#40 Secret work

In 2016, in a real dick move, a friend bought me a book for my birthday called Almost Famous Women about women who had almost done great things but totally crashed and burned right before their Moment. She told me the stories in it reminded her of me.

Five years later, in January 2021 a very famous person mentioned my book had helped her with her quest for sobriety, and this event in turn sold tens of thousands of books and made Quit Like a Woman a New York Times Bestseller. It was less than a year into the pandemic, I was finishing negotiations with the person who would eventually replace me as CEO of Tempest, fundraising a few million dollars, running a company that employed many people, and that month alone my work and Tempest’s work appeared in over 600 news stories. Which is to say, a lot happened that month and it was all pretty good. Then a lot of unwanted shit happened, and by April I was unemployed, and for many valid reasons I won’t list here, pretty certain my life had just…