A crucial update.

(To read this chapter—keep scrolling. If you prefer to listen to me read it aloud, click on the video below:)
It's been seventeen weeks since I started the LOCKED DIARY. That's *seventeen weeks* of incessantly pouring my heart out via a subscription column to my favorite people in the world: all of you.
And guess what? The Locked Diary is 52,000 words. That's about 5,000 words longer than The Great Gatsby but 5,000 words shorter than The Catcher in the Rye and approximately 5,000 times less literary than both esteemed classics.

Real Talk: I started the LOCKED DIARY in a very dark season of life.
My marriage had fallen apart.
The friends I'd thought for certain would catch me when I fell through the cracks of heartbreak dropped me onto the pavement.
I was in a toxic work situation.
A darling gorgeously glittery friend of mine had just died of an accidental overdose.
Another darling friend's gorgeous glittery little sister died of an accidental overdose just days later.
I had no money. No confidence. I felt like I didn't belong anywhere. I felt like I had been robbed of my creativity. I felt hopeless. Drawn. Teeming with nothing but pain and resentment. It had officially happened: I'd lost my fucking sparkle, babe. So I did the unthinkable: I packed up my shit and hopped a plane to my parent's house in Sarasota, Florida. That day my face had been rendered so puffy from crying if I pressed my thumb into my cheek there would be an indent of my actual fingerprint in my pizza-dough face. "You look like a junkie mermaid who's hot off the heels of a bender," my brother told me after I snapped him a selfie the morning I took off.

"Well—you look like Prince Eric from The Little Mermaid," I texted him, "If Prince Eric was on pills and morbidly obese." My brother never poses in the photographs, let alone selfies, so I had no evidence to support my accusations of him resembling a rotund, opioid-addicted Disney character, but I always clap back.
Even in my darkest hours. Especially in my darkest hours. But Blake (my brother) was right. I'd never looked more like a junkie Mermaid than when I landed in Florida at 5 PM with a botched spray tan and dishwater-colored split ends falling into the cracks of my rib cage. And not in a chic way: I hadn't slept in about a year. I hadn't brushed my hair in months. I hadn't consumed anything with the exception of sauvignon blanc in several days. I was hanging on by a thread. And the wine had clearly gone to my head. 'Cause when my friend Josh texted me, "There's a lesbian event in Sarasota tonight at the cine bistro—I can't go but you, like, totally should!" I agreed. Yes—I willingly agreed to go to a lesbian party at a Floridian movie theatre where the median age was about 84, whilst hungry, exhausted, and nursing a smashed-up heart and injured ego. I won't get into the nuance of that night—but don't you worry. That chapter is on her way to you—and boy is *she* the hot mess we all need in our lives during these trying times. I spent the next month finishing up the toxic work project and trying to figure out what the hell to do next.
I've never been one to put my work behind a paywall—after all, I'm always looking to garner as many ~page views~ as possible—but I felt, for the first time, too raw to have my wounds exposed to the entire internet at large. Too many blood-hungry sharks out there. I intrinsically knew that the people who'd be willing to shell out their hard-earned money to view my work would only be people who were in my corner. My most trusted and sacred readership. So I decided to take a stab at the 'ole subscription business model:

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