I get it. Our situation is a little weird and a little confusing. Mostly because I’ve allowed it to be.

The no-frills version is that we moved 300 miles from home and into my sister’s garage. The frills are everything I’ve shared on Instagram both here and on @minimalish.house over the past 14 or so months. Yes, we chose to do that. But why we chose it is much more complicated.

Here’s a higher-level truth: No. Of course, we had no intention of leaving the city we grew up in, met in, and returned to start our life together. Our daughter was a third generation #ValleyGirl. The pride is strong. The roots are deep.

But after more than a decade of failed offers on houses (we’ve legitimately forgotten how many houses we bid on at this point but easily more than 20) we were simply priced out of our beloved hometown. In early 2008 our first offer went in on a house in the Valley listed at $378k, it needed a ton of work and was crawling with termites, but we were still child-free and we were ready for it. A developer outbid us (actually 5 developers, there were 17 bids in all and ours came in at number 6) and our quest for a place to start and raise our family began. By 2017 we were still competing against multiple offers (never less than 7, sometimes as many as 26) and each time the quaint family home became a McMansion at the hands of developer after developer. Once our own (former) realtor had his daughter outbid us on a multi-family unit we brought to him.

By our final offer, we were frantically doing the math to grab one of the fixers in our beloved neighborhood for the bargain price of 800k for a 500 sq foot box with no yard. Scott was nauseous at the prospect of financing so much and getting so little. I was desperate for a forever home for our family. But again, against 14 offers, we were outbid by developers.

Los Angeles has a housing crisis. Let’s be honest, if we couldn’t hack this market from our dual-income upper-middle class white-privileged starting ground, what chance do the majority of my native Angelinos have? The Valley has become an untenable developers playground under its current leadership while residents watch their beloved hometown turn from an architecturally diverse gem to a bunch of condominiums and track housing they could never afford. Blue collar workers who have lived in the Valley for generations are finding themselves forced to move further and further away from their jobs, often with the result of looking for work closer to their new neighborhoods leaving Valley business owners struggling to replace them at rates they can afford to pay.

As our dominoes fell, so did LA’s.

When we realized that we’d never save for a place of our own while sustaining LA housing prices we intentionally decided to get drastic. We claimed the #tinyhousemovement as our millennial dream and kept our chins up, grateful there was a community of people making the choice feel less shameful.

But man, walking away from our last rental in LA, knowing we’d only be met with higher housing costs possibly preventing the return we hope to one day make…that was the hardest thing to do of all.

And now we’re here. And this struggle, it has become a platform from which I MUST spring into social service. #Housing, #SelfEmploymentTax, and #PublicHealth are issues I have no choice but to get into the mud on. To go to the mattresses. To #savethevalley.

Next time on Morgan’s soapbox, we’ll talk about self-employment tax and how it hinders entrepreneurs and small local businesses, not to mention making that housing search that much harder. #meforofficeprettysoon

Mid Century design.

Bloody Marys with pickle juice.

Color.

I don’t like feeling like a joyless zombie.

I don’t like being unable to tell the difference between anxiety and poop.

I don’t like the feeling of pointlessness that creeps in when I let it.

I am a creature of aesthetic. I like it when things look pretty. (Or, as Delilah would interject “You like cool, mommy. I like pretty.”) I forget sometimes that that holds true even when no one is looking. It’s at odds with my lazy side. “Why make my bed if I’m getting back into it later?” “Why put that sweater in the closet when I’m going out again in an hour?” “Why put the food on a plate and dirty an extra dish?” So now I am a creature of aesthetic drinking milk straight from the carton so I don’t dirty the round cups that give me just a little bit of extra pleasure when I hold a drink in them. My lazy side denies my aesthetic side air, and as a result I have created a life that is not aesthetically pleasing, a life of convenience and unitaskers and getting to the things I like later.

Well, it’s fucking later. And I’m a good enough reason for the nice china, even if it creates an extra dish.

Blogabble as hell, but I’m free now, so I experience my life not in bloggable moments but in actual human emotion and it is marvelous. Well, I think it has the potential to be, anyway.

There’s still the reason I made this left-turn into full-time blogging in the first place. My brain is a dirty liar and has a fucked up sense of humor, and the best medicine I’ve found is to write it all down. AKA I’m still kind of a sick puppy where my mental health is concerned, and this place (and you guys, friends and lurkers) have always been an integral part of my treatment. As I’ve mentioned, I’m an obsessive envier. Which is what was so revelatory about the Spielberg thing. To be honest: Watching someone else live the dream? (Yes, even Steven Spielberg) (Yes, I know that’s absurd) That’s the kind of thing that normally would have destroyed me for weeks.

Instead, I let myself enjoy it. Soak it in. Be a fan. Make no mistake, envy is my constant nemesis — I fight it back at every turn even on a good day. So to let go of all of that and dork out and just be able to watch this iconic director direct was really rare for me. I unabashedly lurked and listened, and took in every choice he made, and why, and I had one of the most exciting days I’ve let myself enjoy in as long as I can remember. It was just like every other set I’ve ever been on, if you’re a fellow film geek and wondering, no fireworks, nothing especially unique or magical, just every day movie-making as I’ve always known it. Except Spielberg. And there was so much inspiration in realizing that Spielberg was human.

My default setting is to think of myself as less than. Not quite good enough. Just below the threshold. I’m driven by it when it doesn’t paralyze me. Over the years I’ve gotten better at not letting it paralyze me. But lately, I’ve been feeling a lot of conflict about being medicated. There’s a lot of stigma around mental healthcare as if the brain isn’t just another organ gone haywire. And I wonder what life would feel like with, well, feeling.

This video that my colleague and friend Kelsey made hits home for me in more ways than one:

And so, I’m hard on myself about the treatment for, in part, being so hard on myself. Yesterday I lost my medication bottle (I carry it in my purse because I almost never remember to take it before I leave the house.) This morning, as I took to Facebook to let off some anxiety while waiting for any kind of doctor’s office or pharmacy to open, my friend Marinka also said something that hit home.

So I guess what I’m saying is, for me, the new blogability scale rests on only one thing: Making sure that people know that feeling this way exists — that it’s not just you. That your brain is part of your body, and there’s no shame in not being okay all the time.

This is treatment.

Emotionally…mentally, I have not been having the best few months.

It started with a (grotesquely failed) attempt to wean off of Prozac and it ended with mental mayhem, ghosting on my therapist and pretty much everyone else, and a lot – A LOT – of sleep.

I used to think I didn’t have an addictive personality. It turned out that I just hadn’t found anything I loved enough to be addicted to yet. Now my vices surround me like old friends. Social Media isn’t the least of them.

I have obsessive compulsive disorder, but for me, it doesn’t manifest with a clean house (I wish) or counting rivets in furniture. It manifests in obsessive envy – an inability to think of anything but what everyone else has achieved and then compare and contrast it against my own perceived failures. And, oh, when I’m in a state like I’ve been in, there are many. Every wallet in the check-out line, every car in the parking lot, every ring on someone’s finger is a big giant blinking arrow of what I may not have. And it’s sickening. Unbearably sickening. Compounded by my own anger at myself for living in such a shallow cycle and allowing it to reign over my every waking moment.

The world becomes cloudy to everything but envy and self-loathing. Work becomes the only escape. And with work, comes social media.

And with social media, comes more envy. And the cycle continues.

After the election I took all my social media off of my phone. (Except Instagram dammit, there’s something about it that makes me feel connected even when I’ve burrowed six feet deep.) And while I couldn’t block social sites from my computer without faltering in my livelihood, I have found a borderline laughable amount of solace in eradicating my Facebook newsfeed. (It’s a thing.)

Over the past few weeks Facebook has gone from an outlet of my obsessiveness to kind of an enjoyable place. At first the eradicator let me check into the pages and information I needed to without getting drawn into the abyss of “have-ness” surrounding the data. But then something strange started happening. As I locked down my feed in a post-election infused panic, I made it so that only people that really know me are seeing the things I post, or that are posted about me, and the interaction feels warm and friendly and actually social again. And when I compulsively click on my home feed button, there’s nothing there but a carefully curated quote, gently reminding me that my life is passing by whether I’m enjoying it or not.

I’m starting to awaken to the world again after another months-long battle with that notorious noonday demon. There are a lot of small changes going on in my every day life, and change is always a good distraction from that asshole voice in my head that just won’t shut up. But I also think backing off of social media, and finding the closest thing I could to a social media vacation has helped just a little bit.

Addiction is hard, friends and lurkers. But so is happiness.

I haven’t been quiet about how I feel. I’m trying to actually be a little quieter while I process it all and figure out what to do next. I took all the social apps off my phone because raging into the fiberoptic hole isn’t helping me feel (or do) better. I still slip on to Facebook from time to time to to say something ill-advised, and then I cut myself off again. Social media is as tough an addiction to beat as any.

But I don’t want to talk about politics ever again. I only want to talk about fixing this country. I only want to talk about how half of Americans were so disenfranchised they didn’t even vote. I don’t know what that means for me — if it’s about shifting to a life of public service, or if it’s about using the megaphone I’m privileged to have to make a positive effect on the world. How do you find the most powerful way to make an impact when there’s so much impact that needs to be made?

This election has taught me that I was truly living in a bubble, believing that President-Elect Trump could never happen. That we were on the verge of our first female president. And that that president was going to be one of the most qualified and well-vetted in history. I woke up, and put on my pantsuit, and my Future Is Female shirt, and I marched out of my house prepared to make history.

53% of white women voted for a candidate to openly bragged about assaulting women. Who treats and speaks about women like trash. But why? Is our own racism and misogyny so deeply engrained that white women as a demographic were so willing to ignore the sexism and racism spewing from the male candidate’s lips?

The hardest part about this election for me personally (after breaking the news to my daughter) has been realizing how many people voted Trump but would never admit it to anyone. We’re so divided, we can’t talk to each other face to face, and we’re left to these drastic measures. Where did we lose our humanity? Have our voices just gotten lost in the cacophony of social media?

I don’t believe for a minute that Donald Trump believes in 90% of what he says. I don’t believe that he can or will attempt to do many of the terrifying things he has promised. But I’m no longer afraid of President Trump. I’m afraid of the very idea that he was voted in to office. I’m afraid for the children who will wake up every day wondering if their parents will be deported, and I’m afraid of the people who will take Trump’s election as a cosign from all of us in this country that racism, misogyny, and shitting on others is OK. It is not.

This podcast was helpful for me to listen to as I struggle to understand how this could happen, and the reality of the landscape we’re currently living in.

(h/t to Tara for sharing it with me.)

https://www.revealnews.org/episodes/the-secret-trump-voter/

How are you guys doing?

YOU SHOULD.