Rising from the ashes

On death and joy and where I've been

Hey! I’ve been AWOL from here for over a year. A lot happened in that year and the real reason I stopped writing here was because every time a new thing happened I felt like I couldn’t explain it without the other thing that happened before. So here’s a list.

-My dog got very sick with cancer and she died. It was horrible and sad and I will miss her forever. I have never known such grief. I wrote about it a lot privately but it still makes my eyes well with tears to even write this sentence so I will have to share that later!

Pour one out for the best girl that has ever been <3

-During that period, I was dealing with a lot of overwhelming health problems. Things have gotten a lot better in the past few months, but it combined with the grief to make me feel like I was crawling through quicksand.

-And then! Somebody who had no idea I was going through that sent me an email to tell me that they were disappointed my blog was no longer providing enough value for them! I thought I had turned the paid feature off but I hadn’t, whoops! So I cried a lot and felt very angry and then I officially did turn the paid feature off because I realized there is absolutely no point in turning what is basically your public diary into a transaction for a measly $5 a month! It turns out, monetizing your precious life is a pretty good way to make it feel like it’s not worth anything.

-Then my husband and I won a Halloween costume contest for the costumes HE MADE. BY HAND! They’re amazing! We’re dressed as our local bar where we play trivia every week. And then they put up an offrenda for our dog and we cried some more.

-A few weeks after that I dragged myself to the first weekend of a comedy incubator I was a fellow for and it was wonderful but I was also raw like chicken. More on Y’ALL later!

-Then the holidays came and I realized that I would have a nervous breakdown if I spent them doing anything but walking 20,000 steps a day somewhere I’d never been so I dug into the savings account and hauled my sick ass onto a plane to Italy (and Amsterdam, and Paris). It was gorgeous! It snowed in Paris! If you’re already going to have a nervous breakdown, I recommend at least doing it in the canals of Venice!

-Then I came home and wrote like crazy. I wrote a whole movie in 4 months (in between crying and medical appointments!), just in time for Y’ALL FEST! I flew to New York and pitched my movie and it was fucking incredible.

-I wrote a lot of videos for Adam Conover including Hollywood Killed The Sitcom, Zohran is Teaching The Left to Win, and Labubus are Proof We’ve Given Up

-I also went to Seattle (for a wedding - I did the flowers and the bride’s hair!), Chicago (for a wedding, I was a grooms lady!) and Portland (for the Global Improvisation Symposium, where I was a presenter and steering committee member!)

I used to think I could write through anything. Grief proved to me that sometimes words fail and all you can do is move, no matter how much it hurts. Eventually, the blisters turn into callouses and then you just keep moving. I think I genuinely needed to walk off my grief thousands of steps at a time. And going to all of those beautiful places and wandering around them really helped. I think I cried in every one! Now I feel almost human again. I guess that’s rising from the ashes, right? The literal ashes, which are now sitting on my mantle.

I hope to come back here and write a little more, about grief, loss, failure, fear, and joy. Because there is still, there always is, so much joy.

And speaking of which, oops! I have to go re-write that movie I mentioned earlier! I’m almost out of time before trivia! Love ya! <3 <3 <3 <3

Yeah that’s right, we’re still #1