Andrea C. Stallworth is an author, educator, writer, and creative whose work explores healing, identity, faith, relationships, and personal growth. She is the creator of Brown Girl From Boston, where she shares reflections on life, culture, wellness, and becoming. Andrea is the author of four books, including her newest release, If I’m Honest, a collection of essays and interludes centered on vulnerability, healing, and choosing oneself. Through her writing and creative work, she encourages others to embrace honesty, creativity, and the freedom to define life and success on their own terms.

The day before my book If I’m Honest officially enters the world, I’m surprisingly calm. I’m not running around trying to figure out how to make the book go viral or obsessing over numbers. I’m not sitting on the “innanet” comparing my publishing journey to someone who sold 10,000 copies before breakfast and has a publicist, marketing team, assistant, and an entire support system helping to make it happen. The truth is, our journeys are different, and it took me a while to understand that different does not mean unsuccessful.

Years ago, I wrote a Brown Girl From Boston post after a friend asked me a thoughtful question about sleep, rest, and making time for the grind. My response was simple: You get to define your success. Don’t allow influencers, family, friends, or strangers on the internet to define it for you. Know your limitations. Protect your wellness. Get some sleep. Stop believing that running yourself into the ground is the only way to prove that you want something badly enough.

I didn’t know then how much I would eventually need my own advice.

I have been writing for years. Brown Girl From Boston became a place where I could talk about life, culture, relationships, faith, mental wellness, healing, and whatever else was sitting heavily on my mind. Sometimes I was funny. Sometimes I was serious. Sometimes I was frustrated and simply had something to say. Through all of those versions of myself, I kept writing.

Writing a book, however, felt different.

If I’m Honest came from a season of my life when a lot was changing at once. I experienced heartbreak. My career shifted. Some relationships changed. My plans changed. Most importantly, I changed. There comes a point when you realize you cannot heal while dragging every old version of yourself into your new life. Some things have to be confronted, some things have to be grieved, some things have to be released, and some things need to be written down.

So I wrote about choosing myself. I wrote about relationships and friendships. I wrote about silence and what happens when silence becomes sacred instead of lonely. I wrote about faith, boundaries, grief, accountability, vulnerability, healing, and the uncomfortable truths we sometimes avoid because honesty requires us to do something after we acknowledge them.

Eventually, those words became If I’m Honest, a collection of essays and interludes about vulnerability, healing, and what happens when you stop performing growth and actually begin doing the work. Finishing the manuscript gave me one kind of satisfaction. Publishing it introduced me to an entirely different experience.

Independent publishing will humble you quickly. Suddenly, you aren’t just the writer anymore. You’re thinking about formatting, cover design, distribution, categories, pricing, promotion, social media, timelines, and approximately 742 other things nobody mentioned when you first said, “I think I’m going to write a book.” Somewhere in that process, the old conversation about hustle came back to me.

We live in a culture that loves to glorify exhaustion. Sleep when you’re dead. Hustlers don’t sleep. Grind harder. Wake up earlier. Do more. Be more. I used to hear those messages everywhere, especially online. But the further I traveled through my own creative journey, the less interested I became in proving my ambition through exhaustion.

I don’t believe exhaustion is proof that I’m serious about my dreams. I don’t believe I have to run myself into the ground to prove that I deserve success. And I’ve stopped comparing my productivity to celebrities, influencers, authors, or anyone else who may have an entire team helping them build their career.

I am one woman, a creative woman with a lot of ideas, apparently. I’m an educator, writer, photographer, and author, and I’m still discovering other parts of myself. Honoring all of those parts of me has required something hustle culture rarely celebrates: rest.

There were moments during this publishing journey when the most productive thing I could do was close the laptop and go live my life. I prayed. I walked. I traveled. I took pictures. I laughed. I created things that had absolutely nothing to do with making money. I gave myself permission to rest and returned to the page when I actually had something to say.

That didn’t make me less committed to becoming an author. It helped me remember why I wanted to create in the first place.

Somewhere between writing the manuscript and preparing to release it, my definition of success changed. Of course I want people to buy If I’m Honest. I’m an author. I want people to read my book. I hope something I wrote finds the person who needs it. But I no longer believe the number of books I sell gets to determine whether this journey was successful.

Success happened when I finished the manuscript. It happened when I stopped second guessing whether my story deserved to exist. It happened when I allowed myself to call myself an author. And it happened when I reread my own book and had one very simple thought: That girl can write.

Now I can sit with something I created and feel proud of myself without immediately asking, “Okay, what’s next?” That may be one of the greatest lessons this publishing journey has given me. We spend so much time looking toward the next accomplishment that sometimes we don’t sit long enough with the answered prayer sitting right in front of us.

I wrote the book.

On August 19, If I’m Honest belongs to the readers. I don’t know how many copies it will sell. I don’t know every place my writing will take me or whether this book will eventually become something bigger than what I originally imagined. For once, I don’t need to know.

I’ve done my part. I wrote honestly. I created something I’m proud of. I stopped waiting for permission to call myself a writer, and I stopped allowing somebody else’s definition of success to determine whether I was successful.

If I’m honest, that freedom may be one of the best things I’ve published yet.

If I’m Honest by Andrea C. Stallworth, MSW

If I’m Honest is a collection of personal essays and interludes exploring what happens when we become honest about the relationships, patterns, losses, and versions of ourselves we have outgrown. Through reflections on heartbreak, friendship, faith, boundaries, grief, vulnerability, and choosing oneself, Andrea C. Stallworth examines healing without pretending that the process is always beautiful or linear. At its heart, If I’m Honest is an invitation to stop performing growth, tell ourselves the truth, and make room for the life waiting on the other side of letting go.

Buy the book now: Amazon