MY NEWSLETTER NURTURING SEQUENCE Day 1: I’m a Former Coke Addicted Dog Walker Turned NY Times Bestselling Author Hey hey, Light Hustler. Thanks so much for taking my quiz and being open to hearing from me. I’m oh so aware of the fact that you have an insane number of messages competing for your attention. Yet you took my quiz, entered your email address, and signed up to learn more. I don’t take this lightly. In fact, I now see it as my obligation to compete against the other messages in your Inbox and stand out as something you want to read. I'll do this by introducing myself to you over the next week and then delivering weekly messages that I hope are both interesting and helpful to you. So here goes: I’m Anna David. I’m a former coke addicted dog walker turned New York Times bestselling author who’s determined to help other people share their darkness to find their light. Of course, I can’t help you share your darkness without telling you a little about mine. So here goes… I’ll never forget the day the woman whose dog I was walking told me that she no longer wanted to pay me my hourly rate of $15 since we’d agreed that I’d only be walking her dog for 15 minutes or so. When I explained to her that she lived 20 minutes from me and so the entire experience took me over an hour, she responded, “Yes, but look at it this way: I work at Paramount. And they pay me to be there. They don’t pay me for the time I spend driving there.” So that was it. I was demoted to $7 a day. I wasn’t in a position to complain. At that time in my life, my main activity aside from walking this woman’s dog and lying to my therapist was doing cocaine by myself, pretending to write. My drug use had gone from casual to serious to extreme rather quickly and I was at the point where, after long nights of doing coke alone, I would get so disgusted with myself that I would throw the coke away, only to then start jonesing 20 minutes later and dig it out of the garbage. After learning that I was actually willing to dig drugs out of the trash, I got smarter and started throwing my coke in the dumpster when the self-disgust hit. That’s when I learned that I was willing to dig cocaine out of a dumpster. So I got smarter and moved onto flushing it. Unfortunately, that’s when I learned that I was willing to just call the dealer right after for more. And if there was anything that disturbed me more than doing cocaine alone all the time, it was wasting money—especially when I was making $7 a day and plowing through my savings. I can’t tell you exactly what happened to me that day in May of 2000 when I woke up and called my mom to tell her I had a coke problem. Nothing horrible had happened the night before. Call it God. Call it being sick and tired of being sick and tired. All I know is I made the call and the following week I was in rehab. Getting sober was nothing like I expected it to be. And while the beginning of recovery was just about acclimating to life without white powder, Ambien and Amstel Light as fuel, the longer I trudged the road the more it became about getting out of my own way. Learning to do that changed my entire life—particularly my career. When I got fired from my dream job as an entertainment journalist six months into sobriety, I chose to believe what I’d been hearing in recovery circles—namely that everything was happening the way it was meant to. Instead of lamenting the fact that I’d been fired, I decided it was time to do what I’d been wanting to do since I was seven years old and had discovered, via the Guinness Book of World Records, that the youngest author was six: become a real writer. In recovery, I was able to take all the energy I’d channeled into blotting out my feelings and pour it into my creativity. Perhaps because I felt like I was making up for lost time, I accomplished an insane amount in my first 10 years of recovery—writing and selling two novels and four non-fiction books, writing for The New York Times, Playboy, Cosmo, Redbook, Time, Vice, Marie Claire, Vanity Fair and more and appearing on The Today Show, The Talk and The CBS Morning Show, among many other shows. I don’t say any of this to brag. I say it because I had no idea what I was capable of until I could clear away the wreckage I’d created. I thought, before I got sober, that the height of my success would be to land interviews with big celebrities and write profiles of them. I had no idea I’d write a book, let alone six, and that one would become a New York Times bestseller. Here’s my point: you are more powerful than you know. We all are. The problem is a lot of us put on some tainted glasses along our journey. If I learned to take my glasses off, you can, too. Maybe you’re not picking up shit for $7. But perhaps you have your own version of that. And I’m here to tell you that you can do more. I’d like to share with you some of the best ways I’ve found to do that, so expect an email from me tomorrow with those details. On that note, you’re going to be hearing from me a lot over the next week; I promise the missives won’t come as often after that. But I want us to get to know one another off the bat. Speaking of which, I’d love to know what you’d most like to hear about from me. Hit reply and let me know. Looking for Light in the Darkest of Places, Anna Day 2: We’re Only as Sick as our Secrets “I could never write about that,” she said. “People would judge it too much.” I was talking to one of my students. I can’t tell you how often I hear this refrain from one of them. It’s always after they’ve just told me about the experience they’ve had that meant the most to them— something inevitably disturbing or difficult. Right after expressing concern over being judged, they usually say, “But this is what I want to write about.” And it makes sense; when we’ve struggled with something and come out on the other side, it’s thrilling. We want to share it. We want to help other people find the solution we have. The problem is that it can be terrifying to share our darkness with the world. Who on earth wants to tell strangers that they suffered from abuse, have been crippled by anxiety, used to hoover cocaine or were suicidal over a divorce? We do, that’s who. And that’s because many of us have realized that the best way to release the shame around what we’ve long considered our biggest secrets is to share them. The relief that comes from sharing things we always assumed we’d take to the grave is one thing. But the relief that comes from sharing those so-called secrets with people we don’t even know is just about the most liberating thing I’ve ever experienced. Because that’s when I discovered that other people not only related but also that I was helping them feel less alone. Truth talk: Learning that others relate to some of my most horrifying experiences and feelings has, in fact, helped me as much as years of therapy. I’m not going to lie: it’s taken a lot of trial and error (emphasis on error) to find my people. But now that I have, I’m all the more motivated to find more. None of us want to feel alone. All of us are seeking a tribe. And we’re living in a wonderful time, when we can find tribe members all over the world—people who can love and support and relate to us simply because we’ve shared darkness that makes them feel their own release of shame. So, I urge you, if you’re struggling, share that with someone. It can be a loved one. But it can also be the big wide open world. I promise you that there’s nothing you’ve experienced that someone can’t relate to. You just have to give them the opportunity. When I did that, I not only found relief but I also found success. I’d always thought I had to show the world the perfect me. Turns out I needed to do the opposite to get the acceptance I’d always craved. I needed to be honest, even if that honesty meant sharing things that scared me. And I needed to find my people—and help them find me. Look out for an email from me tomorrow, where I’ll share with you an example of something I really don’t want to admit. Keep on hustling that light, Anna PS I also wanted you to know that I regularly publish posts on my blog.