After my  27 year-old son Charlie died, my friend Elizabeth offered some solid advice. “Drive as little as possible,” she said. “I served on the board of two insurance companies and you are statistically at great risk while driving now.” 

I get it. In the weeks after Charlie died, I frequently got lost driving to places I knew and entire drives home I don’t remember. 

At every moment, we are all living under the influence of something. It can be grieving the death of a son and it can also be living under the influence of falling in love, or holding a baby, seeing a rainbow, or watching the sunset. We can be living under the influence of something painful that was said to us or the disillusionment of being a child of divorced parents who didn’t create safe spaces for the family to grow beyond the break.

 Writing under the influence is choosing to take whatever happens to you and write about it to find meaning, healing, and hope. We write to honor the ones we lost and we write to honor the pieces of ourselves we lost: our body, our worth, our intuition, our faith, our voice.  

We write to know the feeling of being held by a loved one so we can remember that feeling when we are lonely. 

We write to know the strength of our heart so we can remember it will keep beating on the days we feel weak.

We write to bring truth to our lips instead of taking a pill or drink. 

We write to remember that we are worthy, especially when our value isn’t reflected in the words or choices of the world around us.

We write to find our way home to the place where we can respect our story enough to write it down and respect our voice enough to speak it out loud.

As we write, we discover the roadmap back to ourselves and we pick up the lost pieces along the way until we feel whole again.

I'M BETSY 

I'm a writer, performer, mother, grandmother, and guide for women to retrieve the hidden parts of our stories. I am known for speaking about the “things we don’t talk about” but I do it in a way that makes you comfortable being in the conversation. 

I'm the author and publisher of multiple books, and a veteran filmmaker of several acclaimed feature documentaries. I founded Figaro Films, Inc. in 1998 to produce important films which inspire, enlighten, entertain and educate. And  in 2017 I created the platform Beautiful Infinity Books, a publishing collective. BIB offers workshops and retreats to incubate and develop the work of creators.

Born and raised in Indiana, I began my career as a producer/writer of commercials and nonfiction programming after obtaining a BFA in broadcast journalism from Southern Methodist University.  When I'm not traveling, I call California home.