Once Again, Rachel Hollis Wants You to Know She’s Better Than You…

Okay, so, I’m not surprised to see this Tik Tok video where Rachel Hollis is bragging about being unrelatable but, it’s really something to actually see her own up to the real image so many of us have been talking about.

In the video, she says someone called her “unrelatable” after she mentioned having a woman clean her toilets twice a week. And I guess, unrelatable is her whole mission now, since she said:

“What is it about me that made you think I want to be relatable? No, sis, literally everything I do in my life is to live a life that most people can’t relate to. Most people won’t work this hard. Most people won’t get up at 4 a.m. Most people won’t fail publicly again and again just to reach the top of the mountain. Literally every woman I admire in history was unrelatable. If my life is relatable to most people, I’m doing it wrong.”

For the record, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with hiring people to help you with housework and that’s something I do when I can. But, I do think it’s weird the way she focuses on scrubbing toilets, right? Like, she’s mentioning a woman who’s her housecleaner, and then she has to say she’s there to scrub her toilets? It hit my ear wrong, like a weird dig.

Whenever I’ve hired Molly Maids, I have no inclination to call them toilet scrubbers or to define them by that one task. I’m grateful that they get things done better and quicker than I ever would.

I also don’t understand what’s so hard about saying that you’re fortunate when you have a privilege like that. Just because you work hard, that doesn’t mean other people don’t work harder, and for less. She probably didn’t even need to be unrelatable about it in the first place. She could have framed the conversation about why it’s such a help and how like so many other women, she finds it difficult to stay on top of everything herself, including housework. Instead, she basically framed it as a matter of class.

Never in my life have I heard a writer talk to her audience like that. That she doesn’t want to be relatable? That doesn’t even compute with me.

Rachel’s whole brand has been about vulnerability and authentic imperfections. At least, that’s the image she sells.

Suddenly, she’s announcing to the world that she’s unrelatable AF, and omg she even made a list of other unrelatable women she admires.

“Harriet Tubman, RBG, Marie Curie, Oprah Winfrey, Amelia Earhart, Frida Khalo, Malala Yousafzai, Wu Zetian... all Unrelatable AF.”

I mean, honestly. Is there even one name on that list that you’d associate with Rachel Hollis? I feel like she just Googled “She Persisted” and pulled up whatever names she could find and thought looked good. When I Googled it, look what popped up from Chelsea Clinton’s books on Amazon (all names on Rachel’s list):

Let’s just be honest. Most of the women on this list weren’t patting themselves on the back for being able to afford people to… scrub their toilets. Again, I’m not judging anyone for getting housecleaning help. This is all about the attitude. Because what the fuck and who the fuck doesn’t want to be relatable, right?

She’s an influencer and self-help guru. And she’s painfully out-of-touch.

Frankly, seeing this latest bit of Hollis news really just pissed me off. The condescension and the suggestion that nobody works as hard as she does — it’s all so off-putting.

Good grief. As a fellow writer and mom, I’m so irritated with the attitude. I actually spent the day trying to get ready for Easter, and trying to get things together for my daughter’s birthday… and then I made ratatouille with her (despite my aversion to cooking these days) because it’s something she really wanted to do.

So, I did the dicing and slicing. Sophie got to stir the sauce and assemble the dish. Here are some of the photos I put up on Instagram:

It was a good choice to do that for her… but, it was also a hard choice. I still spent all day feeling guilty for not working on my writing, all day worrying about the future, and all day fretting about money as I tried to get shit done. And then I run into this Rachel Hollis “unrelatable AF” nonsense and I’m just like, “here we go again.” (Too bad I don’t work as hard as Rachel, huh?)

One might have hoped that she’d get her shit together enough to, I dunno… do some introspection. I hear that divorce and fucking pandemics are good for all of that.

But Rachel Hollis might genuinely be the least self-aware influencer today.

If you haven’t noticed, this woman really gets under my skin and I’ve written about her in the past.

Buzzfeed quoted at least one of those stories and last summer, Google ranked them higher than articles from The Today Show about her divorce. Sometimes, I feel slightly (slightly) guilty when she complains about shit she's read from her "haters." But then she does something else that's ridiculously out-of-touch.

I suppose the whole reason she gets under my skin so much is that I feel like she uses a really fake and shallow version of “vulnerability,” and she hurts people in the process by promoting such toxic messages. When in doubt, just try harder — that pretty much sums up her advice to women regardless of the actual details that matter.

And for fuck’s sake, she acts like she’s the only woman in the world waking up at 4AM. It’s weird because on one side she projects this image of always, always hustling. On the other side, she’s all about luxury. What’s weird is that there’s no authenticity to sort of bridge that gap. Rachel winds up lashing out at her audience as if she doesn’t even know how much she sends out mixed messages.

I guess she probably doesn’t know.

It’s annoying as hell but it also makes me that much more determined to write a book for people who don’t think they’re perfect, you know? I’m working on a book tentatively titled, No, You’re Not Going to Hell For That, and sometimes, the best way to describe it is like… the kind of book that Rachel Hollis would never write herself because she just can’t do honest and relatable.

Though, now we know for sure that she can do honestly unrelatable AF.

Good to know?

4.5.21 Update:

Rachel issued an "apology":

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