“Jay, you will be happy to know the book has exploded on Amazon! I can’t wait to read it.” Gloria's voice was bright with excitement. I pushed back. Bestseller lists didn't move me.
Gloria Horton-Young had just thrown a "Bingo!" on Mesa Fama's drop of Elizabeth Gilbert's old line into the stream: “Recognizing that people’s reactions don’t belong to you is the only sane way to create.” The words were blank to me, no spark. I was still lodged on the other side—the survivor side, the ground I know too well.
She came at me again. “Rise up and celebrate the change. Celebrate her success telling her story.”
I stayed stubbornly boxed in, arguing the wrong point: “I’m not her groupie. I don’t write Amazon charts.” I carried her words anyway, a cold, heavy, unavoidable stone in my pocket. I couldn’t drop or swallow them.
My notebooks filled with loops and arrows: success / survivor / list / too much.
Day one: I don’t get what she wants from me.
Day two: Why does this itch under my skin?
Day three: Maybe she’s pointing at something I can’t see yet.
Three days of circling that stone, and then it started to show its shape. Underneath was my own blindness: I couldn’t see success at all. Not in Gilbert, not in Doyle, not in the survivors, not in myself. The rulebook I’d inherited told me success meant numbers—badges, trophies, applause. Proof you can tally. And since I’ve never played that game, I couldn’t recognize what Gloria was holding out in front of me.
It took three days to realize the blindness wasn’t mine alone. It’s cultural. We can all name erasure, we can all trace the backlash, but ask us to call rawness success? We freeze. We look past it. We wait for charts and headlines to give us permission. The core longing we share is a desire to carry our own raw truth without shrinking it down. The success Liz, Glennon, and the survivors found wasn’t in avoiding criticism—it was in refusing to trim their stories to fit respectability. They simply insisted: This is my truth, messy and alive, and it stays.
Look around. Liz Gilbert’s so-called messy book is climbing anyway. Already moving across languages. Already passed from hand to hand. Glennon Doyle, Amanda Doyle, Abby Wambach: holding ground with a podcast that won’t sanitize, a tour that sells out, a book that stands unpolished. The Epstein survivors: denied again and again, so they write their own list. A ledger against silence.
None of that fits the old success story. That’s the point. This is no longer the story of erasure. It’s the story of what happens when you decide not to shrink and expand anyway. It’s the story of rawness turned into triumph, too much becoming exactly enough.
So now we’ve got this question sitting here: what do we even call success when it looks like this? The words mocked as indulgent are the ones pulling the crowds. The passages sneered at are the ones being translated. The testimonies shredded in court filings are the ones still standing.
That’s where the old rulebook starts slipping off the table. The one that said: numbers first, polish everything, play nice, shrink down. That book is falling apart page by page. What holds steady is something else entirely. The voice that doesn’t fold. The story that stays as it is. The presence that refuses to vanish. In German, we say “wir können uns alle eine Scheibe davon abschneiden”—we can all take a slice of that. A slice of the courage to let discomfort sit in the room. A slice of the refusal to be tidied away. A slice of the reminder that wholeness isn’t earned—it’s already here, even in grief, chaos, and contradiction.
Gloria saw it before I did. She wasn’t asking me to clap for bestseller lists. She wasn’t waving pom-poms. She was pointing to Gilbert’s choice to hold her story whole, messy, untrimmed. That was the success. Her success. And Doyle’s, and Wambach’s, and the survivors’. Each one framing their own, each one saying "this stays."
It took me days to hear it. Days to burn through the noise in my own head. Days to stop arguing the wrong point. The culture loves to tell us what success looks like. We were trained to call that success. Taught to measure our worth in tallies. And still, what people are showing up for now has nothing to do with that. They show up for the messy book that still gets carried. They lean into the podcast that doesn’t smooth its edges. They repeat the list the courts wanted buried.
You can’t chart that kind of success. You feel it. You know it in your gut. You see it in the way people lean closer instead of away. It lingers longer than any ranking ever could.
Wholeness is not marketable, and yet it sells anyway.
The rulebook was theirs. The win is ours.
The old stories told us rawness was punished. A new story is being written: rawness wins. These figures aren't the exceptions; they are the ingredients for a new recipe. A success that doesn’t come despite imperfection. It comes through imperfection.
I am standing on the precipice. I am about to jump. This feels like coming out again. Before as lesbian, now as whole. Both times I circled the truth for years before stepping into it. Both times the leap was necessary to live authentically. I am able to tell readers from my own inner perception: you can do that and it will free you. This is about a narrative. It is about taking a story of my life that has been a cloak forever. Something I've worn that has molded itself into my body and is comfortable. It's so familiar I know where every single seam is, where the zipper is not working as it should. It's time to let it go.
This isn't about a single win. It's about learning to live without apology, messy and whole. It’s about practicing the stance: it stays, I stay, as I am. This isn’t just an essay; it’s my body’s sense of standing on the edge, about to jump, to live without the cloak. The full embodiment will take time, but I'm about to jump, so, so big.
Now, here's my question for you.
Where in your own life are you still playing by someone else’s rules?
What would success look like if you stopped shrinking?
How might you create your own version of "this stays"?
Because what looks like too much to the world is often the exact ground for a lasting triumph. The victory isn’t in trophies or tours. It has everything to do with living by your own rules, no apologies, until the culture has no choice but to notice.
Thank you for walking this path with me.
In case you missed “part one” of my take on the pushback against Liz Gilbert go, read it here:
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