The Book I had to Write to Leave

I started writing that proposal in a season when every scroll felt like a tightening in my throat.
I’d sit down on the weekends, the only time I had to write, my morning coffee resting on the arm of my grey Rooms-To-Go couch. My laptop balanced on my curled up legs, cozy blanket tucked under my toes.  Cursor blinking.

“Three types of misalignment leaders experience in systems not built for us” — that was the arc I was outlining.

And then… my thumb would drift to Instagram.
Apartment buildings in Gaza, folded in on themselves like wet cardboard.
A father carrying the leg of a child who should have been running to school.
A journalist screaming while holding a baby who would never see another birthday.

I’d shift my eyes back at my bullet points where the cursor’s morse code taunted: and you’re going to write a business book today, yesssss?

Turns out, while my answer was, “yes,” publishing doesn’t want the book I needed to write, and that’s how I know it was the right book.

I was writing a business book about misalignment while living through what felt like one of the most misaligned seasons of my life. I wrote a table of contents. I footnoted the statistics. I tried to stay clean and professional and organized. I tried to find a way to dress my grief up in a suit so someone would take it seriously.

The book was well structured. It had a strong voice. It had editors who said they "loved it" but didn't know where it would land. It had a title that still rings true to me: Ms. Alignment.

Maybe it didn’t land because the proposal was wrong. Or maybe it didn’t land because the world is wrong. Because the market wants neat answers and feel-good empowerment arcs and escapism and not the sound of someone thinking in real time about what it means to be a person in a time of political horror.

Candice, my agent, said this is the hardest year her agency has seen in publishing in nearly two decades. Another agent said she hadn’t sold a single book all year. U.S. trade sales are down, slots are fewer, and the bets are safer.

Even the books that check every box are getting quietly passed over.

She also said the real message was tucked in between the lines of the editor feedback:

The book would spook institutions that benefit from compliance—that it might push some readers to quit misaligned jobs and organize for better ones. That it would disrupt the systems that publishers still quietly serve. 

TBH… They weren’t wrong. My book is a threat to the establishment. (That was the whole point.)

And listen — if Candice had called to say, “You have a six-figure book deal from the biggest, most traditional publisher in the industry,” I would have felt good. I would have felt seen and recognized and wanted. I probably would have poured a glass of champagne and texted every person who ever told me I should write a book.

But I can see now that feeling good in that moment would have been the same pattern I’ve been running my whole life — working for approval from the very systems I’m trying to name and dismantle. If I do publish a book, I want to be crystal-clear about my values in relation to it. It won’t be because a boss wanted me to write a book to strengthen their platform. It won’t be because I was willing to round my corners to fit a slot. It will be because the work itself deserves to live in that form — on my terms.

I don’t need a traditionally published book to do that work. It’s already working.

Since I started writing these essays, no fewer than three readers have emailed to say they finally left the jobs that were wearing them all the way out. Not because I told them to. Not because of me at all. But because something in them got loud enough to hear, and something I wrote met them in that moment. They wanted me to know about their decision, one with far-reaching implications, and I don’t take that lightly.

That was always the hope with Ms. Alignment: not to help people tolerate misalignment, but to name it, feel it, and get the heck out.

Years ago, when I started naming my discomfort with extractive business models and using language around regeneration and revolutionizing business, a colleague told me:

“Everyone wants to talk about revolution like it’s cute. Like it’s cool to call for one. But revolution isn’t cool. People run from revolution.”

It didn’t sit right with me then, and it doesn’t sit right with me now—especially watching that same person now post about Palestine. When revolution only feels dangerous the moment it threatens your place in the hierarchy, it’s never been about justice.

Revolution isn’t cute. But sometimes it’s necessary. You don’t call for one because it sounds good. You call for it when you see suffering and realize silence makes you complicit.

The Gaza war doesn’t live only “over there.”

It lives here:
In who gets called dangerous.
In the pause before someone says the word… Palestine.
In the books that don’t get bought.
In the writers who get shelved.
In the newsrooms that get bombed.

The IPC says famine conditions persist across Gaza. In the north, they’ve been present for over a year. The UN warns that without unrestricted aid and an end to the siege, famine will deepen into the fall.

I picture the mothers I’ve seen, cupping their hands for flour spread thinly across the sand. And flotillas and trucks sit miles from the borders, unable to enter. A manufactured famine, in full view of the world.

It’s not by accident. It’s by design. For control. For punishment.

Those same logics — extraction and impunity — live elsewhere:
In Sudan, where millions are displaced by war and hunger.
In the DRC, where cobalt is mined by children for the devices we hold in our hands.
In U.S. immigration courts, where due process gets bent and broken—often breaking the victims before they can even get to court.

Complicity isn’t a single moment. It’s a long, slow practice of looking away.

And yet… I see more and more people refusing to look away. Refusing to be complicit. Last week, I spoke with someone who recently left their job. They told me:

“I thought I loved it. Then I saw how it really worked. I realized it was no better than working for a cigarette company selling addiction to nicotine—killing people slowly with the story we were telling.”

If you can’t unsee it now, I’m writing this for you.

Well, with you, I hope.

The book didn’t get picked up.
But I got picked up — by myself, by my own integrity, by the voice inside me shouting like my toddlers when they want a snack and I’m still making dinner.

Eventually, the toddler wins.
And so did my truth.

What I don’t want is a platform that rewards silence until it’s safe. I don’t want to repackage my voice to make it comfortable. I don’t want to mistake being traditionally publishable for being free.

Now, I’m watching many of the same people who told me to wait, who warned me to stay quiet, who avoided the word "Palestine" at all costs—speak up.

I’m not mad that they’re speaking.

I’m furious that it took this long.

(To be clear, I’m not arguing for overnight omniscience. I’m arguing for accountability that arrives before it’s algorithmically convenient.)

And it took me until October 7th, 2023 to see it clearly, too. And two years of awareness is not some badge of moral authority—especially not when this has been happening since the Nakba in 1948. 

Up until 2023, the truth was hidden behind the privileged smoke screen I once sat behind: "it's complicated." But now, thanks to social media and Palestinian voices, we can all plainly see what’s happening. 

And I’m grieving the lives lost in the great chasm between silence and strategy. 

Last weekend, a single strike killed six journalists in Gaza City—several from Al Jazeera—marking the deadliest attack on journalists in this war. Over 230 journalists have been murdered in Gaza since October 3rd. We’ve watched them for two years: the voice of their people, committed to staying, fighting for their land, their dignity, their right to live.

So no, I don’t want to write something marketable. I want to write something that lives. 

If you’re feeling the ache to create something honest instead of something optimized—me too. You’re telling the truth in a system that profits from your silence. You’re learning to write, talk, create, and live without contorting. You’re becoming the kind of person who doesn’t abandon themself for approval.

And that’s the book. Even if no one buys it yet.

Let your voice be louder than the algorithm.
Let your voice live, even if it’s not applauded.

We don’t need another book that keeps capitalism comfortable. We need work that names the system and shows people how to opt-out, redistribute power, or at minimum reduce harm—practically.

Because the choice to not look away from your couch is the same choice you’ll be asked to make in every boardroom, ballot box, or byline.

And maybe it starts the same way my book did:

A couch. A coffee. A blinking cursor.

A scroll you can’t unscroll.

A choice about whether to look away.

xo,
Brittany