After Barnes & Noble acquisition, Emily McDowell enters her post-burnout reinvention period
The “viral” creative entrepreneur digs into her new path as a public speaker and consultant — while enjoying time with her fiancé and dealing with Long Covid
“I’m a formerly hard-charging GenX’er who basically murdered myself and factory-farmed my creativity in an attempt to achieve my way into happiness. Shocker: it didn’t work.”
Age: 49
Location: Portland, Oregon
Previous locations: Born in Winchester, Massachusetts; college in St. Paul, Minnesota; San Francisco during the first dot-com boom; Los Angeles for 14 years; moved to Portland in March 2020, arriving on the day everyone freaked out and bought a year’s worth of toilet paper.
Follow me here:
Instagram @emilyonlife (but I’m rarely active there)
Substack: Subject to Change
I’m in the midst of: Navigating Long Covid that caused a reactivation of Epstein-Barr virus. I’ve been ill for about nine months, and confined to bed for about two months of that: in March 2025, and then again in June. I’m constantly negotiating how much energy I have and whether I’m doing too much and setting myself up for a flare.
I’m also in the midst of reinventing my career and identity. I’m a formerly hard-charging and ambitious GenX’er who basically murdered myself and factory-farmed my creativity in an attempt to achieve my way into happiness. Shocker: it didn’t work.
In 2022, the stationery brand I founded, Em & Friends, was acquired by the publishing arm of Barnes & Noble, and I left the company. I had a strict two-year non-compete agreement, so I spent that time consulting with them, staring into space and wondering who I was, healing from clinical burnout, doing a lot of breath work, and studying transitions and liminality.
Truth be told, I still don’t entirely know where I’m going career-wise, or what my future contributions to the world might be. But after four years of leaning into the lost place (well, two years of desperately clinging to my former life and two years of leaning in), I don’t look at those questions as problems to be solved anymore, or judge myself for not having solved them.
In April 2024, I launched my consulting and coaching offerings, then my mom died in June, and then I got Long Covid/EBV. So I’m in the midst of learning to work in a completely different way, by both choice and necessity, that puts my body’s needs first, minimizes stress, and aligns with my intuition instead of society’s definitions of success.
My income: A lot less than it used to be, but enough. I’m very fortunate to be able to replace some of my former work income with investment income.
Monthly expenses in a nutshell: My biggest expense is health care: I’ve spent $36,000 on medical expenses in the last year, including insurance premiums, copays, meds and supplements, and practitioners who don’t take insurance. Beyond that, my mortgage and regular household expenses. I spend money on fancy groceries and DoorDash, a couple trips a year, and charity/mutual aid. I have twin 18-year-old stepsons, but most of their expenses are covered by my partner and their mom.
Primary personal debts: Just my mortgage. I’ll never forget how amazing it felt to pay off my undergrad debt at 37.
Retirement savings: When people hear my brand got acquired by Barnes & Noble, they often assume I made F-U money. I made around $2 million, which is freaking wonderful, but I’m not buying yachts anytime soon. I also lived below my means and put money away for the last 15ish years, so I’m in very good shape for retirement. I didn’t grow up with wealth, so investing was a total mystery to me; I wish I’d started it sooner instead of keeping all my savings in my checking account for seven years!
“When people hear my brand got acquired by Barnes & Noble, they often assume I made F-U money.”
My office: I’ve been working at least part-time from home since 2011. During the Em & Friends years, I was in our Los Angeles office a couple days a week until I moved to Portland in 2020.
Relationship status: Engaged! We met the week the pandemic hit, so our options were to never see each other again or move in together and start bleaching our co-mingled groceries. Lucky for us, it worked out.
I’d like to connect with: People who resonate with my story, folks hiring for speaking gigs (I love doing this and want to do more of it, especially virtually), cool and interesting and curious people in general, potential clients.
My consulting work: I offer strategic, creative, and emotional support to product business owners, both one-to-one and in a group program called The Greater Goods Alliance that I co-lead with Lisa Congdon.
My clients also include entrepreneurs who don’t necessarily sell products, but feel called to work with me; I’ve helped folks write websites, clarify their offerings or design new ones, decide to close or pivot their businesses, and navigate life transitions and liminal space.
I especially love working with product business founders because a decade-plus ago, when I needed a “me,” I couldn’t find one. I hired plenty of consultants over the years, but each one specialized in one or two aspects of what I needed to know: how to prepare a wholesale collection and work with retailers, or how to put together a warehouse, or how to exhibit at a trade show. I didn’t have a creative thought partner for product development. There was nobody I could work with who could help with all the facets of my business, and nobody to learn from who’d actually done the thing I was doing, at the scale I was doing it.
Now I AM that person, and it brings me great joy to share everything I know. This includes helping people clarify exactly what success means to them, and discerning what they actually want, not just for their business, but for their lives— and help them make a plan to get there. I wish I’d had someone to help me with this 10 years ago, too.
A typical weekday schedule in a nutshell: I need like 12 hours of sleep, so I sleep late. I’ve never been a morning person anyway, and at 49 I’ve just embraced it. My morning routine is “being unconscious.” It’s fine.
I get up, make a coffee, put some collagen in it for luck, usually drink it in front of my computer. My work all happens over Zoom and email, at random times; I’m working very part-time at the moment, so I don’t protect certain hours, but I do when I’m busier.
I have a lot of appointments – naturopath, various docs, therapy. Right now, I look at taking care of my health as a job, and I’m very aware and appreciative of having the privilege to do that. I try to see local friends a few days a week, and connect with faraway ones regularly. I make dinner or order in. My partner and I get in bed early and talk; that’s our primary time to connect. We watch dumb TV and provide running commentary.
On the weekends I’m usually: See above, minus the Zoom meetings.
How much my career is tied to my identity: Oh my god, at this point, zero, which is really wild. For more than 20 years, my career was synonymous with my identity – first, in working in the creative departments of major ad agencies, which was so demanding that it essentially required us to collectively brainwash ourselves into believing we were CHANGING THE WORLD, therefore making us willing to regularly pull all-nighters and work through holidays to sell more pizza and car insurance.
I left advertising to start what would become Em & Friends, which pushed me even deeper into identifying with my career, which is the natural outcome of naming the brand after myself, publishing products from my ideas, and creating a brand identity that was based on my personality. Who knew?!
I don’t think it’s inherently problematic to tie one’s career to one’s identity, but for me it definitely contributed heavily to my burnout. When I left Em & Friends in 2021, a huge piece of the work in front of me was detangling and disconnecting my identity and intrinsic worth from what I put into the world, my productivity, and what I’d been publicly known for. I feel infinitely more …
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