A Four-Week Guide by Dorothy
I am Dorothy. The morning I was married, my mother pressed her Bible into my hands and told me what I was for. I was eighteen. It would be sixty-two years before my life became my own.
The Freedom Years is the book I wish someone had pressed into my hands instead. I wrote it the first winter I lived alone. Now I am pressing it into yours.
The complete guide, and the audio read aloud in my own voice.
$19.90 for the first 50 copies — one time, yours to keep, with a 60-day promise.
Then I did not write this book for the woman you were told to be. I wrote it for the one underneath — the one who is still there. She is the reason you are reading this. I know, because she is the reason I am writing it.
What I Found, Late
I will be as honest with you here as I was in my story. When the years finally came that were my own, I did not feel free. I felt lost.
The first winter I lived alone, I stood in my kitchen one evening and could not decide what to make for my own supper. Sixty-one years of a man deciding the shape of my days — and the muscle a woman chooses with had simply wasted in me.
So I learned it back the way you learn to walk again after a long illness: one small, frightening decision at a time. And as I learned it, I wrote it down — in the order I learned it. Not theories. Not scripture. The plain, ordinary steps, from the first small choice to the morning I knew my life had become my own.
That is all The Freedom Years is. Not a book about freedom — the path I walked, written down, so that you do not have to find it in the dark the way I did.
What The Freedom Years Is
I did not write a book to be read in an afternoon and set down. I wrote a hand to hold — for four weeks, because that is how long it took me, one week at a time, to believe my own life had become my own. You do one small thing each week. That is all that is ever asked of you.
Week One
We begin where I began: with supper. With the cup of tea you actually want, the chair you actually like, an hour of a day spent the way you would spend it. They sound like nothing. They are not nothing — they are the muscle. This is the week you begin, very gently, to use it again.
Week Two
Every time you reach for something of your own, a voice will tell you it is selfish. I know that voice. It was put in you by someone else, long ago, and it learned to sound like your own. This week we learn to recognize it — and to let it speak without obeying it.
Week Three
Before you were a wife, a mother, a member — before you belonged to anyone — there was a girl who leaned toward things. Who wanted, and noticed, and loved particular things for no reason but her own. She is not gone. This week we go and find her.
Week Four
A life is not only the absence of what hurt you. It is something you build — a morning that has a shape, work that is yours, people who know your name. This week we look, without fear, at the years in front of you, and we begin to fill them.
By the last page, choosing will not frighten you anymore. It will simply be yours.
How It Comes to You
The Freedom Years comes to you in two forms, and you do not have to choose between them — both are yours.
Set in large, clear type, because I know how the eyes tire at our age. Read it on your telephone, on a computer, or print it onto paper and keep it by your chair.
Every page, read aloud in my own voice, for the evenings when you would rather be told than read. So many of you came to me through your ears. I did not forget that.
It arrives the moment you finish, by email. There is nothing to install, nothing complicated — nothing that asks more of you than opening a message. And it is yours to keep, for good. Not borrowed. Not a subscription. Yours.
Everything That Comes With It
I have kept this simple, on purpose. I do not want to hand you a great pile of things — a pile is only another way of being overwhelmed.
What It Costs
Four weeks of sitting with a good counselor — and I did sit with one, and I am grateful — would cost you many hundreds of dollars. This is not that. It is the next best thing I know: the whole of what that counselor, and twenty years, and a great deal of grief taught me, set down in order so that you can begin tonight.
Regular price $49.90
The Founders' price — for the first 50 copies only
I priced it low on purpose, and I will tell you the true reason. I am eighty years old. I would far rather this book be in your hands, helping you, than sitting in a drawer with me, helping no one. That is the whole of it.
This price is held for the first fifty copies only. After the fiftieth, The Freedom Years becomes $49.90 — and it will be worth every cent. But if it is meant for you, let it be yours now, while the price is still gentle.
I am not going to ask you to be certain right now. Being certain was never something we were given much practice at.
So do this instead. Take The Freedom Years home. Read it, or listen to it. Try the smallest things in it. Give it sixty days — the better part of two months.
If, at the end of that, you do not feel something in you beginning to come back — write to me, and I will return every penny. You will not need a reason. You will not need to send anything back. The book stays yours regardless.
The only thing you are risking tonight is sixty days of being gentler with yourself. I think that is a risk worth taking.
The Questions You May Be Holding
No. I left one, so my story is told in those rooms. But the book is not about religion. It is about a life that someone else decided for you — and that can be a church, or a marriage, or a parent, or simply a time that told a girl to be quiet. If a life was handed to you, this book is for you.
Yes. If you can open an email, you can do everything this asks of you. It arrives as a simple message with your guide and your audio inside. Nothing to install. And if anything goes wrong, you write to me and we fix it together.
It is neither. The Freedom Years is not about leaving anyone. It is about no longer being absent from your own life. A great many of the women reading it are married still.
It begins where you are, and where you are may be tender. But it does not stay there. More than anything it is a practical and a hopeful book — a hand, not a sermon.
Then you write to me within sixty days, I return every penny, and you keep the book. You can read about that just above.
The moment you finish. It comes straight to your email.
I am eighty years old. The years I have been telling you about — the ones that were finally mine — I found them very near the end, and I have made my peace with that arithmetic.
But you are reading this tonight. Which means there is still time — your time — and a small book that can help you stop waiting for permission to live it.
My mother pressed a Bible into my hands and told me what I was for. I have spent this whole page pressing something else into yours. Please do not set it down in a drawer.
Begin your freedom years. Tonight, if you can.
The complete guide and the audio, in my voice.
$19.90 — the first 50 copies. A 60-day promise. Yours to keep.