It is never too late to get your life back.
I’m Dame Eileen Kenney. At fifty-nine I was a waitress 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 to horse people 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. A federal raid. Marriages I walked out of. 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.
So I went to Bali for two months to find the healers nobody advertises. Before I left I’d looked online and found several hundred other women asking the same question into an empty room.
I found many. I put 10 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.
The book
A Waitress Goes to Bali: The Rising Tide
Everything that could break a woman did. Bali wasn’t a destination. It was the last thing standing between her and disappearing completely.
A broke fifty-nine-year-old waitress spent two months finding the authentic healers Bali doesn’t advertise. This is what they found in her — and how to see the healers yourself.
She went because she was running out of ways to stay alive. After surviving a federal raid, business collapse, betrayal, unfathomable loss and decades of unhealed trauma her body finally refused to hold, she did the only thing left: she bought a plane ticket to an island known for its healers and its grace, and she asked to be made whole.
Not a travel book. Not a self-help guide. A true story about what happens when a woman finally stops running from her own life and turns to face it.
Every healer is real. Every session happened. Every word is true.
The contact details for all ten healers are in the back, with their written permission.
On the title of Dame
This title is not a decoration, a clever piece of branding, or a marketing gimmick. It is neither a stunt nor a joke. It isn’t cute. It is the heaviest, most intentional word I own.
A Dame refuses to play the lady — the quiet, accommodating figure who makes herself small so others feel big. She is finished auditioning for roles that do not fit her. She stops waiting for a future invitation to take up space. A Dame is simply a woman who has earned her power, knows its value, and refuses to apologize for it.
The word has real history behind it. In the British honours tradition, Dame is the female equivalent of knighthood. The highest civilian distinction a woman can receive. Not inherited. Not borrowed. Not granted by proximity to someone else’s success. Earned.
Go back further — to the Latin root, domina — and it means something even simpler. The one who knows. The one who holds things together. The one who commands.
You have been her your entire life. You just may not have had the word for it yet.
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 they are too late. That the best chapters already happened.
That is not a life gone wrong. That is the making of a Dame.
She is not starting over. She is starting from. From experience. From wisdom. From the earned, unshakeable knowledge of exactly what she is made of.
You were always a Dame. It was always yours.
Go ahead now — claim it.
Claim Your Dame
This is for the woman who has spent so long surviving that she’s forgotten what it feels like to live.
Who has spent years taking care of everyone else. Who looks fine from the outside and quietly wonders whether this is really all there is.
You are not too old. You are not too broken. It is not too late.
If you’re going to Bali
The Bali Resource Guide — everything I packed and everything I booked. The gear, the points strategy that paid for the flights, the insurance, the apps, and what two months actually cost. Open to anyone, no signup.
There’s a second guide — where I ate, where I slept, and current updates to the healer directory. That one’s for readers of the book, and the code to reach it is in the back.
Get in touch
support@claimyourdame.com