There is a very fair critique by readers that questions female writers in memoir/self help/autobiography genres over the long haul. The raised eye is in response to books that announce the writer’s “life revelations” when the previous book also announced her “life revelations.” And the one before that. When a book is highly prescriptive or instructive, then the next book discloses how fucked up that writer, or her relationships, or her habits, or her worldviews were previously. Readers are expected to hold in tension whatever felt useful from a former book now knowing parts of her life were in shambles, or shamble-adjacent, when she wrote it.
Was she lying before? Pretending? Obscuring? In denial?
I basically got this question for The New York Times‘ “The Interview” series and podcast, The Daily. David Marchese put it more delicately, but he basically asked if I was full of shit in Fierce, Free, and Full of Fire which came out three months before my marriage shredded. This was my response to his question: “Help me through my skepticism.”
“I wrote that book in 2018. In 2018, we were not at the apex of our crisis. A keen eye would have noticed in Fierce where I did talk about my marriage, one of the long sections was about our communication struggles. We were circling the drain around the same repeated patterns neither one of us could ever seem to break. But I have always said, David, that there is a difference between secrecy, which is generally marked by shame, and privacy, which is marked by discretion. Even the most public person deserves some privacy inside her marriage. So I understand your skepticism, and I will say I certainly did not know in 2018 what I knew two years later.”
That was true, but what was also true is that I employed a high degree of denial (which I wrote about extensively in Awake). What was also true is that I didn’t know what I didn’t know. What was also true was I was being actively lied to and gaslit. What is also true is I felt sure we would return to the better version of us; we’d weathered storms before. So the complex answer is that, to some degree, I was shrouding a failing marriage (even from myself) at the same time I was operating on what I knew thus far.
WRITER, GET TO THE POINT.
Most of us, for the most part, in most ways are doing the best with what we know at the time. Hindsight is blindingly clear but bears a marginal relationship to foresight. The unknown gaps in any given story are easy to spot in the rearview mirror:
Your community was toxic.
That belief system was manipulative.
Your friendships were codependent.
He was clearly having an affair.
Analysis is much simpler with all the facts in play, even obvious. So much so that it is tempting to cry foul on any earlier experience. And to be sure, sometimes a situation is a full-blown, all-cards-on-the-table shitshow that someone is hiding: debilitating addiction, a secret life, a violent partner. But usually, life unfolds one layer at a time, and we do our best with the layer we can see.
If you can imagine, I actually have a deeper point (writers are the worst):
Walking Awake into the wild made me a collector of your stories. It was like holding up a magnet that attracted similar plot points. Something I heard repeatedly was this: Tons of you know something true and real in your gut, and now it is time to do something with it. Your instincts have sounded a gong, which you can now hear plainly, and 2026 needs to be the year to respond to it with self-respect.
This was maybe something you only suspected, or perceived dimly before, something still hazy or rumbling at a lower vibration. It involved perhaps the opening notes to a song you couldn’t quite place earlier, one that started running in the background. But you are far enough into it now that you know what you know. Your inner wisdom has spoken, and you must decide if you will believe and trust yourself or not.
You are becoming, if you will indulge me, awake.
Let’s be clear: you can go right back to sleep. That is a choice. You can close your eyes to what you know, what is broken, what needs to change, what needs to be admitted. You can drift right back into slumber and sleep through the next year, the next decade. You can forfeit the better story day by day until you lose the whole next chapter. Change is disruptive, and thus a deterrent. Conflict is hard, and thus a deterrent. Necessary endings are painful, and thus a deterrent.
But what if you believed yourself? What if you honored yourself?
What if you admitted that you know what you know, you know what you need, you know what you want, and that deserves respect?
Not new year, new you.
New year, know you.
This can have a quiet energy. No need to panic and flail. Skip the grandiose resolutions and performative speeches. This is when you get gentle and soft. You aren’t “talking someone into something” or spending codependent energy to change someone else’s behavior, which never works, hasn’t worked, and won’t work. You aren’t shouting on a soapbox. No need for drama. Agency doesn’t require it. It only needs quiet priority legitimized by your own authority.
It isn’t that the previous version of you was a fraud. You were doing the best with what you knew. This is your first time to be a human person. Part of adulthood means evolving, which sometimes means things that served us earlier just don’t anymore. Or it means we have learned more, even more about ourselves. Circumstances and people and relationships and perceptions change, and bravely going with that flow will take us so much further than fighting the current against its obvious course.
To close the loop, the opening essay in Of Mess and Moxie, a book I wrote in 2017 with a very different life, was called “Unbranded”, and the thesis sentence was this:
“You don’t have to be who you first were.”
Updated for 2026: You don’t have to be who you were next. Or after that. Or three years ago. Or last year. When you know more, you can become more. And if we are doing this thing right, we know a little more every year. That is called growth. Maturity. Healthy evolution. Self-respect. Unfortunately it cannot be rushed. It can be sped up with intentional self-examination, of course, but some of it is a function of living longer, which you have.
Beloved, what will you do with what you know?
I can’t wait to watch your courage.