death to the rebrand

on meeting yourself where you are

this is not a self-help substack, but i write a lot of (mostly) self-aware streams of consciousness. i write about what grabs my attention and what conversations i’m hungry for. i’ve been thinking a lot about the rebrand movement, another case of corporate speak bleeding into our existence (blech), and how it’s doing us more harm than good.

it’s february and i can’t remember making any resolutions, let alone following through on them. but there’s no shortage of content that urges me to revamp everything about myself: what i eat, what time i wake up, my nighttime routine, what podcasts to listen to, what hobbies to take up, what friends to cut out, what meditation apps to download, etc.

there are certainly habits that i need to cut out or cut back on. there is certainly room for improvement, but i don’t have this burning desire to be someone else. every single thing i want to change about myself is for the purpose of coming back to myself. how long are we going to say "rebrand" before we realize that it’s a form of murder?

i clearly have mixed feelings about the self-optimization trend, mostly in that it no longer is about the self, but a version of you that does not exist, will never exist, and frankly, does not need to exist. and i do think that the constant need for reinvention is a form of self-sabotage.

when you’re constantly chasing the ideal version of yourself, you tend to neglect the parts of you that need tending to. there’s a reason why the reverse resolutions trend was popular for a hot minute: what about the good parts of ourselves? what about the quirky things that may not fit in the hot girl aesthetic or the corporate y2k dark academia old money coastal grandma art hoe core? we can’t boil our lives down to a trope. we cannot spend our precious days hating ourselves for not being someone else. we get such limited time on earth as it is.

i refer back to this quote by mindy kaling from her memoir, why not me, often:

“people's reaction to me is sometimes "uch, i just don't like her. i hate how she thinks she is so great." but it's not that i think i'm so great. i just don't hate myself. i do idiotic things all the time and i say crazy stuff i regret, but i don't let everything traumatize me. and the scary thing i have noticed is that some people really feel uncomfortable around women who don't hate themselves. so that's why you need to be a little bit brave.” — mindy kaling

i recently took a call with a publicist: off the bat, i told her about who i didn’t want to be (an influencer) or what i didn’t want to do (invite the public into my personal life). we talked about strategies that could help get more eyes on my work and how to position myself in front of the right people. mid-meeting, i started thinking about how authenticity is a dying concept and has become performance art for the internet. but in our three-hour conversation, i never felt like i had to shape-shift into someone else.

i often say that i have reverse imposter syndrome, which isn’t to say that i don’t have insecurities or that i’m always qualified for the opportunities that come my way—but i don’t say no to myself. i don’t let other voices dictate how i feel about myself. there are times i’ve shown up and the work isn’t what i thought it’d be (and vice versa), but i still show the fuck up. i think we owe it to ourselves to try, even if the odds are 1 to 100. especially if the odds feel impossible, because it feels that much better to prove yourself—and other people—wrong.

i’ve known a lot of people who are prone to chronic escapism: they’ll do xyz when this happens, they’re waiting on that thing before they start the other thing, they need to have the perfect setup, the ideal circumstances, and a sign from the universe to start.

the anticipation of the work is often more crippling than the work itself. i founded a literary salon for creative writers and when i meet aspiring writers, they ask, how do you find the time? or sometimes it’s just boiled down to, how? i don’t have a good answer. rather, i don’t have a satisfactory answer that’s a cheat code. i make the time by blocking off my calendar to write. i tell my friends, no, can’t go to bottomless brunch today, i told myself i’d write this book (but another time, because balance or whatever).

sometimes i show up because i have an editor waiting on a story or a producer interested in a concept i pitched them. but mostly, i show up for the future me that needs me to buckle down if i want to meet her someday. almost 100% of the time, it’s unsexy and grueling work. it’s not the ideation phase (which is just daydreaming and talking and imagining), it’s the doing phase where i’m typing and backspacing and huffing and repeating. then it’s the editing phase where i do the whole thing over, but worse, and then you’re left with something that didn’t exist before you gave birth to it.

the “trick” to doing it is to just do it and not let yourself, or anyone else, convince you that it can’t be done now. you can always start now. you might not have the resources to get to point z, but you can at least get from point a to point b.

i’m ending this shortly because i feel myself getting more preachy and while i went to divinity school, i didn’t go for this. so i’ll leave it at this:

i think there is a way to be in motion, to move towards the life and person you want to be, without speedrunning through the experiences that will ultimately shape that future. i feel the same way about ai: you can get the product you want with a few clicks, but you’re missing the creative journey that actually makes you an artist.

start now. start tomorrow. just don’t feel like you have to abandon yourself completely because a tiktoker wants affiliate sales on their ‘5 things you need to level up’ series.