The Prozac Experiment.

Originally posted September 24, 2014

Two weeks ago I went to Portland, OR with my husband for a lovely wedding. The flights were beautiful and smooth, mountains and rivers poking and glistening from above and under clouds. We held hands. And when we arrived, there were friends we can't remember not knowing and tacos and espresso and the kind of laughter that makes us make sense to ourselves again.

On our first morning there, Tim and I walked down the tree-lined streets of our friends' chic neighborhood and made our way to the coffee shop of my dreams. When I walked in, I felt like I was walking into a tulle-filled fantasy; there were glass plates swooped on the walls, a wall of for-sale magazines, fresh baguettes, and just the right mix of chipping paint and high elegance.

We sat at a table for two in the back because I couldn't stop crying. It was all too much. I was happy to be with my husband, happy we'd arrived safely, happy our kids were thriving in our absence, and we'd just found the most pristine example of what a coffee shop should be and I just couldn't keep it together.

It was those things and lots of other things, too. It's always about other things too, isn't it?

"I can't do it like this anymore," I said. I brushed tears away, but couldn't keep up with them; I let them fall onto my saucer.

Tim looked at me and said something like, "Okay. Tell me more."

I knew what I needed to say and struggled mightily to get it out. "I don't think it's supposed to be this hard. I mean, I'm in therapy. We have a beautiful life. I love you. And look at our kids - why is it so hard for me to stay steady?"

He listened, eyes intent.

"I want to try going on something. I want to try Prozac. I'm sorry."

And then I got up to get a napkin, because just so very many tears.

"Why are you sorry?" he said.

"Because I've wanted to be able to handle my shit on my own and I just feel like I can't. I'm dealing with all of my emotional skeletons and it's still just harder than feels reasonable," I said. "I'm willing to do the work. I'm willing to feel uncomfortable as I process my current and past realities. But I can't be completely undone by it anymore. I just can't."

He held my hand from across the table and smiled.

We talked about the logistics, about who I needed to call. The tears slowed down and I took a whole bunch of deep breaths and was able to look at my husband through clear eyes. I drank my is-this-for-fucking-real-it's-so-good espresso and took a bite of my absurdly delicious fresh-baguette/ham/thick-slices-of-butter sandwich and soaked in the perfect-ness of where we were. The relief that comes when we tell the truth about who we are and what we need began to flood my body and we walked home a little lighter.

I've been on Prozac for 12 days now. I'm already feeling less edgy, and I don't much care of it's a placebo effect or if the pills are actually already working their magic - better is better and I will take it.

I've been worried that I won't be able to write anymore if I'm medicated. That the fire that propels me will be extinguished - though it's worth remembering that the fire has also had a tendency to engulf me. I've worried that I'll become a numbed-out version of myself, that my good will be as dull as my bad.

I'm writing this now, in part, just to see if I can.

I'm calling this The Prozac Experiment. If I feel good, I'm going to keep taking it. If I feel doped up, I'll stop. I've finally learned that making declarations about what I will always do or not do just sets me up for eventual contradiction. And so this experiment is for now, for today, for we'll see.

Giving myself a touch of grace was - is - really hard. I'm hoping, that with hard work and a little bit of help, it won't feel that way forever.

Lovin' on you,
*E

Is It Time For A Super Soul Glitter Party?

Originally posted October 15, 2014

Fuckin' A, you guys.

I spent many, many hours today sitting in my bed, writing. I've written some of my favorite things like that, all propped up and cozy. Sometimes I thrive in my studio, and lately, I thrive in my bed.

So I was up there all day while the kids were in school. I wrote and wrote and edited and deleted and cut and pasted and thought and thought and decided, as I framed the shell of my first women's weekend retreat, that I was creating something DEEP and IMPORTANT and SOUL-ALTERING.

But now, I'm sitting on my couch next to my dog. I just ate a piece of apple pie (that I made tonight, bitches) for dinner. The kids are asleep and Tim probably is, too, and the more I think about this weekend-long event I've been creating the more I think, "Wait. Why the serious face, E? Can't it be meaningful and important and fun? How do I make it all of those things?"

Because here's the thing: I'm pretty much over all of this soul-searching feeling so arduous. Like, I wanna get together and figure out some serious shit, get to the bottom of our fears, witness the hell out of a bunch of brave women - I wanna do that like whoa. But I also want to end up talking about sex while we smoke clandestine cigarettes on the porch and eat queso made with Velveeta, late-night.

I want this thing to be all the things. Which made me wonder if it needs to be big. Like, do we just need to have a big fucking slumber party? I am totally serious here. I'm so, so, so all about inclusion and am, just hours after deciding this baby needed to be tiny, feeling like she needs to be a big fucking monster of a weekend, all hot-pink glitter and disco balls and tears and chills and soul-sister-making. I mean, doesn't that sound like a hell of a lot of fun?

I want to make real change by making real connections, and those are easier to make when we're all just being, well, real. And silly. And vulnerable. And fun. And maybe when we wear cute shoes just because and swear a lot and talk about how scary it is to own our shit or take the leap.

You know how I am about and/both. I want an and/both retreat.

I'll bet that almost every business person out there would tell me that opening my process up like this is some sort of marketing suicide, but we all know how good I am at keeping this kind of thing to myself.

So tell me: should we throw down? A soul revolution? A super soul glitter party? I will plan the ever-loving hell out of it, but I just need to know if you're in - if you are, tell me in the comments.

As I've said before, all I've really ever wanted from this space is for it to connect us.

So let's let it do that.

LOVE,
*E

Ice Cream and Cigarettes.

Originally posted October 1, 2014

"Mama, can we have our ice cream now?"

This was how my day began, at 5:57 a.m.

I am, admittedly, an idiot for having bribed my children - in a moment of you-can't-look-like-Neanderthals lunacy - with first-thing-in-the-morning bites of ice cream if they let me cut their finger and toe nails last night before bed. "Sweet," I thought. "I'll get to be the fun mom. Maybe this will make it into the Happy Memories folder in their minds."

I know they've started filing systems. They're my children, after all.

"Yes, just let me finish peeing," I said as I finished scrolling through Facebook in the dark, cozy bathroom. I've learned to lock the door. I am no longer an amateur.

The three of us herded ourselves into the pantry and gathered around the chest freezer. All of the spoons were dirty and so I had two forks in my hand. I scooped a bite out for Osi. "That's all?" he said. "Either eat that or don't have ice cream in the morning," I said. I scooped Isla's out, and was immediately met with, "Osi has mooooore than me." The fact that she sounded like she was doing a Caillou impression made me want to run away. "No he doesn't. Not everything can be exactly the same. Just...eat your ice cream," I said, quickly realizing that I wasn't caffeinated and was therefore unable to deal with problems of unfairness without contradicting myself.

She then promptly dropped her ice cream on the floor.

I went and got her another scoop. "That's not faaair," whined Osi, "I WANT MORE, TOO!"

"Yours didn't fall on the ground. You just ate your ice cream."

He screamed, threw his fork on the floor, and stormed out of the kitchen. He came back a few seconds later with his bright orange Dora the Explorer gardening gloves and threw them at me. I stood still and tried to make my face look like an angry bull's face might look. I don't think I succeeded, as he then picked up a dish towel and threw that at me, too.

"The ice cream's going in the trash," I said, noting, in real time, that I was quickly going down the tit-for-tat route with my four year old, aware that I was about to move from Conscious Parenting to the less effective and more this-is-way-more-about-your-shit-than-the-situation-you're-currently-dealing-with sort of parenting I'll call Childish Parenting - the kind of parenting that makes us more like peers to our children than safe, solid grown-ups.

"FINE. I DON'T CARE. THROW IT AWAY! YOU'RE THE WORST MAMA I COULD EVER ASK FOR!" he shouted. The "you're the worst mama I could ever ask for" isn't new, and is usually balanced nicely with "you're the best mama I could ever ask for", which is what I heard the night before when I told him he'd get a bite of ice cream in the morning.

"Yup. I'm the worst mama ever. I give you ice cream in the morning. I'm horrible."

We then moved on to papers that weren't supposed to be scribbled on being scribbled on, a meltdown because I suggested to Isla that more words could perhaps be fit on a page if the words were written smaller - "I DON'T KNOW HOW TO WRITE SMALLER!" she cried - and a standoff over a water bottle (the nasty one in the dishwasher was the only one he could possibly use. I am an idiot for not understanding this.)

As Osi sat on the floor screaming at me about the water bottle, I stepped outside to breathe in some fresh air. More accurately, I raced over to the kitchen door and escaped the admittedly-temporary hell I was living in. I covered my ears because closing the door had not made the screaming disappear and I needed three seconds of silence. "Please shut the fuck up," I whispered to myself. "Please, please, please." I uncovered my ears and heard my husband's deep voice. "Thank you, God," I thought.

I walked inside and we locked eyes and I breathed a deep breath in and he said, "You ready for a break, babe?" and I wanted to do bedroom things to him for knowing what my face was saying.

"Yes. We all are," I said with a slight smile, relieved to have back-up, grateful to have my back-up be this guy, with his voice and his red work suspenders and his general babe-ness and wise-ness.

Shoes were then tied and long, healing hugs were given. I kissed foreheads and checked backpacks and said goodbye. Tim brought them to school. That alone made the morning feel new; drop-off is almost always my job. As he kissed me goodbye he sensed my relief and gave me the "Oh, boy do I love you" smile that makes me feel like we'll never get old.

"I'm going to sit on the porch when you leave and..."

"Yeah?" he said, reading my mind. "Enjoy it."

"I will."

I went to my studio and grabbed a cigarette from my secret stash. It'd been a long, long time since I'd sinned and smoked one. I went out to the porch and sat in a hot pink chair.

I inhaled.

I felt guilty.

I felt good.

I felt guilty for feeling good.

I sat back and just let the quiet cover me up like a blanket. I looked across the road at the yellow and orange and red trees. I noticed that my rusty mailbox and the yellow "CAUTION: CHILDREN" sign matched my favorite season. I made a mental note to focus on those two things in the middle of the winter when I'm feeling desperate, to remember that there are reminders of the things we love everywhere if we remember to look for them.

I wondered if smoking a cigarette once in awhile made me a bad person, a stupid person, an un-spiritual person. "Am I still on the path if I want to do this sometimes?" And then I remembered this, from way down deep in my files on "TRUTH" and "UNENDING KNOWINGS":

You don't get knocked off the path by being human. You get knocked off the path when you stop believing there's a path.

And BA BAM, just like that, I was back in it. Back in the knowing that I am precisely where I need to be. That my flaws have to be there because I am a human and humans are innately flawed. That the Prozac's okay. That the cigarette is, too. That the morning was okay and the love that brought us back is the only thing that'll keep bringing us back, again and again.

I thought about how the most reliable way to feel the love I haven't always historically felt is to give it to myself, to love myself that way. I thought about how fucking hard that is sometimes even though giving that kind of love to my children feels as easy as breathing. I thought about breathing that love into me.

I smoked that whole cigarette. Then I went inside and put Meghan Trainor on my phone and turned it up as loud as it could go. I took a shower and sang along and danced under the hot, hot water. I got dressed and texted some people I love and told them I miss them. I made an egg sandwich; I folded the edges of the egg so it'd fit the English muffin just so. I opened the window in my studio.

I breathed the clean, damp air.

I believe that there's a path.

And I believe that I am on it.

*E

Just Train The Dog.

Originally posted March 3, 2015

I just dictated a very long, very detailed post into my phone and then the entire thing got erased because I needed to verify my fucking password. I cannot tell you how much this enrages me. My body feels very, very angry right now.

It felt angry before, my body. That's why I was dictating in the first place. Because I had to go outside and move wood from one side of the house to the other, and my dog, who I called repeatedly for 20 minutes, who looked me right in the eye again and again, continued to ignore me.

"Just train the dog," you say?

Oh, yes, of course!  I knew I forgot to do something.  Train the dog and raise the children with gentleness and love and maintain the healthy marriage and these are teachable moments.  And don't forget to grow some food and can it and then cook with it throughout the year.  Don't forget to take care of yourself, too, because you matter.  Get up early to meditate and and exercise and eat well, and not too much coffee and are you sure you want that drink/cigarette/TV show?  Does it really feed your soul?

Somehow, the dog has become representative of so much more.

Just one hour ago, I was filled with a very different feeling. Head-to-toe bliss, golden light.  "I feel happy," I said to the kids as I buckled Osi into his seat. "Me too," they said in unison. We drove home listening to new music. 

I know it's a fucking choice to feel like this. Please don't throw my words back at me right now. I know how annoying it is when people do that; I've surely done it to you.

Right now I just need to feel pissed before I can feel un-pissed.

How will my life look when it looks how I want it to look? How will my life feel when it feels how I want it to feel? When will there be longer spells of those feelings and those visions? Why is it all so fucking staccato?

Back to the firewood: it's not even that I mind moving the wood. I like dealing with firewood. It's that I also need to cook chicken soup for my sick daughter, and write beautiful little cards that I desperately want to write to some women I'm going to circle up with in a few weeks, and hang laundry because our dryer broke and put laundry away, and put new sheets on beds, and vacuum the inch of grime off the stairs.

It's that I need to do all of these things, and - because they're the things I need to do - I keep waiting for one of them to fill me up all the way.  Sometimes some of them fill me up a little bit and then I find myself depleted by something else.

You know when I feel full? When I'm at the ocean. And please don't tell me that I'm just stuck in late-winter blues, because that's not it. The ocean is the one place where I feel whole and full and like I know everything I need to know, for real. Why do I live in a place where I have to tolerate my way through half of the fucking year? What is this weird New England pride I've been born into?

What would I write about if I didn't give a shit who read it? My dysfunctional relationship with my mother? The years and years of work my husband and I have put into being real-life-grown-ups in our marriage? The way my stepmother apologizing for how she treated me as a child completely transformed how I felt about her and, in turn, about life? 

And let's just go there because why not: why don't I have more friends?  

The dog is inside.

I feel less angry than I did before.

My kids are watching OK Go videos and I don't feel guilty about it.

I want to go get a tattoo while I smoke a cigarette.  

I wanna do those things at the same time.  

Right now.  

At the ocean.

Instead, I'm going to go move wood.

*E

This Is Dedicated To The One I Love.

December 29, 2014

We Can't Teach It If We Don't Live It.

Last night I lay in bed next to my tired husband and clicked 'play' on this TED talk by Bryan Stevenson.  I read about it in one of the books my husband brought home a few weeks ago, Talk Like TED.  I'm devouring the clear writing, and every-sentence-validation I feel when I read things like, "...it's also a mistake to believe that you can influence and inspire others by speaking about a topic that you don't love - that is not core to your identity."  I want my words to matter, and so it's foolish to dilute them; the more I water down what I believe, the less potent those beliefs become.

I thought about all of this as I watched Bryan Stevenson speak.  Stevenson is the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, which fights poverty and challenges racial discrimination in the criminal justice system.  He's a clear speaker, at ease on stage and full of humble confidence.  Stevenson's TED talk received the longest standing ovation in TED history.  The theme he touched on that settled most certainly in my middle was this: we have to talk about the things that make us uncomfortable.  He relates this idea to facing injustice in our criminal justice system.  

After the video stopped, my face flushed as I remembered what I believe most deeply: we can not teach emotional health if we don't first live emotional health.

I scurried out of bed, threw a sweater on, and went downstairs to talk to you.

We're getting closer and closer to our collective thesis, to the meat and heart and crux of what we're doing here.

We're getting closer, Loves

The Super Soul Glitter Party is a real-life chance to do the hard and vital work of emotional transformation in a fun, glam setting.

It's just the thing for gals like us.

JOIN US, WON'T YOU?

Originally posted December 21, 2014

Any blogger who denies that she sometimes thinks in quips, anecdotes, or blog/social media posts is full of shit.

I do it. I do it quite a lot, actually. This used to concern me, but now I view it mostly as a tool of my chosen trade.  I sift through my thoughts, mining out the more gem-like ones, forming them into something pretty, something worth reading.

The upside of this way of thinking is that, when utilizing the microphone button on my phone's keyboard, I can get thoughts or posts down in real-time with very little trouble  And while I don't think of myself as a funny person, I like to imagine that I'm a generally witty gal; being able to document moments of wit or insight can be fun, and sometimes even connecting.

And yet the obvious downside of this sort of post-driven-thinking is that I sometimes weigh the value of my thoughts against how popular I think they might be: Will this make people laugh? Will people click Like?

All of these things went through my brain the other day as I composed what turned out to be both a popular - if we're counting Likes - and uncharacteristically snarky Facebook update about my morning with my husband:

“What my husband had for breakfast: two gourmet breakfast tacos.

What I had for breakfast: the scraps from my kid’s plates.

What my husband has for lunch: sauteed veggies, avocado, and a leftover turkey burger. “Look at this Eating Well lunch!”

What I have for lunch: tortilla chips, almonds, cheese, an apple.

Number of people my husband facilitated dressing and getting out of the house: 1.

Number of people I facilitated dressing and getting out of the house: 3.

Number of women in our house who have PMS and are eager for a respectful and fruitful conversation about making our morning loads more equitable: 1.

#reallife

— Emily Ballard, acting badly

After I read and re-read the post, I put it up on my Writer page, despite the reservations I felt deep in the pit of my stomach.

Because, you see, my husband and I are not snarky. We are not passive aggressive.  We are not rude, and though we traverse challenges together - as any honest married couple does - we've always been resolute in our innate decision to be always loving and respectful with our words, even when our tones are hurt or angry. We pride ourselves on this solid kind of communication. We've worked hard to learn it and work daily to maintain it.

A detail worth noting is that my husband does not use Facebook, and so my presence there is almost totally obscured from him. And while he knows that I often speak glowingly about him, he was hurt when he accidentally saw the above post after I left the tab open on the iPad.

He brought it up so calmly.  "I'm okay with you talking about the challenges in our marriage on the blog. Your blog posts are different than these Facebook posts - they're less substantial, like dating a boy you knew you weren't going to marry."

My face burned with well-earned shame.  He was right, of course, and I told him so immediately. I looked back and realized how I'd ignored my intuition, how I ignored the unspoken agreement that my husband and I have always adhered to: to act like the kind of people we want to be married to.

I had chosen Likes over loyalty, fruitless venting over productive problem-solving.

I didn't like how it felt.

I didn't defend my actions.  I didn't tell him to get over it, or ask him to try and see the potential underlying humor.

I apologized, and thanked him for calling me out.  "You make me better," I said.

I will not beg for Likes with petty complaints again.

My marriage - the relationship of my life - is worth so very much more.

*E