the: beginning of it all.
A photo taken by a high school friend the summer I launched Ethigirl.
Slightly over two years ago, from the kitchen table of my childhood home in rural New Brunswick, I created Ethigirl.com. I was fighting my way through the summer after my first year of university, working full-time at a local bank during the day, running during the evenings, and travelling around the province during the weekends.
But those were the easy things. Because there were lots of harder things, too. I finished my first year of university feeling lonely. Throughout high school, the final two years of which I’d also - in retrospect - felt incredibly lonely, I imagined university as a utopia. The time I’d finally find “my people” and thrive instantly. Needless to say, that… didn’t happen. I was also in a long-distance relationship. I felt caught between two worlds: my New Brunswick one, which contained my family and boyfriend, and my Montreal one, which contained my new home, school, and handful of friends I clung to and desperately wished to make lifelong. And I never, during all of those months, felt fully present in either. I started getting unbearable anxiety. My chest felt tight and full of butterflies all the time. Sometimes, I could barely eat. I managed by exercising as much as I could, so that I was too tired to even recognize the anxiety. But I knew something was wrong - something needed to change.
When I moved home that spring, my boyfriend and I broke up several weeks after celebrating three years of dating. I had changed so much during that time that I felt unrecognizable. It was the hardest thing my young heart had faced to that day. So I threw myself into productive things. I started running. A lot. I’d sometimes get up before work, around 5am, and run a 15k before heading into the bank. It was working well, for awhile. My anxiety got better.
Then one week, when my parents were on vacation and I was home alone, I checked my phone while out for groceries. My grandma had sent me a message on Facebook. She was sick and at the hospital. My chest got tight immediately and my heart dropped. I raced to the hospital to see her. She was okay, and I continued to visit her for the next few nights. My parents came home early from their vacation. It seemed like everything was going to be fine.
My grandma and I at my high school prom.
But then my parents came home one day after visiting my grandparents. I remember the look on their face as they came through the door. I couldn’t place it. My dad told me they gave her three months to live. She had been re-diagnosed with cancer. It ended up being three weeks. She passed away just a few days after I moved back to Montreal to start my second year of university. I returned home with my brother and his girlfriend to attend the wake and the funeral.
I had been spending time that summer figuring out what went wrong my first year of university, why I felt so alone and so lost and like everything was wrong. Why this place and time I’d projected so much onto for so many years didn’t live up to the expectations I’d created for it. I thought, second year will be a new start. I’ll do things differently. That summer was supposed to be calm time at home with family. And it really was, up until the end. Until I lost my grandma. Something I could never have been prepared for.
My grandma was everything. She was the strand that tied my family together. She was filled with light and laughter and creativity and the most compassion and selflessness I’ve ever seen a human being possess. I loved her so much.
Her passing made me realize I needed to do something important. I needed to try and create something. I needed to live out my passions in creative, beautiful ways that helped others.
And so I created Ethigirl. And Ethigirl was my place.
It was a brand for me, a persona, something created by me and me alone. People started using it as a nickname. My website was a platform for my passions, for sharing what I believed to be good and right. It allowed me to differentiate myself from other people. It gave me something to talk about when people said “tell me about yourself”. It was an outlet and an identifier.
the: then.
Me on a rooftop in early March, just days into the pandemic.
A couple of months ago, everything changed (obviously). At first, I felt okay. I wrote some things. I reached out to my friends. I exercised.
I was also a hypocrite.
I shared to my Instagram story all of those posts like “the quarantine is not the time to shame yourself for your lack of productivity!!”
…But then went and did literally exactly that. I found myself in darkened rooms unable to find the motivation to eat, let alone write or work on a side hustle or passion project. Why couldn’t I afford myself the same compassion and generosity that I afforded every single one of my talented, intelligent, hardworking friends when they told me they were going through the same things?
At some point, I closed the always-opened tab of Ethigirl.com on my laptop. I could not write anymore. I could not bring myself to write something that didn’t feel equally as existential as the times we are living in. I couldn’t write yet another slow fashion influencer listicle. I could not write something that didn’t feel like me. That didn’t match all of the very raw, vulnerable, unprecedented feelings that I was and still very much am feeling.
So I didn’t write anything at all.
Because I didn’t even know what I actually WANTED to write. How do you put all of this into words?
During this time away from my site, I also realized that along the way, I lost the part of Ethigirl that was an outlet. A creative space. A platform for me to live out the values that my grandma inspired and instilled within me. At some point, it became far more about the page views, the follower counts, the likes and comments. And so much less about the content itself. About writing things that made me tick. That made other people feel something. I realized that I need to make this feel less like an obligation and more of a way of writing my thoughts and inviting the world to read them.
I’ve been thinking a lot about defining, and quite frankly redefining our normative definitions of “success” and “accomplishment”. I could put my academia hat on and critically analyze the fact that capitalism leads us to define our success by financial and productivity terms. By working hard, VERY hard, exhausting ourselves until we reach our lofty goals. Goals that usually look like blog/social media engagement numbers (like follower counts), numbers of articles or posts published, dollars made, hours worked, projects finished. Anything that is tangible and easily quantifiable.
But what about everything else? When the lockdown first happened it forced us all home. Many of us lost our jobs. Many of us never found new ones. We’ve had to process and overcome so many different tragedies, letdowns, and forms of grief over these past few months.
What happens when you can’t pin your identity to a job anymore? Or a university? Or even a career aspiration, because it’s impossible to know absolutely anything with certainty anymore?
I think what happens then is you look inwards. This has been an opportunity to reevaluate all of those five-year, ten-year plans. Toss them out and actually just look at the now. Pause. Take off every single hat we were and focus on ourselves. Because if we didn’t (and don’t) do that, we can’t stay afloat. Not right now.
So we cling onto the small joys. We order the food, we eat the ice cream, we give ourselves the leniency of not finishing that thing that day, or maybe not finishing it at all. We take longer breaks. We sleep more. We go on gentle walks and we don’t punish ourselves. Because we can’t right now. And we have a built-in excuse not to.
Pandemic love.
Many people have started craving connections. Meaningful ones. We need support, love, and affection now than we’ve quite possibly ever needed it before. We’ve started dating more, or at least figuring out what we’re looking for. What love looks like to us, means to us, and what it’s lacked in the past. Again, looking inward and trying to understand what would make us happy in this moment, rather than five or ten years from now. But also doing the hard emotional work.
We’ve been holding onto each other, unfurling our trauma and grief together, carrying each other through the best that we possibly can. And I’ve come to the conclusion that there is absolutely nothing more important than all of these connections and relationships. Life is entirely, inextricably meaningless without them.
the: from now on.
Before the lockdown happened, I was the busiest I had ever been. I would wake up every morning completely exhausted, just barrelling through the best that I could. I’d check my Google calendar once, twice, thrice, infinitely because I couldn’t even remember what was next. I was, I think, happy — I felt accomplished in this time. I was working hard and achieving big goals. I was working on the things I felt passionate about. And then, one day, everything...stopped.
The articles on this website that I am the most proud of, out of anything else I’ve written during my time as the host of this URL, are my Empathetic Academic piece and my Sustainable Dinner Party piece. Both are well-researched, informed by lived experiences, and written and published to evoke some kind of emotion from the reader. Although they aren’t necessarily my articles that have the best SEO, the highest numbers of clicks, the greatest social media engagement, the ones that appear repeatedly on my Google Analytics dashboard, I could not care less. They are my best articles. Because they are the best quality, not the ones that simply “cracked the online code”.
I don’t give a shit anymore about that stuff. Because focusing on the numbers and the data overwhelmed me so much that it stopped me from creating actual good, important content.
So I’m done, mostly, with the listicles. You can expect things to get a little bit more personal over here. I don’t want to fall into the same traps I fell into before.
I want to be vulnerable and as gentle with myself as I try to be with everyone else.
I want to write the things that come to me in the middle of the night.
I want to publish quality content, but I don’t want it to be the same listicle-style stuff that I started out doing.
I will, of course, still share about wonderful brands because it’d be a shame if I didn’t. I’ll still recommend things. But for me, this website was born out of a pretty hard time in my life, and here I am now, about two years later, in maybe an even harder time. I need this outlet, but it needs to evolve as I do.
I’m changing all of the time, but something that will absolutely stay the same is my desire to share what I believe is right and good in the world. That is something I have pretty strong opinions about, and i am sticking to it.
I find myself in another phase of learning, growing, and hardship, from which I can draw many similarities of my pre-second year self. As I enter my final year of university, however, this phase is very different. I’ve grown so much since then, and so too has Ethigirl. Therefore, this platform has to evolve alongside its owner. I am excited to see what the future has in store for this website, and I hope to bring you much more content that I am proud of and that moves you.
With all the love in my heart, and the sustainability to continue in the long run,
Ethigirl.
Thank you for sticking with me.
