On Being A Loser, Self-Optimization, & Self-Annihilation

And other musings from a recovering self-help junkie.

Jun 19, 2025

About eight years ago, I got my first “big kid” job. I had just graduated with my degree in Exercise Physiology from the University of Alabama, and my favorite professor hired me to do some contractual health coaching work for her company. I was assigned to help bring health coaching resources to companies that employed blue-collar factory workers. Which is to say, I was up at 5 am doing finger-prick testing for blood sugar analysis in dusty factories on grown men who had calluses the size of Texas.

During this time, I was often on the road and staying in several hotels. I had recently discovered a genre of reading I couldn’t stop immersing myself in: self-help and personal development. I loved the idea that the more I read, the more I could learn, and the more I learned, the more I could apply. And the more I applied, the more I’d change. As a recent college graduate with little to no idea of what I wanted from life, the concept of treating myself as a project of sorts excited me. It gave formal, nicer language to what I had been doing for years — fixing, poking, prodding, restricting, squeezing, manuevering, contorting myself into the most optimized, ‘best’ version of myself. I knew I could be different, and self-help was how I would get there, wherever that was.

I began with the obvious introductory self-help read: "You Are a Badass” by Jen Sincero. In all sincerity, as a 21-year-old college grad, this book presented ideas to me about how to, like, *sort of* be a better person in a relatively digestible way. The only problem is it’s a really shitty book. At the time, I thought it to be my Bible, filled with small, seemingly simple ways I could ‘improve’ my life and change my circumstances. It’s a bit unclear to me what I was so desperately trying to ‘fix,’ considering I was living with my parents, paying no rent or utility bills, and was in the best shape of my life, but I digress.

Sincero’s book opened up a world that was equal parts self-help, self-hatred, and spiritual bypassing. I devoured (and spent a lot of money on) every self-help/personal development book I could get my hands on, which was a fuck of a lot of books considering self-help was arguably at its height in 2017.

From “Girl, Wash Your Face” to "The Universe Has Your Back,” I was hooked. “Who wouldn’t want to be a better person?!” I thought. “Who wouldn’t want to make more money or have better sex or deepen their relationship to a source bigger than them?!” I can see so clearly now where this all came from, what I was desperate to avoid. And in that avoidance is where self-annihilation begins.

Self-help and personal development are great and all, but to get an ROI, that typically requires, I dunno, actually feeling your feelings? They’re great if you can actually find ways to apply the mostly limp-dick-at-best tools that reside within their usually hollow pages. Otherwise, they’re a great scapegoat for change, cheapening and cosplaying as therapy with an ~aesthetic~ cover and bubble writing font.

Now, I wouldn’t be a true former self-help guru if I didn’t go on to explain that there are a couple of books nestled within this genre that I think are worthwhile. After all, I’m not typically one to write off an entire genre, even if it did make me hate myself a little. Not everything I read was entirely garbage, and self-help — more broadly speaking — led me to other genres, like personal finance. And for a 23-year-old who knew fuck all about budgeting, personal finance was a great genre to become immersed in. Anyway, there was one book within my journey of self-helpery that continues to stand out, continues to defy time and my own personal growth. That book is “This Is How: Surviving What You Think You Can’t” by Augusten Burroughs.

I first read Burroughs’ self-help bible when I had just moved to New York. I went through a gnarly breakup and a bit of a quarter-life crisis that led me to book a one-way ticket to New York City. Burroughs tells, perhaps ironically, of his own self-annihilation, which instilled in me the idea that self-help, or rather, simply becoming a better person, rarely requires the ten-step skincare routines and complex morning routines that Instagram has shown me. It didn’t require sitting in a deep meditative state for 30+ minutes (who the fuck has the time???? In this economy????). It didn’t need me to constantly buy shit (except, heh, maybe his book). It didn’t require me to be thinner, prettier, or some optimized version of myself. It just required me to understand that the bad stuff (read: the shit I avoided) had purpose, too. The bad stuff deserved a thorough examination. The bad stuff — it turns out — wasn’t all that bad.

About seven years ago, nearly to the day, I competed for the title of Miss Iowa 2018. I was 1st Runner Up. I talk about this experience relatively often because 1) it serves as a marker. There is my life before this experience and after this experience. And 2) it was arguably the best-worst-thing to ever happen to me. Well, that and the subsequent quarter-life crisis that ensued shortly thereafter. Now, I can envision someone who may not know who I am reading this essay through their screen thinking, “Why in the fuck would you let a pageant carry so much weight? It’s a marker??? Jesus Christ, lady, go to therapy.” And to that, I’ll see your cynicism over what pageants can do to a person and raise you my therapy bills of the last ten years.

In all sincerity, losing that pageant afforded me more opportunities than winning ever would have. There’s some age-old adage about not learning anything when things are easy; you only learn when you lose. If I had won, I might’ve stayed a bit longer with that toxic partner. If I had won, I might not have moved to New York. If I had won, I might not have quit all my jobs and become a barista, which was, as fate would have it, also one of the better things to happen to me. When I got that job as a barista, I had an extremely informal interview with the owner of the coffee shop. I had known him for years. We sat down, and he took a deep breath, then riffed off a question that still lives rent-free in my brain. He said, “So, if you aren’t a pageant girl anymore, then who are you?” Maybe that was the marker. Maybe that was the ‘after.’ Either way, it was a helluva question for anyone, but especially for a 23-year-old who had spent her entire life working toward a singular goal that didn’t pan out.

All this to say, my self-annihilation was a crucial step in my becoming of self. And that becoming never stops, right? It’s not like we reach some pinnacle of who we are someday, and then everything is a steady decline from there. Maybe we do, but we won’t know it until it’s over. At least I hope not. This took me years to learn. It took me years to learn that I wouldn’t peak at 23. It took me years to understand that losing would be the best thing that ever happened to me. And it turns out, I didn’t ever need a book to understand that, did I? And neither do you.

It took me years to understand that loss — of self, of a person, of a life you thought you’d live — is usually a gain. To love is to lose. To lose is to learn. And to learn is to become. This learning, this becoming, is usually relentless.

Relentless, but worthwhile, all the same.

“All of us are made not only of what we have but of what we lost. And loss is not a subtraction. As an experience, it is an addition. Even when we lose a leg or an arm, there's not less of us but more. Human experience weighs more than human tissue.” -Augusten Burroughs, “This Is How: Surviving What You Think You Can’t”