As soon as I decided to grow the blog side of the business, I knew I needed staff to help me do it. I hired editors to help me write and photographers to take gorgeous photos and an assistant to run my office. As our content grew, so did the fan base. We worked hard and paid attention to trends, and as the audience grew so did the revenue. It was fantastic. It was a company built on my reputation and, ultimately, the ideal that these fans had created about me.
Allow me to take a side step here and explain something about celebrities or social influencers that I didn’t understand at the time. Right now, while I’m writing this book, I have just over a million fans on social media. But at that earlier point in my business history I probably had ten thousand fans on Facebook, and Instagram didn’t exist yet. Regardless, the deal with any sort of fame is just as true today as it was back then, and here it is: You don’t know me. You only know your perception of me. The same is true for The Rock or Oprah or a Kardashian or the president. Even when someone is as transparent as possible—and I would argue that, between pictures of my stretch marks going viral and my last book where I admitted everything from abusing alcohol to being bad at sex, I lead a very transparent public life—even then you don’t know the actual person. Not because they’re necessarily secretive, but because you perceive them through the lens you’ve created.
So, for instance, if you first started following me on Instagram because of a picture of me looking extra stylish, you might think of me as stylish and on-trend. If you came on board during the aforementioned stretch-marks photo explosion, then you might identify with me as a mother or someone who has battled with body-image issues. Whatever you perceive about me (or anyone you don’t truly know) has way more to do with the box you’ve put us in than who we actually are. This is all totally natural and fine, unless that person you admire steps outside the lane you put them into.
For me, that lane was motherhood. And here’s where the whole double-life thing I mentioned earlier comes into play.
I had a legion of fans who were moms (and I still do to this day), but at the time I hadn’t publicly talked about my company. It wasn’t that I was ashamed; I was simply so focused on creating content that I never stopped to explain how it had all come into the world. I assumed everyone would realize I must have had help. I was creating six intricately produced blog posts every single week, and I had two small children. Of course I had help! But for whatever reason, that wasn’t apparent to most people, and when they realized the truth, some of them were pissed. And ruthless. I don’t even recall what it was for, but I know it was a Facebook post where I talked about being a mom. In the comments someone asked when I had time to “do it all.” It didn’t even occur to me to lie.
“Oh, I don’t do it all,” I blithely typed back. “My husband is really involved, and we have a nanny who helps with the boys while I’m at work.”
The internet exploded.
“What kind of mother lets someone else raise her children?”
“Only a selfish bitch would choose work over family!”
“Must be nice to lay around all day while some other woman raises your kids.”
The vitriol was immediate and intense. Some fans were disheartened to learn that I had help in producing the content. Many women were very upset that I had a job outside the home. Others were apoplectic that I had a nanny. I can understand in retrospect that they had perceived me to be a stay-at-home mom, likely because that’s who they were. We tend to see people not as they are but as we are. When I stepped outside the lane they had built for me, they felt cheated or lied to.
I was devastated.
I could not handle that people were so upset with me. Never mind that they were absolute strangers. Never mind that it was in the comments of a Facebook post. I was gutted. Remember little girl me? Remember Shark Teeth? Well, she still desperately wanted to belong, and she hated the idea that anyone might be upset with her.
It honestly seems stupid in retrospect, because I’m so far removed from that insecure young woman (thank you, therapy!). But it made me second-guess everything I did and said publicly. There were a handful of topics I knew would make people angry, so I stopped mentioning them altogether. Working, entrepreneurialism, my team, having a nanny, having a housekeeper, business trips—it all quickly became taboo. I focused on what people loved. Pinterest-worthy photos on how to get organized, parenting advice, exercise tips, and cupcake recipes ruled the day. I worked my butt off for years to grow and scale my company, but if you asked me at the time what I did for a living, I would demurely tell you that I had “a little blog.”
That “little blog” was read by millions of people every month and had a six-figure revenue stream, but I understood that the business behind the blog was upsetting to certain people, so I never mentioned it. And it wasn’t like I just kept certain aspects of my life quiet. The very nature of keeping it a secret started to reinforce the idea that what I was doing—and who I was—was something to be ashamed of. This fed my mommy guilt. This fed my insecurities about the right way to be a wife. When anyone said anything negative about my choices, either online or in person at a family function, I didn’t question it. I came to believe that they were right, that I was doing all this wrong, that a good woman or wife or mother would live totally for her family.
Only I couldn’t give it up. I loved my business, and I loved trying to solve the puzzle of entrepreneurship. It made me happy. It lit my heart on fire. It made me feel alive. But, simultaneously, I didn’t want anyone to be inconvenienced by the thing that gave me joy.
How many of you do that? How many of you reading this are living half lives or, worse, are a shadow of who you were truly meant to be because someone in your life doesn’t fully appreciate or understand you?
I didn’t want to give up on my dream of a successful business, but I also didn’t want anyone to disapprove of me. I lived this double life for nearly five years and suffered from constant anxiety attacks. It took a ton of personal work and some big realizations for me to get to the root of why I felt the need to live this way, but the gist of it is this: I cared more about being loved by others than I cared about loving myself.
So while I continued growing my business, I stopped mentioning it publicly. And when members of our family questioned why I would work rather than stay at home with our children—constantly and with increasing frustration—I learned not to mention it privately either.
Brené Brown says, “Shame is a focus on self, guilt is a focus on behavior. . . . Guilt: I’m sorry. I made a mistake. Shame: I’m sorry. I am a mistake.”1 I didn’t understand it at the time, but I felt extremely ashamed of being a working mom. And I felt ashamed for years. Years of beating myself up, years of trying to please everyone else, years of trying to be exceptional at producing family dinners and toddler birthday party designs in order to prove that my children weren’t missing out on anything. So many years I wasted knotted up inside about other people’s expectations for my life. So many years being distracted from my core mission to motivate and help other women, because I was so worried about everyone else’s perception.
So many years I spent apologizing for who I was.