Why My Next Book Took Me Nearly 10 Years to Write

A reflection on the last year and what led me here.

It’s wild to realize that another year is about to become a memory.

This one, especially, feels bookmarked—marked by moments I know I’ll return to again and again.

A solo birthday date at the spa. Staying at my mom’s house during the wildfires. Debating whether I should go to Lebanon amidst ongoing political crises… and choosing, last minute, to go anyway, which became yet another reminder of why you can’t let fear make your decisions for you.

And last—but certainly not least—writing my next book.

In February, I began laboring my next baby: Dancing With My Shadow: A Cosmic Call Back to Self.

At first, the intention was simple. I wanted to gather my research and lived findings around the shadow and its intersection with astrology—work that has been foundational in my own healing and deeply influential in my work with clients.

But it didn’t stay simple for long.

As I began writing, it became clear that this book was asking something much deeper of me.

It’s been nearly 10 years since my first book, Let That Shit Go: A Journey to Forgiveness, Healing and Understanding Love, was released. And yes—I’m still stubborn. I still hold onto things longer than I maybe should.

What I hadn’t fully admitted until now was that I’d also been living in a kind of writer’s block all those years. Not because I didn’t have anything to say—I always have something to say—but because I had a very specific idea of what my next book was “supposed to” be.

I thought it would be the magical, redemptive love story. The tale of finally finding the man of my dreams. The proof that enduring all the pain beforehand had earned me a romantic, happily-ever-after ending.

But that story never arrived.

Instead, I went to the Underworld.

I studied the patterns—my patterns. The unconscious behaviors that kept leading me toward familiar heartbreak. I faced the dragons I once believed were imprisoning me in a life I didn’t want, only to realize they were actually guarding me—protecting me from experiencing anything beyond what I had learned to survive.

My Major Arcana card for 2025 was The Devil, and I met the Devil this year more than once.

I met the Devil within.

The part of myself that distorted perception to preserve familiar narratives. The part that whispered old stories into my ear to keep me looping in cycles I was desperate to escape. The part that mistook attachment for truth, and fear for intuition.

The work I do with many of you is nothing I haven’t done with myself first. And I’m realizing now that so many of you have witnessed this entire journey in real time—through podcasting (which began back in 2006), my writing, my social media, my books, or simply my digital footprint.

Dancing With My Shadow is the culmination of that trajectory.

There was a part of myself that felt deeply ashamed to write again. Nearly 10 years after publicly sharing intimate, messy, and vulnerable experiences around love… only to still be single?

I told myself my voice had lost credibility. That I no longer had permission to speak about something that continued to slip through my fingers.

I felt like a failure.

But what I see now is that Let That Shit Go was my initiation—perhaps even a humiliation ritual—ushering me into what would become the most pivotal cycle of my life: my priestesshood.

Shortly after that book’s release, the mystic within me emerged. Because the journey I was truly on was never about finding a husband.

It was about finding myself.

Calling her back. Recovering lost pieces. Traveling through time, memory, and the unseen to finally arrive—fully—here.

What’s a greater love story than that?

I’ve long been on the receiving end of people’s projections. She’s pretty, charming, smart—she must have it easy.

People hate when you don’t look like what you’ve been through.

And when you’re an artist—something that took me a long time to reclaim—you cannot create without experience. Art is born from raw emotion, from visceral memories, from the imprints life leaves on your nervous system and soul.

To create, you have to live. You have to love. You have to feel the full spectrum so that you have something real to draw from later.

I’ve done that. And I’m still doing it.

Dancing With My Shadow won’t be another diary of my life. I’ve offered the public more than enough access over the years, and as I get older, privacy is something I hold with reverence.

What this book will offer is insight into what was operating beneath the surface—why the relational patterns you read about in Let That Shit Go kept repeating. The unconscious wounds. The inherited narratives. The self-sabotage. The fears.

The internal prison built in the name of safety—one that kept me protected, yet confined from the very life I claimed I wanted. A golden cage is still a cage.

And how astrology became the language that helped me name what my mind kept protecting me from seeing—revealing the cycles, archetypes, and timing of lessons I was living long before I understood them.

My hope is that this book finds its way into your hands at the perfect time—and that it becomes a springboard for the conversations I’ve been waiting to have with the public. Conversations that give us permission to be messy, complex, chaotic, and inconvenient.

Because only then can we understand what brought us here in the first place.

And finally, be free.

Xo