I Want To Be Shannon Ashley When I Grow Up. Unfortunately, She’s Taken.

On the pitfalls of envy and being your own authentic self. That’s enough. It’s more than enough.

In appreciation of Shannon Ashley and so many other writers who inspire me. A true story.

I should know better. I’ve been kicked in the head by the green-eyed monster enough times in my life, you’d think I’d give that one up. But I guess I had an inch that still needed a whack. Because when I came to Medium looking for a place to hang my hat, I saw a few people rocking it and I said, yeah, I want that.

They were making the big bucks, so I drooled all over my keyboard, planning how I could crack the code. Do what they do, I said to myself. Pick the biggest winner and walk in her shoes.

That would be Shannon Ashley.

I’ve heard some people make more than she does, but she has this big heart and shows others how she does it. Catnip in my favorite flavor, and I took a big hit. By that, I mean, I started reading everything she wrote.

But that wasn’t all I did. I’ve been writing for almost fifty years, and I’m a natural-born storyteller, or so they tell me. At any rate, my own stories came bubbling to the surface. Before I knew it, I was publishing them and doing okay for a newbie. Getting curated and making it into the coveted 7% of writers who earn at least $100 a month.

Pretty good for a newbie, but not Shannon Ashley good.

I’ve floundered around looking for my niche. Some articles soar into the stratosphere, relatively speaking, me not being Shannon Ashley and all. Others sinking like a stone in a rain puddle, me definitely not being Shannon Ashley.

Time flies when you’re 80 years old. My six-month anniversary on Medium snuck up on me. My earnings survived the new pay formula, and I was reaching $400 a month, aiming to earn four and even five figures one day.

But I can be impatient (an understatement if there ever was one), and I decided to take a look at how Shannon was doing.

I had stopped reading some of her posts because, well, we live in different worlds. True, we’re both single mothers, but my little chickadee turns 60 tomorrow. Not much Shannon can help me with on the parenting front, mistakes having already been made and all.

My own mother is kicking up a ruckus in heaven, while her mother still makes Shannon’s life interesting down here. So while i sympathize with her mother-daughter angst, those pieces don’t speak to me.

And yet. There’s a quality in Shannon’s writing that pulls me back, time after time. It’s not her pieces about her sex life or her weight issues, not exactly. It’s the sum total of the way she writes about her life, about anything really.

She nails it in her signoff. Honestly yours. Something like that. Shannon is all about telling the truth. Telling her story honestly.

It’s why people love her. She says what most people are afraid to or didn’t know was in their hearts. She speaks for all of us, honestly. It’s a powerful gift and why she’s so popular.

When that clicked for me, I said, nailed it. I’m going to do that.

I’ll make a bazillion dollars by doing what Shannon does. I’ll clone her, at least her writer persona and just write about my life, very honestly.

So that lasted half a New York minute before my muse hit me upside the head.

Are you freaking crazy? You should know better. You’re not Shannon Ashley. Not even on your best day.

You start writing about your sex life or naming names in your past and you’ll never sleep again. I. Guarantee. It.

If you haven’t learned the meaning of authenticity by now, how many times do I have to smack you silly before you learn it? That isn’t you.

There is only one Shannon Ashley. Not because she’s the best writer on the planet. She may not even be the best writer on Medium. She’s just the best Shannon Ashley. She’s the best of all us, bold and courageous and fierce in her determination to forge her own way in a difficult, begrudging world.

She’s exactly who we all want to be, us writers with fragile egos, delicate temperaments, psyches made of every type of insecurity and confusion.

Shannon isn’t someone for me to imitate, to start writing stories documenting my sex life, my dysfunctional marriages, my awful mistakes as a parent, or every wrong done to me as a child.

I could do that, be brutally honest. It’s not hard to regurgitate injustice or a guilty conscience. But to document one’s life experience in all it’s messy specificity in a way that uplifts and inspires is a gift, a rare talent. That’s what Shannon does that makes her a noteworthy success story on Medium.

Her way of telling her story motivates her readers in many ways. She comforts, heals, and exhorts us to be better than we think we are.

She is a positive beacon in a world that feeds on negative messages. Even when her stories are dark and sad, she wrings humanity out of every episode.

Could I do that? I hardly think not.

My mistake when I thought I should model my writing on Shannon’s was not in thinking I should detail every inch of my body that lights up at the thought of sex. Yeah, Shannon can do that. But she lights up every detail of the human experience to make me comfortable with my own.

I erred in thinking Shannon was unique in what she did. Certainly, her stories are her own. But the best of the best here, whether they earn the big bucks or not, the people to emulate are not the writers of sensational exposes, but the field guides in that wilderness of expression, those writers who find a way to open up their creative impulses and write purely and without artifice, to write honestly about the hard things that make the rest of us feel we’ll not alone in our bewilderment at life.

Our stories will all have the same theme, but the tellings will be unique, that is, if we do what Shannon does, and Jun Wu and John Gorman and Jessica Justice and Hawkeye Pete Egan B.and Felicia C. Sullivan. I could go on and on naming the beacons of authentic writing here. Some of whom make us laugh with their wisdom, like Roz Warren.

Shannon calls it honesty. For me, it’s authenticity, something that can’t be duplicated, even if you followed their business plan down to the letter.

There’s only one of us. On a big platform like Medium, there’s room for the whole gang. As long as we tell our truth, and tell it authentically, who we are is enough.

Just ask Shannon Ashley. She does it every day and twice on Sunday.

I’m an editor and writer on Medium with Top Writer status. I’m also an editor for the publication, Rogues Gallery. I’ve published 55 titles on Amazon and edit for private clients. If you’d like to hire me as your editor for fiction, non-fiction, or business writing, please contact me here. If you’d like to read more of my work on Medium, click here to sign up for my newsletter. I’ll make sure you don’t miss a word. Thank you for reading.