The Audacity of Charging for What Almost Killed You to Learn
The women who want your work for free are telling you everything about their relationship with money
I got a notification this evening from a woman who clearly thought she was writing the most brilliant takedown of my work. She dissected my essay line by line, made jokes about Babylonian priestesses running luxury nervous system bordellos, compared my paywall to her uncle handing out escort cards at a bazaar, and wrapped the whole thing in enough sarcasm to fill a TED talk nobody asked for.
Her issue wasn’t the writing. She liked the writing. Her issue was that while reading something that was clearly doing something to her body, she saw an invitation to become a paid subscriber. The essay itself was completely free. She had full access to every word. And the mere suggestion that more of my work costs $9 a month offended her so deeply that wrote a 400-word note about it on her own page.
She’s not the first. She won’t be the last. But she’s not who I’m writing this for.
I’m writing this for the woman who charges for her work and has been second-guessing herself every time someone tells her it should be free. The woman who has poured years of her life into learning something the hard way and is now sitting at her laptop trying to put a price on it while a voice in her head says, who do you think you are. This is for her.
The Moral Costume
There’s a specific type of woman who believes that certain kinds of knowledge should be free. Not all knowledge. She’s fine paying for a lawyer. She doesn’t walk into her therapist’s office and demand a sliding scale. She pays for Netflix, her Audible subscription, her gym membership, her Uber Eats, her wine. She pays for convenience without hesitating and entertainment without thinking twice.
But the moment a woman charges for something connected to healing, to the body, to spirituality, to the feminine, to any form of wisdom that was earned through pain and survival rather than a degree program, suddenly there’s a moral problem. Suddenly it should be free because it’s sacred. Because it helps people. Because putting a price on it taints it somehow. Because the woman teaching it should be doing it out of love, out of service, out of calling, out of anything other than the audacity of expecting to be compensated for what she knows.
That belief has a name. It’s not righteousness and it’s not intelligence. It’s a money wound, and it wears whatever costume suits the woman carrying it. For some women it sounds spiritual – sacred knowledge should be free. For others it sounds intellectual – I’m too smart to fall for a sales funnel. For others it’s just raw resentment that someone is charging for something they want but won’t pay for. The costume changes. The wound underneath is the same. And the women who carry it are almost always the same women who can’t charge for their own work, who give everything away and then resent the people who don’t reciprocate, who watch other women get paid and call them sellouts instead of students.
What Free Actually Costs
I want to talk about what it costs to learn the things I teach. Not the dollar amount. The life amount.
I didn’t Google Lilith and decide to build a brand around her. I didn’t read a book about the pleasure principle and think, oh this would make a great Substack article. I didn’t stumble across Thelema on a Pinterest board and start connecting it to women’s financial trauma for fun.
I got here through years of the kind of learning that doesn’t come with a certificate or a refund policy. Through hitting my own financial rock bottom and having to figure out why my body kept sending money back every time it arrived. Through shadow work that made me look at parts of myself I would have paid any amount of money to never have to see. Through studying dark feminine embodiment and depth psychology, not because they were trendy but because I needed them to survive what I was going through. Through building a coaching practice, one woman at a time and watching the same wound show up in every single one of them.
Every essay I write comes from that. Every framework, every connection I draw between the body and money and sex and power, comes from lived experience that cost me something real. Not tuition or a weekend workshop. Years of my life, my health, my sleep, and my sense of who I was before I burned it down and rebuilt.
And a woman wants that for free because she decided $9 was too much to pay for it.
The Real Reason She’s Angry
The woman who gets furious at a paywall isn’t angry at the price. Nine dollars is less than her morning coffee order. It’s less than the subscription she pays to stream music she barely listens to. It’s less than the lip gloss she bought last week without thinking about it.
She’s angry because the paywall confronted her with something she doesn’t want to look at. A woman is charging confidently for her sacred work, and that woman’s confidence is a mirror for every time she couldn’t do the same. Every time she undercharged. Every time she gave her time away and called it generosity. Every time she told herself that real spiritual work shouldn’t come with a price tag because that’s what the women around her said, and it was easier to believe them than to question why every woman she admired in the healing space was also broke.
The paywall didn’t insult her. It exposed her.
And instead of sitting with that exposure and asking what it might be teaching her about her own relationship with money, she wrote a comedy routine. Because humor is what we reach for when the truth is too close and we need to create distance from it fast.
What She’s Really Asking For
When a woman demands that your content should be free, she’s not asking for access. She has access. The free essays exist. The free posts exist. The free information on every topic I cover is available in libraries, on YouTube, on a thousand other Substacks and Instagram accounts and podcasts. The information isn’t scarce. The internet is drowning in it.
What she wants is your specific version of it. Your lens. Your lived experience. Your particular way of connecting dots that nobody else connects the same way. She wants what you built from your pain, your research, your sleepless nights, your breakdowns, your breakthroughs. She wants the thing that can’t be Googled because it only exists inside the woman who lived it.
And she wants it handed to her without having to pay for it because somewhere in her body, she believes that a woman’s pain, a woman’s wisdom, a woman’s intellectual and spiritual labor, isn’t worth money. It’s worth gratitude. It’s worth a thank you, a share, a nice comment. But not currency. Never currency. Because currency would mean that what this woman built has real, measurable, economic value, and that would force her to ask why she isn’t building and charging for something of her own.
The Women Who Pay Without Pause
You know who never complains about the paywall? It’s not just the women earning six figures. Some of the women who subscribe to my paid work are stretching to afford it. They’re not swimming in disposable income. Nine dollars means something to them. But they pay it anyway because they can feel what’s on the other side of that door and they want to be in the room. They understand that the price isn’t a barrier. It’s an exchange. They’re trading $9 for access to something their body recognized the moment they started reading, and they decided that whatever is behind that paywall is worth more to them than holding onto the money.
That’s a completely different woman than the one writing sarcastic essays about my pricing. Both might have the same amount in their bank account. The difference has nothing to do with income. It has to do with how they relate to value. One woman sees a price and asks what it’s worth to her. The other sees a price and asks why it isn’t free. One is investing in herself at whatever level she can. The other is demanding that someone else’s labor accommodate her refusal to invest at all.
The women who complain the loudest about what things cost are rarely the women who can’t afford it. They’re the women who won’t pay for it because paying means the transaction is real, the value is real, and they’re on the receiving end of something they could’ve built themselves but didn't. That’s a harder thing to sit with than $9.
The rest of this essay is for paid subscribers. You already know what to do.
$9/month or $97/year