A few years back, my then-sweetheart and I drove up and hiked a bit of the Tahoe Rim Trail. I’m pretty athletic and the hike wasn’t super difficult. So I was surprised to find myself out of breath un…

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I read something a while back about why ADHD brains never quite age the way other brains do, and I’ve never looked at myself or the other A-List women in my life the same way again.

The writer argued that most adults are fully formed in terms of how they relate to the world somewhere in their early thirties. Their tastes harden. Their opinions calcify. They stop asking new questions. They stop falling in love with new things.

They’re just… fully cooked.

But what I call A-List, aka neurocomplex brains… simply never stop.

We never stop asking why. We never stop diving down rabbit holes or following delectable golden threads.

I know you might see this as a liability. Because the culture told you it was. Since kindergarten, you might even have been describing yourself to yourself as scattered, distractible, inconsistent or REALLY desperately needing to get your shit together at some point very soon.

But those are the exact qualities about us that keep us licking the plate of life, high on life and deliciously, radiantly, gloriously alive at 40 and 50 and 60 and 80 and beyond.

We’ve never lost the part of us that knows how to be lit up by the smell of rain on the sidewalk or electrified by a question we cannot stop turning over in the back of our minds.

That energy is your inner goldmine. It will make your life rich in every way.

It doesn’t come with an expiration date. But it does come with a warning label.

This wack-ass culture has been trying to convince you that you are divergent. That you should be more like the Serious, Successful White Men: the ones with logical, linear minds and paths, firm authority and hardened tastes.

When we decide this is the proper path, we slowly stop trusting the part of ourselves that could immediately access enthusiasm when we were 8.

And if we let that happen, our status as timeless and tireless, birthless and deathless, shrinks and slinks underground.

We start performing Responsible Adult Human.

And whatever you create from there is beige as fuck. Interchangeable cog shit.

No bueno.

Because if that’s what you’re creating, not only will THEY (waves hands) not love it.

You won’t love it, either.

Whatever ‘it’ is.

This is why we have to come back, on purpose, to the things we loved as children. Over and over and over and over again.

For continuous re-ignition, which is the only reinvention A-List women ever need.

I know this firsthand.

Because years ago, my then-therapist said something to me that I took so seriously I messed around and changed my whole entire life.

She said: “It’s never too late to have a wonderful childhood.”

That single sentence kicked off two decades of healing, adventure, and becoming for me, and counting.

Two decades of re-membering — putting the dismembered parts of myself together, guided by what I loved before anyone told me who I was allowed to be.

I want today’s prompt to do that for you.

POD #7: Ageless Brain, Timeless You

Step 1: List 11 things you loved as a child.

Not what you were good at. Not what you got praised for. What you loved.

Don’t think too hard. Whatever comes up first.

Example:

Things I loved as a child:

• The smell of the library

• Doing creative projects that mixed eg history and art

• Learning

• History

• Cooking with my grandmother

• Memorizing the lyrics to entire albums

• Playing music

• Learning dance steps

• Reading

• Shopping for clothes

• Eavesdropping on adult conversations

Step 2: List 11 things you loved DOING as a child.

What did you do for hours, where time disappeared? What were you the queen of?

Example:

Things I loved doing as a child:

• Reading under the covers with a flashlight

• Roller skating around the neighborhood

• Making tapes of myself being a TV pundit

• Lying on my grandma’s rug reading labels on the jars

• Getting dressed up

• Singing

• Climbing trees

• Pretending to be a teacher

• Pretending to be a business lady

• Giving speeches

Step 3: Cross out things you did ONLY because you got external attention, affection or approval for doing them.

The piano lessons you took because everyone said you were so talented. The dance recitals you only liked because your mom got teary at them. The straight-A report cards you only chased because your dad pinned them to the fridge.

Be honest. If you wouldn’t have done it without the audience, cross it out.

Step 4: Cross out things you did ONLY because the adults in your life rewarded you for doing them.

The chores you got an allowance for. The “good behavior” you performed for treats. The volunteering you did because it looked good on the application. The instrument you practiced because there was a stipend at the end.

If the reward was the reason, cross it out.

Step 5: Cross out things you know for sure you are happier not doing now.

Maybe you loved running, but your body has told you in no uncertain terms that those days are done.

If you know in your bones you are happier without it now, cross it out.

Step 6: What’s left?

Circle what is left.

Look at it.

Sit with it.

That, my love, is a map to your timelessness: the keys to the glowing, golden electricity within your true, sacred self.

The ultimate reparenting flex is this: Can you protect, steward and invest more of your time and energy into these activities and endeavors this time, instead of slowly starving them of your life force?

Integration Time

Now.

We’ve spent seven days writing. You wrote your breakthrough story. You met your self-repression styles. You put your personal law on trial. You followed your success clues. You named the payoffs of staying quiet. You reclaimed your disowned parts. And today, you remembered what you loved when you were five.

Did you detect any through-lines?

See any golden threads?

What themes showed up across all seven days?

What parts of you did this Challenge return to you?

You don’t have to answer me now, though you can, in the Chat or in the Comments.

But just consider the Integration seeds planted.

Tomorrow, I’ll send you one last integration prompt to wire your week of expansion into your cells.

This Challenge ends today, but your Writing Practice should not.

The 7-Day Writing Challenge runs every month inside The A-List. Same rhythm. Fresh prompts. New version of you each time.

Whether you come back next month or not, here’s what I want you to know.

However late your diagnosis might be, you have lost no years.

And you are not a lost girl.

You are timeless and tireless.

Birthless and deathless.

You are poised and powerful.

Radiant and a magnet to wonderful things.

They now flow to you in wonderful ways…

Under grace, over calm seas.

The Divine Genius Plan for your life now comes to pass.

The revolution will be Substacked.

Uranus just moved into Gemini for the first time in 84 years. The planet of revolution and disruption just landed in the sign of writing, communication, voice, and how we think.

On Substack, you can transform your rabbit-holing and hyperfocus into your own powerful platform for speaking, saying and transmitting whatever you came here to do.

The golden window of opportunity is wide open.

But most women will build their Substack entirely wrong. That’s why the average Substacker quits on week 9 or 10.

If you’ve been wanting to start a Substack of your own — or you started one and stalled out, or you’re already there but it doesn’t feel anything like the way I’m describing mine — don’t miss my LIVE Substack Workshop for Gifted, Neurocomplex Women this Wednesday, May 6th at 8 am PT, 11 am ET, 4 pm London.

This is a 2-hour live convening and transmission where I’m going to share:

• Why the revolution will be Substacked, not Instagrammed, LinkedIn-ed or YouTubed — and what that means for women like us specifically. Why this platform rewards what your brain naturally does, while every other platform has been asking you to be someone you’re not

• The exact 5-day playbook I used to take my new Substack from 2 paying subscribers to 31, and to #4 Rising in Business on the platform — with no ads, no funnel, and no stressful launch

• Why Substack is the right racetrack for your feral Ferrari brain — the neurobiological case for moving your work here

• How to set up your Substack so you’ll actually keep showing up — not on willpower, but on what gives your brain dopamine

• How to think about paid vs. free — why it’s essential to get traction rapidly, and how to do that in a way your brain will actually follow and enjoy (versus burning out trying to perform another launch the Business Bros’ way)

• The new lens I’ve created for women over 40 that turns your Human Design chart into your platform, voice and visibility plan — NOBODY ELSE is teaching this, y’all — because it’s incredibly detailed and nuanced. But it also shifts the entire field.

The workshop is $100 standalone (hit reply to this email if you want that enrollment link) — OR you can get in as an exclusive member benefit for paid subscribers to the A-List ($11/month, $111/year, or $197/year for the Daily Ritual Inner Circle).

Subscribe to Save Your Workshop Seat →

If you subscribe to any A-List paid tier today, you’ll get instant access to the other days of this 7-Day Writing Challenge PLUS a ticket to Wednesday’s workshop AND ongoing access to everything else inside the A-List.

This is your window.

Don’t let this be another time when you were ahead of your time and somehow still missed the boat.

Subscribe to Save Your Workshop Seat

I’ll see you Wednesday.

Head up + heart out,

TNK

I know you’ve experienced those moments.

Where you know exactly what the aligned action is that you want or need to take.

You know what you want or need to say, who to ask, what to ship, what to charg…

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All of your inner dynamics, complexes, emotions, and experiences have a purpose, a goal and a job to do.

That is why I never want you to shush, hush, slay, or mute your inner voices or emotions, no matter how unwanted or uncomfortable they are. It always backfires anyway. And that part of you was trying to do a job within you.

Catch this: We want every part of us — every emotion, every unwanted thought — we want them to carry out their full career within us.

When we see what they need us to see and receive what they have come to give, they dissipate naturally.

By the same token, anything you desire to do and are not doing has a payoff too.

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The online business guru industrial complex is riddled with 30-somethings hawking success rules.

I have a policy of eating the meat and leaving the bones of these things. Because I do appreciate the energy of that stage of the lifecycle… and because even a clock is right twice a day.

One of the things that I keep hearing Business Bros say is: Success Leaves Clues.

And that’s the truth.

But this means something very different to me at 50 than they think it means.

Because in your 30s, you’re really just getting started.

So when they say SUCCESS LEAVES CLUES, their next step is to look around at other people who they see as successful, find the clues and try to apply them to you.

But by the time you hit 40 or 50, SUCCESS LEAVES CLUES hits very differently.

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There’s a story you’ve been telling yourself about yourself your whole, entire life.

You don’t even hear it as a story or a thought you are thinking anymore. It’s more like a trance — a steady, low-grade thought you’ve been thinking for so long that now it’s thinking you. And in the process, it’s creating a pervasive backdrop for how you understand the world, what you think is possible in the world and how you be in the world.

You’ve been thinking this story for so long that it feels like a law of the universe or an inarguable fact. Like gravity. Or your address. It just is.

In today’s prompt, we rewrite this story.

Here’s the audio of today’s prompt:

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Here’s the audio of today’s prompt read by Tara, followed by the text:

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Here’s the audio of the first prompt of our first A-List 7-Day Writing Challenge, read by Tara, followed by the text:

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Step One: Make sure you watched the Mini Course for the Challenge, here.

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Catch this Principle: NATURE ABHORS A VACUUM.

That’s why vacuums dr…

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WELCOME.

I’m so glad you’re here, doing this self-valuing thing together with me and the others here on the A-List.

In my lineage, the difference betweeen habit and ritual is intention. So let me state mine for this Challenge, here and now:

My intention is that you release the pressure of pent-up expression you’ve been holding inside, and that you do it with vast self-compassion.

My intention is that, as a result of your participation in this Challenge, you come to know more about your true self, love your true self even more than you do now and align your thoughts, decisions and actions to be ever-more congruent with your true self.

The space you create in your chest — the unwinding that you feel happen as you write — is your Inner Pipeline opening up to receive what wants to come to you and through you today and for as many days as you’re willing to keep writing for yourself and for your life.

I intend that this practice will build your inner muscles, take shackles off your voice and become a lifelong, beloved ritual you turn to for refuge and ignition.

In the hours before this inaugural A-List 7-Day Writing Challenge commenced, one of the very first people who ever took my Writing Challenges, way back in 2016, dropped me an email.

It was just one sentence.

And it read:

Without further ado, here’s to you reclaiming the most precious part of every day — before anyone else can get to you.

I’ve recorded this Mini Course on The Daily Ritual of Writing for you.

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