I've Written Four Books
in a Messy House

I've made millions of dollars in a messy house, too.

I moved house last month. And thrice since the move, sitting amidst our boxes, a woman I love rattled off some version of this mantra: "You can't create content, write books, think clearly or be successful with a messy house." This morning, as I write this, I feel called, led, and assigned to come against this lie of self-optimization culture.

Listen, I've raised three neurodivergent children over the last 34 years. The littlest one is only 8, she's an artist, and she's not only sensitive about her shit, she is prone to "pebbling" — meaning, she leaves little bits and bobs of tiny weird shit all over the place. They are love offerings, art and artifacts of her hyperactive, hyper-magical mind. And the more she loves you, the more of them she leaves for you.

I feel very, VERY loved indeed, because all over the house and particularly on my desk, she pebbles me with: shells, purse-sized pony figures and leaves, decapitated purple bamboo flowers, pictorial grocery lists in her own hand, black Barbies with thick thighs dressed in clothes she made out of a sherpa-lined slipper sock she cut into pieces, and masterpieces like this headless black baby doll entombed in my $60 Voluspa candle — she said she was trying to make a mummy, and she gave me the head separately.

A love offering — the mummy, entombed in a $60 Voluspa candle. The head came separately.

I reached into my bag at the sauna the other day and got a handful of seaweed Londyn had left in there from our morning dip in the Atlantic two days before. Baby Goddesses ain't tidy. Tidy must be taught. And to teach tidy without instilling anxiety in either student or teacher? That learning curve is long.

Now — imagine the picture I just painted for you, times three children, over 34 years.

And during these years, I self-published two books, traditionally published two more, built my own newsletter to 58,000 people and grown another email list from 45 million people to 120 million people in two years — all with organic content and no paid advertising. More recently and more importantly, during these years I also moved to Portugal to raise my baby goddess, healed from a crippling autoimmune condition and healed from multi-generational trauma, while buying a 12-bedroom surf guesthouse to turn into Casa Creatress™.

But as we were moving into our new family home, a little jewelry-box of a compound by the beach here in Portugal, one friend urged me to get unpacked as fast as humanly possible on grounds that "you can't write until your house is clean."

"Listen," I said. "Maybe you can't."

But if I had to wait to do things until I had a spotless house, I would never create anything. Ever. I've had kids since I was 16. So the state of my home has not been 100% under my control for the vast majority of my adult life. When you have multiple neurodivergent children, and you are neurodivergent, too, and you live in large homes, and you employ other humans to help manage your homes, messy moments — even messy seasons — are par for the course.

Now, some would say this is an excuse. They'd say that everything is about priorities. And with this, I agree. That's exactly why I never say I don't have time. Because I do have time. Just not to clean.

I choose creating over cleaning, 99% of the time. The housekeeper will come, eventually. At some point. (Probably.) And I own my choice with pride. Because I made that choice as part of a commitment not to participate in self-silencing things. The lie of culture and capitalarchy that says I "must" do anything but sit down and write before I can sit down and write? These are self-silencing things.

Accordingly: unsubscribe.

"But my mom instilled the fear of God in me to keep my spaces tidy, so it gives me anxiety when they are not," one friend shared. "That's why I live in small spaces, and just don't have much stuff."

Babe, listen, I thought. If you like it, I love it. But as for me and my house? We love space, and we love stuff. Not all stuff, but beautiful, fine, inspiring stuff. Like the black and white Dior dresses I bought in Paris and Cannes when I first started to make real money that look like Christian Dior himself descended from the spheres and sewed them onto my body. Like the 3x5 index card I had the presence of mind to ask my grandmother to write her sweet potato pie recipe on when I was 30, and have taken all over the world with me since.

I have a clinical-level addiction to fine paper goods. Gilt-edge notecards and letterpressed things. Stationery. Journals. And I fill 'em up. The Faber-Castell XB pen x Clairefontaine notebook combo is so fast and buttery and specific — it's the only combo I've found to date that can keep up with the speed of my mind. So I adore them. And the thirty-something journals I've filled this year are sitting on a table right now in my pool house.

I have a glassware fetish, too. My Weck jars with their fussy orange rubber seals and metal clips. The little green glass wax seal presses I bought somewhere in the world. These vintage, iridescent shot glasses I bought here in the village for 50 centimos by the each.

If you have a lot of stuff and a lot of space, keeping things tidy isn't a quick one-hour task you can bust out before you start writing. It's a long game, played in baby steps and big leaps.

So you can see why, to my mind, the "fear of God" they instilled in us about cleaning is some overseer shit. I used to have it, too. My Dad was a Marine, with a racial respectability complex so intense that my parents used to obsess over the identicality of the spiral hedge angles in our front yard. It was like that.

The more unmasked and committed to full self-expression I've become, the more I see that capitalarchy wants us cleaning, not creating. It's one way they keep women quiet.

Think about it: When you have a big bolt of inspiration come in, but you turn your head and see a pile of clothes, your conditioning tapes play this False Prerequisite PSA: "You can't write until the pile of clothes is gone."

Now, if that pile of clothes and tidying it allow you to open up the mental space and work out the kinks in your body that allow the flow to flow? Go head on, then. Procrastivity, the ADHD docs call it. But if you condition your ability to write dependent upon having a pile-free, tidy house, what happens after you deal with that pile? You find another pile. And the new pile becomes another false prerequisite. Then, by the time you deem your house clean enough to write? That electric bolt of inspiration is gone.

Pre-pile, your writing could all be so simple. But you had to (clean and) make it hard. Why do we do it? I'm convinced that we do this because the radically delicious words and perfect paragraphs that were burning a hole in our pocket before we saw the pile absolutely terrified the fuck out of us. Who we might be or become if we let all of that out, and what that would require of us? Deeply, truly horrifying.

But those ideas that are so pure, so whole, so powerful and that come through as vessels or transmissions? They're not yours to fuck around with. I call them Gifts from the Goddess.

Miss Jill Scott talked about this on Scott Evans' House Guest podcast the other day. She shared how the lyrics for her song "And I Heard" were delivered to her perfectly, fully formed, in a dream. "It woke me up and I sat straight up in the bed. I got some paper, and I just started writing, and it didn't stop. I didn't have to question. I didn't have to go back and erase. I didn't have to do anything. It came out as a fluid, 100% fact."

Not only did Spirit move her to capture the song, she also was moved to sing it the next day at the House of Blues, even though her band had never rehearsed it and had to improvise through the whole song. Prince happened to be there that night — and came to her dressing room after the set. Then Stevie Wonder showed up, too, and asked why everyone in the parking lot was so entirely, thoroughly and completely lit — the audience had emptied the club and was outside singing the song together as one.

Prince told Stevie about the song, then Prince began singing the song and its rhythms, verbatim and with 100% accuracy, even though he'd just heard it once. Even though she'd just written it the night before. Her dressing room turned into a once-in-a-Universe cypher, with her band circled around, Stevie Wonder beatboxing, and Prince singing her song. Magical, musical heaven. Come to think of it, she even talked about how Prince was wearing all white that night and how his pants looked like they were made of angel feathers and made an angel feather sound as he walked.

As she told this story, Ms. Scott described this moment — without hesitation, multiple times — as the "best night of my life."

Now, at my house, we watched this podcast — RAPT and ENRAPTURED, I TELL YOU — with one of my friends who said that "you can't create without a clean house" is Universal law. And I know it's true that many women take creative hiatuses when they have young children at home. Lauryn Hill did. Shirley Horn did. Even Miss Jill Scott did, as she shared in another segment of the podcast.

I created more commercial content — courses and programs, emails and such — in the ten years I had with no kids at home. But all four of the books I've written to date were written with kids underfoot. And having done it both ways, I would be remiss not to mention how many of the prolific creatresses of the previous generation, like Dolly and Gloria (RIP), chose not to have children and, by so doing, also chose not to have children's messes.

But imagine if that song lyric had come to Jill Scott in the middle of the night, and she told herself that she couldn't write it down until she first cleaned the house. Imagine the inner turbulence that would have blocked her creative flow if she were constantly trying to instill the fear of God in her child, instead of trying to dial up his glow. Imagine if a parent had done that to her, so that she had anxiety any time the conditions in her home were not perfectly tidy.

She would never have written that song. And she would never have had the best night of her life with Prince and Stevie Wonder. And we would never have had the gift of this wildly inspiring story we're talking about today.

The friend who was over watching this podcast interview with Londyn and me is a white jazz musician, so I felt moved to share a bit of Black music lore with her after we finished watching it. In Black-landia, Prince is often talked about as The Ultimate Channel, and I mean that in the most metaphysical, cosmic, Universal way. He was prolific as an artist and performer, but also as a songwriter. Legend says he was able to be so prolific because many of his songs just came to him perfect, whole, and complete — the exact same way Jill Scott described that song coming to her.

Michael Jackson once famously said this is why he got up and recorded songs in the middle of the night, because "if I don't act on my ideas, God will give them to Prince."

In her book Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert said something very similar. She told how she had received a very specific, complex fictional plot that took place in the Amazon and was working on it when life got in the way for several years. Before she could get back to the project, she had lunch with the writer Ann Patchett.

She began to outline the plot of the novel she was currently writing. As she spoke, the hair on my arms stood straight up. The blood rushed out of my face. She was describing my book. Not a book similar to mine, but my book. She was describing the exact plot, the exact characters, the exact setting, and the exact themes… I knew with absolute certainty that Ann had not plagiarized me. How could she have? I had never told a single soul about the plot of my book… We had simply both been visited by the same disembodied, energetic life-form of an idea.

Her take was identical to MJ's: "If you don't act on an idea quickly enough, or if you neglect it, it will leave you. It will go find someone else who is ready to bring it into the world."

In some ways, this should take the pressure off. The Goddess wants to create, through you, in whatever domain your gifts lie, the creations that would acquire what I call Territory for the Queendom: head space, heart space, calendar space, actual real estate.

But should life — or your need to have a tidier home than you have now, in this moment — impede the flow of the Goddess-sent creations that are trying to course through your bloodstream and out onto the page? She will get them created another way, or through another creator. That's good for the Queendom, bien sûr. But if this takes place more than one time, or even frequently, it will begin to feel like you are silencing your true, sacred self. Because you are.

If you do this a lot, you'll start to feel like your mind and your Notes app is a Good Idea Graveyard. If you do this so frequently it becomes a habit, it will start to feel like a growing gap that, by the time you're 50, becomes a gaping crevasse between your big self and the big dreams that would change your life.

And if you happen to have kids and you repeatedly delay creating what you want to create because your house is messy, you'll begin to feel like said kids are responsible for your unlived life. And that's what Jung deemed the greatest burden a child can bear: the unlived life of their parents.

And this was very, VERY fucking intentional on my part. This has taken place by my sovereign decree and executive decision, over and over again. I decided to unsubscribe from false prerequisites for creating. And so I did. A clean tabletop is all the square footage I need to acquire territory for the queendom with my pen.

To my mind, "the fear of God" is far less than my fear of the Goddess getting bored of waiting for me to clean, and sending my bold, beautiful idea to a more willing writer.

So this morning, at 7:45 am, on my clean desk, in a clean-but-half-unpacked house, today's creation games begin.