Darling Sister,
I typed the last word of On Our Knees, sent the whole manuscript to my editor, and did not celebrate.
No champagne. No dancing around the kitchen.
Instead I got what Brené Brown calls a vulnerability hangover — the sick, shaky comedown that hits after you hand strangers the most naked parts of your life.
The book was in. And every cell in my body wanted to change my name and move to Portugal.
So, naturally, I hid.
I was sure I hated every word I’d written. Sure I’d flayed myself open across three hundred pages for nothing. Sure the whole thing was one long humiliation with my name printed across the front, in a font, forever.
And I started crawling toward the cave. You know the one, Sister. Dark, quiet, fully stocked with snacks and denial. The place where nothing can hurt you because you’ve stopped doing anything at all.
I have spent thirty years teaching women how to walk out of that cave. I wrote an entire book about it.
And the very week I finished that book, the cave called my name like an old boyfriend with terrible timing — and I went.
It still calls me, by the way. Even now. Even after everything.
What got me out wasn’t willpower. It wasn’t a mantra. It wasn’t one brilliant thing I whispered to myself in the mirror at 2am while eating cereal over the sink. It was my Sister Goddesses, who simply refused to let me stay gone.
They pulled me into a week-long Rupture Ride — where a circle of women gets together and physically wills their sister back to her own radiance, whether she likes it or not.
They made me read a passage of the book out loud while they witnessed me. Wet eyes, zero fixing, no advice. They handed my own words back to me until I could finally hear what they were hearing. Then they put on the music and we Swamped — three songs, moving the shame and the grief and the terror straight up and out through my hips, because apparently that’s where I keep it.
Seven days later, I was a different woman. Where there’d been shame, there was pride. I’m not being dramatic — okay, I’m a little bit being dramatic, I did write a book about my own dead lover’s ghost, drama is sort of my whole thing — but I mean it. I was changed.
I didn’t edit the book into being less exposed. It’s exactly as naked on day seven as it was on day one. What changed is I stopped running from it.
I let myself be witnessed in the mess instead of tidying up first. Turns out surrender isn’t fixing the situation — it’s turning the lights back on inside it.
And it starts with being witnessed. The one who still remembers her own light holds the door for the one who’s forgotten hers. We all forget. I forget. You forget. We get so tired and so overfunctioning that we start to believe someone bricked over the door years ago and threw away the key.
Sisterhood is not a nice-to-have. It’s the rope that comes down into the dark when you’ve forgotten how to climb. It’s the woman who looks you dead in the eye on the exact day you’ve forgotten who you are and says: b*tch, you are radiant, get up.
Nobody comes up off the floor alone. Not even me. Not even the week I finished writing a whole book about how to do it.
So if you feel yourself crawling toward your own cave right now — don’t go quietly.
Call one woman who loves you and tell her what’s actually going on. Then let her drag you back out.
That’s the rope. Grab it.
Love + pleasure,
