For those not following me on social media, you may not have heard me screaming about my article featured in the Huffington Post today.
Let me just tell you, it was so hard to send the email submitting that story. I sat at my computer for about two hours, editing and re-editing everything, asking my cat, “Should I send it?”; yelling to Mike from my office, “I’m scared. I don’t know if I can do it.”
I finally got over myself, held my breath, and clicked “send.”
I have struggled to articulate this complex story for months now. My relationship with my ex, alcohol, has many moving parts, many explanations, with many illustrations of how I have hurt others and myself. It is a mucky, disgusting, confusing mess. Countless tiny embarrassments, nervous cover-ups and assurances to people, to myself, that I was okay. Even now, nearly four years later, I am still processing what happened to me and why.
It seems the only way I could meaningfully compose this part of my life was to couch it in a frame narrative about stress. In fact, when I read the Huffington Post’s call for submissions about stress, my very first thought was, “Stress? Oh, I can tell you about stress.” I sat down, and the story poured out of me as if from a pitcher.
It’s admittedly a little dry, but that was the only way I could keep the focus of the narrative. The second I would start to interject a moment of how it felt, I would spin off into a 500 word tangent that would somehow lead me to railing about the injustices of the U.S. Healthcare and Educational systems. There is no simple way to describe the experience of your life falling apart except to simply describe how your life fell apart; at least for now.
So, here is my very first article published somewhere other than on this blog (or in the California State University Library system). I could not have done this without your support. Thank you all.
Second only to yoga, which oddly, I don’t mind.