When Hailey was born my first thought was that I needed a drink and that hospitals should have bars in them.

Some people we define as trolls are just critics. Sometimes they have a point. And I hear them. But for the ones who comment "I want to kill you in your sleep," I respond to them too.

Pretty much everyone hates high school. It's a measure of your humanity, I suspect. If you enjoyed high school, you were probably a psychopath or a cheerleader. Or possibly both. Those things aren't mutually exclusive, you know. I've tried to block out the memory of my high school years, but no matter how hard you try, it's always with you, like an unwanted hitchhiker. Or herpes. I assume.

Like books, the Internet has saved my life. It helped me recognize that so many people I adore suffer from the same things I do.

Meanwhile, I was doodling pictures of vampiric cougars.

When Hailey was born my first thought was that I needed a drink and that hospitals should have bars in them.

I can finally see that all the terrible parts of my life, the embarrassing parts, the incidents I wanted to pretend never happened, and the things that make me "weird" and "different," were actually the most important parts of my life. They were the parts that made me ME.