I Drove 3,000 Miles for This
How the Solar Eclipse Led Me to Write a Book About Feminism & Illness
A year ago, I took a solo road trip from my home in California to Austin, Texas, to watch the solar eclipse. I booked the trip a few months prior as motivation and a reward for relaunching my business. After three years of healing full-time and a year of housing drama, I was finally healthy and in a good living situation. I was hard at work on a business plan to relaunch Sister.
Before getting sick, I had a thriving, profitable company, with consistent revenue and well developed product lines, including the highly successful Feminist Business School. I was determined to pick up where I’d left off.
Despite working on my business relaunch for hours each day, I couldn’t get much traction. I was second-guessing myself constantly and unable to commit to one idea. I was desperate to generate revenue, but I kept getting tangled in the trauma triggers I didn’t realize were enmeshed in my business. After a couple of months, I found myself in the familiar position of spending my days attending to my CPTSD and regulating my nervous system instead of working on my business. I became fearful of recreating a company that would contribute to making me sick again. I was at cross-purposes and going nowhere fast.
In the weeks before the eclipse, I contemplated cancelling the journey. I had brazenly booked the trip on credit cards, confident that cash would be flowing soon. As the trip approached, betting on myself looked increasingly foolish. By the time my departure date rolled around, my business was still non-operational but I decided to go anyhow. I told my healer, “I have no idea why I’m going, it doesn’t make any sense. Financially, it’s a terrible idea. But, I feel like it’s something I need to do.”
I had a number of epiphanies and breakthroughs on my 10-day expedition, as I drove over 3,000 miles by myself. Importantly, I realized that I was missing the point of my healing journey. I had gone to such lengths to heal my mind and my body, I had done so much work to recover my health, learned so many healing tools, gained so much wisdom, and importantly, done so much writing to document my process and make meaning of my experience. And yet, once I regained my physical health, I lapsed back into capitalist conditioning: ignoring the needs of my body and glossing over my experience of illness, wanting to tuck it all away and not talk about it, seduced by the illusion that I could recover some normal of the past and get back to business-as-usual.
I had to admit to myself that this was misguided.
ILLNESS IS A PORTAL
A few days after I returned home from Texas, I was puttering around the house doing nothing remarkable when I was electrified with an insight, a cosmic download. I grabbed the nearest pen and a scrap of paper and jotted down: ILLNESS IS A PORTAL
During the pandemic, I’d been moved by Arundhati Roy’s essay, The Pandemic is a Portal where she wrote,
Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.
We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.
Her words came flooding back and the dots connected. My experience of illness was not extraneous, it was not a departure from my “normal” life, it was a constitutive experience: one that not only defined me, but transformed me. I had a full-body realization that my healing journey was intrinsically linked to my feminist work, that illness is a portal to embodied feminist consciousness.
In other words: what we learn in the process of healing our bodies is essential to the feminist work of healing our social, political and economic bodies.
I was relieved to have found my way forward.
I didn’t need to get back to [feminist] business, I needed to recenter my work around the lessons of the portal: to re-view my experience of illness with a feminist consciousness, and connect the work of healing my body with the collective work of healing our social/political/economic bodies.
I put my head down and started tapping out a keynote. I developed a structural rhythm: alternating autobiographical narrative with feminist theory.
I began with my feminist awakening in high school, told the story of studying feminism in the academy, getting sick, abandoning academia, healing myself, becoming an entrepreneur, studying with an energy healer, becoming a professional feminist, getting sick again, running a successful business, getting sicker, healing myself as a full-time job, making feminist meaning of my experience of illness, and embodying my feminist consciousness in my daily life. I concluded in the present, with my recommendations for navigating the rise of autocracy using my feminist healing framework.
Two and a half months after the eclipse, I presented my first version of the Feminist Flourishing Framework keynote over Zoom.
Two months after that, I presented a second revised and expanded version and announced the forthcoming book.
I then spent two months designing and laying out the Feminist Flourishing Framework book while working with an editor to polish the manuscript.
I wrote the final chapters in the two weeks following the pivotal presidential election here in the U.S., incorporating my reflections and predictions for a second T**** presidency, to ensure that the book would be hyper-relevant and attuned to this historic moment.
Eight months to the day after I returned from my eclipse trip, the Feminist Flourishing Framework book was released into the world.
I’m proud of the Feminist Flourishing Framework and my decision to make meaning of my experience of illness, instead of pretending publicly that it didn’t happen. This book is absolutely the culmination of everything I have learned up until this point about feminism and healing. It’s not just a story of my life but a feminist primer and an embodied ecologic social change strategy, rooted in feminist scholarship.
Two months into this disastrous presidential administration here in the U.S., I am more certain than ever of the timeliness and relevance of this Framework. Although this book is an autobiography, it’s not about me. It’s a feminist guidebook for healing our social, political and economic bodies in the months, years, and decades ahead. ✻ Get yours today.
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