I watched a bunch of true crime to deal with my anxiety so you don't have to.
Leave a light on before you go to bed. It'll keep you safe.
Without divulging too much, I’ve had a tough go of things lately. Maybe the last year or so? The stress is a bit of a roller coaster. It ebbs and flows. It’s about the kids. It’s about my parents. It’s about my husband. It’s about the absolute fucking mess that is my house, and then I get little nudges of reality and I'll take a breath and I realize that I’m okay. Really.
It’s not that bad. It’s not that fucking bad.
I’ve been repeating this mantra to myself my entire adult life.
Anyway, I haven’t entirely realized just how stressed I was until a family issue arose last week, wherein I dealt with the issue poorly and ended up having a panic attack.
I ended up taking a day off to sink into depression, which felt silly at first. A day to be a teenager again? Just an entire day of laying in bed, crying in angst? Thankfully, my husband took the brunt of the workload, and I spent the entire day with the curtains closed, drifting in and out of sleep while watching Hasan Piker react to police interrogations.
Probably not the best choice of decompression content, but it was the choice I made and now I’m addicted.1
Hi, I’m a mom and I love true crime.
It’s a cliche as old as modern motherhood, really. I’ve been listening to true crime podcasts while getting ready in the morning ever since listening to political podcasts while getting ready in the morning got too frustrating.
I used to spend every day in this ball of rage, and I wasn’t a pleasant person to be around in the break room at work. People were just trying to eat their lunches and I was sitting in the corner ranting about capitalism and voter apathy and corporate greed. I really needed to calm the fuck down.
True crime is just another way to stay immersed in current events, only with a more personal angle. It doesn’t really make me paranoid in the sense that I’m always locking the door.2 I like to think that I fear getting raped and murdered while waiting for the bus just as much as any other woman would. But who knows?
I’m a woman. I’m always paranoid about something.
Is that normal? Am I okay?
I’m totally okay.
It’s not that bad, I say every night as I get out of bed and venture downstairs to check if the door is locked.
Time to compartmentalize!
Everything I write is self-expression. Everything I write is a blend of whatever I’m into at that moment in time, so no doubt the true crime has helped me compartmentalize some of the stress with my current WIP, which is the erotic horror novella3 I mentioned in a previous newsletter.
Ever since I started editing the second draft, it’s become glaringly obvious just how much of my anger was going into it. But I pushed it under, kept waking up at 6 AM every morning, kept making my daughter’s lunch, kept feeding the kids breakfast, kept dressing myself up, doing my hair, doing my makeup, making everything fucking perfect.
Meanwhile, I was pushing a bunch of angst into my main character. Her name is Jennifer, and I guess I’ll tell you more about her in time. She’s not me, exactly. She’s compartmentalized frustration blended into fiction.
One of the most fascinating parts about some of the videos I watched during my “depression day” was about an angst-ridden trans person coping with their angst by obsessing over two unlikely things: Ember, a character from the TV show Danny Phantom, and Columbine. But then their obsession slips into a state of broken reality, and they ultimately end up committing a mass shooting before committing suicide. The story is both terrifying and fascinating at the same time.4 The incident itself is horrifying, but I found myself identifying a bit with their personal isolation, and it did coax me to recollect a lot of my own teenage isolation, and did make me reflect a bit on some of my "weirdness" during that time of my life.
Thankfully, I got through my teen years without doing anything brash, but the video also made me kind of think about Jennifer and what she’s become to me. She’s a character that absorbs all my angst. I’m currently working on the second draft of Mommy Complex, and the process proved to be quite a struggle. I go through a roller coaster of emotion, wondering why the fuck I can’t just be a faster writer. But then I also have small breakthroughs after I’ll spend a week writing a damn sex scene, and I’ll be like, Damn, yeah, she’s got things kinda rough, doesn’t she?
And then I’m like, Right, Jennifer is you, isn’t she?
And then I’m like, “No, it’s not that bad.”
My writer brain rationalization.
Before I had kids, I used to spend whatever time I had to myself just living in my stories. I’d plot things. I’d have conversations. I’d jot it all down frantically in a notebook or a work document or a receipt. It’s always been a coping mechanism, either for boredom or stress.
Some of my best stories ended up being the ones I wrote while immersed in this other reality, giving a bit of myself for the sake of the story. Being emotionally unavailable. A bit withdrawn. The need to socialize disappears and I’ll slam in the headphones, listen to my playlist, play pretend in my head for a while.
Writer Brain, I call it.
Since I had kids, that writer brain time has slipped away. There’s too much other stuff in my head. There’s always screaming in the background. There’s so much coffee, so much clutter, so many fucking ads to scroll past when I’m just trying to find a fucking recipe to make for dinner, and a fucking grocery list to fire off to my husband before he gets out of work, late yet again.
Every so often, life gives me a bit of a break and I have the time to decompress inside a story, much like I did when writing “Woman of the White Cottage” or “The Fruits of Wartime”, both of which appear in my upcoming collection, Ending in Ashes.5 I wrote those stories in 2021, though, and since then, I've been totally unable to immerse myself fully into a story.
It’s been really weird. I really wasn’t feeling okay. I was going through a lot of life changes in that time, though. In 2022, I quit my retail job of 16 years and started working in a small local store. My husband also took on a treasury role at my church and spent a lot more time out of the house, which left me doing the single mom thing for many nights. My sister moved into my basement with her kid. It’s been a lot. I just didn’t have time to spend immersed in fiction, even though I was still forcing myself to write it.
But alas, this week, after taking that depression day off, it returned. There I was, working my 4-hour shift at my slow and quiet retail store. No customers. Nothing to do but walk back and forth. Pace. I was thinking about all that interrogation footage I’d watched, and then the antagonist of my novel started talking:
“It IS that bad, Mommy.”
There he was, alive and well. And I got reacquainted.
I finished up the second draft of Act II last night and I’m so fucking excited.
I feel (a bit) better now.
I was okay, right?
It wasn’t that bad, right?
It honestly isn’t, at least not to the degree that I’m going to do something awful. I get frustrated, but I have a supportive partner. I talk with my kids and tell them that I get sad and upset sometimes, the same way they do. I ask for hugs when I need them. And as much fun as I have online, I do take the time to spend time away from it, immersed in reality, making human connections.
Four years ago, I made a list of therapists to contact. One of them I committed to memory, so I contacted her.
Hopefully, she’ll get back to me soon, because I have some stuff to talk about.
Footnotes
In my defence, I could have made poorer choices, like drowning my sorrows in wine or shitty erotica, but I don’t wanna go spoiling my novella or anything…
That paranoia was already instilled in me by my mom, who always locked the door even when I’d go outside just to check the fucking mail.
It’s actually a novel now. Hitting 60,000 words. During the second draft, I also figured out how to craftily turn it into a trilogy. Fingers crossed I can maintain this story-writing energy for the long term.