It’s been a month since I last wrote and it’s been a great roller coaster ride. The BF and I submitted a grant application at the midnight hour last night and I realized—along with the fact that I need to keep track of our timeline and schedules next time so this doesn’t happen again and his frustration and temper and stress level go skyrocketing—that entrepreneur life has its ebbs and flows whereas a j-o-b is just bzzzzzzzz. Kind of like when someone dies in the hospital and the machine goes “beeeeeeeep…”

OK, so the other real reason I have been MIA lately and really in general for the last year really is that I have experienced some setbacks in my blog—in terms of attacks—and then to add on to that my good friend’s semi-warning question a couple months ago about if I’m ready to deal with the responses to me revealing all my vulnerabilities and deep-dark-secrets online and in my ebook. It’s been echoing in my head and I’ve been trailing a slew of self-doubt behind me ever since.

Do I want to reveal that much online? To strangers? To potentially invite further attacks? Well, no, no one likes attacks. And I don’t relish them one bit, though I would like to get better at being able to handle them. But that’s not who I spill my blood on the page for. It’s to all the other women who have written to me, publicly or privately, and said I never told you but your blog really saved me last year when I was down and out. I really appreciate your resources in your book. I read your book in one sitting! That means the world to me.

And I don’t do it for fame. Fame just seems horribly annoying and superficial, but instead kind of like Schindler in Schindler’s List when he’s on the railroad tracks and he pulls out his ballpoint pen and says— But I could have saved one more person…! OK, a bit dramatic but it really is to touch the dark corners of young women’s hearts and minds. Where we feel that horrible and shitty about ourselves, where we feel we hate the world and our classmates and our teachers and our parents that much; where we feel guilty and anxious and miserable but we’re just numb and used to it because there’s no respite from it, and to come upon this lake in a desert but it’s not a mirage and to pull it out when you wish and get a little perspective.

A new perspective. Because that’s what I didn’t have back then.