The Spreadsheet
I didn’t plan to tell this story. For months, I’ve been living in this strange in-between space where everything looks normal from the outside, and nothing is normal on the inside. I go to work.
I answer emails.
I post the occasional photo of coffee cups or sunsets. People like and comment and send little heart emojis, and every time I hit “share” on another harmless snapshot that doesn’t mention the fact that my entire life collapsed on my 30th birthday, something inside me tightens.
It feels like I’m lying by omission. Like I’m curating a museum exhibit of a person who no longer exists.
So here I am, sitting on the floor of my half-unpacked one-bedroom, laptop balanced on a cardboard box, trying to turn the most surreal night of my life into sentences.
This is the long version. The version I’m still sorting through even as I write it. I remember the car ride there so clearly it feels like someone recorded it and keeps pressing play in my head.
It was a cold, bright day, the kind of winter afternoon where the sun is out but seems to be shining through glass, more glare than warmth.
I had just finished a big project at work—a brutal, months-long slog that ended with my boss actually saying the words “You saved us”—and for the first time in a while, I felt hopeful. Thirty sounded like a line in the sand.
A new decade. I had this mental list going as I drove: start therapy again, take a solo trip somewhere, maybe finally move out of my tiny studio and into an actual grown-up apartment.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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