Glennon & Abby / Influencers / The Good Place
I promise it links together
Glennon Doyle and Abby Wambach were dancing in front of me at a Maren Morris show a couple of weeks ago.
(We were at Girls Just Wanna Weekend in Mexico, and they were there taping a live episode of We Can Do Hard Things.)
I’ve read memoirs by both of them, and it struck me how bizarre it was that I was right next to them—to them, a stone-cold stranger—yet I knew intimate details about their lives, love, and marriage.
Details they were clearly ok with people knowing, because they’d put them in a book! But it still made me feel weirdly stalkery.
I just watched Apple Cider Vinegar on Netflix, a docu-drama about an Australian wellness influencer who pretended to have brain cancer to build an audience for her blog and health brand.
The aspect of the story that fascinated me was the intentions of the featured blogger and other wellness influencers referenced in the story. They all started sharing their health stories genuinely intending to help others going through similar experiences. But, as they became known, their motivations shifted to sharing purely to gain more fame.
It made me think about the inherent motivation to share.
Altruism can motivate sharing, but it’s easy to wonder if there’s always a dash of superiority and egotism.
I’m starting to think that this style of online sharing, masked by computers and phone screens, is more like singing to a large crowd.
It looks like you’re sharing your most intimate thoughts and feelings with strangers, but it only feels like you’re sharing them with your laptop.
Singing to a giant crowd isn’t as terrifying as singing to just a few people because you can’t see individual faces in a large crowd, so it feels like you’re singing to yourself.
Both situations look like large-scale vulnerability, but, in practicality, they’re far more solitary.
It’s why it felt ok for Glennon and Abby to share the story of how they met via their books in a way that would’ve been super weird for me to walk up to them at the show and say, “Tell me about your relationship!”
I think it’s also why it was easy for the wellness influencers to lose sight of the women on the other side of their screens and start chasing fame.
The link between sharer and sharee is as strong as steel and flimsy as gossamer.
We can connect deeply with and feel seen and inspired by people on the other side of these screens, but we can also make them disappear with a button click.
It’s easy to start asking, why bother adding my voice to the noise?
I’ve had the flu for the last week, which means I finally had time to watch The Good Place in its entirety. Maybe it was the cold medicine, maybe it was my fevered existential crisis, but one line hit me like a truck:
“Soulmates aren’t found, they’re made.”
You don’t just stumble upon your perfect person—you find someone great and decide to build something with them. You commit. You show up. You do the work.
And it feels like the same is true for luck. For success.
Luck isn’t found. It’s created.
Success won’t just appear one day, fully formed. You decide what it looks like for you, and then you get to work building the life you want.
And maybe, sharing works the same way.
We don’t just find our voices or our community online—we build them. Post by post, note by note, word by word.
Until one day, it doesn’t feel like shouting into the void anymore.