Then I found out the truth. Just like in the REO Speedwagon song, I heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend: Loser had cheated on me while I was in Thailand. Then the doormat was replaced by a raging bitch. At midnight on a Tuesday, I stormed unannounced into our home—his home—and demanded to know: Who was she?
One thing that I didn’t write about here was my vague suspicion—completely paranoid, of course—that perhaps the she had been my boss (his boss too)! My boss’s boss’s boss to be exact. Theresa of the supermodel smile and supersize thighs, the deputy vice president of our unit. At age twenty-five!
I could tell Loser had a thing for her, even though he’d denied it. Who wouldn’t? Besides being young and rich, she was the only other semi-attractive woman in the vicinity of our building besides me. Everyone else was a fat, balding, ponytailed developer in a bad tie-dye. Thank God she had a boyfriend (an underwear model, so it was rumored), a colossal butt, and no fashion sense. Because even if Loser did have a crush on her, she was taken. She’d even paraded her boyfriend around the halls just a month before, making sure all we girls had plenty of time to get an eyeful of his hot bod. This fact didn’t stop me from feeling like roadkill under Loser and Theresa’s tires.
Even if I did want to exorcise the thought by writing about it, I knew better than to make such accusations on the Internet (even though my audience was, currently, zero). Plus, it simply wasn’t a possibility. What would a wealthy executive with an underwear-model boyfriend want with a less-wealthy tighty-whitey-wearing nobody like Loser?
Who? I screamed. Who was it?! Who did you cheat on me with while I was gone?
A friend of a friend! (But he had no friends!) She was no one! Just a fling!
Are you still seeing her?! Have you been cheating on me these last two months?
No! It was a fling!
Why would you ever do such a thing to me?!
I—I wanted out but I didn’t know how to tell you.
Finally I saw it. Loser was a squid monster after all. He’d twisted his slimy tentacles of guilt and deception around my neck, all because he wasn’t strong enough to break up with me like a man. After I’d hurled a few choice epithets at him, degraded his character in a voice loud enough for all the neighbors to hear, and almost broken down and hugged him because he looked so pathetic, I half stumbled, half ran out of the condo into the warm July night.
And just like that, it was over.
The courtyard was quiet when I at last looked up from the computer screen. The light outside had turned flat and gray. A bird chirped in the tree right outside the bedroom window, a single, lonely chirp that filled the air briefly and was met with silence.
I slumped on the desk, the wood cool against my forehead. I felt emptied out. I lay there for a minute, enjoying the complete lack of emotion. No loneliness. No anxiety. Nothing except relief. I had done it! I had beaten back the demons. For the afternoon anyway.
I lay there, trying in vain to hold on to my feeling of Zen calmness. Because now I had to decide what to do with this sprawling confessional. Post it? Delete it? Save the decision for later?
“When are you going to start your blog?” Lucy—soon to be known by her screen name, “GalPal #2”—had been asking me lately. “You’d be great at writing a blog!”
I played Lucy’s words over in my mind for encouragement as I raised my head and fiddled with the settings on Blogger. What template to use? I tried several. How to make it so my name didn’t appear? Enable comments? Sure, why not? After a half hour of experimentation, all that was left to do was click the “Publish” button. Then Breakup Babe would be live on the Web. First, however, I had to beat back the voices in my head.
This stuff is crap! And those friends of yours who know you as a “writer” but who’ve never actually read your stuff? They’ll now be able to see what a phony you really are. No one is gonna read this.
That wasn’t true, though! Lucy would read it! And Sylvia! Oh-so-loyal Sylvia (soon to be known as GalPal #1) who—while we were both in grad school at the University of Washington—had written an outraged letter to the editor of U.W. Daily when they terminated my year-old humor column, admonishing them: “Rachel Cooper is the best writer the Daily has EVER had!”
Fine. I would just do it. Then I would send the link to Sylvia and Lucy and that was it. Oh, and maybe my sister, Sarah, and Jane, too (soon to be known as Li’l Sis and GalPal #3, respectively). Before my upswing of courage could fail me, I stared at the “Publish” button and took a deep breath. It was like all those times I’d dialed the first six digits of a cute boy’s phone number, and then let my finger hover, trembling, over the seventh.
Press it!
I’m scared!
Just do it.
I can’t—
DO. IT.
So I pressed the button. And five seconds later, Breakup Babe was born. The site was pink and purple. And, like any baby, small, unformed, and poised to change my life forever.
But all I could think was Oh my God, what have I done?
What I had done, in fact, was set the recovery process in motion. On that August afternoon, however, all I cared about was that posting my first Breakup Babe entry had successfully eaten up three hours of my day. Three hours in which I had not cried or felt as if I were about to go insane with fear and loneliness.
The next day, I got my first inkling of things to come. Because there, in the Comments section, were two entries:
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Hey, back when we were kids, I got in trouble for reading your journal! Are you sure you won’t try to hit me with the Wiffle bat now? Good entry!
Sarah
See, I told you you’d be great at writing a blog! Keep it up! It will give me something to read at work when I’m bored.
Lucy
These comments, innocuous as they were, elated me. Even when I’d written for major newspapers and glossy magazines, never had I gotten responses that quickly, that directly. I could only imagine the kind of thrill it would be to get comments from readers who weren’t close friends and family members. It made me want to write more, just to keep them entertained. To keep the comments coming!
So began my addiction to blogging.
This addiction had its drawbacks. But it was only later, over the course of weeks, months, a year, during which I dropped twenty pounds, popped countless prescription drugs, and drowned my sorrows in men, men, and more men, that I realized just how liberating—and how risky—blogging could be.
Chapter Two
Tuesday, August 20, 2002
9:34 PM Breakup Babe
My new job is one that requires concentration, something I do not possess right now. My title is Technical Editor and my job is to edit “documentation” for programmers, scintillating prose along the lines of:
The ReadyCallBack function supplies event notifications to the DirectoryServices container browser dialog box. A pointer to this function is sent to the container browser dialog box in the regCallback member of the SLPBROWSEINFO structure when the SearchForContainer function is called.
Do I understand programming? No. Do I care about programming? No? Did I lie about my “commitment to technology” in my job interview? Yes. But it’s a job, it pays a lot of money, and the economy sucks. And I have finally admitted to myself that even an artiste needs to eat.
It wouldn’t be so bad if I could just lock myself in my windowless office and pretend to understand what I’m doing. But now, as a full-time employee (as opposed to the carefree temp I once was), I have meetings every day. Team meetings, project meetings, face time, and morale boosters, which only serve to make my morale worse because I might see Loser there.
Two weeks after my first Breakup Babe entry, my addiction to blogging had taken root. I’d given the URL to several select girlfriends and to Peter (aka GuyPal #1), an honorary girl who swore that he would not give the location away to any males of his acquaintance, lest I one day want to date them. A “spiritual” type,
as well as a would-be artiste himself, I figured GuyPal #1 would find the blog shallow and boring. But apparently not.
“You, my dear,” he e-mailed me one day, in that pseudo-profound manner he was fond of, “are a Writer.”
“I wish you would write every day!” said Lucy (aka GalPal #2).
“I check it first thing when I get into work!” said Sylvia (aka GalPal #1).
And so, because I was now feeling more like a Writer, and because my small but ardent audience encouraged me, I wrote. But their praise made me greedy. After all, there was a potential audience of millions out there! Theoretically, anyone with an Internet connection could read my blog—if they knew where it was, that is.
Each time I posted something new, the link showed up for a minute on the front page of Blogger, on its list of Ten Most Recently Published Blogs. But how likely was it that even one person would find it that way? Although I didn’t want certain people to find it—Loser for one and my coworkers for another—I had enough confidence now that I wanted an audience that consisted of more than just my five best friends. What I really wanted was for Blogger to put it on its list of “Blogs of Note.” Then people would find it for sure—because that link stayed up on the front page of Blogger for a couple weeks.
While I wondered how to make that happen, the good feedback from my friends cheered me up and motivated me to keep writing. My unfinished book lurked in the back of my mind. Maybe I should be working on that, instead of pouring all this creative energy into the blog. Five agents had expressed interest in my proposal for Temporary Insanity, a humorous look at the myriad jobs I’d had since college. Of course that was two years ago now.
After receiving my submission all those years ago, Georgina Owens, assistant to Vicky Roberts at the renowned Hedley Literistic, said, “We would love to see several sample chapters as soon as possible.” They’d been so excited that they’d actually phoned me, so as to beat potential competitors to the punch. (Had I accidentally suggested somehow, in my proposal, that any part of my book was actually written? Oops.)
I’d tried to write the book. Thanks, in part, to the stability of my life with Loser, I became focused and disciplined. I wrote on a schedule. I beat down the voices that told me, “You suck; you can’t write; why are you trying?” But two years and hundreds of thousands of words later, I didn’t have a single good chapter I could send those deluded agents—no doubt still waiting with bated breath for my masterpiece.
I wanted to finish it. Turn it into a best seller. Realize the potential that all those agents saw in it. But Temporary Insanity would have to wait. Venting about my broken heart online, knowing I had an audience (however small), was too cathartic.
Today I started out the day feeling almost like a normal human being. I was about to go to our editors’ meeting. I hadn’t cried in two whole days. I was also wearing several new purchases to show off my ever-dwindling body (ten pounds bulldozed so far by the Heartbreak Diet!) including a slinky purple shirt from Anthropologie ($70) and a pair of form-fitting Banana Republic jeans ($75).
With a cup of coffee in hand, I rose from my desk in preparation to leave my office. Maybe I would even participate in our meeting today, instead of sitting in zombified silence like an escapee from Night of the Living Dead.
Then I made the big mistake. I opened my office door. And there he was, walking down the hall with a coworker, laughing. Laughing! Wearing an outfit I’d seen hundreds of times before on his lanky frame: black jeans and that tight white T-shirt that showed off to advantage those perfectly muscled arms—a product of regular workouts (or rather suck-up sessions) with his boss. Loser was a developer, but he longed to be an executive, and lost no opportunities to hobnob with higher-ups. His brown hair was moussed to within an inch of its life and he wore his usual pair of tiny wire-rimmed glasses (that I thought were pretentious before I fell in love with him, but that I now thought were the sexiest thing in the world).
He started to say something. All I heard were the words “Hey, don’t you—” before I reeled backward into my office. The familiar yet now unfamiliar sound of his voice struck me like a hammer. I’d heard that voice say so many things. “You look so cute today!” “Would you do the dishes?” “I love you so much.” Whining, in the most insincere tone I’d ever heard, “I’m sorry; I just wasn’t getting what I needed from you.”
I slammed the door. I teetered for a moment in my new strappy Nordstrom’s sandals ($85), wondering what to do. Maybe I could still make it to my meeting? But now the thought of sitting in a windowless conference room debating parameter descriptions with a bunch of Empire-logowear-clad made my despair complete. And, suddenly, I could barely stand.
I dragged myself over to my desk and crawled underneath it. I sobbed under my desk for a full hour, certain that I would never make it to another meeting again. Certain that Security would find me there and cart me off to the asylum, where I would live out the rest of my life medicated to oblivion wearing only one of those buttless gowns. But at least I wouldn’t have to run into Loser laughing in the halls.
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I’m sorry, but Loser is pretentious. We never told you this, but M. and I used to call him “Dieter” behind his back—remember the Mike Myers character from Saturday Night Live who wore all black and talked in a fake German accent? That’s who he reminded us of. You can do so much better—and you will!
Li’l Sis
This particular under-the-desk episode occurred before my antidepressants truly kicked in. In a preemptive strike, I’d gone to see my drug-dispensing shrink, Dr. Melville (not to be confused with my therapist, Jade, she of the pink office and the tie-dyed mumus), the day after the running episode, to get a prescription should Loser and I break up. I hoped I wouldn’t need them, of course, but I’d learned my lesson five years ago, when my father died.
Back then I was so scared of taking antidepressants (oh, sweet, innocent, young me!) that it wasn’t until I’d become an obsessive-compulsive insomniac who couldn’t leave my apartment until the items on every surface were precisely “centered” that I finally took the advice of my mental health team: drugs. I became an instant convert. Hail Celexa, the holy pink pill!
This time I needed no convincing to hop on the little pink pill bandwagon. I’d gone off Celexa when Loser and I started dating. I filled my newest prescription the day after the Confrontation in the Condo. And though I could hardly believe it would help me face the void that had suddenly opened up around me, it did. Slowly but surely.
Sunday, August 25, 2002
1:37 PM Breakup Babe
Lest you think all I do is moan and sob, I will tell you that I went on my first date since the breakup last night. Yes! I had a great time at a big, sensational party. Unfortunately, I went to this party with BadNews Boy. I KNOW! I swore up and down I wouldn’t do it, and really I didn’t do anything except let myself be hugged and touched and made to feel generally desirable.
BadNews Boy is an ex-fling of mine. A blast from the past of my carefree temp days. During those first heady years of the tech boom, while Empire poured its plentiful cash into multimedia ventures and staffed them with artsy young temps, I interspersed temp jobs at Empire with more glamorous jobs (like writing for adventure travel webzines). I had cash in my pocket for the first time ever. I morphed from a sensible grad school drone into a short-skirt-and-chunky-heels-wearing flirt. To complete my image, I slept with cute temp boys left and right. Including BadNews Boy. Who burned me in the end—as they all did—because I always fell for them and they always ran away.
It was a hungover Sunday morning when I dragged my laptop to my favorite Capitol Hill coffee shop to write this entry. When I’d been jettisoned from Loser’s lakeside bungalow, away from his lily-white executive neighbors, I’d landed on upper Capitol Hill, on an elegant street lined with 1920s apartment buildings. The Hill was filled with gays, artists, grunge-era holdovers, and a healthy dose of hipste
r yuppies like me. There were even (gasp!) a few people of color (at least where I lived, which bordered the more southerly Central District, Seattle’s squeaky-clean version of a slum).
I’d jumped out of bed that morning as fast as my swollen head would allow. Mornings were the worst. When I slept I could forget (except when the nightmares came). When I woke up I had to remember all over again, and the knowledge rolled like a boulder onto my chest. He’s gone. If I didn’t get up right away, the boulder would crush me.
Just after the breakup, I’d been waking early, 4:30, 5. The boulder would fall into place and I’d lie there, pinned to my bed, surveying the yawning chasm of the day. How would I fill all those hours? If only I could sleep till noon—or later! “Early waking,” muttered Dr. Melville, as he’d written up my prescription for Celexa. “That will go away when the drugs kick in.” How I loved Dr. Melville.
Today I’d slept until the insanely late hour of 8:30. Then again, I’d been up until 4:00. When I woke up, the sun was streaming in through the blinds, making the hardwood floor glow. But I was in no mood to appreciate the “old-world charm” of my new apartment, so different from Loser’s sleek new house. I had to get out. Immediately.
Now here I was at Victrola, the coffeehouse with the best people watching in Seattle. It was filled, as usual, with dyed hair. Hipster band T-shirts. Funky glasses. The 80-year-old piano player who banged out tunes on Sunday afternoons in magenta knickers and a feathered cap. The fifty something guy with lank, gray hair to his shoulders, always reading some obscure poetry book and looking not-so-furtively around at all the hot, tattooed chicks with streaked hair and fashionable shoes.
I was slugging down a double Americano, feeling the boulder roll slowly off me the more caffeine I imbibed and the more I wrote. Safely away from my bed, I also felt a kind of hungover dreaminess about the night before. I’d been on a date! I tried, however, to write about it in the most cynical way possible. After all, this was BadNews Boy, and this certainly wasn’t going anywhere. (Was it?)
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