If I made candles, this would be simple.
I'd pour them, label them, price them, list them. If someone didn't like the scent, they'd move on. It wouldn't mean anything about me. The candle is the candle. I'm just the person who made it.
But I don't make candles. I write books with my blood in them. I offer mentorship that runs on everything I've survived and metabolized. I built frameworks from the wreckage of my own unraveling and turned them into tools other people can use.
So when I put the work into the world, I'm not shipping a product. I'm shipping myself — packaged, priced, and handed to strangers who didn't watch me make it.
That's a different act entirely.
And here's what no one tells you about it: the vulnerability isn't in the making. The making is the easy part. The making is private, generative, alive. You and the work, alone in a room, building something true.
The vulnerability is in the price tag.
Because a price tag says: this is worth something. My time is worth something. What I know — what I've lived, what I've carried, what I've composted into wisdom — has material value. And I'm asking you to agree.
That's not a marketing problem. That's an identity negotiation.
I think this is why so many people who do deep work struggle to sell it. Not because they can't build a funnel or write a caption. Because the ask isn't "buy my thing." The ask is "see me, value me, and pay me for what I actually am."
And if you grew up learning that your worth was in what you gave away — your care, your labor, your attention, your body — then asking to be paid for the thing you do most naturally feels like breaking a rule you didn't know you'd agreed to.
It's not a block. It's a reclamation.
The way through isn't to pretend the work is separate from you. It's not. Your books are you. Your mentorship is you. Your teaching is the distilled, lived, hard-won you.
The way through is to let that be the reason it costs something — not the reason it can't.
The woman who charges for her medicine isn't betraying the medicine. She's honoring the years it took to carry it. She's saying: this cost me everything to learn. It's not free because it wasn't free.
That's not capitalism. That's reciprocity.
If something moved while you were reading — there's more where this came from.