When the book you're writing is writing you

What happens when the transformation you're promising others has to move through you first

Dear Friends,

I keep saying the phrase “this book has been writing me” every time I talk about my book and the wild journey it’s been taking me on for the last three years.

I have a feeling every non-fiction writer will agree with me that once the seed of a book’s concept has been planted in you and you agree to be the channel for the message, your life goes into a vortex where the ideas start shaping you before you can even start putting them on paper.

The transformation you are promising others, has to first be embodied by you. Sounds lovely, except, transformation means going into the dark chrysalis that will reveal all your shadows so they can be seen from all angles. Once you see them, the devotion to self asks you to integrate those shadows into your being so they can guide you into the state of feeling whole. Whole, as in embracing everything you are, including those shadows we’d rather not identify with, and not apologizing or minimizing any aspect of what makes us an imperfect and divine human.

Writing a book is a spiritual process of transformation.

Writing in the most radically honest expression, asks us to embody what we preach.

Embodying our messages before we put them out into the world is starting to feel like a radical idea in this era of performative guru talk on every single platfom known to mankind. It’s so easy to have a brilliant surface-level thought, throw it into your favorite AI app and have it create a deep thought beautifully designed to share for likes.

IT IS SO EASY.

What is not easy, what requires surrendering over and over again, is to sit with that brilliant thought, let it simmer as long as it needs to and understand how it manifests in your life. To get honest with it. To question it. To discern it from every angle. Yes, to embody it.

What do I mean by embodying a thought?

It’s when there’s congruency and alignment between your thoughts, your words and your actions. It takes radical honesty with yourself to take that level of inner inventory.

Expertise is what you've studied. Embodied wisdom is what has moved through you.

This might feel controversial for some to read, but for me, writers on any platform have a responsibility to embody what we teach. There’s a difference between sharing our process, our ideas and thoughts as they come to us with the transparency of this is what I feel and how I’m living with this emotion. It’s a whole other to package it as an expert lesson when we haven’t yet fully sat with the depth of the transformation the lessons are meant to deliver.

I’ll share a concrete example of this. In December 2024, I was deep into writing my book, Done with the Hustle. The book is structured into 14 chapters, plus an introduction. I finished chapter 7 and had perfectly planned my time to finish the other half of the book by my contracted deadline of April 30th, 2025. I was on a roll and the following chapters were on the topic of community and I considered myself such an expert after 15 years of designing and nurturing one of the most prolific and loved communities for Latinas.

Easy peasy, I thought, and flew out to El Salvador and Mexico with my daughter to spend the holiday break with friends and family.

On January 7 2025, the Palisades fire started and it was shortly followed by the Altadena one. Both communities where we had deep ties having lived in Palisades and in the San Gabriel Valley, where Altadena is located, for a few years each. For days, I would open my Instagram to learn of another friend or community member who had lost their home, business or been evacuated.

All of Southern California was activated and being affected in one way or another. In my mountain village of Idyllwild, we were constantly on alert and without electricity because of the threat of fires being put out all around us for weeks. Needless to say, I wrote nothing that whole month.

And then, my company, #WeAllGrow, started going up in flames. For more context on that, you can read this post, but in short, the attacks and dismantling of DEI programs by the incoming administration directly affected us, so I had to make the immediate decision to close down the company I had founded and led for fourteen years. The company that represented the whole definition of community for me. The company that was not only my livelihood but my identity and how I moved in community.

My publishers asked me to pause the writing and focus on the transition of the company and, ultimately, on the transition of self I would experience in the process. To grieve the losses and the betrayals and move through the portal of change with presence. My editor very wisely told me that I would eventually pour all of it into the book.

Almost six months later, I was finally able to face the manuscript. I opened up the file and looked at the outline to find the chapter that was waiting for me. It was titled: The Power of Sisterhood. When one grows, we all grow.

Uff. I just sat and stared at it. The meaning of sisterhood had shifted for me. The meaning of the phrase I coined and so many women aligned their hearts with, “when one grows, we all grow” had expanded for me.

Staring at my computer screen, I understood that the whole process of detangling from the hustle this book was taking me through, had its own timeline that could not be rushed because I was being transformed in the process. And I had to allow that to happen. To remove the concept of a perfect timeline or preaching concepts I was learning through research and the lived experience of others without deeply integrating them myself.

Or in the case of community, where I clearly had expertise, allow it to dismantle so I could usher in a new era of a deeper meaning of community where the “we” includes me.

I could teach community. It took losing mine to understand it.

That’s when I realized: This book had been writing me just as much as I’d been writing it. And if I were going to write this chapter with total honesty, it couldn’t come from a polished, performative place. It had to come from the middle of the mess; from the muck of the ache and the letting go. But most importantly, it had to come from an embodied place, where my lived experience meets my truth, as imperfect as that truth may be. In honoring that truth, the last thing I could do was write a book about disengaging from the hustle while still being tangled up in it myself.

So if you’re in the middle of something that refuses to move on your timeline, let it do its work on you first. I’m learning to trust that the thing I’m making is also making me, and that’s the only way any of it comes out true. Ya casi estoy del otro lado, dear ones, and I’m leaving the door open.

Tell me in the comments or via email: what are you in the middle of that's refusing to move on your timeline? I want to know what's writing you.

Con amor,

Ana Flores 🌹