Category: Uncategorized

I’ve stopped watching the news completely.

This isn’t like me. When I lived in Morocco, I made videos after the inauguration comparing what I saw with a VPN to what appeared on U.S. browsers, tracing how the algorithm trims reality for us without asking permission. But now I’m back in the states, and the gaping howl of a real Michigan winter has arrived for the first time in years, sucking the moisture out of my hands and lips as the soft grey sky stretches from horizon to flat horizon.

When I was in Ecuador, my sister told me she didn’t want to know what was going on in the world. I looked at her like she’d confessed to eating drywall. How could you not want to know? From abroad, America’s collapse is lit in neon. Up close, though? You just keep living. I skimmed The Guardian’s U.S. page today and it read like dispatches from a foreign country: apparently we’re bombing Venezuela for reasons that smell like oil.

I used to work in media; I used to work in politics. Now I have zero interest in the world outside my headphones and weighted blanket. That scares me a little — but not enough to turn the news back on.

Everything is going to hell. I don’t need the updates.

Six weeks in the U.S. and it’s like I never left. I knew it would happen — that the Andes would fade — but I didn’t expect the erasure to be this fast. I had a Title IX flare-up in a very questionable way at my first post, and I start the next one Monday. I’m going to Mexico in twelve days for the holidays, so I’ll get a break from whatever this weather is. And I need to stay in one place for a while, so it might as well be here.

Everything looks “fine.” Too much salt on the roads, strip malls with vacancies, kids fried from overstimulation and not enough adults in the building. My Toyota starts in the morning, my bed is soft, my heart echoes. My kids still live with their dad — who scares them — and everyone pretends that’s normal.

It’s a normal timeline running parallel to extraordinary times. The strange part is forgetting that I changed.

International school job fairs are revving up for next year, and I feel bone-tired. I don’t know if I can do another round of reinvention. I love kids. I’m good at teaching. But all I want to do is write. And statistically, writing is a terrible plan. The economy is pretending to be fine but rotting under the floorboards, and I’m lucky to have a job lined up for the year.

Still — the books won’t stop knocking on my cerebral cortex. I turn around and there’s another one waiting: the guide for homeschooling kids with special needs; the book about how men aren’t actually lonely, they’re just unmodeled; the sci-fi romance where a stay-at-home mom gets abducted by aliens and saves the world; the memoir that elbows me in my sleep; the book of metaphors about teaching.

I’m full of books, not IEP goals. They’re not going to get written in a classroom, and they’re definitely not going to get written when I fall asleep in my chair at 7 p.m. next to the unopened boxes that allegedly contain a couch.

Everything feels unreal. Anesthetized. Wrapped in seven layers of gauze.

Over Thanksgiving, Meijer had persimmons. I got excited — kaki in Morocco were the size of my fist, so juicy they ran down my wrist, sweet in a way that felt almost pharmaceutical. The ones from Meijer were small. Hard. Three weeks later they still haven’t softened. They taste like cardboard.

There’s something wrong here. My pattern recognition isn’t blaring sirens, but it’s humming. An itch under the snowpack. A shift in the air pressure. Things are off.

We’re not getting through this winter without a storm.

I’m calling it now.

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When the twins were small, I handled Thanksgiving and my ex, Lewis, did Christmas. The day after my feast, we’d go chop down the tree—the kids waddling in snowsuits so thick they could hardly bend, me half-asleep after cooking for 16 people the day before. The sky would spit snow while they ran ahead, and I trudged behind in a haze I didn’t know was exhaustion until much later.

Sometimes we would have people staying at the house with us as we got closer to the holiday itself. Most of the family was just a few hours drive away, so they came the day of, but sometimes we had people stay over. My sister would come from Wisconsin, or my brother would come from up north. My dad would come from Ohio. And one of those years, we were all hanging out, and Lewis made breakfast for dinner. It was his favorite thing to make: he’d scramble a dozen eggs and make a platter of bacon. He’d make a stack of toast and sometimes waffles, although it’s not the waffles I remember from this particular year. 

It wasn’t anything he’d made at all. It was an orange.

There were at least six people around the table. I can’t remember who all of them were, but I know that the kids were next to me on my right, and my brother and sister were across the table. Lewis put all of the food on the table, and we all were sitting down. Seating was tight in the dining room with the table expanded and all the people sitting around it. We all were thanking him for making all the food and spooning it onto our plates, passing around the dishes and having side conversations like you do at a big family dinner. I looked down at my plate, and I remember thinking it was so much grease. 

I looked over the kids’ small heads at Lewis. He was sitting right next to the sideboard with the fruit bowl on it. I raised my voice over the conversation and asked if he could please pass me an orange.

He picked one out of the bowl.

The next thing I knew, my glasses slammed into my cheekbone. A flash of pain. My sinus burned. My nose started dripping. My eyes watered, and before I could stop myself the words came out:

“Why did you do that to me?”

I reached up to my nose, and pulled my fingers away. They were covered in blood. There was a moment of perfect silence.

My sister laughed. My brother shot to his feet, ducked behind the crowded chairs, and disappeared into the kitchen. I sat frozen with blood on my hands, trying not to cry. He came back with a cool paper towel and wiped my nose. That small kindness steadied me.

I looked down the table at my husband, the man who had stood before God and promised to love and care for me, the father of my children, and he wasn’t even looking at me. He was staring at his plate and shovelling eggs into his mouth, muttering about how he was hungry. 

Someone else at the table, I don’t know who, started talking about poor Lewis, it wasn’t his fault. The story gelled quickly. What a random thing to have happen, to toss your wife an orange and she couldn’t catch it in time. She’s so clumsy sometimes, it wasn’t his fault it happened to hit her in the nose and then all that blood… the poor guy. And everything was okay. The blood stopped relatively quickly and we all got to eat our delicious dinner of scrambled eggs (that were slightly cold), perfectly done bacon (that had zero nutritional value), and white toast (that I never ate because I hate toast). And after a few minutes, someone mock-whined, “why did you do that to me?” and everyone laughed. It became a family joke. 

Years later, long after I left, I remembered something that made my stomach drop: he threw it overhand.

I was less than six feet away.

And today I realized he threw it inches from our children’s faces.

That asshole had everyone so well-trained.

But it isn’t one act that makes a thing abuse. Abuse is not the pain or the blood or the tears—I stayed another ten years after that dinner. Abuse is the moment you push down your own emotional response because you know there’s no point showing it. It’s knowing nothing you do will change anything, so you keep moving forward into a life that isn’t what you thought it would be. You adjust your reality until the unacceptable becomes normal and you become the problem. You up your antidepressants and getting something new to help you sleep.

I was lucky. I left. Most women don’t. Many are in marriages that resemble mine in some way. Not all were hit with oranges in front of their families, who then comforted the man who threw it. But many are lied to, minimized, or managed. Many have accepted a life that feels muted and inevitable because someone needs them to keep the machinery running. They don’t know their sepia-toned misery isn’t normal.

They don’t realize that our default is actually technicolor, just like we thought it was when we were kids.

I’m alone this Thanksgiving, but I know I’m not really alone. I can see in color now. Even if I’m the only one in my apartment tonight, I welcome the sisters who don’t yet know they’re my sisters. I’m laying the table. The meal is almost ready. Soon we can sit down together and say grace.

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It’s been a while. I’ve missed you.

I’m sitting in a chair from IKEA—with an ottoman, thank you very much—in a carpeted apartment looking out at a maple tree that’s already lost all its leaves. The only other furniture I have is a bed—memory foam, thank you very much—and four lamps, two of which I still haven’t figured out where to put. My end tables are a printer box and the box from one of the lamps. I have a snake plant in a bucket named George, a yoga mat, and today I broke down and bought a programmable coffee maker because I get up at 5:45 am for my job.

The wifi is fast, I have a RAV4 again, and I’m still trying to find a kind of bread that won’t make me sick.

And winter is coming fast.

If I sit in just the right spot, I can watch the sun set past one of the other buildings in this complex. My balcony faces west, and the pinks and oranges are outstanding. The problem is that the sun sets at 5:15 right now and I have to have my eyes closed by 9:45—U.S. high school start times are inhumane. Everything is very flat here, and the other day I passed a car with a sticker that said We Are All Charlie Kirk.

No, sir or madam, we are not.

There turns out to be a role called “travel special education teacher.” You make good money, the contract ends at the end of the school year, and they parachute you into places that are in deep shit and ask you to create structures and then leave. This is exactly the kind of work I love. I’ve never been the person who can settle into the same job for 20 years. I always imagined I could be that person if I tried hard enough, but the truth is I need an end date.

It doesn’t mean I don’t love the kids, the school, or the town—I do. But I’m built for repair work, not permanence. Hand me a stack of overdue IEPs and an impossible scheduling situation and I’ll vibrate with glee. Make me sit through parent-teacher conferences for the rest of eternity and… ugh.

I’ve always moved every two or three years, except when I was married, and the only reason I stayed then was for the stability of everyone around me. And I was good at it—really good. I threw myself into the community-building rituals of being a Midwestern mom. But it was very, very, very hard.

Lately I’ve started thinking of myself as having a border collie brain. It needs to herd things, and it needs to keep moving. You can’t make a border collie sit still unless they’re exhausted. And at the end of the day, I am very, very tired right now.

And weirdly happy.

I went to the Detroit Institute of Arts today. I wandered through the African art exhibit, and I didn’t see anything from Morocco. Morocco is part of Africa. There was some gorgeous work from Valencia in the Islamic art section, but the rest was mostly Iran and Turkey. They were beautiful, but not representative. If you’re going to call something Islamic art, then where’s Indonesia? And anyway—Islam is the religion, not the people. That’s like calling everything else Christian art.

But looking at the calligraphy, I heard the echo of the call to prayer in the deepest parts of my ears, and I was grinning like an idiot. And when I came home I wondered whether I should buy a couch or do a month in Bali.

I’m happy here, and it’s home, but also it’s not home. I’m living in a part of the state where my mother’s and father’s bloodlines intersect within fifteen miles. Some of the people I work with know my cousins. I’m learning that little things I thought were family quirks are actually regional language tics, and somehow the highways here feel braided into my DNA. No one has any money, no one has any time, everything is too expensive, and I’m trying to uphold structures that may not even exist by the end of this school year. Michigan will be fine, but further south—I pray for those kids.

There’s a lot to write about. My Spanish is exceptional now, so Cuenca was worth it for that alone, but I’m not looking forward to the deep freeze of January and February, or the political weirdness that refuses to die. I try not to think about how Stalin starved Ukraine and instead focus on generalizing math skills for kids with IEPs and keeping them out of jail when they take a hit off a vape pen in the middle of gym class.

I missed this, sometimes. I can only handle so many rich kids at once. I’m traveling to two places for Thanksgiving, and I’m eyeing Mexico—not the beach, somewhere with good coffee and very little English—for Christmas break. I’m thinking bigger for Spring Break. Winter here is brutal, and I don’t want to be immobilized under a blanket staring at salt stains on my shoes for two months. I want to remember color and light.

But the hummingbirds by my window are distant now. So are the goats on Sunday mornings, their bells tinkling on the other side of the compound wall. I’m in the land of my people for the coming season, with a lease and a car loan and George.

I’m okay. At least for a while.

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I thought I was being a nice person. 

I knew that I was eventually going to have to say something to a particular person, and I didn’t want to because I thought that they would figure it out themselves. Well, they didn’t, so I had to say something, and I hate conflict.

On the other side of the hour of angry tears that followed, I realized that I have one hell of a resentment. It’s the kind of resentment that makes me hate being sober. I want to stay pissed. I love, love, LOVE this particular resentment, and want to hold on to it forever. But I can’t–and it sucks.

Men are fucking assholes. I have a goddamned resentment about men, especially men with substance abuse issues. I hate almost all of them. They have no idea how cruel the world can be, because no matter how far they fall there will always be someone to give them another chance. 

Women don’t get those chances. 

Last night, I received a message from someone who I thought was a friend that made me realize that they are DEEP in the shit right now. They are actively demolishing their life, and I’ve been feeling bad, and listening, and sending fun pictures of the Andes. I’ve been hanging on their messages to see if they’re okay. But I realized that, in all likelihood, they’re completely disassociated from reality right now.

Because they have a penis, they keep getting away with it. I don’t know how much is substance abuse and how much is a midlife crisis, but they’re in it deep and they still have a place to live, a job, and people who care about them deeply. No matter how many people tell them off, they’re probably going to have an inexhaustible supply of people who will prop them up and tell them that everything is going to be okay and invest their light in them. 

Women do not have it this easy. 

When I got sober–oh so many days ago–and I told my ex that I was going to go to meetings, he asked me if I had to go every day. He wondered out loud how long I would stick with it. I sat quietly with him at the kitchen table as he told me that he’d heard stories of people joining the group I joined and coming to their house and pouring all of the liquor down the sink. He started getting drunk in the basement three times a week: I would hear it, my hands shaking, as I put our kids to bed. 

My ex was more concerned about the liquor than the mother of his children. 

I was full of fucking rage this morning, that this guy I used to know still has a family and a job and gets to look like the cool guy. He had talked to me about getting sober, and I not only told him how I did it, I debated it with him. He seemed to come to some sort of resolution. 

But nothing seems to have changed. 

That was well over a year ago. How was he still winning? How did he get to keep floating by on the fact that he’s a fucking white man?

Men have everything in the goddamned world—the option to choose not to get sober, to choose not to do the right thing. Those bastards are allowed to be bastards, just because they want to be. And I had to schedule my meetings around the binges of the man who’d sworn in front of God that he loved me more than anything in the entire world.

This poor guy was lucky I didn’t get on a plane, drive up to his house, and kick down the door to give him a piece of my mind. He was lucky he was on another continent. 

But here is where he becomes the lesson. And let me say, I hate this fucking part.

It’s the option that pisses me off. It’s that he has the option. I’m not mad at this guy in particular, or all white men everywhere, I’m mad that I myself never had the option. It was only one of the world’s white men who spent a decade and a half narrowing my life to one bad option, and it wasn’t this guy. And I’m not really mad at that one white man. I’m mad at me, for not leaving before the bad option he chose for me was the only one left. 

And being mad at me is what makes me drink. So I took a walk, and got a Ritter Sport, and came home and ate a peanut butter and honey sandwich for dinner. I breathed, and opened my computer, and the wave of grace that washed over me prepared me for what I’m about to say. 

To the man to whom I sent a somewhat crispy message this morning: if you’re reading this, you know who you are. This, and all of the days I’m leaving you alone that follow, are my amends. I still don’t want you to contact me until you figure your shit out. But I want you to see how it works, imperfect as it is. It’s the classic “it’s not you, it’s me.” 

I tried to tell you this with love, but I believe I might have failed. We’re all just awkwardly fumbling our way toward being better people, no matter how many days we’ve strung together. We’re doing the best with what we have, and we’re trying to be kind without getting our asses kicked. That’s grace in motion.

But seriously, you’re lucky beyond your wildest dreams. Please don’t waste it.

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I am absolutely, dead tired of looking for work. I’ve been at it since March. At first I thought I was never going to teach again, so I started a Google Data Analyst certificate. I got pretty far. I started this blog, browsed freelance writing gigs, decided I didn’t want to make thirteen cents an hour. I set up a Carrd for special education consulting. I even invented an alter ego who does intelligence work, because doing learning support internationally is basically that anyway.

No dice.

So a few weeks ago I circled back to teaching jobs. I applied to NGOs, paid seventy-five dollars for a subscription to the international schools database, color-coded a spreadsheet, got my references lined up. I sent out applications for this year and even the 26-27 school year. One NGO rejected me. Another nibbled, asked for interview times. I sent them. Silence since.

Meanwhile my border collie brain has been running in circles: the water went out for hours last week, there’s a national strike about diesel prices (I’m with the Indigenous people on this one), and today the power was supposed to go out too.

So I thought. And thought. And finally said: fuck it. I’m going to work on the book.

Eight years ago I wrote a 227-page sci-fi draft called Matter. I printed it, put it in a binder, posted about it on Facebook. A handful of likes, zero comments. No one ever brought it up again. I thought writing a draft was a big deal. Apparently it wasn’t. So I shelved it, became a teacher, and tried not to care.

After my divorce I printed it again, tried revising during a week alone, and realized it was a shitty draft. Back it went to the shelf.

But this week, with job apps marinating, I opened the original 2018 file. Made an outline doc, character sheets, grabbed a notebook. Started reading it like a scientist. And it’s… actually not that bad. It needs structure, some connective tissue, and a main character with more guts. But the bones are good.

She’s a stay-at-home wife abducted by aliens, chased by the CIA. It’s about power and loss, about having to let go of everything to make something new. About when to hold on and when to let go. At the end you’re living a life you never imagined. There’s love and heartbreak and the unraveling of an old identity.

Seven years ago I thought I’d never leave that rust-belt house, vacuuming dog-hair dust bunnies and cooking for people who barely tolerated my menu ideas. Instead, in less than a year I’ve slept on five continents. I’ve eaten ragu in Bologna, heard the Ramadan cannon, fought through Istanbul duty-free, watched a Quebec lake thaw in spring. Now I’m nestled in mountains south of the equator, listening to thunderstorms that never quite rain.

Until I figure out where I’m going next, I can straighten out Matter. Test the beams, change the drapes, pick new furniture. Keep my brain from chewing itself to bits. Maybe even live the dream of seeing my name on a spine.

The me from seven years ago would barely be able to breathe with happiness. I’m very much doing it for her.

I have been so incredibly fucking tired. 

Last week, I realized I’d been running on fumes for decades. I realized I’d been nervous and exhausted and trying to make everything make sense for as long as I could remember. Even when I was drinking, even when the twins were babies, even when I was in Morocco. I’ve been dancing steps that other people told me were the right ones, even if it didn’t look like I was doing it the right way. Turns out that being on the spectrum means you’re allergic to doing what other people tell you to do. 

God I hate that.

Still, I followed the steps. I worked my way through college after being written out of the will. I got married immediately after getting pregnant. I stayed home with the kids because we couldn’t afford daycare. I made all the baby food to save money. I got early intervention for my kid who wasn’t talking. I took responsibility for my own mental health. I cleaned the house in a passable way. I went to writers’ conferences with my mother-in-law. I made sure that everyone always had plenty of fruits and vegetables to eat. I hit the elliptical at the Y. I forced myself to run on a city river trail by taking a big black dog with me. I got sober. I was a Girl Scout leader and cookie mom. I was a PTA secretary. I made casseroles. I made Thanksgiving dinner for over 15 people every year. I quit the small jobs at the library and the local free weekly newspaper when childcare fell through because family is more important. I organized snack closets at school. I gave out Goldfish crackers and popsicles to the neighborhood kids in the summers because I knew that their parents couldn’t afford to give them snacks. I tutored a kid with dyslexia on my porch. I made sure the neighborhood refugee kids knew that our door was always open for them to jump on the trampoline or eat a banana or just pretend to be an ordinary kid for a while. I went back to college when my kids were old enough in order to be a special education teacher. I put a neighborhood food pantry in our front yard when the pandemic started. I worked in the toughest school in the toughest district in the area after I graduated because I wanted to help where it was needed the most. 

I wasn’t perfect, but I did a lot, and I did it under circumstances that, frankly, most men refuse to imagine. I can honestly say that I did everything I could. Unlike our boomer parents, I can stand in front of you, in my too-tight jeans and fading hoodie, and say that I did my best.

I still got fucked over.

I think that you probably did, too. That’s why you’re here. 

This morning, I remembered being 15 years old and reading Naked Lunch, by William S. Burroughs. He said that the naked lunch is “a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.” In those days, it rang true, but I didn’t know why. I was just in the presence of something deeply profound.

But now I know. I look around the table and see what everyone is eating, whether they chose the morsel or not. I hate to tell you this, but it’s all inedible, pretty much. It’s all shit. But we have to eat it, because otherwise, what are we supposed to do?

We have to go to the corporate job, because we need the insurance and the house. Or, we don’t have a corporate job and live in a crappier house and the deductible on our insurance gives us a heart attack if we think about it too deeply. We’re all trying to do the right thing, and choices have consequences. 

Are you going to be selfish or are you going to do the right thing? And we’re all good people, right? 

So we do the right thing. 

We hold our nose, take our bite, and hope for the best. Even then, the only choice is to take it or not take it. There’s no way we’re getting something nutritious or good, we’re going to get what we get anyway. Either we get a bite or we don’t get a bite, but it’s never good.

I don’t want to say that the hoops that I jumped through, the things I did, the choices I made for my children and my family weren’t worth it. Everyone got out alive, and I know that a lot of people don’t. I should be grateful. 

But part of this moment is realizing that not everyone has to make the choice about whether to take the bite or not. There are a lot of people who get along by filling the forks. And I think we should start calling them out. Because our choice is not about us, but rather about them. 

The next time I get fucked over, I want to at least know that it’s happening. I want every sensation acknowledged, and I want to know exactly who’s doing it. But most importantly, I want them to know that I know. 

That good woman, who did everything right? She’s gone. And I will look them straight in the eyes when they do it.

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Act I: Married

We had a bird feeder in our backyard, and I often sat at the dining room table watching the swirl of birds through the half-fogged sliding glass door to the backyard like I was watching TV.

He walked home for lunch every day and I sat across the table from him and watched in silence while he ate last night’s leftovers while looking at his phone. 

On the weekends, we paraded the twins to the gourmet popcorn shop in Old Town, him in front with the children and me five or so paces behind, enjoying the quiet.

Act II: After I Left

I looked for fat sparrows everywhere like some people look for morels.

As a special education teacher, I worked through lunch with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a few mini cucumbers, and an apple–then dragged another three hours of work home with me in a rolling bag.

Cheese popcorn was my favorite dinner and I don’t know if I ever got all the cheese gunk out of the keyboard of my work laptop.

Act III: Now, In Another Hemisphere

I’m looking out my window at a tree with purple blooms in the middle of winter, watching hummingbirds the size of robins flit back and forth.

I walk to a restaurant every day where mom and grandma work the kitchen while the son waits tables and my three course lunch costs $2.50.

They bring you popcorn to put in the soup, and every time I drop in a handful I giggle.

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I talked to a detective today. She believed my story, but I don’t think she can do anything about it.

I waited until my kids were 18 before talking to the police. I knew there would be consequences, and I wanted them to be at least some version of safe. I’m not sure it’s going to work. My son’s dad has already started arguing with him.

I waited too long. I was scared, and I waited too long.

I did everything I was told would keep us safe. I stayed home with the kids, went back to school, became a special education teacher. I worked in city schools. I took my meds and went to therapy. I made sure everyone ate, went to the doctor, and got where they needed to go.

I wasn’t perfect, but I believed if you did everything right, things would turn out okay. They didn’t. I’ve been holding on with all my fingernails, and now I have to let go.

I keep thinking I shouldn’t have to leave.

Now I’m back at the house where I’m dogsitting, watching the pug’s favorite movie, A Dog’s Purpose. It’s terrible. I can’t stop crying. Not movie-crying — tears streaming for no clear reason. I just talked to a detective. I just told my son the truth.

Maybe that’s reason enough.

I fly to Toronto Monday morning, spend a week with three fantastic dogs on a ridiculous downtown balcony, and then I’m on another continent. I have no reason to come back. I feel emptied out.

I don’t know if anyone knows how much I’ve been holding on. And now I’m crying at a manipulative dog movie with cake in the kitchen, at what’s either the bleeding edge of my past or the leading edge of my future.

Thank god for cake.

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Stephen Colbert got cancelled last week. Which is devastating, because I was absolutely planning to go on his show—right after finishing the book I’ve been writing for the last 20 years.

Everyone knows it happened; everyone’s up in arms. The hot takes on social media are probably done by now. Great job, everyone. Be proud of yourselves.

I’ve never stayed up late enough to watch him live. I had kids, then a job that drained me so much I was in bed by 9 PM every night. But I watched the clips. And here’s the thing: Stephen Colbert saved my life.

I’ve always written—and I’ve always been ashamed of it. Even when I edited a university lit journal and assisted a man who later had his NYT obit (RIP Lewis Dabney, you charming disaster), I felt like an imposter. Just some probably undiagnosed, mentally ill kid from a chemical company town who thought she was smarter than she was.

I was naive enough to think that even without a trust fund, publishing connections, or family support, I’d still make it in New York as a book editor. It was the dream. I was 30, I’d worked my way through college, and I was ready.

Then I died. And then I got pregnant.

Writing became something I snuck in while caring for twins—because the circumstances were such that I was caring for twins all the time. My journals were one paragraph every two weeks. Proust went on the back burner. Grad school for literature? My ex said it was useless, and I believed him. So instead, I made my kids my entire world. I became the mom I wished I’d had.

But still. Stephen was there.

I had days I couldn’t be good. Days when I thought about the life I could’ve had if I hadn’t gotten knocked up. Days when I believed someone, someday, would realize I wasn’t crazy—that I actually had something. Somehow, I wrote 36,000 words of a sci-fi novel about a stay-at-home mom abducted by aliens who saves Earth from a corporate overlord race in league with the CIA. I put it in a baby-blue binder. I marked it up in red pen. Then I got in the minivan and drove to pick up the kids.

When I wasn’t writing, I was on The Late Show. (Or Oprah. Didn’t matter.) I imagined being that mysterious Midwestern writer who changed science fiction. I’d win the Pulitzer, and sit under bright lights in a perfectly cut navy dress with silver ombré sparkles and flats, discussing craft and politics like a pro.

Reality? The book wasn’t good. Because writing and editing a good book takes time and energy, and I had neither. Instead, I went back to school for special ed certification. It was brutal—everything was. It wasn’t until my marriage ended that I understood why.

That’s another book. The one I swore I’d never write. The one I started last night.

It’s not as funny as the alien-abduction novel, but it might save someone’s life. Stephen Colbert was the vision that kept me alive through that story—the possibility that someone, somewhere, might get what I was doing. That my frantic keyboard-banging between school pickups was actually the real story of my life. That vision kept me alive in a situation designed for me not to live.

He’s part of the reason I’m here to tell it. But I’m not writing for him anymore. Or Oprah. Or the Vanity Fair glam shot after the Pulitzer. I’m writing for me. By hand, under a skylight in an Airbnb in Ecuador. Not caring about glamour—open to mystery, ready for what comes next.

If I’ve done my math right, I have less than a year to publish if I want to live the dream of getting on his show. I better fucking get going.

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What happens when the suffering ends—and you have to decide how to live again?

When you get to a certain time in your life, you’ve probably seen some shit. I know that there’s someone out there who has been perfectly loved and supported their entire life. I hear stories. I assume they’re true.

Fucking good for them. The rest of us have scars. Some days I feel like all I am is a bunch of scars stitched together. 

Yoga helps. When I started over a year ago, I was so locked in my body that it feels like a miracle every time I feel space between my ribs. I can do things with my body now that I never thought I’d be able to do. Last October, I went to a retreat in Morocco and couldn’t stand on one foot for three seconds. I didn’t trust the earth to hold me up. Now I can hold crow for five seconds—and when I rise from it, I yawp like Whitman intended. The scars are there, but they’re not binding me any more. They move, they stretch. Some of them are even changing. 

I am living with things that I never thought I would live with. I thought that the things that happened to me would kill me eventually and all I was doing was enduring until they finally took me down. I thought I was on borrowed time until my past consumed me. I thought that I had worked so hard to get off a ventilator and get sober and to survive things that other women do not survive in order to just exist. 

I thought that if I endured enough, something good would happen. I was taught this. In CCD, I learned that good people who suffer in the correct way get to heaven. The crucifix above my childhood bed told me suffering was holy. Jesus hung on that cross for us, and every lesson at church was a meditation on pain. Later, Buddhism taught me that life is suffering. Every script says the same thing. Every script says endure. 

But the more I learned about the world, I learned that there are probably things that are worse than death. The loneliness that lasts years. The violence disguised as love. The pain of a mind turned on itself. 

In the past few years I’ve learned there is nothing good enough in this world or beyond to justify the suffering that I’ve been through. Not that my suffering is unique–I’m a middle aged, middle class white woman in the United States of America. However, there have been layers on top of it that have made it unbelievably hard, and there are some days, more than I’d like to admit, that the act of letting my feet hit the ground when I get out of bed in the morning isn’t so much the start of an amazing opportunity but rather a question: Can I really do this today? Can I put one foot in front of the other without collapsing? 

Adrenaline kept me going for a couple of years, but after I got back from Morocco last March I couldn’t pretend to be functional any more, at least in the way I used to be. That’s a story in itself. It’s a chapter in a book that I’m writing, and I’ll leave it there for now. 

But today I realized that yes, life is suffering, but not the way that we’re taught. We all are born with wounds that we spend our whole lives trying to heal, and so many of us get other ones layered on top of the original. 

Although we can put a number to our pain in the emergency room, we cannot rank ourselves amongst others based on who has endured the most. (Although many people would like to try.) Trauma isn’t a sliding scale: In the middle of what we can’t control—and the shame and guilt after—we all feel the same: naked, alone, and desperate to hide.

But today, after stretching and moving my scars around so that they are .001% more flexible, I realized that I’m no longer in pain. And now that I’m not enduring, I have no idea what to do with my life. There’s no manual here. There’s no manual for being scarred so deeply that you no longer resemble anything close to who you used to be but are still expected to follow the same rules. 

I don’t want to live like that any more. 

I think that most people don’t know that where I’m at even exists. This is the realm of young, white, male philosophy majors with trust funds, and I panicked that I cannot afford to be in this rare air. Regardless, I AM here, and I AM breathing it. 

What the fuck do I do?

I do know this: in just a few days I will be on my fifth continent in just over six months. I might want to move there, I might not, but I’m exploring. The last time I did this I ended up moving across an ocean three weeks later, and I have a feeling that this might be a similar situation. 

But this is the first time that I’m truly free. I’m not escaping, I’m not fleeing, I’m not trying to get as far away from something as possible. I’m coming from a place of curiosity about what comes next, without the anxiety of what might happen actively nipping at my heels (and being consciously ignored). I don’t know what’s going to work, but I know what didn’t in the past, so I’m going to stay away from that. 

No one ever talks about what comes after the suffering in real life. Nobody tells you what comes after the resurrection. I’m about to find out.

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I write about survival, reinvention, and what comes after the hard part. If you want to read more like this, join my list here — no spam, just honest words when they’re ready.