Welcome to It’s Not Us

The system is crazy. We don't have to be.

Photo credit: Dylan Shaw on Unsplash.

Several years ago, I published a book, It’s Not You, that describes how I deprogrammed myself from a dating culture that tells people, especially women, seeking romantic relationships that their unattached state is due to some personal failing—they’re too picky, too needy, too independent, etc. I talk about how I awakened from that lie and connected with the truth of myself and my life.

Shortly after the book came out, I started hearing from people who faced different issues. At a book event, a woman struggling with infertility told me she faced the same kind of cluelessness and condescension as she tried to get pregnant. “You could have swapped out ‘singleness’ for ‘infertility’ and the book would have worked in the exact same way,” she said. A cancer survivor surprised me by saying the same thing applied to her situation.

She didn’t mean that being single is the same as having cancer. She was talking about fact that when you are facing a difficult challenge—such as finding a person to share your life with—the world is quick to rush in with platitudes and facile fixes. Sometimes it’s because they mean well; sometimes they just don’t want to hear about it. Either way, the self-help message that seems cheerful on the surface—you can do it!—so often denies the reality of what people are up against.

Change your attitude. Change your diet. Change your lifestyle. It’s all up to you.

I’m not against self-help. For many years, I wrote self-help stories for magazines, and I got a lot out of it. I started doing yoga after writing about yoga; I started meditating after writing about meditation. I ate more vegetables, saved more money, and eliminated toxic people from my life.

My pieces offered useful advice, but they also existed in a vacuum-sealed world where individual choices are the only thing that matter. If you’re having trouble saving for retirement, the problem could be that you’re buying gourmet sandwiches at lunchtime. But it could also be a surprise medical bill or an employer who refuses to align salaries with the rate of inflation. 

The challenge is: How do we hold these two ideas at once? How do we do our best to move forward in our lives, while also understanding the structural issues that often hold us back? How do we work to address those structural issues, on behalf of ourselves and others, while also recognizing that we have to live in the world—to pay our bills, maintain our health insurance, and care for children and aging parents? Advocating for single-payer health care might help create a better future for many people, possibly you, but it’s not going to pay this month’s insurance premium.

That’s what this newsletter will explore. Through interviews with experts, conversations with readers, and personal essays—by me and others—this Substack will discuss how to deal with our personal challenges while also acknowledging, and working to address, the systemic obstacles that contribute to them. I personally find this approach more useful, because it prevents me from falling into an abyss of self-blame when I hit setbacks. Instead, it allows me to do a clinical analysis of what went wrong, one that helps me separate what I can control from what I probably can’t. That more detached and forgiving attitude helps me to move forward because I don’t have to live in fear of my harshest critic, me.

Publishing It’s Not You was very fulfilling because so many people wrote me and said it helped them deal with the many challenges of being single. But of course we all face many more challenges than that, and dispiriting feedback is not exclusive to relationship status.

So I’d like to ask for your help: Are you facing an It’s Not You-like challenge in your life: work, money, mental health, physical health, family, friendships? Are you getting the feedback that a particular problem is all your fault, but you suspect it’s not so simple? Have you had an “it’s not me” epiphany — a moment when you realized you could stop blaming yourself for a difficulty in your life? If so, what happened after that? 

I’m hoping to learn more about what people are facing so that I can seek out the research and the experts that can help us all find a more constructive approach to dealing with these problems. I’m eager to know what you think.

Thanks,

Sara

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