I’ve loved writing for as long as I can remember. Long before I understood sex and long before I met Jack. It was my outlet as a child, my way to make sense of the world and find peace and order in all this chaos that is life.
It was a nerdy hobby in high school. Navigating the teenage social scene was awkward for me, but dialing into AOL to craft a website and related stories from the point of view of a fictional version of me felt effortless. I told stories, some based on truth. I was featured in a German rail magazine. I made online friends, exchanging daily emails. But no one I knew in real life ever read those stories, and those Geocities websites are long gone.
Being a natural-born writer made academics easy for me. I was “that girl,” the one who got a 4.0 on the first draft of every essay, even in the courses where the professors would try to scare us by proudly proclaiming that they never gave perfect scores. I earned praise and scholarships, and I didn’t even have to apply for a job at the college writing center — they extended the offer within weeks of my freshman orientation.
After completing my undergraduate degree, I landed my dream job, the exact one that I’d seen posted online years prior when I made my decision to pursue library science. The librarian prior to me was moving to another building, and I started work with only the promise of a Master’s. I suppose they thought my 3.98 college GPA spoke for my work ethic, my intelligence, my maturity. Perhaps yes. In hindsight, I also see it reflecting on my perfectionism, my tendency to exert my willpower to bend the future to my whims, my fortitude in the academic setting.
I had everything planned out. I married Jack in the spring that followed, after he too graduated from college and secured a position in the working world. We bought a bungalow at age 22 and promptly had the married, guilt-free sex that we’d been craving for years. It wasn’t long before the babies came, first Holden, then Catherine, and the house grew cramped.
So we moved into our dream home, albeit a fixer-upper for my perfectionist self. It’s situated on a non-sports lake, practically a nature preserve, so it’s peaceful and quiet and we don’t have to pay lakefront taxes. There were just enough neighbors for our kids to have a happy childhood, but not so many that I ever feel suffocated. I decorated, and planned, and pursued promotions at work, and popped out Sylvia, and proceeded down a path that seemed to promise perfection.
Instead, I got depressed. True, the mental health issues were always there, since high school, really. But every time something wonderful happened to me — and there were plenty of wonderful things, so many, from falling in love with Jack to excelling in school to the wedding and babies and houses and career successes — I would bounce back. I would swell with pride, and my depression would momentarily cease. I would feel whole, momentarily, and the guilt and shame and sorrow would diminish, fading into the background.
But babies slow things down. Babies require you to sit on the couch, nursing them, admiring them, anticipating their next need. It was beautiful until it was maddening. I could stroke Sylvia’s fine baby hair in the dark of night as I nursed her in bed, soaking in the magic of what I thought would be my last baby, only to get sucked into the dark hole of Pinterest while nursing on the couch by the light of day. I took in my surroundings and saw what I didn’t have, rather than what I did. I compared my 1990s builder-grade house to the historical lakehouses I scrolled past, wishing for other.
Wishing away my life.
I knew that Jack was a stellar dad and exceptional husband. I saw how he put his career on hold to let me pursue all of my dreams and keep all of us happy. I was annoyed when he accused me of not appreciating him, of being out of touch. I didn’t see what he saw — me, in a cloud, disconnected and depressed. Fearful of death but afraid to really live.
Was it some combination of postpartum depression and being on the mini-pill and feeling completely overwhelmed with my responsibilities, without the humility to admit it to my perfectionist self? Certainly, that was part of my story, so I took steps to remedy it all. I threw out the pill and started to make efforts to humor Jack, booking the nude beach vacation he’d been pestering me about for years. Sex was how he wanted affirmation that I loved him, that I was alright, that we were alright.
I promptly became pregnant with Eloise. Not on purpose.
This deviation from our plan rattled me in the best possible way. Perhaps it prepared me for the scare that would follow shortly after her birth, when Catherine became infected with a rare disease that panicked me. She healed, but I will never forget the fear I felt. For a moment, I may have blanked out on life again as I processed the unthinkable. As I went back to work and adjusted to life as a family of six, as I processed the death of a close co-worker and started to contemplate not just my own mortality, but also the mortality of everyone I loved.
I would die, and if I wasn’t living now, what the fuck was I doing?
It was around that time in life that I really started trying. Day tripping. Traveling, most often with four young kids in tow. Living. Loving.
I put increased effort into everything, but most especially my mental health. At the same time, having four little kids means that you have to let some things go, and I learned to relax and say no. I started setting boundaries in baby steps, and within five years I would make great strides.
I started reading novels again with more fervor than I had in years. I journaled and reflected on the relief it brought to write things out. I enjoyed planning events for my family, and I relented to Jack’s constant requests for sex, remembering again how much my sexuality was a part of my whole self.
I started smoking weed and gained some perspective. I found that I could dwell in those dark thoughts of mortality while high, and then apply the wisdom that I’d garnered in that other realm to my real life. I let myself bask in my appreciation for my life, my people, my home.
We renovated. The kitties that we’d adopted as a young married couple passed on, and we adopted two rescue dogs. Our schedules became packed with Scouts and gymnastics and swim lessons and birthday parties. Jack and I left the kids for a week in the summers and flew to Jamaica, where we explored our prime-of-life sexualities. I unearthed my suppressed bisexuality and started to lay claim to my authentic self. I had never felt more whole, more alive.
Then the pandemic hit. For a moment, the slower pace was a welcome relief. Life had been flying by and I was distinctly aware that I hadn’t had much time of late to reflect and appreciate all of my blessings. We kicked off the first lockdown with board games and family movies and repeated nights of fantastic kinky sex after the kids were all tucked in. We smoked too much weed and worked too little, but still I was inspired. I was ready to write, and I started a blog about my sex life and all the revelations I’d recently had.
Writing for an audience brought me a joy that I hadn’t anticipated. I was constantly inspired, not by Pinterest or material goods, but by ideas and the validation of sharing them with the wider world. Those summer sex vacations had made me feel confident and ready to show myself to the world, but during pandemic times, it would only be virtually. Perhaps that wasn’t enough; perhaps that was why the seasonal depression that struck me the following winter was so hard.
Perhaps all that led to my pursuit of polyamorous relationships the following spring. Perhaps that’s why I spiraled out of control, losing myself over a narcissistic guy at work and consoling myself with my first lesbian relationship. Perhaps that’s why I cloistered myself in my mind, my obsessions, while ignoring Jack’s pleas to snap out of my funk and pay attention to my family, my life. Perhaps I was lost in the new self that I had been slowly been unraveling from years of guilt and shame and depression.
But I found my footing. I found it, and then I reflected back on all that I’d done and all that I’d gone through, in the way that works best for me.
I did realize, in the midst of it all, that a book was forming. I realized before any of this Main Character Energy business that my story was unique and ultimately leading me to some sort of newfound perspective on life.
So I wrote. I had been writing all along, for a blog audience, but I was censoring myself. Only wanting to write the juicy details, the stuff that would titillate and tease just enough to gain an audience. The stuff that wouldn’t hurt anyone’s feelings, or reveal too much, or make me look bad.
Now I wrote the truth. I wrote as things evolved for well over a year — from November of 2021, when the guy at work broke my heart, through the school year as my relationship with his wife evolved into something more than friendship, over the summer as I processed the love I was now feeling for my girlfriend, and throughout the next school year as my girlfriend broke my heart yet again and that coworker’s wife became just a friend, but a good friend.
By the summer of 2023 I had finally gained that new perspective, and things felt calm. Normal. Perfect in all the imperfections.
I felt like I’d come back to myself, and to my children, and to my Jack. I felt like I’d gone on a journey and endured battles with monsters and demons, mostly from within. I felt like I’d taken a stand against those who would object to my carefully placed boundaries — most notably my conservative, critical parents. I felt like I’d unearthed the warrior woman within me, and then let her rise into the heaven that she herself had created. Her home.
So I wrote it all with as much truth and heart as I could muster. I wrote as much as I could share and still be entertaining, and not too preachy. I wrote about what hurt, what will surely make you cringe, and what still stands out in my memory. I wrote about the things I want to forget, hoping to leave them behind on paper, but also hoping that I hold onto the lessons learned.
I’m not who I am in that book. She’s Eliza, the fictional me from the past. She’s the personification of those years of suppression and shame. She’s the guilt of never being good enough, of not enjoying life in the proper way. She’s the mistakes I made and life experience I’ve gained. Eliza is the resolutions I’ve finally realized.
I’m a writer, so I write.
I don’t want to write for you. For an audience. For validation. I want to write to make sense of the world and my place in it. I want to write to reflect and proceed forward on the best path. I want to write for my mental health and for fun. I want to write for Jack, to show him who I am and how much I love him. For my children, if they ever really want to know what I think. For the purpose of uncovering who is under this skin, who resides in this soul. For me.
I find myself a bit lost in the marketing of it all. The queries for a literary agent, the Medium posts about gaining more followers, about making 800K in a month while only writing two hours a day. I don’t want to care about money, about validation, about followers, about fame. And yet I want to be read. I want to be known. I want to be seen — and that’s how I got into the mess that I portrayed in my book in the first place.
It’s not lost on me that until I started living, those relatively few years back, that I had something to write about. That something also caused me to pull back from life and stay cooped up in my closet for well over a year, tapping sentiments onto a keyboard. I delayed living yet again in lieu of writing, and in my writing I focused on those haunting old memories, then on attempts to market them. No good.
There must be a balance between the two. Being alive, and writing it down. Soaking in the moments of my life, finding ultimate presence in my existence, feeling love for others, and sharing it with the words that flow from my fingertips. That’s my journey now.
Let’s see how I do.
True, I wrote this mostly for myself first, and for Jack second, but I’d be honored if you found value in my book, too. Go on, take a peek. It’s available now on Amazon.
