I was a world-class leaver

I spent 25 years as an award-winning Executive Creative Director, leading global campaigns for Porsche, BMW, Cartier, Google, and adidas across four continents. From the outside, it looked like I had everything figured out. From the inside, I was navigating severe bipolar disorder, profound self-hatred, and a pattern I’ve come to know intimately: leaving myself.
 

I used to be a world-class leaver.
 

What changed wasn’t a lightning bolt moment or a single breakthrough. It was the slow, messy, unglamorous discovery that the success, the joy, the creative work I wanted and that actually meant something couldn’t be built on a foundation of self-abandonment. It had to be built on self-love. Not the poster version. The kind that has grit, real uncomfortable, sometimes painful grit. The kind that demands you stay when every part of you wants to run as far and as fast as humanly possible.
 

That discovery reshaped everything. Today I speak about what I’ve learned: that the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it is a safety gap. It is not a willpower gap. That many of us are Quiet Misfits. People who look like they fit in but feel a nagging sense of being in the wrong room. That self-love isn’t soft. It’s not narcissism. It’s the very ground beneath everything. It is our foundation.

Mental health matters to me deeply, and I talk about mental fitness because fitness is about something you build, practice, and strengthen. It is not something you fix. We are not broken.

I host The Lulu Essey Podcast, which is intentionally unedited, because if I’m asking people to stop performing, stop pretending, stop reaching for perfection, then I will go first. I advise people who’ve achieved success by every external measure and still feel like something fundamental is missing. And I’m building a body of work that positions self-love not as retreat or indulgence, but as the foundation most high performers never think to build.
 

My journey from South Africa through 19 years in Hong Kong to making New York home taught me something I now share from every stage:
 

The world doesn’t need our perfection. It needs our humanity.