My Creative Breakthrough (& Block)

Why I’ve been stuck trying to finish my memoir for 4 years (April 2025)

My whole life, all I’ve ever really wanted was to be a writer and to tell meaningful stories.

My mum groomed me to go to Law School. I was on the High School Debate Team, the State Debate Team, and the Model United Nations Assembly. I studied philosophy and was ready to put my preferences in for university when I had a dream at the age of 17.

I started having intuitive, psychic dreams around that age. I knew that I’d never end up working in a typical career. I knew that I’d have to carve out a path for myself because my dream job didn’t exist. I knew that I’d one day travel the world as a sort of storytelling journalist working on my own Humans of New York style projects, not for Time, Nat Geo, or anything like that. I knew that I’d write books and maybe even screenplays that weren’t novels but held a message meant to awaken humanity and remind us of our true nature.

There was always a sense that my career would be in the media realm, at the intersection of Philosophy, Transformation, and Storytelling – that my soul came here to have a big impact.

For most of my life, my vision seemed far too big for me to know what to do with. I didn’t know where to start or how to approach it.

I knew that I needed a lot of different skills and experience. I knew that I needed to learn how business worked. I needed marketing and branding skills. I needed to learn how to make money for myself, independently of any system.

I also knew that I needed to have a deep understanding of the human experience before I could write about it. So, in my early 20s, I made a pact with myself. Go out and live in the world, fully. Fall in love, travel, and work on yourself. Say yes to all of it and most importantly, don’t skirt around the edges. Go all the way into every experience so you can extract the wisdom.

One day, when the time is right, you’ll know when you have something meaningful to write about.

Then at the end of 2020, I spontaneously heard my intuition say, “It’s time to write the book.” A few days later, I saw one of my favourite authors, Neil Strauss, post to his mailing list that he was launching his first-ever mastermind, The Writers Roundtable. I knew I had to be in that group. The Content Emporium had just wrapped its first full year, closing on $166,000. The mastermind was $25,000 – a steep investment. But this was my chance to be mentored by a multiple New York Times bestselling author and a Rolling Stone journalist —the man who wrote one of my favorite narrative non-fictions, The Truth.

I applied. I was accepted. I was in, alongside 19 other aspiring authors.

I had no idea what to write about. I just trusted my intuition.

2021 turned out to be one of the most challenging years of my life. As the year unfolded, I found myself in a series of really interesting situations. Then I had a lightbulb moment. “The book is happening right now. I’m in it. The story just isn’t complete yet.”

I was given a true Hero’s Journey to embark upon and overcome. I manifested the perfect story arc with the perfect set of characters, challenges, insights, and ending.

I struggled to write consistently, show up to finish my pages, and felt like I wasn’t receiving the intimate support I needed in the group. So, I hired a one-on-one creative mentor and paid her $30,000 for six months of coaching and accountability.

By February 2022, I had finished my first draft. A relatively unreadable 85,000-word version of events that I wouldn’t be willing to share with anyone except a book coach or editor who could help me polish it into a more readable second draft.

A friend of mine introduced me to a Ghostwriter/Editor who claimed to have written 3 NYT bestsellers. When I told her my story, her jaw was on the floor, “Phoebe, I’m not blowing smoke up your ass but this is the best story to have ever come across my desk. It has all of the elements for a bestseller. If we get this right, you could be the Elizabeth Gilbert of the Millennial generation.”

Of course, this was exactly what I wanted to hear, so I paid her $22,000 to help me finish what felt like an impossible task on my own. I didn’t know what I was doing. There was no way I could do this story justice without proper help. She had experience. I didn’t. Full stop.

Working with her didn’t pan out the way I had hoped. I thought she understood the spiritual wisdom and nuances that were paramount to the story’s potency. In September 2022, she dumped a 65,000-word manuscript in my lap, right as I was heading into the launch of Human Design For Business. She had completely rewritten my story, the characters, and took out what made it emotionally deep, intricate, and ultimately what made it mine.

She turned it into a cheap Twilight, 50 Shades of Grey blockbuster where the men were villains and I was an annoying Carrie Bradshaw. She had completely removed the magic.

I was livid, but I had to get through our launches, so I put my life’s work on the back burner and vowed to return to it in 2023 after I’d made some money and bought myself some time.

In August 2023, I made a declaration. I would find a publisher and set a deadline so I could finish the book. I googled “how to write a query letter,” wrote one in a few days, and landed three different meetings with three different publishers – a self-publishing house, a hybrid publisher, and a traditional one.

I signed a publishing deal with the hybrid publisher.

But that same doubt came back to haunt me. I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing, and I was deeply afraid that it wouldn’t be good enough. So I reached out to someone I personally knew who had the perfect skill set to mentor me through the process. I paid him $15,000.

At this stage, I had already invested so much time and money into the book. I felt like I was so close, and all I wanted more than anything was to finish the project that I thought would give my life more meaning than anything else ever could.

I planned a 90-day book-writing sprint, set a mutually agreed-upon deadline with my publisher, and moved to Los Angeles to complete that chapter. You all know what happened next. I got mold poisoning, and it completely derailed my entire life. When I finally returned to health, my book coach became the source of a very public series of allegations and was effectively cancelled.

I was losing motivation, and I started to lose hope in my dreams.

Throughout the last 18 months, I had this intuitive awareness that something wasn’t quite right. “It doesn’t take this long to write a book,” I thought to myself. There had to be some kind of unconscious sabotage or protection mechanism at work. It was the only thing that made sense… but the external circumstances also seemed very… logical. Could it have just been a series of coincidences and bad luck?

Then, in December of 2024, I had my annual Psychic reading with Michelle the Medium....

“There’s a disconnect with the way that you’re approaching your creative projects. It’s like you want to get to the finish line so you can feel accomplished but that won’t actually give you the feeling that you’re looking for. You’re right to say it’s taken a lot longer than it needed to. This is because 95% of you doesn’t believe in yourself creatively. 5% of you does. The rest of you doubts yourself.”

“There’s also something you really need to let go of, that you’ve been resisting. This is a leap of faith moment. Come to the edge. Jump into the abyss. This act of faith is what creates the transformation. You can’t see what’s on the other side of the fog until you walk through the fog. You’ve got to trust that if you keep moving in that direction, something is going to reveal itself.”

I had a strong feeling that Michelle was talking about my brand and the current version of my business, The Content Emporium.

The Breakthrough

I met up with my friend Amy Rushworth for a poolside hangout in Bali. I mentioned everything that had been on my mind. She asked me what uncomfortable things I might be resisting, until the answer spontaneously emerged from within me, and suddenly everything became resoundingly obvious.

I was resisting the feeling that I didn’t know what I was doing. I admitted that I felt creatively inadequate and vulnerable about my writing.

“This makes total sense why you spent so much money on coaches and editors… you’ve been outsourcing your sense of trust within yourself. Financial lessons are often the most painful but obvious mirrors. Where’s your Chiron placement?”

Leo in the 10th house.

We both said at the same time, “Oh my god. Of course.” My wounding is feeling insecure around my creative self-expression, in my house of career, legacy, and public image.

Suddenly, I remembered one of the early astrology readings I had in October 2021. The astrologer looked at my chart and point-blank asked me if I was writing a book. I said yes and asked why. “Well, you have a placement that suggests that the process of writing this book heals you, and the process of publishing it heals the world.”

At the time, I thought it was because of the contents of the trauma I had healed and overcome. For a long time, I was so attached to the meaning of the story that I failed to see what was fundamentally more important – the creative process itself.

This is why nothing else was working.

This book is a spiritual initiation in my journey of self-actualisation – and it’s one that I’ve kept trying to bypass. This is a door that only I can walk through. This was never about the book itself. The book is simply a vehicle for me to overcome my creative insecurities, just like a business is a vehicle for us to overcome our belief systems about our internal power and what we’re capable of. It’s not about getting to the end outcome. It’s about being in the uncomfortable feelings as they arise and writing through them until they’re healed. It’s from this tender place that we truly liberate ourselves.

Then I had a penny drop moment – my Mercury placement is the exact same placement as my Chiron.

Of course, my career hasn’t taken off yet. I haven’t overcome my wounding. I’ve been splashing around in the shallow end of a swimming pool, teaching storytelling, communications, and content from my natural talents, but without the depth of having mastered the creative process. Suddenly, everything Neil shared throughout The Writers Roundtable made sense. I was so caught up in technical craft that I couldn’t surrender to the process itself. I didn’t trust that if I just closed my eyes and listened that I could channel the creative consciousness that pervades us.

I have walked this path in business, surrendering the meaning of what it means to make a million dollars, knowing that what fulfils you is the person that you become in the process – someone you can be proud of.

Now I must walk the same path in my creative career, surrendering my ego’s need for public recognition and acclaim, allowing myself to fall deeply in love with the process itself and finding deep joy not in the outcome but instead from the satisfaction of overcoming my vulnerabilities.

Ironically, it was once I gave up my ego’s need for the millions that my business did two consecutive 7-figure years. The person I became was an energetic match for that level of success. These are the laws of the universe. I know the same principle applies to creative work or anything else you want to materialise in your reality.

A few days later, I drove up to Ubud to have an in-person coaching session and hang out with my incredible friend, and notorious figure, Dane Tomas lol. Wizard, ISTA facilitator, Master of the Tantric Arts, Writer, Author, Marketer, Entrepreneur, coach, music producer, and rapper are all words to describe this legend of a human.

We went through an integration process to bring my Artist and Entrepreneur archetypes together. Then he gave me really practical advice – “start a blog!”

Share the journey of your writing process. This is so on brand for you. You’ve always shared what you were doing, what was working, your epiphanies and breakthroughs as you’ve had them… you’re just shifting the vehicle from business to creativity, but the through line is still the same. Start a Substack where you document how many words you’re getting down every day, the emotions and resistance that come up, how you work through it, etc.

Doing this will get people emotionally bought into the outcome and the journey. People want to see you pull it off. When you eventually launch this book, people are going to be so excited about it because they were there every step of the way while you were working through it.

The blog itself acts as marketing material, especially if you share snippets of your writing and excerpts from the book.

It creates a positive feedback loop where the behaviour of showing up to write gets positively reinforced on a much shorter timeline, so you’re motivated to keep going.

It creates public accountability. You’re more likely to follow through once you’ve made the public declaration and stay committed to the process. You won’t just drop off.

Creating content in this way helps move your brand in this new direction in a natural and authentic way. From there, financial opportunities will inevitably arise.

The sooner you start moving in this direction, the more alignment you’ll feel and the sooner everything falls into place.

TLDR: They say we teach what we come here to learn. I’m going to dedicate this next chapter to finishing the memoir/narrative non fiction that I wrote in 2021, documenting everything I learn about the creative process as I move through it. I believe that the undertaking of this process will lay down the foundations for my legacy (10th House) work.