It's okay to disappear. Even for years.
You're feeling lost and stuck and unmotivated and pointless and purposeless for a reason; it's a gift; don't ignore it.
Trigger warning: Discussion of passive suicidality
“In a world that entices us to browse through the lives of others to help us better determine how we feel about ourselves, and to in turn feel the need to be constantly visible — for visibility these days seems to somehow equate to success — don’t be afraid to disappear from it, from us, for a while and see what comes to you in the silence.” - Michaela Cole
I’ve been saying some version of this for the past few years, and I want to repeat it for those of you who might just now be losing the plot and feel like something is wrong because you can’t do what you were just able to do, or get out of bed, or stop numbing out, because the world is crumbling and so are you but we’re still supposed to go to work.
In January 2021, a year after my book Quit Like a Woman was published (and had done relatively well), Chrissy Teigen, who had over 30 million Instagram followers, posted a story that said my book helped her stop drinking.
I cannot overstate the impact this has had on my life and work. My book sold out on the internet, surpassed Obama’s book on Amazon, and landed on the NYT bestseller list. All of a sudden, I was famous. Very, very famous (in a niche way, but still, niche famous is famous).
Less than a month later, my life fell the fuck apart, and while my work and likeness and name became lodged in the cultural zeitgeist as a self-help queen and as someone who was saving everyone from drinking their faces off and helping the masses live their best fucking life, I was an actual crumple of flesh; a barely living thing.
From February 2021 until very recently, I remained there, in a state of confusion, personal collapse, existential crisis, and passively suicidal (as in, I did not want to live, and wished to be wiped from the earth). Some people refer to this as down-cycling, others call it liminal space, and still others call it transition. I call it the only name it deserves, which is pure fucking hell.
As someone who has always gotten a great deal of reward from my work (and still does!)—or rather, as someone who has only known herself through her success in her work and who had up to that point gotten most of her worth as a human being through her work— when that went away, when I couldn't function or meet the expectations of Holly Whitaker, New York Times bestselling author of Quit Like a Woman (that has now sold over 600,000 copies), lord have mercy: I fucking melted. There was the original dysfunction, and then there was the dysfunction that arises when you cannot accept the original dysfunction, and I still don’t know which was worse.
The one thing I didn't do, though (and actually couldn’t do because I was clinically burnt-out) was force it.
For the first time in my life, I stopped. And I mean, I really fucking stopped. You might have seen my publishing here; you might have noticed I started a podcast or even that I wrote a book for Audible, but that’s not reflective of my reality. My reality was depression. My reality was lost on top of lost on top of lost. My reality was I didn’t know who I was, who I would be again, if I would ever work again, or contribute again, or be able to do more than watch 30 hours of TV a week, which is what I did, often. My reality was I started smoking pot so I didn’t kill myself. My reality was that I stayed where I didn’t want to be.
Until very, very recently, I was certain that I’d never ever want to engage with life again, or be here writing again, or do anything again, and the only reason I kept trying was because I needed to make money, and I didn’t know how else to do it but write.
I only reached the other side by essentially not trying to get there at all, and abandoning all hope that I ever would, while somehow simultaneously believing with my whole heart that this season, too, has a purpose, even if it went on forever. I only reached the other side by letting it happen to me thoroughly and totally. (And if I was ambitious about my career before, let me tell you, I was ambitious as hell about being lost.)
If any of this feels or sounds even faintly relevant—if right now you're in it and you’ve been in it and even if you’ve been in it for years and years and you can't make it work; if you feel like you are melting, if you feel like all you want to do is nothing forever, if you feel like you are repeating the same story and the same day over and over again. If you feel like you have lost the plot, are the only one, are going to be stuck here forever, cannot pull it together, cannot remember who you used to be and might never again, or like your physical presence in the world is farce and the real you is a lazy uninpsired, nihilisitc, pessimistic, has-been. If you feel like you are a bummer or a bore or pointless or are being left behind by a world that even in *all of this* (gestures to everything everywhere right now), everyone is still somehow building their careers (and crushing it). If you are terrified that you will never feel like yourself again or feel like anything again or contribute in any kind of meaningful way—my suggestion is to stay there.
And not just stay there, but maybe even lean into it and fully inhabit it and wear it like it’s your favorite cardigan. Wrap yourself in it, go to sleep with it, eat and drink and kiss it. Let it happen to you. Let yourself dissolve into. Listen to the fact that your body or your soul or your psyche or all of you does not want what your mean brain thinks it wants.
You are being asked to do something different, something that has not been done before by many other people, and definitely not by people with “online presences” who are talking about fucking burnout while they build their fucking empire. (I mean, if I were to do it all over again? I would have gone somewhere else that didn’t have internet instead of doing what I did, which was keep trying to use the internet, so probably don’t even listen to me. Find a person who left; ask them.)
Most of us go through life running from one thing to the next; we do this for a lot of reasons, but we do this mostly because we are terrified of not being anything at all—of losing our fixed identity, which is the scaffolding of how we exist in the world. People will say they are going to disappear and they’ll take three months off or even six months off and maybe for some that really is disappearing—but to me and what I went through? That was a mean joke. That was barely an inhale. That was when I was still staying up late into the night pretending to be giving it all up while I maniacally plotted how to remain relevant.
If this is not you, please kiss the ground and humbly ask that you never have to experience this.
If this is you, I beg you, let yourself explore this uncharted territory. Let yourself lean into what is no longer working and let all the things that you think you should do and probably were just minutes ago completely able to do but for some reason can no longer do at all fall the fuck away so you can actually sit with yourself—and I mean actually sit with your SELF—while all those labels that hold you together and give you a fixed identity slip away, and see what's left at the end of the day. What is left is what you’ve been looking for everywhere else.
It would be entirely irresponsible for me to say all of this without also explaining that I had sufficient funds saved to make this possible (and by that I mean I had a retirement account that I drained); that I worked during this time to make ends meet; and that I own a house I was willing to sell to finance my disappearance. I am a few hundred thousand dollars in debt over it, I still might have to sell this house. I consider all of this to mean I am extraordinarily privileged and it was worth it to me and I would do it all over again.
Do not rob yourself of the experience of losing your shit. Do not try to band-aid over it with a new purpose or a project or even a fucking craft project or any of that shit. It doesn't happen to everyone like this, but it happens to some of us, and if we use it? I've been in recovery for 12 years, I've gotten sober from multiple things, and I've been through a lot of terrible fucking shit. Hands-down, not knowing who I was or what I was doing with my life, or if I would ever have anything to contribute to the world again, was the best thing that ever happened to me.
It freed me from many of the ideas that keep all of us trapped—it freed me from the fallacy that we need to have a purpose to have a good life. It freed me from the idea that I needed to service my already successful book or already niche-famous persona or build a legacy for1 my life to have mattered. It allowed me to actually show up in my life, build real community, and find joy in the most simple and mundane things. It allowed me to finally realize I have enough. It allowed me to develop a worth that is independent of what I do, and is tied to my inherent am-ness.
Before all of this, nothing was enough—there weren't enough readers, eyeballs, dollars, coffees, homes, any of it. I was never measuring up. I was never catching up. I was never arriving. This is no longer the case for me.
It doesn't mean that I don't have the same neurosis, the same tendencies, or that I don't freak out about my purpose or whether I'm contributing or any of that shit—but those are just places I visit sometimes, and not what informs the value of my life. What informs the value of my life is that I’m living.
I've written extensively about this experience here over the past few years. Below are some of my favorite pieces.
and I also had a short-run series podcast called Quitted about this. (Again! It looks like I was doing so much work; for me, I was not. My reality was that I was barely functioning.)
Super important to note I was also diagnosed with ADHD during this period of time and entered perimenopause; things that were amplified by not being anchored, and things that amplified my unanchored-ness.
I am literally reading this while sitting with my dying mother. Not hyperbole. She is in her final hours. And even though I’ve taken a leave of work and feel space and privilege and freedom and support, I have this aching conflict of stepping forward into the space and unknown and rushing back to the grind of doing things anyway even though I don’t really have it in me because I’m being crushed by grief. (Your words about Andrea Gibson were profoundly connected to my experience this past couple of years and I thank you for always saying things out loud just when I need the reflection). My mother hollered the other day from her passage tunnel, “I can’t go forward and I can’t go backward.” And this is precisely how I feel right now. What else is there to do when sitting with the dying but to lean in and be present and patient? Thanks for being with me/us. I love you. Really. So much.
As someone who has been in this liminal space since the pandemic, your words are a balm to keep staying here, to be witness and present to just being. I have a poem on my fridge that as been a guiding light over these years by Martha Postlethwaite called “Clearing”
Do not try to save
the whole word
or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create
a clearing
in the dense forest
of your life
and wait there
patiently,
until the song
that is your life
falls into your own
cupped hands
and you recognize and greet it.
Only then will you know
how to give yourself to this world so worthy of rescue.