I over-dieted in my teens, and over-drank in my twenties. In the circles I now hang in, this makes me a recovering anorexic alcoholic. 

My fifth grade teacher  told my mom the world wouldn’t know how smart I was unless I wrote. I’ve been at it– on and off– ever since. See world! Liv. Is. Smart.

I wrote a book called, Loud in Here: A Memoir of Drinking, Dieting, and Dating. It a coming of age story fraught with binge drinking, an eating disorder, and blackout trysts. The manuscript is currently unpublished.

 I’m married with two children who stand on the cusp of adolescence fully capable of Googling. This poses a new challenge in my writing life: how to stay authentic without subjecting them to the unnecessay embarrassment of their mom’s experiences and words. 

Which, if you’re my husband, is reason enough to suggest I shove the shame deep in the back of the skeleton closet.

I subsribe to the words of poet Sean Thomas Dougherty;

Why Bother?

Because right now there is            someone

Out there with

a wound                                         in the exact shape

                                                                         of your words.

It’s also only through writing that I am able to figure out what I think; it’s how I come to make sense of pain; its my adult thumb-sucking device, and my best answer to the inevitable piercing loneliness of being a human.