Back on my Bullshit. or something.

In the most Brokeback Mountain of ways (well, maybe not the most Brokeback Mountain of ways) — I just can’t quit you. The whole lot of ya. Xanga, Livejournal, Blogger, eleventy billion iterations of WordPress … for some reason, I keep coming back, common sense and lack of time be damned. If Xanga had not GOMI’d itself in 2013, I’d pull some of the *riveting* content I know I was churning out in 2005 as a twenty-one year old, before “content” was “content-as-we-know-it” and show off my early adopter status. I wasn’t an “influencer;” I just be writing, ya know?

The concept of blogging in the Xanga days was much more simple than it is now. There weren’t monetizations or media kits or metrics that judged your worth as a writer. You just wrote. And people stumbled upon it and commented. And that shifted over into Blogger in 2010ish, and the Blogger reader was the best thing to happen to any of us that had a group to follow. You participated in link-ups, posted GIFs, wrote about your day … and people responded. You were authentically yourself (at least, I was), and you didn’t need to concern yourself with anything else. Sometimes, you ended up in Buzzfeed articles, or shops sent you free shoes, but man, the landscape was nothing like the Forbes millionaire list it has become.

A lot of life was lived in the space between then and now, Xanga and WordPress, the proverbial Alpha and Omega: over twenty years, if we’re being precise. I’ll give y’all a non-exclusive, in-no-particular-order list of shit that’s gone down since I started blogging in the dark ages.

Since I started blogging in 2003, my romantic life has been … interesting at best. Let’s tick them off: a handful of boyfriends, some shitty, some okay, none truly great; quite a few more of what the kids now call “situationships” (which we in Oklahoma sororities in the early oughts knew only as “repeat offending shackers”); a quick foray into ladytown; one fiance-that-never-became-a husband; one proposal to which I responded “no,” that made me sad for much longer than I ever expected; two near-proposals, proposals that were supposed to occur that I literally ran away from; one colossal dickhead that I wasted half a decade with; and an actual husband, a guy I knew for almost a decade before we got married, that I’ve now been married to for six years.

I’ve lifeguarded, I’ve bartended, I’ve taught gymnastics, I’ve answered phones, I’ve sold overpriced shoes. For the last nearly fifteen years, I’ve lawyered. I’ve represented foster care workers, defending their removals of kids in shitty situations. I’ve seen horrific pictures that no one should ever have to see and heard gut-wrenching stories that no one should ever have to hear. I’ve towed the agency line when I very firmly believed the agency was wrong. I know more about Medicaid provider enrollments and state Board of Pharmacy licensing in all fifty states than anyone ever should. I’ve hustled, I’ve sold, I’ve scrounged, I’ve hit the jackpot, I’ve squandered, I’ve started again. Rinse and repeat. Ebbs and flows, peaks and valleys, que sera sera.

I learned humility in a way that nearly broke me when I failed the bar exam. Twice. Only once before that had I been told no in a manner that I couldn’t talk my way out of (when I didn’t get into a law school that I really wanted to attend). With every other aspect of my life, I had been able to get what I wanted. And I finally encountered something I couldn’t talk my way out of (or into, so to speak). It was a lesson in perseverance and patience and how to survive a fucking ego-shattering blow twice in one year (one of which was on my fucking birthday).

I’ve learned that you can’t motivate anyone to try to be better if you’re the only one who wants it, especially if you’re bankrolling a life they don’t want to change. I’ve learned that those who can’t trust can’t be trusted, and that if someone spends years questioning your own fidelity, they end up on the recieving end of some illicit police reports. I’ve learned that ripping off the Bandaid makes you less of a villain than prolonging the inevitable. And I’ve learned I’m okay with being a villain in someone else’s story. I’m not in control of what anyone else wants to say about me. There are two sides to every story, but I’ll be damned if my side isn’t more interesting, with more context.

Want to hear about the Ruin Your Life Tour of 2015? Ooowee, buckle up, it’s a good one. (footnote: it’s actually not a good one at all, it’s a part of my life that is so incredibly goddamn depressing that thinking about it makes me lose my breath, but being the Sue Heck-Mary Sunshine optimistic douchebag I am, I reframe the whole thing into a punchline so I can stomach the abject pain of it all. It was damn near the shittiest time of my life, but the stories that came out of it are so ridiculous that I can’t help but tell them with a badge of honor because I seem relatively sane now and *it’s an origin story, okay.* It’s sort of like when a drunk’s drunk stories are hilarious while he’s drinking, but after he gets sober, the stories seem sad and makes him sad and everything is holy-shit-sad? Anywhoodles. We still talk about it because the shock factor is better than the sad factor, and I’m nothing if not an entertainer, damn it.)

I’ve learned that, with the right person, you want to figure it out. You aren’t always looking to Irish goodbye and hopscotch up the male food chain. Dale and I shared our crazy early, and then showed our crazy afterward and admittedly, in the beginning, we had a few moments where I thought, “Ohh motherfucker, if I could voir dire my own jury, no one in this country would convict me once they know the facts,” but who among us, right? I am happy to report that there have been zero murders, and really, not even a lot of fights, and we made it through the COVID lockdown with an abundance of love and grace. We’re at a point now where we recognize almost immediately when we’re being snappish assholes to each other and apologize quickly, before it becomes a thing. Or if I’m bottling something up, I’ll tell him before it becomes a Hiroshima-level catastrophe. We also genuinely like each other. I’ve found that it helps.

I had a quarter-life crisis, which, after dealing with my current midlife crisis, seems so Bush League and OMGSTUPID, you sweet summer child, you know nothing, Jon Snow. Maybe as elder millennials, with our entire lives existing in crisis mode, we don’t know any other way to exist. We needed a crisis we could control, so we took a feeling that literally everyone, even goddamn cavemen, had at twenty-five, slapped a label on it, and marketed the shit out of it. If everyone is dissatisfied, no one is dissatisfied. There’s safety in numbers. Or something.

// also, my current midlife crisis is a “why have I not written the Great American Novel™ yet, what the fuck have I even accomplished halfway to death” midlife crisis, not a “buy-a-Miata-and-pierce-my-chach” midlife crisis. //

My friends have come and gone and evolved and shifted and changed, even my oldest of friends. I have a few that I could call in a panic and they’d show up, but short of jail time or death, I don’t hear from them much. We swap nostalgic TikToks about old conversion vans that remind us of my mom’s in 1993, and sometimes we text if a classmate has gone to jail, but many of them have quieted. No flashbang of dramatics; just the end of a very long, very bright candle, finally making its way to the bottom and darkening. I’ve also picked up a few that are in the trenches with me, and some that are on completely different paths. I love having lunch with my friend Jade because she also loves to travel, but she and her husband are DINKs, and their experiences are so different from ours (she’s also wicked smart and I leave our meetings feeling better as a human). Small and mighty will beat large and superficial six days a week and twice on Sundays.

I had three babies. At one point in the not-so-far-away past, I didn’t think I’d end up with any, and I’d convinced myself that it was okay, I didn’t really want any, because your mind can do a great job of protecting your heart. Then I got married and had a honeymoon baby and two surprises after that. I don’t talk about the ease with which I had my babies because I feel guilty that it was easy. I was 35 when I got pregnant with my first, Scout, the first time we actually “tried( (though “tried” means what I was off birth control and we were just drunken YOLOing). I actually sobbed in the bathroom because I thought that, after half my life on the pill, I’d need to be off it for at least a few months before it would happen. I was so very WRONG. Her brother and sister, Avett and Willa, were also surprises, born when I was 38 and 40. In a time when it seems like so many women, especially women my age, struggle with infertility, I often feel weird talking about the ease with which my babies came. So usually, in mixed crowds, I don’t. But I am overwhelmingly thankful.

// also, please know that if you are intending to use the “family planning method” of birth control, my youngest two are products of that method. plan accordingly and don’t drink a lot of wine. //

And with all of that, for some reason — call it narcissism, call it masochism, call it whatever-ism, I guess, so long as it involves a complete lack of pride and zero fear of public mockery — I keep sharing. The irony is, for the first forty years of my life, I was paralyzed by what others thought of me, but I was never scared enough to stop writing about it. Who knows? I’m a lawyer, not a shrink, and I haven’t talked to a therapist in a whole ass minute.