Last year and the beginning of this year gave me a lot to sit with.
For two quarters I felt led to move differently. Quieter. More still. More intentional about letting the Holy Spirit lead me instead of rushing to understand everything. That is not a natural setting for me. I am a builder by temperament and an auditor by training, and both of those want to solve the thing immediately.
I never stopped creating. I was quietly filling journal pages with what the Holy Spirit was putting in me, pulling out of me, correcting in me, and helping me see differently. Patterns. Questions. Convictions. Things I needed to release. Things I needed to stop carrying. Things I had normalized for years without ever really examining.
Then I looked at what I had written
At some point I realized I was not just journaling anymore.
I was auditing my life.
That word is not decoration for me. I spent years in auditing professionally. An audit is not an accusation. It is a careful, unhurried look at what was actually spent versus what was actually recorded, and the whole discipline rests on one idea: you cannot manage what you have never counted.
What I found in those pages was a ledger nobody had ever asked me to keep. Grace given, over and over, freely. Grace acknowledged, almost never. And a balance that had been quietly accruing against me for years while I told myself it was fine, because naming the cost felt like admitting the giving was not pure.
Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts.Psalm 139:23
What the book actually is
Somewhere in those pages, The Good Girl Tax was born.
It is a loving audit of everything you give for free. The understanding. The second chances. The benefit of the doubt. The emotional labor nobody logs. The time you gave because you were the one who noticed first, and noticing became your job by default.
Let me say clearly what it is not. It is not a book about becoming harder. Your grace is holy, and I am not asking you to spend less of it. I am asking you to stop pretending it costs you nothing, because a woman who will not count what she gives cannot tell the difference between generosity and depletion until she is already empty.
This is a different kind of book from the workbooks. The workbooks help you process what you feel. This one helps you see what it has been costing you.
Why this one feels different to me
Because I was creating things to serve other women while God was quietly doing a deeper work in me too.
I did not set out to write it. I set out to be still, which I am not naturally good at, and the book is what was underneath the stillness. That is usually how it goes. The thing you were avoiding looking at is the thing with your name on it.
The Good Girl Tax is coming soon. If you want the free worksheet, an excerpt from the book, and word when it releases, the waitlist is open here.
Bring your ledger. We are going to go through it together.
With you on the journey,
Autumn