Mission

 

What's a paper tiger?

Our ancestors were wired to make two kinds of mistakes — to think there was a tiger in the bushes when there wasn't one, and to miss the tiger that was actually there. The cost of the first mistake was needless anxiety. The cost of the second was much worse. So we evolved to make the first mistake a thousand times just to avoid making the second once.

Fear, in that sense, is a survival mechanism. It kept our ancestors alive. It keeps us cautious and careful and sometimes paralyzed at 2 a.m. over things that will look smaller in the morning.

Most of the threats we face aren't physical dangers. They're the fears we've built up in our minds — about loss, about starting over, about whether we're doing any of this right. They look like tigers. They're usually made of paper.

That's what this place is about.

Who Paper Tiger is for.

Women who are doing the honest, real work of rebuilding something — which is less glamorous than it sounds and more necessary than most people will admit. Maybe you lost a partner and you're still figuring out what your life is supposed to look like now, or you're raising kids while quietly managing your own anxiety, trying to model something you're still learning yourself.

Maybe you're back on the dating apps at 43 and wondering what exactly you're doing there, swiping through a carousel of strangers with the specific, low-grade bewilderment of someone who did not expect to be doing this again and is doing it anyway because the alternative is giving up, and you're not ready to do that either.

This is not a space for people who have it figured out. My hope is that my writing will make you feel less alone.

What Paper Tiger makes.

Books are written by me, Cara Baker Davis, and are from the inside perspective I have. These are real experiences I'm describing — not from a safe distance. I wrote a memoir about anxiety and rebuilding after loss. I wrote a novella about dating again after losing your husband. I write children's books about fear and self-acceptance rooted in my experiences with my children. And the free resources I made because they helped me first.

Everything here started as something I needed. Most of it became something I could offer to someone else in the same season.