My 2005 head shot, which was clearly very serious business.
I know I said yesterday that I wasn't going to publish the post I wrote over on Medium here because I figured many of you have already heard bits and pieces of my "I was fired from It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia" story, but last night I was laying in my bed, half-reading about the Taylor Swift and Katy Perry drama but mostly thinking about why I'd published an original piece on a site other than my own - which is not something that I typically do; I like to save the best stuff for you guys - and you know what I realized? The real reason I didn't originally want to publish this post here was because the people who read here every day know me. Really, really well. And sometimes it's easier to release the stories that make me feel the most vulnerable into a world populated by strangers rather than writing them on the walls of my home.
It is humiliating, that some (many?) people think that the most interesting thing about me is the fact that I was once almost on a TV show, and then wasn't. It is embarrassing, explaining to people why the fact that I don't act anymore is a positive thing for me, why I truly, truly wouldn't have it any other way, and watching their foreheads wrinkle in pity anyway. If you are a person who was once an actor - or a musician, or an artist, or a writer, or anything "creative" - in some ways you will always be an ex-actor/musician/writer; that will always be the way you are introduced at a party (the subtext, of course, being that of course you wish you were something other than what you are right now). And so for years, I tried to bend and twist my past into a story that wouldn't make people whisper behind my back once I'd walked away: god, could you even imagine how much that sucks for her?!
An Abridged History Of My Body
Before you read this, I think I should tell you why I wrote it.
The other day, my friend Erin wrote a post about her "mom bod," to explain why she created this sweatshirt on glam | camp. She showed photos of her postpartum stomach, described how it can happily hold in its folds a package of mum-mums (mine can, too; I tried). She talked about how poorly she used to treat her body, how poorly others used to treat it, and how her relationship to it changed once she became a mother. She suggested that I also write about my own experience with my body, and how becoming a mother has affected it. I didn't want to, because it sounded frightening...and then I realized that I had to, because it sounded frightening. When you're in tears before your fingertips even touch the keyboard, you know that you've hit on something that you need to get to the bottom of.
So I thought and thought, and what I realized was that for me it hasn't been a journey of learning to love the curves and the shape of my body (it's been that, too, but that's another story for another day) as much as it has been learning to treasure the very stuff of it, the meat and bones and blood. The life of it.
I wouldn't say that my relationship with my body has, historically, been an especially positive one. Not because I don't "like" it, in the "do you like what you see when you look in the mirror?" sense (I do, more on some days than on others, but generally I do), but because it's always felt like a danger zone, a virtual ocean of opportunities to be wounded.
The Post I Wish I’d Read Before Having My Second Child
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Six weeks after my daughter was born, an email landed in my inbox that sounded like it had come from the inside of my own head. A reader, J, wrote to me that she was pregnant with her second baby, and that she was excited, of course...but also scared. Scared of how her life was going to change - rewind from the calm of the toddler era to the madness of the infant period - and scared that her relationship with her first baby would be...not lost, but dimmed somehow. Pushed aside.
Her email was such a relief to me to receive, because I understood it completely. I had struggled so much with these fears myself and experienced such enormous guilt about them that...I guess it just helped to know that others felt exactly as I did.
…And Here We Are (Video)
We're heeeeeere! We're here we're here we're here.
I went a little MIA for the past three days because...well, because "busy" is a little bit of an understatement, but also because I didn't have Internet. But now I do, whee. So I'm back! Hi.
I love it here.
And That’s A Wrap On That (Video)
The Hardest Thing
Illustration by Paperfashion
Kendrick and I are not getting along lately.
Just writing that - putting it out in public - feels scary.
Someone With Problems
I wrote a few weeks ago how, in the days following Goldie's birth - when I feared a relapse of the postpartum depression that I'd suffered from after Indy arrived - I was prescribed a low-dose medication to combat the chronic insomnia and anxiety that I've been dealing with for a good decade (and hopefully make PPD more unlikely). It's been two months, and I figure now is as good of a time as any to write about how it's been going.
* * *
Growing up, my parents taught me that no one would handle my problems for me; it was on me to face them, and then fix them. If I had an issue with a teacher, a fight with a friend, an essay that I just couldn't seem to get right, they were there to listen and offer suggestions, of course, but they were not going to storm the gates and take over; finding a solution was my job. And I'm grateful for that.
Westbound
In two and a half weeks, I am moving to California.
That's not a joke or an exaggeration (although it is temporary; I'll explain), and to say I'm feeling overwhelmed - because this is something we decided only a few days ago - would be the understatement of the century.
Here's what's happening: Kendrick was offered a summer internship in San Jose (just south of San Francisco) that was just too exciting of an opportunity to pass up. Too good for him, too good for his future. Our future. It's exactly the kind of opportunity that we had hoped to see arise when we made the decision for him to go to business school and sleep in another state several days a week, and for us to spend two years as a single-income family.
This Kind Of Life
I'm scared that one day, a few years from now, my husband will wake up and look at me and at the life that we've built and think, Is that it? Is that all I get? I'm scared that he'll think that. I'm scared that I'll think that.
