One year ago, I wrote a piece that completely altered my life. From pressing publish, to seeing it go viral, the journey always seemed to me to be more personal than public. Sure, millions of people were reading something I’d written and that was cool, but I was learning how to deal with harsh criticism, how to handle a brighter spotlight, and how to do this thing called writing.

I never felt comfortable calling myself a writer before I wrote “The Problem With Little White Girls (and Boys).” I had a “real” job that took up most of my time, I rarely kept to a posting schedule, and I’d only done a handful of freelance pieces, mostly as favors to friends. While the attention around the article made me more comfortable identifying as a writer, it made others see me as a scholar on a topic that I had some life experience in, but not nearly enough to be labelled an expert.

Publications wanted me to write freelance pieces on voluntourism. Radio and television shows wanted to interview me about voluntourism. Schools wanted me to speak about voluntourism. At first, this made me pretty uncomfortable. I’d shared a semi-thoughtful opinion about a personal life experience, I was not an expert. I was also scared that rather than being seen as a writer, I was becoming a personality. It was frightening to think, silly as it might sound, that I was getting attention because my brash opinions rather than my prose.

Over the past year, I’ve been working on embracing that while voluntourism isn’t my only area of interest; it is a debate that I should embrace for as long as it interests me. This week I am preparing to visit UNC Chapel Hill to give a talk on volunteer travel to students, I’ve been working with two filmmakers on awesome projects that shine a spotlight on voluntourism and western perceptions of Africa, and have gotten really good at being filmed walking (seriously harder than it looks). I have written more on the topic of voluntourism than I’d ever thought I would, and I joined the board of Onwards, a non-profit providing travelers with a meaningful alternative to volunteer trips in the Dominican Republic.

Most recently, I was featured in New York Times “Your Money” columnist Ron Lieber’s new book The Opposite of Spoiled: Raising Kids Who Are Grounded, Generous, and Smart About Money. It’s an amazing tool for parents looking to raise grounded children and financially savvy children…so hopefully every parent ever. I seriously recommend it to anyone interested in how to have tough conversations about money, not just those with young children.

I decided that I would do a “one year checkin” a few weeks ago, probably because it’s an easy post to bang out at 6am before class. At first, I decided to do a video. I’ve never done one for pippabiddle.com and I thought that it might be a cool way to share some of the stuff that’s happened. Now, this doesn’t mean that I will not ever make videos, but I realized pretty quickly that it’d be strange to make a video about the piece that made me a writer. So, I wrote.

Thank you for reading then, thank you for reading now, and thank you for (hopefully) continuing to read in the future. Please consider signing up for my weekly newsletter via one of the annoying pop-ups you probably hate, it makes it way easier to keep up with one email, once a week, and no spam. If you need a speaker about any topic, even just about being a weird 22-year-old writer, check out my press/speaking page, and if you just want to chat Tweet me at @philippabiddle.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart,

Pippa