“It’s still magic, even if you know how it’s done.” — Terry Pratchett

When you’re trying to make a living by writing, you’re bound to come across dozens of articles offering writing advice—always use active voice, never use exclamation marks, avoid adverbs—that rehash the same advice over and over again.

There’s also a lot of talk of the business of writing: how to pitch clients, how to grow your audience, how to write 30,000 words a week without burning out. It’s useful information, absolutely.

It’s also incredibly dull.

Obviously, running a business isn’t all fun and games. In fact, it’s…

Wellness is one of the trendiest buzzwords to be used in marketing, online branding, and content creation, reaching the peak of its popularity in March and April 2021, according to Google Trends data. It’s so popular, in fact, that millennials are called “the wellness generation.”

At its core, wellness is a fantastic thing: It’s the act of practicing healthy habits daily in order to achieve better physical and mental health outcomes. People want to be healthier and happier.

So now we’re hearing terms like mindfulness, mental clarity, and focus rather than hustle, grind, and workaholic. As people came to understand…

Our goal here at Invisible Illness is always to offer a safe space for people to share their mental health stories as well as provide resources for anyone who is struggling. Lately, our big focus has been on presenting research-backed articles about mental health and overcoming mental illness, alongside personal accounts of individual struggles and victories.

We hope that by talking openly about mental illness, we can help to remove the stigma surrounding it and help the conversation become more approachable.

Talking about mental illness can be a scary conversation. The feelings one experiences can often be hard to describe…

Ah, YouTube. We watch more than a billion hours of content on it every day, and if that seems outrageous, remember that over 500 hours of content are uploaded to the site every minute.

Of course, with that much content being uploaded and consumed each day, there are bound to be problems—and YouTube is no stranger to controversies. Whether it’s someone murdering a cat on camera, allegations of sexual assault, racist comments, filming a dead body, faking their girlfriend’s death, or pedophilia, it seems like there’s some big new controversy every week on the platform.

And every time there’s a…

Anytime I hear someone refer to themselves as an entrepreneur, solo-preneur, or any variation of a preneur, I instinctively tense up. Maybe it’s because I can only think of the Spongebob episode where he and Patrick try to sell chocolate as entrepreneurs, or maybe it has something to do with my deep-rooted hatred of “business.”

That’s right. I’m a self-employed writer who hates business. And it’s not that I’m above selling my writing as a product or that I value artistic integrity above all else; I’m entirely comfortable being a “sellout” if it means I can pay rent and put…

Warning: Content addresses substance abuse and sexual assault.

“I could really use a coffee,” I said to my girlfriend as we were leaving brunch. It was an unsurprising gray day in Pittsburgh. The weather was damp and cool. I’m jealous of anyone who lives in a part of the world where spring is lush and rainy. Here, the threat of rain looms long overhead, but the promise of it never comes. It is a dull grayness we’re left with.

“There’s that place right across the square,” she said. I knew the place she was talking about well. I’d gone there…

I am single handedly the least organized person in my life. My backpack in high school was a nuclear fallout site — Chernobyl in a sack. Every assignment I handed in was crumpled and folded over a dozen times. It’s a miracle they got handed in at all, really, and not lost in the physics-defying Ramona Flowers-like bottomless void of a bag I carried.

I thought I lost my W-2 earlier this year. I should not, I repeat should not, be trusted to handle large amounts of physical paper. …

Like any good millennial, I do my grocery shopping at Trader Joe’s. It’s a weekly trip I take, and I usually leave with the same things in my basket. Until a few weekends ago when my partner convinced me to buy a succulent.

“It’ll liven up your room,” she said. I live in a two-bedroom apartment, and mine is probably less than 100-square-feet. I also stupidly bought a queen-sized bed when I moved in last year, so you could say it’s a pretty cramped space. I definitely would.

Still, the succulent was small, and they’re easy enough to take care…