The Best Worst Blog Post of All Time

This is, undoubtedly, the best worst blog post of all time.

(Why? Who even says that about their blog?)

I do. Because I’ve spent over 14 months drafting it. No one in their right bloomin’ mind would spend so much time on something so small and insignificant in the grand scheme of life. It’s like obsessing over a 14-month-old band-aid. Just rip the damn thing off already. (And seriously…you’re disgusting for leaving it on that long. Ew, Jess. Just…ew. #shameshameshame)

So here we are. Where to begin. Tiny Head-Voice squeaking: “Start at the beginning and go to the end!” (NO. No one cares to be dragged through my drama for free. That’s what I pay my counselor for.)

But to be real with y’all–the Big Life Transition happened (henceforth known as the BLT, because everyone has a love/hate relationship with BLT’s…why the tomato???…more on that some other time).

My marriage of eight years ended. Truth. All my dreams and goals and plans flickered to a bittersweet death that I never dreamed I’d endure in my lifetime. But it did. #plottwist

If you really wanna know all the details, let’s grab Koffee sometime (that’s coffee with Kahlua…which is the only non-violent way you’re going to pry those details out of me anyway). For the sake of brevity, however, there was tragedy, loss, pain, betrayal…followed by an inexplicable amount of joy, revelation, love, and peace. With the occasional flicker of WhatTheEffAmIEvenDoing.

Like me, my story is far from perfect.

Because like most Big Life Transitions, there’s usually a peak, a pitfall, maybe some rolling hills, a frigid cold river to cross, quicksand, a field of daisies hiding an undergrowth of poison oak, trial by a religious cult, with another peak on the horizon that may or may not be host to the Eye of Sauron. It makes you doubt everything you thought you knew, question your faith, question your people, question your direction. THERE IS SO MUCH DOUBT AND CONFUSION YOU ARE LITERALLY SUFFOCATING FROM IT.

And then you wake up. Either literally or metaphorically, but you wake up. One day it just clicks. (Or snaps, or implodes, or whatever that looks like for you.) And you realize one singular Truth: this is not how my story ends. So you decide to rewrite your story, and you change the ending through a series of small, seemingly simple choices to begin living with purpose. My initial goal was to purely drag myself into an upright position void of all self-loathing, self-doubt, and fear. And a huge component of that process revolved around putting myself back out there in the public eye. I needed (really needed) to reconnect with my community, both micro and macro, to regain what was lost during my absence. So much of what I do personally and professionally is deeply rooted in my community–friends, family, colleagues, acquaintances–and the experiences we share as a tribe.

So I did the best thing for myself: I paid to spend a whole day sharing my ideas and fears with a bunch of strangers.

Translation: I attended a creative writing festival this weekend.

This is adulting at its finest hour. Gather a bunch of writers and poets together in one room and you find yourself with unparalleled insecurity statistics. (Writers rule the roost when it comes to self-doubt and self-loathing; we are the eunuchs of the publishing trade.)

After conversing with some of my fellow attendees, we all agreed that there tends to be a ton of pressure when creating “the first post” after taking a hiatus from the public eye, no matter the reason for said hiatus. We talked about this for 25 MINUTES before coming to our conclusion: What a waste of breath. We are a bunch of whiners. GO WRITE SOMETHING ALREADY. We smiled, shook hands, exchanged business cards, and walked away, heads high like we just solved world hunger.

But to us, that conundrum was the Eternal Unsolvable Problem. I had absolutely no clue how to crawl back to my platform after being knocked on my ass so hard that something inside me broke. (My metaphorical ass did not break; my confidence, my ego, my self-worth, however…something within and between these is what broke. But not beyond fixin’.)

And rather than obsess about it and allow it to consume my thoughts and my time, I’ve chosen to heed the advice of the 21st century sensei, Queen Elsa of Arendelle:

LET IT GO.

So I did. And here we are. And it sucks. I just blathered on randomly about everything and nothing at all. But the beauty is that I’m aware of this. And I know this post is not my best work, but I don’t care. Not because I feel I should torture my readers with crappy writing, but because, above all, I truly had to write this for myself. However it needed to be said, I felt that something needed to be written in order for me to finally move on. This oddity needed to be put out there in its imperfect and awkward glory for the world to accept or reject at its will. Acknowledged and dismissed so that I can put it to rest.

And whether my story is accepted or rejected doesn’t matter–it happened, it’s truth, and there’s no denying the 14-month-old band-aid now taking up residence in the waste bin.

Now, onto the next. I’ve got a date with a real sandwich and that Sauron eyeball peak thingy. #sauronsohotrightnow #putaringonit