 100 subscribers.

Because their whole premise is teaching you how to GROW and SCALE a personal brand.

Even though their own personal brand only grows IF people follow them for that very advice…?

??????????

Oh.

There’s more.

If, perhaps out of curiosity, you do follow and click on their post to learn more about how to grow your Substack following, you’re met with:

A PAYWALL.

Cue 7 laughing emojis.

I wish I could say I was making this shit up.

Sharing real expertise is not a problem in itself. There are people teaching this stuff who genuinely have a lot of rock-solid insight and experience. But inevitably, there are also people like in the example above who learn just enough to sound credible, then try to pass off their paper-thin tactics as expertise. And sometimes, they cause more harm because they might encourage unethical practices and maybe even straight-up fleece people. Scammers, in other words.

I’ve traced this pattern across many industries, re-oriented in different ways, but it’s unmistakable: A transaction sometimes built solely on smoke and mirrors. And nothing more.

Sometimes I catch myself laughing not because it’s funny (okay, it kind of is), but because the cycle is so precise, so callous. The machine sustains itself through the propagation of believers, each carrying the Dream forward, each using the exact same frameworks and tactics to seal it. Some, again, way less ethically than others.

That’s how the sickness spreads, slowly at first then suddenly —

All at once.

Obviously, not everyone monetizing is bullshit.

I’ve worked with very smart, successful entrepreneurs, and I owe a lot of what I now know to our working relationships. But that’s the thing: When everyone is performing competence, it’s hard to tell the good ones apart from the hucksters for sure.

Because worse than someone who isn’t successful trying to pretend they’re successful so they could sell you their blueprint for success are the ones who are successful on the surface, but in their personal lives or business, they can’t and don’t practice what they preach.

They’re not exactly charlatans. Just walking contradictions. People who know better, but can’t always hold it together. People who sound all-knowing, but can’t help themselves in the arena they’re supposed to help you in. (Something I explored in my 58-minute video essay with Frasier below.)

Some examples of what I mean:

The business coach who helps entrepreneurs find purpose in their lives, but is lost and aimless in their own.

The mindset coach who pushes people to stop worshipping money, but chases get-rich schemes themselves.

The richest, most successful ones who help people do X, but know that, somewhere deep-down, their very business model depends on stuck people — and people staying that way.

That’s where I sold a piece of my soul, when I turned a blind eye to contradictions like these. Because they’re human.

And so am I.

And so, this is where we’ve landed:

A machine where hope is fuel and belief multiplies belief, until no one remembers who wrote the original script, only that it must be enacted.

On everyone.

Step 4. Freedom, but bigger

Biggie was right: Mo’ money, mo’ problems.

Because the Dream of freedom doesn’t start or end with just having the business. Even if it’s successful.

Nope.

You see, the most perverse version of the Dream, at the higher levels, is this idea that it’s not enough to simply make good money. Five figures? Cute. Six figures? Barely impressive.

The real flex isn’t earning more. It’s scaling more. Systemize it. Automate it. Delegate that shit.

That’s the unspoken pact: You must scale and systematize. It’s stupid not to. Go bigger, better, faster. Are you an entrepreneur or not?!

HUSTLE!

Oh, wait — my bad, I got my messages mixed up.

I meant: DO NOT HUSTLE.

The real question: How little do you work?

If anyone is working the standard 40 hours or more to make 6 or 7 figures, I’m sorry to say that’s chump status. You need an Effortless Business:

Make more. Do less.

In other words, make as much money as humanly possible, while working as little as possible.

That’s the new measuring stick for success in the digital age.

I get it. That is exactly why people started this in the first place: To escape traditional work and the hours that felt so suffocating. To do more (er, less?). To dream bigger.

However, scale is what the machine loves the most. It feasts on a steady diet of likes, views, and clicks. And we feed it because a mouth has to eat. Conveniently, so does ours.

This cycle — one that has led a lot of people to complete and total burnout — is made palatable by the most toxic seduction: That you can be “free” once you get to a certain point in your business. That since YOU’RE the boss the business can run on its own and generate immense amounts of money while you vacation and eat a lot of cheese in Italy.

HELLO, FREED$M$

For the extremely determined lucky few, that could be true. But for most, scale is an insatiable monster.

What often starts as a small operation can grow into something that swallows you whole because of ad spend, people, and expectations. The bigger your business, the more new problems come up, the more money you spend, the more new subscribers you need to sell to, the more dependent you become on platforms, the more you flood the machine to sustain it.

As a result, we all get hit with the ads. The headlines. The reels. The videos. The podcast interviews. The clips of those same podcast interviews. Endlessly, with ever-growing velocity from every single person sustaining the Dream, clawing at our crumbling attention. The problems only growing bigger, louder, more desperate until…

I think of a conversation I had with a friend who had grown her nutrition education business to millions in annual revenue. For nearly a decade, she tried to retire, but the business always found a way to drag her back in. Because when you’re the brand, you don’t just get to stop. You’re the one the machine wants. You’re the one that’s monetizable.

Eventually, she made a decision that startled me:

A quarter of a million dollars, not to invest or grow — but to scale down and escape. To stop outsourcing her life in the name of freedom.

I’ve never forgotten it.

Unlike my friend, most people at this stage don’t leave, even if they feel trapped. Most double-down or pivot sideways into an adjacent niche — or even turn around and sell the Dream themselves, if they’re not already. New niche, same game. Flood the system.

I’ve seen this exact pattern repeated over and over again with industry peers, friends, friends of friends, clients, even myself. It’s not if but when you’ll get consumed by the pressure to scale. The Dream is simply impossible to resist.

For me, I started my business because I wanted the freedom to write for no one else but myself, while being comfortably flush with cash. Dream bigger?

No, I wanted it all.

I had built my business to a level most would be thrilled with, but it was never enough. Build a bigger team, bigger client list, bigger everything — outsource it!

And I did so reluctantly, thinking scale would finally deliver on the promise that was supposed to have already arrived: my complete freedom, fully funded. Fully mine. Thinking that if I kept going, freedom was just around the corner, after one more 6-figure contract, just one more hire or process…then I can truly step away and let the business run while I focused on writing.

That’s what’s happening for people in the Big Leagues, right?

Right???

I remember speaking to another business owner who had scaled to $4 million per year with a similar business, and I asked them what their problems looked like. Selfishly, I wanted to hear that they’d cracked the code, that they were finally free to do whatever they wanted. But what I’d heard instead made me scream internally:

Same problems, different scale.

They were still not free.

That was when I knew, even if I busted my hump to scale bigger and bigger, who knows if I would ever get back to what I wanted? Was I ever going to “stop”? That was the bind.

Turns out, the business that was supposed to set me free becomes a different kind of cage.

Even Tim Ferriss, 5X New York Times best-seller with millions of podcast downloads, has described his own success as such:

Many of my peers happen to love business for business’s sake: build, scale, get acquired, repeat — all of it fun, exciting problems to be solved. “It’s the journey!" everyone would say. Yeah, I’ve done a 10-year fitness transformation. I know all about the slog that no one sees. I had fun too (at times), and I don’t regret any single lesson. But the business was a means to an end for me, which, as it turns out, was this all along: doing what I’m doing now.

This was never about scale. It was about chasing a promise of arrival that never arrives.

Because even arrival isn’t enough.

“It’s simple,” they said, “You just need…the right mindset, tools, habits, hires, systems — all of which I sell, btw — then you’ll be free.”

Biggest grift of our generation, indeed.

Then there’s us

The audience.

We play our part too. We say we want truth and depth, but what do we actually engage with?

The emotional bait. The headlines with outrageous promises, like this:

The Substack Notes posturing as “let’s support each other’s journey!” when really, they’re an age-old growth tactic called follow-for-follow under the guise of community. And yeah, it works freakishly well for visibility and engagement:

In other words, we say we want something real, but we reward the instant dopamine, the fast punchlines, and the performances.

It’s hypocrisy, yes, but I don’t think it’s that simple.

I think a lot of us scroll for relief. Meaning. Maybe a glimmer of hope when everything feels fucked. When we’re burnt out, lonely, or craving connection, fast dopamine starts to feel like a salve.

But that’s also exactly what makes this so twisted: The very thing we reach for is what keeps the creator-audience loop spinning.

Creators know what performs through their analytics, often bending their work and their voice to meet better numbers. I’ve positioned stories and posts to bait the metrics I now claim to reject, and if you’re creating, I’m sure you have too. It’s the price of visibility, after all. The platforms in turn respond to what we’re clicking on and what’s being engaged with the most.

That’s how it decides what’s worth seeing.

The loop teaches creators what to make. So they keep making what works, and what works is often familiarity and sameness. Same headline formulas. Same hooks and story arcs.

Even the big legacy players aren’t exempt.

Once something is proven, it’ll keep getting made. Because if people clicked once, they’ll likely click again.

The algorithm teaches, the audience confirms.

Snake eats tail.

Can’t argue with this logic when the stuff performs.

Even the ones who do want to make something different and more meaningful to them learn the hard way: To continue keeping their Dream alive, to avoid being invisible and forgotten, the audience…must approve.

It’s why “realness” itself has become performative. And why it’s easy to forget what it felt like to make (or find) something sacred.

It’s just how the machine works.

It makes all of us complicit, even when you know it’s rigged.

Uh-oh!

Shadow Stephanie here. Looks like you are only reading the free version of this essay.

To unlock the rest of it, upgrade now to signal versus self: Elevated™

Oh wait…

I got ahead of myself.

It's already free (so don't click :)

I regret to inform you we’re still in the machine

So this is where we’ve ended up.

Everyday people getting squeezed from every direction — platform dynamics, a crumbling economy, and the self-replicating engine of the Dream itself. In summary:

1. The Dream says: Freedom is possible, if you monetize yourself.

2. You make endless content to grow.

3. You feed the Dream and the machine in order to stay relevant.

4. You’re encouraged to keep upgrading the Self to go bigger, faster, better.

The cycle repeats — belief begetting belief, performance begetting performance — until good intentions blur, and barely anyone remembers where the line was.

And here we are.

Our monetization culture can’t be reduced to a simple binary. It’s not “all creators are bad and greedy and trying to make money off us.”

It’s a full-stack of forces with the candle being burned on both ends: creators burning out (themselves or their team) trying to keep pace with shifting platforms and culture, and the audience feeling a soul-deep exhaustion from all the content and the pitches. Where opting out completely is not the most sustainable nor a tidy solution.

Maybe you think, after all this, that I am now anti-business and anti-monetization. I’m not. There’s nothing wrong with believing in yourself and selling. I believe good work deserves money, but that’s not what’s happening here.

What we’re seeing isn’t about fair exchange or value. Instead, it’s a system that turns everything sacred into strategy, everything meaningful into bait. It doesn’t care about sincerity. It only cares about what spreads.

What does bait look like exactly?

Bait often doesn’t look like bait at first. It’s encoded in plain emotional language, the kind that sounds sincere, urgent even. But once you hear what they’re really saying, you can’t unhear it. An example:

Translation: “Look at how easily I cracked the algorithm. Are you still busting your ass for NO results? Lol. Stop making totally avoidable mistakes and learn from me.”

That was probably an easy one, so here’s another that’s a cousin of those “let’s support each other!” Notes:

Translation: “I know it’s hard so here’s a relatable backstory, a clear before/after, and a call-to-action for engagement disguised as support. Because liking and commenting help ME, and you’ll feel like you’re being seen in the process.”

Support resonates particularly strongly on Substack because it’s marketed as one of the internet’s last bastions of community-powered work. It’s why we see so much community-coded language here (some sincere) versus other platforms — and why it also becomes the bait.

Last one:

Translation: “I’ve created a fictional but believable enemy. Please validate how noble I am as I exaggerate the performance, right now, on the stage I claim to resist.”

This one is particularly fascinating because it’s not clear how this person actually knows people are self-censoring. But it conjures up a familiar enemy — cowardice, conformity, and submission — and beats on a war drum for everyone to rise up.

And the kicker: It’s posted on a platform built to reward exactly this kind of algorithmic gasoline. This is what I meant earlier when I said even the critics who perform dissent in the exact way the machine likes aren’t untouched.

2,700 Likes. 126 Comments. 548 Restacks.

Proof enough.

Obviously, I’m not clean here. I’m on Substack writing about this. I’ve shaped stories and deployed language knowing full well how it bends perception, and why. That’s why I can’t unsee the deeper translations.

Once you’ve crafted enough yourself and seen enough variations from enough people, for long enough, the scent of bait is unmistakably there. All of it is just code-switching for the internet we are all a part of.

I’m not raging against the machine because it failed me. It didn’t. I’m haunted by how well it works — and how easy it is to fall in line.

If THIS ends up spreading somehow, fine. I wrote this because I had something to say, and it’s this:

There has to be a line somewhere.

This relentless push to perform and monetize parts of us — what we love, who we are, what we know, what we’ve experienced — is costing us more than we realize.

Specifically: It’s made us forget how to value something that doesn’t make us money, grow our audience, or prove our worth. If we can’t play without being productive, be curious without calculating ROI, or crave connection without assessing “usefulness” of the relationship, what exactly are we left with?

Perhaps this well-worn but highly appropriate maxim in this context:

This is why we can’t have nice things.

Because everything nice becomes commodified, if it hasn’t been already.

Nothing can simply exist for its own sake — a leisure activity, a way of living, a moment, a relationship — without immediately needing to prove its value, share it for attention, and then ask how it scales.

When nothing is sacred anymore, you forget how to recognize what should be.

I’ve wrestled with this plenty of times. It’s partly why it took me 10 years to come back to creating for myself. I’d discover a little spark of joy in something — film photography, sewing, maybe an insightful conversation — and immediately my mind goes to: But how can I make money off this? Then I’d run the quick calculations and decide it’s not even worth spending time on.

Even rest and leisure have to be justified (something I explored in my essay about decoupling from my productivity addiction).

That’s the damage and the sickness.

I still believe in empowerment, but I no longer believe in the kind that confuses proof of worth with actual value.

I miss the feeling that something mattered before it could be measured.

Because now the thing can no longer just be enjoyed. The most sacred parts of ourselves aren't for self-expression, but repurposed for some sort of hook, even if it starts with noble intentions.

That’s the tension of the double bind.

The urge to bend, just a little bit, to have our cake and eat it too.

The stories we tell ourselves, until they stop working

I played the game with its usual playbooks. I wanted my time, freedom, and enough money — and I got ‘em. In many ways, I achieved the Dream. But at what cost?

At the highest levels of the game, I believed that reducing people to metrics like subscriber count, average order value, and revenue was not only okay, but necessary. Each number was a proxy for a person I never had to see.

Human attention and engagement, reduced to predictable levers and cold math.

I think of Joan Didion’s line: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Maybe we tell ourselves that we have no choice to monetize because how else are we going to make money? That we’re the only ones being real and everyone else is fake. Or that once we make a certain amount of money, then we’ll be happy, then we’ll stop.

We need these stories to keep going.

I was telling myself that I was building something meaningful, that I wasn’t even in the same galaxy as those smarmy grifters, that I needed more money and then some more — for what? I wasn’t too sure — to keep going exactly as I was. If I wasn’t hurting anyone, if I wasn’t lying, it felt kosher. It felt justified. I see now that I was living inside a story that had been packaged by someone else and sold to me too. What did I tell ya?

The Dream feeds on itself to stay alive.

But that story usually came at a cost — and it wasn’t always mine to pay.

Eventually, the story stopped working.

Eventually, I’d get a client win, but feel no pride. I’d show up every day, but feel like a ghost in my own work. I’d see my bank account number shoot up, but instead of joy there was only…emptiness.

Emptiness is a strange feeling. It shows up when it shouldn’t. I was the most successful I had ever been. I was respected by peers and loved ones. Wasn’t that enough? Shouldn’t I be happy? Why wouldn’t this weight in my chest go away?

It didn’t feel like a crisis. It felt more like forgetting in slow motion — of what I once believed and who I was.

Emptiness, it turns out, isn’t the absence of emotions. It’s the burial of all of them at once: the contradictory emotions, the flashes of both pride and shame, the flickers of satisfaction and disgust. All of it congeals into something heavy and unnameable. It’s the result of buying into a Dream that was never yours to begin with, and enacting it because it was part of the script regardless. Your whole existence becoming an echo of the collective voice, one that coos:

“Buy a house.”

“Build a business that pays you while you sleep.”

“Want more and be more than you are because it would be a travesty to just be...”

I didn’t know that then. I just knew I was unhappy. And I couldn’t sleep. Night after night, for years, I was wrecked by insomnia. The anxiety, this gnawing sense that nothing I did was ever enough, was constant.

I can’t remember the exact turning point, but there was one. There always is.

Maybe it was because I realized I had turned into someone I didn’t like. Someone who would brag about revenue, always scheming to squeeze more and more. Someone who would measure the value of others by their revenue numbers.

Maybe it was watching and reading stuff online, only to instantly recognize the attention-grabbing gimmicks, the pandering, the bait, the voice that sounded too authentic and sanitized — all of it objectively fine but all of it things I can no longer stomach when I was the one they were being used on.

Or maybe I’d like to think that one day I just wised up, stopped suppressing the emptiness, and examined it more closely.

Whatever it was, the dam broke.

And somehow I recognized it, finally.

Guilt.

Ah, you slippery bastard.

Once I named it, it hit me all at once: Guilt for shaping and amplifying stories I didn’t believe in. Guilt for how I could feel something was off sometimes and still push through. Guilt for betraying myself and for how long I’d been doing it.

That was supposed to be the cue to stop.

But instead, it was a seed. It would still take another year or so for me to walk away and start over.

I’ve told this story before in fragments.

But not like this.

I had to tell a new one.

Let me begin again

signal versus self is what came next.

If you’re here, there’s probably these big, honkin’ questions in your mind:

If I’m in the machine, writing things like this, am I not still playing the game? Is Shadow Stephanie not going to do her thing and monetize too?

Well. No one enters or gets out of the machine clean.

When nothing is sacred anymore, it’s hard to know what should still be.

But I do know.

Not just from recognition, but from contrast. From deliberately rejecting performance and optimization culture and the metrics that hijack meaning. The very ones I used to worship.

Both this newsletter and my YouTube channel are my attempt to restore that sanctity. It’s part creative un-optimization, part public rebuild of a new belief system.

This means I wouldn’t be trying to convince you I’ll change your life. I wouldn’t be trying to teach anything through didactic performance and frameworks as I once did.

I wouldn’t even be trying to build a brand like I once taught others to do.

I wracked my brain over every possible alternative.

Except refusal.

What if I just make cool work?

In a machine that deforms meaning into monetizable signals, making work on my terms becomes an act of reclamation — of the self and my voice.

Because I believe the most meaningful ideas shouldn’t be rushed, crammed into neat little lessons, or molded into Restackable elegance. They take time to build, to spiral, and to land — just like real thought does. This is exactly what the machine tries to convince people they don’t want. Because otherwise it couldn’t farm them as a brand, clip them into spreadable content, nor feed them back into the ouroboros monetization loop.

But people do want it:

As for monetization, I’m not against it. Monetization is inevitable. It’s not a question of will I? But a question of how?

I spent the entire essay circling the methods I’ve used to monetize before, and now when I do it, I have to be mindful of the paths that would erode my voice and creative longevity. After everything I’ve learned, how I do it has to serve something more than the machine, or I’m just shoveling my own words back into its mouth.

I recognize that if I don’t play nice by the current rules, it’s much harder to thrive. But if I do…?

The slope is always slippery, isn’t it? “Just this once…” becomes “just one more.” And once I bend, the work is no longer mine, but the machine’s. I’ve already spent far too long mistaking its voice for the sound of my own.

Turns out I have a choice, after all.

I still want attention. I still want to grow inside the machine. But I’ve seen and lived the spiritual decay of doing it any other way. Now, I only want to thrive if the work is wholly mine — about things I like, things that matter to me, in the exact way I want to make it.

Even if it’s strange.

Because strange is what refusal looks like now. Even when there’s no guarantee it’ll lead anywhere.

I could’ve waited to publish this until I gained a bigger audience, made more money. But then it’d be convenient, not conviction, wouldn’t it? This, too, is the double bind.

And I refuse to pretend otherwise.

My way isn’t “better.” It’s just the way I now know, after spending decades inside nearly every corner of today’s creative culture, how to return to something closer to art, for its own sake — without getting sucked back into the churn or betraying myself again.

It’s as simple as that, and that is everything.

When I offer something for sale, you’ll know. It’s the work itself.

The work IS the point.

If you see it too, I trust you to decide from there.

And me, I’m just learning how to make work honestly and stay creatively human in the machine.

That’s the story.

And I’m the one writing it for myself.

Don’t tell my partner, but I’ve fallen for another man.

A fictional one.

His name is Frasier, and he’s the titular radio psychiatrist of the ‘90s sitcom Frasier, a show that helped shift the cultural conversations around mental health during a time when access to it was much more difficult and stigmatized.

Frasier dissects his emotions, analyzes his relationships, and chases self-understanding with the zeal of a man who believes he’s only one insight away from finally fixing everything in his life.

He also has terrible judgment, despite his Harvard credentials.

Then there are other inconsistencies: Frasier can spend an entire episode offering thoughtful advice to callers struggling with their lives. And in the same episode, ignore every bit of it himself.

And somehow, the people still adore and revere Dr. Frasier Crane as an all-knowing authority — even as meltdowns become a core personality trait.

I’ve long stopped taking advice from today’s influencers, and yet I can’t stop watching Frasier.

In fact: the more meltdowns, the better.

And the more I watched, the more Frasier seemed to predict our current moment — three decades before it arrived.

That’s when I was jolted with a thought and threw my head back, cackling like a mad scientist:

How would this fictional ‘90s radio psychiatrist fare in the modern influencer era?

So I followed the thread…all the way down the rabbit hole.

And things got a little carried away:

I didn’t mean to write this much about Frasier. I thought I was just asking a simple, spectacularly absurd question.

Now the video is 58 minutes long. Oops.

Between yesterdays and all the things I have yet to discover, between nothing and every possibility…

…that is where I live now.

Where the first morning rays spill through my windows and the old ways no longer seem relevant. Where I wake, again, to try to find a new lifestyle and try to find it in the one place I once refused to look:

The blankness of an empty calendar.

In a previous life, all those now-intentionally blank columns on my Google calendar would’ve filled me with a fear that I imagine surfaces when you’re lost at sea, alone, disoriented, with no shore in sight. Luckily for old me, that fear never overstayed its welcome.

Every day I’d wake up to a calendar stacked with meetings, inboxes screeching with urgent-sounding messages, and an insatiable to-do list of tasks and reminders. Even the rest I would eventually “earn” was an orchestrated silence before the beat drop.

That filled calendar was always, for my sake, a lighthouse. The marked and impromptu events, to-dos across my days, weeks, and months — all of it a hybrid signal for both order and chaos. Structure and aimlessness. Momentum and stagnation.

Now, as I open up my calendar out of habit, the blankness leaves me no place to hide, no motion under which to bury that fear. Now, there’s just space. Too much, in fact.

If I leaned in, I’d fall right into its vastness and soundlessness, and once more, maybe for good this time, find myself adrift.

But this time, because I chose it.

I thought I already knew what this essay would be when I sat down to write it: A reflection on my opting out of productivity culture; a soft letting go of the output, of the doing, of the constant drum beat of more. That was before I’d metabolized just how much my day-to-day groundedness depended on that forward motion, something I wouldn’t firmly realize until I made it all dissolve.

A few false starts later and I saw that this isn’t just about “quitting” or untangling my worth from the cold, optimized part of myself.

This is a withdrawal. This is a confrontation.

With myself. With my past choices.

With time.

The best way to explain what I mean is to simply walk you through it:

A day in the life of…

…a once-ambitious, high-achieving perfectionist who staked her entire worth on how much doing she could do, and what happened when she just —

Stopped.

Let us begin here.

8:00 a.m.

I do not personally know many people who’ve actually attributed their entire success to a rigid morning routine. You know the ones: those promoted by hustle evangelists who insist that you, too, can be maximally productive and win the day as they do if you just follow their oddly specific set of rituals. Something like:

Wake at 6 (if you’re a real one, 5)
      Journal
          Meditate
                  Read
                     Exercise
                            PlunGe into ice water
                         Build an orphaNage
                Eat bReaKfaSt or don’t (the internet can never agree on this one)

…all in the span of two hours, with or without butter in your coffee (remember that guy?).

I never followed a morning ritual myself. Not even back then.

Most mornings I was awake by 6. Sometimes 4 or 5, though it wasn’t some supreme ambition rustling me awake. It was fear.

One that lived just below the level of consciousness, telling me that I wasn’t doing enough. That no matter how much I’d already accomplished the day before or how obsessively I optimized, I was always one step behind. So I’d lie there, wide awake before dawn, wrecked by an insomnia that only worsened over the years.

Somehow my drive to stay productive — the very belief system that promised me a better life if I just optimized, just sanded myself down enough to be rewarded by the system — betrayed me.

Was there anything more tragic than all that effort — the morning rituals, the calendars and planners, the “systems” — to outrun the fear, yet never feel ahead?

Maybe that’s the paradox that traps us. It certainly did for me. For too long, in retrospect.

Nowadays I wake up when I wake up. Sometimes it’s 5 a.m., often 8 a.m., occasionally 9, even 10, but rarely past that, if ever.

Most people would see this unplanned wake time as a blessing, and they wouldn’t be wrong.

But it doesn’t yet feel like an act of rebellion. Not really.

These irregular mornings are actually the aftershock of detaching from the pressure to always be doing. An unhooking that’s worked double time to defang that fear of falling behind, and in turn, loosen insomnia’s grip.

My body simply hasn’t caught up to the fact that we’ve stopped.

It’s still in flight mode.

8:27 a.m.

The closest thing to a ritual is my morning cup of coffee.

A latte that I make at home: One espresso shot extracted from 18 grams of ground beans. Pulled for 28 seconds. Then topped with 240 milliliters of steamed low-fat 2% milk.

From here, the day doesn’t begin so much as it unfolds, less with a snap and more with a breath, as if I’d been holding one for years.

I’m not sprinting anymore, but I still carry this underlying tension, like being in a room that grows colder the longer I sit in it.

As long as I have my latte, I feel grounded. Things are good. Things are like they’ve always been.

I sip and savor every bit of it.

Then —

…it’s gone.

I barely register the disappointment, but it’s there. Because now that the cup is empty, the tides start to shift. The calm recedes.

And so the drift begins.

I guess that’s the hidden value of a morning ritual, no matter how bombastic or banal.

It keeps your feet on the ground, if only for a little while.

9:01 a.m.

By now, I’ve finished a meeting with my team over Zoom —

Is what I would’ve said in another life.

Back then I would’ve also stared down my to-do list, which I often quickly scribbled on a 3x5 index card the night before, ready to take pride in marking each item off with a satisfying checkmark.

They say the best way to build momentum is by tackling the hardest task first. Or maybe it was to start small with frictionless wins for things to snowball?

I never figured out which was actually more optimized, more efficient. But I believed in both, because either way, completion felt like proof.

Of effort, direction, and yes, worth.

Now I sit on the couch, holding onto my empty coffee cup like it’s a life raft, and think about all the things I could do. Not must-dos. Or even to-dos.

Rather: would-be-nice-to-get-around-tos.

It could be anything!

On deck: creative projects, mainly. I have a video script to write and an essay still forming. The creating is life-giving, but ever since shedding the cadence of constant factory-like output, my creative process has longer gestation periods. That means, unfortunately, it’s not every day that I get to the part that I secretly still crave: the doing, which gives the drifting shape. Gives me something to aim toward, something to endure for.

Ironically (and fittingly), it also means the larger gaps of not doing actually serve the work.

Aside from projects, there are the less glorious maintenance tasks of adulthood: doing laundry, getting groceries, watering plants, maybe shaving my legs.

The kinds of things that keep you afloat, even if they don’t look like progress.

The day is young.

It could be anything!

9:35 a.m.

My mind flits from one thought to another, trying, failing, then trying again to settle on an activity:

I could watch The White Lotus or Frasier, but it’s too early to be watching TV. (Though now that I think about it… says who?)

I could play video games, but maybe not Lies of P (that’s too mentally demanding) or Norco (that’s too slow).

I could read, but nah, maybe later.

I could… I could…

I’m not sure of anything anymore. Even the smallest options slip through fingers that used to know how to decide.

Oh.

How about a walk? Yes, a walk sounds just perfect. If I can’t create motion in my calendar, at least I can create it in my body.

I don’t bring my phone. It’s good to leave the house.

The sky is nice. Hey, a fluffy dog, too.

They say walks are good: for clearing your head, for your health, for letting ideas germinate. Somehow the productivity complex has swallowed up even walks and spat them out as one more productive behavior to track.

Am I doing this right?

Am I walking efficiently?

I wander. Not too slow, not too fast, not too sure what I’m hoping to find.

When is a walk just a walk?

Where does being productive end — and living begin?

10:33 a.m.

It’s been about two and a half hours since I woke.

Just two. And a half hours.

I’ve got to admit by now: A part of me, that productive one, the one that can’t help but optimize anything into a system, wants to turn this lack of doing into a system of optimized not-doing. How? Oh, I promise you: If I let myself, I wouldn’t just figure it out. I’d probably break it down into a 7-part framework for the most successful unproductive year of your life.

It’s like my brain will stop at nothing to simply avoid being with nothing.

Over the last many years, I’ve shaped identity through output. Now that I’m reshaping that identity, it feels like losing a drug and the version of myself it allowed me to be.

I’ve been so defined by how I spend time that I don’t trust myself inside it. You’d think that when you finally get the chance to slow down, your body would still. But no, I get restless.

Time feels different in the stillness of nothing. It doesn’t tick like a clock or flow like a river. It watches quietly, then asks: “What have you done with me?”

Trick question.

No matter how precise the systems for excellence and freedom, time remains untamed. It’s neither chaotic nor kind.

It’s just indifferent.

Whether you’re sprinting or stalling, rising or ebbing, it doesn’t wait. It doesn’t care.

And that… that coldness —

Maybe that’s what I’m still learning to live with.

11:37 a.m.

Lunch time. Finally, something to do.

I lay out two slices of sourdough bread to begin making a sandwich.

For nearly all of my life, I equated time with money, believing that time could be spent like money: save it, invest it, even waste it. Everything had a going rate:

$200/hour if you’re consulting.

$100/hour if you’re editing.

$0/hour if you’re thinking or eating.

I stack turkey on one slice of bread, cheese on the other.

I think about all the times I’d rushed out to the kitchen between meetings to cobble together something that passed as sustenance, then scuttled back to the office within 10 minutes. Lunch was just productivity culture’s code for You can still work while you chew, right?

Is it any wonder why we’re always in a hurry, even during the times we’re “supposed” to have for ourselves?

Time isn’t yours.

Time is money.

Time is a debt collector.

I add avocado and a squirt of mayo. Then one more violently wheezy squirt — a lot more mayo than I normally do because I deserve it, goddammit.

Sandwich…

complete.

Thank goodness, too. I’ve just bought myself some time from time.

11:52 a.m.

Ugh, I finish the sandwich too fast, against all advice to chew slowly and “take your time.”

Crud.

Now I guess…dishes?

In that moment between one completion and the next, there’s this flicker of:

1:07 p.m.

I watch Frasier (the original series) while scrolling through news headlines, and boy, my brain melts down before long.

So I wipe the counter, even get into the tiniest of crevices I’d missed before.

I vacuum. A curious onlooker might wonder if I’m training for the Olympics, specifically in the category of “domestically repressed rage.”

Then I turn my attention to the bookcase in our living room and decide: Yes, the books do, in fact, need to be rearranged alphabetically. Maybe by color, too.

Good. This is good.

If I keep moving, I’m still useful. I’m proving I still matter.

For what?

For whom?

Maybe no one in particular. Maybe myself. Or maybe…

…time?

2:26 p.m.

I’ve officially finished every reasonable chore in the home by now. Any more and I’ll have to go over to the neighbor’s and hijack their chores.

I can’t help it. The ghost of doing still haunts me.

It shows up as a voice that chants: “Hurry, hurry…huRRy” — and I obey, moving efficiently, reflexively, like I’m running out of time, like there’s an appointment I can’t be late to. I fall back into the rhythm without thinking.

Then I catch myself.

There’s nothing to rush for. Your calendar is empty, silly.

And yet, I move like I’m being chased.

When time is no longer stolen from you, something strange happens: You start to see what you’ve done with it.

And maybe even —

what it’s done to you.

2:32 p.m.

Leftover doing energy pulses under my skin. It won’t let go. It wants to home in on its next targets. (Turns out, the advice to start with easy, frictionless tasks to grease the wheels was better…)

Momentum needs motion, so I give it more.

I open Procreate on the iPad, not sure of what I’m going to draw. Only that I need to keep moving my hands.

Just keep it loose, you’re not trying to paint the next Starry Night.

They say having many hobbies is ideal and healthy. This counts, I think.

2:40 p.m.

Actually —

I really should be reading. I’ve been meaning to finish The Poppy War trilogy anyway.

They say I should be reading all the time to keep my thinking sharp and expansive.

You know what else they say?

That there’s an optimal way to do something. Always.

Like reading 52 books a year. One per week.

Like walking 10,000 steps a day. What is that, five miles?

Those are the numbers to aim for, if you want to do it right.

Maybe I should go for another walk then. Maybe this time with an audiobook — knock out both in one go.

Or maybe…

3:10 p.m.

Instead of painting… instead of reading…

Instead of going on a walk…

I find myself sprawled out on the couch, overwhelmed by all the things I feel like I should be doing but committing to none.

Sigh. I’m wasting so much time with coulds and shoulds.

We all dream of “getting our time back.” But once I had it, I wasn’t sure what to do with it.

Should I work on something?

Should I rest?

Should I…Could I live a little?

Every option felt like a test. Every misstep — a bad movie, a dud of a book, a conversation gone sideways — would squander the rarest, most precious resource of all: my “free” time.

And by “free,” they mean that time was yours to do with, as long as you felt like you were doing something of value. Something justifiable. Something that, if someone asked about it, you could point to and say, “Time well spent.”

Time, after all, is a debt collector. And if you don’t pay it back in usefulness, what are you even doing?

Maybe that’s why some people claim work is their hobby:

They genuinely wouldn’t know what else to do.

4:21 p.m.

I lie back on the couch — oh, hey, I’m a winner on a losing streak!

Riddle me this: Why is nothing harder than everything?

I catch the afternoon light dancing with shadows on the walls.

Lucky shadows, 

            still at it.

Is the absence of doing always this loud?

Goddamn.

That’s when the couch

 forgets

       it’s a couch.

6:36 p.m.

Daylight is quickly waning.

All the drifting, the productivity ghosts, the drag of outdated identities lead here.

This is the part where the weight of undirected time starts to settle into a slow-motion dread that doesn’t dissipate.

For those of us — actually, that’s all of us — whose psyche has been colonized by productivity culture, where the embedded belief is that if you’re not already in the midst of doing, you’re either too early, too late, or caught between things that never resolve, the sun setting is the unceremonious closing gong that mocks:

My tally for today is… too much. I’ve done a whole lot of nothing.

But isn’t that the point of an empty calendar?

It should be freedom. It even feels like freedom — at first. The kind that only time unmoored from productivity, life unhooked from milestones, and days no longer punctuated by events can grant.

What if freedom isn’t relief?

The burden doesn’t disappear when you have wide-open days. It migrates, because even if no one else is dictating your hours, you still have to spend time well.

You still have to uSe iT wiSeLy, even without the usual guardrails of to-do lists and calendar events.

An empty calendar isn’t freedom. Not exactly. It becomes a shift from the optimization of urgency to the optimization of openness. A pressure disguised as endless possibilities.

And when that pressure mounts, the old ways start to make sense again. At least, then, my life, my purpose, slotted in very nicely between my to-do list and sleep.

Doing things proved something.

Proved my aliveness.

7:20 p.m.

Time doesn’t feel as scarce as it once did, but it still doesn’t feel…safe.

Every so often, somewhere in the negative space the calendar left behind, I feel something else that doesn’t yet resemble peace, or even joy.

Rather, a kind of lightness, like the quiet weight of nothing tugging at me. And for a moment, it’s bearable, even beautiful.

“Productivity withdrawal” is real.

But it’s not really from productivity itself, but from the identity that wrapped itself around the output and the schedules full of doing. From the unspooling of a life unhooked from deadlines and achievement milestones.

Where the stillness of time doesn’t mean ease.

It means I’m alone with the passing.

8:03 p.m.

What does time become when there’s nothing to chase? When there’s no event to move toward?

When it’s just you and the day — and the silence between them?

Is it really okay to stop?

I’m not lost, but I’m listening for what I sound like in silence.

Time is a drumbeat — ba dum, ba dum, ba dum.

Or is that my own heartbeat, now that I’m finally still enough to hear it?

Now that I’m finally still enough to face the part of me that can no longer hide behind momentum.

Ma’am?

There’s nowhere left to run.

Here lies what remains.

9:15 p.m.

Spend enough time with time, under productivity culture, and you inevitably think of it as an enemy to thwart or outsmart.

But when you stop performing, stop demanding anything of time, it starts to play a different role in your life.

It stops being some force you battle or bend.

It hovers instead, like a ghost.

Like an unending and intimate presence to exist alongside, without you needing to earn the moment.

Only later do you realize that time also isn’t money. It’s not something to save, or waste, or be indebted to. But something you just let go.

Maybe that’s why we kept moving so fast —

So we wouldn’t stop and see what we were hiding from.

They say if you want to write, you should be cranking out 1,000 words a day.

But I’m not writing to keep up.

I’m writing to remember who I am, with time as my only witness.

9:49 p.m.

I still feel unsettled by time.

Time flatters the future because it helps you forget what you’ve already abandoned and distracts you from where you are now.

But maybe that’s what it means to finally be with time, not always running ahead of it.

If I do this right, and I hope I am, the end of the to-do list is where my life might begin.

This is the moment. The moment no one describes.

The moment something in you might still change:

In the breathless beauty of not-yet.

11:43 p.m.

I have nothing to show for the day.

Except that I lived it — hour by hour, breath by breath.

They say you should get at least eight hours of sleep if you want optimal health, sharp focus, and longevity.

But I’m not sleeping to optimize.

I’m sleeping to “try out,” finally after a long, long time, what real sleep feels like when it’s not fear-driven or performance-based.

Just sleep in its purest form.

Not as something earned after a full day’s worth of doing.

But as a basic right.

I disappeared from the internet as a creative for 10 years. Not because I was “rebelling against the system,” but because I stopped believing I was allowed to create just for myself.

Before then, I used to write and publish a lot. I started on GameFAQs (IYKYK!), published in major outlets, and even started a YouTube channel. Creating was deeply a part of me. But at some point, I decided that this creative self was no longer valid, no longer enough, didn’t make enough money. So I buried her. Alive, I think.

And all of my creative work along with her.

Looking back, the most painful thing wasn’t burying that creative self. It was realizing that the urge to create stayed very much alive, always scratching beneath the surface. It whispered when I just wanted to veg out on the couch. It tugged, quietly and relentlessly, whenever I was watching or reading other creatives.

But I ignored it for many, many years because hey, I had bigger, better goals around money.

And well, I hit those money goals.

Shot straight through and made more than younger me ever thought possible. I’d built the kind of life that would’ve made those “be your own boss, design your lifestyle!” hucksters proud: nice car, lavish meals out, freedom to travel — whenever, wherever.

But if you’ve ever had the misfortune of reaching your goals, you already know the cosmically crushing truth:

I felt more hollow than ever. I’d try to soothe this void by leaning into more “experiences” or buying myself a lot of nice things, like an addict chasing more and more dopamine hits.

Then finally, last year I heard it: the creative urge I thought I’d buried, knocking again (and this time not gently). I didn’t recognize it at first. It was just this nagging feeling in my gut that I couldn’t keep going like this anymore. Couldn’t live this vicious loop of expanding, stretching, and convincing myself that I was worshipping the right gods. You know: money, status, power.

So I did the only thing that made sense: I overcorrected.

I walked away from my profitable business and, as you’d expect, was immediately met with “Are you crazy? You’re throwing it all away?!”

People called me a quitter. Some asked if I was having a mid-life crisis (and honestly, maybe I was).

Only I knew the truth behind the truth.

That’s the thing about intentional life changes. No one gets you at first: family asks why; peers question the strategy, your “end game”; and friends want to know what’s next. A never-ending exercise in soothing their fears on top of your own, all exhausting enough to make anyone turn back, just to make it all go away.

I understood their fears, but I didn’t turn back because I had finally returned to the thing they couldn’t see:

Myself.

In April, I released my first creative work for myself in 10 years. And what came out was a story that I started a decade ago on my old YouTube channel — a fitness transformation — and what it cost me to chase a goal for all that time. Similarly, about how I changed and came back to myself.

When I was making that video and preparing to launch this Substack, I had this sense that both symbolized a threshold for me to cross. A sort of imaginary finish line that would mark the “completion” of my reinvention. Now that these are published and live, I can say: I was right.

But only half-right.

Crossing the threshold wasn’t the end of my reinvention. It was the beginning of the real battle, the kind no one warns you about.

Reinvention is a process, a fight, a long drowning — if you’re doing it right.

Most people who talk about reinvention tend to overfocus on the before (the initial impetus for change) and the after (“I’m successful now!”). They treat it like it’s some neat bridge you just cross, where a confetti-filled parade awaits you on the other side. But everyone glosses over the messy middle — that purgatory of “during” — where old values and beliefs don’t quite belong, but the “new you” hasn’t quite emerged yet.

Reinvention doesn’t move like a ladder. It spirals.

Not up, not down.

In.

I didn’t set out to structure things this way. It just came out like this. And maybe it's the truest shape reinvention ever takes.

The same gods, the same promises — until you see them for what they are.

What most people call reinvention is often just rearranged performance. This — this is something else.

It’s the strange, exit-less and window-less waiting room of the soul. Where you’re no longer who you were, but not yet who you’re becoming. So you’re just waiting. In stillness. And in that stillness is this secret desperation for things to work, for you to be right, and to show the world that you didn’t just take a bet on yourself and have nothing to show for it.

Except no receptionist ever calls you forward.

Instead, it’s living inside a life that isn’t quite yours yet. Not a before, not an after, but in-between, where no one can clap for you, no one can tell you you’re doing it right, and no guru can sell you a shortcut.

That’s what it feels like.

This is the truth about reinvention.

And most people won’t stay for this part. I almost didn’t.

The middle that breaks people

Take a look at these two images. What do they make you feel?

Maybe you feel unsettled. Perhaps comforted?

Maybe these images call up some strange nostalgia, like a déjà vu you can’t place, but at the same time, you know something feels deeply wrong.

Almost like the slow, panning scenes in a horror film, where everything looks too calm, too composed. And without knowing why, you brace. You don’t know what for — maybe a monster just beyond the frame — but somehow, your body already knows.

How is that possible? How can these images evoke a sense of nostalgia, familiarity, and unease at the same time?

Look again. This time more closely.

The first image, the hotel hallway, lulls you into false familiarity. You’ve been here before. Maybe seen it somewhere, like in a movie or a travel brochure perhaps. Hallways like this usually lead somewhere, with glowing exit signs marking your way. But this one is different.

This hallway stretches on forever.

No exit. No end.

Even the soft red glow of what looks like an exit sign plays mind tricks on you.

And yet, you feel a strange pull to walk down it anyway. Slowly at first, then faster and faster. As you do, dread sinks in. You keep going against your better judgment, lured by a tiny flicker of hope that maybe, just maybe, there’s a way out you can’t see yet.

Then there’s the second image: The lone blue chair under a flood of yellow-green fluorescent lighting.

It may look inviting at first. Even comforting. But something is off.

Isolation hums under the skin. A pure, desolate endlessness in a deserted space where you, let alone any human, don’t belong. Shouldn’t belong. Still, that single blue chair beckons, as if saying:

It looks like peace, a chance to finally rest. But notice the ceiling above warping into the distance. There’s no preview of what lies ahead. Just a single blue chair, and this growing sense that maybe this is it. Maybe this is where you stay.

The hallway and the blue chair aren’t just poetic.

They’re the lived spaces of every person who’s ever tried to change their life and wondered why it’s often so hard, so paralyzing.

Together, the hallway and the blue chair embody liminality, the transitory spaces between one state and another.

That uncanny, almost beautiful wrongness of being left behind while still being urged forward toward…who knows. Where hope, desolation, and grief breathe inside the same ghostly, otherworldly spaces.

It’s the feeling of being nowhere…but not lost. Alive…but not becoming.

Just this seemingly perpetual state of in-betweenness.

And that is exactly the murky middle a reinvention inhabits. Both are the connective tissue between a “before” and an “after.” The spaces between the old self and the unseen future.

Most of us think it’s just the hallway. That once we push through it, we’re done. I believed that, too.

Only in retrospect did I understand that the hallway was only half the story — and battle.

No wonder reinvention feels so deeply unsettling. No wonder it breaks most people.

No one wants to be here. Neither wandering that hallway nor sitting alone in that blue chair. So isolating, so suffocating.

But perhaps more terrifying…

You are not truly alone.

No one comes for you

Once I made the decision to reinvent myself, I felt very little hesitation. I already knew what would be waiting if I went back: A long, living death. The kind that festers like a quiet rot eroding your sense of self until there’s nothing left of you to save.

The only way forward was figuring out what came next.

It’s the same impulse that sends so many on soul-searching quests — traveling the world, moving to new cities, enrolling in retreats — in the hope that the Answer is just around the corner.

This is the liminal hallway that we all must walk. With no end in sight, no clarity. Just the tiniest sliver of hope that an exit exists — somehow, somewhere.

Obviously, I did find that exit. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be reading this. But I’d be lying if I told you I was only in that hallway momentarily. That I already knew: “Ah, I am going to write for myself on this Substack and make videos on YouTube!”

Nope.

I dragged my feet down that hallway for eight months, pulled forward by nothing but a fragile trust that it would lead somewhere.

There comes a point in everyone’s hallway where — no matter if you look back or ahead — it collapses into one long stretch of sameness. A point of no return or arriving, but the same blur of hallway forever in an eerie stillness.

That was the stretch where I started to wonder: Was this what I left everything for?

In one of my essays, I said that the worst part about reinventing yourself isn’t just the hit on finances or being misunderstood. It’s this — a feeling of lostness, unmoored in endless, tacky carpeted stillness. Where the silence makes any flicker of doubt inside your mind grow bigger, louder. Where the real battle isn’t just “you.”

It’s fending off voices from the past. The very same that tempt you to turn back and question your every move like the world’s most annoying back-seat driver.

“You’re making the wrong choice…turn back before you regret this.”

“There’s a reason everyone thinks you’re being crazy.”

“We knew it. You should’ve stayed.”

That’s what the silence is testing.

It strips you bare and chips away at your resolve. It tests whether you’ll double down on your decisions when there is no applause or validation. When it’s just you caught in this torrent of your own making, in your own silence, with no life raft in sight.

This is the part everyone wants to fast-forward. This is the “during” that becomes nearly unbearable to move through because being in the same claustrophobic space with this stillness and yourself for this long is a different sort of death.

The death of clinging to certainty. The death of clinging to control. And to who you thought you were. A death of self as you’ve known it, while grief, hope, and existential despair orbit in maddening proximity.

The task here is simple, really — survive it long enough for the exit to come into view.

It did for me eventually, though there was no triumph. Or fireworks. It wasn’t catharsis either. Just the faintest thud of something still alive.

I just knew the alternative too well, and that knowledge made survival the only option for me.

Earlier, I said I was carried forward through the hallway by a belief that I could find the exit even if I couldn’t see it yet. But there was another unseen, pulsing force that pushed me forward: The urge to return to my creativity somehow — a glimmer that moved faster than any thought, stronger than any doubt.

Yes, creating again was the only path that made sense. And yet, I recognized even that path was fraught with its own perils.

My years of being behind the scenes of big and small brands alike had pulled back the curtain, revealing a “game” that most people weren’t even aware they were playing. I knew the players (and myself) well enough to know exactly what would be lying in wait to drag me back. Not new threats, just the old gods reborn:

Metrics.

Performance.

Visibility.

Money.

Productivity.

The same gods and traps that I had to break away from in the first place. And the truth is, I don’t disavow them because I suddenly realize I’m better than them or that I’m above it all. For me to say that I don’t care about these things would be an outright lie.

Of course, I care about money. Of course, I still want validation. I still look at metrics. I still want to be seen.

But even knowing this doesn’t shield you from their seduction.

It’s never a clean break because these gods don’t shout their presence. They don’t rage. They murmur, quietly and patiently under the surface. The old gods reshape themselves and wear different clothes, disguising themselves so thoroughly that you mistake them for the sound of your own inner voice.

If I leaned in, I would trust them to build me a new life. But a false one. Different costume, same leash.

But I didn’t. And only because I’ve seen what that life would leave me. I had already pulled myself out — just barely, after all. And what followed after my jailbreak wasn’t any clarity-induced relief.

Just me sitting in the wreckage of everything I thought I wanted, feeling raw, brittle, and severed from the dead ambitions that once felt so vital.

And only then, somewhere inside that impossible narrowing of self, did something stir: a memory of my old self. The long, lost version of me that was once creating, laughing, and feeling totally, completely uninhibited. A self so unconcerned that it broke my heart to remember her.

That was when I understood: That was who I needed to become again.

It took time and an excruciating silence. It took tearing down parts of myself I had spent too many years building.

Eventually, I reached out for her, and to my shock, she reached back. She felt different, and I knew I was too, both of us deeply altered by this shared creative silence. She wasn’t wide-eyed anymore, and I no longer needed her to prove anything. And somehow, we still fit, like I was always meant to be that person.

Click.

That’s when the hallway finally started to shift and an exit loomed into view.

Or at least, that’s what I thought at first.

Because lest we forget, we have yet to arrive at the blue chair.

False exits where the gods whisper

The roadmap was crystal clear: I just had to make my first public works again.

Part of that decision was starting a Substack and re-launching my YouTube channel in order to reconnect with the fitness thread I’d left behind. Not just to be seen again, but to prove to myself I was really back.

And well, here we are.

If you watch the 44-minute video, you’d see similarities in the arc I’m sharing here, just reflected in fitness form. And maybe — if you paid even closer attention — you could feel it, too: The grief I carried throughout my creative silence, wrapped in an unshakable hope for the self I was still in the middle of becoming.

But what the finished video can never and would never reveal was the quiet violence inside that creation process.

It was more than just “Man, creating is hard!” (It truly is.) Rather, it was this clash between new, emerging desires and old instincts, the ones forged in the old armor of survival, that made the process extra…extra. These instincts don’t just disappear. They whisper like they care:

“Stay small. Don’t risk too much.”

“Just fit in. Make your work algorithm-friendly. Everyone else does.”

“You know how to get attention fast. C’mon, you know you want it…”

I heard them, loud and clear, and I knew the drill: I could game attention. I could mold my work to something less true. Again.

But I’ve already lived that trade-off. I had only just reclaimed myself, and I wasn’t willing to lose her again.

This time I would hold the line, stick to my terms, and stay true to my creative vision. And deep down, I expected it to work. I believed my integrity would be rewarded…

…maybe?

It felt like a collision of instincts: create or collapse. Stay true or be seen. A game of chicken between integrity and attention.

All this, I thought, was the test. The teacher.

That this was the reinvention’s final boss before I could unlock whatever was supposed to come next.

Bring it on, I said. Because finally, I had a direction. An exit!

I just had to go through with the making, the act of creating and finally releasing my work — on my own terms, like I’d planned. If there were ever a higher stakes moment than this in my recent life, I couldn’t name it.

The sheer pressure I had placed on this video: hope, fear, and excitement — all stacked on a single release. All I wanted was for someone to see me. Really see me. I didn’t need a lot. Just enough to feel like I wasn’t crazy for doing this.

To my credit, I wasn’t naive. I wasn’t blindly throwing things into the void. I brought the full weight of my experience to the table: I scanned the field, noted the patterns, built the infrastructure. I made sure every piece was thoughtful, intentional, and aligned. I played it smart. I played it sharp.

But for all of my skill, all of my precision, and all of my preparation, there was one thing I couldn’t properly brace for:

The devastating silence after I hit publish.

A handful of views. A few comments from close friends. That’s it.

I didn’t expect to blow up, only a small hope for something to catch. But even trying to manage expectations doesn’t soften the gut punch: To keep yourself silent for the better part of a decade, and then, after everything, be met with a different kind of quiet. A silence all the same, just on the other side.

And colder, too, because now it was public.

Don’t people realize how awesome this is? Don’t people see what I had to go through to get here? Don’t people see ME?

That was when I realized the horrible truth unfurling: I hadn’t reached the end.

I’d only arrived…just to find the blue chair waiting for me.

I thought that my crossing was publishing the video. I thought the threshold was revealing myself in public. I finally created something after 10 years! Wasn’t that enough?

Silence.

The brutal truth landed: No one gave a shit.

If the hallway is the slog, the blue chair is what actually comes after: The unsettling quiet that greets you when you think you’ve arrived. The solace that feels like relief at first until you realize it’s just another rotation in the spiral of reinvention, coiling even tighter.

After all the pain before the hallway, the lonely crawl through it, and every ounce of grit to stay true, the silence did me in. I was so worn down from the grind of the hallway that anything else, even a false sense of safety and comfort, felt like salvation.

That’s the true snare of the blue chair: You sit down seeking relief, refuge, the familiar.

And once you do, that’s when they strike.

First, the past voices come roaring back — louder and more brazen than ever:

“See, we tried to warn you.”

“You should’ve listened to us. Should’ve stayed. This is what you get.”

“But don’t worry…you know better now.”

Voices so exacting yet so oddly consoling that you unknowingly get rocked to sleep and start to lower your defenses. Then while you’re in this raw, vulnerable state, the old gods appear before you, dressed in new clothes and smiling like saviors.

They coo, “We see you. You only need to come back to us, and we’ll show you how to make the world care.”

I could feel the old habits and instincts stir beneath me. I could start to feel the familiar pull. The suffocating pressure that comes with being less easy to understand, less marketable.

Maybe if I leaned in a little...

Maybe if I gave the algorithms more of what they demanded...

Maybe if I made myself a little smaller, a little shinier, a little more palatable...

Then people would care. Then they would see me.

One small bend. The “Just this once…” The tiniest sacrifice that feels safe to make…until it’s not. And slowly, so slowly, the old gods take their place on the pedestal again. And you?

You begin to disappear. Not all at once, but piece by piece. Just a little, then a little more. Until one day, you’re smiling because the world is celebrating you…

And all it cost was yourself.

If the hallway was despair, the blue chair is temptation, calling to you in a saccharine, comforting voice.

It’s the ever-so gentle invitation to settle in liminality and call it enlightenment. The blue chair lets you build a brand around unfinished healing, and perform the “after” while the “during” quietly still bleeds underneath.

It feels like growth. You think you’ve changed, but all you’ve really done is step into a different cage and lock your own door behind you.

In real life, that looks like…

…taking a better-paying job at a new company and telling yourself it’s different — only to realize the handcuffs fit better this time, because of the perks.

…prioritizing creative freedom — only to turn your passion into a monetized personal brand and kneel to an audience.

…pivoting into a new niche, a new brand, a new industry — only to rerun the same tired playbook in a different setting.

…starting your own business — only to still measure your worth by how little you work and how much money you make.

…leaving a job to go freelance — only to recreate the same 60-hour grind and call it freedom, just in your pajamas.

These are reinventions that leave your loyalty to the old gods intact. A false exit. The prettiest kind.

A false exit isn’t failure, but success that asks you to stay a little longer — and forget what you came for. It gives you a story to tell, something to point to, and a way to say:

“Look, I made it.”

That’s when the real game becomes clear: You’re not in competition against anyone else. Not even against yourself.

You’re up against the forces that destroy most people before they even glimpse the other side. Things like financial responsibility, peer pressure, and societal pressure.

The invisible gravity of the status quo.

The real enemy at this stage isn’t doubt. It’s the seduction back into the cage, disguised as safety and respite from the unknown.

Because if the reinvention that comes out is still about proving your worth, being seen as productive, and getting approval from the same systems but in a different arena, then —

It’s like surviving the hallway, only to die in the blue chair.

The old gods have always been patient. They always return, just not in the form you expect. They just learn the language of healing, change the altar, and call it freedom.

Here they laid it all out for me on a silver platter, refined and fully optimized.

All I had to do was nod. All I had to do was obey.

If I say yes to this, I get everything I thought I wanted: recognition, ease, and validation.

But if I say no, then…

The choice to remain

It’s funny, isn’t it?

How easy it is to say you’ll hold your ground. To claim you’ll stay true to your vision, no matter what. When the battle feels far off, when the stakes don’t feel real yet, your intentions seem unshakable, like steel.

But it’s all hot air until your resolve gets tested for real.

Because the moment the true enemies show themselves — the temptations you swore you’d resist, the easy outs you promised not to take — that’s when you find out what you’re actually made of.

I certainly faltered there.

The response to my first video in a decade fell painfully short of the sky-high expectations I’d placed on it, and all I could think was: Maybe I wasn’t as good as I thought.

Maybe I was naive to believe I could do things differently — and still make it work.

That gap between how I thought people would react and how they actually did cracked something open, deep and uncomfortable.

And just like that, the old gods changed clothes.

Suddenly, the answer seemed obvious: Pitch the work. Frame it better. Optimize. Just this once.

And before I knew it, the dam broke. I was right back in the trenches: Finding and curating lists of promotion targets, carefully crafting cold pitches, obsessively refreshing views and comments. My old instincts humming like they’d just been waiting for permission to act.

Oh, how fast I fell back in. I knew the traps. I’d accounted for them. But there I was, right back in the hustle I thought I’d outgrown, chasing metrics and mistaking proof for meaning.

That’s the power of the old gods. That’s how deeply they take root. You think you’re moving up — with new tools, new praise, more room to move — only to discover later you’ve been pruned to fit the shape of the system.

And just as I was about to spend another full day hunting for promotional opportunities, I caught myself.

I’d seen this door before. And that was when I recognized it.

It wasn’t opportunity. It was a false exit: elegant, optimized, and shaped like mercy.

I’ve walked through it many times in different costumes: as a creative chasing fulfillment; as a freelancer chasing freedom; as an entrepreneur chasing power.

Every one of them almost worked. Each one promised me true change. Each one promised that this time, this version of me, finally made sense.

For a moment, it felt like maybe they were right. Because oftentimes it feels like the old gods are on your side, chanting the words of healing, purpose, power, and even creativity. But each time, something just felt slightly off. And only later, after the initial spell wore off (as it always does), would I look up and realize that I had just built the same exact house, with rearranged furniture and repainted walls.

The “freedom” still had a leash. The “success” still required a shape. The version of me being celebrated was never quite me.

And then comes a quiet and merciful moment when you realize you could stay. That this version could almost work. No one would blame you.

Initially, the question you set out to answer in a reinvention is likely:

But the real dilemma in reinvention reveals itself to be:

I almost chose the former.

But I remembered what it cost me the first time and every time after. That’s what made it dangerous.

I’ve walked through enough false exits to finally know their true shape, and this one had all the markings.

Facing the allure and power of the old gods, shapeshifted but still the same as ever, was the true crossing. The true threshold and reinvention. Not the video’s release.

And for the first time in my life, I could no longer say yes to the old gods.

Not because I didn’t want ambition, money, status, or recognition. It was because my creative integrity now demanded it.

It demanded that I choose silence over spectacle. To choose intention over desperation. And to choose myself over selling my soul for speed.

Even if there was no guarantee anything would come of it.

Most people are terrified to drop what they’ve built. Their self-worth, their security, their identity are all tied up in it. And that’s not weakness. It’s just how the illusion works. We all get tricked.

Once I made my choice, I dropped all promotion activity that didn’t serve the work and went back to focus on the making. I knew real freedom and sovereignty meant preserving my own creative spark and core.

I still feel the pull. I still glance at the metrics. I still want to be seen. But I no longer offer myself in sacrifice to them.

Only to the work. Only to what’s true.

And that’s the truth of it: Ambiguity still lingers. The unknown is still here. But now, I’m moving through it with my integrity and soul — whatever remains of it anyway — intact.

We do not always arrive. We do not always triumph.

We survive, unfinished — and move forward only with our compass pointed true.

The gods of metrics, validation, performance, productivity, and money don’t need to be exiled. They’re tempting, familiar, and occasionally useful.

But not my masters.

The old gods always return. The question is never if.

It’s what you’ll do when they do.

Ten years is over 20 Marvel movie releases and 10 iPhone updates.

It’s one worldwide pandemic. Two and a half presidential terms. And at least three existential crises. It’s your favorite jeans wearing out, coming back in style, and then back out.

Ten years is enough time to change your life; or to put something off for so long it starts to feel like it could never exist beyond an idea in your head.

This long-form video essay I published — even what you’re reading now — is both the thing that changed my life, and the thing I thought I’d never finish.

On the surface, my video titled “What a 10-year fitness transformation couldn’t fix” is a 44-minute meditation on my fitness journey and the truth about what a goal can take from you (and what it might leave behind when you’re finally ready to listen). For anyone who’s ever found themselves trapped between a goal and their own mind, I think you’ll get it.

But there’s more to it.

Ten years ago, I started a YouTube channel to document that very fitness journey. Oh, how fun it was to flex a creative muscle beyond doing what I had always done — writing words on a screen. I did it for a while until one day I just …disappeared.

And it wasn’t just me that disappeared. So did all of my public creative work. Just silence for all that time.

So to put this video out now is a new beginning.

Because finally, it exists.

You see, this video isn’t just about fitness. It represents something much bigger and more personal: It’s the product of a decade of effort and avoidance, of changing goals and changing selves, and eventually finding the nerve to return to something I thought I had left behind.

It’s about finally creating again after so many years of thinking about it, circling around it, and never quite doing it.

And while a part of me wants to regret all the time I didn’t spend making things… I also know I couldn’t have made this any sooner.

People say the hardest part is just starting. But what I’ve found even harder than starting is starting again.

Fitness transformations and creative reinventions have the same enemy: inertia. It’s easy to keep going when what you’re doing is nothing. Harder to stop, reset, and try again, especially when no one else is expecting you to.

But now, I’ve broken the loop with this.

At last.

And it feels so good to be back at the beginning again.

Before we go deep, let’s play a game.

Oh, c’mon, it’ll be fun! I’ll say some names, and you respond (in your head) with the first movie character that comes to mind. Got it? Here we go…

Al Pacino.

Macaulay Culkin.

Mark Hamill.

Jon Heder.

Christopher Reeve.

OK, if you said…

• Al Pacino → Tony Montana from Scarface

• Macaulay Culkin → Kevin McCallister from Home Alone

• Mark Hamill → Luke Skywalker from Star Wars

• Jon Heder → Napoleon Dynamite from Napoleon Dynamite

• Christopher Reeve → Clark Kent from Superman

…good job!

And if the answers came fast, awesome. But also: Kind of chilling.

So many of these famous names spent years building their public persona — only to realize later, often too late, that it has become a cage. And this doesn’t just happen in Hollywood.

• In music, Vanilla Ice is the “Ice Ice Baby” guy, even though he’s tried to lean into more hardcore rap.

• In the creator economy, PewDiePie is the loud gamer YouTuber, no matter what else he does.

• In self-help, Tim Ferriss is “The 4-Hour Workweek” guy, despite doing and being so much more.

Ferriss himself mused openly about his long podcasting career:

That line haunts me — for reasons that’ll make sense later.

Once the world decides what you are, it shoves you into a box. Which makes you start to wonder…

What happens when you try to pivot after building — intentionally or accidentally — around one thing in your career?

What happens when you want to change from the thing people know you for or expect you to be?

Well, we already know what happens.

Some never escape the cage.

Look at Macaulay Culkin.

Culkin skyrocketed to fame in 1990 with Home Alone, becoming one of the biggest child stars ever. His role was iconic, but it also froze him in time. He was cemented in the public’s mind as Kevin McCallister, the adorable child monster who concocted all sorts of twisted, painful-looking booby traps, even long after Culkin had grown up.

Culkin tried to escape and pivot into more mature acting. He took a darker role in The Good Son, playing a (non-ironic) child psychopath. But it flopped. Critics panned it. The Washington Post wrote that his casting seemed “to throw the whole film out of whack, making the picture play more like an inadvertent comedy than a thriller.” One movie-goer wrote, “Kevin McCallister as a villain?! WHY?!?”

Message received, loud and clear: People didn’t want him to change.

Unlike Leonardo DiCaprio or Jodie Foster — who successfully transitioned from child stars to serious actors — Culkin never fully escaped Kevin McCallister. Over time, he stopped trying.

But why does this happen? Why do we do this to people?

Four words: Thanks a lot, brain.

Our brains just crave shortcuts. It’s easier to label someone as that one thing than to keep updating our perception of them. That’s why your mom still thinks you’re the same now as you were when you were 12.

Psychologists call this the halo effect, which is when one standout trait overshadows everything else about a person. If you’re famous for playing one role, running one company, or making one viral hit, congratulations! That’s now all people see.

And once that label sticks, another little quirk of the brain called confirmation bias kicks in, where we search for the very things that already confirm what we already believe — and ignore anything that contradicts it. That’s why we want people to stay in their lane. We expect them to.

And really, that’s where the problems begin. Because it’s not just that people forget you’re capable of more. It’s that they actively reject the idea.

It’s almost funny if you stop and think about how unintentionally merciless we can be. How easy it is for us to define someone by one character in a movie. One company. One meme. One viral moment. It’s as if the world clings to that one thing and somehow twists it into the ultimate defining characteristic of who you are and what you’re capable of from now ‘til forever and ever.

And if you try to change? NO, God forbid. The world resists. They doubt. They mock. And if you keep going?

They abandon you.

The real problem isn’t being good at something and having people love it. The real problem isn’t even that you might stop making money if you try to be something else and do something new.

No, the real problem — the deep horror, I think — is feeling stuck.

Stuck in your past endeavors, achievements, and identities. Stuck in this endless loop of “Is this it?” Stuck being only that thing, even when you want to move beyond it.

And then another part of your brain kicks in and you wonder: Isn’t it just practical? Because hey, if you’re making money, if your audience is still there, if your brand is strong — why bother doing something new? Cash that check and live your life, right?

Sure, it’s practical. Logical even.

If you’ve ever spent time building something — heck, even just worked a job for a while — you know the feeling. At first, it’s exciting. Then it’s comfortable. And then one day, it’s suffocating.

You know that repeating the same thing doesn’t just stall your career, it hollows you out. If it gets bad enough, you start to feel like an NPC in your own life. Eventually, you want more. Not because you have to, but because staying the same starts to feel like slow, excruciating death.

Then the answer is obvious…

CHANGE!

QUIT!

GO FOR BROKE!

Yes, but… therein lies the kicker: Breaking out comes with a price.

When you pivot, you don’t just risk failure. You risk losing everything you’ve built.

If you’ve built an audience, you risk alienating the very audience that built you. They turn away not out of spite but because they signed up for one thing — and now you’re doing something else.

If you switch lanes, the algorithm doesn’t know what to do with you anymore. Are you an amateur K-pop singer or a tech reviewer?

And because the core within is deeply tied to identity, you start to doubt yourself: Is this a mistake? Should I have just stuck to the same thing?

But the scariest part isn’t the doubt.

It’s the silence that follows when you’ve stepped outside your old world and no one else is there to give you applause. When it’s just you alone — and this version of yourself you hope is real — trying to survive the in-between.

That’s why so many people stay stuck.

That’s why Macaulay Culkin stopped trying. That’s why some musicians stick to the same sound. That’s why many creators keep going even when they’re exhausted (or hate their own work). Easier to play it safe when the cost of pivoting is so high that most people would rather stay trapped in a cage than risk stepping outside of it.

But some people do break out.

Plenty of gutsy people have rewritten the script. And to see how, we only need to look at comedian horror filmmaker Jordan Peele. Few have done it better.

For years, Jordan Peele was best known as one half of Key & Peele, the long-running sketch comedy series that blended satire with absurdity (“And I said *looks around* biiiiiiiiiiiiit-chh….”). Peele was a brilliant comedian, but that’s all the world saw him as, myself included.

Then one day, in 2017, he made what everyone expected him to make the LEAST. And that moment was the turning point of his entire career — and identity.

Peele shocked the world with Get Out, a total departure from his comedy-based work. Get Out was a horror film. One that was commercially and culturally a super-smash hit, and generally regarded as genre-defying.

Instead of announcing his pivot and hoping Hollywood would hand him the opportunity, Peele had been quietly shaping Get Out for years. He wove his lived experiences into it, using his sharpened intuition for comedic timing and social commentary to craft something entirely new. Originally, he was hired to just screenwrite, but Sean McKittrick of Donnie Darko fame believed in his vision and brought him fully onboard to direct.

And so, Peele stepped into a completely new identity — and the world followed, not the other way around. He’d successfully escaped. Today, Jordan Peele isn’t just a comedian-turned-horror-director. He’s a highly respected horror filmmaker.

Unlike Culkin, Peele’s reinvention worked because he controlled the shift and let the work speak for itself. Culkin’s reinvention failed due to three reasons:

1. Never fully steered his reinvention: He did take darker serious roles, but none framed his transition in a way that helped audiences accept him.

2. Let others define him: He became Kevin McCallister forever because he never built a new identity strong enough to override it.

3. Reacted to the industry instead of shaping his path: After his early struggles, he faded away instead of actively forcing a reinvention.

The throughline is simple: Taking control is everything. Specifically, narrative control is everything.

And that brings me to my last-ever PR-related lesson:

Narrative control isn’t just for brands. It’s for people — all of us.

You can’t outrun bad PR and just hope it goes away. Brands and companies (and actors and musicians and creators – anyone) sometimes watch their public perception spin out of control because they let it; or they remain reactive.

Smart PR is about framing, taking things people say that you may not like and owning them as positive traits (or a compass for growth). It’s not about being defensive and trying to minimize what IS already being said, but being proactive and leading with a new narrative.

Macaulay Culkin lost control of the narrative, and others defined him — both Hollywood and the audience. It’s not all a total sob story, though, as he eventually returned to acting and took on roles that better aligned with him.

Peele’s story is proof that public perception doesn’t have to define you forever. But narrative control shouldn’t always need to take years or decades. Because most of us don’t have that kind of time.

Speaking of which… that brings things back to me (and you).

The story of Peele, the story of Culkin… It was all framing, a setup — and maybe you already saw this coming, you clever reader you — because this is exactly what’s happening with me and this newsletter (now on Substack).

In my PR agency, I used to help people control their public perception. Over the years, I noticed a pattern over and over again. Of people who felt trapped by their own success. Creators who wanted to pivot but feared losing their audience. Entrepreneurs who wanted to escape their own brand. And I’d tell them the same thing I’m telling you now:

That’s why I’m making one myself, starting with this essay.

I’m no longer that PR & media strategist who helps launch authors to best-seller status or turn creators into hosts of their own Netflix or HBO shows. That was never truly me.

If I’ve learned anything from working with people who felt trapped in their own success, it’s that reinvention isn’t always just a luxury.

Sometimes it’s survival.

After all, it’s easy to keep doing what works. It’s easy to let the public or some algorithm decide who you are. It’s easy to stay in a cage if the world keeps rewarding you for it.

But what’s easy isn’t always what’s worth it in the end.

I’ve spent years helping others escape their own cages — helping them craft a public image, control their narrative, and define themselves before the world could do it for them. But I never got to do that for myself.

Until now.

I’m taking my own advice. Taking that narrative control.

The world won’t let you change unless you make them see you differently.

So that’s what signal versus self is: The end of me staying invisible. The end of giving all my ideas to other people to run with. The end of standing just outside the frame.

It’s me coming full-circle back to my creative writing core.

Some readers have followed me for over a decade. Some know I’ve written all sorts of articles across industries like wellness, video games, entrepreneurship, money, and more — across publications like The New York Times, GQ, New York Magazine, and more. But somewhere along the way, I had put myself in a cage and made myself disappear.

This is my re-emergence.

Soooo…what’s next?

I have some ideas. Still figuring out others. And I’ll let them unfold in real time.

But what I do know now: Answers come best to me when I write my way into them.

signal versus self is the place to do just that. It’s my dual-platform space (here on Substack and on YouTube) to create freely and follow my curiosity, wherever it leads.

Sometimes that means essays exploring the internet, media, and all the ways we make sense of the world. Other times, it’s about identity, expectations, the weird ways we change (or don’t). Mostly, it’s about whatever’s on my mind — things I like, things I question, and things that make me stop and go hmmmmm…

This newsletter is the companion to my YouTube channel, which features long-form essays that sometimes expand on ideas here, but often go in a completely new direction.

The essays will evolve. The ideas will evolve. And that’s the whole point.

This won’t be for everyone, and I don’t intend it to be. But if you’ve ever felt trapped in an identity that no longer fits, if you’ve ever questioned what’s next, if you’ve ever wanted to escape the cage the world put you in, then maybe this could be your kind of thing.

Welcome to signal versus self… just remember to take your shoes off.

Originally sent to email subscribers with a personal intro — edited for clarity and flow on the site.

Wait, who are you again?

Okay, so you probably signed up for my newsletter, signal versus self, which lives here on Substack and on YouTube under the same name, after reading or watching something I made. (Or maybe you vaguely remember me from an earlier incarnation, in which case I’m frankly impressed.)

I get where the confusion comes from, truly.

You’ve probably seen “Stephanie K. Lee” periodically emerge from the shadows to drop several thousand words — without any explanation — before disappearing again like the hero of an action movie dramatically walking away from a slow-motion explosion scene.

“Who the hell is this woman? Why is this happening?” are questions any reasonable person might ask.

Well, I am signal versus self.

And signal versus self is me, the human behind it, Stephanie K. Lee.

Hello again!

OK, remind me what *I* get out of being here?

I can’t promise you’ll walk away with solutions, frameworks, takeaways, or a highly efficient…well, anything.

What I can tell you is that the people who stick around tend to have a habit of wandering. They’re not lost, merely searching. For what, they couldn’t tell you. But they’ll know it when they see it.

They like stumbling onto stories they didn’t know they wanted to read. Like walking into a bookstore not looking for anything in particular, but secretly hoping something will find them.

They click into endless rabbit holes and, three hours later, they look up and go, “Oops, I should really get back to what I was doing.”

And we know they don’t.

Er ok, then. What kinda rabbit holes exactly…?

Sometimes they’re from my life: experiences I’ve lived through, TV shows I’ve watched, books I’ve read, nuggets from conversations I’ve had.

Almost always they’re questions that strike me in the middle of a shower or workout. Examples:

• What happens after getting the thing you thought you wanted doesn’t make you happy?

• How do you live knowing that time itself doesn’t care how you spend it?

• Why does being online now feel like everything exists to make yourself feel like a never-ending project?

• What does a 90s show reveal about our modern landscape of mental health?

• Why does a TV character trying to iron his pants make me sad?

Currently, I make entire essays around questions like these, both in written and video form.

Usually they’re much longer than most people (even I) expect.

Is this all leading somewhere?

I believe so.

At the very least, I’m building a body of work that reflects who I am now.

And if I’m being optimistic, I’m trying to invoke something I miss about being on the internet.

I’m not merely talking about nostalgia or the “good ol’ days.” More a feeling I once had. This feeling of stumbling onto something totally unexpected yet wonderful, not because you set out to find that thing, but because you were perfectly happy not knowing what you’d come across or what you’d get out of it. I never had to ask myself, “Was this worth my time?” because usually it was.

These days, when I am online, I find that the act of even being here feels simply administrative. It feels too efficient.

A little dead even.

What is there left to discover that isn’t already engineered to find me first?

So perhaps this is my attempt to recapture that lost feeling of serendipitous discovery, and if it all goes to plan, make things feel more alive again.

Fine, but...who ARE you?

It all depends on when you met me.

You may remember me from health and fitness writing. Or travel videos from living across nine countries. Or maybe from the years I disappeared behind other people’s businesses, helping them tell stories while I stayed off-camera.

You might’ve unknowingly followed something that had my fingerprints all over it — without ever knowing my name.

Before all of that, I spent the early internet writing strategy guides and reviews for some of your favorite video games.

Now this is me.

The accumulated me.

I’ve lived through so many versions of myself that signal versus self is part return, part culmination of everything that I’ve done, everyone that I’ve been.

It started as a promise to myself to return to the kinds of things I used to make, before I was taught to justify every little thing by how useful or valuable it could be.

So for the first time since 2001, when I published my very first piece of online writing on GameFAQs, the work belongs entirely to me.

Why are the topics all over the place?

I get why you’d ask that because when you zoom out, you see:

Fitness! Identity death! Modern creativity! Mortality! Productivity but not! A man setting his living room on fire!

Unlike most newsletters, signal versus self doesn’t operate as a “newsletter about X.”

More like: a certain way of paying attention in the world.

You see, I’m a very obsessive person. Things consume me. Not all things, of course, just the things my brain latches onto. My business used to do that. Deciding whether I should deadlift on Mondays or Fridays used to do that. Now it’s the questions that power these essays.

Which essay I decide to work on next depends on how entangled I get with the question that started it in the first place.

And that’s how a newsletter that begins with starting all over talks about fitness transformations, then talks about insomnia and even goes on to explore whether a fictional 90s radio psychiatrist could thrive in the modern influencer economy.

Why don’t your essays give solutions or prescriptions?

Mostly because I’ve done enough of that, and as I’ve gotten older, I’ve begun wondering why we keep running into the same problems in the first place.

I’m no longer convinced that life’s biggest questions can be slotted into a five-step framework, a 13-minute video, or a $997 course.

Makes me think the interesting part isn’t always the answer. Nor the easy conclusions.

Perhaps it’s the question underneath the question.

Or the questions we choose to keep paying attention to.

At least, that’s how I’d like to explain why I spend so much time mentally munching on things most reasonable people would’ve moved on from ages ago.

You don’t really “get to the point” either…

Personally, I’m not particularly drawn to books or essays that tell me everything I need to know in the first paragraph.

Same with movies and shows.

And truth be told, I learn what the work wants to become as I write it.

Its unfolding is part of the fun — and the discovery.

My god, your essays contain thousands of words. Where does one even begin?

That’s what happens when 20-plus years of writing and total free rein collide, baby.

I suppose the best place to begin is, like with everything else, in the beginning.

This is the piece that started it all.

Anything else is a bonus.

Much like this page.

Page last updated: June 9, 2026.