I am writing this on my personal laptop, which hasn’t been turned on since spring of 2016. Even then it was only used as my TV, living its entire life on a shelf in my bedroom closet, with an HDMI cable connecting it to the wall-mounted TV. 

The bedroom closet is different now, the bedroom TV is now bigger and hooked to a Roku, and the little TV that used to play me episodes of 30 Rock until I fell asleep is now in the closet waiting to be given to someone or sold on Craigslist. We all successfully escaped from East Nashville. Then Cape Cod. I landed in Hendersonville, two miles from a good friend, one mile from my gym, and so close to the Lowe’s that when I bought my giant, rolling trash can and had trouble jamming it into my Civic, I actually considered just walking it to my house. Hello, neighbors! I am your new neighbor and I am CLASSY. 

I never wrote a blog about any of that, the moving away, the moving back, because I could never find the words. In hindsight, it was pretty unfair of me to expect myself to watch my whole life plan fall apart in front of me and then find a way to tell the internet all about it while never seeming angry, disappointed, judgey, or sad. Especially because I was SO MUCH of all of those things that I hired a therapist to help me sift through all of it. He is a very nice man who does a very good job of letting me rant or be petty or shitty or angry or sassy or whatever I needed to be that day, but only for a limited amount of time. Without fail, he will always steer the ship back to “what are you going to do differently next time?” and “what are your goals now and what are you doing to reach them?” 

Because I was angry and disappointed and judgey and sad, I kept answering that I was never dating again and that my plans involved my friends, my cats, and whatever quantity of booze would be socially acceptable. 

But there he’d be, every two weeks or so, always wanting to know. I’m not sure how we got there, but I eventually stopped being angry, disappointed, and sad. Judginess dies hard. Don’t hold your breath on that one. My conclusions were that a lot of my feels were rooted in being my fault. I had not spoken up for myself. I had not said “hey, this is not OK” when it was not OK. Other people can make you feel like you don’t matter, but only you can make yourself disappear. And, y’all. I disappeared SO HARD.

It takes a lot to hit publish on anything anymore. When I grew up on the internet, you could just write things and know that no one was looking. Nothing you could say would result in a bunch of PlayStation Dudebros doxxing you into nonexistence. Nothing you could say would be an instant career-ender. I never worried that one day I would go to a job interview and be asked to explain three years’ worth of tweets full of curse words and dramatic, not-veiled-enough references to Fall Out Boy lyrics. I never worried that I would get threatened in a parking lot for referring to someone at my gym as Public Domain-ard James Keenan. 

That didn’t really happen. There is a guy at my gym who bears a striking resemblance to the singer from Tool, but I only gave him a nickname in my head. Also, props to him on his quads being so cut. #QuadGoals. 

Every time I would think about writing something, these thoughts would immediately follow:

1. <X person> over at <x site> had the same thought, but they said it way better than you could. What are you going to do, just link to their post? Isn’t that what Facebook is for?
2. No one is going to read this anyway. 
3. Maybe it’s good that no one is going to read this anyway. You haven’t been great and stringing thoughts together since, like, undergrad. 
4. Seriously, who the fuck cares what you think about anything. 
5. If somebody does read this, they are just going to tell you what a petty, judgey, shallow, horrible person you are, because isn’t that what the entire internet is for now? Well, that and googling how tall celebrities are?
6. See, shallow!

In my defense, I’m only Googling celebrities’ heights out of curiosity, because I’m jealous of anyone who is able to use their top kitchen shelves for anything other than “toss the plastic stuff up there and pray there’s no avalanche.” I am aware of the existence of step stools, but that requires effort, and we all know I’m not going to figure out a “system” for using those shelves unless there’s peanut butter up there. Priorities.

Over time, my sessions with my therapist were less about my no-longer-very-recent breakup and more about other things. Work stuff. Friend stuff. Why I feel a need to murder people every time I watch the news….and there would be my therapist saying, “so why don’t you write this stuff down?” and I would start listing all these reasons about how you can’t say anything online without 100 people telling you why you suck, how it never seems like a good time to write, how a friend of mine set a super-high bar for writing really well-written, self-aware blogs in which she never looks like a giant, petty asshole (because she actually is not a giant, petty asshole), and how am I supposed to live in a world with that and oh my god if you like run-on sentences, you have come to the right place. 

And he would just look at me and say something like “why do you think you don’t deserve to be heard?”

“BUT–“

And he’d sit there and watch me squirm around, trying to actually answer his rhetorical question until I would realize that he’d just Oprahed the shit out of me. “It’s just so hard to hit the publish button,” I would say. “I feel like you need to,” he would say back. And I would go home and continue to waterboard myself with books about how to be more assertive, while continuing to make excuses about “how the internet is now” and “something something people doxxing you.”

Point A: I need to believe that we can all do better than to have our entire lives summed up by Facebook posts. I need to believe that this is a better way of communicating than posting a bunch of fomo inspo all over Instagram and accidentally trying to convince everybody that our lives are almost as perfect as we are. I want to have a conversation that feels like a conversation and not just two people talking AT each other. I want to listen to someone talk and be an active listener, instead of pretty much only being capable of this:

Friend: “So X thing happened and I’m super excited about it.”
Me: “Like.”

Point B: No one is interested in doxxing me, and if they ever become interested in doxxing me, they are going to be so, so bored. I can just picture a bunch of GamerGate dudebros getting together to hack into my iCloud, only to find pictures of food, sewing patterns I want to buy, and roughly 2875 cat memes.

So I ran out of excuses. I let myself run out of excuses. I hit publish.