You Tried: A Deadbeat’s Guide to Self-Actualization

For emotionally inconsistent overachievers, burnt-out soft people, and anyone pretending to be fine.

You meant to get your life together.
You tried to heal, hustle, journal, meditate, optimize, exfoliate your trauma, and pivot into a “better you.”

It didn’t work. That’s okay.
This book won’t fix you either.

What it will do is sit beside you—softly judging, gently spiralling, and offering comfort in the form of wildly specific lists, painfully relatable quizzes, fake motivational quotes, and guided visualizations that smell faintly of existential dread.

Part self-help parody, part emotional survival guide, You Tried traces nine deeply unnecessary “stages of personal development” from denial to weaponized mediocrity. Along the way, it offers:

• Productivity rituals for people who never follow through
• A fake diploma in Emotional Resilience™
• Burnout Bingo
• The Spiral Survival Go-Bag™
• Affirmations like “I am doing my best, and sometimes my best is medium”
• …and an optional exit survey you’ll fill out ironically

Written for anyone who’s ever cried in a grocery store, Googled “how to be okay,” or responded to a text with “LOL I’m fine,” You Tried is a deeply human meditation on doing less, spiralling with style, and calling it growth.

This is not a guide to success.
It’s a messy shrine to trying anyway.