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There’s the kind of sick that cripples you and the kind that’s fun. I hit the perfect threshold this week with a cough, cold, and sore throat that made me unfit for public consumption but well enough to still work. I had the most fun at home and left the house for two 5-minute fresh air stints between Sunday evening and Friday morning. Ben drove down and stayed with me for a true mixture of a wild and chill weekend.

I woke up on the wrong side of the bed and feel like I’ve been playing a game of catchup today that I keep losing no matter how fast I run. But I’d never do this to you:

I feel like I’m still not used to being in the world again, and I haven’t been working out because I’ve been sick. Over a week out from being in the gym I can feel myself being irritable in a way that only a workout can fix, but I need to tend to my garden here first. But then again, walking up the stairs with my laundry made me cough, so maybe I’m actually taking care of myself. Why is it that all of my favorite things are things that require slowing down when there isn’t enough time in the day?

My friend Noor isn’t doing The Artist’s way with me, but she’s on a similar path of self-expansion and care — or, at least, more journaling. She texted me to tell me about an epiphany she had while journaling, and we got into a voice memo volley about life.

It’s nice to be in the same boat of growth as your friends. What are friends for, anyway, if they don’t challenge you to be better? Noor is a smart and very cool person, which makes sense why she included a lot of qualifiers when bringing up something she learned from Mel Robbins.

If you aren’t in the self-help vortex (I’d say I’m high enough up to know the players but not ever hear from them), Mel Robbins is the perfect archetype of a white lady self-help guru: a skinny, fake-blonde, 50-something podcast host and author with girlboss style fit for a Ted Talk. The most popular idea she’s championed is the concept of Let Them, to let the things out of your control stay out of your control and not worry about fixing them. I can see this being helpful and also being abused.

Self-help is both the coolest thing around right now and, moreover, deeply uncool. Because I love Noor deeply and also know she doesn’t have to prove her coolness to me, I told her that she doesn’t need to crap on this lady to me because 1. I agree that she and her ilk are annoying but also because 2. I don’t want the messenger to get in the way of my friend sharing something that inspired her with me.

We had two simultaneous conversations for a while first about what this lady was saying but second about self-help in general, which inspired this newsletter. Why come up with an idea when you can let them come to you?

This is the Mel Robbins exercise from a random podcast episode Noor heard (as her friend, I should amplify her coolness and state the fact that she is not a frequent listener):

I was happy to hear these as a thing that my friend wanted to tell me, not necessarily because I wanted to explore Robbinsism. However, over the course of our conversation, I ended up unknowingly arriving at my own answers to these questions. I said these out loud to Noor but doing so made me feel an emotion I wouldn’t have felt a few weeks ago about it: afraid.

In my self-help universe that one could argue The Artist’s Way is in (I think it’s much more than that but can see reasoning in both directions), I’ve been reading how this crazy lady talks about synchronicity — when separate, random events feel linked by the universe. Artist’s Way author Julia Cameron uses a lot of her book’s real estate to talk about how when we speak our intentions into the universe to be careful what we wish for, because we’re going to get them right back. Someone might talk about how they’ve always wanted to make a movie and then end up at a party that night talking to someone that happens to be a filmmaker looking for extra help.

To say your desires aloud gives the universe an inch when it decides to give back a mile. Even in telling Noor about the drastic difference of my plan B, I said I couldn’t even believe I was saying it out loud. That day, the plan B continued following me in ways that surprised me. But the even bigger surprise? I was living a self-help author’s dream: stumbling into a real-time collision of, not one but, two self-help concepts.

I can’t believe I’ve dedicated so much precious newsletter real estate to synchronicity and let them, but if I’ve learned anything from my self-help stuff it’s to be earnest instead of holding yourself back with what’s supposed to be cool.

Then again, self-help is the coolest thing around. Self-help content is massive in the scrolls (as in written material) and scrolls (as in social feeds) of many Americans. We are individualistic, allegedly pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps people. We want the tools to be successful, to live full lives. Shouldn’t we be chasing the things that are supposed to make us happier and healthier? The act of searching for help is helpful enough, and what a win to find something that we actually learn from. We look to these influencers, life coaches, motivational speakers, authors, and bodybuilders because we can’t get it all done alone. Wanting to be authentic, to be kind, these are genuinely cool things.

But following someone around like this is deeply uncool. We are lonely, unsexed, and getting dumber. We are lost and constantly looking for daddy but don’t know where to begin. These influencers find us when we are vulnerable. I wonder if self-help stuff is more popular with devout religious people or with agnostic people that don’t want religion but still want daddy.

I don’t really do self-help aside from reading Burnout while I was getting burned out way too fast in broadcast news — a book I still never finished the last 10 pages of (but is pretty good if you like this kind of thing, about how women, specifically, shoulder too much that it destroys our bodies).

Self-optimization is a disease, one that I am afflicted with but that I think I do better than an imagined stereotype of a Brené Brown-loving Midwestern mom. I believe this about myself because I usually hate getting advice from other people, let alone self-help professionals. If the vibe is wrong from the jump, I can’t let my guard down; I’ll be a terrible mentee and either take criticism too seriously or not seriously enough. I am deeply skeptical of authority and fly away at the earliest scent of cult.

And that’s what sucks about self-help people: they want their cults so they can grift. They might hook you in with one idea and hypnotize you into buying their books, their class bundles, their notebooks with that ugly cursive font on the front saying something like None of Your Business. It’s all marketing. They have the secrets, they have the tools only if you keep buying in. They want your parasocial relationships on Instagram to translate to frequent adds to a Shopify cart. I hate those that prey on the vulnerable, and these news anchor hair-quaffed men and blazer-wearing women are making a killing doing it under the guise of helping you.

We are so willing to give up our executive functioning if the right person or robot tells us to. Fascism relies on us falling asleep, and even though self-help theoretically wakes us up, the dollars to be made keep us with at least one eye closed. Instead of getting a little help where we need it, some of us cede power entirely — to our algorithms, our governments, our gods, even to the freeze of indecision.

Obviously, we can’t insulate ourselves from all of this or keep our circles too small. This is part of how we got into this mess in the first place. I think our consumption of self-help content comes from a good place: I want to better myself. But if you spend so much time working on yourself, when are you just being yourself? I think I’ve heard this from an anti-self-help-self-helper- - - but it’s true.

I think we can benefit from self-helpy thinkers as long as we don’t get too into it. Moderation, like with all things. Noor got some good out of Mel Robbins without buying tickets to her tour. I’m getting a lot out of The Artist’s Way and simultaneously rolling my eyes at the pretentiousness of its author. Our inner-skeptic is here because it wants to take care of us, but we have to learn when to give it a break. Take what’s meaningful, and get the hell out of dodge.

I am constantly trying to better myself, but that’s also exhausting. But maybe that’s also an excuse for my laziness. Or even better: just shut up and go eat dinner!

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