I met Janelle Hanchett in person backstage at BlogHer's Voices of the Year show, where she was preparing to read "We Don't Start Out With Needles in Our Arms."

She was also wearing a baby at the time. We spent about five minutes debating whether or not said baby should be worn onto the stage (I was a fan of the idea in theory but, having worn a baby myself in the past, not a fan of the reality of having a baby anywhere near a microphone in a room of 3,000 people). 

Janelle's story is a shocker, both for its rock-bottom and for its normal. I volunteered to be on the launch team for her memoir, I'M JUST HAPPY TO BE HERE, because after putting out a book about mental illness myself, I get how scary that is. Not only are you sort of laying yourself bare as a writer, you're exposing to the Instagram world what mental illness really feels like. Janelle's story is one of addiction and recovery, but I recognized in her writing a lot of the same rage I've felt at times in my life and the same mental pain that is so severe it feels physical. 

What I've always admired about Janelle's writing: Her beautiful sentences. While I feel confident she could turn the mundane details of life into art, she's got some pretty compelling material to work with, and the result is truly important writing. A few of my favorite quotes:

I signed my daughter out, chatted with the receptionist, held my girl's hand to the car to make sure she was safe, and all these actions felt like tiny miracles. I gave the death glare to the woman when I saw her in the parking lot, because I was sober, not Jesus.

But then I would think of the inhumanity of my former life, of the morning I woke up and realized I could not exist among humankind, of the day I couldn't use the restroom properly, of the day I woke up alone in a hospital bed, and the day I spoke in the cracked dialects of the wholly insane, and I'd think, I am only human, and that is precisely the miracle.

And then, most disturbing of all, I got sober and realized I was still an asshole. I got sober and realized I still hurt people. I even resolved my childhood issues, and I'm still fucking bored.

My story wasn't untrue. It was simply unsustainable.

When I finished reading the book, I thought about all the ways everyone tries to self-medicate when we're still bored. I'm reading THE SHALLOWS right now, which is about how the Internet is affecting our brain circuitry and making it harder to focus. As pissed as I am at Louis CK right now, his ditty on how we can't stand to be alone with ourselves for even five minutes still deeply resonates. We joke about needing chocolate or a glass of wine or a Xanax, but not about another Oxy or some heroin, because dude, that is a serious problem. But isn't the real problem that we're bored? Janelle is no different from you or me: I've met her. She was making jokes and swigging water and wearing a baby. When I was unemployed, I avoided talking about it too much with people because I'd see the fear in their eyes that what happened to me might happen to them. I remember Stacy Morrison writing in her book about how her friends acted as if divorce was catching. What's truly terrifying about others' misfortunes is how easily they could happen to us.

What's amazing is that whatever misfortune befalls us, we can be resilient. It might take a try or twelve. It might take Good News Jack to overcome our three a.m. bad ideas. It might take getting over our egos or our childhoods or learning to sit with the shitty as well as the sublime. I've given all this a lot of thought in the past year with the lay-off and the cancer. Sitting with shitty is really hard. Learning to be more resilient is really hard.

Janelle has given us a gift with her honesty. We can't understand true resilience without seeing the bottom and hearing the mental monologue. This book is that. 

In 2010, I wrote a post about anorexia and Dr. Phil. Shortly after that, I wrote a response on BlogHer which seems to have been lost in the abyss. Shortly before I was laid off from SheKnows Media (which acquired BlogHer and is now being acquired by Penske Media, I transferred some of my posts to Medium on a lark. One of them was 5 Things You Should Know About Your Girlfriend With an Eating Disorder.

I've said it before: It's amazing, but I have received between 3-5 emails a week since I originally wrote the article sometime between 2010 and 2016 (yes, I admit, I don't have the will to research my posts on BlogHer -- it's painful). Originally I tried to write back individually to people, and at one point I had a six-month ongoing conversation with a mom, but after a while it became too overwhelming to keep up with all of the stories. And, after all, I wrote a book about this whole thing. So I started sending back this reply to the people who write me:

I get so many emails like this I put everything I know about eating disorders and recovery in a novel called THE OBVIOUS GAME. You could read it together and use it as a conversation starter. Either way it should help you understand. Good luck - there is a lot about romantic relationships and how they are affected in the book. 

RJBA

One time prior to today someone had an adverse reaction to this response, saying I was trying to sell them a book. I pointed out that THEY wrote ME, and that was the end of it. So imagine my surprise when today, I got this:

"send me an email and I will answer your questions"

"Fuck you and buy my book"

Thanks for nothing

There is a very long list of responses I wanted to send to that email. The post is years old. I haven't even worked at SheKnows Media since August 2016. My book came out in 2013. I stopped writing publicly about eating disorders around 2015/2016. Also? These are the last two paragraphs of the post referenced:

I’m sure some boyfriend somewhere right now is wondering how he can help his girlfriend as she once again refuses to eat. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, if you or someone you love is suffering from an eating disorder, you can email me and I will try to point you in the right direction. My personal email is ritajarens@gmail.com.

My debut young adult novel is The Obvious Game, published by InkSpell Publishing. The Obvious Game is based on my experience with anorexia. If you are a librarian and are having trouble finding my book, please write me at ritajarens@gmail.com to purchase the book at the 40% author discount price.

Beloved was pretty shocked at the whole thing. I wasn't, but I admit I was angry. I've had a long week. I just had my year-anniversary mammogram of my diagnosis this morning. (It was clean! Thank you, Jesus!) I wrote that post to help people a whole lot of years ago and this kid is treating me like a telemarketer at Grandma's dinner hour.

This is what was going through my head: WHO ARE YOU TO TALK TO ME LIKE THIS WHEN YOU EMAILED ME? ARE WE CONFUSED ABOUT WHO IS DOING THE CONTACTING?

But I sat with it. I went to the gym. I ran a few miles. I reflected on my clean mammogram and all the imaginary problems I had worried about that are not at this moment coming to fruition. I reflected on my recent eight-pound weight loss (anyone who loses weight due to cancer is apparently not a stress eater like me) that I pulled off without undue restrictions or falling back into old bad eating disordered habits.

And I thought: This kid is in pain. He thought he would write me and maybe I'd become some sort of personal mentor to him, and I let him down with my canned response.

And yeah, kid, I get it. I did.

Here's the thing: I want to be a helper. I really do. I want to help you get through this. But I also am a cancer survivor and a lay-off survivor and a mom and a daughter and a sister and a wife and a co-worker and a friend. I have a house to manage and a career. I walk my cat in a freakin' harness every morning. I take fish oil and am working on a new novel.

So when I tell you I put everything I know about eating disorders in a novel and maybe you should read it, I'm not pitching you to buy my book. Go request it from your library or download it off of one of the million pirated sites I see every day on my Google alerts. What I'm saying is that I put three years of thought into what you're asking and I WROTE A BOOK ABOUT IT.

I get that you're frustrated.

I get that you need help.

We all do. And lashing out at each other is not the way to get it.

So no, I'm not going to use your name. I'm not going to shame you.

But dude, let up. I feel your pain because despite overcoming one kind of pain, there is always another. Be kind to each other - you never know who escaped a repeat cancer diagnosis today: THIS WOMAN.

What an amazing thing! If you're in New York and want to come, here's an evite for you. Feel free to forward, invite, spread the news. I'd love to see you.

 

So, this happened last week:

And then I died and went to heaven. The end.

"I don't feel funny anymore. I've started to wonder if I've changed," she said.

She's one of the funniest people I know. I'm sure she hasn't lost her wicked talents. But grief is pain and pain is work and she's not done with the work yet.

I don't doubt, though, that she's changed in a different way. Pain -- physical, mental, spiritual pain -- changes us.

This winter I've lived in a physical house of pain. I broke my leg before Christmas and had surgery to put in a plate and five screws on January 6. The physical limitations of crutches also brought on a lot of emotional pain. They robbed me of my main anxiety coping mechanism, exercise, as well as my freedom of movement. I can't carry anything using my crutches, I have trouble with stairs and I can't drive.

After my surgery, I had a nerve block for the first eighteen hours. The doctor told me to start taking the Oxycontin before I went to bed because the block would wear off during the night. It did, and not even the Oxy could touch the flames shooting up my calf. I ended up calling a pharmacist in the morning and asking if I could take anything else on top of it, something that blew my mind since normally I don't need much painkiller at all. Two Advil on top of Oxy later, I finally fell into restless sleep.

That whole next day passed in wave after wave of red-hot burning pain where the plate was. It felt like labor contractions, only in one little 3"x2" area. I willed myself to just bear this part, because at least the surgery was over and the path to healing finally seemed clear.

I'd get through this post-surgery week, then I'd be on crutches a while longer, then someday, I'd be able to put weight on my leg again. And then I'd walk. And then I'd run.

Soon after that horrible day, my pain turned a corner and I was able to drop down to one pain pill instead of two every four hours, then one every eight, then just two Advil, then one Advil, then, finally, no Advil. The only pain left now is the muscle ache in my shoulders, neck and arms from crutching around and the psychological frustration at not being able to exercise or drive. I don't depend on others well, nor do I like relying on other people to be able to leave my house.

In the midst of all this, I read Dan Ariely's THE UPSIDE OF IRRATIONALITY. In this book, Dan reveals a lot about his own personal experiences with burns over 70% of his body from a military accident as well as his adventures as an academic researcher. He really caught my attention when he delved deeper into pain.

I told my grieving friend about Ariely's studies, thinking it might help her, because what Ariely found was fascinating. After recruiting and testing a bunch of ex-military people who had either been injured, not been injured or had a disease, he wrote:

Moreover, we found that there seems to be generalized adaptation involved in the process of acclimating to pain. Even though the people in our study had endured their injuries many years before, their overall approach to pain and ability to tolerate it seemed to have changed, and this change lasted for a long time ... I suspect that people with injuries like mine learn to associate pain with hope for a good outcome -- and this link between suffering and hope eliminates some of the fear inherent in painful experiences. On the other hand, the two chronically ill individuals who took part in our pain study could not make any connection between their pain and hope for improvement.

It's fortunate I read this book so soon on the heels (ha) of my surgery when my memory of that searing bone pain was so fresh, because I really think Ariely's onto something. Yeah, the pain sucked, but I completely associated the post-surgery pain with progress, much more so than I did the fresh-break pain. This in turn made it easier psychologically to muscle through post-surgery even though the magnitude of pain was far worse. It's like the pain of childbirth, I suppose -- pain we deem necessary.

Maybe that's it -- maybe how we feel about pain depends on whether or not we deem it necessary.

I told all this to my friend, and then we sat on the phone in silence for a minute. It was one of those moments you get maybe once in a week if you're lucky when the workday bullshit lifts and you see the world for real before the computer dings or the phone pings or the kid walks in through the front door.

We hung up and the bubble of meaning popped, but I'm looking for the growth in all pain now. And I'm still very eager to run again someday.

(Editor's Note: Not sure why it keeps embedding "it was amazing" or how to make this prettier. But I like it anyway.)

 

WHAT I READ IN 2015

 

it was amazing

 

 

 

it was amazing

 

 

 

 

it was amazing

 

 

it was amazing

 

 

 

it was amazing

 

 

 

really liked it

 

 

 

 

it was amazing

 

 

it was amazing

 

 

 

 

it was amazing

 

 

really liked it

 

 

At the beginning of the school year, I instituted Library Tuesdays. On Library Tuesdays, I and anyone in my family who wants to (or needs to) come with me heads out to the public library with novel-in-progress or homework or book in tow. I get there, I set the timer on my phone for an hour (longer would be nice, but I have to be realistic about how late I can push dinner since this is after my full-time job), I put on my headphones and I work on whichever novel I'm focusing on at the time.

This is my latest iteration of Project Find Time to Write. Last year, my husband traveled so much I tried instituting Saturday blocks of time for myself, even going so far as to put them on both my and his calendars, but life didn't cooperate. There were always family plans or birthday parties or something that cut into my writing time until I was never getting anything done and feeling more and more lethargic about fiction and guilty about not writing.

The year before that, I tried to have Tuesdays after dinner be my writing time, with my husband taking over bedtime duties for our girl, but then sometimes he had a late meeting and sometimes we ate late and sometimes I couldn't bring myself to sit at the same desk where I spend ten hours a day at my day job and write more.

The year before that, my daughter was still in ballet and I used the hour and a half of her classes twice a week to write, and that was kind of nirvana for writing me, but it was awful for parent me because she ended up hating ballet so much she cried every time we made her go. (Still, writing me was pretty sad to have that custom-carved two blocks of time a week dance away on little abandoned ballet slippers.)

In the eleven years since I became a working parent, I've tried so many things in the name of finding time to write. I've booked meetings with myself in abandoned conference rooms over my lunch hour. I've holed up in Panera for five or six hours at a time while my husband and daughter hit a state fair or lone trip to visit his family. I've written on six-hour roadtrips, headphones planted in my ears while my husband listened to sports radio and my daughter napped or watched a portable DVD player as she got older.

One thing that has never grown easier: finding the time to write. The location changes, but the struggle lives on.

After more than a decade of living this struggle, I've realized finding the time comes down to making  necessary changes in two areas: location and methodology.

One: I can't find time to write fiction at home. Some may find this unusual since I work my fulltime job as managing editor of BlogHer at home, but normally during my workday the only folks home are my cat and occasionally my husband, but he is also working and thus not trying to distract me. However, if I try to write on a weekend or weeknight, there is a child who would like my attention, please, but there are also a zillion other chores and events that must be squeezed into nights and weekends in order to keep the house from dissolving under a pile of trash or my child from walking around with her toes sticking out the ends of her too-small shoes.

Two: I can't actually write fiction on a computer anymore. I used to be able to pull out a laptop in the car or what have you, but I just don't have it in me now. After almost twenty years spent sitting at a computer for the bulk of my workweek days, the last thing I want to look at in my copious free time is another damn screen. So, I don't draft on the computer anymore. I type up what I've written after the fact, but I don't compose with a cursor these days.

My current way of separating out Library Tuesdays and my novel writing from the day job is to write longhand in a notebook preferably at the library but at the very least somewhere that is not my house where I am not surrounded by my family.

I've temporarily abandoned my third novel-in-progress to go back to THE BIRTHRIGHT OF PARKER CLEAVES, which I realized isn't done yet after seeing a pattern in query rejections and getting some insight from a novelist friend.

A few Library Tuesdays ago, I emailed the manuscript to my Kindle and went through the whole thing making notes, highlighting parts to cut and figuring out what sucked. Then I compared the Word document against my Kindle and cut 7,000 words and made a bunch of notes. Then I printed out the manuscript. And now I haul the printed manuscript plus my notebook and headphones to the library, pick a section I've marked to rewrite, elaborate upon or grow a new head, and write longhand for one hour.

When I first started doing this, it was hard to get to an hour. It felt like a chore. I questioned whether to abandon PARKER CLEAVES altogether. It wasn't until after I made those deep cuts that it started getting fun again and I was surprised when my alarm when off.

The hard part about writing novels on top of a day job (though I'm sure it's hard on top of any sort of life) comes, for me, in finding the pay-off. At first I thought the pay-off would be financial or in reputation. Then when neither of my first two books blew the roof off the publishing world, I thought the pay-off would be social, in that it would be give me something to talk about. Then I realized when I'm in the thick of it, I don't want to talk about what I'm working on at all. Finally, I realized the pay-off comes at the end of Library Tuesday, when I pack up my stuff and count up the new pages and realize that I am four baby steps closer to another finished, published novel.

It comes when I sit down to type what I wrote and think maybe it's a little better than what I cut.

It comes from looking at the stack of paper I just printed and thinking that even though it might be done yet, I did that, and I am doing that, and I'm doing that even though it's not my job to do it, and it's not my public's voracious appetite for my next work to do it.

I'm just doing it because like it.

Remembering you're doing something because you like it makes it easier to prioritize.

See you at the library next Tuesday.

I haven't been here because I've been at BlogHer writing a ton lately about ... so many things. If you're so inclined ...

• How Jill Nystul's 'One Good Thing' Blog Became Her 'One Good Life' Memoir -- Jill talks about one good thing every day to a crazy-huge audience. She's just released a memoir to tell the world why.

• How to Sound Like an Authority Figure -- It's an art and a science, right?

• Marriage Contracts: Should We Have Marital Term Limits? -- I wrote this post a few years ago, but I recently read THE NEW I DO and revisited my post to start the conversation over.

• What More Can We Say About Baltimore and Freddie Gray? -- This was the hardest post to write, very late at night and vetted by trusted women of color.

• How to Measure Your Blogging Success Without Using Metrics -- There's more than one way to determine your ROI.

• SheWrites Publisher Kamy Wicoff on Her First Novel, 'Wishful Thinking' -- I identify with Kamy in so many ways, and coming to novel-writing later in life is one of them.

I met author Margaret Dilloway when I was managing the BlogHer Book Club. We discussed and reviewed her first book, HOW TO BE AN AMERICAN HOUSEWIFE, and her second book, THE CARE AND HANDLING OF ROSES WITH THORNS. Since then, we've grown friendly and I even got to have dinner with her at last year's BlogHer conference. When author Angélique Jamail gave me the opportunity to interview another author for Women Writer Wednesdays on her blog, I picked Margaret. I hope you enjoy the interview! We discuss craft, her favorite of her books, her career and more!

For the book club discussions:

• HOW TO BE AN AMERICAN HOUSEWIFE
• THE CARE AND HANDLING OF ROSES WITH THORNS