I am intensely interested in who people really are. I want to be known deeply by my small circle of friends, and I want to know each of them deeply too. I want to confess my innermost thoughts and be seen as I really am. I want to see people this way too. 

Is there anything so liberating as living an authentic life?

Two years 3 months and 25 days since I had left Koh Phangan from this same beach, that the sand kissed and the water bathed my feet again for the first time.

A few weeks prior to leaving, the in turns peculiar, baffling, bamboozling, enraging, heartbreaking, grief engulfing, and horrifying series of events that would unravel my life as I’d known it began their work.

Let no one keep you from your journey
no rabbi or priest, no mother
who wants you to dig for treasures
she misplaced, no father
who won't let one life be enough,
no lover who measures their worth
by what you might give up,
no voice that tells you in the night
it can't be done.

Heartbreak when you have loved so deeply is devastating. For weeks you might be a barely held together semblance of sobbing, tormented grief. Not a bad day or 2 or 3 but weeks of paralyzing, crippling despair. For a full week you might not wash, change clothes or leave the house. You might not eat for days at a time. You might be beyond comfort, completely inconsolable. You might not want to tell anyone what is happening because you fear misrepresenting yourself, or them. Or because it might make it more real and you’d do anything right now for it not to be real.

10 years and 7 weeks ago today the structure of my life began to crumble when after a series of ever-worsening drunken fights throughout the darkest most drunken and depressed days of my life, my 200lb alcoholic boyfriend flipped over the bed I was lying in, smashed it up then grabbed me and threw me across our bedroom against the wall leaving me with a severe back injury. It was the last time I ever saw him and the end of the most destructive and gnarly relationship I ever had.