If we take that small step, there's always another we can take, and eventually a goal thought to be too far to reach becomes achievable. -Ellen Langer, professor of psychology at Harvard. (The first woman ever to be tenured in psychology at Harvard).

Welcome to July! “I love how summer just wraps its arms around you like a warm blanket.” ― Kellie Elmore

I like Monday’s newsletter to be uplifting and inspirational. I like to give you ladies something to grasp onto for the week - something that’ll keep you going when things seem hard. I wasn’t sure I could provide that this week, given the news. But then, writing about my experience with my abortion, my daughter and her uncertain future, I couldn’t help but find hope for my own sake. And I believe we need hope right now. We need to stay positive if we’re gonna fight.

In 1976 Tenzin Palmo traveled to India to seek enlightenment. For the first six years, she was in a monastary.  The only woman among 100 monks, she found even the most enlightened men were discriminatory towards her gender.  “The monks were kind, and I had no problems of sexual harassment or troubles of that sort, but of course I was unfortunately within a female form. They actually told me they prayed that in my next life I would have the good fortune to be reborn as a male so that I could join in all the monastery's activities.”   Unable to receive the true Budhist instruction and experience she hoped to find at the monastary, she left to seek her own spiritual instruction. She found a cave in the Himalyayas 10 feet wide and six feet deep and locked herself away in uninterrupted, intense spiritual practice. for 12 years.   In the course of her retreat she grew her own food and practiced deep meditation based on ancient Buddhist methods. In the summer months supplies were delivered from Keylong and she grew turnips and potatoes nearby. She stockpiled for winter, for when the cave was snowbound. In accordance with protocol, she could never lay down, sleeping upright in a traditional wooden meditation box for just three hours a night. For the first nine years, she occasionally took trips away from the cave, while the last 3 years were spent in strict retreat – meaning total isolation and silence. She survived temperatures of below −30° Fahrenheit and snow for six to eight months of the year.   After twelve years she left her cave and started her travels around the world. When asked what she gained for living so many years in a cave, she said: "It’s not what I gained, it’s what I lost."

We are locked inside our brains, cut off from the present moment, always centered on something beyond our reach…But what’s happening right now is ‘it’ and it’s the only ‘it’ we have. The rest is just fabrication. -Tenzin Palmo

In 1973, after working 20 jobs by the time she was 23, Barbara Corcoran was working as a receptionist for the Giffuni Brothers’ real estate company when she co-founded The Corcoran-Simonè company with her boyfriend, who loaned $1,000. The business plan was simple: to start a tiny real estate company, selling apartments in New York City. She split from her boyfriend after he told her he was going to marry her secretary and then formed her own firm, The Corcoran Group.   During this time she began publishing The Corcoran Report, a newsletter covering real estate data trends in New York City. This gave her the publicity and clout to help her brokerage grow as she was believed to be an expert in the real estate market.   “I sat down and collected all of our eleven sales for the past six months and I added them all together and divided by eleven. I then took that average and presented it as the average price for a Manhattan apartment. The media ate it up.”   After running the business over twenty years, in 2001 she sold her business to NRT for $66 million.

Lily Tomlin

No one could ever accuse Rita Mae Brown of having lived a boring life. The bestselling author of 37 books is nothing if not versatile: feminist activist, mystery writer, lesbian pioneer, screenwriter, novelist.   Born to an unmarried teenage mother and her married businessman boyfriend, she was left at an orphanage, then retrieved and raised by her mother's cousin and her husband. After being expelled from University of Florida (at the time it was racially segregated) for participating in the civil rights movement, she hitchhiked to New York City and lived there between 1964 and 1969, sometimes homeless, while attending New York University where she received a degree in Classics and English.   She was involved with the Student Homophile League at Columbia University in 1967 but left it because the men in the league were not interested in women's rights.   She then took an administrative position with the National Organization for Women, but resigned over comments by Betty Friedan seen by some as anti-gay and by the NOW's attempts to distance itself from lesbian organizations. Brown claimed that lesbian was "the one word that can cause the Executive Committee [of NOW] a collective heart attack.”   In the early 1970s, she became a founding member of The Furies Collective, a separatist lesbian feminist collective in Washington, DC. The women wanted to create a communal living situation for radical feminists. The group purchased two houses, where they lived together and used consciousness raising techniques to talk about things like homophobia, feminism, and child rearing. Brown was exiled from The Furies after a few months and the group dismantled in 1972, a year after its inception.   She eventually moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, where she lived briefly with actress, author, and screenwriter Fannie Flagg. They later broke up due to, according to Brown, "generational differences", although Flagg and Brown are the same age.

I think I’m a pretty optimistic person but today I feel completely defeated. I know being a writer is tough, and for years I’ve sustained myself on the dream - that if I keep going, keep writing, one day I’ll support myself with it. But there are days, like today, when I’m tired. Tired of the conference calls and emails. Tired of getting up early to write. Tired of worrying about having to send my daughter to nursery school so I can have some extra time to work on this dream that only I care about. It would be so much easier to just give up. Do my 9-5 and forget the dream. But then I find a passage like this. Some quote, some words, so ray of light that’s strong enough to illuminate the heavy darkness that’s overcome me. And while it’s still a heavy day, it helps lighten it. So I’m putting it out there, hoping it helps some of you dreamers out there.

I took my daughter to the pool this weekend, which was a bigger event than it sounds. I’ve never been totally comfortable in a bathing suit, but add the pregnancy weight and recently sprouted back acne, and my mild anxiety had turned into absolute dread. But the excitement of seeing my daughter experience water (not in a bath) outweighed my pain. When we got there I kept my head down, slipped my cover up off and made a beeline to the shallow section. Then I saw her. A beautiful blonde around my age, holding a baby Emmy’s age, hair up in a messy bun, revealing a tan, perfectly smooth back. She was wearing a one piece with one of those big slits through the side, exposing a toned torso. My heart sank. I tried not looking at her, on focusing on my daughter, but I couldn’t help comparing. She’s beautiful. I’m disgusting. But then, like the voice of an old friend, a quote from The Book of Moods popped into my head. ‘You’re not pretty like her, you’re pretty like you.’ Another woman’s beauty is not in replacement of my own. That’s right, I thought. I felt better. I stopped worrying about her and started focusing on my life in front of me. Then, moments later, I felt eyes on me. When I turned around the beautiful girl quickly turned away, but not before I noticed she now she had her hair down, like mine. Maybe it was a coincidence. Or maybe, I thought of that Diane von Furstenberg quote, ‘You see the woman across the room, you think, She’s so poised; she’s so together. But she looks at you and you are the woman across the room for her.’ I felt the insecurity and shame leave my body and a feeling of power and pride replace it. That’s the magic of quotes. The right words at the right time have the power to alter our thoughts. And our thoughts alter our moments. Over the course of five years, I collected over 100 quotes and phrases, like the ones above, that worked their way into my psyche and wrote a book around them. The Book of Moods is a collection of all those important words every woman needs to hear and it’s on KINDLE SALE TODAY FOR $1.99. Even if don’t need a new book, for $1.99 it’s worth it just for the quotes. LINK IN BIO TO PURCHASE.

It’s gonna be a good month. Say it. Believe it. #welcometojune

In 2006, Ann Patchett gave the commencement address at her alma mater, Sarah Lawrence College. She spoke of her own time attending college, feeling lost and alone, to line cook to teacher to waitress and, eventually, to award-winning author. The speech offered such hope and inspiration for anyone at a crossroads, whether graduating, changing careers, or transitioning from one life stage to another, that it was adapted into small book titled, What Now?