Use the form on the right to contact us.
You can edit the text in this area, and change where the contact form on the right submits to, by entering edit mode using the modes on the bottom right.
123 Street Avenue, City Town, 99999
(123) 555-6789
email@address.com
You can set your address, phone number, email and site description in the settings tab.
Link to read me page with more information.
Thank you science.
Thank you resilience.
Thank you perseverance.
Thank you patience.
Thank you insurance.
Thank you body.
Thank you spirit.
Thank you faith and friends.
Thank you every ounce of pain that broke my heart wide open enough for this love.
I am grateful.
Armed with an iPhone and 15 minutes:
As I prepare to give birth (TOMORROW!!), I've been thinking a lot about fear.
Traumatic events--be it deaths or illnesses, violations of trust or physical injuries--leave a psychological scar. The more traumatic the event, the deeper the scar. I picture these scars as actual, literal dead spots on my brain, places where neural pathways have been forced to detour. In the years since my brother died; since I've struggled with a gastrointestinal disorder; since I've undergone physical therapy, surgery, and more physical therapy for an injury; since I've experienced multiple rounds of treatment for infertility and two pregnancy losses, I've developed quite the network of detours.
These detours are Fear and Anxiety. Somewhere, in the midst of facing life's challenges, my brain started to believe (or hope, anyway) that it could avoid pain if it predicted it. I could prepare myself for disaster and disappointment ahead of time, I thought. And so began my habit of cataloging Worst Case Scenarios.
The logical part of my brain (which thankfully still exists, though it is sometimes cut off by road blocks) knew that this would never work. Bad things, hard things, kept happening, and they kept hurting. All my detours did was make the time between events (good or bad) miserable. They functioned like literal road detours: they were cumbersome, winding, and inconvenient. They were frustrating. They seemed to lead nowhere. And yet I'd been using them for so long that they'd become the actual path.
This pregnancy has been difficult for me. After so many failures, success feels too good to be true. From what I've heard from other women who have experienced pregnancy after infertility, this is common. It's hard to trust that something we've wanted for so long and worked so hard for is possible. There have been times, many times, over the past 38 weeks that I've let myself follow those sneaky, snaky backroads.
And what I've learned is this: that's okay.
When I'm able to be mindful of the detours, when I am able to recognize the patterns of fear and anxiety in my thinking, when I am able to acknowledge those patterns without judgment, the road disappears. The road doesn't need to exist. The moment is what matters, and it is a space both defined and infinite.
Tomorrow I enter the unknown, and whatever combination of joy and fear it brings. But today? Today I am nervous and scared and excited. Today I am here.
Greetings everyone! I've so missed my camera and posting daily to this space, but I've been working hard on finishing advance copies of my book and preparing for the impending arrival of Little Bee (three weeks to go!). Just wanted to take a quick break today to publicize a campaign on Healthline. The site, called "You've Got This," is a place where people living with bipolar disorder can post video messages of support and encouragement to those who have been newly diagnosed. For each video uploaded, Healthline will donate $10 to the non-profit To Write Love On Her Arms, an organization for people struggling with depression, addiction, and self-injury.
I was 16 when I was diagnosed with depression. Back then the internet was little more than a glorified AOL chatroom. I didn't know anyone who had experienced depression. I didn't know anyone who had to take medication for a mood disorder. I hadn't even read The Bell Jar yet. I had no idea what having depression meant for my future, but I assumed it couldn't be anything good.
I was wrong. I was really, really wrong.
I am so grateful that so many people are sharing their stories. I'm grateful that so many organizations are giving us spaces to do that. And I hope that we continue to reach out to others, to let them know that living well with mental illness is possible, one step at a time.
So I flaked out on the end of the August Break. I had a really good reason, though--I've been working on a post for my publisher. It's for a series called Behind the Book, and wow, writing about writing my book? Not as easy as I thought it would be. Probably because while writing a memoir about losing my brother to suicide was incredibly healing, it was also slow and raw and painful, like digging glass splinters out of my heart with my fingers.
It's been ten years since my brother took his own life. I was 24 at the time. Fresh out of a graduate program in literature, I believed words were the answer to everything. I would write about my brother eventually, I knew. What I didn’t know was when I would do it or what I would say. The first year without him the grief was too hot and too sharp to touch. I worked a series of low-paying jobs and zombie-walked my way through the days, waiting for the pain to ease enough for me to approach it.
Of course, that didn't happen.
Here’s the thing about avoidance: it doesn’t work. The more I tried to ignore my grief the larger it swelled. By the second year after his death it had grown so big it eclipsed everything else. I quit all my jobs. I isolated myself from friends. There were some days I couldn’t even leave the house. I knew then that I didn’t have a choice—I was going to have to write my way through. And it was going to hurt like hell.
I developed a routine. In the morning: breakfast. A run. A couple hours of mind-numbing TV. Lunch. A little more TV. And then the long walk down the hallway to my office, where my brother’s journals waited on my desk.
If it was a good day, I’d spend a few hours reading his words, combing my memory, taking notes, recording observations, and trying to jam together a few more puzzle pieces. If it wasn’t a good day I’d write about how hard it was, how angry I was, how tired I was, how little made sense. I’d wonder what the fuck I was doing, why I was wasting my time, why I couldn’t just move on with my life. If it was a bad day I would cry. And if it was a really bad day I would stay on the couch after lunch and watch reruns of Law & Order until the sun set and my husband’s key scraped in the lock. Those days came far more often than I wanted them to, and I made them far worse than I needed to. I berated myself for being a failure. I let my husband do the dinner dishes, popped tranquilizers, and went to bed feeling hollow, weak, and ashamed.
That’s what my life looked like, every day, for about four years.
Yikes.
Here’s the good news: it got easier. All those thoughts and feelings started turning into a narrative, and as the story began to emerge my grief began to soften. The more I made sense of my and my brother’s pasts, the longer I was able to sit with my brother’s death, the more space there was for me to breathe again. To laugh. To dance.
Another four years have passed since then, during which I’ve survived a life-threatening illness, infertility treatment, and a major injury that resulted in two years of chronic pain (second memoir, anyone?). Yet somehow it wasn’t until I started working on this post that I realized that writing this memoir is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. It forced me to face the darkest, most frightening parts of my grief and myself.
And then, it brought me back to life.
Lines:
Today's prompt is Morning.
Morning light in my office
I am not, and never have been, what is referred to as "a morning person." I've often wished I was. People sing morning's praises highly. Many writers say it's when they get their best work done. It's supposedly peaceful and fresh and full of promise.
I wouldn't know. My brain is a pile of dead slugs until noon.
Once I lamented this fact in the presence of a very poetic stranger. He said I was looking at it all wrong. He said I came from the Theodore Roethke school of morning.
Since then I have nurtured my nature. I keep my mornings quiet and unscheduled. I practice mindfulness, and gently wait for my consciousness to fully return.
Morning light in the dining room
Today's prompt: Little
I've always wanted to wear lots of fun, funky jewelry and bright, interesting makeup. I see other women doing it and they look fantastic. The problem is whenever I try it, I don't look like "me." I don't feel like me. I feel the most like myself with clean skin, comfy clothes, and no more jewelry than my wedding band. (Fun fact: the band in the picture below is actually my second one. You can read the back story here, on my old blog).
I do, however, love tattoos. Had my husband not gently suggested I wait two years between each one, I'd probably be covered in them. I think his approach is a good one, though. It forces me to really think about what I want to put on my skin and why. The more thought and meaning that goes into each, the better. The next one I'm planning is going to be pretty big (in size and significance), and it will probably be more like three to five years before it happens. Maybe in the meantime I'll try some dangly earrings.
It is REALLY freaking hard to photograph your own back tattoo.