Ariel Meadow Stallings - From Sh!tshow to Afterglow: Putting Life Back Together When It All Falls Apart

OH, HELLO. NICE TO SEE YOU HERE. I WISH WE WERE MEETING UNDER DIFFERENT CIRCUMSTANCES , but here we are.

If youre reading this, chances are that shit feels pretty messed up in your life. Things may have collapsed. A slap in the face painfully announced that who you thought you were just doesnt line up with your current life. Where you thought you were going is no longer on the map. Theres disorientation in the atmosphere. Theres probably a lot of crying, maybe not a lot of sleeping (or too much sleeping), and freaking out. Your life may have fallen apart last month or last year, or maybe it was a decade ago and the janky old Band-Aid just fell off and you realized that the injury never healed.

Regardless, this much is sure: something has shifted, drastically. You may not have seen it coming, but even if you maybe sorta did, you didnt think it would feel like THIS like your skins being peeled off and your mind is filled with screaming monkeys. Like every bone in your body has cracked and yet somehow youre supposed to keep walking. Like you dont know who you are anymore. You thought you sorta had life figured out, but it suddenly became clear that you really super didnt.

Life may feel so off that your brain cant handle it. You find yourself bumping into walls, dropping things, missing the last step when you go down the stairs. Maybe you felt like you had your situation handled, but now you wake up each morning and as you remember your new reality, you think, This is my life now? Who even am I?

This kind of existential life-crisis shitshow is like a freeway: there are a lot of different on-ramps, but once youre on it, things move whether you want them to or not, and you cant really slow down. However you found yourself here, chances are decent it wasnt just one precipitating incident. For me, it was a triple punch.

Its a good setup for a bad jokedid you hear the one about the divorced wedding expert? Did you hear the one about that offbeat lady who wrote a book about her offbeat wedding and then spent a decade supporting other people planning their offbeat weddings, who believed in nothing more than offbeat love, who then had her offbeat marriage abruptly end in the most on-beat way possible? HA HA!

So yeah, hi. Im Ariel, and Im the butt of that joke. Im also the ventricles and bile and tear ducts and open palms and broken eyelid capillaries of that joke. That joke was part of my crisis, but just one part.

Im lots of other things besides that joke but many of the other things also sound like punch lines. Im the forest-raised child of hippies who grew up to be an urban-condo-dwelling entrepreneur. Im the brainy honors student whose stoner college goal was how little effort I could expend to maintain my A- GPA. Im the daughter of an herbalist midwife who spent five years failing to get pregnant before having IVF and a C-section. Im oh-so-iconoclastic with decades of rainbow-colored hair and weird clothes living a totally typical middle-class American life: education, career, wedding, home, family, divorce, aging.

So yeah: Im the offbeat lady whos exactly like everyone else.

I got married in 2004 and wrote a book about it called Offbeat Bride while working a corporate day job. In 2007, I launched offbeatbride.com to promote the book, but the site turned into my job so I went full-time with my tiny digital media company in 2009 while breastfeeding my newborn son.

I spent years building my business, jokingly named the Offbeat Empire. Its a publishing company for nontraditional people going through traditional life passages: committing to a partner, creating a home, starting a family. I first shared my story and then the stories of thousands of other people, weaving a web of personal narrative and relationships and online community and empowerment and support all focused around one core belief: being offbeat could save us all! I handled my logistics like a boss, did a lil therapy when needed, cuddled with my family on the couch, gossiped with friends, balanced my companys books, traveled a bit. Life was good! I felt like I had things sorta figured out.

Then 2015 happened.

In January of that year, my left ovary exploded while I was on a cross-country business trip. I thought it was food poisoning, so I went ahead with cohosting a five-hundred-person wedding expo in a silver dress and a bouffant, gritting through the pain and sweating off my red lipstick. I made it back to Seattle and ended up in the ER for emergency surgery, sliced up the middle with an eight-inch incision and a drainage tube hanging out of the side of my abdomen. I spent a week in the hospital, another month refiguring how to walk, and then a few months after that I turned forty. The milestone birthday was a gentle slap in the face, your classic midlife mortality check.

Then in November of 2015, my partner of eighteen years sat me down on the living room floor and told me he didnt see a future for us. I felt blindsided.

The year that followed was the most excruciating experience of my life. Already disoriented from my mortality check, I was completely leveled. Nothing made sense. I walked into walls. I randomly threw up. I barely slept. I couldnt digest food. It was a complete shitshow. Then, because I couldnt figure out how to fix it, I wholeheartedly surrendered.