The business authored the woman and the woman authored the business. You grew up together, fused, and you are more spectacular than you would ever have been without it, this vehicle for self-expression and cash and culture-making that let you become someone you couldn't have become any other way. So when the experts tell you to separate yourself from your work, they're asking for a limb (no thank you). You have the book, or the following, or the mission with a name and a waitlist, or all three, and from the outside it looks like you made it, because you did. From the inside, you haven't had a weekend that was actually a weekend in years, you rewrite your copywriter's caption at 11 p.m. because if it doesn't sound like you it doesn't go out (of course it has to sound like you; it is you), and every time you picture a sabbatical you also picture the whole thing coming apart without you. And when you're exhausted and can't picture your life without it, the experts call it burnout, or boundaries, or a nervous system to regulate. Some of it is (I'm a self-help girl, I'd never pretend otherwise). AND a huge chunk of it is a cost you've been paying since the day you went public, and it has a very long history.

In nineteenth-century France, a femme publique, a public woman, meant a registered prostitute. In Victorian Britain, the Contagious Diseases Acts let police in garrison towns name any woman they suspected a "common prostitute" and force her into an internal examination, and a respectable woman had nowhere to rest, eat or use a lavatory in London's West End until the department stores gave her a reason and a place to be out. And in the colonial Congo, a woman living on her own in the city was called a femme libre, a free woman, and from 1929 she paid a special tax, on the presumption that any woman without a husband must be selling herself.

Three countries, three different centuries, and the same logic underneath all of it, which comes straight out of the founding documents of liberal democracy. The whole system rests on a split between public and private: the public sphere of politics, money, ideas and power was for men, and the private sphere of the home, the body and the family was for women (the political theorist Carole Pateman wrote a whole book on how that split was built, The Sexual Contract). So a woman in the public sphere was out of place by definition. She was transgressive, and a transgressive woman was fair game: for abuse, for degradation, for attack, for fines. We are still having that fight, everywhere. It's the bathroom debate (who counts as a woman, and who gets to be in public as one), the mother told to cover up while she feeds her baby, "what was she wearing," and the pile-on that starts in a group chat you're not in.

Every woman who leaves the house pays some version of this tax. The Public Woman pays the extreme version, because she has made herself the public thing: her face on the sales page, her name on the spine, her prices posted where anyone can argue with them. So she braces. She checks every syllable, redoes her team's work, stays reachable, never lets anything slip, because a woman in public who slips is fair game. After enough years of bracing, there's no woman left over at the end of the day, only the business. The flip side is that she's also the woman in charge of her own destiny, making the cultural intervention, making the impact AND making the money. (None of which makes the tax easier to bear. If anything, the more you win, the more they think you owe.) That's the Public Woman Tax, and it gets charged on the very things that make you powerful. Everything they use against you (your visibility, your prices, your body, the fact that you and your business are one and the same) is a source of power, which is exactly why it gets attacked. You don't have to give any of it up. You get to grow a self bigger than the brand, so the business becomes one magnificent expression of you instead of the only one, and the tax stops costing you your life.

The tax is still collected. It's the stranger who comments on your arms under a video about pricing strategy. It's the podcast host who's your biggest fan, and who also wants you on the show so they can psychoanalyze you in public (and you're supposed to be ever the good sport and happily say yes). It's the pile-on that starts in a group chat you're not in, led (because of course it is) by a woman who took your course and kissed your ass… until. It's rewriting your copywriter's caption at 11 p.m. because it doesn't sound like you, because everything is you. And almost everything sold to women at your level is leadership development: executive presence, delegation frameworks, the CEO mindset, a retreat with a sound bath. Some of it is useful (I've bought plenty of it, sound bath included). All of it misses the part that's actually costing you, which is that you're a woman in public, and a woman in public gets taxed. That pressure is the whole reason you went looking for support in the first place, and the coach, the therapist, the retreat and the leadership program each worked on everything except the pressure.

And then one day you hit a wall. The model that built everything, the one that worked so well for so long that you taught it to other people, stops working. The launch that used to sell out in a weekend limps. The book doesn't land like the last one did. You do all the things (you invented half the things) and the numbers just sit there, and you can't fix it with more Facebook ads, because it isn't a business problem. It's existential. You ARE the business and the business is you. It made you and you made it, and the two of you have been joined at the heart for so long that when it stalls, you don't know who you are.

Most women get out of that by making the work the villain. Suddenly they hate the thing they built and want to burn it all down and move to a farm (there is always a farm), because hating it is the only permission slip they can find to leave. Daughters do the same thing to their mothers, and we all do it at the end of marriages. It costs you the best thing you ever made. There's a grown-up version of the separation. It's called individuation, and it's at the heart of everything I teach: you are more than your work (and your work is SPECTACULAR), and you get to keep making it (bigger, if you want).

The most conscious women I know have a name for the wall. They call it an ego death, and they treat it as a spiritual juncture: the retreat, the ceremony, the new teacher, the year of sitting with it, the caption about sitting with it. The pain is real and so is the growth. But the crisis was provoked by the business and by an identity fused to it, and no plant-medicine circle can separate you from a business you go home to on Monday. What you're in is a crisis of individuation, and it has a way through.

That farm fantasy runs on black-and-white thinking we were handed: either you're the private woman on the off-grid alpaca farm, or it's your name in lights on Broadway and you belong to everyone. One of the great delights of public womanhood, once you've individuated from the business and the brand that (yes) made you, is that you get to have both. Your name can be in lights, and your Sundays, your body, your marriage and your mornings can stay entirely, gloriously yours.

One of the steepest Public Woman Taxes is all the parts of yourself you weren't allowed to experience. While the rest of us were faffing around in our twenties, you were growing an empire from scratch, and the empire needed you serious, credible, appropriate and available. So when the private woman finally gets some air, she goes looking for what the tax took: a whole new face, the brand-name luggage, the hot boyfriend, the push-up bra, a life-altering experience in a cave or a temple. Whatever the comments say, none of this is about beauty standards, ageism or the male gaze. It's about the fact that you've been adulting since you were eight, you've spent the last twenty years building the business, and you never once got to be ridiculous. Get it, girl (the private woman is collecting her refund, with interest). And you don't have to random your way through it, one cosmetic surgeon, two shamans and a regrettable boyfriend at a time. It's predictable. It has a shape, and I can show you the shape before you're in the middle of it. There's a process, and there's someone to hold you through it, unafraid of anything you want to reclaim. So we do it on purpose, as part of the work, and the woman you get back is the one you actually want to be.

You make everyone around you better. Your team, your clients, your readers, your friends, the women coming up behind you, the assistant you hired at twenty-three who now runs your whole operation. You see their potential before they do, you hand them the opportunity, you hold the vision when they lose it, and you do it so well that everyone assumes you don't need it back. There's almost no one doing it for you. The people around you look to you, and the people you'd look to are busy being looked to. That's the gap I fill, and I am very, very good at it.