I am disoriented.
Over the weekend, in Houston, the words I read joined forces and piled together and turned into living, breathing women. Beautiful women. Women with voices and laughs and perfume and hugging arms and cold hands and deep breaths.
I’m kind of a big mouth on the Internet, where my voice is only as loud as the words I bang into my keyboard. I can be bold here, and even still—many times I have to walk away to shake and jitter over something I “said” or something I read.
In a room full of women from the Internet, I am not bold. I am not steady. I hide in the back of the room, tweeting because it’s kind of like talking. I laugh nervously as I speak, talk too loud because I’m gasping a little in between sentences.
You’re real. Every single one of you. You wake up in the morning. You brush your teeth. Maybe you make breakfast for your children. Maybe you pee a few times before dawn. You have fingers and toes and breath and you are real.
And that is weird.
I’m real. And the real me who calls my friends when I’m stuck in the car, the real me who snuggles with my older son every night to tell stories before bed—sometimes she doesn’t quite mesh with Maria Melee the Big-Mouth on the Internet.
On Friday night in Houston, I hid under thick sheets and hugged a pillow and shook and cried and cried and cried until my nose was so stuffed I couldn’t eat. I hobbled to the bathroom and winced through stomach cramps and diarrhea and silently thanked my roommate for having somewhere else to be.
I can’t explain, coherently, why I freaked out. But I can tell you that it broke my heart to be that weak, that I felt a senseless sense of shame for being away from my family, for pretending to be bold on the Internet. I felt disappointed that in the evening hours all my strength fizzled away and the voice of unreasonable self-loathing became the boss of all the voices in my head. I paced in the bathroom and talked to myself.
“You’re awesome. You had a baby. You’re brave. This is not a big deal. You are always bitching when George has a hotel room on a business trip and doesn’t have anything to do but watch TV and enjoy himself. You can do this.”
I took a Unisom and dimmed the lights and climbed into bed and turned on a white noise app and finally fell asleep. And in the middle of the night when I woke up to pee I felt fine. Just tired. And in the morning I felt jittery but I talked it out and ate a big breakfast and powered through the next day and I had fun.
I did.
The next night, I did a little better. I didn’t cry, and that felt like victory. I struggled to fall asleep and soothed myself by thinking, “I won’t go to BlogHer, I will just stay home. I can’t do this, it’s okay, I won’t.”
I sigh now, knowing very well how silly that sounds. But when I just-barely-think about going anywhere again my stomach tightens.
I’ll just delete my Twitter account and stop blogging and I’ll just stop doing all this and I’ll just spend more time with my children and pay more attention to work and I’ll stop all of this.
“What happened,” my friends asked, when I confessed how bad I felt in the evenings.
But nothing happened. No drama. No one was mean. Women I admire and feel at times very intimidated by came up to me with literally open arms.
I even hugged it out and had a giggling conversation with someone I always pictured as a bit, well… mythical.
All the fear and tension came from inside of me, and from the jarring evidence that you’re all real. From the jarring realization that all that adrenaline and anxiety and love and joy and inspiration sets me off like a livewire and leaves my insides tangled up in painful knots.
I read somewhere that a solid, significant handful of bloggers always “quit” after conferences. I don’t know why that is, but I know that it’s very hard to be a real person in the real world with real people when you’re used to bouncing your words around—when you’re used to loving your friends with letters and numbers.
I know I need to find a sense of balance and ease again. I need to fight the sway of this unreasonable angst and weird sense of shame and I need to get my groove back. I need to breathe easily again.
I’m not sure where to begin other than to write, because ultimately, that’s what I’m doing here. Writing.
I guess it’s everything else—every heartbeat between the words—that’s awfully complicated.
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