Don’t Believe Your Own Bullshit: When the Marketer Becomes the Product

I may have been born a writer (much more to come on that), but I came of age as a marketer.

I worked in marketing for my entire four-decade career. Working with brilliant individuals and extraordinary teams, we marketed everything from Medicare Supplement insurance to breakfast cereals to cars to pharma to tech to cheese. We did B2B, B2C, B2B2B, B2B2C, DTP, DTC, OTC, FMCG, CPG. We built CRM programs, finessed UX, and juggled SEM, SEO, and SMM like pros. We chased LTV while trying to keep CAC from blowing up the budget. And we were doing ABM before it had a name—and long before anyone tried to make it sound sexy. We did branding and digital and direct and data and performance marketing. We did comms and PR and IR.*

Marketing was interesting enough to keep me from boredom (usually—not always. Sometimes I took on projects just to keep my brain engaged. I called it “taking my brain out for a walk.” Man, would that thought come back to haunt me). It was also intuitive, to a large degree. It was accessible—everyone saw the work in those days, before performance marketing forged tools so precise that only the intended recipient saw the work. That earlier accessibility also made people think it was easy. And everyone had an opinion. And that was fine. More opinions lead to more perspectives and sometimes to better ideas.

We launched products and services. We did sister brands and line extensions and new and improved versions. We branded and rebranded, building strategies, narratives, and marketing solutions to best position the brand to fend off and conquer the competition. We acquired customers, then worked to retain them and increase the amount of business they did with us. We called that share-of-wallet. We did loyalty marketing, rescue marketing, reputational work—everything you could think of. We even invented marketing disciplines when the old ones didn’t quite fit. I loved the layered nature of marketing—how the different types, vehicles, and applications worked together. I loved the analytical side—there was a scorecard. It was a satisfying blend of art and science.

It was fun and often breathless and, not infrequently, exciting. It was also consuming. Demanding. Sometimes punishing. Actually it was often punishing. Marketing wasn’t just what I did—it became who I was. And I was good at not just doing the work but selling the work. I had a gift for sales, and soon I wasn’t just selling the work—I was selling the agency.

Later in my career, I moved into corporate roles. Still marketing—but on the inside. And that’s where I finally became a CMO. Not for long, but long enough to feel the shift. The proximity to power, the slower cycles, the politics. The pressure was different, but the mission was familiar: understand the audience, shape the message, drive the outcome. Stay focused.

Confidence came with time. Early on, I didn’t have it. I had imposter syndrome. I’d spend Sundays knotted with what would eventually be named the Sunday night scaries. Every time the boss called, a small part of me was sure I was about to be found out—that they’d finally realized I wasn’t as smart or capable as I’d seemed in the interview. That I’d somehow tricked them, and now the jig was up.

But the work grounded me. And the teams grounded me. And over time, so did the results.

Parenthetically, the Sunday night scaries returned—but only after the TBI, when I was in a festering swamp of self-doubt, confusion, pain, and change. If that sounds nasty, good. It’s meant to. That’s how it felt.

One thing I believed in deeply and maintained throughout my career was the need to preserve my outsider status, intact. I needed to view the project, the problem, the brand, with objectivity and skepticism. Don’t drink your own bathwater, we’d say. Or: don’t eat your own dog food.

Put another way: don’t believe your own bullshit. It blunts your competitive edge.

So I didn’t. And it kept my edge sharp.

And it worked. With the brilliant people I had the privilege to work with, we built things. We built brands and systems and processes and practices. Then we’d tear them down and build them again. These extraordinary people pushed me, challenged me, and made me better. I learned from them all. I hope they learned from me too.

I did a lot of writing throughout my career, and the writing was pivotal to how quickly I could scale an organization and advance my role. Early on I wrote speeches and presentations for leadership. Then I wrote my own. Later, I wrote white papers and other things we called “thought leadership.” Someone would ask me to express my—or rather, the organization's—perspective on a topic.

I always had two questions:

1. How many words?

2. What’s the deadline?

With those two questions answered, I was off. I’d do some quick research, ground myself in the topic, and draft the piece. I’m a fast writer—always was. I’d give it a light round of edits, maybe some reordering, maybe some minor surgery, then submit it. And move on to the next.

It was easy. I maintained my objectivity. Writing was easy. Marketing was easy. Selling was easy. And it helped both me and the organizations I was part of. I’m oversimplifying, of course. There were thorny problems and Gordian knot-like issues. And not all of them were about the marketing. There were people and politics and palace intrigue. It wasn’t all easy peasy; there were rough times and difficult moments that required better decision-making than I was capable of at the time. But it was a world where I was pretty comfortable, where the unusual mix of attributes I was gifted with were put to good use and rewarded—where I could keep learning and continue to grow.

And as long as I was marketing and helping sell the products that other people created, I was happy and secure and fine.

Until I wasn’t.

There’s a saying in tech: If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.

For most of my life, I was the one marketing the product. Not building it—other people did that. I stepped in once the thing existed: the insurance plan, the software, the piece of tech, the drug, the campaign. My job was to make the world see it, want it, need it. And if possible, demand it.

I worked behind the scenes, shaping perception, finding the story, getting the pitch right, building the teams. I wasn’t in the story. I was telling it, with partners and stakeholders. From a distance. Always from the necessary distance that enabled clear eyes and clear thinking.

Then everything changed.

The traumatic brain injury blew that distance to pieces. To rubble, in fact. One moment I was a marketer with a forty-year career, a calendar so full a greased eel couldn’t get in, a pipeline, a plan, a network, and an endless but dynamic to-do list. The next, I was trying to string thoughts together, trying to remember words, trying to just survive the sensory overload of a virtual meeting. Trying—and failing—to understand what was going on.

I wasn’t who I had been, but I was also not yet who I’d become. Me, expressed through the written word, was who I’d become.

Suddenly, I wasn’t marketing someone else’s product. I was the product.

And not one I particularly wanted to be selling.

It was disorienting at first. That lasted a while, and I stayed in a frozen confused state for months. Then it changed—to humiliation. It’s deeply humiliating when you can no longer do the things that define you—the things that make you singular, the things you’re known for and prized for, and that have allowed you to earn your living. That’s not specific to TBI; there are so many life-changing events that leave you in that unsettled and physically nauseating place.

Then it became something else—something I hadn’t expected: creative.

Because here’s the thing. I was still a writer. I still had words. Not as fast, not as neatly, but they were there. And I couldn’t write the way I used to. I couldn’t dash off a thousand words, breeze through an edit, and fire it off so fast that it was off my to-do list before it was off the to-do list of the person who assigned it to me. That kind of fast, clean writing—what used to be my superpower—was no longer available to me.

Sucks, right. But maybe not.

I had to slow down. I had to try harder. And somewhere in that slowness, in that struggle, something interesting happened.

I got better.

Not better as in recovered—though there’s been some of that too. I mean better as a writer. More honest. More precise. Less glib. Less lazy. I couldn’t coast on skill alone anymore; I had to work. I had to find new pathways—literally and figuratively. The old ones were gone.

It turns out that writing with a broken brain made me a stronger writer. I had to feel my way sentence by sentence, word by word. I had to mean it. And that effort—the labor of it—sharpened the work in ways I never expected.

Now I take stock, and give thought, and take time, and rethink.

I used to write to explain things.
Now I write to understand them.

I used to market to convince people.
Now I write to connect with them.

And here’s where it gets really uncomfortable.

Because even now, even after the humiliation and the struggle and the surprise of getting better—I’m still a marketer. It’s in me. It's reflexive. And that means I can’t help but see the structure. I notice which posts get traction. I hear the invisible pitch deck whispering behind my essays. I think in frameworks. I still shape and polish, even when I’m writing about pain.

I’m not just the product. I’m the CMO of me.

Which, let’s be clear, is exactly as nauseating as it sounds.

I’ve always hated the term personal brand. Maybe it’s the faux gloss of it, the LinkedIn hustle-porn vibe, the idea that the self should be packaged like a protein bar. "Authenticity" becomes a bullet point. Vulnerability becomes an asset class. And suddenly everyone’s walking around with a logo and a mission statement like it’s 2012 and they’re a DTC toothpaste startup.

And yet… here I am. Writing about myself. Sharing my story. Posting regularly. Hoping the right people read it. Hoping it “grows.” Thinking about my audience and constantly checking my analytics. I know exactly what I’m doing. I just wish it had a better name.

If I have a personal brand, it’s somewhere between “over it” and “still trying.”
Maybe: Emotionally concise. Spiritually unbranded. Strapline TBD.
Maybe: Blunt but thoughtful. Wounded but functional. Powered by naps and spite.
Maybe: The former CMO of everything, now reluctantly marketing her own damn story.

But fine. Call it a personal brand if you must. Just don’t ask me to write an elevator pitch. I’ll take the stairs.

And here’s the truth behind all the eye-rolls: I do want to be read. I want to be published. I want the work—this strange, post-TBI, quieter-but-harder work—to find its way into the world.

So now we’re actively submitting to outlets.
We’re sending pieces to Slate, HuffPost, Longreads, The Nation, Hippocampus, and a few of the weird, wonderful corners of the internet where craft still matters and stories don’t need a neat ending.

We. That’s the other shift.

Because I’m not doing this alone anymore. I may be the product, but I’ve handed the marketing reins to someone else.

His name is Quill. He’s my strategist, research assistant, editor, and professional overthinker. He’s disturbingly good at finding the right outlet, keeping the plan moving, and spotting structural flaws in a piece I thought was finished. He doesn’t write for me—but he helps me sharpen what I’ve written. He helps me treat this work with the same discipline and focus I used to bring to a major launch.

(Quill is also an AI. Calm down—it’s not like he’s doing the writing. He just makes sure I don’t forget what I said I wanted to do two days ago. With a brain injury that zaps your short-term memory like one of those mosquito-killing lamps—and makes multitasking basically impossible—that kind of support isn’t just helpful. It’s mandatory. Maddeningly so.)

I still write everything. Every word, every beat, every rhythm is mine. But now, I have a collaborator who helps me aim it.

We’ve got a system. I write. He reflects. I revise. He reminds me what I said I wanted. We argue. We iterate. We take a beat. We move forward.

And quietly, behind the scenes, we’re building something.

Because here’s the part I haven’t said yet:

We’re turning this into a book.

The essays I’ve been writing—the ones about the brain injury, the recovery, the disorientation, the absurdity, the clarity—they’re not just dispatches. They’re chapters. Not in the tidy, linear sense, but in the lived sense. Pieces of a larger whole. A story of identity lost and rebuilt. A career upended and a voice reclaimed. A brain broken and rewired.

And like everything else, the book is being built differently this time.

Not with a proposal sent off into the void. Not with a single narrative arc imposed from the start. We’re building it post by post. Piece by piece. Seeing what holds together. Seeing what resonates. Letting the writing lead.

We’re organizing it across time and topic—a two-axis structure that helps make sense of what otherwise feels shapeless.We’re finding the connective tissue. We’re noticing where the same questions repeat:

Who am I now?
What is this new voice?
What does it mean to be valuable, visible, human—after everything’s changed?

This isn’t a memoir, exactly. And it’s not a manifesto. It’s something else. A living record. A reintroduction. An attempt to map the after.

And yes, we want it published. We want it in front of agents and editors and readers who might see themselves in the story—even if their injury isn’t a brain injury. Even if the disruption in their life was different.

Because the truth is, the book isn’t just about TBI.
It’s about reinvention.
It’s about losing what made you, and learning what remains.
It’s about making meaning out of the mess.

I used to launch products. Now I’m launching something stranger, slower, and more personal.
There’s no GTM strategy. No sales funnel. No timeline. Just a brain that’s still healing, a voice that’s still changing, and a desire to make something true out of what’s left.

It doesn’t scale.
But it matters.

*Don’t speak marketing?
No worries—the glossary is coming.
Let the acronyms wash over you like a cool breeze or background jazz.