There was a period of time, oh almost a decade ago, that I completely lost it. I joke that it was my Maria Carey meltdown (you do remember the time in her “Glitter” era when she started speaking gibberish on TRL while pushing an ice cream cart around only to wind up in a “sanatorium”, don’t you?). Well mine was exactly like that minus the fame and the money, the butt shorts and the Carson Daly. I had wound up, after a decade of living on my own in California, back in my hometown working in the mall I used to troll as a preteen. It was so not pretty I can’t even tell you. Every so often I would look up from folding a t-shirt (I spent an inordinate amount of time folding t-shirts) to see the schadenfreudic-full face of some girl I went to high school with strolling with her baby while wearing a two carat VS1 diamond on her finger. I cannot tell you how many uncomfortable and humiliating conversations I had during that period of my life, in between the time I spent traveling from the putty colored walls of my shrink’s office to the hallowed halls of Baybrook Mall’s very own Banana Republic to the zombied-out hours I spent watching “The Bachelor” and “The Swan” on my mom’s couch. It was truly pitiful, not to mention ridiculously expensive due to the megadoses of anti-depressants and sleeping pills I popped every day. 

The how I got there part isn’t really all that important, but suffice to say I was in the midst of this full-blown major depressive episode by my own making. I had been on a fast track to a life that I thought I wanted, that I thought I was entitled to, only to have all of it blow up spectacularly in my face; I was suffering wildly at discovering that no one is guaranteed anything in life, certainly not everyone gets a happy ending and what made me so special to think I was so special? I was barely 30 and still young, but I held zero hope for my life ending up as I had plotted, planned and engineered with a Machiavellianish intensity.