I Wrote A Goddamn Book

[Listen to an audio version of this blog HERE.]

About two years ago, I was engaged to a man I knew I couldn’t marry. Life is funny in hindsight but cruel in moments, and the day I told him, definitively and forever, that I could not marry him, was an especially cruel day. I loved him greatly, but sometimes the kindest way to love someone is from a distance. I could not be in the path of his pain or fury any longer, so he packed his things and moved out of state.

Another funny but cruel plot twist is that we had moved from Chicago to California together. My friends and family were primarily in the Midwest and I found myself alone in a very confusing place. I was culturally shocked, naive beyond belief, and entirely uncertain about what I was doing. The ensuing two years were full of joys and pains. Fear and failure. Triumphs and healing from traumas. I found myself writing more. Sometimes ferociously, sometimes angrily, sometimes in tears. Writing things down has a way of giving them truth. I wrote about things I was scared to say out loud, or ashamed to admit. I wrote about abuse, the self-hatred at the bottom of my eating disorder, the incomprehensible double standard women are confronted with every damn day, and the ways my childhood informed my later self.

Last fall, my friend Alex and I ate some mushrooms and ran around a mountain together. My brain…