One of those column entries on writing...
And a week of realizing I can't give myself away to the future.
Every once and a while, I need to call a girlfriend who has her shit together in the moment more than I do, and tell her about how my brain feels like a jigsaw puzzle that just got dropped on the rug. I am on the floor crawling around looking for the pieces, unable to really know if I got them all because who wants to count 500 tiny pieces of cardboard? The truth won’t be revealed until the end when I am looking at an empty hole in my mountain-river landscape. This friend has also come to me when she had scattered thoughts, so it is reciprocal and I feel no shame about needing someone to say “Look, this is what I see.” I exhale because the truth is so simple and gentle, I had just created an entire emotional maelstrom around its essence.
In this case, the conundrum was my next book.
I wrote a whole memoir about buying a house in South Los Angeles in the pandemic which takes the reader not just through the toils of saving for a home as a single woman/mother of two girls, but also the neighborhood which is racially diverse (with me being the only white person.) I tried to pitch a little, and at one event with agents was told I would better serve the world with a book on women’s financial independence. I was like, are you kidding? I still match bills to income on my phone calculator each month with a little worry? Who do you think I am? Rockefeller’s niece? I knew that didn’t feel good but I tried that version out. I wanted to vomit. I was not going to write that book about annuities so I put it down.
Then I went to France on the writing retreat in June and shared that I had a memoir, and the teachers read the first chapter. They applauded my voice and said you HAVE to continue forth with this book in memoir form. There is no other way. So with their expertise from the four days in mind, I spent a week in Paris pecking away at the better version of the memoir. Then I got home and ceremoniously ignored the book. I made some half-hearted attempts to work on the book in the library only to spend most of the time wishing I had brought snacks and admonishing the two loud men at the local computers.
Now, here I was with this friend explaining how the pillars of my work were not integrating. I have this book coaching business I LOVE and then my real estate I own, and this book. This book. She very clearly told me the book needed to be about what I truly represented. A courageous woman who took a risk to buy not one but two properties in less than 3 years on her own in Los Angeles. I overcame incredible obstacles, all the while leaning into learning about all the facts that come with first time home ownership. Plus, yes, it was a risk to move into a part of Los Angeles where I was a minority.
“That book aligns with who you are as a person, what you teach, you're growing real estate portfolio…” I jumped in.
“And my first book which was about recovering from denial of abuse through a courageous journey of self-discovery, sobriety and lots of lessons within.”
“Yes!” she said.
The missing puzzle appeared in the corner of the kitchen, disguised by the linoleum floor. I erased my scattered white board over my desk and rearranged the columns of my goals. I felt hopeful about the book again. I could inspire women to take a risk, whether it be real estate or not.
We get to continue to look at our integration of our business, our books and our voices as women out into the world. We are never done, just always reshaping and forming. I would be bored as fuck if I was done, or always knew. I do appreciate the days of calm knowing, but that is because I earned them.
Where can you look at your life and find the integrations? Where are you spending your time worrying about where your expectations won’t get met versus being in the reality of today which you can shape around you?