Dear Normal, I Miss You, But I’m Heading on the (S)Hero’s Journey

Last week, I offered the members of the Sovereign Writers Circle this writing prompt:

Write a Letter to “Normal”

As the world seems to change by the hour and things that were totally commonplace just a week ago seem like an impossible, distant dream, we are constantly being asked to adapt to a new normal.

Spend some time considering what “normal” is. What was normal then, what is normal now? What is this thing they call “normal” anyway?

One of our Sovereign Writers shared the most simple and true opening line:

Dear Normal, I miss you…

Amen! Isn’t that something we’re all feeling right now?

We miss “Normal,” but the greatest stories require us to leave Normal behind 

As is so often the way, you only see the real possibilities of your creation after you put it into the world and let people make it their own.

When the members of the SWC talked about various understandings of “normal,” I saw something totally new contained within that prompt of mine.

I saw the start of the Hero’s Journey.

If you’ve spent any time thinking about storytelling, you’ve probably heard about Hero’s Journey. The scholar Joseph Campbell compared ancient myths from around the world and found a common story across a host of cultures that described the individual’s process of “becoming.” This framework has been applied to everything from the creation of epic movie sagas to the development of brands and personal narratives.

As the Hollywood story consultant Christopher Vogler describes it in The Writer’s Journey, the classic Hero’s Journey begins with a Call to Adventure that causes the (s)hero to leave the everyday “normal” work and go on a great and dangerous quest.

The most well-known examples of heroes who trace this journey, of course, are Dorothy leaving Kansas for Oz and Luke leaving Tatooine to take on the Empire. Think of these iconic characters and their worlds we know so well…

“Normal” wasn’t necessarily perfect. Both of them hated their pokey old farms and longed for something more.

They didn’t make the leap just because they yearned for adventure, however. They answered that Call to Adventure only when faced with calamity. Dorothy got swept up in a tornado. Luke’s aunt and uncle were killed by storm troopers. They had no choice but to respond to a moment of great disruption.

At the conclusion of a the story, after many travails, and with the help of many allies, the protagonist returns to where the story began. They’ve changed in some fundamental way and are now armed with the elixir, the great wisdom or solution that will benefit everyone who stayed behind in the Ordinary World.

We are all at the same point in the Hero’s Journey

Before I go on, I want to mention the true heroes in this pandemic.

Hospital employees - from cleaning staff to receptionists to doctors to respiratory therapists - are saving lives and helping people transition. Volunteers are making masks at home and aid workers are delivering food and supplies to people confined without resources. Grocery store staff and delivery workers are keeping life going for all of the healthy, huddled masses. I recognize them and thank them all.

So, when I say “we” are all at the same point in the Hero’s Journey, I mean all of us who might have the time to sit down to write a letter that begins, “Dear Normal, I miss you…”

I am writing this post for those of us who are riding out Covid-19 on the couch, worrying about keeping the kids busy and keeping the business running. I am writing for those of us who haven’t been thrust out of “normal” by great calamity. (Yet.)

It’s my sincerest prayer that everyone who reads this will not encounter a life-changing, journey-defining event during this pandemic. Sadly, I think it’s inevitable that some of us will suffer great loss, but we’re not even at the middle of this crisis yet, and we just don’t know.

No matter what happens in the weeks to come, we are all at that point of beginning a great new adventure because we’re never going to be able to go back to life as it was.

We’ll never look at a supermarket aisle full of toilet paper or a full bottle of hand sanitizer in the same way.

When we’re back on Main Street again and the world is again open for business, we will undoubtedly see empty storefronts because beloved small businesses and restaurants will not be able to come back from.

People we love up close or admire from afar will die. We’ll all understand that life, society, and the economy are much more fragile than we imagined.

The Journey Ahead Will Be Terrible and Beautiful

Like Dorothy and Luke, we don’t have choice about leaving Normal behind.

If you want to be the shero of your own life - to stand Sovereign in your own life - you need to accept this call to step out of the reality that was and into the strange new world. (Metaphorically, of course. We’re not stepping anywhere except on a socially distanced walk in the sunshine.)

The way ahead is full of risk and loss and there’s no guarantee that New Normal will be as comfortable as the old one. It certainly won’t be as innocent.

But that’s how stories work. That’s how life works.

We are living the story right now. None of us knows quite what will happen next. Soon, we will begin to tell the story of how we survived - and even thrived - in 2020.

Can I help you tell your story as we all set out on this Hero’s Journey together?

The next round of Stand In Your Sovereign Story begins on September 30, and I would love to have you with us.

Rest, Heal, Rearrange

My well - of energy, of words, of vision - has been running dry for weeks. I've tried to fake it, and from time to time, I pulled it off. Inside, I have been feeling parched, barren, and exhausted.⁣

This week, I started over.⁣⁣

I've been living in the in-between place that comes after a great big project is completed and before the next push really begins. It's a hard place to be, all full of self-recrimination about how I "should" be planning more, earning more, speaking more. ⁣⁣

Ultimately, I knew I needed this trough after the huge wave of energy and creativity that was the final sprint to finish my book, but it was hard to settle into that truth. I'm too well programmed to equate the push with success. I'm too accustomed to beating myself up for being lazy and playing small.⁣

I finally got the physical and spiritual support I needed to figure out why I've been feeling so drained and depressed. (Thank you, Eleanora Amendolara of the Sacred Center Mystery School for your healing wisdom! Thank you for seeing that the problem was my thyroid and my adrenals as well as a struggle to step through the portal into a new phase of spiritual expansion.)⁣

With that wisdom (and some powerful herbs and nutritional supplements), I gave myself permission to stay quiet for a few more days. I watched those phenomenally impressive Americans speak truth to Congress. I read ⁣Meggan Watterson’s book about Mary Magdalene and reconnected with one of the most powerful spiritual foremothers. ⁣

And then, I started moving all the furniture around.⁣

I needed my space to reflect that my spiritual furniture has been completely rearranged by the writing of The Sovereignty Knot: A Woman's Way to Freedom, Power, Love, and Magic. I needed this room where I do my work to look like an author's study rather than a mompreneur's cluttered office. ⁣

It's still in process, but there's a new flow to this space. This room feels like it wants to hold the mystery, the growth, and the new connections I'll be making in this next phase of personal, professional, creative, spiritual becoming.⁣⁣

Where are you right now?

Are you riding the wave, doing the work, and making it happen?
Are you sliding down into the doldrums because you need to give into gravity for a little while?
Are you struggling, thinking you should be riding or resting in a different way?
Are you ready to rearrange the furniture on the inside and do the healing work?
Are you ready to rearrange the furniture in the office because you're ready for a new phase?⁣

Wherever you are, I invite you to pause, to look around, and to take some notes. Capture this moment on the page so you know what it's like to feel wildly free or in gentle recovery or in the dark place in between.⁣

And if you need help along the way as you try to sort out just where you are and what to do next, call on me. ⁣

Book a Tarot & Intuitive Healing Session or join The Sovereign Writers Circle.

⁣

When Mercury Retrograde Magic Exposes Your Biggest Business Mistakes

Every once in a while, when you’re not cursing the tech issues and the travel delays, Mercury Retrograde offers near unimaginable gifts.

You might not be familiar with the planetary event that’s something like an astrological starter drug because its effect is so clear and ubiquitous that it turns skeptics into believers. Here are the basics: about three times a year for over three weeks at a time the planet that rules communication and travel, Mercury, appears to be going backwards in the sky. This latest round runs from March 5 - 28, but some say you can feel the echoes for weeks before and after.

During Mercury Retrograde all sorts of misunderstandings can happen if you’re not extra impeccable with your word. Some say you should never launch a new venture or sign a contract during this period. It’s also that time of the year when a certain type of people (my people) say things like “of course Instagram and Facebook are down.”

Mercury Retrograde is also a time to review, revise, and re-envision choices you’ve made. (This is when the magic comes in.)

This particular Retrograde has been a cruel one in many ways, but I also am hearing powerful stories of looking back in order to look forward. I have my own “turn back to move forward” story for you, and I am almost certain it’s going to have a happy ending.

Let’s Consider the Progress Paradox

Transformation. Evolution. Growth.

These are powerful potent words. These are especially potent truths for us Transformation Professionals - the healers, coaches, and therapists who are here to support individual (and, by extension collective) growth.

And yet, we know that night always follows day, death always follows birth, and even planets move backwards from time to time. Perpetual forward motion isn’t actually a thing supported by the laws of the universe.

Plus, we know that this obsession with progress and the blind need to constantly expand can have dire consequences.

Think of the environmental degradation caused by the perpetual quest for cheap fossil fuels. Think of what we know about burst economic bubbles and the inevitability of recession (even if we’ve been taught to be terrified of it). Think of the stories of burn-out, anxiety, depression, and collapse you hear from entrepreneurs who felt they could never stop playing the game.

The constant need to push to adopt the next innovation and to hit the next income bracket has untold costs.

But it’s all so seductive…

Spiritual and emotional growth feel so good! It’s so easy to think we must translate our own internal evolutionary processes into “I need to share this with the world! Right now.”

But let me get back to my own story of accidental over-evolution

A Sovereign Tangle of Change, Growth, and Passion

Last year was a year of intense and gorgeous growth for me. (It’s nothing compared to the terrible beauty that is emerging in 2019, but that story is still being lived right now and isn’t quite ready to be told.)

In 2018, I launched the Sovereign Writers Circle. This same year I finally manifested the freedom to go back to visit Ireland for the first time in fourteen years. The relationship that’s most fundamental to my sense of happiness and security - my marriage - got stronger and more sure. My business felt more real and sustainable than it ever had.

All the while, I was working on my book about personal and creative Sovereignty. I was learning to use that word in conversation and how to live in as I moved through the world.

Everything seemed to be showing me that I need to consciously grow toward putting Sovereignty at the heart of all my work. Lots of wise people who know more about scaling businesses and being brave encouraged me to lead with the stuff that I talked about with such fire and passion.

So I rode the swells of Sovereignty as far as I could.

For a Few Months, The Sovereign Writers Circle Went By Another Name

Sometime in November I decided to change the name of my beloved online membership community from The Sovereign Writer Circle to The Sovereignty Circle.

The decision must have been a long time coming for me, but it emerged in a unilateral sort of rush. Sovereign businesswoman that I am, there’s no authority to ask for approval, of course, but I never even thought to call on the insight of the nearly twenty group members who had helped co-create this magical space.

Since I was keeping our powerful, effective structure the same (four writing practice sessions, one guest expert workshop, and one writing coaching and story healing call per month), the change wasn’t all that big of a deal.

Or was it?

Personal Growth Is Supposed to Become Professional Growth, Right?

Membership growth in the Circle essentially ground to a halt.

Why? I hadn’t let up on my marketing efforts or my passion for the group. In fact, I was throwing myself into the new year with big goals. I was wall papering Instagram with all kinds of magical sovereign awesome. I was spreading my seasonal 7MagicWords Challenge everywhere. I was offering free community writing practice sessions. I was shouting about the Sovereignty Circle from the digital rooftops.

And… crickets. (Ok, so it was the middle of a New York winter. Let’s say it was as silent as a nighttime snowfall in my new member applicants in box.)

But I kept going telling myself it was a temporary lull… This was growth. This was evolution. This was paying my dues to the gods of change.  This was also exhaustion, confusion, and an entrepreneurial breakdown to breakthrough bound to happen.

Of course, it doesn’t take divine omniscience to know why the group had virtually stopped growing. It just required some perspectacles that weren’t clouded with the dust from the road name “I Must Evolve, Grow, and Change Right Now In a Very Public Way.”

Along with the name, I also adjusted the group’s sales page considerably, bringing in new images and talking to slightly different clients in a whole new way.  

Without realizing it, I revamped the invitation a group that meets once a week to write, that uses writing as our primary discovery tool and medium to be seen in the world, and I didn’t actually say the word “writing” until about halfway through.

And, instead of talking to the people I know I am born to support - the healers, coaches, and therapists who have been the vast majority of my clients for years - I just started talking to a general woman wandering through her middle years in search of sovereignty.

I was so preoccupied with trying to embody and convey my new messages about sovereignty that I forgot to stand sovereign in the very thing that I’m known for, the very thing that I most wanted to offer to people, the very thing that people are asking me to provide.

The Biggest Mistake: I Accidentally Stole My Beloved Writers’ Collective Identity

One of the most powerful affirmations that guides my work in these days is “May I have the heart of a servant and the vision of a leader.” Creating space for the healer-writers in this online group of mine has been the single greatest privilege of my professional life.

But when I shifted the name of their group without even a casual “whatcha think?” to my members, I showed I was neither a confident nor a conscious leader. I was too busy leading us in a new direction to see how I was being called to serve.

Only when I started to look at the first quarter of the year and all the growth that hadn’t manifested the way I’d imagined did I realize I might have made a mistake when I renamed the group.

That’s when I asked my members how they’d feel about reverting back to the original name.

They were unanimous. In their hearts, this always was and always would be The Sovereign Writers Circle.

I’d accidentally taken something important from them when I deleted “writing” from our name.

As one member says, “I describe this group to people I know as: "my writing group for therapists who have their own story to tell.’”

And So, Thanks to Mercury Retrograde, Retrospection, and the Courage to Ask for Input… The Sovereign Writers Circle is BACK. (And stronger than ever.)

Right now I’m accepting applications from transformation professionals who are ready to write and live and more powerful story and who want to learn and grow with a like-hearted community of writer-healers.

Are you ready to discover more about yourself, your work, and the people you’re here to serve and finally put that into words with the help of a fabulous community and a leader who learns from her mistakes? We’re accepting new members through April 1.

Find the Power of Sovereignty Within the Dream of Community

Dream is an Irish word that doesn’t actually have anything to do with nighttime visions. (One of my favorite Irish words for dreams is aisling, but we’ll get to that another time.)

In the Irish language, dream is actually associated with “tribe” or “community.”

Once upon a time, I must have known this, back when I carried a Gaeilge/Bearla dictionary in my backpack, rushing from the dorm to an early morning class. But it’s been so long since my days at Boston College and the National University of Ireland in Galway. It’s like another lifetime, those years when modern poetry and ancient myth were the most important things in the world…

Since then, I’ve forgotten most of my Irish. And in those two decades since I knew enough of the Gaelic to know when the lads were talking about me at the pub, I know I have forgotten the power of community over and over again too.

Forgetting is a gift

Here’s the thing… whether it’s a random word from a language spoken in a small corner of the world or whether it’s something essential to our own well being or to the entire of the human race, we’re going to forget. In fact, we forget in order to understand the important things.

I find that the miracles come in the rediscovery, in the looping back to something you once knew and now have a chance to really know.

Life conspires to remind us of the words, feelings, and experiences that used to feel magical and significant. We get a fresh chance to make meaning and root into wisdom that’s at once eternal and brand new.

This is the joy. This is the point. The knowing, the forgetting, the re-membering reveals what wants to matter and guide the whole rest of the journey.

But Losing Track of a Sense of Community is Just Painful

I wandered alone for so many years, but I don’t think I ever really knew it.

When I was in my early twenties, living in a new city and trying to make a shaky relationship work, a therapist diagnosed me as “lonely.” She wasn’t wrong. (She wasn’t helpful, mind you, but she wasn’t wrong.)

A few years later, when I rooted myself into a “real job” and had moved in with the guy who’d become my husband, I would have looked the opposite of lonely. Yoga classes, the bustle of the campus where I worked, the grown-up tasks of a busy woman with stuff to do. I was in the mix of it all.

But then I remember our wedding and how I needed to piece together my old life, pulling people from around the world for a week of parties. For a short time, I was living the dream, thriving in a big circle of the people I loved best.

(My friends are too wonderful to tell me how bridezilla-esque I often was through all this desperate gathering of the tribe for that marathon celebration… Bless ‘em!)

After the honeymoon, things sort of folded in on themselves. Our world of two became small, and sometimes the coziness felt claustrophobic.

It’s Time to Reckon with the Isolation Habit

Now, I realize I have a lifelong pattern of losing track of everybody else when I devote myself to “the one.” (Yes, you can call this codependency if you want. It’s not a pretty word, but when we pull the unbeautiful words out of the shadows we can rewrite the limiting stories we once crafted with narrow, unsavory phrases.)

Having a couple of kids would actually make the whole thing worse before it got better. The house was full, the experience felt hollow too much of the time, and our little commune didn’t necessarily feel held by a larger community.

This isn’t just a personal flaw or a way of functioning that is unique to my family. It’s a phenomenon that has take over much of our society, particularly with all the screens that substitute for human interaction and the substances that are supposed to help us cope with modern life.

Many of us have lost track of a wider sense of belonging because of our relationship and family structures, because of our demanding jobs, because wine is easier, because there are so many things tugging at our attention that seem more important than connections with soul friends.

Recovering the Dream of Community Begins with Acknowledging We Need It

In the last year or so, I have connected with my original self. More than that, I have connected with my Sovereign Self.

After years of wandering and wishing and half-living my dreams while trying to live according to someone else’s guidelines for success, I’ve recovered the magic and the truth that’s long been hiding in my core.

Reconnecting with my Sovereign Self is about reviving the passions of the younger me (the princess I once was had a confidence problem and drank too much, but she had the right idea about a lot of things).

It’s about standing proudly in the experience and knowledge I’ve gained and declaring myself queen of my own life. It’s about leaning into the wisdom of my future self even as I stay rooted in the magical, insightful self that was my birthright.

(We all have the princess, the queen, and the wise woman playing within us all the time, you know… This trinity of being is at the heart of The Sovereignty Knot, the new book that’s coming out in October 2019.)

And, in the midst of all this personal discovery, I have discovered how much I’ve missed community. Somehow, I had begun to feel unworthy of it.

Community was a garden I had stopped tending. I came to believe I had to be a permanent exile for letting the weeds choke out the beds and the gate.

All through the years when I let endless responsibilities and the tendency toward self-isolation rule my life, I didn’t realise that community was actually dream that I couldn’t quite name.

It think it’s easy for many of us to miss this realization. After all, when you’re a mother of young children, a partner trying to keep a relationship together, or a woman running a business, your life is just so jam packed.

It’s easy to misunderstand an overflowing life for a full life. It’s easy to confuse the packed calendar with an inherent sense of belonging.

We Practice the Dance Between Individuality and Communality

There’s another reason I didn’t sense my own yearning for community, and it’s rooted in this idea of sovereignty that guides my life and work

It’s easy to assume the quest for sovereignty is a solitary journey.

After all, at the heart of this work is a call to discover who you really are and what you really want. You’re called to go beneath and beyond the expectations and the demands that have been imposed upon you. You’re called recognize all the ways you’re letting others write your story. Sovereignty invites you to unhook from what “they” say about how to live your life. Your Sovereign Self is inspired by your own inherent worth.

Sovereignty is about entering into personal relationship with the earth beneath your feet and with the air in your lungs. It’s about finding a home in your own body and in your own company. It is about the silence you find when you slow down enough to connect with the divine tides that guide your life.

Living Sovereignty Is about Living in Relationship

But after that personal discovery, after all that inner silence and natural stillness, there’s the vital step that is living sovereignty.

You are so secure in your story, your identity, you skin that you’re able to reach out and offer your help and your embrace. You can hold the stories of others and allow your story to merge with theirs.

You can heal and love and offer and receive care with wild abandon when you’re truly standing in your personal and creative sovereignty.

We Find Sovereignty in Community

There’s a gorgeous paradox in the the Sovereignty Knot: in order to truly root into yourself so you can build strong, healthy relationships, you need the support of others.

You fulfill your dream of individual sovereignty within the circle of a community.

It’s been a parallel journey for me. As I’ve opened myself up to all the ways I’m worthy of being part of community and creating community, I’ve understood my own sovereign worth and the worth of my own sovereign story. As I’ve stood sovereign and rooted into my own inherent truth I have found myself in true reciprocal relationships that matter and that sustain us all.

You embody sovereignty when you’re held by community. You uphold strong communities when you show up as your sovereign self.

You may have heard of the Sovereign Writers Circle, the online group I have coached and curated for the last year. You may have thought that it was intriguing but instantly felt scared off by the name. (“Me, a writer?” you might have thought.)

I want to (re)introduce you to my online community because it offers something different than you might have expected from a writing group.  

I’m renaming it because I know that our work has always about so much more than “just” writing. We use writing as our primary tool and we rely on words to help us make and explain our magic, but the ultimate goal is not blog posts or book chapters.

The ultimate goal of the Sovereignty Circle is to help you dream into the ways you’re called to stand in your own power. We do this work into order to know, embody, and tell the stories and do the work that can change the world.

Our weekly writing sessions help you make the time to do the individual discovery work. Our group writing coaching and story healing sessions help you draw from the support and wisdom of sovereign sisters like you.

The Sovereignty Circle is welcoming new members through January 2. Find out about the group and let me know if you have any questions. We would love to have you with us!

So You Dream of Creating “A Writing Life”…

So many of us walk around with a secret (or not so secret) yearning for some other way to be, some other kind of life to lead.

This thing you yearn for, it’s not so far from who you are now. You’re not asking to join the circus or live on the moon. Instead, you want your own life, plus a little something more true, more authentically yours.

You find yourself reaching for some kind of life that’s perpetually almost within your grasp, but not quite. You taste it during stolen hours or weekend retreats, but it doesn’t stay. It’s like living in a constant state of “If only... but not yet.”

A creative life. A spiritual life. An artist’s life. A writing life.

What You Learn Two Decades Into “Not Quite a Writer’s Life”

For me, it was always the quest for “a writing life.” It was the quest to reclaim the life I’d had when I was too young to feel unworthy of it.

The adult me could write now and then, sure, but to have a life that placed my own writing somewhere near the center of my day and my identity? Oh, that sounds absolutely divine, thank you, but I just couldn’t possibly!

The excuses evolved through the years, but they all seemed reasonable enough at the time…

There was the relationship. My passion and my confidence about the words I put on the page dried up when I fell in love with an older guy who fancied himself a writer. I was 17. None of my girlish stories could be more important than loving a man and the creative work that he was sure were so important...

There was the inner critic. Eventually, we broke up and that guy went on to not actually become a writer, but I still couldn’t get my inspiration to conspire with my reality to create a writing habit. Though I had plenty of time throughout my 20s, I would be all full of passion and potential until I sat down and stared at a cruel blank page. No story could ever be good enough after all that time spend wishing I could be a “real” writer...

There was the mothering. Once I hit my 30s and found myself with a house and children, there was barely time to shower or even to think, never mind develop a writing practice that was nourishing and consistent. No story could be more worthy than my family and worries about our finances...

One constant belief that carried me for over 20 years: a writing life was something that other people could have.

The blessed ones. People who didn’t have to work, who didn’t have to parent, who didn’t have to sleep. People with stories more compelling, tragic, and impossible to ignore. People who were born brilliant. People born without an inner critic. People who trusted that they were here to be artists and had some sort of creative grit I just couldn’t find or fully understand.

But then I began to realize… There’s no such thing as “other people.” And I had a twisted perspective on what it meant to be “blessed” to boot.

Good news: the entire world is conspiring to help me (to help all of us) reckon with - and struggle with - these truths.

Division and Illusion On a Grand Scale

Right now, on a global scale, the waves of manufactured division are trying to erode the bedrock of human connection. Illusion is trying to flame brighter than shared truth.

There are structures in place - old, top-down power structures - that tell us we are a country checkered with two primary colors and that we are a world that’s meant to be sliced up according to our differences in politics, religion, and culture.

And yet, we’re also watching the entire spectrum of colors and identities emerge, rise up, blend, shift, and find countless new forms of expression.

It’s both painful and easy to see the contradictions, to see why this moment in history seems so overwhelming, confusing, and just so wrong… There are things we know in our bones, the basic stuff of right and wrong, but then we’re barraged by narratives of an alternate reality constantly being presented by “the other side.”

Division and Illusion on the Individual Scale

To varying degrees, we are reflections of the collective. Throughout my creative life I’d created my own private biosphere where I constantly planted hope, but the brutal storms of division and illusion always seemed wash away the seeds and destroy the immature root system.

In this world I had created, I wasn’t like the fortunate, productive people who wrote great things and boldly took in the harvest.

I couldn’t be savvy enough or brave enough to make the sacrifices to prioritize my writing. Somehow, my burden was heavier - even if it was the weight of the horrifically mundane. Those other people and their secret success sauce were meant to be followed and envied, but also avoided.

I told myself I had to push through my own workaday reality, which could never be quite as bright or full of promise as the creative reality of others. I had to take each practical project that came along to pay for the groceries and simply tell the art to wait in line. When I had all the money, marriage, and mothering figured out, then I could write.

Oh, My Heart, I Am Sick to Death of that Story

There’d be a certain amount of continuity to this tale if I told you that I came to my epiphany when I reached my 40s. But really, it’s just not necessary to wait another nine months for the revolution. The change is happening now…

I’ve quit praying for a writing life and decided that I’d better just start living in.

In part, change is rolling through because I was bored sick of the old stories, limitations, and fear. In part, it’s because time had done its work and life had started to change around me.

I started to see that my marriage (to a different guy who never considered himself a writer and who was never threatened by my creativity) wasn’t served by my playing small. My children got older. The years I had spent writing words for others seemed less like lost opportunities and more like the apprenticeship that would hold me as I grew a family.

And I just plain old outgrew the narrow life offered by my bad old friends division and illusion.

So many moments and choices brought me here, back at the page with the trust and confidence of my young, fearless self. Countless stories and words had to pile up until I could again trust my voice and declare that my life must be a writing life.  

Ultimately, though, it all comes down to one word - one enormous, magical word that I plan on spending the rest of my life teasing out…

Photo by Dev on Unsplash

Sovereignty.

It’s a word that found me long before its definition did.

Sovereignty came to me as something to do with freeing the princess, crowning the queen, and embracing the wise woman. This trinity of ideas found me during the darkest time when I was mourning my mother’s death, trying to figure how to be a mom to my newborn, and stumbling through the early days of entrepreneurship.

Sovereignty was a signal fire that shone on a distant shore, finding me in the midst of a long dark night.

And yet, for so long, sovereignty was as much of a “someday” dream as having a writing life was.

I knew I wanted to be sovereign, that I had to be sovereign in order to fully experience my own life. I knew I was meant to...

• fully accept and inhabit my own worthiness

• connect with and own my creative power

• feel whole and comfortable in my own skin, on this earth, in my relationships, and in my own story

• reckon with all that I yearned for, all that I’d been, all that I am in this moment, and all I’ve denied about myself, my reality, and our collective reality

• take on the truth of the world and be strong enough to make a difference - without sacrificing myself, body, mind and spirit.

It’s been a long, spiraling journey to get anywhere near sovereignty, to get anywhere near a writing life.

But here I am, with over 45,000 words in my Book of Sovereignty manuscript.

And here I am, founding the Sovereign Writers Circle and holding space for a phenomenal group of healers and creatives who want to bring their words and stories into the world.

I waited for my reality to change, I waited for my real life to sort itself out in order to make way for my writing life.

And then I stopped waiting and started writing and I realized that the difference between me and a real writing life, a real creative life was about 1000 words a day devoted to a passion project that integrates the most essential parts of who I am and what I know I must say.

What If the Writing Life You Long for Isn’t Really About Writing At All?

The most true advice one can offer an “aspiring writer” is to quit aspiring and start writing.

It’s also the most brutal advice, and I think I have finally sorted out why…

Writing is less about putting words on a page than it is about expressing your sovereign story - as an individual, as a creative, as someone with a story that you know in your bones is worthy of remembering, imagining, drafting, editing, and risking in the world.

And so, I invite you to lean into your longing for a writing life, but please don’t stop there. I invite you to set a goal to live a sovereign life as well.