Hello and welcome. My name is Anna Mitchael. For the last 25 years, I have worked as a writer and editor. I spent my 20s bouncing from one great American city to the next—Boston, New York, Seattle, and Denver—penning everything from big-brand ads to the little lines on your Starbucks cups. I’ve written three novels with my name on them and ghostwritten a handful more. For many years, I also moonlighted as an advice columnist named “Boots.”
About six years ago, I took a job 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 purpose and some truth. For most of my adult life, I 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 doing our best but going in circles. The world 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, eventually 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 offer return chutes to the things we easily forget while rushing through our days: wonder and hope.
The book that resulted is They Will Tell You the World Is Yours, a collection of 85 vignettes about a woman who decides she’s done buying what the world is selling—and the spiritual awakening unfolds from there. Each vignette is written so you can go as deep as you want. Why? Because some days we want to feel... and other days, we just want to know someone else out there feels like we do. These vignettes build a world that offers both. My hope is that, in different seasons, you can return and discover something new 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, I’m always working to weave the quiet, unseen threads that hold our lives together into the story. I’ll never be the writer directing traffic and telling people where to go. I’m the one trying to catch fireflies in a glass jar, so people can come a little closer and—if they choose—go deeper into the complex beauty always swirling around us.