You shouldn't have to become someone else to be seen.

Building a business as an introvert might look different, but that's the point.

My newsletter had an almost 50% open rate. By every account, that’s supposed to mean you’re doing it right, it’s working.

I shut it down anyway.

I didn’t stop because I didn’t enjoy the writing. I loved the stories I told in there. I’d check the numbers and get that little hit of Yes! This is landing, this is good.

Then I’d sit down, open up the email marketing program to write the next one and feel the weight of it on my chest, like Road Runner had dropped the anvil right there.

I couldn’t have told you what that anvil was about. I just knew that every week, it was there.

If you’d asked me, point blank, who the newsletter was helping and how or where it was going, I didn’t have an easy answer.

Meanwhile, something else had been working under my skin for months.

This whole game of being visible, getting seen, getting found, building a name…it was starting to feel like a constant uphill battle, even for me, someone who had been in marketing for 25 years. It wasn’t the algorithm. (Though I do love to blame it. But that’s just hard. This wasn’t about hard.)

The game felt wrong. Like I’d been shoved onto a field to play a game built for a person who wasn’t me, running on advice that kept yelling one thing: become someone you’re not or you’ll never win. Someone louder. Bigger. Bolder. Different-er. Pick your -er word (or just make one up like I do.)

Post every day. Get on every stage. Be on, all the time, everywhere, and just call your exhaustion ambition.

I’m an introvert building a business I believe in, almost a year in, and and I decided early on that fear wasn’t going to get a vote in how I do it. (Sometimes that’s a negotiation, but I always win.)

So over this past year, I’ve tried it all: posting for 120 days straight, posts that were vulnerable, funny, “authoritative”, you name it, I wrote it. I submitted a TED talk. (Didn’t get it. Slightly relieved, honestly. lol) Went on a podcast. Submitted more speaking sessions. Sat down and let myself get recorded for three hours diving into my business. (We pretend that YouTube video doesn’t exist.)

And a lot more dips into what I have called my “moments of doing scary things.” And I’m proud of all of it. Not one regret. (A few deletes, but no regrets.)

Doing the thing that scares you, on purpose, because you've decided uncertainty doesn't get to run the show, is part of the work. And I would do every bit of it again.

There’s a difference though, between choosing a hard, bright thing every now and then and being told that those bright, new things are the only mode available, every day, and the only door in to where you want to be.

I have a name for that mode now: Spotlight Visibility mode.

The advice that says the (only) way to be seen is to walk into the brightest light, grab all the attention, and fight to stay there. All of the advice, even well-meaning, sounded like that’s the one place it landed. Over and over.

That somehow that loud version is the price of admission, the factory setting, the thing you must perform every single day or you don’t get to be found at all.

I tried it all, on purpose. And it doesn’t fit.

And then last week, someone made the comment to “suck it up and get over it” and “if you don’t like visibility, maybe you shouldn’t build a business then.”

So I’m calling it now: That’s bs.

I’m an introvert.
That isn’t a weakness.
It’s not a thing to fix.
It’s not a situation to overcome.

This is just our operating system. I’m not confessing a flaw here.

But when you have to show up in a way that challenges the core of who you are, day after day after day with no air in between, it drains the exact system you need for the work you’re good at.

If you run me in spotlight mode as a lifestyle, you won’t get more of me. You’ll get less. (Just ask my husband, when those weeks land with multiple calls, webinars and other things, and the moment I hit a wall.)

You get a worn-down draft of the person whose entire value is how she thinks.

And I wasn’t the only one feeling this way.

My clients kept saying the same things, in the same tired voice.
”I tried that, and it just made me feel worse.”
”I question myself every day because I can’t keep up with posting all the time.”
”I wish I could just quit social altogether. I hate it.”

Smart, capable people, fully convinced the problem was them.

They’d been shoved onto that same field, into a game they were told they had to play one certain way to win, but the instructions were written in a different language. And they blame themselves for not figuring it out.

When an introvert says she needs quiet, that she needs to recharge, that she can't run at full volume indefinitely, it tends to get heard as a soft little confession. Support emojis come out.

When a person walks into a room, plants their feet, and tells everyone exactly what they think, we call that standing your ground. We applaud it. The “You go!” comments come out.

So let me say this plainly, because I believe it all the way down to my slipper-clad toes.

We are also standing our ground.

Choosing the quiet, choosing the work over the performance, choosing not to set fire to your own system to satisfy somebody else’s version of how they got visible, is not a retreat. That is a person who knows exactly who they are and where they stand.

It just turns out my ground has a porch on it.

You shouldn’t have to become someone else to be seen.

(PS above image… my whiteboard on my desk, in my handwriting.)

The advice we’ve all been handed is only one version of being visible. One.

There is another.

Easier on the system, the kind that leaves you feeling more sure of yourself rather than less. It doesn’t ask you to work twice as hard or sand off the exact parts that make you worth finding in the first place.

This is why I shut down my newsletter with the almost 50% open rate. I know, by the metrics, that’s a fairly unhinged thing to do. I am also resetting this entire Substack space, which used to be my occasional-when-I-dip-into-fiction mode sharing space. (I’ll still do that, too, sometimes.)

But I wanted a space to show that it is possible and to bring you along, step by step, while I build an introvert-approved visibility playbook, from story to strategies to systems. And giving you all the steps so you can build one for yourself, too.

I renamed this to From the Back Porch. The name isn’t an accident, and it’s not a retreat. (Well, maybe sometimes.) The back porch is where I do my best thinking. It’s where I start my mornings and end my days. It’s where I figure out what’s actually true before I say it out loud anywhere else.

And I’ll keep proving the one thing I believe most: you don’t have to become someone else to be seen.

Pull up a chair. The porch is open.