She is one of those women who I wanted to be instead of me (when I was younger and less enlightened, of course!).  In 1992, we toured at the same time- she with her best-seller The Beauty Myth and me with The Woman’s Comfort Book.  I’ll never forget being made up to go on some Washington D.C. TV show and having the make-up gal go on and on about how Naomi had just been in the day before and how she hadn’t needed any make-up and how beautiful she was (it may have been lost on this woman that Naomi was appearing on this very show to talk about how women are imprisoned by the beauty myth).  I sat in the make-up chair and felt like a pimply adolescent- here I was, needing a whole lot of make-up, appearing to talk about a subject that often strays into talk of bathtubs and candles.  Even though I had written my book from a profoundly feminist viewpoint, I so wanted to be a beautiful intellectual talking about feminism, about meaty subjects…

Some of you know my story of seeing and slowly accepting my "soul deliverable" the term Molly Gordon coined for what you can’t help but do, what you can’t help but offer the world (except when you get in the way and think you should be offering Naomi Wolf’s gifts). I remember writing the first book proposal for The Woman’s Comfort Book as if I were an intellectual or Ph.D. therapist and having it rejected by every publisher.  When I went back to my original one page of scrawled notes and wrote the proposal from those- which I thought was far too easy- I wrote a book that has been helpful to hundreds of thousands of women. 

Coming to accept who I am and what I offer- well, isn’t that the work for so many of us?  Given this history, I was curious to read this article about Naomi’s life changes.  I felt so connected to her struggles and had to laugh at where she is now- where I am (not with Jesus but with everything is okay and there is a divine plan, etc.) What a lovely reminder of how the work of accepting ourselves and our path never stops, even when it is so radically not what we want or what fits our idea of ourselves.

Let’s talk about "too easy" next (no, I’m not talking about sex!)!