What Rooted in Wellness reminded me about being in the room.

Last Saturday I was in Fairburn for Rooted in Wellness, hosted by Faithfully Fit Moms, walking a room of women through The Becoming Girl. I have been turning it over in my mind all week, and I want to write it down before the feeling wears off.

Here is what I keep coming back to. I wrote that workbook alone. Most of it happened at a kitchen table, early, before anyone else was awake. When you write something in that kind of quiet, you are guessing. You hope the prompt lands. You hope the question is the right question. You have no way of knowing.

Then you watch someone actually use it

There is a moment in a live session that you cannot manufacture. You give the room a prompt, and the talking stops, and everyone bends over the page at the same time. Nobody is performing. Nobody is trying to give the right answer. They are just writing, honestly, in a room full of people they may have met an hour earlier.

That silence taught me something I did not learn in three years of writing. Women are not short on desire to do this work. They are short on permission and short on company. Give them a quiet room, a real question, and other women doing the same thing beside them, and they will go deeper in forty minutes than they have gone in months alone.

And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another.Hebrews 10:24-25

What I am taking forward

I am going to keep writing, because the books reach women I will never stand in a room with. But I am done treating the live work as the side project. Something happens in person that the page cannot do by itself, and I want to build more of it.

To every woman who came out on a Saturday, gave me your attention, and let yourself be honest on the page in front of strangers: thank you. You gave me more than I gave you. And to Faithfully Fit Moms for making the room, I am grateful.

If you were there and you are still working through your book, keep going. The section you skipped is usually the one that had your name on it.

With you on the journey,
Autumn