My old roommate, Serria, once pointed out a habit my entire family shares when it comes to storytelling.  All of us will often start off a story by saying a sentence or two, but then we stop, interrupting ourselves mid-thought by asking the person we’re talking to, “Have I told you this before?” 

When I started this project, I knew the randomness in choosing the date would likely lead me to entries I did not want to share on the Internet.  Whether for emotional or legal or just really, really, really embarrassing reasons, I knew there were going to be moments of my life I could not make public – but, because it didn’t come up when I ran the numbers on that first post, I figured I’d deal with the problem if and when it arose.

Over the past decade, I’ve found comfort in writing, in length, about experiences that have happened to me. I love that I am able to lace together memories from different times in my life to create a successful storyline and it’s been a skill that I’ve carried gratefully around with pride. (In an extremely “on brand” moment for me, I do believe the knowledge that I even possessed this ability stemmed from winning a $1,000 scholarship my senior year of high school for writing a piece about my first kiss).

Looking at these entries all together, you probably couldn’t tell that most of them are about my body. But, because I am me and can read my own subtext, I know they are. Last year, I got pneumonia and was unimaginably sick — sick enough that, on some nights, I genuinely believed I was going to die. Coming out of that, I no longer cared if my stomach looked a little fluffy or if my arms weren’t as toned as they had been a few years back. I was just happy to be alive.

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.

When I was 19, a boy touched my arm at a party and changed the entire trajectory of how I thought my life was going to go.

I got my second shot on the second of May and, after — while still cautious — I started doing some activities I hadn’t done since the previous March. Most importantly, I visited my 95-year-old grandfather, one of the most significant people in my life who, prior to COVID, I had the fortune of being able to see every few weeks. (Our reunion ended the way it usually has for the last almost-thirty years — with the two of us watching black and white films in the living room and me eventually falling asleep on the couch before him because, despite our age difference, his bedtime is about four-and-a-half hours after mine).

I spent my first week back in NYC going to every type of doctor’s appointment imaginable. I thought of myself as healthy, almost laughably so, considering our placement in the midst of a pandemic, but after over a year of pushing off all but one meeting with a medical professional due to COVID, I scheduled a different appointment for each day of that first week I returned.

Before I traumatically sprayed blood all over my oral surgeon and his office after an artery burst during my wisdom tooth surgery in January, I thought I would never see him again. At 28, I was geriatric (his words, definitely not mine) for the surgery, but even so, we both expected it to go well enough that I would be in and out of his office within the day.

That is not what happened.

I’ve felt very exhausted by the pandemic this month and I know that’s not a unique experience. The realization that we have been doing this for almost a year really hit me hard and every sentence that stuck out to me in February seemed to jump out because of how I could relate it to the loneliness/fear/monotony/etc I have been feeling for what seems like…. forever.

For the past year, I have been tracking every book I read by writing elementary-school level summaries for each of them. They are brief, including only the title, the author and a sentence that usually starts out with “I loved this book…” or “I did not like this book…” and there are a lot of them because, in addition to reading very, very fast, I am also one of those very, very annoying people who refuses to stop a book partway through, even if I absolutely hate it and complain about it the entire time.

On our first date, late in the night at a cocktail bar in East Village, he kisses me so suddenly after hours of conversation that I can’t breathe.

I didn't live at Chang's apartment the first time I spent the night there.

It was the beginning of my second year in the city and a snowstorm was on its way, ready to completely shut down Manhattan. Because ZG and I both knew from experience we were not equipped to handle a storm alone (the last time it happened, he'd had only two eggs and a container of mustard. I had chips and a bottle of bad wine), we left our homes on the Upper East Side to spend the storm stranded in Serria's Chelsea apartment.

The first time I noticed the lump protruding between two of my left ribs happened to be the same day I decided I needed to break up with my boyfriend of four years.

Back in August, I had a date that I came thisclose to canceling -- partly because I had never actually met him in person and I'm always a little bit terrified of being stabbed on first Internet dates, but mostly because it wasn't scheduled to start until 9:45 on a Monday night.

"That's my bedtime!," I told Serria, my roommate who refused to listen to my excuses even though she knows I prefer to be either asleep or aggressively watching Netflix before the clock hits four digits. Like a true friend, she all but pushed me out the door of the apartment, eerily similar to how she'd once forced me out of a cab almost two years earlier when I was starting to get cold feet about confronting a dude who had ghosted me.