Part 3: This is the hardest part of my story to share, but the rest doesn’t make sense without it.

“To be your real self is hard because you have to break through the facade of being easy or uncomplicated or whatever others wanted you to be. And risk being vulnerable or different or having something important for you to say.”

@notesfromyourtherapist on Instagram

This is the third post in a series about how The Willa Workshops on willawanders.com came to be. It’s kind of a long story, and I don’t know how many people will find it interesting, but the response to my first post in this series has been very warm, so I’m just going to continue to go with that.

Part 3

Here comes the part of the story that I don’t love talking about: I became a food and diet blogger.

So I’m running this printing business full time with my business partner and I have three small kids and a great husband and I wake up one day and think: I should start a weight loss blog!

And because I’m pretty impulsive and sometimes I do like learning new things, it seemed like a good idea at the time. I had just starved my way to the thinnest I’d been as an adult and I was so brainwashed by the thin ideal that I was rightfully scared I was going to put all the weight back on.

I thought the reasonable and rational thing to do would be to go public with my “weight struggles” and start a blog. I not so secretly wished that authoring a blog on dieting would be THE thing that would self-shame me into continuing to starve myself.

I was SUCH a good girl. I was just trying to do what I thought the world required of me: be as small as possible without actually dying.

I don’t know how many years I was a diet blogger, but it was no small thing. I was low-key sorta famous in some obscure dieting cult circles.

I don’t want to go down a whole rabbit hole of toxicity and negativity, but I do want you to know that I was, for many, many years, running a recipe blog for cultish dieting.

As embarrassed as I am now about that huge phase of my life, I have to say that when I look back at it, I can see that I learned some valuable lessons from the entire experience.

I learned how to be a pretty decent product photographer.

I developed a skill for story telling. I became a good enough writer. I got very comfortable with putting myself out there and being vulnerable in a public kinda way.

I discovered online marketing - the good, the bad and the truly manipulative and ugly. With this awareness, and my huge wake up from diet culture, I now always try to use my powers for good and not evil.

I saw how the diet and self-help industry played upon people’s longing to feel like they get to figure their life problems out and finally fix themselves by doing X, Y and Z every day . . . and how regular humans beat the crap out of themselves for never being able to live up to impossible standards of “everyday” anything. I learned to run away from impossible standards of perfection and harmful messaging.

But the most important thing that I discovered (thank you to podcaster and author Christy Harrison) was that dieting was The Life Thief.

Dieting had stolen all of my mental and physical energy to do the thing that I really loved to do, make art. The entire time (about a decade) that I was obsessively dieting and then blogging about dieting and then selling other people on dieting, I never made any art at all.

And you know how much I love to make art.

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Well, that was a lot more raw truth. Please share your thoughts in the comments below.