Letting Jesus Take The Wheel

When I felt, at the start of Covid, that I had lost my career, that I would never have success again, felt in fact like a complete failure; when the persona of the glamorous bestselling author crumbled, the persona that had kept me safe for years, it left in its wake the inadequate, insecure little girl who was raised in an environment where she was told she was not enough, and came to believe that was true. Oh! But I covered it up well!

When all of it came crashing down, I would have given anything, anything, to get it back.

I had no idea who I was if I wasn’t a bestselling novelist. A failure, was the only thing I could come up with. For years I tried to claw my career back, hoping against hope that the next book would hit big again, that this time, next time, I would hit it out of the ballpark, get my career, and my confidence back.

It was the first time in my adult life I had ever operated from a place of scarcity and fear. I didn’t then understand the truism that life is where you look, that when you come from a place of scarcity and fear, you will only ever attract more scarcity and fear.

I didn’t know then that everything had to break in order to be rebuilt. That all of the constructs and roles I had hidden behind had to crumble in exactly the way they did, that being forced to feel all the pain, shame, humiliation, and loss, would be the only way to emerge from the ashes and start to construct a new life.

And, I didn’t know then that the new life was not going to be the same as the old one. The old one was driven by ego, felt validated only by success and large financial rewards - those were the metrics that told me I was good enough. Only when it was all taken away, when I set about the very hard work of learning to love the inner child, the little girl who never felt good enough, would a new path emerge.

It wouldn’t look like my old life, for the ego had been destroyed, and it is no longer about success. I may have more novels in me, but I’m not writing them, or indeed anything else, in the desperate hope that it will become a bestseller.

At my lowest, my loneliest, I started writing about my life honestly on social media, all the insecurities, the shame, the loneliness, the fear, and in doing so, unexpectedly ended up with a book deal to write a memoir about all of it.

It led to hundreds of messages from women who were reading what I was writing, the messy, painful truth of midlife, of being in a marriage where you no longer feel valued or loved, where you lose yourself entirely, no longer remember who you are, of finding the courage and the strength to break free, to architect a new life for yourself, on no-one’s terms but your own.

It led to starting to hold retreats in Marrakech, initially writing retreats, and for the first time in October, a Rewilding retreat. It led to personally reaching out to so many of the women who have messaged me, sharing my story in the hope that it may help them find themselves again, at a time when they feel, as I did, both untethered, and lost.

It led to a much smaller circle of friends. I am astonished at how many people disappeared when I started telling the truth, when I stopped being a “person to know”. Some were people I genuinely believed friends, others book influencers, fellow authors, who called themselves friends, before unfollowing me once I left Connecticut. I have come to terms with it - they were never my people in the first place, were never attracted to the woman, perhaps, but to the glittery persona.

There is a story in the memoir about an author, a big author, an author I thought a friend, who had a new book coming out. I messaged her and asked if I could get a galley, after I saw all our mutual friends reading it online, their faces glowing as they held the ARC up for the photograph, all of them excited, delighted, at getting their hands on this new, prized prize. Her response showed me just how low I had fallen: