Me, as drawn by Jacqueline Bisset for Carrying On
Well THAT was a morning.
So you know how I've been having all these Big Life Realizations lately? One of them is that I need to refocus this site to be less about *me* - essentially because I've started to realize that I want to be peaceful, and happy. Which means having less drama in my life. But which also, alas, leaves me with fewer stories to tell.
There are some - many? - things about which I am a touch head-in-the-clouds, but identity theft is not one of them. I mean, I was the victim of a major hacking just a few years ago. My entire purse was stolen in 2015, and my car was broken into earlier this year, resulting in the theft of all of the personal information I had compiled in anticipation of a trip to the passport office (yes, like all of it).
As a result of these incidents, I am a password ninja, am on a first-name basis with the peeps at Experian, have an FBI agent's personal number in my contacts list, and pay a truly unconscionable amount of money to Lifelock every month so that my social security number (and my kids' numbers) don't get used for any nefarious purposes.
As of tomorrow, I will be doing a thing that I have not done in a solid decade: I will be going offline. Not for a day here and a day there - that, I've done, albeit with much reluctance and even then only because of catastrophic cell phone service. Nope, this time it's for more than a week.
And I won't even be able to break rank and load up Instagram in a moment of weakness, because the place where I'm going requires you to turn in all electronics upon arrival.
About that place: it's in Northern California, in the woods, but I'm not going to say exactly where I'm going - largely because the place emphasizes anonymity and such, but also because it feels like a good idea on a personal level. I learned about it in the wake of this wildly melodramatic moment, when a couple of people - wholly independently - reached out to me to suggest giving it a try. During that not-so-long-ago time, I found myself in a place where I knew I needed help, and finally realized that the methods I'd been using to cope were really just that: things that were helping me "get by." They weren't helping me get better.
Me, January 2018
I got an email the other day that reminded me why I keep writing this site, even during the times when it's especially hard, and I very much don't want to. The email was from a woman who feared she was in the midst of an ectopic pregnancy, and was having trouble "convincing" the doctors of her suspicions. She remembered the post I'd written nearly two years ago, about my own ectopic pregnancy - the one that very nearly killed me, and would have had I not been fortunate enough to have a friend who knew the signs to look for - and kept her questions for the doctors coming.
It's isn't the only email like this I've ever gotten. It's not even the only email like this I've gotten this month. It turns out that despite the fact that ectopic pregnancies account for 1-2% of all pregnancies - making them not particularly uncommon - vast numbers of us have no idea what they are, or what they might look like. Myself included.
Late night lights in Truth Or Consequences, NM
I've been writing Ramshackle Glam for nearly ten whole years - which means that there is a LOT of good stuff hanging out in my archives. So each Friday, we'll be doing a little throwback to one of my personal favorites. This week, I got to thinking about readings - I've had a few done over the years, but two in particular stand out in my memory. The first was a reading that Kendrick and I did together midway through our cross-country move from New York to California. The second was a reading I got shortly after the divorce.
Both made me realize that there's something I've been trying so hard to find for years now. But I'm starting to wonder whether that something is a part of me I left in the past and want so badly to recapture...or a part of me that's still dancing around the edges, waiting to be discovered.
