I owe you an update.
I know the drama began when I filled you in on my business stalker and my ongoing dilemma of finding a business owner, or investor, who’d rather work with me than date me. For my own court-ordered safety and my financial safety, I put everything into storage. Since then, I’ve been bouncing between friends and family, which I dramatically like to call my safe houses.
Thank you to everyone who reached out to me personally. As you know, I overshare with purpose, but there are things that simply aren’t smart, safe, or legally sound to share online.
I am very purposeful with what I say, with the tidbits of my life that I’ve shared so far. But as the title goes, you still know little about me.
I’m not saying that to downplay the relationship we’ve built through me writing to you, but because I am a multi-layered woman with too many sides to count. Sometimes the sides I choose to show, write about, or act on are intentional, for the outcome, the lesson, or the morality I’m trying to instill. Not because I think you need it, but because I believe the world does.
I’m writing to you because I know my morality is high, my ambition is among the stars, and my brain thinks in such a strange, wonderful way that the lessons I stumble across in life come at me with extremes. Earlier this year, I sat with myself and journaled religiously for a minimum of ten minutes every single morning, right after my eyes opened and my pups ran out to potty in the yard.
I sat with my lessons in storytelling. Every single one of Shonda Rhimes’s courses I sat through during COVID. Each textbook I read about persuasion, how to make someone eager to finish the story. How the extremes and the unexpected turn normalcy into humor, fear, and great storytelling.
I remember leaning back in the chair where I was writing. My two dogs were running through the open air on the side of the mountain that hugs both Tennessee and Georgia. And, like Signal Mountain itself, I was sitting there deciding whether I wanted to pay taxes on my own lessons, my own story, my own home.
It was in that moment that I decided I did— it was my extremes that I needed to share.
Perhaps I’m writing this much for selfish purposes. I’ve admitted that the world being infected by my words makes my insides warm. But I’ve always written this much, if not more, so it’s not that I’ve been writing more; it’s that I’ve been sharing more.
And I don’t think that’s selfish. What is selfish is the number of novels I snuck into the backyard bonfire in the countryside of Minnesota, so no one would ever read the anger and frustration I poured into those hundred-page manuscripts.
What’s selfish is stockpiling three shelves of an antique bookshelf with nothing but handwritten notebooks of poems and op-eds. What’s selfish is the number of days and weeks that have gone by where I’ve kept my mouth closed, convincing myself that my lessons and my life were too abnormal to share.
What makes beautiful television, a mesmerizing film, a story that takes over your soul, is not normalcy. It’s the breathtakingly beautiful decisions and devotion, the morality that cannot be shaken, no matter the circumstances. It’s the stories that encompass such extreme measures that we watch in awe and still manage to see a part of ourselves in them.
I hope this makes sense.
Cinderella had an evil stepmother, a fairy godmother, and a curfew of midnight—not a stepmother with minor boundary issues and a nice therapist she pays for.
It’s the stories with extreme circumstances that we read, listen to, and watch, where we find a slice of ourselves within them. A story built on normalcy rarely does that, and when it does, it’s usually because it’s visually or rhythmically poetic enough to use every other trick in the book to make you eager for the next line.
It’s an arousal. A tease, a pressure point, a climax, and the aftercare— unless, of course, you’re the show with the biggest cliffhanger in history that got canceled before the next season.
With all of this, and while actively going through an extreme situation, I decided it was truest to my mission, and my found purpose, to share as much as I can.
Because, if we’re being frank, cities are slowly breeding psychopaths whose eyes don’t flinch when they witness a murder from across the street. Populations are swelling on the thought that the more power you have, the more your desired shames are allowed to become small-circle secrets. And the sex industry has spread so far into daily life that its beginnings are starting to blur into corporate behavior.
This isn’t everyone, not every city, not every company, not every person—but it is happening.
And being a young woman who’s spent her career in male-dominated industries, I hear the same refrain from my colleagues: “As long as you’re this young, hot—and this fertile—Sheridan, this may keep happening.”
So yes, I know how to handle it. If that means packing up my things, renting a storage unit, and rerouting my entire life, so be it.
And that’s exactly what I did.
I had an employer who began lowering my pay and eventually stopped paying me when I refused to play along with his… tactics. Then came the networking prospect turned stalker. I hadn’t shared the employer part before because I wasn’t sure it was smart—but it’s the reality many women live in, especially when you’ve always been the one directly under the CEO.
Right now, I can’t speak on the loss of money.
But I haven’t heard or gotten any weird pings from my networking stalker, so I can go back to my city now. Still, finding something I can tunnel my ambition into feels more uncertain than ever. The small part of the world I thought was mine flipped upside down, and I’m not sure where my next little corner of it will be.
I’ve moved across the country several times now, and I’ve never been afraid of a new beginning. So I’m trying everything—taking small gigs in between, am contemplating trying to keep my business advisory alive, though it’s difficult when you’re in hiding, tucked away in the countryside with two pups, my laptop, and a shit ton of notebooks.
I’ve promised to share my writing more, so this week I released several different works, one of the many projects I’m dabbling in till I find my slice of the world again.
This piece is titled Why Modern Dating is Performance Art. It’s a generational philosophical piece on today’s dating culture and how trauma seeps into our sex and relationships.
Why Modern Dating Is Performance Art
This week, I also published a few poems. I’ll share my favorite of the few here.
My poetry is often fiction, and yet sometimes it’s also painfully true. Either way, my poems are written with layered meanings for different readers. I started doing that when my sisters and friends kept snooping in my diary—I’d write decoy meanings to mess with them.
The habit stuck. I write so that someone, maybe you, will feel something real in it. Long enough to see yourself inside my extremes.
Because you still know little about me. But I think, slowly, you’re starting to.
P.S. I was a pirate for Halloween, and I did in fact steal your booty. Find this on Insta
xo,
Sheridan Guerrette
WhatSheridanSaid.com
Life Behind the Artist: Wed at 9/8C
