I spent five hours on a post for social media only for it to completely flop.

I say five hours.

The truth is, before even pressing record, I spent an (additional) hour before doing my hair, putting on makeup and trying to convince myself that the yellow top I initially grabbed didn’t wash me out.

Then, I filmed. I spent nearly three and a half hours editing, watched it back a few too many times until finally, I saved it and then waited for the perfect time to post. I let a week go by. I couldn’t be flippant as to when to share this masterpiece I just exhausted myself over. Till one early evening, I decided it was time.

Post.

I must admit, there’s something exhilarating about giving your self-expression somewhere to be received. It’s exciting to have poured yourself into something and await the response your soul is craving.

I don’t want to admit it, but I want to be seen.

As a creative.
As someone whose expression meant something to someone.
As someone who was able to give a sense of value out into the world.

It’s not just selfless though.

I also want to be seen as intelligent, honest, pretty, put-together but not too much so, intentional, respected, and someone worth listening to. The list could go on, but I’ll spare you some time.

I sat there on my less than comfortable couch, letting a few minutes pass by before opening the app again. And then, nothing. Crickets. Silence. I put my phone in another room. I told myself this was my attempt at practicing social media boundaries but that was a lie. The truth is, this was really just my attempt at self-regulation for a complete vulnerability hangover. The self-control lasted an hour until finally, I opened the app again. And again, nothing. I didn’t know silence could echo.

And so the inner dialogue continues.

How could something I just worked so hard at creating not land?? Was it the time of day I posted? The hook? Maybe I should change the caption. Will editing the caption post posting affect the engagement??

In spite of this internal wrestling, I then spent an additional hour engaging on the app, hoping that doing so would contribute to some kind of good mojo or something. (Spoiler alert: it didn’t.) Until finally, I gave up.

Seven hours. Total.

Feeling invisible feels extra vulnerable in the moments you’ve clearly worked so hard on something you wanted to be received. It would be lovely to say that this is an anomaly of an occurrence but that would be a lie. The truth is, if you’re an artist, writer, or creative in any capacity in this online digital world, it is more normal than we like to admit to feel like we lack being seen, despite pouring our heart and soul into what we do.

I’ve had seasons of my life where this lack of feeling received really got to me.

As a result, I’ve taken week and month long breaks thinking that in doing so, maybe I would come back with a revived strategy that would make it all worth it or if not that, at least convince myself that I don’t actually want to be seen for my creative efforts.

I’ve admittedly had an on-again, off-again relationship with social media. I find it exhausting to feel like my vulnerabilities bleed through my content only for them to sometimes not land. And maybe you’re there too. Maybe you have a creative endeavor, a message, an expression you want to show the world but the idea or the already lived experience of silence in return makes you want to shrink back.

I get it. I’ve been there.

Years ago, I thought by becoming a Creative Director for a social media agency (a title I still hold), I would somehow transcend this struggle. Surely, if I could understand how it all worked, I wouldn’t have to be met with the reality of feeling the incessant need to hide likes on a post I just slaved over.

And yet, here I am, years later, still experiencing that vulnerability hangover from time to time. I’ve now spent years professionally thinking through what qualifies as good content, analyzing good hooks and personally experiencing what happens when they simply don’t land. I’ve watched accounts go from single digits to hundreds and thousands while posting minimally while seeing others doing everything “right” despite not moving at all.

And somewhere between those two perspectives, I’ve started to understand something that is fundamentally shifting the way I use social media to support my creative work (and causing legitimate growth) rather than allowing social media to determine how I feel about it.

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I don’t think a lot of us want love. At least not in the way we say we do. I think we think we want love, but in actuality, what we really want is control. A version of love that buys us a sense of eternal security. A mortal reminder that we are in fact worthy of being chosen because we now have proof of it in living form.

Saying we want love, however, sounds prettier. It affirms the desire we have to believe that we are in fact not lonely, just waiting to be chosen and this makes us feel good.

The truth is, despite the stories we tell ourselves at 2 a.m, I don’t think we want to experience love as much as we want everything we think that love will give us.

We want to be claimed. Secured. Chosen. Held as though certainty was something to hold. We want love incarnate, to affirm to us that what we experience is real, and perhaps more importantly, that we are worthy of experiencing in the first place.

When being chosen is the thing that makes you feel enough, attachment will feel like devotion and possession will feel like the thing that you’ve spent your entire life searching for, but never quite out loud.

And from time to time, we get a glimpse of a reality that distorts this inward desire to be claimed. We see people wear the numbers of years they’ve stayed together like a badge of honor, despite being wildly unfulfilled. We watch the woman stay with the man who controls her despite being given every reason to leave or the man who would rather be needed than to experience what it feels like to be left.

We see it and know it, the understanding that being needed isn’t the same thing as being loved, and yet, something within us longs for it anyway. It’s why we make movies and shows all articulating the same storyline.

Maybe the thing that makes these stories so intoxicating to consume is also the thing that makes them so difficult to admit: we recognize ourselves in them. For the way they mirror back to us the lives we’ve lived while in someone else’s hands.

But the truth is, what culture, or often times, our own experience, has framed as love is a version that wouldn’t last for most beyond the ending credits despite our incessant desire to watch it again and again. I think, if we’re going to experience a different kind of love, we need to rewrite a different understanding of it.

And that’s where this essay comes in.

The stories that shape the love we experience

I grew up believing the basics. Divorce is bad and love, if it’s really love, always ends in a happily-ever-after. There’s an undeniable gift in being taught that people are worth staying for. But endurance is not the same thing as love.

I’m part of the lucky minority of people who have parents that are both still together and even perhaps more rare, happy while doing so. Staying is something I’ve witnessed long before I had the opportunity to choose it for myself. Yet, somewhere along the way, I began to measure the depth of love by its ability to remain. I mistook permanence for the security I secretly lacked within myself.

To be chosen feels like being loved. To be left is to have not been loved at all. And to willingly release your hold of someone you still ache to keep, feels both impossible and contradictory all at the same time.

My first heartbreak occurred at the age of eighteen in an Albertson’s parking lot, when the first man I loved told me he didn’t want me anymore. Young love, in hindsight, is never as infinite as it feels in the moment, but it’s quite intoxicating to experience forever like it’s standing right in front of you. It’s easy to believe something you can touch and loving him made eternity something I could hold. I’m convinced love will make the most atheistic human believe in magic because it’s magical to see love embody a human form. Forever now had a face, a voice, a name.

Until one day, it didn’t. How could you love someone so fully and it still not be enough?

After that goodbye, I spent an entire year crying in pillows that weren’t mine and attempting to find home in people as though bodies were something to take shelter in.

Heartbreak feels like death, and in some ways it is. It’s a death to the version of reality we grew comfortable in calling a life and a death to the person we thought we were because of who we were beside them.

The illusion of safety that comes with self-abandonment & making yourself small enough for nobody to leave

Before I’d ever dated, I had already become fluent in a language of love that made self-denial sound holy. I grew up attending Sunday church and went to Vacation Bible School throughout my youth. It never felt like vacation, despite the palm tree decorations hung up on the florescent-lit walls yet, we called it that anyway. And even before I could articulate such a thought, I experienced the fact that even love has its own branding.

I was five years old, sitting cross-legged on the onyx carpet of a baptist church, when I first remember learning that being, “good” meant denying yourself. Take up your cross. Follow him. Become less so that God can become more. I didn’t have much to take up at the age of five, nor did I have language for self-abandonment. I did, however, have language for obedience.

And it was there that I slowly began to internalize the idea that to love something greater than myself meant learning how to become smaller beside it. And somewhere along the way, I stopped needing religion to tell me that love required sacrifice.

I had already learned the lesson.

The romance of disappearing into someone else

There’s something seemingly romantic about choosing to escape inside the confines of somebody else. A relationship, a friendship, a version of God that requires you to leave yourself in the longing of it. Falling into somebody else can make it easy to abandon yourself, but self-sacrifice is a low cost to pay when becoming someone else feels like freedom.

I thought I experienced love numerous times throughout my twenties. Partners of which we exchanged, “I love you’s” as though saying the words themself made them true. But every time I said it, I found myself needing to be less in order to keep it. Exist less. Want less. Need less. Eventually, I got tired of sucking myself in order to fit within the love I was craving.

And then one day, I met him and everything changed.

Up until him, I had never experienced a love that felt so genuine and safe. Being with him, in many ways, made me feel more like myself, and for the first time ever, I found myself experiencing a love so expansive I had no choice but to take up space inside of it.

Yet, the morning after my 30th birthday, I told the man I loved that I needed to let him go.

Letting go of him felt like letting go of myself and yet, I chose to let go anyway. The familiar truth I’d realized, but was too afraid to admit, was that we were both negotiating. Both asking for the other to meet us in places the other could not meet, both craving to be held in ways the other didn’t know how. Both trying to secure love by controlling the conditions in which it existed.

It’s a terrifying thing to let go of a love that you’re “almost” certain about. A relationship that checks off things you’ve always wanted but never knew you’d find, all the while not being able to escape the inner knowing that says, “not now, not this.”

It sounds like a contradiction; willingly saying goodbye to someone despite loving them all at the same time. Most of us have been conditioned to believe that if you love something or someone, you’ll do everything to keep it, no matter the cost. Whether it pains you, wounds you, or requires you to give up everything you’ve ever wanted, love is the thing that makes every sacrifice worth it.

Even if it costs you yourself.

But the truth is, being deeply loved didn’t make me more scared to lose it. In fact, it made me trust myself enough to leave, if and when staying meant losing the parts of myself I was relearning how to love.

And maybe that’s what makes love the greatest and most vulnerable gift of all.

Because it’s not about whether or not you love someone enough to keep them. It’s whether you love someone enough to let them go. It’s not about how much you can escape into them. It’s about being so alive and present in your own experience, that when and if the love you share isn’t pushing you toward your most most authentic selves, you’re empowered enough to let them run free rather than needing for them to stay.

Love will challenge you to let go completely. But not because self-martyrdom is somehow holy or because love requires us to shrink ourselves to fit inside it, but because to love anyone or anything means being willing to surrender it to something greater than ourselves. A version of a life and fullness to which we maybe we were never meant to hold for them.

I’ve learned that having a level of detachment is a necessary ingredient to love anything because without it, it’s not truly love but control. An attempt to find security within ourselves through somebody else’s willingness to stay.

I wanted love, as I knew it. It felt safe. Familiar. But when you normalize an “almost-good enough” kind of life, familiarity will feel like comfort and comfort will feel like safety. Choosing an “almost-right” kind of love meant keeping us both from the lives we were meant to live, and despite my comfort zone screaming at me to stay, there’s nothing safe about that.

Maybe the deepest form of love isn’t gripping something tightly enough that we never risk losing it but rather allowing ourselves to hold it with open hands. To choose someone without needing their choosing of us to make us whole. To let love be an experience rather than something we possess.

And when our minds go searching for certainty in the quiet moments at 2 a.m, maybe the love we’re so desperately seeking isn’t found in the arms of someone else, but in trusting that even if love, as we currently know it leaves, we will still be here. In fullness, not parts.

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About This Author:

I’m Sierra Scott — a writer and creative exploring identity, belief, and the stories that shape how we live. I write about religious deconstruction, people-pleasing, relationships, and the in-between space of rebuilding a life that feels like your own.

Find me on Instagram or TikTok for more on unlearning, rebuilding, and becoming.

Other pieces you may enjoy:

In recent years, a new unified language has been quietly shaping our culture and internal landscape. Therapy-speak. A term which can be defined as, “The casual and frequent use of clinical psychology terms in everyday life.”

In today’s culture, we love using therapy-speak to define our situation. A glorification I’ve seen happen progressively over the last handful of years. According to a study done by MDPI, health and wellness content increased over six-hundred percent in 2021. In light of this explosion of self-help, life coaches have taken over our screens and concepts that were once only used in therapy rooms were now being condensed to shareable carousel posts, allowing a much larger audience to feel heard and understood. Social media took concepts that once felt foreign and clinical and turned them into something that felt accessible and reachable.

I, too, was one of them. In 2019, I was attempting to piece myself together after a broken engagement, failed relationship and a loss of identity that came when I began slowly letting go of my black and white religious worldview. I craved to be known, seen and understood and for the first time ever, the people and places I’d most commonly learned to see myself in were gone.

Finding self-help felt like being saved all over again.

Like I was being transformed. And without hesitation, I dove head-first, knee-deep, all-in. I shared my healing journey online, kept “The Body Keeps The Score” in my bag as though it was my new bible and even got my life coaching certification.

Self-help and internet pop-psychology made what once felt distant, something accessible. No longer did we need to wait to sit in a therapist’s office in order to feel heard and understood. Now, we could experience it all from the comfort of our bedrooms. Yet, with this rise of life-coaches and therapy-speak, also came something else quietly shaping our culture: the overexploitation of psychological language.

And suddenly, a shift occurred.

It’s now currently 2026.

For many of us, we’ve learned to label hardship as trauma, canceling someone as a form of boundaries, disagreement as gaslighting and the presence of any form of discomfort as a justifiable reason to take a mental health day and free ourselves from any inconvenient obligation.

With the increase in knowledge of psychological terms, you’d think that we’d hold more capacity for understanding, complexity and nuance. Yet, in the midst of our most psychologically literate era, studies have shown we’ve entered a public health epidemic as a result of loneliness and social isolation.

Such findings beg us to identify an uncomfortable reality: could it be true that more language doesn’t necessarily mean more connection?

Because while the use of therapy-speak seems to offer a sense of moral salvation and superiority, I’ve come to believe that the deliverance it offers is not as gratifying as it may seem. Perhaps, naming something isn’t the same thing as understanding it. Perhaps, the overexploitation of psychological language hasn’t made us better at understanding people or ourselves. It’s just made us better at categorizing.

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Our need for labels is killing our ability to have relationships

I don’t think social media is what started this craving for language as much as it highlighted our need for it. Labels allow us categorize, and categorization is one of the brains oldest survival mechanisms. Social identity theory affirms this. If we can label ourselves as being part of a group identity, we will subconsciously be scanning for anyone who affirms that identity for us. Anyone who falls outside that construct becomes someone that we are likely to see as an outsider, “other”, undermining our group identity and valued less favorably.

This internal seeking of labels is a way we survive. Finding a sense of belonging allows us to find our place in the world. The problem with therapy-speak, however, is that it allows us to indulge in the subconscious temptation to use it as a tool to categorize people for survival rather than as a tool to help us expand our capacity to hold the complexity of genuine and full relationships.

Instead of holding the tension of, “Someone experienced this differently than me," we say, “They’re gaslighting me." Instead of saying, “They’re not someone I like," we say, “They’re a narcissist." Instead of saying, “I’m feeling discomfort,” we say, “I’m having a panic attack."

Using such bold, polarizing and clinical terms allows us to label something or someone outside of us as the problem, and further encourages the idea that we are distant from it. The more we make the claim somebody else is toxic, the more healed we tell ourselves that we are and beyond that, the more we internalize the idea that the answer is somewhere outside of our control.

In my essay, Self-Help Can Be a Form of Avoidance Too, I talk about this tension of finding a sense of unspoken gratification from distancing ourselves from the problems we see. Martyrdom clothed in a heart to be good. In the essay itself, I write:

”There’s something seductive about being a martyr. I think it’s why we so often spend our lives making identity from our pain and calling it “good.” If we can be in a perpetual state of being wounded, willingly inconvenienced in the name of serving others, we never have to be the one who wounds. We never have to be the inconvenience.”

Note: I’d like to point out that my criticism of the use of such words is not because I don’t think these words have any value, but rather the opposite. These words do hold value, and language is an incredible tool for understanding our experience. That is why I’m advocating for a more intentional use of them.

The measure of emotional intelligence is not found in the language you use to categorize other people but in your capacity for nuance, complexity and your ability to extend empathy without reducing people to labels

Our culture has believed a lie. The lie is that the more self-help books you read, the more therapy you do, the more psychological terms you use, the more healed you are. Labeling things and people around us allows us to feel safe. It makes us feel like we’re doing something about the discomfort at hand, without actually having to move beyond the boundaries of our comfort zone to confront it.

It’s avoidance. The truth is, it’s easier to label somebody else being toxic, narcissistic and any other name that affirms the brand we’ve given them within our heads. So as long as I choose to cancel you, I don’t have to do the uncomfortable work of having a conversation with you. So as long as I choose to label you as a narcissist, I don’t have to question the unhealthy dynamics within myself that allowed me to entertain such a relationship or friendship in the first place.

Rather than acknowledging any sense of self-responsibility or ownership over how I’m handling the situation, instead, get to hand that to you. All the while, adorning myself with language that affirms to me that I am not the problem.

The walls we build in an attempt to hide from ourselves

The problem is not that we lack language to understand ourselves or the world around us. The problem is that we’re terrified of the inevitable vulnerability that is required if we were to allow ourselves to acknowledge the roles in which we've too played in the cycles of our own suffering.

What would it look like, if, rather than spending our efforts attempting to prove why somebody in our life is a narcissist, we spent our time attempting to understand what unhealthy dynamics within us existed that made us susceptible to such a relationship in the first place? What would it look like if, rather than labeling any moment of inconvenient discomfort as a panic attack, we sat with our discomfort long enough to be able to learn how to move with it? What if, rather than labeling what we see as the problem, we spent our time learning to see ourselves as the answer?

The language we use is supposed to expand our capacity, not limit it. As a writer who also has a natural bend towards conflict avoidance, I’m far too familiar with hiding my vulnerabilities behind language, words or statements that sound prettier in my head. I’m terrified of the self-inventory that is required if I were to allow myself to say the messy yet honest thing out loud.

Language is both my first love and my drug of choice all at the same time. It’s both healed the parts of me that I struggled to put words to and protected me from the things I was too terrified to admit.

But even good things can become cages.

And that’s why I’m writing this essay.

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I’m Sierra Scott — a writer and creative exploring identity, belief, and the stories that shape how we live. I write about religious deconstruction, people-pleasing, relationships, and the in-between space of rebuilding a life that feels like your own.

Find me on Instagram or TikTok for more on unlearning, rebuilding, and becoming.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been praised for my adaptability. Throughout my life, adaptability has taken on many forms. It’s looked like moving states, switching schools, waiting in restaurants long after the agreed upon-time and, most of all, swallowing my feelings before anybody else has to hold them.

Swallowing my feelings has often left me feeling stuffed, but I’ve found the cost of doing so to be much easier than the inevitable conflict I fear I will face if I were to allow my feelings to bleed out, spilling out on those around me.

I’m not quite sure when I first started doing it. The stuffing. The swallowing. As babies, we come out of our mothers’ wombs screaming in an ache to be heard. Our entire being is centered around an attempt to get our needs and wants met. I’m not saying I desire to go back to this. An existence centered around nothing but ourselves sounds admittedly hollow and unfulfilling at best, but I would be lying if I didn’t say a part of me craved the tenacity of my younger self.

I don’t think that version of us disappears as much as it gets negotiated away. We don’t wake up one morning and suddenly decide that our needs matter less. We learn it slowly, gradually. We experience life, death, first loves, first heartbreaks, all the while absorbing messages about what it means to be pretty, likable, and everything else we hope to become.

I never stopped having needs. I just became increasingly aware of how those needs inconvenienced other people. And somewhere along the way, I internalized a fundamental lesson:

The more agreeable I was, the easier I was to consume. The more digestible I became.

Being consumed is not the same thing as being loved

We do it all the time; we want connection. Connection means belonging and belonging means survival, so we compile a list of traits in our brains as to what we think we must become in order to get that. We stop advocating for the fullness of who we are and slowly begin exchanging it for asking ourselves who the world wants us to be.

The voice in my head tells me that I want to be loved, but being loved requires you to show up completely, fully and at times wildly inconveniently. So instead, I settle for being consumed. Being consumed feels like being wanted, even if it means contorting ourselves in the longing of it.

I’ve been thinking about how much of my life has been built around being liked. This desire has been far from overt, which is why I think it’s been so hard for me to detect. I have no issues rebelling against trends, forming an opinion of my own or opposing the idea that people exist in some kind of hierarchy. Instead, the desire to be liked for me has shown up in much more subtle ways than that.

It’s looked like drinking the wrong coffee simply because I don’t want to face the implications of asking for a new one and being seen as picky. It’s shown up in overly forgiving responses despite knowing a boundary had been crossed or in my continuous ability to stay in friendships or relationships long after they’ve expired.

Seemingly small moments but all of which have shaped me in the big moments too.

I once had a friend praise me for being such a “low-maintenance friend.” The comment itself, which was intended to be a compliment, quickly sent me into an internal unraveling. She saw someone who didn’t require much in friendship. Yet what I felt was a self-induced suffering that came from the piling up of things left unsaid in an effort to be convenient.

And in all my years of shapeshifting myself to be more agreeable, likable and easier to consume, here was the thing I never realized:

Whether you swallow your feelings whole or let them bleed out, you’re going to face discomfort either way. The question shouldn’t be, “How do you avoid discomfort?” but rather, “Which one are you more willing to live with?”

While I think it’s true that the best friendships or relationships shouldn’t feel costly all the time, I’ve come to believe there should be a cost. You don’t experience a relationship that goes beyond skin-deep without one. It should cost you your convenience from time to time, your pride, your human desire to always be right, and your willingness to look at your own unhealthy tendencies. Without any level of friction, I’m left with the question: Are we truly showing up fully, or just as a projected version of ourselves we’ve decided is easier to live with?

The truth is, what she saw as low-maintenance was often just a terrible habit of subconsciously thinking other people’s comfort took precedence over my own. And that habit had me being perceived as low-maintenance when, in actuality, I had just gotten really good at stuffing.

In the last year, I’ve increasingly come to realize the relationships I’ve held onto that have required me to be less of myself in an attempt to give them the room they needed to exist. That, too, is a projection, I admit. Partly from experience, partly from fear. These people, often charismatic in nature, are ones whom I admire for so easily taking up the space I subconsciously fear taking.

And in the quiet moments between me and my journal, I’ve come to realize another truth about myself. I’ve spent so much of my life studying and admiring the people who take up space that I never noticed the role I’d quietly assigned myself: the one who gives it away. If someone else is naturally loud, expressive, opinionated, or needy, I instinctively become quieter. More agreeable. Easier. And somewhere along the way, I began confusing making room for other people with disappearing myself.

Why self-erasure feels like connection

The lie I realized I had believed was that being liked is the same thing as connection. But the truth is, we don’t self-erase just because we think it buys us connection. We self-erase because it allows us to avoid the parts of ourselves we’re too uncomfortable to face.

If I’m low-maintenance, I don’t actually have to name what I want. I can hide behind my perception of your expectations, wants, or needs being met and escape into a realm I’ve convinced myself you’d be happier with.

I don’t want to communicate that this tendency to self-reduce is heroic. In fact, it’s far from it. Because the problem with building a life centered around being adaptable or liked is that the moment you stop, you realize the entirety of the relationship was built upon a version of you that never really existed in the first place. Instead, it was built around the prettier version. The more liked version. The version you created and projected out in an attempt to be more lovable.

But love that requires you to escape in anyway yourself is not love, it’s an illusion you’ve normalized living with.

Your fear of being, “too much” is costing you your life

I always felt a strong desire to be good. Being good looked like different things at different times. Sometimes it looked like following the rules, and other times it looked like breaking them for the sake of something more true. But what happens when our commitment to being the things we want to be takes precedence over showing up as we truly are?

As a child, and well into my young adulthood, music was my life. I held my guitar like Sunday churchgoers hold their Bibles and experienced my most confident and alive expression while playing music for crowds of people. Contrary to popular belief, however, the confidence I felt as a young adult playing on stages that once felt big was not built during my years of being given external affirmations for my efforts and art. It was built by the twelve-year-old version of me who decided to pick up a guitar despite not knowing how to properly tune it and clumsily playing my way through it anyway.

The willingness to move through the tension of being bad or wrong is what allowed me, so many years later, to show up fully.

I think relationships are often like that too. True, fulfilling relationships aren’t birthed out of never having conflict, struggles, or a cost. In fact, they’re deepened by their ability to have those things and move through them anyway. To have the capacity to change, move, and transform as we are meant to without it threatening the livelihood of the relationship itself.

Perhaps your constant bend toward being adaptable isn’t just a people-pleasing problem but rather an avoidance and discomfort with genuine vulnerability

But what clarity could be uncovered from our relationships if only we allowed ourselves to show up as full-people?

Because as I’m learning, there is a feedback regarding the dynamics we’ve held, that comes only when we allow ourselves the vulnerability of being inconvenient or something outside of what we feel is expected of us.

These days, rather than finding myself daydreaming about the illusionary peace that comes from making other people happy, I find myself dreaming of something else: a version of life where I’ve become such an advocate for myself that being an inconvenience is not seen as a roadblock but as an inevitable circumstance.

This essay, quite honestly, is an example of me attempting to do just that. To show up as I am, before I think it’s how it should be.

And in the moments when I’m tempted to shrink back, self-erase or make myself adaptable for the sake of someone else’s comfort, I’ll remember the twelve-year-old girl who sat on her cold bathroom floor. The one who night after night, committed herself to clumsily playing her out-of-tune guitar for her whole house to hear until one day, she finally got it right.

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About this author

I’m Sierra Scott — a writer and creative exploring identity, belief, and the stories that shape how we live. I write about religious deconstruction, people-pleasing, relationships, and the in-between space of rebuilding a life that feels like your own.

Find me on Instagram or TikTok for more on unlearning, rebuilding, and becoming.

Feeling safe, respected and loved by your partner is not some golden standard. It is the bare minimum.

I’ve been aware that writing such a statement may, and has, left some people feeling as though I must be selfish, ungrateful, impossible to please, or dismissive of the kind of love so many people have spent their lives believing should be enough. And yet, that is why I wrote that essay.

If you were one of lucky few as I’ve been, to have parents stay together from the time of birth to present, you may have seen what it looks like for two people to stay, despite the varying life circumstances that could’ve easily pulled them apart.

But time is a poor metric for love. People stay for a laundry list of seemingly justifiable reasons: children, finances, religion, fear, familiarity, obligation, or even with the hope that tomorrow will feel different than today. The presence of a relationship, no matter how long, doesn’t make it good, alive or healthy. It just means it exists.

I’m knowingly in the privileged select few, as I’m lucky enough to have both. Parents who are both together, and somehow, still managed to like and love each other through it.

But despite the strong example of love I saw set before me, I still had lessons to learn in the decade that was my twenties about love and attachment.

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At twenty-two, I learned that caring for someone else at the cost of losing myself wasn’t actually love at all, but codependency. At twenty-six, I learned that the best things in life don’t leave you in a constant state of questioning. Not knowing is knowing something. And at thirty, I learned that it’s not selfish to let them go. It’s selfish to hold unto somebody hoping they’ll one day evolve into who you want them to be, all because you’re unwilling to be honest with the fact, that they we’re only meant to be in your life for a season.

Not all of those lessons were learned because I loved someone who failed to meet me halfway. Some of them were learned because I was loved by someone who did.

The stories we tell ourselves in order to justify what we really want

We do it all the time: in relationships, politics, religion, etc etc. We point the finger outside of us because doing so gives us a sense of distance from the problem. If the problem is outside of us, then we don’t have to look within us to see how we’ve contributed to the cycles that played a role in our own suffering.

To be clear, there are circumstances and situations to which the one at fault is solely the person who abused the dynamic. This is not in reference to that. It is, however, a critique of the stories we use to make us feel better about ourselves, even if they keep us from understanding the fullness of what happened.

Truthfully, we don't always need the other person to be terrible because they actually were. Perhaps, we need them to be terrible because it's the only way we know how to justify leaving.

We demonize the person, their capacity, (or lack thereof) as being the issue, because we’re too insecure within ourselves to leave otherwise. We wait until things are, by our standards, beyond repair because the idea that we could leave something that’s not innately broken would threaten the story we’ve spent our lives curating about our own sense of goodness.

But just because something is good doesn’t mean it’s for you.

The temptation to settle for an almost-right kind of life

When I look back at each relationship I’ve experienced, I can list a number of reasons as to why, for each one of them, I could have continued to stay. It’s a humbling and empowering thing to realize that even in the relationships we’re tempted to label as wrong, we still were being fed something that led to our lack of leaving.

Sometimes that looks like choosing chaos in exchange for peace because doing so is more familiar. Sometimes it looks like choosing a partner that feels almost-right in exchange for the inevitable fear that comes with starting over, being alone or not finding better. All of which are shitty reasons to stay, and quite honestly, expose just as much about my own unhealthiness as it did in the dynamic itself.

We’re terrified of wanting more because if we actually admit the fullness of what we desire, then we have to do something about it. Self responsibility becomes unavoidable. Confronting the lack we feel within ourselves becomes necessary, no longer something we can project unto someone or something else.

Sometimes you will leave despite it being good. Because in its goodness you became aware that the breadcrumbs you once spent savoring are nothing more than that; breadcrumbs.

But maybe the problem isn’t that you’re wanting or asking for too much. Maybe, just maybe, you’re finally getting tired of asking for breadcrumbs and are starting to admit the fact that you really want the whole damn pie.

About this author

I’m Sierra Scott — a writer and creative exploring identity, belief, and the stories that shape how we live. I write about religious deconstruction, people-pleasing, relationships, and the in-between space of rebuilding a life that feels like your own.

Find me on Instagram or TikTok for more on unlearning, rebuilding, and becoming.

When I was nineteen years old, I went through the worst heartbreak of my life. First loves are like that. They swallow you whole only to one day toss you out, and years later, find their way back into your phone at 2 a.m. with a “wryd” text as though midnight loneliness was some sort of grand gesture.

What would later ensue, would be nearly a decade of dating boys, shapeshifting myself in hopes of making them men (or just interested), and all the while quietly wondering what was wrong with me in the process.

Women are good at doing that. Taking blame for things that aren’t ours, all the while exhausting ourselves, attempting to look pretty while doing it.

Today, I’m thirty years old. While I may not be married or thereby hold a traditional sign of society’s view of success when it comes to relationships, I do have other qualifications that have led me to writing this essay.

In the last ten years of my life, I’ve called off a wedding and held numerous long-term relationships, each one having taught me a deeper truth myself and my conditioning. While the ending of each of those relationships could be seen as a sign of failure to some, to me, it serves as a sign of my unwillingness to settle for an almost-right kind of love.

And now, a decade later, I can confidently say I’ve never felt more complete and alive in who I am and who I am becoming.

It is for that reason I come to you with this essay. Not as somebody who’s had it all together, but as somebody who has split herself open, cried in one too many parking lots, and read a few too many articles attempting to dissect the age-old question, “Does he like me or does he like me not?”

And after ten years, I realized that for a large majority of my twenties, I was asking the wrong questions. Here’s what the dating advice columns didn’t tell me:

Rather than asking: “Does he like me?” what you should be asking is, “Do you like him?”

For as long as I have been alive, stories of a “broken” woman and a man who comes to save her have been abundantly glorified. There’s something about a damsel in distress, a woman who, against all odds, remains utterly convinced in the lack of knowing her enough-ness that we can’t seem to get enough of.

We want a hero story. And women, who are in such a state, are looking for a hero.

A hero who pursues them, chases them and gives their life meaning. Being pursued means being validated. Being validated feels like being enough. It’s why we look to men with empty bios and who pose with dead fish to validate the parts of ourselves we do not yet affirm within ourselves.

In modern dating, we do it all the time. We find someone we like, enough, and slowly or quickly, begin to detach from ourselves because we’ve learned to see a kind of romanticism in attaching to another person. As though the smaller we become, the more that love itself can fill the empty gaps in which our presence once consumed. We stop asking what we want or what we like, and begin to disappear into someone else, all the while calling it intimacy.

But that’s not intimacy. It’s attachment.

Because intimacy that comes at the cost of abandoning yourself is nothing more than proximity mistaken for connection. You cannot be deeply known by another when you have already left yourself behind.

If you want an honest relationship, you have to be willing to be honest yourself. If you want a genuine, no bull-shit, real and deep relationship, you have to be willing to be those things yourself.

And in order to be that, you cannot escape yourself in the longing of someone else.

Whether or not they like you, is irrelevant if you don’t first answer the initial question; do you like them? Does this person align with your values? Do they hold capacity to meet you where you need to be met? Do you want to spend time with them?

It’s not about just about whether they like you. It’s do you like them?

And even more importantly, do you like yourself?

Because until then, you will date people as a means to prove to yourself that you’re enough. And anybody whose validation you had to chase to get, you will chase keeping.

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Rather than asking, “Will they ever change?”, you should be asking, “Is what they’re giving right now, as they are, enough for you?”.

I’ve held onto relationships many times in the name of hoping that they would change. I would like to point out a clear distinction in that sentence. I wanted them to change. It wasn’t a matter of preference—wishing they would do the dishes more often or remember my coffee order.

It was wanting them to meet me in a want or need in a way that they physically, mentally or emotionally were not able to.

Whether or not I realized it at the time, the days, months or years I spent in the yearning that they would one day evolve in the way I’d hoped, was not as much reflection of their lack as much as it was my own.

I stayed in the question of, “Do I stay or do I go?” because it felt easier than leaving. So as long as I allowed myself to wallow in indecision, I was at least enduring the discomfort that came with knowing I wasn’t the villainized selfish one who chose to leave.

But it’s not selfish to leave.

What’s selfish is holding unto someone with the expectation that they will one day evolve into who you want them to be, all because you’re unwilling to be honest with the fact, that they we’re only meant to be in your life for a season.

When you spend months or years of your life, normalizing a relationship that you know is not for you, leaving will threaten every bit of energy you spent years endlessly trying to convince yourself that this version of a life was enough.

To leave, means to admit that you were wrong.

In my recent essay, “Leaving is Hard But Staying in the Wrong Place is Harder”, I write about this tension of exchanging safety for aliveness.

I write,

If you’re merely looking for safety, you can find it. You’ll find it in the almost-good-enough job, an almost-good-enough relationship, and while sitting in almost-good-enough conversations that don’t require much of you. You’ll build an almost-good-enough life, in an almost-good-enough place, with an almost-good-enough group of friends, all the while attempting to convince yourself that your almost-good-enough life is not the same thing as settling. But feeling safe is not the same as feeling alive. And for whoever is reading this, I want you to know, you can in fact have both.

The question shouldn’t be, “Will they ever change?” The question you should be asking is, “Is what they’re giving, right now, enough for you?”

Because it’s only when you stop trying to fix, heal, or change someone that you allow them to show up as they are. And when they do, let that, whatever that is, be the deciding factor in whether or not this is actually someone you want in your to begin with.

That is your answer.

If I weren’t afraid of being alone or starting over, would I still choose this?

Sometimes we don’t stay because we’re confused, we stay because we’re afraid. We’re terrified of the inevitable what if’s that await us if we do in fact start over. The unknown feels exhausting to face and while we may know deep down that the life we’re normalizing isn’t the life for us, at least it’s familiar. It’s predictable. We know how to contort ourselves. We know how to fit ourselves in the box that is an almost-good enough life and when you’ve spent long enough contorting yourself and calling that normal, an almost-good enough relationship will feel like enough.

Starting over will feel scarier than the risk of staying.

But the riskiest place you can be is in any place that makes you lack peace within yourself.

What would you do if you weren’t afraid? What would you do if you believed deep down that your needs weren’t something you had to fight for but something that could be met, without fight or resistance? What would you do if you knew that a love that makes you feel seen, supported and respected, was not some idealized form of romanticism but the bare minimum that it is?

That is the life that is waiting for you on the other side of your fear.

All you have to do is step over it.

And if you’re still feeling the weight of indecision, just know, that is an answer too.

About this author

I’m Sierra Scott — a writer and creative exploring identity, belief, and the stories that shape how we live. I write about religious deconstruction, people-pleasing, relationships, and the in-between space of rebuilding a life that feels like your own.

Find me on Instagram or TikTok for more on unlearning, rebuilding, and becoming.

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It’s the year 2022 and, for the first time ever, God became an algorithm.

We call her AI, ChatGPT, or “Chat” for short, but the truth is, that isn’t actually her original name. Before taking on the form of an algorithm, we called her perfection, optimization, productivity, success, validation, knowledge, and a plethora of other names.

I do not hold the capacity to list them all, for I am only a human.

But here, it’s the year 2022, and now, we have a name that encompasses all of that in one. A god we can speak to. A god who responds by the tap of a screen. A god who’s made in our image.

And suddenly, a movement is formed.

It’s now 2026. Most of us interact with AI more than we interact with our own family. Therapy has often been exchanged for conversations with a robot that we continue to claim is unbiased, and many have even found love with their AI, often speaking about them as though they’re a real person.

And now, more than ever, the lines between what’s real and produced are ever-increasingly blurred.

I think the devotion to AI is in part due to our society’s absolute obsession with self-optimization. It’s no longer enough to be human. We must be more than human. Super-human. Seemingly devoid of error. Skin and bones existing to portray a sense of hollow perfection or success. Creating an eroticism out of unattainability, we’ve become allergic to the very thing that makes us real.

But this didn’t start with artificial intelligence. Long before we began outsourcing our thinking to algorithms, we were being taught the same lesson elsewhere: that who we are, as we are, is somehow insufficient.

Diet culture made women believe their bodies were wrong.
Dating apps made people believe there was always someone better around the corner.
The Girlboss movement made women believe success required becoming a machine.
And cults like Heaven’s Gate made people believe their humanity was something to transcend.

All different in strategy but each the same in message:

“Perfection is only one step away. And here is the key that will finally give it to you.”

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Consumerism only works if we’re convinced we’re missing something.

Our modern society thrives on manufacturing a sense of lack.

The more an ad can convince you that you’re in need of something you do not have yet, the more you will buy, consume, and the more dependent you will become. It’s why we buy the new pair of jeans despite them looking arguably identical to the other five pairs we already own. It’s not because we need another pair. It’s because we want to feel something that the others no longer make us feel.

By creating this sense of lack, consumerism indoctrinates us with the idea that we are incomplete until we find the thing that promises to save us.

We feel undesirable, so we buy beauty. We feel uncertain, so we chase answers. We feel lonely, so we seek validation until we’re feeling starved again. Somewhere deeply hidden within us, we know this cycle only keeps us hungry. But confronting our attachment to that hunger for more would require us to admit that we ourselves fell victim to a system and story that profited from us believing that we are not enough as we are.

To admit that would be to admit we’re human.
And that, we simply cannot do.

Perhaps, The Most Powerful of Gods Are The Ones We Refuse to Name

Some people will say they don’t believe in God. I disagree.

For most of us, we’ve created a God in our heads but have yet to acknowledge its existence. We may not call it God, Yaweh, Jesus, or Allah, or any of the traditional names, but we do worship it as such. It shows up in our insatiable longing, a sense of divine summoning, a God made real in our unwavering devotion toward this constant chasing of something more, something better, something not-human.

A yet-to-be-lived version of ourselves where our denim is three sizes smaller. A reality where our emails lack any form of potential error and a life where every inconvenient emotion can now be rationalized through a robot that’s been trained to comfort us.

The lack of acknowledgment that we’re in such a cycle is what keeps us reliant upon modern-day technologies that promise us the gift of perfection in exchange for our devotion to it.

This is especially true when it comes to AI.

Rather than trusting ourselves, our own judgment, thoughts, words, and conclusions, we’re now encouraged to hand it over to a robot who’s smarter, quicker, and supposedly more reliable than we are.

In an article published by The New Yorker, titled A.I. Is Homogenizing Our Thoughts, Kyle Chayka writes,

“Of course, a writer can in theory always refuse an A.I.-generated suggestion. But the tools seem to exert a hypnotic effect, causing the constant flow of suggestions to override the writer’s own voice. Aditya Vashistha, a professor of information science at Cornell who co-authored the study, compared the A.I. to ‘a teacher who is sitting behind me every time I’m writing, saying, “This is the better version.”’ He added, ‘Through such routine exposure, you lose your identity, you lose the authenticity. You lose confidence in your writing.’”

This slow erasure of self doesn’t happen by chance. It happens gradually and upon a foundation that has been set, long before complete erasure occurs. In order for such a state of hypnosis to happen, a few things must take place:

• A person must be seeking a transformation or something they believe they do not yet have, leading them to a state of emotional vulnerability.

• A person must narrow their attention to a singular idea or source of authority.

• Messages are repeatedly enforced, again and again.

• Attention becomes so immersed that critical thinking begins to recede in favor of receiving what is being offered as truth, and complete absorption takes place.

Perhaps the Scariest Things About Cults & Watching Bad Relationships on our Screens is the Familiarity We Feel

This cycle isn’t unfamiliar to us. We’ve seen it play out in various other contexts outside of our screens. We can see it in the high-demand religious groups that we look at ashamedly for all the ways in which we believe they’ve “missed the mark”. We can see it in the documentaries we watch of a relationship gone wrong, as we point the finger and wonder how the hell they got there. We make movies and headlines, all of which remind us of the ways such a reality exists outside of us, but somehow never within us.

Yet, whether it’s in a longing for love, belonging, or a sense of knowing truth, it’s all the same cycle, particularly when it comes to our use of artificial intelligence.

We crave a sense of knowledge we do not yet have. We’ve acknowledged a robot that’s undoubtedly smarter and faster than us. We narrow our attention to it by feeding it our hopes in the form of prompts. It tells us the answer. An answer we’re convinced we couldn’t have arrived at on our own. At least not as objectively or as quickly. And slowly, we detach from our own self-trust and give it to a robot that we now deem is better than us.

Nowadays, with the use of AI, attaining the illusion of perfection has become easier than ever. In today’s culture, self-optimization is the new religion, and AI is the path to holiness. We’ve become so obsessed with the values of self-optimization that we’re willing to escape our humanness in the longing for it.

We are so desperate to feel a sense of validation that we’re willing to settle for the illusion of it rather than do the work to get the thing itself.

Rather than take the time to become a writer, we direct it with prompts and call it ours. Rather than investing the energy or money into therapy, we spill our wounds into a chatbox and call that a diagnosis.

Rebelling Against the Pressure to Be the Most Optimized, Error-Free Version of Yourself

I don’t want to live a plastic life.

A life that’s curated with things, accomplishments, and titles that are almost mine but not quite. I don’t want to spend my days attempting to transcend what makes me human for the sake of being something I was never intended to be. A false sense of perfection. A hollow trophy of un-fought-for accomplishments.

I want to experience the beauty that can only be known when we slow down long enough to experience it. Writing shitty lines for the sake of writing less shitty ones later, becoming a student of the craft, noticing what feels true in my body before asking a robot, who is algorithmically biased, to tell me what I want to hear.

Maybe the problem isn’t AI.

Maybe it’s our desire to be saved from being human.

Perhaps, in this increasingly AI-obsessed world, the most rebellious act of devotion is remaining human in a world that is constantly begging for you to be something else.

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About this author

I’m Sierra Scott — a writer and creative exploring identity, belief, and the stories that shape how we live. I write about religious deconstruction, people-pleasing, relationships, and the in-between space of rebuilding a life that feels like your own.

Find me on Instagram or TikTok for more on unlearning, rebuilding, and becoming.

It’s the fall of 2021. I’m twenty-five. The book, “The Body Keeps the Score,” lies on my living room table, reminding me of all the ways I have, in fact, done the work.

You know the work. It’s the vague term adopted by self-help gurus and life coaches to describe the process of healing your inner child and becoming your most actualized self. As far as I understand it, there’s the self that exists right here and the self that exists out there—a more accomplished, higher, and evolved version of me. That’s the one I want.

“The work.”

The wording itself alludes to a sense of mysteriousness. An unspoken honor of exclusivity, which I like, as someone who often strived to prove myself in spaces I never quite belonged. It holds a subtle underlying tone of martyrdom reserved only for those who are willing, and that, I am. After all, work is often tied to doing the things we do not want to do. Spending our days existing behind a screen, making a man we’ve never met money we’ve never seen, all the while, soaking in the glory of all the things we could be doing as though unhappiness was something to indulge in.

There’s something seductive about being a martyr. I think it’s why we so often spend our lives making identity from our pain and calling it “good.” If we can be in a perpetual state of being wounded, willingly inconvenienced in the name of serving others, we never have to be the one who wounds. We never have to be the inconvenience.

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Reading self-help made me feel like I was doing something about my wounds.

I first discovered my love for reading at nineteen years old, when I gave my life to a religion that I would later let go of. Eventually, my daily studies were replaced with books on how to heal, and for the first time ever, I experienced a healing that wasn’t dependent upon my ability to get God right. The idea that such an experience wasn’t limited to the singular context I’d been given, shattered what I thought I knew, and provoked in me a deep curiosity for all things growth.

And right then and there, I became obsessed.

I’d read more books than I watched movies, and was in a constant state of listening to podcasts telling me how to better optimize my life. I reposted quotes from authors like Brené Brown and completed my life coaching certification, which affirmed to me, that I was (mostly) healed.

And yet, in the summer of 2023, I would find myself in a therapist’s office, absolutely unable to answer the question of “How does that feel?” without immediately filtering it through answers I had been given. How do I feel? How do I FEEL!? It became impossible to articulate anything that didn’t sound like it’d been told to me through a book or a podcast.

I didn’t know how to articulate how I felt. But I knew how I should feel.

I grew up with inspiring and incredible women who, despite how deeply they loved me, exemplified that sometimes, how you should feel is more important than how you do feel. Like many generations of women, they too we’re indoctrinated to believe that it’s okay to be upset, sad, tired, or angry, but vocalizing it would cause someone else discomfort, and that, we simply do not do.

Self-help is like that sometimes. A blanket sweeping acknowledgement that yes, life is shitty sometimes, but have you tried thinking better thoughts?

Despite the sometimes well-intentioned solution, it consistently communicates the same message. You are still broken and in need of fixing. This singular message is part of why the self-help industry holds the power to be as profitable as it is today. So as long as we believe we are in need of fixing, we will look to something or someone outside of ourselves to fix us.

Our culture’s obsession with "becoming” is slowly killing us

We live in a culture that worships becoming. Becoming the highest, hottest, and most healed version of ourselves. In our insatiable need to become, we reinforce the idea that if you’re not becoming, you’re falling behind.

I sat in my therapist’s office, embarrassed and flushed by my lack of an answer to such a seemingly simple question, and had a realization. If healing was something I could think my way towards, I would’ve experienced it by now.

The truth is, my over-consumption of self-help felt safe to me. It felt like I was doing something about the pain without actually having to do the work of feeling it. It was comfortable. I could indulge in such a way that it would communicate to everyone around me, “Don’t worry everyone! She’s learning, she’s growing, she’s becoming, and she’s not falling apart!”

And yet, I was learning that there’s an aspect to healing that cannot be thought toward but rather, only experienced through feeling.

It makes sense. I didn’t think my way toward trauma. I didn’t think my way toward pain. I experienced it. I felt it. It didn’t live in my thoughts. It lived in my body and the emotions I’d spent years burying. Attempting to think my way towards healing was only allowing me to access the part of me that knew how to explain the wound, not the part of me that actually experienced it.

I didn’t want to feel my feelings. I’d spent so long swallowing them, pushing them down that I didn’t know what would happen if I spilled them out, my guts existing in bare sight, letting my grief drip onto the table.

And yet, so long as I didn’t allow myself to feel the filthy, grotesque, untamed emotions beneath me, I would remain committed to a performance while calling it healing.

Self-help was how I affirmed to myself that I was still in fact, holding my shit together, despite my body begging me to allow myself to fall apart.

In the summer of 2023, I decided to take an entire year off from reading self-help. In my mind, that decision was made declaratively as I sat on the mustard-green couch and, for the first time ever, allowed myself to consider a way of being that didn’t require me to disappear in the longing of it. In reality, it happened slowly and unintentionally as I began to experience an unexpected relief that came from letting go of the habitual consumption of content that made me feel like I needed to be somewhere other than where I was.

And somewhere along the way, it clicked. What is so often framed as an obsession with becoming better is sometimes just a deep-seated fear that if we stop improving, we’ll stop being worthy.

Be it success, belonging, or whatever else we’re so desperate to get and convinced we don’t have yet.

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My on and off again relationship with self-help today

I still read self-help sometimes. I think my value for curiosity, introspection and growth is too engrained in who I am to never allow myself to indulge.

But these days, it’s different.

I can recognize the industry of it all as the industry that it is, I’m becoming more aware of when I’m gaslighting myself out of feelings I want to avoid versus expanding my capacity to feel the opposite. And perhaps most of all, I can put down the book long enough to actually experience the healing and life that exists beyond it.

I still get overwhelmed when asked the age old question, “How does that make you feel?”

But these days, rather than picking up a book to help me explain it away, I sit with the question. Sometimes in silence. Sometimes with a pen in hand.

And I write.

About this author

I’m Sierra Scott — a writer and creative exploring identity, belief, and the stories that shape how we live. I write about religious deconstruction, people-pleasing, relationships, and the in-between space of rebuilding a life that feels like your own.

Find me on Instagram or TikTok for more on unlearning, rebuilding, and becoming.

and yet, so many of those who find problem with the term, “deconstruction” do so each and everyday.

i talk about my deconstruction journey online because when i was questioning my beliefs and wrestling with the inner tension i’d felt, i thought nobody could understand me. while it may be some people’s journey, i didn’t relate with being angry at the church and leaving as a response. i didn’t relate with having a desire to live a life that i couldn’t yet live and therefore leaving because of it.

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contrary to popular belief, i left because of my faith, not despite it. it was experiencing a God that wasn’t scared of my questions or my ability to change my mind. it was the understanding my human ability to out run absolute truth was far weaker than God’s ability to keep me in it. it was the reckoning that while the God i knew was supposedly friend of sinners, my friends we’re people who looked and believed like me.

contrary to popular belief, my deconstruction journey was not merely a “deconstruction” but a deep remembrance and reunion of what it means to be both utterly human and an expression of divinity all at the same time.

these days, i no longer hold myself to needing to fit within any one particular box of belief. i no longer view changing my mind as a threat to my sense of security and i no longer see others who believe or live differently than me as an opportunity to “fix” or as someone to, “save”.

call it what you want: a backsliding, a slipping away, a lost soul.

but deconstruction led me closer to jesus than religion ever did.

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about this author

i’m sierra scott — a writer and creative exploring identity, belief, and the stories that shape how we live. i write about religious deconstruction, people-pleasing, relationships, and the in-between space of rebuilding a life that feels like your own.

find me on instagram or tiktok for more on unlearning, rebuilding, and becoming.

As a child, I was often praised for my sense of adaptability. As an adult, I’ve learned that self-contortion in the name of keeping peace and adaptability are not the same thing.

At twenty-something, I sat in a coffee shop spilling my insides on the page of a lemon-drop martini colored journal.

What if I quit my job?
What if I left this relationship?
What if I started fresh?

Two words. What if?

Seemingly innocent yet animalistic enough to transport me somewhere my reality hadn’t. I was like a dog awaiting to escape captivity. I saw my cages. I saw the life waiting for me beyond my cages. But I didn’t yet know what it meant or how to get free.

Sometimes that’s all we need.

Not a five-step system. Not a two-year plan but just the courage to ask, “what if” and to have the audacity to see where our imagination may lead us.

I started to let myself dream. First, in my head. Then, on the page. In doing so, I began to unmask things I desired but had never allowed myself to acknowledge. Maybe out of fear. Maybe out of complacency. Maybe out of both.

And four years later, on a rainy Sunday afternoon, I eventually came to say the words I once could only whisper through ink in the dotted pages of my journal.

“I don’t want this.”

And right then and there, everything changed.

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It has never ceased to amuse me that we spend our entire lives curating a sense of self, a projected idea of how our life should look and go, only for a singular moment or an uttering of a mere few words to hold the power to change everything.

We want to change our lives. Yet, rather than saying the few words out loud that would change it all, we spend weeks, months or years wallowing in indecision, preparing for every scenario possible, convincing ourselves that the gap between our knowing and our doing is somehow productive. I’m not here to advocate for reckless decision making. But, I am here to say that arguably so, that staying where you are may be equally as reckless.

For months, I let my mind run wild beyond the cages I’d been living in. The pages became my playground and the pen became my muse. Imagining a life beyond the one I’d spent a lifetime curating felt electrifying. Like I was rebelling against my own complacency. Like I was allowing myself to be completely, seductively and captivatingly allured by the forbidden fruit, intoxicated by possibilities of what could be.

Even if only on the page.

As a woman, this act of allowing my desires to take shape on the page, independent from the preconditioned filtering of how it’d made anyone else feel, felt particularly provocative. Defiant. Feral.

From the time we’re young girls, we’ve already been impressed with messages that tell us who we are and who we’ll become. We swallow our feelings and call that maturity. We hyper-extend and over-give and call that nurturing. We curate a life around other people’s needs and timelines and call that romantic.

But here I was, protesting from my insides against every message my younger self once believed.

The pages became the place where I allowed everything I’d buried to finally catch fire. It’s where I allowed myself to imagine a life that mirrored my desires, no matter how selfish, reckless or intangible it may have felt. I allowed myself to imagine, even if my imagination took me places that would cause life as I knew it to implode.

I imagined, until imagining a life I could’ve been living felt more exhausting than facing the fear of chasing it.

A lot has changed since I’ve practiced imagining. I called off a wedding. I left good relationships with good people in the name of believing I was allowed to want more than “almost-right”. I changed careers. I left a religion, a belief system and a version of God that required me to be codependent on my brokenness in order to be deemed as, “saved”.

And contrary to popular belief, it didn’t start with mapping out a five-year plan. It started in the violent whispers of desires not yet acknowledged etched in the pages of my journal.

And right then and there, my life began to change.

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I’m Sierra Scott — a writer and creative exploring identity, belief, and the stories that shape how we live. I write about religious deconstruction, people-pleasing, relationships, and the in-between space of rebuilding a life that feels like your own.

Find me on Instagram or TikTok for more on unlearning, rebuilding, and becoming.

For the past five years, I’ve been in an on-again, off-again relationship with social media. The kind where we break up, get back together, and swear this time will be different.

I haven’t had a personal account in nearly a decade, but as a creative, I keep coming back to it as the place I am “supposed” to share my work. I built one account to a few thousand followers, had a Britney Spears-adjacent meltdown, made a brand-new account, started over from scratch… and now, after nearly three years of rebuilding, I’m sitting here feeling like I should be five steps ahead.

I’ve spent more hours than I want to admit researching the “right” strategies, attempting to understand the incomprehensible algorithm and creating content for a platform that I’m still unsure actually knows my name.

Things weren’t always like this.

Interestingly enough, when I look at the previous account in which I grew to a few thousand and actually enjoyed posting, I realized a few key differences in how I held the app as a whole:

• I posted when I wanted to and felt compelled—not when instagram coaches told me I needed to

• I prioritized quality over quantity and depth over speed

• I didn’t bind myself to a long list of expectations as to what being on the app was supposed to look like and instead allowed myself to show up as I wanted

Yet somewhere along the way, I found myself flooded with a never-ending list of to-do’s that looks a lot like this:

“Post every day. Batch your content. Plan your content. Strategize your content. Make reels. But also carousels. But also long-form captions. But also keep it short. Post at the right time. Engage before you post. Engage after you post.
Comment back. Respond to DMs. Reply thoughtfully. Build community. Study the algorithm. But don’t chase the algorithm.. you are an artist, remember? Be consistent. Be disciplined. Show up even when you don’t feel like it. But don’t force it. Let it be natural. Let it flow. Build a personal brand. Refine your aesthetic. But don’t curate too much. After all, people want “real.” Grow your following.

And above all,
remember to have fun.”

This is the dialogue that exists within my head.

And if you’re not doing the above?

“You’re not a real artist. You’re self-sabotaging. People will forget about you. You aren’t trying hard enough. You don’t have what it takes to be successful. Etc, etc, etc.”

And in the desire to do everything, I find myself unable to commit to anything at all.

I post consistently for a month, (or two) until something happens. I get sick or fall “off track” and suddenly, my all or nothing mentality kicks in and I spend another few months “away” from the platform.

But it’s not truly away.

I am in fact still thinking about it every single day, reminding myself of all the ways I’m not fully, “showing up” and sabotaging my art.

And once I feel enough guilt or shame, I find myself coming back to it once again, spending hours creating content and reminding myself that this time is going to be different.

Living Inside the Paradox of Making Art in the Digital Age of Consumption

A lot of us creatives find ourselves in an increasingly difficult tension: the desire to create meaningful art while living in a world that prioritizes fast consumption and quick satisfaction.

I’d like to make an important note here:

When I say art, I don’t mean only paintings or words on a page. I mean the conversations your creativity sparks, the questions it invites, the ideas it plants. Sure, writing and painting and drawing are all forms of creativity, but art is what’s beneath that.

Still, this essay is for the creatives who feel the pull to share something real, and are exhausted by a culture that requires constant visibility.

We’re told we need to create x amount of times per week, just to keep up with the algorithm, just to have a chance of being seen at all.

But art is not the same thing as content.

Art requires your unique perspective and thoughts. It says something to the world that is unique to you and is rooted in a level of emotional depth. Content, on the other hand, isn’t. While content can be thought-provoking, it doesn’t require your originality. It’s made for quick consumption and fast-hitting metrics. The intention of art is to inspire and invoke something beyond it. The intention of content is to be consumed.

Content asks to be seen but art inspires you to see something beyond it.

I created a lot of content in the year of 2025.

Doing so was an external proclamation of something my soul needed to proclaim which is that “MY ART FUCKING MATTERS!!!!” Taking myself seriously as a creative, showing up regularly online was my way of embodying that much needed to be internalized truth.

And yet, I found myself more often than not burned-out, exhausted from the never-ending hamster wheel of trying to figure out what to create next and fearful of the algorithmic consequences if I failed to keep up.

But I don’t want to merely create content. I want to create art—with my words, with my perspectives, how I communicate, how I listen, how I learn, how I change my mind, how I communicate ideas, how I hold two seemingly contradictory ideas at once.

I want to be a writer who says something because it’s meaningful, not because I fear the consequences of not saying anything at all.

That is the trust I want to build with you and those who choose to engage with my work.

How I’m Rewriting the Algorithm in My Mind: From Creating Content to Creating Art

All of this thinking has me in a season of deeply evaluating where I’m at and allowing myself to put down my social media long enough to think thoroughly in how I want to use it.

Here are a few shifts I’ll be making for the time being as a gal who both sees the magical benefit of social media while also not wanting to sell my soul in the process of it:

I am prioritizing quality over quantity.

I will not be posting a bajillion times a week, thank you.

At least not now.

I will allow myself to change in the way I show up online. I will not bind myself to the idea that constant visibility is a metric of success. I will pursue the discomfort that comes with being dedicated to my craft in ways that don’t involve needing to be online every two seconds. The daily urgency to post is not an urgency I am willing live by right now. Content, as I know it, will be an overflow of the inner-work and writing I’m doing here and in my daily life, not the other way around.

One of the things that has drained me the most on socials, is the endless obligation to be saying something, anything.

In trying to say something constantly, I’ve found I’m not really saying anything at all.

I will be creating more and consuming less (& more intentionally overall).

Have you ever noticed that the times in your life where you have been in the thick of the content consumption and creation hamster wheel, have been the times in your life where you seemingly have the least to say?

Ideas suddenly don’t flow as much. Everything feels unoriginal. It starts to feel mechanical.

I’m convinced it’s because art requires lived experience. And lived experience requires us getting the hell off of our devices.

If you want to create better art, experience.

Experience life so deeply that you have no choice but to create.

I will not allow my posture toward creating on socials to be centered around appeasing an algorithm.

These days, I’m making the choice, to allow myself to be in a season of pouring into my craft even at the risk of not showing up online in the ways we’re constantly told we should be if you’re a creative.

And when I do post, I’m shifting my focus.

Instead of merely asking, “how will this perform?” I will be asking different questions:

• Does this piece of content reflect who I want to be and how I want to be perceived as a creative?

• Is this piece of content giving value in a way that feels genuine to me?

• Is this piece of content and my intentions for creating and posting it in alignment with my values?

Ultimately, You Don’t Need an Audience to Create

You see, constant visibility, as social media both provides and demands, is both a gift and a curse for the artist. It can make us believe that in order to validate our creativity, we must always have something to say.

But not every season is about being seen. Some are about becoming someone worth listening to and that work can only be done when we step away from the screen long enough to live the life in front of us.

There is a time and place for strategy, output, and pushing through discomfort. But as our culture moves toward constant visibility and the lines between content and art continue to blur, knowing when to step back, listen inward, and create from intention rather than pressure becomes essential.

It’s what separates art from content.
Choosing silence is not the same thing as being passive.
And de-centering the algorithm doesn’t mean you’re giving up.

Sometimes, it is the active choice that allows us to remember the deeper truth:

“I’m not a content creator. I’m a fucking artist.”

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If you resonated with the above essay, you may like the following:

For many of us, we were taught that to be a woman is to be a nurturer. We watched women around us serve at the cost of losing themselves, stay despite being given every reason to leave, and then be applauded for their ability to not crumble and to look pretty while doing it.

As a byproduct, we’ve internalized the idea that it is our civil duty to stay in the name of “love” no matter the cost.

This is what “good women” do.

But when does nurturing or staying become an act of avoidance—a way to hold onto others because we’ve yet to learn how to fully hold ourselves? And in those moments when our body is screaming at us to leave despite our conditioning telling us to stay, at what point do we listen to the gnawing in our chest despite our very best effort to ignore it?

You know, “it.”

It is the inescapable, relentless, unrelenting, quiet yet all-consuming voice deep inside that says, “Not now, not this.” I gave it many names, all of which sound prettier and more justifiable in my head. I called it indecision, uncertainty, or maybe a season of doubt.

But here’s the truth that took me years to see:

The greatest risk, I had believed, was leaving something familiar, when in reality, the greatest risk was staying somewhere my soul had already outgrown.

And in believing that, I stayed.

I stayed in jobs that I didn’t love and relationships that felt “almost” right, thinking that maybe if I held it together long enough, I would somehow be able to contort myself enough to fit inside of it.

Misalignment will feel safe if you’ve normalized it long enough.

But familiarity and safety are not the same thing.

If you want to change your life, change what you normalize. Change what you normalize in your relationships with others and your relationship with yourself. Don’t let yourself fall for the thinking that because something has always been this way, it will always be that way. That is how you get stuck. That is how misalignment becomes your normal.

Here’s what years of staying in misalignment taught me:

Leaving is hard, but staying in a place that isn’t meant for you is even harder.

The best things in life don’t leave you in a perpetual state of confusion. They won’t have you suffocated by a never-ending list of “what if’s,” and they won’t leave you questioning your state of happiness.

Think about it.

Do you have to question if you love your favorite food or if you like cream in your coffee each morning? When asked about your passions, your hobbies, or even your favorite music, do you find yourself confused, unsure, and in a continuous state of overwhelm, or do you find yourself excited to talk about the things that bring you life?

Love doesn’t require convincing.

Hear me when I say this: Good things can and will at times be hard or complex. But if your discomfort isn’t actively drawing you closer to the life or the person you want to become, that is your permission slip to do something different.

Indecision feels productive.

We believe that by thinking through every possible outcome or scenario, we are somehow protecting ourselves from the hurt we’re so terrified we may inevitably cause. We think it’s selfish to let go, so instead we spend our days swallowing our unspoken wants, needs, or desires in hopes that if we do so long enough, one day, we will feel content.

We stay because the fear of leaving outweighs the unknown that comes with continuing to live with the reality that we’ve already spent years abandoning parts of ourselves in pursuit of normalizing.

Hear me when I say this:

Letting go is not selfish; what’s selfish is holding on with the expectation that something or someone will one day become what you need it to be, simply because you’re unwilling to admit it was only meant for a season.

Sometimes love requires letting go.

Not knowing is knowing something.

Indecision may not feel like a no, but it’s still not a yes.

If you’re merely looking for safety, you can find it. You’ll find it in the almost-good-enough job, an almost-good-enough relationship, and while sitting in almost-good-enough conversations that don’t require much of you. You’ll build an almost-good-enough life, in an almost-good-enough place, with an almost-good-enough group of friends, all the while attempting to convince yourself that your almost-good-enough life is not the same thing as settling.

But feeling safe is not the same as feeling alive.

And for whoever is reading this, I want you to know, you can in fact have both.

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If this read resonated with you, here’s a few relevant reads to check out:

Disclaimer: Some of you will not like this article.

And that is okay.

I’ve found that the times in which I’m most tempted to shrink back in self-censorship, is often times that moments in which what I want to say matters the most.

I recently found myself re-reading some old books that I read during one of the darkest periods of my life. I was young, in-love (trauma-bonded really, but that’s at least what the movies told me) and yet found myself being recommended books from my therapist like,

“Dodging Energy Vampires: An Empath’s Guide to Evading Relationships That Drain You and Restoring Your Health and Power”.

The first time I picked up that book, I didn’t actually fully understand what the term, “narcissist” meant. To be fair, it was before TikTok life coaches dictated our screens and terms like “toxic” and “narcissist” became catch-all diagnoses for anyone who hurt us.

Yet after one too many years and lessons I’d thought I’d already learned, I would eventually come to name my experience for what it was.

And for a moment, that was empowering. But empowerment is not the same as liberation.

And here’s what nobody talks about when they talk about narcissistic dynamics, or (most) any unhealthy dynamic at all:

Dynamics take two.

(With some caveat of course, to which we talk about later in this article).

I recognize that statement holds the power to make your eyebrows curl and eyes squint in discomfort. In our culture, we’ve become increasingly more willing to name dynamics and yet increasingly unwillingly to name our part in them—especially when our emotions are involved.

It’s easier to label another human as wrong, bad or narcissistic. Doing so gives us a sense of power back and makes us feel like we’re distancing ourselves from the problem at hand.

If we can label somebody else as wrong, we get to be right.

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What an (Almost) Viral TikTok Video Taught Me About Self-Responsibility

In June of 2025, I posted what would become my most popular video yet on TikTok (64k+ views and growing). In it, to which you can view here, I comedically attempt to point fun, while shining a light on some of the darker, unspoken, less “pretty” internalizations behind behaviors that many of us, particularly women, have learned to romanticize in the name of being, “good”.

Behaviors like people-pleasing and self-abandonment have often been sold to us as a shiny golden path to which we can walk upon to affirm our goodness—as though, the smaller we allow ourselves to become in the name of keeping the peace around us, the more lovable we are.

As women, we smile and humbly proclaim all of our perfectionistic ways, while internally applauding ourselves for the many ways we’ve managed to hold our shit together in a world that very much makes us want to do the exact opposite.

It should come as no surprise then that when I posted that video which attempted to reframe our idea of people-pleasing being something we’ve commonly been taught as good, as something that is more subconsciously and unintentionally manipulative as a means of self-protection, people had their opinions.

Their comments only affirmed for me what I already knew: Firstly, the line between being a “good person” and being a people-pleaser has become so blurred that many of us can no longer tell the difference. (That’s an article for another time).

And secondly, we love to use terms like, “toxic” to describe dynamics outside of us, but are increasingly unwilling to acknowledge the toxicity that exists within us.

Because to say that we had a part to play is to threaten our own sense of goodness—the version of ourselves we’ve worked so hard to project.

To consider that we may have remained in unhealthy dynamics—not because we are broken, but because we lacked boundaries or self-trust—forces us to release the wounded-hero narrative we’ve been telling ourselves in order to survive.

But what TikTok won’t tell you, is that simply naming or leaving the situations or relationships you claim broke you, won’t in and of itself save you.

Taking self-responsibility over your life will.

Let me make something clear. There are experiences where self-responsibility does not apply. There are wounds that were not shaped by choice, but by harm. There are dynamics where the only responsibility belongs to the one who violated safety, power, or consent.

This is not about those moments.

This essay, is an exploration on the patterns we adapted in order to survive and the patterns we willingly carry forward.

Self-responsibility is not taking ownership over what isn’t yours. It’s not mistaking self-martyrdom or self-blame as something that is holy or just. But what it is doing, is taking the power over your story versus letting your story have the power over you.

True healing requires the uncomfortable work of examining how we participated in, stayed in, or were shaped by unhealthy dynamics—not because we are at fault, but because agency is the only place real power lives.

What helped me more than labeling the experience outside of myself, was understanding the parts of myself that were making me both susceptible and continuously seemingly controlled by that dynamic in the first place.

For it wasn’t until I was willing to uproot my own sense of ego and self-identity that healing began to actually happen. For as long as I only saw myself as a victim, I would never be able to save myself from the problem.

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What TikTok Doesn’t Tell You About Healing

Contrary to popular belief, healing is not just processing the things that have happened to you. It is also becoming self-aware and taking ownership of the roles in which you have played in the cycles of your own suffering.

Your trauma is not your fault.

But it is your responsibility.

Because being hot has nothing to do with how you look.

It does have everything to do with how you feel.

So here are five things you can do to become the hottest and smartest version of yourself that have nothing to do with how you look:

1. Take yourself out on a weekly self-love date.

Make it a habit to spend time with yourself. Date yourself. Put on the dress you’ve been searching for an excuse to wear and take yourself out to dinner.

Because there is nothing hotter than a person who’s secure, content and can relish in their own company.

I think a lot of us prevent ourselves from doing things alone because we think it’ll heighten the sense of loneliness we feel. Phycology, however, tells us a different story.

According to an article on Phycology Today, which I will link here, the brain can’t actually distinguish between being alone and loneliness unless we teach it how.

Studies have shown that prioritizing time in solitude, learning to be content in the presence of your own company, leads to higher emotional regulation, lower anxiety and greater depths of self-awareness.

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2. Actively consume perspectives from people you don’t agree with.

One of the downfalls to growing up in a culture that is increasingly more sensitive, is that far too easily we become swallowed within an echo chamber of people who see and look at the world the same way as us.

In the book The Coddling of the American Mind written by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, they state:

“A culture that allows the concept of ‘safety’ to creep so far that it equates emotional discomfort with physical danger is a culture that encourages people to systematically protect one another from the very experiences embedded in daily life that they need in order to become strong and healthy.”

If you want to become smarter, more emotionally intelligent or educated you cannot choose contentment while residing in the comfort of your own echo chamber. You must be willing to move beyond the bounds of discomfort and to be willing to engage in other perspectives—not from a place of fear or condemnation but curiosity and intellectual humility.

Letting yourself consume thoughts and perspectives from those who you don’t agree with allows yourself to see beyond the boundaries and limitations of your own biases.

Sitting and leaning into that discomfort, is attractive.

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3. Keep the promises you make to yourself. When you say you’re going to do something, do it.

Becoming confident has less to do with how you look and more to do with the measure in which you trust yourself. Every time you follow through with what you say you’re going to do, your brain releases dopamine. Not because of the achievement, but because of the consistency.

When we break promises to ourselves, we affirm to our subconscious mind that the lies in which we’re tempted to believe about our own lack of worthiness and ability are in fact correct.

Following through with your promises has far more to do with your confidence than the result of those actions ever will.

4. Create more than you consume.

When we create, we activate the prefrontal cortex. This is the portion of our brain that is responsible for agency, self-expression and emotional regulation.

Creating allows you to step into your power.

Consuming leads you to comparison.

5. Replace short-form mindless content with long-form thoughtful content.

About a month ago, I replaced my nightly TikTok doomscroll with reading on Substack. While I recognize that Substack, is in and of itself still a social media platform, the benefits I’ve experienced are already substantial.

And when you look at that stats behind it, it makes sense.

When we consume short-form content, we become normalized to the stimuli it provides. It triggers what is called either a positive or a negative reward prediction error. A positive reward prediction error is what happens when we experience more reward than what our brain initially predicted, whereas a negative reward prediction would be when we experience less than.

The unpredictability of what comes next, keeps our brains stimulated and in a constant cycle of consumption.

On the other hand, when we choose to consume long-form content (a book, an article, a substack post, etc etc), we improve memory, comprehension, critical thinking and emotional intelligence.

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So ditch the lip filler (or don’t).

But either way, just remember that being hot and smart has little do with how you look or your education status and everything to do with how you choose to carry yourself.

*Update: Since writing this piece, we are now at seventeen baby!*

While that number may be small, I’d by lying if I didn’t say that a deep sense of excitement rushed through my body the moment we hit the double digits.

Ten people; which is roughly the amount of people that could fit within my tiny studio apartment without feeling suffocated. As I’m writing these words at my favorite local cafe, I look around me. I count ten people and imagine them all willingly and choosing to listen to these words right now.

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Starting on any platform is a humbling experience. Especially, as someone who works in a job where I help build other people’s platforms. And yet, starting afresh has made me reflect greatly on the topic of visibility.

To what importance does visibility play in the life of a creative?
What does it mean to be an artist of words when nobody is listening?
If nobody ever applauded, would we still create?

There’s this quiet tension I keep learning to hold: the desire to be seen, and the deeper truth that being seen was never the point of creating in the first place.

I’d be lying if I didn’t say I experienced a wave of disappointment and grief anytime a piece I’m working on is met with silence that’s louder than the praise I pretended not to crave.

Yet, in the last few weeks, writing for this little corner of the internet has taught me some things about my own creativity that I never expected to confront.

The Part of the Journey That Feels Like Failure But is Just The Beginning

What nobody ever tells you about building a community of people who consume your work, is that it is when the numbers are the smallest that you have the most freedom to experiment without the added pressure of maintaining momentum.

There’s an intimacy to small beginnings—it has a way of reflecting back to you the parts of yourself that you’d rather keep hidden. The parts of you that are tempted to shrink back in correlation to the level of applause, the parts of you that’s inspired to write only if there’s someone to validate it on the other side.

It is in this stage, that something very important happens:

Your voice is taking shape.

I read an article the other day titled, “How to Master the Art of Writing” by Hasif and in it, she posed a powerful question that hasn’t left my mind since. In it, she writes:

People often ask: How do you become a good writer?
But maybe that’s the wrong question.
Maybe the real question is, how do you become someone worth listening to?

Everybody wants followers, but not everyone wants to take the time to cultivate their voice. Because contrary to popular belief, finding your voice isn’t just about the words you write for the people who are watching; it’s about the words you live out when nobody is listening.

Your voice as a writer isn’t defined solely by your ability to paint realities with poetic lines. It’s shaped by how you show up when no one is looking, in the moments you return to the page without knowing if anyone will ever hear you, and in your willingness to express yourself honestly instead of curating or censoring your truth.

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And this leads me to my next point:

Communities aren’t created. They’re built.

For every successful creative you admire, there was a time in which they started from zero. A time when silence was louder than the applause, a time in which they had more reasons to stop creating than they did to keep going.

Yet, they continued anyway.

It wasn’t about believing that they could reach an audience of thousands—it was about believing in themself enough, that they could build an audience of one.

Then ten.

Then a hundred.

Then a thousand.

In order to sustain the readership so many of us crave, we have to build the muscle that allows us to hold it. Without that, we won’t have true readership but rather empty metrics that are dependent upon the fleeting strike of inspiration and momentary resonance.

And it is in this quiet and seemingly hidden season you begin to learn a fundamental lesson:

Consistency and self-belief will take you farther than virality or the algorithm ever will.

In one of my favorite books to ever exist, “The Artists Way” by Julia Cameron, she talks about a concept called, “the shadow artist”, a term in which I undeniably and unfortunately resonate far too deeply with.

The shadow artist is the creative who is pulled towards living a life that exemplifies their own artistic self-expression, yet instead finds themselves choosing to stand in roles just outside where they truly want to be.

By doing so, they let themselves be close enough to their dreams to feel like they’re doing something but far enough to not have to fully commit. It’s the artist who uses their talents to support other people’s creative dreams instead of claiming their own.

Self-sabotage clothed in artistic expression of an, “almost” life but not-yet.

There’s a lot of ways we learn to self-sabotage our own creativity and this is definitely mine.

When we’re starting out on any creative endeavor, I think we can all fall into this trap too easily. Showing up just long enough to say we did it, but not long enough to actually build the damn thing our hearts are longing to create.

The reality is, you cannot have the life you’re wanting without the willingness to withstand the gritty and messy action.

The book you’re looking to write, is on the other side of you returning to the page time and time again, even when it feels uninspiring to do so.

The community you’re wanting to cultivate, is on the other side of you showing up fully, not just in pieces or when it’s convenient.

Here’s the best news I can give both you and I:

The biggest thing that stands in your way between you and the creative life you want to live, is not something outside of yourself.

It’s not the algorithm. It’s not your lack of resources.

It’s you.

And the moment you realize that you can’t actually control anyone but you anyway, is the moment you realize how liberating that is.

So whether you’re writing for an audience of one or one thousand, I hope you let yourself show up the same: bold, unapologetic and unwilling to shrink just because the room is still filling.

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Prior to these last two years, I had never gotten paid for photography, had an ancient Canon camera that was from the early 2000’s and had never done branding or web design for somebody before.

I think it surprises people, and even myself, to know that to this day, I still have never taken a class for any of the above.

That’s not to say, that I haven’t done hours and hours of research and learning. But what it is to say, is that in more ways than one, you could argue that I am not qualified to do the work I do.

The first time I ever got paid for photography, I remember it distinctly.

I’d been asked to do maternity photos for a woman I’d used to work with. I was nervous. I’d spent days saving posts to a Pinterest Board, attempting to remember the poses so I could make her believe that my direction was from confidence and not replication. The night before, I played out the shoot in my mind. I drafted a text in my notes that looked something along the lines of this:

When I’d arrived at the shoot, I’d been told that they hadn't liked any of the photographers they’ve hired in the past.

If I wasn’t nervous then, I definitely was now.

After a day of anxiously awaiting, shooting and then running home to edit—I finally delivered the photos. And to my surprise, they loved them. Enough to even hire me again once the baby had been born.

For the last two years, I’ve done many more shoots. Some of which I felt qualified for, most of which I didn’t. I’ve begun to make peace with the fact that the feeling of being an ultimate beginner may never fully go away.

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And yet, the thing that has propelled me the most, contrary to popular belief is not an increased skillset.

It’s my self-belief.

Let me tell you a secret:

I don’t think I know much more about photography than I did two years ago. My knowledge regarding such is arguably roughly the same and there’s still far more that I don’t know than that which I do.

And yet, my income has nearly doubled the last two years as a result of such.

Not because I got better, more skilled or knowledgable about the craft but because I believed in myself enough to take messy action. I didn’t let myself be limited to the fact that I couldn’t afford expensive education programs and instead spent my time shooting, watching youtube videos, balancing both learning about the craft and doing.

Here’s what a lot of people don’t realize:

So as long as you have a passion for the craft and a desire to learn, you are already five steps ahead of the person who is seeking your creative service. That alone qualifies you to be paid for your work.

To this day, I still feel crippled by imposter syndrome. I look at other creatives in this field and find myself mesmerized by their work. Their lighting. Their setup. Their eye. At times, I get hired for a shoot, and immediately go into repair mode despite the fact that the shoot hasn’t even happened. And in those moments, I remind myself of a very simple truth.

I don’t have to be the best at what I do. I just have to be better than the person who is hiring me.

And in that moment, the pressure begins to relieve.

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I still remember in 2018, when Joshua Harris, author of, “I Kissed Dating Goodbye”, became the face of this phenomenon when he shared his detachment from his long-held Christian beliefs.

His story was just one of many—and to my surprise,

I eventually became one of them.

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I used to see these individuals as reflections of my own hidden shame—living monuments of my unspoken questions and doubts. Their departures mirrored my silent curiosity, yet the commentary in the church always sounded the same:

“They just want to follow their desires.”
“They never knew the difference between religion and relationship.”
“Their faith was rooted in emotions, not sound theology.”

I believed these narratives too, as they offered a comforting simplicity that helped me avoid the discomfort of any form of nuance or uncertainty.

Faith gave my life meaning and structure, and without it, I feared becoming “lost” and “confused,” as I’d been warned so many times before.

But what I didn’t realize at the time, was how deeply my faith was entangled with fear—fear of losing what gave my life direction, fear of admitting that I didn’t have all the answers, and fear of what others might think if I admitted that my faith was unraveling.

For two years, I found myself questioning.
Doubting.
Seeking.

I went to church on Sundays only to pack both my bible and books like, “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins in my bag for future reading.

If that sounds like a contradiction to you, you’re both right and wrong.

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In one sense, we’re taught in the church that anything that exists outside of the Christian framework we’ve been given is lost and confused. On the other hand, God and Christianity were never synonymous to me.

And yet, as I would later discover for most people who claimed the title of Christian, those two were inextricably linked.

I stopped attending church in the summer of 2020.

For many people in my life, this was a time in which I seemingly appeared the most lost and to the Christian eye, one may argue I was. After all, I stopped filling up a seat on Sunday’s, exchanged my reading of books that taught me how to battle my doubt with books that encouraged me to ask bigger questions and listened to old Cardi B like it was the new Hillsong.

Overtime, I found that the routines that once filled me with joy (when done) and shame (when not), no longer filled up my days like they used to.

Prayer evolved from something I did to something that always was and worship became any moment I trusted the divine enough to be fully present in it—whatever it was.

And in leaving the church, I found that God was never merely in it—for it was only my experience of God that had kept God there.

For even when I left, there God seemingly was.
Awaiting for me outside and there at every possible outcome or conclusion.

God left the Church to be with me outside of it.

Without judgement.
Without labels.
Without needing me to be anywhere other than where I am.

People like to say I “left God.” And to be honest, I’ve stopped correcting them.

I’ve come to realize that if the divine is confined to a church building, religious affiliation or our own ability to “get God right” then we never worshipped the same God to begin with.

The truth is, I believe in God most days.
But some days, I don’t.

Yet greater than my belief in God is a belief in who God is, if there is such a divine being.

For if God is who I’ve experienced him to be, there is no man up in the sky awaiting to condemn us from our predestined brokenness or applauding us for making religion out of politics. For if God is truly God, I believe he exists in the crevice between who you are and who you’re becoming.

For some, God exists in buildings with crosses, and for others God is found in the quiet courage of queer bodies who’ve learned to make sanctuaries of themselves. For some, God exists in stained glass and sermons, and for others God is found in the ones who lip-sync their way into courage — queens who’ve learned to hold holiness in their own hands.

Contrary to what Matt Chandler or many of those in the church will tell you, it takes a tremendous amount of bravery and courage to uproot your entire belief system.

Changing your mind, expanding your perspective, seeing beyond the constructs that were once handed to you is a sign of humility, not weakness.

And if you’re out here doing it, no matter where you end up, I want you to know that says more to me than your church attendance or religious affiliations ever has.

I may have lost my religion.

But in losing my religion, I found God and more importantly, I found myself.

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Creating a Hinge profile.

It’s Monday in the middle of November. The irony of it all is not lost on me. As the leaves are changing, so am I—literally, emotionally, mentally, spiritually.

Breakups tend to do that to you.

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Which leads me here, drinking a glass of rosé and attempting to curate a profile that markets both my availability and value.

If I’m honest, I don’t actually care if I meet anyone.

And yet, that’s the reason I’m objectifying myself to swiping along the pool of men, most of which have uncombed beards and bad mirror selfies as their profile photo.

I’m convinced that so many of us get on the apps at the wrong time. We think the right time is when we’re lonely, seeking companionship, desiring to be seen by another.

But I think that’s a lie.

The best time to get on the apps is when you’re not lonely or not needing somebody else’s validation in order to make you feel seen or valued.

For it’s then, and only then, I believe, will you not become overwhelmed by an inbox of men you’re halfway attracted to and incompatible with, only to delete the apps a week later and wonder why it works for everyone else.

The Wild, Wild West of Online Men

Truth be told, I don’t even care for western things all that much, yet here I am, running headfirst into the wild, wild west—a place where men pose with strange angles thinking it’s hot, and I’m supposed to find the perfect blend of photos that make me look both done up and natural all at the same time.

As a newly single thirty-year-old, I’m aware of the fact that I’ll want stories to tell someday—and online dating is the place to deliver just that.

I find it romantic to believe that the universe can surprise you when you least expect it.

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As someone who’s met her last two long-term relationships through the apps, I can confirm: creating a profile that inadvertently “sells yourself” to the general male population never feels any less objectifying.

With every question asked, I’m reminded that my answers could, in theory, define my future.

I need to choose wisely.

If it sounds like I’m taking this too seriously, that is probably both true and untrue.

Questions I find myself asking (but would never say out loud):

• Does this photo make me look skinny?

• Does it look like I’m trying too hard?

• What the hell is that?

• Is this too playful? Too serious?

• Where are my good photos?

• For the love of God, how can I not attract men who only pose with dead animals?

I spend nearly an hour swiping.

You’d think I’d be tired, but for some reason the endless curiosity of who could be next keeps me going. And just when I was getting tired of selling myself to the algorithm, something happens.

A notification.

A small rush of dopamine and curiosity courses through my body.

This is where it always starts. This is how it always begins.

I tap the message icon, and there it is:

A message from a guy named Liam.

And with cautious yet curious anticipation, I open it, eager to hear the thoughtful words that are awaiting my response on the other side.

He says,

“Hey”

…And just like that, I’m reminded that I’m not in love land anymore.

Welcome to Hinge.

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I recognize that the above statement holds the capacity to either sound like a quarter-life crisis or the beginning of a romantic rom-com. My hope is it’s the latter.

Truth is, I was the kid who prided myself on knowing exactly what they wanted to do. The vision was big but simple: I was going to live in the heart of a big city, work a creative job, and spend my twenties becoming a modern-day Carrie Bradshaw.

While I understood the logistics of this were somewhat unrealistic for a girl of my financial status and age, I made peace at a young age that even the sacrifices themselves would be romantic.

Living in a dingy apartment was proof of my commitment. Eating ramen each night was an expression of outward alignment with the struggling artist archetype I romanticized. And the unpredictability of it all was proof of my own resiliency.

While the dream was strong, nobody could’ve prepared me for the tidal wave that made up my twenties. After moving halfway across the country, a called-off wedding & too many heartbreaks later, I was now asking myself the question:

What do I want in life?

Maybe you’re asking the same question. Maybe you’re at a crossroads between who you were and who you’re becoming. Maybe you too have found yourself rethinking what it would look like to change the trajectory—or the plot—altogether.

If that’s you, hi.
Welcome to the party.

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And while I can’t say I have it fully figured out, I can tell you some things I’m learning that are making this season of my life a little bit less terrifying.

1. Shift the focus from what you want to do to how you want to feel.

Behind every dream, desire, or hope is a feeling—a yearning to feel something that otherwise you may not. What is that?

Are you looking to feel alive, seen, safe, expressed, connected, free, soft, chosen, aligned, or calm?

Figure out what you want to feel. And once you have an idea of that, understand that to want something means that, to some capacity, we don’t feel we have it—at least not in its fullness—right now.

How can you make a practice out of feeling that?
What things can you do to start your day with the thing you’re yearning for?
What opportunities exist within your reach right now to experience that?

Do that.

2. Study your envy.

Envy is a pathway to becoming aware of the things we’ve deemed unworthy of being seen within ourselves. Study it. Look at what you’re envious of within other people.

Do you shrink back when you see someone who’s confident or expressed?
Do you find yourself jealous of people who are chasing dreams you’ve let rest within your head?

The truth is, your envy isn’t because you can’t or don’t have the capacity to have the thing you’re craving. Your envy is your own discomfort with the fact that you’ve chosen not to have it—and that makes you feel at war within yourself.

It’s easier to look down on someone else for having something you want than it is to go through the tension of learning to step into that thing.

3. Not knowing is knowing something.

Confusion doesn’t usually mean you don’t know anything. It often just means what you do know is either terrifyingly uncomfortable, or you only know one side of the coin—knowing what you want but not knowing how to get there, or knowing what you don’t want but not knowing how to let it go.

If you find yourself in the thick of indecision, give yourself space to calm your nervous system. Take a bath. Go for a walk. And when you’re ready, be radically honest with yourself.

What would you do if you weren’t afraid?
How long are you willing to sit in confusion before you let yourself believe that the best things in life are not things to be confused by?

You may be surprised by how much you do know.

To all the others who find themselves too in a place of asking what they want to do with their life, may we each each find the answers—not through another self-help book, or podcast but within ourselves.

And of course, let me know if any of the above points resonated with you.

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I’d love to connect.

Sincerely,
Sierra

Recently, I said goodbye to the only man who’s ever made romantic love feel safe.

And I don’t just mean physically. I mean the kind of safety that makes you nearly pee your pants because you’re laughing so hard, articulate every fear you’ve ever had just because you can, nothing in the world is off-limits kind of safety.

Prior to him, love was always met with half-lived “I love you’s” and pretending to like movies I cared little to nothing about.

Like many women, I spent a majority of my adolescent life reaching for love, losing myself in the longing of it and deeming that as romance. Self-martyrdom disguised as a form of romantic, heroic selflessness—I thought this made me a hopeless romantic. Turns out, I just had low self-esteem that unfortunately never seemed to prevent me from trying to fit in places I never quite belonged.

That is, until I met him.

He was six feet of absolute goodness, towering in stature but calm in presence. His arms were covered with stories inked, embedding themselves beneath his skin, reminding me always that love for him was more than skin-deep. His favorite pastime was anything that made my eyes widen with wonder and excitement. Every meal I made was his favorite one yet, and date nights weren’t asked for but an eager expectation.

He ticked off every box I made for myself when I was a little girl, lying underneath the canopy above my bed as I listened to my iPod shuffle and daydreamed of what it would be like for me to meet my one, one day.

Kind.
Patient.
Tattoos, (obviously).

But for reasons beyond either of our control, something was off, and I didn’t know how to fix it. For months, our disconnect became my new fixation until one day, I finally said goodbye.

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The Lie Society Tells Us About Finding, “The One”

Ironic, isn’t it?

As women, we’re trained from the time we’re little girls to find our one and hold onto them forever, no matter the cost.

Whether it pains you, wounds you, or causes you to give up everything you ever wanted before, the message is consistent:

“Life begins when you find your one.”

I first thought I found my one when I was at the ripe age of twenty-one. He was a musician with tatted arms, calloused hands, and carried a flask of whiskey everywhere he went. I was a new Christian whose favorite band was Death Cab For Cutie, and I thought that singular truth made me edgy.

He liked being needy. I liked being needed.

I interpreted his rage as passion, and he interpreted my insecurities as the opportunity they were. After nearly five years, a called-off wedding, and countless sessions weeping on my grandmother’s cold laundry room floor, I finally left.

Yet it was in that relationship that I learned a very important, yet unromantic, lesson.

Lesson #1:

You can’t love somebody into healing. For if you could’ve, he would’ve begun by now.

But life, in its favorite kind of irony, wasn’t done teaching me yet.

Lessons from Suitor Two

After a year of terrible first dates and one too many lessons I thought I’d already learned, I would then meet suitor two. He was nothing like suitor one—calm, steady, and consumed sports like it was a holy communion. Traditionally masculine in every sense of the word: he hunted the way I write—religiously and consistently, listened to Joe Rogan like it was the morning news, and saw the idea of unpacking the past in therapy as “unproductive.”

Three years, one apartment, and one house later—I left. Again.

Only this time, not because of explosions and fires I didn’t know how to put out, but because there was no fire, no spark, and seemingly nothing to save.

And in the quiet, hidden moments between me and my own thoughts, I’d often find myself reminiscing on suitor one. I couldn’t help but think about all the ways that suitor two was far more compatible. After all, he didn’t leave me in a constant state of tears, questioning my entire sense of reality and then leading me to believe it was my civil duty to apologize to everyone for it. Yet somehow, I was still left feeling starved—aching for more than three-worded answers and Friday nights that didn’t involve watching sports on a screen.

Was I selfish for wanting more?

Right then, I learned another much-needed lesson, which is this:

Lesson #2:

When love feels like a romanticized ideal rather than a standard, we will reach for breadcrumbs and convince ourselves that we’re full.

I didn’t want somebody who I couldn’t enter the depths of pain, joy, grief, tenderness or laughter with.

I deserved more.
And quite honestly, he did too.

Yet, I was learning that would have to start with me.

Love, as I was learning to see it, requires accepting the parts of ourselves that we’ve deemed unworthy of being seen. For it’s only when we learn to accept the fullness of who we are that we then have the courage to allow other people to peek into our beautiful humanly mess too.

Without this, love is nothing more than adoration for the projected versions of ourselves we’ve curated in an attempt to feel lovable.

With every experience in which I uncovered what love wasn’t, I was one step closer to understanding what love was.

And right then, while sitting in a car full of memories stuffed in cardboard boxes, I added to my internalized list—the one I made and kept locked away in my head as a little girl.

Kind.
Patient.
Tattoos.
Safe.

Safety meant being able to fall—completely, fully, messily. Never second-guessing if the person on the other side was willing to meet you halfway. It meant allowing yourself to experience the fullness of who you are, not just the parts you predict will be more lovable.

And that was when I met him.

My kind and gentle giant, as I would later call him—never before had I met a man who would love me so intentionally, so confidently. After years of reaching for safety, I finally found it.

Meeting him was nothing short of a reflection of divine grace. With him, I’d laugh, I’d cry, and I’d learn to talk about the things that filled me with rage rather than just swallow them whole.

For the first time, I was with someone whose love was so wildly expansive, I had no choice but to take up space inside of it.

Yet for reasons beyond either of our control, I would choose to say goodbye. And he would love me enough to let me go.

Loving him gave me the most valuable lesson of all:

Lesson #3:

Safety is not some golden standard; it’s the bare fucking minimum.

Being with somebody who makes you feel intimately, incomprehensibly, wildly, earth-shatteringly seen, pursued, respected, and loved is not some unreachable reality. Not only does it exist, but it’s possible. It is possible to experience a love that doesn’t require you to transcend your beautiful mess in the longing of it.

When so much of our understanding of love is shaped by movies and shows during our adolescent years, it makes sense why we accept breadcrumbs and try to convince ourselves that we’re full.

Whether it be,

Lucas and Peyton in One Tree Hill, which showcased chemistry as chaos.
Chuck and Blair in Gossip Girl, which glamorized manipulation and called it passion.
The Bachelor, which has commodified vulnerability and called that love.

We are trained to romanticize love that leaves us feeling an insatiable aching for what we do not yet have.

We want to be known, yet we entertain one-word texts and call it effort.
We want to be pursued, yet we refuse to do the work of healing our anxious patterns that are aching for a sense of control.
We want to be loved, but we allow our very definition of the word itself to be defined by whoever gives us the closest replica to such.

But one day, if we’re lucky enough, we have a divine encounter with someone who doesn’t see those things as an obligation but a gift. And in a compilation of seemingly mundane moments, they begin to imprint a beautifully simplistic and radical message:

Lesson #4:

You were never asking too much, you were simply asking the wrong person.

What would it look like if women began seeing this kind of love as the expectation and not just some ideal?

What would it look like if we allowed ourselves to be fully honest about what doesn’t actually fulfill us and started carving space for what does?

What would it look like if we saw the safety of being fully, radically, and completely ourselves in pursuit of love as the bare minimum that it is?

If you ask me, I think there’d be a lot fewer good movies.
But there’d be a lot more full women.

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About this author

I’m Sierra Scott — a writer and creative exploring identity, belief, and the stories that shape how we live. I write about religious deconstruction, people-pleasing, relationships, and the in-between space of rebuilding a life that feels like your own.

Find me on Instagram or TikTok for more on unlearning, rebuilding, and becoming.