When my family moved to Idaho, I was two — it was just me, my dad, my mom and my mom’s 4-month pregnant belly that I had named Jonny. This was not supposed to be the name of the baby who would later arrive, but I’d gotten into the daily habit of placing both hands on my mom’s stomach and addressing “Jonny” by name while recapping my toddler-like adventures and clearly, it stuck.

I’ll start out with this — I have thought of myself as creatively blocked for a long, long time. Over the last month, I’ve told a few people I have been feeling this way, but before that, the only person who actually knew was my boss. In the middle of one of our weekly, standard 1:1’s, I surprisingly blurted it out when I wasn’t expecting to. It’s hard to admit you aren’t feeling creative when your job is to BE creative and I guess I’d naively hoped that just saying the words out loud to the person who is in charge of me would cause all my ideas to float their way back into my head.

Years ago, when I was trying to get sober for the second time, I ordered a sparkling water when I went to dinner with friends of a friend.  I had not told anyone I was trying to get sober, nor that it was my second go around, instead disguising it once again under the ruse of doing the Whole 30 and “feeling, like, really good!”  I wasn’t ready to admit to myself, let alone my friends, that I thought I might have a drinking problem.

The telltale sign that I am mentally unwell is when I begin rewatching “GIRLS.” The only person who knows this is my ex-roommate, Serria. We lived together for five-and-a-half years during our mid-to-late twenties, so it’s safe to say she is the person who has most often seen me at my highest highs and my lowest lows. I don’t watch a lot of television or movies, so when I did (and did it repetitively), it’d allow her to pick up on viewing habits that reflected my mental state.

Because I used to spend every day of every summer of my teenage years covered in tanning oil on my best friend’s trampoline, I now spend one day every year naked in a small room with a woman named Meredith who takes not one, but two photos of each individual mole on my body.

A couple weeks after I published the last piece I wrote on this site, a story all about being confident in my independence and feeling proud that I don’t have to rely on a man, I found a tiny mouse in my apartment and immediately wanted to rescind everything I had written.