I Have a Glennon Doyle Complex

On the longing and improbable dreams that come from writing in public

Before I started writing again, I had this idea — equal parts sincere and delusional — that the thing standing between me and success was simply the courage to start.

While writing has been a significant part of my professional life, I’m the writer behind the writer behind the writer — the media strategist who works with an influential author and then directs a qualified ghostwriter to do the heavy lifting. Until recently, my most meaningful personal writing had been captured in the pages of my master’s dissertation (turned in way back in 2019) and scattered throughout an assortment of half-filled journals I’ve visited at random intervals over the years.

But despite this off-and-on relationship with the craft, I’ve always hoped it could be more than a far-off dream of a hypothetical life with a better, stronger version of me in the driver’s seat.

I believed finding success as a writer was a game of skill, but also bravery and confidence, and that once I channeled the strength to step into the light and out from the safe, covered protection of anonymity, the pieces would fall into place.

All I needed to do was show up and share my unfiltered truth.

After all, that’s what Glennon Doyle did.

Now, I know invoking Glennon (who’s been heavily side-eyed on this platform lately) might feel like a reach. But I’m guessing many of you have read her work and, like me, found something valuable in it.

I first stumbled across Love Warrior during the early, most disconcerting days of the pandemic. I had just finished a master’s program in social policy, was living at home in job-search limbo, and wrestling with the possibility of sobriety after years of destructive drinking. Untamed was published soon after and helped awaken me to the possibility of breaking my lifelong cycle of self-abandonment.

Glennon’s words felt like home.

They moved me at the time I needed them most — not because she wielded metaphor like a scalpel or wrote the most elegant prose, but because her stories were honest, familiar, and deeply human. She made me believe that my voice, too, could shine.

Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash

For years, I carried that hope with me, waiting for a time when I’d be bold enough to claim my identity — maybe even my destiny — as a writer.

And now, in this moment of personal rebirth, I’ve finally acted on it.

I started writing publicly. I hit publish.

But the immediate aftermath has been a bit less rapturous than I might have imagined. As a lifelong perfectionist, the desire for immediate gratification is real — and deeply corrosive.

I don’t blame myself for the deeply human desire to want my words to matter — to know that the work and vulnerability are paying off. It doesn’t help that social media has trained our brains to equate engagement with value and has stripped away any mystery by providing us with in-depth stats that tell us just how many (or few) people are seeing our work.

And while Substack has connected me with some truly incredible individuals, there is an undercurrent of humble-bragging and hustling for subscribers that I’ve found unsettling — and, if I’m being honest, tempting to participate in. Shuffling through endless posts offering perspective on how creators achieved overnight successes has only stoked the belief that I should be doing this better, differently, more successfully than I am. That showing up with authenticity simply isn’t enough to break through.

Call it a tale of two Substacks: this platform celebrates the slow, steady art of writing while also nudging you to monetize, promote, and broadcast your work to everyone from your hairdresser to the guy you slept with 12 years ago whose number is still inexplicably in your phone.

It’s transactional. And for someone who’s been on an ambition treadmill for more than a decade, it’s tempting to let that desire for external validation drown out the deeper reasons I started writing again.

The “Glennon Doyle Complex”, as I’ve come to call it, is the beautiful, dangerous belief that if you just share your most painful truths, the world will reward you — with understanding, with applause, and maybe even with a book deal.

But the truth is: Glennon didn’t get to Glennon overnight. And neither will I.

While social media — and the reality that we are total strangers, no matter how intimate the writer/reader relationship can feel — can create the illusion that things materialize quickly for certain writers, I’ll never know the profound effort Glennon put into building her Momastery blog before publishing her books and achieving mainstream success. Just as I’ll never know how many drafts each of the writers I admire on Substack are starting, revising, and scrapping on their way to building a following here.

All I can do is keep writing and hold tight to the beautiful connections I’ve already made.

Because for me, this ultimately isn’t about elevation.

It’s about reclamation.

Of my voice.

Of my value.

Of my life.

Maybe my subscriber count won’t soar into the thousands. Maybe writing won’t become a full-time vocation with biweekly checks. Maybe I’m not meant to be the next Glennon Doyle.

And that’s okay.

Because this journey is mine. And I’m eager to see where it takes me.