What ideas did you INHERIT about recording your life experience?

And what do you do with a decade of your own written thoughts? I’m sequestering myself in this hotel room for the next 24 hours to find out…

This weekend, I packed up a suitcase full of journals and headed to a hotel. I’ve gifted myself a writing retreat to make some progress toward my book which I am scheduled to turn in a couple of months.

Did I mention I’m writing a new book?

Yes. It’s called The Rest Revolution, and it will be out in late 2024/early 2025 on Wiley Press.

I’m thrilled to be working on this book which will synthesize my findings on how so many of us are redefining work, rest, and ambition in this post-pandemic (if we can call it that) era.

A little background on the book.

The pandemic did a number on me. It did a number on us all. But for me, I was wrestling with the reality of rearing a newborn baby, navigating my busiest season in business, and protecting myself and my family members from a deadly virus.

It was 2021. I was running a cohort of high-achieving women through my Package Your Genius Academy personal branding program and during our weekly coaching sessions, they’d all share some version of the same refrain:

“We’re exhausted…”

On top of our goal to explore new career directions, purpose, and build our personal brands together, it became clear that another very real mandate of my work had become helping my coaching clients survive the Great Exhaustion.

I pitched an essay about all this to a few publications. I reached out to The Atlantic, Vox, and The Washington Post.

The Washington Post picked it up.

The resulting article created a viral moment that helped me connect with even more exhausted women. More people reached out to share their stories. I was invited to discuss the piece on a podcast. Organizations invited me in to speak.

I realized that while the article captured the overarching sentiment shared by my cohort members, it only scratched the surface. I had conducted nearly ten hours of interviews for the piece which was barely 1000 words. So many critical parts of this conversation were omitted to make the piece fit into my assigned word count. I had so much more to say.

One article was not enough.

I voiced my desire to write a longer work and, in a departure from my normal approach, I spoke it aloud. I told others that I wanted a book deal. I shared the intention. I pitched more essays on different aspects of rest to keep reinforcing my new swim lane, and landed a few more bylines.

I wrote about how Black women were exhausted with selling ourselves on social media for The Huffington Post.

I explored how I want my kids to rest and not be workaholics, but am not sure if I can let go of the “work 2x as hard” message that’s been passed down from Black, Brown and immigrant parents for decades. When my children are growing up in a world that is still solidly racist and sexist, can they afford to take their feet off the gas? Will I regret not pushing them to build a stronger work ethic? I wrote about all of this (again my word count only scratched the very very tip of the surface) in an op-ed that appeared in the Los Angeles Times.

I kept pitching and writing with the hopes of landing an opportunity to go longer on this topic.

I kept penning pieces with the goal to write a full-fledged book.

And that offer finally came.

Wiley loved my idea and got behind it. We inked a deal in 2023 and I’ve been working on what this larger work will say and ultimately mean for me as a writer.

Which brings me to this hotel room with a stack of journals that represent the last decade of my private thoughts. I’m grateful to have a written record of my pandemic experience and the Cliff Notes for my life that extend even further back. I’m re-reading passages to jog my memory on some of those sleep-deprived seasons when the only way I could manufacture enough energy to drag myself from one day to the next was to power myself up through the pen.

These pages are so sacred. Overflowing and full of connections. Like this entry from 2021 where I recognized - in retrospect - the symptoms of my parents’ burnout.

Or this entry on how exhausted I felt carrying the mental load of parenting and Zoom-schooling teens during the pandemic while trying to also adopt the mindset of gentle parenting.

It’s kind of like reading notes from the frontlines of burnout - the daily situations, frustrations, and minutiae that all lead to exhaustion. I’m so grateful to my former self who had the foresight to record her experiences for a time such as this!

So to answer the question posed at the beginning of this post, that’s what I’m doing with a decade full of journal entries. I’m spending the next day combing through these pages looking for clues and themes to inform the structure and content of my book.

Wish me luck!