Stacey Lindsay is a journalist and author whose work has always centered on one thing — creating the conditions for people to tell the truth. As a girl, she watched Diane Sawyer, Maria Shriver, and Christiane Amanpour on the news and felt the thread pulling her toward that work. Years later she took the risk to follow it. Her early career as a journalist took her out into the field — everything from covering tornados in Oklahoma to driving through southeast Kansas talking to farmers and veterans. She has spent her life listening to other people’s truths. This book is the first time she turned the journalism on herself.
What she noticed as a journalist, and then as a woman entering her forties, was a gap. A season of life where women are releasing what hasn’t been working, questioning the lies they’ve been carrying about their worth, their lives, their possibilities. A season that didn’t have enough honest storytelling around it. She writes about feeling a “perpetual homesickness for my own truth” and that feels like the wound underneath this book. The reason she had to write it. The writing became the healing and the road back to truth.
What struck me and what I keep returning to through the arc of this season is how this book invites us past the surface of concepts we hear constantly but rarely interrogate fully. Patriarchy. Worth. Identity. Stacey’s journalism takes us deeper, so we can actually reckon with our own liberation.
Reading this book felt like meeting a collective of women who had challenged the status quo, with each story Stacey pulls together as a paradigm-shifting reimagining of what is possible in our lifetimes.
What she built is not a self-help book. It is not a how-to. It is something rarer. A mirror held up by a journalist who has spent her whole career in the room when people finally say the thing they haven’t said out loud before. And this time, one of those people was her.
Her mother told her at fifteen: don’t lose your identity. Never lose your identity. What Stacey witnessed in the years that followed became the quiet center of everything she built. This book feels like a dedication and a calling to awaken what has remained unlived.
This conversation goes into the territory this show was made for — what it costs to contort yourself to fit the stories you were handed, what starts to shift when you stop, and what becomes possible on the other side of that reckoning. For Stacey, for the women in this book, and for all of us who recognize ourselves in it.
Her formation as a journalist and the career she built before she turned the lens on herself
The reckoning with having contributed to the very narratives she is now questioning — the binary thinking, the patriarchal ideals, the capitalism she helped fuel
Her mother’s story — the warning she gave Stacey at fifteen, the life she couldn’t hold onto, and what witnessing that did
The invisible inner prison — what patriarchal conditioning actually feels like from the inside, not as a definition but as a lived experience
Why ambition isn’t disappearing — it’s being redirected, and the difference matters
Work that becomes extractive, and what it means to build boundaries not to do less but to protect what actually feeds you
The Autumn Queen — the mythological archetype missing from our storytelling, the one that lives between mother and crone, and why its absence has been anything but accidental
Money, worth, and sweat equity — the conversation women have been conditioned out of having
Relationships she stayed in longer than she should have and what she would tell her younger self now
Social media and the subtle, relentless ways it erodes self-trust
What the writing process actually looked like and why finishing this book required the same faith she is asking her readers to find
The season of life she is in right now, and why taking care of herself is the most important thing she can do for everyone she lovesStacey Lindsay is a multimedia journalist, writer, and editor whose work has spanned television, radio, print, and digital media. Known for her warm, empathetic approach, she has interviewed hundreds of public figures and civilians on topics like spirituality, health, civics, politics, identity, art, sexuality, women’s equality, and work. Her upcoming book, BEING 40: The Decade of Letting Go—and Embracing Who We Are, is out May 5th.
Pre-order BEING 40: Bookshop.org or wherever books are sold — audio, e-book, and physical editions available
Stacey recommends buying from an indie bookstore or Bookshop.org if you can.
MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE:
Valerie Reign — coined Patriarchal Stress Disorder and the concept of the invisible inner prison women carry
Steph Jagger — women’s coach and writer who introduced Stacey to the concept of the Autumn Queen as the missing archetype
Dené Logan — author, therapist, and facilitator who names this phase the Enchantress — a season of deep embodied knowing and return to self
Julia Cameron — The Artist’s Way and the practice of morning pages
Adrienne Rich — “Until we can understand the assumptions in which we were drenched, we cannot know ourselves”CONNECT WITH THE TRUTH IS
Instagram: @thetruthispodcast
Substack: Kathryn Flaschner
Hosted by Kathryn Flaschner
Production & Editing by Anton LaPlume
Music by Will Savino — wsavino.com
Visual Identity by Sarah Gainor & Jonathan Bush
Advised by Natalie Tulloch
Topics: midlife women, reinvention, women’s identity, female ambition, patriarchal conditioning, women and work, self-worth
