Hello and welcome. My name is Anna Mitchael. For two and a half decades, I have worked as a writer and editor. I’ve written quippy lines on your Starbucks cups. Stories for all kinds of magazines. Even books for celebrities. Once a month I moonlight as an advice columnist named Boots.
About six years ago I went to work as Deputy Editor of a national magazine. Pretty quickly, my inbox filled up with correspondence from women who were on a search I knew all too well—looking for hope, purpose, and some truth. For most of my adult life I had thought it was just me, that I was one of the unlucky ones who couldn’t figure things out. But then I understood: many of us were going in circles. Culture was offering more “answers” than ever before. Self-help and make-your-life-better masters, gurus, podcasters, and influencers were camped out on every corner of social media. Yet… none of their solutions seemed to last. We had been told if we could work harder and fix ourselves enough, life would feel better, but that promise had proven to be nothing but smoke, mirrors, and a formula for deep exhaustion.
I didn’t want to tell people how to live, but I did want to write about the experience of a search that ends well. I wanted to create a collection that offers truth.
The book that resulted is They Will Tell You the World Is Yours. It’s a collection of 85 vignettes that tell the story of a woman who decides she’s done buying what the world is selling, and the spiritual awakening unfolds from there. It’s written so you can go as deep as you want into the stories. Some days we want to feel, other days we only want assurance someone feels like we do. These vignettes are created for both. My hope is that in different seasons you can return and be struck by new discoveries in each. Writing about the spiritual life fundamentally altered my own, and now this is the only space where I want to create. Whether I’m putting together books, essays, or advice columns by a curious Texan named Boots, the threads that hold our lives together are what I am always working to weave into the story. I will never be the writer directing traffic and telling everyone where to go. I’m the one trying to catch fireflies in the glass, so people can come a little closer and, if they choose, go deeper into the complex, frustrating, rich, beauty that’s always swirling around us.