I was fifty-nine years old, waiting tables in Florida, when the bill came due.

It arrived on a weekday evening shift, standing at the dish pit in the back-of-house fluorescent light with my feet screaming and my mind completely blank. Covered in sweat, pieces of food and customers’ condemnations. Past exhausted. Past numb. Thinking a thought so simple and so devastating it stopped me cold:

This cannot be what life is supposed to be like. What are we doing?

Before all this I was an actress, a championship equestrian, and the inventor of a product sold around the world. I had been to paradise many times. I had been many places and done the extraordinary things. I had lived the big life.

I had never been to me.

Eighteen years in a courthouse. Marriages I walked out on. Businesses lost. Grief. And the particular exhaustion of a woman who has spent decades holding everything together for everyone else.

The system that had been demanding everything I had was no longer giving anything back. And something in me — something very old and very honest — said:

Enough.

I took a two-month sabbatical from life and went to Bali to find the healers nobody advertises.

There, after much searching, I found them. I put them in the book. I wrote down every name, every price, every number, and the whole experience I had — and all ten gave me written permission to publish them.

What I think,
and you can take it or leave it

We live in a world that works us until there’s nothing left, then sells us the cure. Food that makes us sick. A new name for every symptom and a prescription to go with it. A news cycle engineered to keep you agitated and worn down. And underneath all of it, the quiet suggestion that if you can’t keep up, something is wrong with you.

Nothing is wrong with you. You are tired because it is exhausting, and because it was built this way.

That is not a failure of the system. That is the system.

That was about to change.

What I found

One of them put his hands on my abdomen and told me exactly what was wrong inside my body. He named it and went straight to the spot. No imaging, no blood work, no history from me — I hadn’t told him anything.

The hospital in Bangkok had found the same thing weeks earlier. Confirmed by machine, in an institution with every diagnostic technology available.

Two entirely different doors. The same truth behind both. I have looked for the rational explanation and I have not found one yet.

Another is eighty years old, nearly blind, and never leaves his seat — but he moves you plenty. No website, no appointments. You make the trip, you wait your turn, and when his energy runs out he stands up and walks away.

While I waited, I watched him look across the compound at a woman he had never met and tell her which places on her body needed attention. She pointed to those exact spots. Then he told her what she did for a living. He was right. She hadn’t said a word to him.

I hadn’t had my turn yet. I was still watching, thinking about what I’d just seen, and wondering what he was going to find in me.

There was one who never touched me at all. He sat me down across a small desk and talked, for hours, until every answer I’d been giving my whole life had come apart in my hands and only one question was left standing.

And one who had pages waiting when I arrived — charts built from my birth data, prepared before I walked through the door. He already knew things. Not the vague things that could apply to anyone. Specific things.

There were ten of them.

I wrote down every name, every price, every number. All ten gave me written permission to publish them, and every word of what happened in those rooms is in the book.

The Book

A woman survives two decades of loss, betrayal, even a federal raid — then travels to Bali for one last attempt to save her own life. Every healer is real. Every session happened. Every word is true.

A Waitress Goes to Bali: The Rising Tide is the whole story — what sent me there, what happened when I arrived, and what I found out about healing that nobody at home was going to tell me.

The healer directory is in the back. That’s the only place it lives, and it’s the reason the book exists.

And this site

This isn’t a travel site and it isn’t self-help. It’s built on seven pillars, and everything here sits under one of them:

It’s for women over forty, over fifty, over sixty. Divorced. Widowed. Empty nesters. Women who gave up a career to raise a family and now feel something is missing. Women burned out by careers that stopped meaning anything. Women who forgot themselves. Women who want adventure. Women who need hope. Women who know there has to be more.

It’s for the woman who has spent so long surviving that she’s forgotten what it feels like to live. Who looks fine from the outside and quietly wonders whether this is really all there is.

You have survived your first act. Now claim your second.

You are not too old. You are not too broken. It is not too late.

I know, because I was all three.

Why I call myself Dame

This title I gave myself is not a decoration. It is the heaviest, most intentional word I own. Not inherited. Not borrowed. Earned.

A Dame is simply a woman who has earned her power, knows its value, and refuses to apologize for it.

Most women arrive at midlife carrying decades of competence, sacrifice, and hard-won wisdom — and have somehow been convinced that none of it counts.

That is not a life gone wrong. That is the making of a Dame.

You have been her your entire life. You just may not have had the word for it yet.

Go ahead now — claim it.

— Dame Eileen Kenney
support@claimyourdame.com