Content Warning: This post includes mention of severe depression and anxiety, drugs, and toxic relationships. But also: hope. If you know me, you know my story. If you don’t, it’s a long one — one that started about ten years ago when I was finally diagnosed with depression and anxiety. …

*Purchase I Am Not Easy To Love here, and read it on Kindle, or on your phone, computer, or tablet with the free-to-download Kindle app.* After my first major heartbreak, I dreaded the possibility of another one. After my second, I thought I would never recover — and almost didn’t. …

I never intended to pursue residential treatment. I also never intended to be cripplingly depressed. Not just depressed — not just suicidal — but utterly listless, devoid of anything at all. I was an outline someone had neglected to color in, a bulleted list without any entries. …

Ignorance around herpes and other STDs made coming to terms with my diagnosis harder than it needed to be — Life, I had long ago determined, was a cosmic joke — an empyrean prank — an infinite farce directed, cast, and produced by entities beyond my understanding. …

a poem

‘I’m less attracted to you since you’ve gained weight,’ he says, and I say, ‘Fuck you.’ — 1. “I’m less attracted to you since you’ve gained weight,” he says. I can’t blame him. So am I. 2. This body isn’t mine. This body: pale, freckled, stretched out like pizza dough, soft around the middle, thighs plush. The curves of my cheeks like a jack-o-lantern grin. …

My first friend, I think, was a hospital nurse. Born two months early, I spent my first few weeks of life in the NICU. My mother keeps the Polaroids in her purse — me, lilliputian, with a shock of dark hair, cradled in an incubator, staring out with sloe eyes…

All my life, anxiety has moved me across the board of my life like a pawn — I’m 10 years old and I can’t eat. I’m camping with my parents. Flies thrum in the humidity and I wave them from my face like I fan away the smoke from the campfire. Somehow, in the wilderness, my dad has obtained the most sacred of modern conveniences: a steaming…

a poem