Note: I am re-publishing the memoir chapters over the next two weeks for new subscribers. If you’ve already read them, there will be some slight edits and additions but there is no need to read them again if you do not wish to! This is all a leadup to a relaunch of this newsletter, and greater involvement and expension of it in the coming months. Thank you.

Before

In 2015, I died in the gravel outside my house in Albuquerque, New Mexico, trying to crawl to my car. It was a clear, cool, bright high desert day, Easter Sunday, and I was forty-six years old.

In an attempt to end what I believed then was a life of endless pain, I had swallowed ninety Lamictal tablets, an act I regretted the moment I did it. Each tablet held 100 mg of the prescription medication. People start to die at 4000 mg. Almost no one makes it back after 9000. As the pills quickly dissolved, I tried to purge. They wouldn’t come up. I was desperate. I begged the handsome man who was living with me — the one who said he loved me but also did things like strangle me until I passed — to call 911.

He said no.

I remember thinking: So this is how I go. A writer. A mother. A woman who once had dreams. Dying in her front yard while the man she loved takes another toke, tells her to shut up, says he hopes she dies.

But that’s not the story.

He’s not the story.

He’s the mistake that led to the blessing.

The story is what happened after my head hit the ground.

The story begins when I died.

And it's weirdly, surprisingly… beautiful.

The Slow Undoing

To understand how I got there—curled up on my left side in the gravel of the neatly xeriscaped yard of my pink stucco tract home, dying while a brutal but baby-faced man I fed and loved cheered the grim reaper on and laughed (yes, laughed)—you’d have to rewind.

Not just to the moment I met him. Much farther than that.

You’d have to go back to the girl who learned to confuse cruelty with love before the age of two. The girl who believed she had to earn tenderness, and never quite deserved it when it arrived.

You’d have to meet me before I met Brian.

Because Brian wasn’t the cause of my overdose. He and the overdose were both symptoms of the way my brain got wired by narcissistic abuse and neglect from my very first moments on earth.

I was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1969, to not one but two narcissistic parents. I didn’t know it at the time. Hell, I didn’t know it until something like five minutes ago.

My mother was a former beauty queen—almost six feet tall, fair and blue-eyed, something of a 1950s movie star in her own mind. My dad was five inches shorter, but tough in the way of small dogs and dictators: a Cuban exile orphaned at age nine in Havana after his stepdad killed his mother, who came to the U.S. alone at fifteen.

They were both brilliant in their own ways. He was an academic. She was a poet and a black sheep in her conservative ranching family. She married my dad precisely because, as a Cuban immigrant who spoke very little English at the time, he was perfect for scandalizing her Republican parents—people who proudly identified as “white” despite their “Spanish” heritage, and never met a racial slur they didn’t like.

Let me give you a memory I have of my mom.

My mother has always been very proud of her breasts.

Not proud like a woman who’s survived a mastectomy. Not proud like a new mother nursing her baby. I mean proud like a woman in a beer commercial. Proud like she thought they were her résumé. Proud like she believed they were the only real reason(s) she deserved love.

When I was in the fourth grade, we had a Mother’s Day assignment in Ms. Waldschmidt’s class. This was the ‘70s. Ms. W had a Dorothy Hamill haircut, wore gauzy peasant skirts, and believed deeply in Gloria Steinem. She handed us all a worksheet with interview questions and blank lines for our mothers’ answers.

One question read: “What does your mother believe are her best qualities?”

Most kids came back with things like: She’s smart. She’s kind. She never gives up. You know—aspirational stuff. Mom stuff.

Not Maxine.

When I asked her, she leaned back in the kitchen chair, like she was posing for a camera only she could see, and said:

“My tits and my ass.”

She laughed. Loudly. Like she’d won something. It was the same laugh she used when she told everyone she was naming her new white Cutlass Supreme “Moby Dick, and not because of the book.”

I froze. I was nine. I still played with dolls. I knew there was something wrong with my mother, but I didn’t know exactly what it was. I remember gripping the pen and staring at the worksheet, trying to decide if I should actually write down what she’d said. But I’d already learned by then that editing Maxine was dangerous. So I wrote it.

The next day, I was the only kid asked to stay after class.

Ms. Waldschmidt crouched beside my desk and gently asked if everything was okay at home. I lied. I said I made it up. She gave me a new worksheet and told me to try again.

I did, and made up the answers.

But I never forgot the first answer.

Because Maxine wasn’t joking.

So no, it didn’t exactly come as a surprise when I found out she hadn’t breastfed me as a baby.

Years later, after I had a child of my own and was knee-deep in sleepless nights and lactation schedules, I asked her about it. I wanted to know why she’d given me only formula, especially considering all the documented health and cognitive benefits of breastfeeding.

She wrinkled her nose like I’d asked her to lick a public toilet.

“Breastfeeding? Ugh. That’s disgusting,” she said, adjusting her bra. Then she pushed up her own breasts with her hands like a proud shopkeeper arranging a window display and said: “I’ve always thought these were best reserved for men. Letting a baby ruin them was not part of my life plan.”

And just like that, a whole blueprint of my childhood made sense.

As for my dad?

Well, my first memory of him comes from the era when he told anyone who’d listen that Houdini had nothing on the brilliant Nelson. His latest trick? Waking up his infant daughter using only the power of his mind.

He would sit beside my crib, not to soothe or rock me, but to will me into pain and misery. He’d stare down at my tiny sleeping body, concentrate, and try to make me cry. And when I did—which I always did—he’d smile like a magician finishing a performance at the Magic Castle. Ta-da!

Waking up to your hipster Cuban father glowering at you with his oversized Freddy Fender mustache and pink-tinted eyeglasses would make any baby cry. But he took it as proof of his psychic genius. My tears weren’t about fear or confusion or being a fussy newborn—the things a parent might wish to comfort a baby out of.

No. My tears were my father’s triumph.

And yet, in those days, he was often nicer than my mother—but only as long as you played the role he’d written for you. You had to be his rapt audience. Even at age four, I’d be subjected to listening to his endless monologues about his brilliance, his trauma, his philosophy, his revolution that never happened.

There’s a family passport photo of us from that year. I’m four. My parents are beaming. We’re on our way to Glasgow, Scotland, where my freshly-minted Ph.D. father—the only Marxist exiled Cuban sociologist in the USA, or so he claimed—had landed his first university appointment.

I’m standing stiffly beside them, my left hand pressed over my right chest, like I’m about to say the Pledge of Allegiance in backwardsland. I look terrified and bewildered.

And I remember why. I remember thinking: I have to look patriotic. I have to look American. I have to keep my dad safe so they don’t take him away.

At four years old, I was already convinced the CIA might be coming for him. That my job, in that photo and beyond it, was to protect him. To protect his story. To never have a story of my own.

To be the good daughter of the brilliant, hunted revolutionary.

To be quiet.

To be loyal.

To be small.

To endure, as long as my pain made someone else feel important.

To cry on command.

This ends today’s portion. In a day or two, I’ll post the next chapter. Don’t worry, we don’t linger in the past for too long. We get right to the NDE soon! xo

Did you like what you’ve read so far? Please subscribe to make sure you get every chapter of my Near-Death Experience memoir, MY SOMEWHERE ELSE, which I’ve serialized for release in this newsletter over the next month or two. If there’s enough interest in this story here, I’ll compile it for publication in paperback and ebook. Thanks for your support. If you can afford to paid subscription, it would help me to do this full-time. xoxo Alisa

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I Died.

Let me say that plainly, because I’ve spent more than ten years not saying it—or saying it sideways, or dressed up in metaphors soft enough to keep me from getting laughed out of the world I worked so hard to belong to. The “smart” world. The serious world. The fancy, fact-obsessed, materialist world of journalism, publishing, Ivy League degrees, and TEDx talks.

The world where two separate literary agents told me flat-out: Never speak of what happened to you when you died. Don’t tell anyone you crossed over. Don’t tell them you saw “beings.” Don’t tell them you had to learn an important soul lesson before you were allowed to come back to your body. People who’ve never had an experience like that will think you’ve lost your mind. They’ll stop reading. You’ll be finished.

So I stayed quiet.

But eleven years is a long damn time to make yourself smaller just so other people won’t feel weird around your truth. Eleven years is long enough.

So, yeah. Screw it. Let’s go.

I died. And yes—my medical record confirms it.

I. Was. Dead.

And it was amazing.

And part of the lesson and agreement I made with the beings I met on the other side—yes, actual beings, and yes, they were hilarious — was this: if I got to come back, I would talk about it. I would write, speak, sing, dance, shout, whisper, testify about the fact that death is not the end of consciousness. Even if assholes were more than ready to point fingers and say “that’s cray-zay.” Fine. Say it. I don’t care. You’ll find out on your own, when the time comes. Plus, how ridiculous is it that so many people find near-death experience stories crazy, but in the same breath will tell you we must respect organized religions, that, in fact, any policitian who wants to get elected in the United States MUST have some sort of religion to get taken seriously? Make. It. Make. Sense.

So here I am. Anyway. Keeping my word.

Let me be clear: before I died, I believed death was the Great Empty. A permanent erasure. A cold, inert nothingness, like the end of a broken machine that just shuts off one day and is good only for the scrap heap. I was convinced beyond convinced that there was no such thing as a soul, that whatever sentience we had was the coincidental product of evolution and brain cells. I not only didn’t believe in an afterlife, I was a dick about it. I thought anyone who did believe in an afterlife was emotionally weak, intellectually lazy, or just plain delusional. Or, you know, stupid.

I was a proudly rational woman. An award-winning print and broadcast journalist. A bestselling novelist with 1 million books in print in 11 languages around the world. A science-minded person who trusted evidence, logic, and peer-reviewed studies. I thought spiritual woo-woo people were sad. Sweet. Harmless.

So imagine my surprise when I died and — poof — I wasn’t fucking gone. There was no Big Empty. The machinery of my personality and ability to sense and exist and communicate was still in tact, albeit shifted.

My consciousness had left my body. I went somewhere else. Somewhere vast, geometric, intelligent, and alive. Somewhere ancient and compassionate and dazzling. Somewhere so real it made this world feel like the illusion. That’s what My Somewhere Else is about: where I went, what I learned there, and what I brought back to share with the world.

This is the story of my life, my death and my return to life. But it’s also the start of the real work I came back here to do, work that scares the shit out of me. The work I promised my guides I would do if I made it back into this body.

Let’s do this.

What to expect

Starting now, on this Substack, which I’ve re-branded as SAMSARA with SARAI, I’ll be re-releasing My Somewhere Else, a memoir about my near-death experience, chapter by chapter, a chapter per day.

If this feels familiar, it’s because I did this back in 2025, too, and gathered about 1600 subscribers who are still here with me. Let me explain.

At the same time I was posting MY SOMEWHERE ELSE in 2025, I was also building a separate political/news Substack that, much to my surprise, took the hell off and now has 51,000 subscribers.

The problem with having had both of my newsletters under the same Substack account was that the people who are naturally drawn to near-death experiences and spiritual truths are often not the same people who want the hard-hitting political investigations. Just because both of those interests exist easily and naturally within ME, I learned, doesn’t mean they exist like that for everyone else.

The problem is further compounded by the fact that on Substack, if you have multiple newsletters under one account and you post “Notes,” which are the social-media feed aspect of Substack, where writers often alert non-subscribers to new posts on their newsletters and engage in conversation with the public about ideas, all of your subscribers to every one of your newsletters gets them. This means the readers who found me through the spiritual near-death experience newsletter found themselves suddenly bombarded by horror stories from the Epstein files, and the political readers who found me because of those Epstein stories were suddenly seeing Notes from me about my spirit guides.

Fucking disaster.

The app does not allow you to filter Note recipients. It’s a real problem, and one they need to address. It ended up being such a phenomenal branding problem for me that I just sort of stopped writing the spiritual newsletter. This wasn’t because I lost interest in it. It was, rather, because the political newsletter was paying the bills, and it began to eat up most of my time. My guides and Source were not pleased with me about this. My own spirit was unsettled by the retreat from my “mission,” so to speak, to tell people about the Other Side.

So this week, in August of 2026, I created a SECOND Substack account and moved the original MY SOMEWHERE ELSE newsletter out of the old account, to the new one. The branding issue persisted, however, in that both newsletters were still on the same PLATFORM with the same SEARCH function, and anyone searching for my posts would run up against what to THEM might seem to be a branding mismatch. To solve that problem, I have opted to use a pen name for the spiritual newsletter, not because I have a split fucking personality like some of my hardcore materialist enemies would like to think, but rather to avoid the problem listed above when people SEARCH for one or another of the names.

Pen names are normal and often used in publishing to keep different lanes of the same versatile writer clearly demarcated. This should surprise no one who has ever read a book. There will, of course, be hysterical people, gleeful goblins likely the ones from the political side who constantly seek to discredit my reporting there for their own authoritarian purposes, who are triggered by all these adjustments. Ask me if I give a fuck. I don’t. That’s their journey, likely one of learning to trust people, and I am not going to worry myself about it.

The political newsletter will remain where it is, under the name it’s under. And this, my near-death experience memoir, MY SOMEWHERE ELSE, will now live here in serialized form, in the “new” newsletter I’m calling SAMSARA, writing under the pen name Sarai Ana Luz, which is actually more than a simple pen name, but that’s another post for another day. Still me. New name. All of it done to better serve my readers in both newsletters, though I am sure there will be a few bumps at first.

Because SAMSARA is “new,” I am opting to start over and post the entire NDE memoir again. It will give me a chance to look at the material with fresh eyes, do some editing and tightening and expansion. If you read it the first time, you’ll find new information and fewer typos this second time around. It should not take more than two weeks to post the whole thing again, and then I’ll start to post the new material — talks, guided meditations and essays. I’ve also opted to keep the newsletter free. If you were a paid subscriber before, don’t worry. I’ve paused payments and you will not be charged anything.

Final Thought:

I’ll close with the short prologue to the memoir:

On April 5, 2015, I died in the gravel outside my house in Albuquerque, New Mexico, trying to crawl to my car in the midst of seizures. It wasn’t poetic.

I had intentionally swallowed ninety Lamictal tablets of 100 mg each—9000 mg—an act I regretted the moment I did it. People my size start to die from Lamictal at 4000 mg, and you can count the folks who’ve made it back after 10,000 mg on three fingers. I begged Brian, the boyfriend who was living with me, to call 911.

He said no.

I remember thinking: So this is how I go. A writer. A mother. A woman who once had dreams. Dying in her driveway while the man inside smokes weed, laughs, as he tells me to shut up, as he says he hopes I die.

But that’s not the story.

Because fuck Brian. He’s not my story.

He’s my mistake.

The story is what came after my head hit the ground.

The story is what happened after Brian got his wish.

The story begins when I died.

And unlike Brian, death was beautiful and filled with love.