Okay. I don't want to get dramatic about all of this.
I started a blog called Life in LA about three years ago. At the time I was 25 and living in Hollywood and taking care of my dying father. He passed away about two months into it all. I continued writing for a while. A couple of months later the Sydney Morning Herald named mine one of the top 20 best blogs in the world. I had all these Aussie readers. It was kind of cool.
And then my grief caught up with me and I kind of got lost in myself and my life and I left Life in LA behind. I'm not sure what's drawing me back to this place now. A lot of things, I guess.
A lot's changed in the last three years. I'm twenty-eight now. I'm still living in Venice Beach. My parents are still dead. I'm in grad school now, getting my masters in clinical psychology. I work in a community mental health center as a vocational rehabilitation specialist, which means that I help chronically mentally ill clients find work. I also intern as a therapist in a community clinic, which means that I have about six clients that I see for individual psychotherapy.
I'm a busy girl. School full-time, job full-time, internship. I'm constantly struggling to find a balance which means that I drink a lot more than I should, that sometimes I call in sick and lay around in the living room in my underwear with the blinds closed. It means that sometimes I shirk all responsibility and spend all my free time with friends, laughing, drinking, taking weird pictures and yelling at Noah Wylie. Sometimes it means that I ignore all of my friends, let my emails and texts pile up, and spend all my time concentrating on my clients and my classes. Sometimes it means that I get drunk and yell at my boyfriend. He's never once deserved it. So there. I admit it: rarely am I able to do all of the things in my life with grace.
Maybe this will help. It might just go like all the other things. Weeks of extreme posting followed by dry air. Or maybe coming here, emptying my words and screams into the vast echoey chambers of the internet, will help me to sort through all the chaos.