I Hate My First Book

So, let's roast it 🔥

When I wrote my first book, Hardcore Self Help: F**K Anxiety, it was a different time. I wrote this during my pre-doctoral internship before I even finished my Ph.D. It came from a genuine place. I was pissed at the mental health field for being inaccessible and confusing. I wanted to put something out there that was a quick and helpful read. I also apparently wanted to curse a lot. The book was fairly early in the wave of the foul mouthed self-help books that now line the shelves at your local Paper Source or hipster coffee shop. And since it was one of the first useful books in the genre, it really took off. At one point in time, it was the first result on all of Amazon if you searched for “anxiety.” That also led to a substantial income. For a while, the income that I got from that book completely eclipsed the income from my “real” work.

All of that is to say that I would never want to go back in time and not write the book. It changed the course of my life in an amazing way. But now that I am a decade older and wiser, looking back at it just makes me cringe. So, fuck it. Let’s tear it apart.

First off, have you ever noticed that it’s written as Hardcore Self Help and not Hardcore Self-Help?? Why the fuck did I do that? I remember I had some reason in my head way back then. Something like the hyphen might screw up search engines or that it would be better to keep it out for the stylizing of the cover, but it just drives me insane now. Like there are literally times, when I have to write, “Hardcore Self Help is a series for people that want self-help without the jargon.” How insane is that?