What's It All About?

Permission to rewrite our stories

My book, The Ten Permissions, is coming out in the US in September 2025.

I started writing this book during Covid, when, like many others, I felt the urge to make something. I craved forward motion and found it in one word after the other.

It began as a brainy book, the distillation of a life spent working around the globe on human development. I approached it as a Professional presenting a new way to optimize human learning and growth in a disruptive 21^st century. I offered examples from decades of social development work, my language technical, my lens long. This was Work.

Until something happened. My parents passed away, one after the other. My father first from Covid and my mother roughly nine months later from cancer. I said goodbye to my father by video call, waving close-up at his gaunt, haunted face. Next to my mother’s hospice bed, I watched as her breathing slowed and the nurse confirmed her faint heartbeat had completely faded.

As you observe the dying, your brain flashes experiences like a highlight reel, memories at once comforting and relentless. Vacations and holidays and firsts and lasts and stand-out moments in the middle. A road trip mom and I took to Florida when she let me put the convertible top down even though it would mess her hair. When they both visited me in California decades later and we laughed our way down to San Diego as my father’s jokes rolled. How I relished his mood and their togetherness. You remember laughter, tears, shouting, tumbling, trembling. The times when your body registers the occasion.

In the days following her death, for so many days in a row, I sat in the skin of a sad little girl who felt like an old friend. That same aching stomach, a familiar urge to vomit out the pain. Questions instead of answers, a trembling voice where certainty once stood. An inner chaos I’d spent eighteen years learning to contain threatened to erupt.

I returned to this book for comfort and certainty and that sense of progress that had brought me here in the first place. But something was different now. This book was coming from my throat, not my head. Words spilled out with tears.

I guess you could say my parents had all the modern afflictions: depression, debt, anxiety. My parents’ story is uniquely sad. And it isn’t. They’d done everything right – played by all the middle-class rules, had all the middle-class stuff – and they died depressed and lonely.

Yes, losing a parent sparks existential wonder. My wonder was more about their lives than their deaths. Because for all the stuff they’d gained and lost during a life of striving for status and success, all that was left was an aching hollowness.

This book is a gift from my parents. My gift to them. Because of them I set out, searching for something I couldn’t name, longing for something I hoped to feel.

I wanted more happiness, more meaning, more contentment. I wanted permission to write my own story, to make my own rules. I don’t think I’m the only one.