Note to Self

Note to Self by Connor Franta is an intimate and disarmingly honest collection of personal essays and reflections from one of YouTube’s most beloved creators — a young man writing with courage and vulnerability about identity, mental health, creativity, and the strange experience of growing up in public.

About the Book

Connor Franta rose to fame on YouTube as a twenty-something creator who built a devoted following through his warmth, humor, and willingness to share his inner life. Note to Self is his second book and represents a significant evolution from his memoir debut — less chronological narrative, more a collection of meditations, personal essays, prose poems, and journal-like reflections on the questions that preoccupy him most urgently.

The book is organized around themes — creativity, identity, love, self-acceptance, depression — and within each theme Franta writes with a directness and self-awareness that belies his age. He writes about coming out as gay, about his struggles with anxiety and depression, about the surreal experience of being famous on the internet, and about the pressure to perform happiness for an audience while privately struggling. He also writes beautifully about his passion for photography, music, and the arts, and about finding meaning through creative work.

What distinguishes Note to Self from other celebrity self-help is its refusal to offer tidy answers. Franta is honest about the fact that he is still figuring things out, still learning who he is, still wrestling with questions he cannot yet answer. This humility makes the book feel trustworthy rather than prescriptive. The writing is clean and unpretentious, with occasional passages of genuine lyric beauty, particularly in the sections on creativity and nature.

What Makes It a Meridian Award Winner

The Meridian Award for Self-Help recognizes books that genuinely help readers understand themselves and navigate their lives with greater clarity and compassion — and Note to Self does this in an unusually authentic way. Rather than dispensing advice from a position of authority, Franta offers companionship: the sense that someone else is asking the same hard questions you are, and that asking them matters. For the generation that grew up with Franta, this book arrives as both a mirror and a companion. Its treatment of mental health, LGBTQ+ identity, and the pressure to perform on social media addresses issues that millions of young people face daily with more candor than most self-help books dare.

Who Should Read This

Note to Self will resonate most deeply with readers in their late teens and twenties who are navigating questions of identity, vocation, and mental health. Fans of Franta’s YouTube channel will find a richer, more reflective version of the voice they already know. But the book’s core themes — how to be yourself in a world that pressures you to be someone else, how to find meaning through creativity, how to accept your own imperfection — are universal enough to speak to readers of any age. Parents trying to understand their young adult children, counselors looking for relatable reading recommendations, and anyone who has struggled with anxiety or identity will find something here.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Note to Self worth reading?

For its intended audience, absolutely. Note to Self offers the rare combination of honesty, warmth, and genuine self-reflection that makes a reader feel understood rather than lectured. It is a quick read — Franta’s voice is accessible and conversational — but its emotional impact is real. For younger readers especially, encountering a public figure willing to be this honest about depression, sexuality, and creative doubt can be genuinely meaningful.

What genre is Note to Self?

Note to Self is personal essays and self-help, drawing on memoir, reflective writing, and motivational literature. It won the 2016 Meridian Award for Self-Help, recognizing Franta’s authentic and impactful contribution to the conversation around youth mental health, LGBTQ+ identity, and creative self-expression. Published by Atria Books, it became a New York Times bestseller.