Happy Birthday, SHERO!

Taking a moment to reflect, be grateful and think about all the exciting possibilities ahead, thanks to the last five years with you.

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Five years ago, I took my newsletter to another level by adding paid subscriptions. I had started this entire experiment only a few months earlier with no real understanding of what it could become or what I could build. I was perpetually frustrated by Twitter’s character limitations when I had a complex legal or political assessment to make, so when the pitch from Hamish McKenzie to try Substack came at the perfect time, I decided I had nothing to lose and gave it a try.

Little did I know that this endeavor would manifest into my dream job. I remember sitting in the office of one of my favorite law professors during my first year of law school, when she asked me: “what is your dream job?” I gave her a perplexed and blank look because I had not let myself really consider that question. My experience up to that point had taught me that no one in the legal field really appreciated anything imaginative, especially dreams. In that moment, I decided to be honest and admit to myself what I really wanted.

“I want to be a writer,” I told her. She looked at me sternly and said, “Girl. I know you better than that, what does that mean…” I thought for a minute about what I imagined my dream life to look like, where I wanted to live and who I wanted to become. “I want to write articles that empower women with issues we are not focused enough on as we make our own money and have our own lives.” I took a deep breath and continued: “I want to write about legal and political issues that women were never taught when they were teaching it to boys.”

Something about the sparkle in her eyes and the excitement in her face pushed me to keep going and say things I had never even imagined for myself until that very moment. “I want to move people and make them feel things and make them think but also make them feel like they really belong and are not alone.” Then, to lessen the intensity of my last, deep statement that drew a huge silence from us both, I did my typical thing where I make a joke to not feel so vulnerable: “I want to be the political Carrie Bradshaw.”

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It took many years to actually find my way, but once I spoke those words and made my goals real to myself and another person, something shifted. I spent the next few years focusing on my legal career and political activism, but I was always longing for something else, and for that feeling when work does not actually feel like work. For an artist, trapped in a lawyer’s life, the idea of jumping off the cliff to give up the traditional career that took so much work, felt absolutely crazy. I would liken it to choosing the bad boy from the wrong side of town over the the perfect guy who is kneeling before you with a ring when you never wanted a ring.

Working in the legal field never worked for me. In the legal world I never felt seen. There was no room for creativity in most areas of the law that I experienced, despite what you see from gripping criminal dramas on TV. A lot of the actual work is very cookie cutter and repetitive, and there is not a lot of room for spontaneity or risk-taking when advocating for someone else. While I loved some things about practicing law and my clients, it was just not a fit for me.

It is so much easier to see your path once you are looking back on it. A series of personal disasters caused my trajectory to shift drastically a few times and each time this happened, I felt like a failure instead of accepting the truth — the universe was realigning me so that I could be where I was supposed to be. I would love to tell you that it was an adventure worth re-living a million times over and that everyone should try it, but that is not entirely accurate.

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You know when you are in the wrong place, and the time comes when you are unwilling to walk in that direction another day. It was scary, and painful, and confusing, but I had no choice, as if something was pulling me forward from inside. Sometimes the experience is so horrible that you have to cry really hard on the phone to your mother and ruin the device entirely by water damage. Sometimes you loathe yourself and feel like you have made a mistake. Sometimes you watch TeenMom on repeat to make yourself feel better about at least getting your education, even though you didn’t start a family.

Then, little by little, a few things happen to make you feel like you are in the right place. You start to like the work you are doing, and think about it all the time, even when you are not doing it. You are happier and have a little buzz inside that makes you excited to wake up and start the day. You like interacting with people again, and start to see the good in people who used to irritate you. Even when terrible things are happening all around you — like Donald Trump being elected President of the United States — you feel alive and you fly.

I’d love to say that everything has been simple since landing in the right place, but the changing political landscape and the uncertainty of social media has made the last few years very difficult. The political burnout from the Trump years has also chased away some good people, who were kind enough to tell me they were taking a break from it all as they left the SHERO subscription service.

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What encourages me to keep going is that everyone is in need of some inspiration, and things will not always feel this way. This is an exciting proposition now: get back up, keep moving and evolve even though you don’t know how, when or where to start to rebuild. This will make SHERO a constant for all of us that desperately need something familiar to hold onto.

There are still struggles figuring out what I am doing and where I am trying to take this SHERO dream next. But, I love the challenge and the opportunity for magic, that is always around every corner in this life. When I first opened up my newsletter for paid subscriptions, I knew my mom would be the first one, but I hoped not the only one.

All of you have been here and you never let me down. I look forward to your comments and think about you all when I write. You are my inspiration and it has been an honor to have you as readers. SHERO is more than a blog to me — it is the embodiment of my hopes for us all…to feel empowered to be who we really are by knowing as much as we can know.

Thanks for being on this journey with me — here’s to a thousand more years of SHERO!

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Amee Vanderpool writes the SHERO Newsletter, is an attorney, published author, contributor to newspapers and magazines, and an analyst for BBC radio. She can be reached at avanderpool@gmail.com or follow her on Twitter @girlsreallyrule.