Welcome to Back to Shameless
Back to Shameless is an honest, funny, and hopeful essay collection about navigating the messy middle and becoming the people our kid selves would be proud of.
It’s about letting go of fear so we can step more fully into ourselves.
Or maybe more accurately, back into ourselves.
“Back to shameless” is a homecoming, not a new frontier.
It’s getting back to the place before outside influence made us so malleable.
The tutu over the jeans.
The juice-moustached belly laugh.
The “I wanna be a singer, a horse doctor, and have a house full of cats!”
As adults, we get bogged down by fear, responsibility, bills, group chats, dental appointments, and jobs that require us to say things like “synergy” without immediately walking into the sea.
We have to toe a more delicate line than when we were three-foot and feral. But that shouldn’t excuse us from becoming the fullest, loudest, most honest versions of ourselves.
What you’ll get here
Every week, I write essays and notes about the strange work of unlocking who we really are:
Resilience inside the messy middle
Nostalgia as a way back to yourself
Shame, self-abandonment, and being seen
Humour as a survival skill
Millennial girlhood, period
Creativity, voice, and authenticity
Becoming the adult your kid self would be proud of
Some pieces are funny. Some are deep. Some start as jokes and then slowly remove one of your emotional load-bearing walls.
That is, unfortunately, the brand.
Why subscribe?
Because you miss your loud parts.
Because you’re tired of pretending you know what the hell you’re doing.
Because you want to ride shotgun with a pal who’s also trying to figure it out.
Because you want less boring, more real.
Because you want to read something that feels like a kitchen conversation at 10:47 p.m., when the snacks are out and everyone has stopped pretending to be chill.
Who writes this?
I’m Grace McClure, a recovering marketing leader for tech startups, lifelong writer, and former stand-up comic.
My work has appeared in HuffPost, I was quoted in The New York Times once, and I spent Canada’s never-ending pandemic writing a 70,000-word essay collection.
Somewhere between burnout, craving a life that feels more “me,” and renovating myself and houses, I decided it was time to let you in.
Back to Shameless is part essay collection, part becoming project, part shit-talking side group chat energy.
Ready to get a bit more shameless? Join us.
