Fellow Empresses, how’s the Queendom holding up?
Is your nervous system feeling a little like a vat of moules frites... right on the verge of boiling over? Never fear. Today’s exclusive Empress Excerpt comes from none other than Sara Connell, author of The Download... the book you reach for right after you finish Atomic Habits and Mel Robbins’s Let Them.
I first met Sara over text while stranded at Chicago O’Hare after the incredible M-Factor summit hosted by Pamela DeRose and Julie Fedeli of Midlife Upgrade, alongside an extraordinary lineup of women, including Suzanne Gilberg, MD, Tamsen Fadal, and Dr. Sharon Malone (among so many others). I had just been pulled aside by TSA because Julie and Pam had sent me home with a truly phenomenal swag bag featuring a little gift from plusOne (vibrators & more!) ... and let’s just say the security agents had questions.
At that moment, somewhere between Gate C19 and a federal pat-down, I realized Empress was absolutely going to need Sara.
The very next month, she flew to Boston, and we’ve been talking ever since about her brilliant forthcoming book on the neuroscience of agency, reinvention, and success. The Download officially arrives on October 6.
So without further ado, please welcome our newest Empress author, Sara Connell.
CW: Touches on child sexual assault.
You’re making 35,000 decisions a day. Your nervous system is running hot. AI is rewriting the rules of work, creativity, and reality itself faster than any of us can refresh the feed. And somewhere underneath the noise, you can feel it: a more knowing part of you that has the answers, if only the static would clear long enough for you to hear it.
If you’ve devoured The Telepathy Tapes, fallen down the rabbit hole of the CIA’s Project Stargate, and sensed that intuition, consciousness, neuroscience, and the body’s intelligence are converging into something the culture is finally ready to talk about, The Download is the book you’ve been waiting for.
In this exclusive Barnes & Noble excerpt, Sara Connell shows how she first encountered the cosmos, how trauma snuffed that knowing out, and why everyone from Tesla and Einstein to MIT neuroscientists studying ChatGPT-induced cognitive decline is pointing to the same uncomfortable, exhilarating truth:
In an age of acceleration, the future will not belong to those who think faster. It will belong to those who Download deeper.
“My brain is only a receiver, in the Universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength and inspiration. I have not penetrated into the secrets of this core, but I know that it exists.”
— Nikola Tesla
“There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and there is only one of you in all time; this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost.”
— Martha Graham
Have you ever had an impulse to turn left instead of right and later found out you avoided a traffic pile up? Thought of a person you hadn’t talked to in years and then, boom, they texted you that same day? Have you woken up from a dream with the answer to a problem you’ve been trying to solve for months? Been walking down the street when you were struck with the idea for a new project or the vision of a new dream that seemed to arrive almost fully formed on the screen of your mind?
If you have, then you’ve experienced a Download. And if you haven’t already, you will by the time you finish reading this book.
In the computer world, a download is “an act or instance of transferring something (such as data or files) usually from a large computer to the memory of another device.”
In the world of this book, a Download is a desired idea, solution, or experience that arrives from beyond ordinary thought.
Picasso said every child is born an artist, and I believe every human is born intuitive. We all have the ability to receive clarity, inspiration, and guidance beyond the rational, logical mind.
At night, after reading Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Sara Crewe or Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins — books that were so good I felt a nearly physical ache to write such books myself — I would unplug the nightlight, pull the shades on my windows below the windowsill, and press the door into the door frame until the knob clicked tight so the room would be sealed from light.
In this darkness, the mundane objects of my room appeared to animate.
The flowers on my cotton sheets sprouted vines and stretched upward. The golden figures at the top of my swim trophies leapt off their marble pedestals. Then it would feel as if the ceiling pulled back, like in a planetarium, and the room filled with stars until there was nothing between me and the cosmos.
I did not feel alone in this space.
Quite the opposite.
This was where ideas came.
Loving tones, like notes played through a wind instrument. I understood what I had not been able to glean at school and even detected answers to my biggest, scariest question:
Was there something beyond this human body? This life?
At the bookstore, if there was a book with a floating eye on the cover or a character bestowed with magical powers, that book came home with me. I was the kid at sleepovers shaking up the Magic 8 Ball and initiating games of “light as a feather, stiff as a board,” thrilling when six tiny girls were able to lift the body of a friend with only a pinky.
I checked out the TIME magazine hardcover on ESP so many times the school librarian eventually gave it to me to keep.
I longed for the adults in my life to validate this world beyond the three-dimensional, or what poet Kathleen Raine calls “the mountain behind the mountain.”
In my traditional Catholic household, the things I sensed in my room were considered the fluff of fiction. Suggestions otherwise were met with a wary eye. Even when the adults didn’t validate my experience, I knew.
Sensing that an elderly relative was about to pass before the family phone call. Practicing telepathy with a friend by each writing down a number at midnight and comparing them on the morning bus to school.
I was certain there was a layer beyond the physical. That magic was real.
At eight years old, nothing would convince me otherwise.
Then, at a sleepover in third grade, my friend’s father found me as I came out of the bathroom.
A truck of a man.
He planted himself between me and the hallway and pointed to his room.
“I’m going to show you what grown-ups do in bed.”
Afterward, he told me that if I said anything, I’d never see my family again.
I never doubted his power to make good on that threat.
I crept down the hall where my friend had gone to sleep and pushed her dresser against the inside of her bedroom door.
The next day, my mother picked me up and took my sister and me to the mall. There was a children’s play area with an orange slide and gymnasium mats set out for tumbling and running. I stood next to my mother in the area where adults swapped parenting war stories while waving at their somersaulting children.
“Go play,” my mother said.
But I stood stiff as a candle, shivering in my Mickey Mouse t-shirt.
“I can’t,” I said.
I had crossed over a threshold that I couldn’t see but would forever feel.
In this new space, I was frozen and voiceless.
Obedient to the threat I’d been given, I never told.
In his celebrated book The Body Keeps the Score, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk explains that trauma is stored not just as memories, but as physical tension, sensory imprints, and chronic physiological arousal within the body. It forces the body to remain stuck in the past, reacting to safety as if it were danger.
I began to live in that state, like a candle whose flame had been snuffed.
Like many children who endure assault, I shoved that experience so far from my conscious mind that for years I almost didn’t recall that it happened.
I was able to avoid the memory.
But I also lost the magic.
Back in my room at night, there were the same sheets with climbing vines, the same eyelet curtains, the same swimming trophies.
But the voices didn’t hum.
There were no startling new ideas.
The ceiling didn’t open.
I couldn’t see the stars.
The golden swimmers were frozen again at the top of their starting blocks.
The dark was just dark.
Stay tuned. Many more Empress excerpts and Empress Questionnaires to come!
Yours in Grandeur & Deep Sh*t,
PS - I am a human typo. Amnesty appreciated.
*The information contained in this post is intended for informational purposes only and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any illness. Before using any practices or products referenced in this piece or others, always consult your healthcare providers, read all labels, and heed all cautions that come with the products. Information received from this piece, or anywhere in this Substack, should never be used in place of a consultation or advice from a healthcare provider. If you suspect you have any adverse conditions, please consult your healthcare providers immediately. This Substack, including Alisa Jones and any other writers or editors, disclaims any responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of any information contained herein. Opinions of any writers in this Substack are their own, and the Substack does not accept responsibility for statements made by writers. This Substack does not make any representations or warranties about a writer’s qualifications or credibility.
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