Summer Rewind: Exploring the Loneliness Epidemic with Athena Dixon

Well, hello, Athena. Welcome to the Writing Your Resilience podcast. I am so glad that you’re here today.

Athena Dixon Dixon [1:54]
Thank you so much for having me.

[1:56]
You have been in the middle of a book launch for The Loneliness Files. I got this here — I have some little tabbed marks, because I just love all of your writing. I’ve been a huge fan for a long time, and every time I get one of your books, the way I love them is by writing in them. I’m underlining, I’m starring, I’m doing all of that, because to me that’s love.

Athena Dixon [2:19]
It is. I do the same thing.

[2:22]
Because you just launched a book, what would you like us to know about The Loneliness Files, and what would you like us to know about you?

Athena Dixon [2:29]
I think The Loneliness Files is, for me — and I hope for the audience — a series of explorations, a series of conversations, both internally and externally, about how we’ve come to be in these very lonely places in our lives. It looks at how we might find some solutions to loneliness but also acknowledges its usefulness. And about me — I guess I’m an insanely curious person who gets really hyper-fixated on things about the human experience. I hope that my writing is a way of puzzling out those feelings and emotions, and that other people can find connection to it. That alone makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something in my work.

[3:10]
I can definitely say that I’ve seen that curiosity on the page, and you make me more curious about the experience of loneliness. It’s been an issue for a long time for a lot of people, and I think COVID really brought it home. What was the inspiration for the book? You touch on it inside, but what would you like us to know?

Athena Dixon [3:28]
I guess the biggest thing is that the book wasn’t necessarily meant to be a book at the outset. What happened was I went from working in an office five days a week to being alone in a two-bedroom apartment — no partner, no pet, no family in the city. What I thought would be two weeks of relaxation and resetting turned into roughly three years of working from home, and I got really, really lonely in a way I hadn’t been before.

I thought that because I had this sense of independence, I was okay. I got hyper-fixated on video game walkthroughs, listening to them during the day because I could hear the lull of conversation, voices starting and stopping. That eventually led me to watching videos about mysterious disappearances and mysterious deaths, and I came across the story of Joyce Carol Vincent. I saw myself in her, and because of that — out of both curiosity and fear — I decided I was going to start writing about my own feelings. About eight essays in, that morphed into thinking I was writing a book about loneliness and disconnection.

[4:41]
That first essay — I will not stop thinking about it. Do you want to tell us a little about Joyce and what you learned about her? I think this is such a great hook for everything you write about in this book.

Athena Dixon [4:59]
Joyce Carol Vincent was a British woman who, at the time of her passing at 38, was kind of everything you’d expect someone to be in the world. She had corporate jobs, she had four sisters, she had a fiancé at one point. She was very beautiful and very connected to the world. But at some point, around 2003, she let go of her life and isolated herself in an apartment above a shopping center. Around Christmas of that year, she passed away — and they didn’t find her body until 2006.

When they found her, she was still in front of the television. The TV was still on, her utilities were still on, and there were Christmas gifts beside her. And so, this story unfolds: how does a person who was so connected to the world disappear for three years without anyone knowing she was gone? She became, for me, the poster child for how a person can slip through the cracks of society.

[6:01]
That was one of the things that hit me so hard — how could no one know for three years?

Athena Dixon [6:12]
One of her neighbors apparently knocked because her television was a little loud, but she didn’t answer, so they let it go. The smell of decomposition — there was a mall below her apartment, so people assumed it was the dumpsters. All these little clues that might have signaled something was wrong just fell by the wayside. It wasn’t until the social programs keeping her rent paid and her utilities on could no longer function around her absence that anyone thought to act. They went to evict her — and that’s how they found her.

[6:46]
That is just bananas to me. And what I love about this book is that you use these very public events as a way to draw inward. I’ve been sitting with what those COVID years must have been like for you — alone in an apartment, everything mediated by a screen, living in a big city. We talk about loneliness as isolation, but there’s another form: being in a huge group of people and still feeling completely alone. Living in a big city, I imagine it was a little of both. Did you have that experience?

Athena Dixon [7:33]
I think so. During those three COVID years — which is one of the lenses through which the book is told — I realized I live in a small apartment building by city standards, maybe 36 units. And as COVID wore on, I realized I don’t know my neighbors’ names. I might know a last name from the mailboxes downstairs. We may have passed each other in the elevator or on the stairs, but I know nothing about these people, and yet I live in the center of them.

I live in a city of a million and a half people, but outside of passing hellos at the post office or the grocery store, there’s no real connection. And then individually, I was isolated — so far from family, so far from friends. It was this concentric circle of isolation: the bigger city, then the individual family unit, then the individual apartment. It was really hard to escape.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [8:35]
It sounds absolutely relentless. And yet you were able to take that experience and turn it into a book — to really look at all these different facets of loneliness. What struck me while reading is how intimate your writing feels. You write about your individual experience — and you’re a poet as well as a prose writer, and it shows — but you write in a way that speaks directly to my experience, even though you and I have had very different lives. When you were writing this, did you know you were doing that? Have you heard this before?

Athena Dixon [9:31]
I’m starting to hear it more. People are coming to me and saying they found things that resonated, that I was giving voice to their experiences. But I think I approach the page — especially prose — with this idea: I know what it feels like to think your experiences or your voice aren’t loud enough or valid enough or valuable enough. So, whatever I write, I want to find a way to give voice and platform to people who may feel the same.

I try to make my experiences personal, because I’m writing personal memoir, but also universal enough that people can step into my skin and see their own experiences. It’s something I think about, but when I’m actually in the act of writing, I’m just trying to get the experience onto the page in a way that sonically works, emotionally works, creatively works. Because I’m willing to be honest and transparent — not to the point of harming myself, but transparent enough that people feel comfortable linking their own experiences to mine — I think that’s why it resonates. Readers realize there’s no performance. It’s just: this is what this feels like. And I hope that if you’ve felt this too, we can come into community together.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [11:04]
I love how you talk about writing honestly about your experience — vulnerably, but with a boundary. There’s the part that’s for the world, and the part that’s just for you. How do you manage that? I think it’s a huge issue for a lot of writers, especially in this very confessional culture. Social media says tell us everything, and yet sharing everything isn’t necessarily in service to you or to anyone else.

Athena Dixon [11:41]
The first thing I always do when I’m getting ready to write something personal is ask myself: is this for public consumption? I have this folder called “Good Morning Heartache” where I write things I need to get out of my body and brain, but don’t want to put into the world — because they’re mean-spirited, or hurtful, or harmful to me or others, or there’s something unresolved that I’m not ready to share. Once something is in the world, you can’t control how people analyze it, judge it, or how long you’ll be asked about it. It doesn’t belong to you anymore.

So, I ask myself tough questions: yes, this might be creatively really good, but what’s the harm? If I’m at a conference, doing an interview, or someone emails me — will having to respond to that cause me harm? If the answer is yes, it’s not time to put it into the world.

That said, I’ve circled back to things I thought I wasn’t ready to write about — sometimes years after the experience went into that folder. And I approach writing the way I approach social media: I’m honest, it’s not always pretty, but there’s nothing I put out that I’m not willing to talk to someone about. I think you owe it to your readers to be transparent about the highs and the lows — but also to not do harm to yourself. Readers can tell when you’re being salacious for the sake of it. I’m not willing to sacrifice those things about myself, but I’m also not willing to hide very real experiences in order to paint a picture of a person who doesn’t really exist.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [13:53]
Yes — and I think it’s so important. When it comes to my own social media and newsletter, my measure is: if I wouldn’t shout it in Walmart — or maybe shout it to a friend in Walmart — then maybe it’s not ready for the world, for all the reasons you named. Once it’s out there it doesn’t belong to you, and sometimes people don’t know what to do with really difficult material. You’re handing them something they’re not equipped to hold.

Some of what you write about in this book — feeling suicidal, wearing a mask, projecting this illusion of the perfect person, the perfect friend — you share that in such a way that I feel it, and yet I don’t feel burdened by it.

Athena Dixon [14:54]
Part of this is an ongoing path I’m on as a writer. I was doing a talk last weekend, and one of the things that came up was whether I regret things I’ve written in the past. I said I didn’t regret anything, but I do wish I’d given more creative care to some of that work — less diary entry, more craft. I think I’m starting to refine a skill set that allows me to be open and transparent without coming across as just raw.

Rawness in personal memoir and essay gets conflated a lot with honesty. It’s almost like people equate the two, and I’m like — yeah, but the brutal part is what you’re focusing on. Honesty can come without that brutality. It’s always my goal: I want to be honest, but I don’t want to be brutal to myself or to other people. Once it’s out in the world, I can’t control it, and I don’t want that kind of creative karma on myself or anybody else.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [15:58]
That’s an evolutionary process for all of us. You mentioned you’ve been developing this skill set over time — what would you say are the key parts of it?

Athena Dixon [16:09]
I think I’m learning to rein in what I feel. In my first book versus this one, my first book I jokingly call my “scream book,” because it was like nobody’s ever listened to me before, so I’m just going to scream onto the page and let the chips fall where they may. Now, three years later, I’ve learned to rein in those emotions and pack them a little more neatly without sacrificing the experience. It’s almost like figuring out how to harness the wind.

My skill set is becoming very much about this: how do I home in on individual lines, individual images, individual emotions, and find the correct vessel for that story? In my first book, I thought the vessel was just the page — like, the page is the foundation and that’s it. Now I’m asking: what is the vessel of the story? What is the emotional movement? What am I hoping to move toward, even if there’s no resolution? It can’t just be “here is the experience, I’m done.” There has to be some kind of movement.

I also used to be really married to the idea that there had to be a resolution. There doesn’t.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [17:28]
There doesn’t — and I agree, because sometimes trying to create a resolution is a way of lying about the experience. Not everything gets resolved.

When you were talking about this new way of looking at your work, the first essay that came to mind for me — one I absolutely love — is “The Incredible Shrinking Woman.” You wrote it so fast, and then it got published by Roxane Gay. As you think about the vessel of the story and all of these craft questions, does that essay come to mind, or does something else?

Athena Dixon [18:05]
If I go back to that essay, I think I would have expanded it. I would have given it more scenes. While I think there’s depth there, it’s still fairly surface level — good enough to get published, obviously, but I could have delved deeper into some of those images, those fears and insecurities, in a way that would have brought a bigger audience to it.

I wasn’t thinking externally at all during that essay. For anyone who hasn’t heard me talk about it before: I wrote it on a plane, on my phone, because I was angry — really angry at the woman in front of me — and writing was my way of not saying anything to her. Had I given it more time, I would have found better entry points for readers. It probably would have been a couple thousand words longer, and I think it would have given a fuller picture of me as a person, with more emotional depth in the narration.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [19:09]
What I hear is that it’s a matter of both time and craft — a mixture of the two. You need the time to figure out what was really going on, what your angle is, what role you want to play, and then you apply the craft: the sentence-level work, the structure.

I’m going to link that essay in the show notes, because it is still a beautiful and powerful piece. I’ve actually used it with clients to show them what good, focused writing looks like. Even knowing you could write it differently now, the sharpness of the experience and the directness of it — that’s where the power is.

You’ve worked very hard for a very long time to hone your craft, and you’ve written incredible books. Something else you’ve talked about over the years is what success looks like to you. Since your book came out, you’ve been mentioned in the New York Times, reviewed in the Washington Post, all of these things. How is that impacting your sense of what success means for you?

Athena Dixon [20:30]
My personal definition of writing success hasn’t changed. I’m taking these opportunities that are popping up right now as tools to help me get closer to goals I haven’t met yet. One of the things I’d deem a writing success for me is finally landing an agent, and I’m hoping I can now say, “Hey, by the way, my book was in the Washington Post and the New York Times and got a Kirkus review — do you want to represent me?”

The New York Times and Washington Post were never on my writing success bingo card. I’m using them as tools to get what I really want: being able to transition out of my day job, having conversations with people who are interested in talking to me now, approaching an agent and saying, “I have a little bit of a spotlight right now — can you please look at what I’m working on?”

After the spotlight from this book wanes, the things I want from my writing life haven’t changed. I don’t think I’ll ever pitch the Big Five. I don’t think I want to be a full-time writer. So, I just want to use these opportunities to get closer to those goals.

And I’d say the same thing to anyone in a similar position: your list can change, your idea of success can evolve, but if there’s a really big swing, you have to stop and ask yourself — if I get everything this swing is offering me, will I be happy? Will I be content? Can I maintain it? There’s no guarantee you can stay on that pendulum, so if you swing back to the middle, what still exists there? You want the really good stuff, but you also want to be realistic about what you can sustain and what you can live comfortably with as a person.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [22:48]
Absolutely. And something you said really resonates with me: “I don’t want to be a full-time writer.” Honestly, I don’t want to be a full-time writer either — I have my own reasons for that, which I can share in a moment. But I’m curious why you say that, especially with all this success coming at you.

Athena Dixon [23:10]
Practically speaking, I need a steady paycheck. I’m a single person who lives far from family. I don’t come from generational wealth. My parents are retirement age, my sister is twelve years younger, and my income is my income. If I don’t have steady income, it impacts where I can live, what I can eat, what I can drive, my insurance — all of it. In my mid-40s, for the foreseeable future, I’m it. I have to plan to take care of myself.

But beyond the practical: I love writing, and I know myself well enough to know that if I spent my entire working life doing it full-time, I’d burn out. I’d find some level of resentment. It would become a chore. If my livelihood is directly tied to how many books I can sell, or how big an advance I can get, and whether I can earn it out — I know I won’t be happy, because it becomes all business and no creativity.

Writing for publication has two very different sides, and the business side doesn’t care how good your book is. I don’t want to live in that business side. I also have other interests. I genuinely enjoy reading other people’s work and giving feedback. I enjoy speaking engagements, even though I get nervous. I like being able to move within creative spaces without being married to one and burning myself out on it.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [25:00]
That’s a lot of it for me too — I don’t want my creativity married to the business. I’m grateful every single day that I get to do what I do, even though I scrap and hustle to make it work. I love that I get to do different things: I love teaching, I love editing, and I love knowing those things are separate from my own writing. I can go off and write for the joy of it, for the truth of the story. Yeah, if something gets published and I get a check, great — but when you get too married to the business, it becomes all about the external audience. That works for some writers, but I think it can steal your joy.

Athena Dixon [25:54]
Yes, and for me it comes down to genre too. I can’t imagine, as a creative nonfiction writer and essayist writing very personal material, having my entire livelihood depend on mining myself — my brain, my experiences — at a clip that would sustain a comfortable life. The personal damage would be enormous. And at some point, you start writing in the moment rather than from a distance, and that’s a slippery slope: you become a data miner. You’re not even living a full life; you’re writing for content.

I was talking to a group last week and it came up — the curse of the influencer: content becomes more important than living. I never want to be in a situation where I’m more concerned about the content than the lived experience. So, for me, it just wouldn’t work.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [26:53]
Amen to that. Even with social media — I have accounts, I’m working on Instagram, doing things that are in alignment with what I do, and I have someone who helps me with that (which I’m transparent about, because I think that’s perfectly fine). But I do not walk around with my phone trying to record everything. There’s plenty of my life that isn’t recorded and always will be, and I feel good about that. I can’t be in the moment if I’m constantly mining everything — thinking, “Oh, this is the perfect sunset for Instagram.” You’re not present anymore.

Athena Dixon [27:42]
Right. I sometimes call myself a magpie because I always have scraps of things — screenshots, little notes — but even in those moments when I think, this might be useful later, I’m very conscious that there has to be distance. If you’re writing something in the moment, there’s so much potential for manipulation: you can start tailoring the experience to fit what you’re writing, rather than writing what actually happened.

I never want to write too closely to the thing I’ve just lived. I’m not a person who writes articles or hot takes — I can’t do that. I need space to puzzle out how an experience connects to other things in my life, to find the kernel of curiosity that’s really driving me, rather than just a flash of something in the moment. I’ll catalog it. But I’m not actively creating from it right away, because there’s just not enough distance yet.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [28:47]
I think that’s really important. I taught a course for Jane Friedman recently on the psychology of memoir, and we talked a lot about memory. One thing that happens is that you take in all of these experiences and record them in your brain, but the more you rehearse certain parts, the more that becomes the memory. So, if you’re spending a lot of time not just recording — journaling, getting things down while they’re fresh, which is great — but actually trying to manipulate the experience for an audience, you take away the capacity to make those deeper connections. You solidify certain parts of the memory and actually erase or minimize others, because that’s how the brain works. It identifies certain things as unimportant and takes them away.

Athena Dixon [29:39]
It’s passion versus performance again. You can tell when you’re being led somewhere very specific — when you’re being shown a very particular face or a very curated version of something — versus someone who is just so passionate and curious that they’re willing to share openly.

We exist in a world — and I say this as someone very much connected to social media and online life — where we’ve hit this weird tipping point. We’re so used to curated lives and highlight reels and content creation, and now that “influencer” is a real career, we forget the social part of social media. We forget that at its onset it was just a way of connecting with community, not branding or selling or maintaining a perfect facade. Those things have their place — you need organized structures — but that can’t be the only way people engage with it. On my end, I try to have a mix: here’s the performance part where I’m promoting something, but here’s also the passion part where I’m ranting about a random book in my stories. There needs to be a balance, and I’m hoping that becomes more of the norm.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [31:13]
Absolutely. When you don’t have that balance, everything becomes so performative — and it actually enhances your sense of loneliness, because you’re not really engaging with other people. It’s one more screen you’re putting stuff out into. And I think there are two ways it can make you lonely: one, if you put things out and don’t get the likes or comments or feedback, it can reinforce this idea that maybe you don’t matter, maybe what you have to say doesn’t matter. And two, if you’re always performing, you’re never actually being authentic.

Athena Dixon [31:57]
It’s digital loneliness. Because we’re so hyperconnected — with access to each other pretty much 24/7 — people assume that all connection on social media is valuable or valid. But it’s so ingrained in our daily lives that it’s easy to scroll and double-tap, scroll and like, scroll and retweet without actually reading the caption, watching the reel, really taking in what someone put into the world. It’s just muscle memory at this point. And there’s a loneliness in being that detached — from yourself and from others. You’re touching, but there’s a disconnection. A buffer.

I’m not above the muscle memory at all. I’m on Facebook more than anywhere else, and Twitter is mostly just me reposting things people tag me in. Instagram is where I make a conscious effort to actually engage, because it’s where I feel most comfortable. I make a point to slow down, read captions, look at people’s stories, DM people in a way that’s more than just “I saw your post, acknowledged, next.” But it’s muscle memory we have to fight against.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [33:37]
Because if we don’t, what are we left with? A bunch of screens and nothing real. There’s this huge epidemic — especially among men, though I think it’s happening for women too — where our worlds are becoming smaller and smaller, our connections weaker, because so much is mediated by screens and we spend so much more time alone. I work from home all the time, and I have to actively make concerted efforts to maintain relationships, because I could just stay at my house and pet my cats all day if I wanted to.

In your book, you look at all of these different dimensions — other people’s loneliness, your own, the loneliness COVID forced on you. But there’s something we have in common that I’d love to talk about: your experience in the sensory deprivation tank. Intentionally going into isolation.

Athena Dixon [34:41]
I stumbled across it on Groupon, oddly enough — I was really into Groupon at the time. That’s actually also how I learned to shoot; I bought a shooting range coupon. And then I found the float tank.

For me it came down to the fact that my brain is always on. I barely sleep, because from the moment my eyes open, I’m just off and running — thinking about things I have to do, things I haven’t responded to. When I came across the sensory deprivation tank, I thought: the easiest thing I can do is lock myself in there for 90 minutes. No phone, no sound, no light. Just me floating in the dark. That’ll help me reset.

The first float absolutely did not work. People I’ve talked to about float tanks are usually like, “How do you float in the dark for 90 minutes?” — but that wasn’t my fear. My fear was missing out on what was happening outside the tank. What notifications I was missing, what calls, what opportunities. And then there was this compulsion: I need to post this; I have to show people I’m doing this cool thing. It took multiple trips before I successfully disconnected, and it actually took buying a monthly membership before I could do it. I didn’t realize how hard it would be to just stop being connected to everything. It took a lot.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [36:22]
It takes so much effort. I’ve had floats that were this blissful, amazing experience — just completely letting go. And then others where my mind is running through everything I should be doing out in the world. My greatest fear in the float tank, though, is getting that salt in my eyes.

Athena Dixon [36:48]
I did the pod first, and then the room-size tank — I write about the room-size experience in the book. The pod was barely big enough to stretch my arms and touch the sides. There was a little hook on the inside with a spray bottle and a towel, and I did not think about the fact that my hands would be salty when I reached for them. Getting salt in my eyes was not pleasant.

I miss doing them, honestly. I think I’m better prepared now, because I went in originally thinking the tank itself was going to do the magic — that I’d just get in, turn off the light, and automatically disconnect. Now I understand it’s an internal thing. I’m better at disconnecting my body because I’m actively aware of how connected I always am. Before, I think I just assumed, “Oh, your body will shut down, like going to sleep.” But it’s not like that at all. I’ve never once fallen asleep in the float tank — though I took a friend, and he slept the entire 90 minutes his very first time.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [38:07]
I am very impressed by this person.

Athena Dixon [38:09]
Jealous — why can’t I do that? The experience I write about in the book was scary, because I wasn’t fully prepared for my own thoughts at that level. When it’s pitch dark and there’s no sound and it’s just you and your brain, there’s no external stimuli to distract yourself with — no notification, no TV, no song. It’s just you in the dark. And that was the first time I realized: I can’t control my thoughts the way I thought I could. I can control them on the page, but just out in the world, in my own head. No.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [38:55]
A lot of people who listen to this podcast are trauma survivors, and they might think, “Oh, I’ll try a sensory deprivation tank” — and what I would say is: don’t do that without some preparation, for the very reason you’re describing. It’s the same thing with a long vacation. It can sound wonderful, but if you suddenly have a lot of unstructured time to yourself, your brain can become a bad neighborhood. You can spiral into dark thoughts, and if you don’t have ways to bring yourself back out, the experience isn’t going to be supportive.

Athena Dixon [39:32]
Right — it’s not just physically lovely, floating and not touching anything. For people going in purely for a physical reset, for their joints or their body, fine. But mentally, you really have to be prepared. I write in the book about the Ganzfeld effect — when you cut off your other senses, your brain tries to fill in the neural noise. For me, that meant having this experience where my eyes were closed, and I felt like I couldn’t stop seeing. Every time I thought my brain was settling, images and random memories would just pop up. At some levels it can be a genuinely psychedelic experience. So, you have to be prepared to either deal with it while you’re in the tank, have some kind of aftercare when you get out, or have a plan for how to decompress from the decompression. Your mind is just completely free.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [40:33]
A free mind can be a great thing, and it can be a terrible thing. You talk about the mind always being on — and I’m curious how that intersects with loneliness. When I think of loneliness, a word that comes to mind is absence, but I wonder what you learned through writing this book. How does all of that come together for you?

Athena Dixon [41:07]
For me, part of how my brain functions is that it’s always in a state of hyper-independence. There’s this constant undercurrent of: there’s nothing anyone can do for me that I can’t do for myself. And that hyper-independence creates a kind of isolation — a loneliness — because I don’t reach out to people for help, or to puzzle through something, or just to vent. I cut myself off, because my brain is always saying, you’re fine, you’re capable, you can do this. And yes, I am — but I also don’t have to do it alone.

Writing this book was the first time I really confronted that. It made me ask: why did you move almost 400 miles away by yourself, with no apartment lined up, to a major American city? Why do you only go home once a year, especially now that your parents and aunts and uncles are getting older? Why are you living alone and not reaching out more? What I’d framed as “I’m a modern American woman living independently in the city and I’m successful” was really a way of hiding things I was afraid to confront — including a fear of dying alone, of not being good enough to have a partner, and still healing from the trauma that brought me to Philadelphia in the first place.

It was the first time I had to sit down and say: there’s an illusion you live under. Some of it is useful. A lot of it is just weighing you down. You have to figure out what’s worth keeping and what needs to go.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [43:07]
How has the reception of this book influenced that internal conversation — what you’re confronting, what the book has helped you recognize?

Athena Dixon [43:18]
The reception has surprised me in some ways. There’s been criticism from people who felt the book was too sad, too depressing — and I mean, it’s called The Loneliness Files, so I’m not sure what to tell you. But what that made me realize is that those responses are coming from people who are just stepping onto the path I’m currently walking.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [43:45]
What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve received that you love to pass on to others?

Athena Dixon [43:52]
I always go back to something Beth Nguyen told me in my VONA memoir pod back in 2018. I was very much afraid of not being important enough or not having an interesting enough story to write memoir and personal essay. I said as much in the group, and she stopped me and asked: “What would it mean to you to have had a person with your voice writing when you were growing up?”

I had never thought about it that way. All I could see was I’m just this regular, boring person without loud or boisterous experiences. But that question made me realize there are people who need to hear what you write, in the way that you write it — as quiet or as loud as it can possibly be. From that point forward, I’ve always made it a point to write for people who feel like they don’t have a representative voice in the genre.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [44:49]
I love that. I sometimes tell people: think of the person who most needs this book and write to that person. It sounds like you have a very clear sense of who that person is for you.

Since this is the Writing Your Resilience podcast, I always like to ask: how do you tap into your resilience? We all have it, but sometimes we forget. What do you do?

Athena Dixon [45:17]
I keep coming back to grace. As writers — and as human beings generally — we are so hard on ourselves. We think putting ourselves through the ringer is a sign of strength, that enduring every rejection and setback this industry heaps on you is just paying your dues. But you’re still a human being. Give yourself the grace to feel what you need to feel. If a rejection makes you cry, cry. If something amazing happens, don’t be ashamed to celebrate it. Let yourself experience the full range of human emotions — because that is your resilience.

You need those highs and lows to make it through this industry, and if you focus too much on the negative, you miss all the small joys along the way. I never want a writer to feel like, because they’re not on the New York Times bestseller list or don’t yet have an agent or a book deal, the publication they got from their dream journal doesn’t matter. It does. Celebrate all of it and give yourself the grace to understand that it’s not always going to work out — but you’re still here.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [46:40]
You are still here. And I love what you said, because Brené Brown talks about how when you try to squash negative feelings — or get consumed by them — you also steal your joy. You need the full range of emotions to write honestly and vulnerably. And writing honestly and vulnerably doesn’t only mean writing about the sad or difficult things. It means all of it and giving yourself room for all of it.

Since you have a book out — and this will be in the show notes — sometimes authors have specific places where book sales are most beneficial to them. Is there a best place for people to buy your book?

Athena Dixon [47:20]
With this particular contract, it’s actually the same percentage across the board for me. That said, I would prefer that if you’re going to buy the book, you buy it from a local indie bookstore or through Bookshop.org — you can search by your local area, and it’ll point you to a store near you. It doesn’t change things for me financially, but it does change things for the people actually selling you the book. That profit should go to the smaller bookstores.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [47:41]
Absolutely. And for those of you who are writers, indie booksellers are also the people who will one day open their doors to let you read from your own book — and hopefully stock it on their shelves.

Athena Dixon [47:51]
Yes.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [47:52]
Where’s the best place for people to find you online?

Athena Dixon [47:56]
You can find me mainly on Instagram under the username @TheNewspaper. You can also search my first and last name across platforms. I’m on TikTok as well, but that’s really just for videos. If you want to talk to me, see what I’m up to, and hear about writing and the writing process, Instagram is the best place.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [48:16]
That will also be in the show notes, so don’t worry if you didn’t catch it. Please do go find Athena and connect with her, because she is amazing. I am deeply grateful for all the work that she does — I can’t tell you how many times I mention her name when I’m working with clients. I hope there are days when your ears are burning and you think, “I wonder what that is” — because it’s me talking about how wonderful you are.

I’m also so grateful you wrote this book. It’s fantastic, and I learned so much from it — not just from what you wrote about, but from how you wrote it. And I had that beautiful experience of feeling a little less lonely in the world because of it. Thank you so much for being here today, and for everything you do.

Athena Dixon [49:02]
Thank you so much for having me.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [49:04]
That’s it for today’s episode. Thank you so much for listening — I couldn’t do this podcast without your support. If you loved this episode, here are three simple ways to keep the show thriving.

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Until next time — remember that your story matters. As you write and connect with the truest, most authentic version of yourself, you become not just the writer, but the person you’re meant to be. And that, my friends, is the real freedom writing can offer.