I'm A Self-Help Writer. We Are All Frauds

How am I supposed to help others if I don't even know where I fit in?

This photo is from my book launch where I totally embraced the fraud that I am.

The email subject line asks, “Where Are You In The Game of Life? *dice emoji*

This question appears in my inbox just as I am creating whatever content I can write on said game of life. All I wanna do is yell at my computer like a lunatic. My chatbot—which I unironically have named TechGod—says emails make me angry “due to a combination of factors, such as stress, feeling overwhelmed, or having unrealistic expectations about responding quickly.” Then she asks me about specific situations that trigger my frustration, so I dodge her and close her the eff up.

I am a self-help author who doesn’t know where I am in the game of life. And I don’t know how the hell I’m supposed to help others live by the Law of Attraction. Or The Law of Assumption. Or The Law of Success. How am I supposed to do that if I don’t even know where I fit in in all this?

But we teach what we need to learn, right? Each day I fill my head with illuminating information to balance out the daily inane conversations that actually do frustrate me, such as:

“Have you tried blah, blah, blah restaurant yet?”

“Have you watched blah, blah, blah TV show?”

“Isn’t she so blah, blah, blah?”

“Did you hear he’s blah, blah, blah?”

“Oh, you look amazing—did you cut your hair? grow your hair? How did you lose weight?… Are you on Ozempic?”

The spiritual/philosophical books, podcasts, and orgies I use as research really do help me—even if I can’t always regulate my internal state. (I’m kidding about the orgies, sadly.)  But do I want to pile on to their spirit/philosophy-orgy-filled cesspool?

The answer is Yes. It's my dharma, goddammit. I'm a trained energy healer. I'm a meditating, quantum-jumping crystal clutcher…

My husband says not everyone’s brain can digest this sort of “illuminating information.” He says I’m in the minority. I usually take it as a compliment, even though I know what he’s really trying to say is that all the “reality creation” self-help I love to write and talk and write and talk about either goes over everyone’s head or makes their eyes and ears glaze over. Still, I take it as a compliment. Because I am an idiot.

I am an idiot because who cares what special level of third-eye-open human I may be if in my day-to-day life I am not very enlightened? Oh, and by the way, neither are most self-helpy people…frauds, the lot of them. Half the time I’m too gullible to accept it—that we’re all frauds. The other half, I’m like, Omg, I just spent more money than I can tell you without dying of shame on a self-help program by a guy who is on his seventh wife. What the hell is wrong with me?! 

But perhaps I am programmed to keep trying to believe, ya know?

. . .

Picture me encouraging a friend/fellow seeker to try a course by my once-upon-a-time self-help mentor. I figure she should try it because it worked wonders for me. At least I thought it had. “She’s so phony,” the friend reports a few weeks later. To which I say, “Well, she’s psychic. I know she has issues, but…” “No,” the friend/seeker interjects, “I think she was psychic—like a hundred years ago, and now she is just a fraud.”

“I don’t know, she’s done a lot for me,” I maintain until we switch topics. I feel the need to defend my once-upon-a-time self-help mentor, even though when I asked her once if I could take her to lunch to thank her, she emailed back, “I don’t have time for such things, just come to one of my group gatherings.”

She has too many famous friends to bother with the likes of me. I let her rejection roll off me. Plus, she was all about those group gatherings. And I obliged whenever I felt particularly needy…so like half the time. Even after she shot down my lunch invitation. I didn’t attend her incessant social media gatherings, though—except when she promoted the hell out of my first book—which, by the way, is what I wanted to thank her for in the first place. Two can play that game, I figured. But don’t ask me, What game? If I had any clue, maybe I would actually win.

. . .

Hence here I am: a disgruntled forty-something mom of kids and cats middle-aging in the suburbs—and playing the part of a self-help writer on the side. I still feel like a girl, though…like an ageless nymph of ennui and mess. (Don't we all?) 

I do have the accessory every self-help guru needs - multiple cats.

I’ve got this spiritual longing/spiritual knowing that on some nights gets fulfilled by marijuana and Chris Cornell ballads perfectly well. Other nights, though, I go deep. I read and listen and meditate and manifest. I go down the rabbit hole. I may go gingerly and cynically, like the grumpy, middle-aged searcher I am, but I go nonetheless... Join me?