Prologue
Many years ago I started a personal website so that I could share my thoughts on pop culture with a few of my friends scattered across the country. I wrote about movies and music and dissected the plot lines from short-lived sitcoms, sometimes adding a paragraph or two about the men in my life. Within a year my audience had grown from a few friends to thousands of strangers all over the world. More and more I found myself writing about my personal life, and eventually I started writing about my office job and how much I wanted to strangle my boss, often using words and phrases that would embarrass a sailor. When the company I worked for found my website, they fired me, walked me to my car with a cardboard box full of my belongings, and frisked me to make sure I hadn't stolen a stapler. Suddenly confronted with what I had done and who I had become, I took down my website because I knew I was about to have a nervous breakdown. And I didn't want to do it publicly.
Within six months I had put the website back online, although by that time I had learned to approach my writing with a heightened sensitivity to boundaries. I still wrote about my personal life, but I made sure to write about people in a way that they would never be upset when they showed up in one of my stories. Most of the stories at the time were about my new husband and how unemployment had forced us to move from Los Angeles to my mother's basement in Utah, and they would soon chronicle the purchase of our first house, the agonizing decision over paint chips, and the morning we saw a second line show up on a pregnancy test.
Pregnancy was an endless trove of content, and as my body changed I shared with my audience how I felt like I had been possessed by a hostile host organism. And although my website brought me a lot of comfort during those months, I truly believed that I would give it all up once I had the baby. I didn't think there would be time to maintain a website when my days would be filled with diapers and breast pads and hobbling to and from the crib.
But then I had that baby, and immediately everything in my life opened up with the same speed that it fell apart. My world expanded with a sympathy for every other human who had brought a child into their lives, but I had never before felt so isolated or alone. There were many days when the only way I could survive another hour was by writing about it.
So I kept writing about it, and then I had a nervous breakdown. Publicly.
The nine months of that pregnancy and the nine months after I brought the baby home were the most transforming period of my life. I had never flown so high, nor had I ever sunk so low. Hour by hour I searched for something to laugh about so that at the end of the day I could catch my breath instead of giving in to an overwhelming sense of hopelessness. A nuclear bomb had gone off in my living room, and although I had had nine months to prepare for the mess, it took me nine months to piece everything back together.
Luckily I collected notes throughout the cleanup, and when I finally stepped out of darkness and into daylight I realized just how close I had come to giving in, and how crucial it had been for me to share my journey. I don't think I would have survived it had I not offered up my story and reached out to bridge the loneliness. This is that story.
