Before the aneurysm, I was someone who prided herself on being capable.
That’s not the most interesting thing about me, in retrospect. But it was the organizing principle. I worked hard, I showed up, I delivered. I had a career that was going somewhere and a quiet certainty about what the next several years would look like.
Then, on May 29, 2019, a brain aneurysm ruptured. And the version of me that had been so carefully assembled — capable, consistent, certain about the future — stopped being the point.
What followed was the five years I am now writing a book about. Seventeen times on an operating table. Twenty-three ER visits. Fifty-one days in hospitals. A cascade of health complications I won’t try to summarize here because the book does it better. But also: a marriage that not only held but strengthened, a child born in the middle of all of it, a slow and not always graceful process of figuring out who I was when I could no longer define myself by what I could do.
I left my job recently. Some of you found me through that announcement. What I want you to know is that the leaving and the book are connected. Not because one caused the other, but because they’re part of the same longer reckoning with what I actually want my life to look like now. What I want to spend my time on. What feels worth doing.
The book is called I Think I’m Ready to Talk. It comes out in September. It covers May 2019 through September 2024 and it is the most honest thing I have ever made. I didn’t write it because I wanted to talk about being sick. I wrote it because I kept running into a version of this story that didn’t match mine … the version where surviving something catastrophic makes you immediately grateful and clear-eyed and changed for the better. Where the hard part is the emergency and everything after is recovery.
That wasn’t my experience. The emergency was almost the easy part. What came after — the years of follow-up surgeries, the reproductive health complications nobody warned me about, the friendships that couldn’t hold the weight of a long illness, the slow work of figuring out who I was now — that was the real story.
This site exists because I needed somewhere to tell it while the book was being made. The blog is where I’ve been working through the parts that didn’t fit neatly into chapters. The newsletter is where I write to people directly. And in September, the book is where all of it lands.
If you’re new here — welcome. You are arriving at an interesting moment. The story is almost out.
I’m thankful for whatever led you here. I’m thankful to continue this journey with you.