God Didn’t Have a Halo—She Had a Newport, a Beer, and a Mouth From Queens
The day a woman on a stone bench summoned my next timeline with five words: “Tell a different story, fuckah.”
It was Austin. August.
The kind of heat that makes the air feel like a living thing with teeth.
Humidity so thick you couldn’t walk without sweating through your intentions.
I didn’t go there to change my life—I went there to chase it.
To close deals. Build funnels. Network my way into some kind of high-ticket deliverance.
I was still a drinker then.
Vodka, neat, like I had something to prove.
She drank beer like it was gospel—slow, foamy, unapologetic.
And between our buzzed breaths, outside the overly air-conditioned ballroom of a now-defunct affiliate marketing conference,
God appeared in the form of a woman named Ellie with beer in hand and a Newport hanging from her lips.
The stones weren’t benches exactly.
They were part of the landscaping—large, flat rectangle boulders scattered just off the sidewalk.
But they summoned us.
Like the universe itself whispered:
“You’d better sit down for this.”
So we did.
We sat until the wee hours of the morning, soaked in sweat and smoke, rehashing the same sentence again and again—
as if we were churning the spell of it into existence.
“Tell a different story.”
Thick Queens accent. No explanation. No escape.
Over and over.
And when I asked her—what story? which one? how? what does this even mean?—
she’d flick her ash, motion to whoever was nearby—other conference escapees, smokers wandering into our orbit—and say:
“Tell her.”
“Tell her to tell a different story.”
And they would.
Like it was a line in a play I didn’t know I’d been cast in.
I don’t know where she came from.
Sometimes I wonder if I pulled her through a crack in the simulation.
If she only existed because I finally collapsed enough to let her arrive.
She talks about her past, but none of it ever registered for me.
It wasn’t just unfamiliar—it was irrelevant.
It felt like she only started existing the moment I needed her.
Like the universe conjured her in a thick Queens accent
to sit beside me and whisper the one sentence that would tear my old life apart.
She lives in a tiny town in upstate NY.
The kind of place with winding roads and woods thick enough to keep secrets—the kind of woods where your past could vanish and no one would ask questions.
I’ve never been there. But when I picture it, I see something out of The Shack—
not the tidy parts, but the part where God shows up as an old woman,
lives off the grid, drinks beer, smokes Newports,
and calls you “fuckah” with the casual reverence only a true New Yorker could lace into a blessing.
She didn’t coddle.
She conjured.
She didn’t ask if I was ready—she lit another cigarette and declared me summoned.
She wasn’t meant to stay.
She was meant to summon.
I left the conference more lost than I arrived.
Not because I didn’t understand her.
But because I did—somewhere too deep to articulate.
She didn’t give me advice.
She gave me permission.
And not the kind that made me feel empowered.
The kind that made me feel undone.
I thought I was there to learn affiliate strategy.
But what I got was a woman with beer on her breath and God in her lungs,
smoking prophecy into the air
like she’d already seen who I’d become
and was just waiting for me to catch up.
And now?
Years later, I’ve written a book that doesn’t offer strategy.
It offers destruction.
A book that doesn’t ask for your belief—it dares you to moan your truth through it.
A book that only exists because one woman sat outside a conference
in hundred-degree heat
and wouldn’t stop telling me what I wasn’t ready to hear.
Tell a different story.
She didn’t explain it.
She just embodied it.
And then walked away like she hadn’t rearranged the trajectory of my life
with one cigarette, one sentence, one Queens-bred spell.
So this one’s for her.
And for every woman still sitting on a stone bench in her life,
sweating through the fantasy,
numbing with vodka,
and waiting for someone to tell her
she doesn’t have to sell a thing she no longer believes in.
Ellie told me to tell a different story.
“Tell it, fuckah.”
So I did.
And now I’ll never stop.
Before there was a book, there was a rock.
Before there was a strategy, there was surrender.
Before I led, I was wrecked.
The Wet List isn’t a waitlist.
It’s a bench.
A place for women who are sweating through the life they built,
knowing something else is coming—but not sure what yet.
You don’t join The Wet List because you’re ready.
You join it because you heard the whisper:
“Tell a different story.”
And if you’re wondering what story I conjured up
between the pages of my book, Think & Grow Wet—
hit the button.
The first taste begins to seep out soon.
You ready, fuckah?
Good.
Now go find your seat.
-L