Allison Raskin's Blog, page 3

I’M IN MY AVOIDANCE ERA

“What are you doing for Mother’s Day?”

I shouldn’t have been surprised so many people asked me this, with a hint of concern. It was a double whammy of a holiday for me this year. The first May without my mom and the first time I’ve ever been a mom-to-be. I imagine most of my friends thought I’d be an emotional wreck, spending the day sobbing and/or honoring my mother’s unparalleled impact on my life. I did neither. Instead, I spent my Sunday working—prepping a podcast, seeing a client and desperately trying to hit my word count for my next novel. I couldn’t ignore that it was Mother’s Day given people’s thoughtful checking in. But I didn’t have the desire to engage with my emotions around it. And not just because I had gotten my lashes done the day before and wasn’t allowed to cry. Although that was a good excuse.

This refusal to peak under the curtain of my defense mechanisms has become a habit lately. Since my mother got sick last August, I have had to battle so many negative emotions. Wave after wave of horrible moments crashed down on me, barely allowing enough time to gasp for air before being dragged back down by some other new experience of loss or anger. It was exhausting and raw and real. And at a certain point a few weeks ago, I decided to opt out of the storm and climb aboard an insulated submarine that kept me safe but didn’t have any windows.

It feels embarrassing as someone in the mental health field to admit that I have been avoiding my feelings. It’s like a heart surgeon confessing to a secret diet of bacon, steak and French fries. Or a dermatologist professing they have never applied sunscreen. The entire therapeutic model is built around dismantling avoidance and here I am indulging it. Simply because I don’t want to feel bad anymore? I’m pretty sure that’s not allowed!

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I received a message the other day from someone also struggling with the loss of a parent and they said they hoped they could be as strong as me one day. What are they talking about, I thought. I haven’t been strong at all. I’m not interested in sitting with my feelings. I’m letting memories of my mom slip away rather than taking the time to nurture them. I’m building a new life without bringing her along in the way I’d promised so I can evade discomfort. I am, in many ways, indulging my least evolved self while simultaneously posting the obligatory Instagram photos on the right days to make it seem like I’m not. If I had the energy, I would be pretty disappointed with myself right about now. But that would require engaging with the bad and we’ve already established I’m not interested in doing that.

Maybe this perception of me as strong is a holdover from how I behaved earlier in this process when I more successfully rejected my worst instincts. While my mom was dying, I often wanted to run away from caring for her and go watch TV. In those dark times, my deepest desire wasn’t to show up, it was to decompress on a couch. But I managed to push through anyway because my mom needed me. And I knew I wouldn’t have been able to forgive myself if I’d given in to my craving for avoidance while she was still alive. Now that she is gone, though, the only person my avoidance hurts is some nebulous version of my future self and that is entirely less motivating. Why should I sacrifice so much for her? I don’t even know her!

The other component to all of this is that when you allow yourself to feel deeply you have a harder time picking and choosing what you care about. I suspect that if I was suffering this loss during a time of greater prosperity it might not be so hard for me to hold. But the current world is a nightmare if you allow yourself to pay attention. The images from the ongoing genocide in Gaza are too horrifying to describe and every day there is a new update regarding the Trump administration’s determination to bring targeted harm across the globe. Are we all going to die in an AI fueled, nuclear shoot out soon? Kind of unclear if I’m being objective about the way things are going. Shutting myself off from all of it, including the distress of so many in my own city of Los Angeles, is a hugely appealing—albeit cowardly—option. I don’t think I have the current capacity to hold onto both pain and hope in the way one needs to to live fully in this reality. So, I’m squeezing my metaphorical eyes shut instead, which doesn’t keep all the light out but certainly obscures the worst of it.

I think a lot about one’s capacity in my coaching work. What do you have to give today? What are you hoping to be able to give tomorrow? This framework is what allows me to not give up on myself completely because I know our capacities can change with time and circumstance. Right now, I am pregnant, overworked and on a looming book deadline. While avoidance isn’t ideal, it does exist for a reason and often serves a purpose. It’s possible I need this vacation from grief to survive these next few months. That shutting down in this moment isn’t a free pass to shut down forever but more of a “closed for maintenance” situation. Once I turn my book in and have more time for myself, I can then spend that time finding a new therapist, returning to my grief and properly processing what it will be like to become a mom without my mom. I will also try to find a way to not ignore the horror of 2025 without letting it consume and destroy me. (A balancing act so many of us are trying to navigate.)

This avoidance era is real, but I am determined that it will also be brief. I suspect that even if I didn’t have a timeline for reengaging with my grief it would reengage for me. That’s why avoidance as a long-term strategy isn’t a successful one. You can only shut off for so long before your pipes burst.

xoxo,

Allison

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IS IT TOO SOON TO TELL YOU I’M PREGNANT?

I had my first positive pregnancy test on April 6. The line was so faint, I had a hard time believing it was true. My husband, an innate optimist, immediately started celebrating while I tried to temper my expectations. After all, there are few things less guaranteed than a full-term pregnancy in your mid-30’s. Especially when you’ve recently had a string of life-changing bad things happen to you and are on defense for the next shoe to drop.

But over the course of the next few days, and a series of darker lines, I began to accept my new reality: I was pregnant. My body was able to do the thing I had zero proof it could do before. That didn’t mean I was ensured to have a baby, though. Miscarriages are extremely common and for those first few weeks I worried that anything I did “wrong” could lead to an abrupt end to this new phase of life. When I started spotting the day of my first blood test, I thought, well, there goes that. It made sense that I was primed to expect the worst. My family has always been extremely cautious when it comes to pregnancy, and I have an anxiety disorder. As I slowly began to tell my inner circle the huge news, I offset the news with a warning: It’s very early. Anything could happen.

But then I realized, anything could happen still applies after the first trimester. Pregnancy is a masterclass in uncertainty. Keeping the news to myself until I was “in the clear” no longer made sense because “the clear” doesn’t exist. Even if I am lucky enough to deliver a baby, there is no promise of what their life will look like or how long it will last.

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THINGS I CAN’T DO ANYMORE

1) I can’t call you out of the blue to ask if something really happened to me or not. You were the holder of family memories while my mind is often blank or obscured with doubt. I’ll never be able to fact-check my personal lore again, which means I will likely lose much of it to time like I have the actual memories.

2) I can’t go on all day shopping trips with you where we scamper from dressing room to dressing room hoping to find new versions of ourselves. I won’t have someone telling me to just try it on and once I do admit it’s not doing anything for me.

3) I can’t look forward to Mother’s Day because it is a celebration of the longest, deepest relationship of my life. Instead, it will be a painful reminder of what I don’t have anymore. I will have to scour through old pictures of you to post in remembrance because I will never get to take a new one.

4) I can’t call you up multiple times a day just to share mundane details of my life or settle a playful argument with my husband. My house used to ring out with declarations of let’s call my mommy. Now it’s haunted with murmurs of I miss my mom.

5) I can’t look forward to going to my parents’ house in New York anymore because now it belongs to my father and his new girlfriend. I can’t rifle through your bathroom cabinet searching for a ChapStick or a new bottle of cream because someone else uses your sink and I barely know her.

6) I can’t ask you how you survived living so much of your life without your own mom. How did you hide your grief so well? Or was I just not looking close enough to notice?

7) I can’t ask for your help when I bring my future child home for the first time. I can’t ask you to be in the delivery room with me or depend on your giving nature when my body is wrecked and my baby is crying. I won’t have you to help guide me through one of the biggest transitions of my life after you’ve been with me for every other spurt of growth and change. It kills me that I will inevitably become someone you will never get to meet.

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8) I can’t assume that just because something is incredibly unlikely it won’t happen. When I told you there was a chance that what was happening to your body might kill you back in August, I truly believed I was just giving you all the information. I naively assured you that CJD was so rare that I felt confident it wasn’t what you had. I was wrong. Rare doesn’t mean never and that is a lesson I won’t be able to forget.

9) I can’t convince myself that everything is okay when I am spiraling or worried about something that doesn’t actually matter. While those things might be a waste of my mental energy, the overall sense that I am okay no longer exists. I will never be okay again because I will always be without you and that is simply unacceptable, even if it is (somehow) tolerable.

10) I can’t ask you if your knee has ever hurt in this specific way or not. I can’t compare notes on our chronic joint issues and feel solace that someone else knows what it’s like to live in a body similar to mine.

11) I can’t feel unconflicted about becoming a mother myself because I know the experience will be a spigot for my grief, each new moment a glaring reminder that you aren’t here to share it with me.

12) I can’t completely fall apart because I know you will be there to fly across the country and infuse me with the care needed to put myself back together. I have to find a way to stay strong now—the way you always did.

xoxo,

Allison

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HOW OFTEN SHOULD I TALK ABOUT MY DEAD MOM?

I guested on a podcast the other week and after a wonderful mix of banter and heartfelt advice, I did what many would consider a serious faux pas. I made a shocking and destructive comment about my mother being dead. Even as it was happening, I had a sense I probably shouldn’t do this. It’s one thing to make that kind of joke when I am on my own podcast because my Just Between Us co-hosts already know 1) my mom is dead and 2) I have an affinity for dark jokes. But these were two women I had just met and hitting them with, “I’m glad my mom is dead, so she didn’t hear me not know what an archipelago is,” was probably too much. Although, in my defense, she was constantly disappointed my lack of geography knowledge.

Since losing my best friend/mother in September, I have struggled to know how often I should bring her up and in what context. In the immediate aftermath of her shocking death from CJD, there was an expectation that she would be the center of conversation. But now that it has been almost seven months without her corporeal form, she clearly isn’t as top of mind for everyone who isn’t me and my immediate family. So do I risk “bringing the mood down” by constantly bringing her up or do I forgo social niceties and say whatever the hell I want?

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THE MESSY WORK OF TURNING YOUR REAL LIFE INTO FICTION

When I asked my audiobook director, who is also one of my closest friends, who her favorite character was in my new romcom novel, SAVE THE DATE, she laughed and said it wouldn’t be fair to answer since so many of the characters are based on real people she knows. It felt too rude to say, for instance, that she liked Jackie over Alan because that would imply she liked my sister, Jocelyn, more than my father, Ken. Except…it wouldn’t actually be rude because Jackie and Alan aren’t real.

I have been basing my narrative work on my real life since my senior year of college. For the first few years of my screenwriting program at USC, I thought big. My first full-length screenplay was about a border town in Texas that built a wall to keep out immigrants. (Rather prescient for 2008 if I may take a moment to brag.) My next one was a love story about a trans soccer player and her college sweetheart, which was an unusual choice for someone who had never questioned her own gender identity. But by the time I hit my senior thesis, I decided to take a step back from tackling big, political issues I had no real experience with and instead turn inward. The result was a small story about a girl—very much based on me—trying to find her footing in her early twenties. This movie was not great. But the sitcom I wrote in another class that was clearly based off my own family was.

Everyone always says, write what you know, but I have taken this advice to its fullest. The first TV show I sold was based off my YouTube channel, Just Between Us, where my best friend and I played heightened versions of ourselves. My first novel, I Hate Everyone But You, allowed me to lift my (rather challenging) college experience out of my head and onto the page. My novels and scripts are filled with a mix of things that have happened to me along with stories and details I have completely made up. Sometimes I delight in thinking about readers trying to decipher which is which.

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Apparently, I have gotten so good at mixing the real with the imaginary that my own father couldn’t remember which parts of SAVE THE DATE were based on true events. (To be fair, this might be more due to his poor memory than my expectational writing prowess. I guess we will never know for sure, which works for me.) It makes sense that this novel in particular has been hard for him to decipher since it is based off such a pivotal moment in my own life. You see, back in 2020 my fiancé walked out on me without any explanation other than something was missing. Given my life-long obsession with marriage and upcoming nonfiction book about the intersection of mental health and romantic relationships, this loss was a huge blow both personally and professionally. How could I, a budding relationship expert, not have realized my partner had fallen out of love with me?

When I returned to my parents’ home in New York from Los Angeles to lick my wounds, I expected everyone to tell me to take a long break from relationships. Instead, my father started making jokes about finding a new groom in time for my wedding date. My mom asked if there was anyone in my past I could just start dating again. The idea of slotting someone else into the role my ex had vacated seemed ludicrous in real life but absolutely perfect for the plot of a romance novel. Luckily, HarperCollins and my incredible editor, Lynn Raposo, agreed. So I got to work to complete a manuscript that was basically a multiverse version of my own life.

Except…(again) it wasn’t really. My protagonist, Emma, is a licensed marriage and family therapist. She grew up in LA rather than Westchester, NY. And her popularity as a YouTuber came after starting a career in psychology rather than the other way around (in addition to writing, I also have a master’s in psychology and now work as a relationship coach). While these might seem like minor differences, they matter more than you’d think. I didn’t want to tell the story of an influencer who got broken up with in the public eye and was embarrassed (closer to my real experience as someone whose career took off by working at BuzzFeed Video in 2014/2015). I wanted to tell the story of a couples therapist who regretted sharing her relationship publicly because now that she was dumped it threatened her professional credibility. If the character’s backstory was too close to my own, I would have been limited in what I wanted to explore and say about love and marriage.

During that senior thesis class in college, my professor shared an observation that has stuck with me. He said something to the effect of, “Main characters are often the most boring because we base them on ourselves, and we are too afraid to give them flaws.” Going into SAVE THE DATE, I did not want to make this mistake. And—as early Goodreads readers who are frustrated with Emma’s bad decisions note—I don’t think I did. I, Allison, would never have tried to find a new groom in time for my original wedding date because that is bonkers. But Emma, my protagonist, was willing to give it a go, which is what allows the book to exist in the first place.

While I love using my real life as a starting off point for both plot and characters, I have to constantly remember that it is not my job to stick to the truth. Instead, my job is to look for ways to distort and heighten the truth for the sake of my story. Emma’s sister Jackie is far more outlandish than my actual sister Jocelyn because that makes her pop and helps move the story forward. Whenever I make the decision to write fiction, I am no longer beholden to the real people in my life like I am in my nonfiction work. I am free to play and exaggerate and fuck everything up.

I will forever be a big proponent of pulling from your real life as inspiration for your fiction writing. It allows you to dive into worlds and characters that are familiar and captivating, while also processing your most emotional experiences on the page. But never let this approach hold you back from following the thread to somewhere even more compelling than what actually happened. That’s why fiction exists after all.

xoxo,

Allison

This essay first appeared in the Sh*t No One Tells You About Writing newsletter.

P.S. It would mean a lot to me if you hit the like button to increase chances of engagement! Also, if you are able to upgrade to paid subscriber or share my posts with a potential reader, I would be incredibly thankful! Thank you for reading!

NOT MAKING MY MOTHER’S MISTAKES

For my 35th birthday last June, I decided I wanted to paint some ceramics. So I dragged my parents and husband to Color Me Mine in the middle of the week. The location we went to was on the brink of shutting down and we were the only customers. As we debated what to paint, my mother declared she wasn’t going to partake in what is (strangely) my favorite activity. She said she wasn’t any good at it, so it was better not to try. Using my birthday girl privileges, I pressured her to do it anyway and within the hour she had created a beautifully design on a ceramic plate that now sits proudly on my coffee table. Yet, when we all told her it was stunning, she refused to believe it.

Since my brilliant mother died in September, I have spent a lot of time thinking and writing about all the ways I want to continue her legacy of curiosity and kindness. We’ve always been eerily similar from our face to our killer dance moves. I found our similarities delightful while she was alive and even more precious now that she’s gone. But my mother was not one to wear rose-colored glasses. She was a practical realist with a master’s in journalism. She would be the first to admit that to not include her flaws in my memory of her would be refusing to tell the whole story. Not to mention, there is as much to learn from what held her back—like her fear of not being good enough to even try—as there is to learn from what made her exceptional.

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I'M TERRIFIED TO SHARE THIS WITH YOU

For years I used to tell people, “The one great thing about books is that if you sell one, you know it will one day exist in the world.” While this might seem obvious, it couldn’t be further from how the entertainment industry works. I’ve sold four TV shows to different networks over the years and they have all died in various stages of development. It is never a sure thing that your show will get made and distributed until it’s actually on the air. And even then it could get canceled mid season. Books, on the other hand, are a much safer medium if you can get over the (huge) hurdle of having a publisher make you an offer. Or so I thought.

I’ve never admitted this publicly before, but my last non-fiction book, I Do (I Think): Conversations About Modern Marriage, was canceled by its original publisher. This came as a huge shock because it disproved a belief I had been hanging onto for dear life. Selling a book didn’t mean you were in the clear. In fact, it might mean you were on the hook for money you’d already been paid. (Thankfully, my agent was able to negotiate that I only owed the original publisher half of my received advance if I sold it somewhere else. Huge win for me and Stacy!)

I’m not going to speculate too much about why this cancelation happened. It was strange circumstances and there had been a changing of the guard while I wrote the first draft. It was not a situation where I went back and forth my with editor and just couldn’t get it right or take the notes. I was cut loose early in the editing process and had to immediately keep rewriting this now rejected book so I could sell it somewhere else and not let down the dozens of people who generously gave their time and expertise for it.

Somehow I managed to keep working on it, but not without a significant blow to my confidence as a writer. Perhaps the only thing that made this possible is that exactly one week before I got the news it was canceled in June 2023, I had been offered an incredible two-book deal by HarperCollins for my first (and second) romance novel.

It is not lost on me what might have happened if the order of those two updates had been reversed. Knowing I had just sold two novels certainly softened the blow of having I Do (I Think) canceled. It meant I didn’t totally fall apart and run screaming into the ocean. But I did begin to question if I had any idea what I was doing as an author. I had sold the novel off a sample and was now terrified that once I turned in the manuscript my editor would come to her senses and cancel this deal too.

Thankfully, that didn’t happen. And even more surprisingly, I managed to find a home for I Do (I Think) at an even bigger publisher, where, with the help of my new editor, we turned the book into a much better version of itself. But my relationship toward writing had already been damaged. And now, almost two years later, I am still recovering.

This all brings me to today and why I am so scared to share something that in the past wouldn’t have caused me a second thought. My debut romance novel, Save The Date, is (finally) coming out next week. We decided that it would be a fun idea to exclusively share the first chapter with my Substack community, much like I did for my first non-fiction book, Overthinking About You. But as the date approached for me to release it, I found myself getting really worried.

What if everyone hates it? What if this excerpt deters people from buying it? What if I have no business in this genre at all?

I’ll admit that a lot of this concern is fueled by obsessively reading the novel’s early GoodReads reviews. I KNOW I AM NOT SUPPOSED TO DO THIS. But, despite everyone in my life telling me to stop, I can’t seem to break the cycle or get comments like “it was hard for me to get into it” or “the writing is clunky” out of my head. I can feel myself already mentally distancing myself from the book in case it sucks and people hate it.

And yet…It was’t canceled. And neither was my contract for my second romcom novel that I am currently writing. For all the security I lost by realizing that selling a book doesn’t actually make you safe, I now know that if Save The Date was a bad book, they simply wouldn’t have published it.

So, with that in mind, I am excited/terrified to share the first chapter with you. If you enjoy the read, please consider preordering it! It will arrive next week and do a lot to help the book’s momentum.

And if you don’t like the read, that is also okay. But I don’t need to know.

xoxo,

Allison

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CHAPTER ONE

“I just don’t understand what happened.”

Emma Moskowitz lay face down in her parents’ office as they talked above her inert body. The carpet irritated her sensitive cheek, but getting a rash was the least of her worries at the moment. She was used to rashes. What she wasn’t used to—at least not yet—was the staggering pain of betrayal.

“He didn’t explain why he was doing this?” her father, Alan, asked for what had to have been the fifth time in as many minutes. Instead of verbally responding, Emma let out a long groan to signal that she wasn’t yet in the mood to psychoanalyze why her carefully planned life was falling apart. She was still very much in the maybe I could just lie here for a few years and then die stage of grieving. That stage wasn’t talked about nearly enough. It was important.

“What did she say?” Alan looked to Emma’s mother, Debbie, for an interpretation of what could best be described as an animalistic, guttural moan.

“I don’t think she wants to talk about it just yet,” Debbie offered, despite knowing this explanation likely wasn’t going to appease her type-A husband.

“Can I have some water?” Emma interjected, finally moving into a seated position from a full-body sprawl. She wasn’t entirely confident that she was capable of drinking anything yet, but she thought she owed it to her family to try. She knew her mom hated seeing her in pain and her dad hated not having a clear solution to offer. Now that he was retired, Alan wasn’t sure what to do with himself. Emma didn’t want her recent upheaval to become his newest pet project (along with pickleball, online poker and brewing his own root beer). Despite her mother’s endless complaints of being smothered by her loving husband, Alan was the busiest retired person Emma knew. And as a couples therapist, she knew quite a few. Having a recently retired spouse was the new seven-year-itch—except this version of an itch appeared to be an overwhelming desire to be left alone. Emma wished with all her might that she was someone who wanted to be left alone instead of being herself: a person who as a child found a way to play “wedding” at every single playdate.

“Do you want bottled or from the tap with ice?” Debbie asked as though the right form of H2O could fix a broken heart. “Doesn’t matter.” Emma sighed for effect. “Nothing matters anymore.”

Through a brief exchange of eye contact, Alan and Debbie mutually agreed it wasn’t safe to leave their youngest daughter by herself. So Alan went to retrieve the requested water, while Debbie did her best to sit on the floor, ignoring her numerous knee issues and bad back. Her hand hovered over Emma’s leg; she was unsure if physical touch would cause comfort or alarm. “I am so sorry this is happening to you,” Debbie whispered.

Emma thought about all the other times in her life that her mother had said this. There was the time Emma fell off a chair when she was six and broke her collarbone. The time in her early twenties when her “best friends” planned a weekend trip without informing or inviting her. And there were the far too many times Emma had been unceremoniously dumped by a variety of men.

Although her present situation technically fell into the latter category, Emma felt that having her fiancé walk out on her for no apparent reason warranted its own classification of suffering. This time was different than when her college boyfriend left her to date a high-schooler. Or when her adult boyfriend left her for a college student. This felt like the sort of pain you couldn’t get over with a laugh and a puff of medical-grade marijuana. This felt like the sort of pain that changed you forever. Alan returned with both a cold glass of ice and a plastic water bottle. When Emma didn’t move to take either one, he set them on the side table and declared, “I think I should call him.”

“Call who?” Debbie asked with the cautious optimism of someone who hoped her husband wasn’t a total moron. “Ryan! Maybe I can talk some sense into him. Or at least get some answers.”

Fear overtook Emma’s nervous system at the mere thought of that conversation occurring. She reached out and grasped her father’s ankle to let him know she meant business. “Please do not contact him. He won’t tell you anything useful,” Emma pleaded. “All he told me is something is missing and there is no point in working on it because it can’t be fixed. I just need to move on.”

Debbie and Alan looked at Emma with a mixture of compassion and concern. Emma couldn’t blame them—not after showing up the previous evening crying and shouting “It’s over! He left me!” before abruptly passing out on the couch to avoid her feelings. Emma felt a pang of guilt that she’d left her parents with such confounding uncertainty for almost ten hours. She knew more than most that not knowing was a special form of torture. It was time to fill them in.

“It only lasted twenty minutes.” Emma moaned as the painful memory hit her again. They had been eating dinner in front of the TV when she noticed something was off. As soon as she asked about it—expecting to hear that Ryan’s stomach hurt or his boss was annoying him again—the floodgates opened. Apparently, he’d been having doubts for months but didn’t know how to tell her. Emma tried her best to fight for them, but a switch had been flipped in Ryan’s brain and it was like trying to reason with a concrete wall. Every suggestion she flung out to try to work on their relationship was met with steely resistance. It was obvious that once the words were finally out of Ryan’s mouth, he had no intention of taking them back. He had been set free while Emma was left crushed and disoriented. Their engagement was unceremoniously over in less time than it took to watch a network sitcom.

“What were the doubts? Do you know?” Alan asked in a rather accusatory tone. Despite being retired, he would forever be a lawyer combing through details in search of a win. He didn’t seem to understand that social contracts could be broken far more easily and with fewer repercussions than legal ones.

Emma shook her head. “Unless something is missing is a clarifying answer for you. Because it’s not for me!” She could feel that she was losing control of her emotions. Within a minute or two, any attempt at coherent speech would be usurped by streaming tears and a horrifying amount of snot. She tried to get a handle on herself as her brain went into overdrive, poking and pinching the most vulnerable parts of her psyche, her insecurities finding every possible way to punish her for someone else’s decision.

The entire breakup had felt surreal from start to finish. Emma hadn’t even fully realized she was experiencing a breakup until about halfway through. She’d known things had been off be- tween them for a few months, but it seemed to be more of a Ryan issue than a Ryan-and-Emma issue. He was unhappy with his job. He was struggling with anxiety. He had less interest in his hobbies than normal. To Emma, a licensed marriage and family therapist, it was pretty obvious he was in the midst of a depressive episode. She tried her best to be supportive while her partner was going through a tough time—and she used every ounce of self-esteem that came from her newly earned secure attachment style to not take it personally.

Turns out, she should have taken it personally. Because, according to Ryan, the issues in his life were not related to anxiety or depression after all. He was miserable because he was in the wrong relationship. She was the source of the problem, not him. And once he realized that, he had to end things right away. Or, you know, once Emma dragged it out of him on a random Monday night.

As Emma recounted this to her parents, somehow managing to make it through without dissolving into incoherent sobs, she felt slightly vindicated by the looks of confusion on their faces. This was objectively confusing, right? To ask your live-in partner to marry you and then walk out six months later completely certain that there was nothing to be done to salvage the relationship? Emma was a couples therapist, for Christ’s sake! She made a living salvaging relationships and Ryan wasn’t even willing to try? It was both a personal and a professional slap in the face.

Emma had a bunch of clients in far worse situations than hers who’d been tirelessly working on fixing things for years. One notable client had slept with his wife’s second cousin for three years and they were still together. Yet Ryan—who only a few months ago had cried with happiness as he put an engagement ring on Emma’s finger—insisted there was no point in even attempting to repair whatever he thought was broken. He had too many “concerns,” so it was best to just move on. What those concerns were exactly remained a mystery that would likely haunt Emma until she died in what she anxiously feared would be an untimely and possibly gruesome fashion.

While on the topic of unfortunate demises, Emma briefly considered murdering Ryan before news of her abandonment became public. That way she would be perceived as a grieving fiancée instead of a rejected loser, which felt much more palatable. While murder would never be her first choice when dealing with a crisis, her reputation was on the line. It is one thing to get blindsided by your partner when you’re a civilian. It’s quite another when you have a master’s in clinical psychology and make a living giving relationship advice. It was the professional equivalent of a cardiologist not realizing she was having a heart attack: mortifying. For the first time, Emma regretted her inability to hide in obscurity due to her hard-earned success.

Oh, fuck.

“My book deal!”

Debbie stopped stroking Emma’s back, unsure of what this seemingly random declaration meant. But like any good mom, she remained determined to be supportive. “That’s right. You have a book deal, a YouTube channel, and a thriving private practice. I know your heart is shattered right now, but you have a full life. Ryan was just a part of it, not the whole thing.”

Years of therapy talk had clearly rubbed off on her mother by osmosis, but Emma wasn’t in the position to take any of it in just yet. So instead, she channeled her teenage self and shouted, “No, you don’t get it! He’s ruined my book deal. How can I write a book about the secret to maintaining healthy relationships when mine just imploded? I’m going to have to give the money back and die from shame instead.” She looked at her father pleadingly. “Can I slowly die at home? In my old room? You won’t even notice!”

“I think we would notice if you were slowly dying in the guest room.”

“Guest room? You said it would always be my room! This is even worse than I thought!”

And with that, Emma collapsed once again on the carpet. Face rash be damned.

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MY RECENTLY WIDOWED FATHER IS MOVING IN WITH HIS NEW GIRLFRIEND

Last Thursday I joined a Zoom meeting with my book editor and publicity team teary-eyed. I had just been told that my dad and his girlfriend of ten weeks had decided to co-purchase a new apartment. They had already found a place and were going to sell their respective NYC apartments so they could officially live together and split their time between the city and my family home in Westchester, NY. I shouldn’t have been surprised by the news. They had become inseparable since they met in January, and my dad acts fast when he gets an idea in his head. But it still hit me hard, and I started off what was supposed to be a meeting about the launch of my upcoming novel by blurting out my emotional distress. I felt lucky that if I had to have a professional Zoom that morning, it was one where I could get away with openly crying.

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GOOD VIBES ONLY IS IMPOSSIBLE WHEN YOUR MOM IS DEAD

It’s been almost six months since my mother died and somehow I am still here. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. For me to be unable to get out bed or begin tempting fate with reckless, suicidal behavior. Instead, I find myself taking better care of myself than ever before. I have (finally) cut out weed. And I even reduced my sugar intake on the suggestion of my fertility acupuncturist. When I felt myself slipping into depression a few weeks ago, I responsibly went up on my mediation rather than letting go and falling into the open, appealing arms of despair. But instead of feeling proud of my resilience, I feel confused. My life now is objectively worse than my life before and yet…I am tolerating the very thing I always assumed would break me. Am I just avoiding my grief? Or is something else at play here?

As someone with near life-long OCD, discomfort is not unfamiliar to me. I spend my days afraid to touch doors, chairs and any kind of communal space. I worry about potential opportunities for contamination and plan my showers around certain exposures. I often feel jealous of anyone who’s mind isn’t filled with germ-based thoughts. Much like someone would daydream about being rich or famous, I daydream about being to go in an Uber without thinking about it or sit on a friend’s couch without disgust. That kind of brain seems too good to be true even though I know most people are walking around living my dream. (Or at least one portion of it. I would also love to be really rich and rather famous.) I say all this because I have little experience being completely at ease in the world, and I wonder if that constant hum of discomfort helped prepare me for this enormous loss.

I recently saw a TikTok from therapist RaQuel Hopkins that clicked a lot of this into place for me. She made the bold claim that the mental health industry has focused too much on pushing the idea of protecting your peace when really the better avenue for mental stability is increasing your tolerance for discomfort. When you live a life in search of constant peace, you have no choice but retreat from the world because you end up avoiding everything that makes you uncomfortable. You cut people out of your life. You avoid social situations. You resist taking big swings in your career to mitigate the risk of failure. Your nervous system might feel more regulated, but your world is rapidly shrinking.

As I often tell my coaching clients, avoidance make sense. Our anxiety and survival instinct want to protect us from anything deemed threatening. The problem is that our brains don’t do a great job of categorizing what is actually a threat and what is hard yet tolerable. And some of the rhetoric circulating online suggests that if the action you don’t want to do makes you feel bad, then you shouldn’t have to do it. I’m not going to argue that that isn’t true. Everyone gets to decide what they have the capacity for—especially in the hellscape that is 2025. But I think we often fail to ask the important follow up question: what am I sacrificing by not doing this hard thing? Sometimes the answer is not much. You can probably skip that uncomfortable conversation with your racist neighbor without real repercussions. But often the answer is that you are sacrificing a greater level of intimacy with your partner, stronger ties to your community and/or the kind of experiences that make putting up with distress worth it. (Here’s where I add the caveat that I am exclusively talking about things that don’t put you in danger—mentally or physically—or push you beyond what you can reasonably handle given your specific context.)

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I think what often gets missed in online mental health discourse is that your goal shouldn’t be to achieve some level of enlightenment where nothing ever bothers you (impossible) or create a life where you never interact with anything bothersome (boring and small). Instead, we want to strengthen our tolerance for discomfort. Because once we know we can tolerate discomfort, it becomes easier to navigate a world that is filled with horrible things. We can switch our mindset from protecting our peace in this moment to forging through the distress to get to what’s on the other side. And the better we get at doing that, the more evidence we have that we can survive things we don’t like to do. Like continuing to live in a world without my mom.

Accepting that certain things will simply be awful has been transformative for me. It is far easier to go into a situation thinking, “this is going to suck” than to try to mental gymnastics my way into feeling something other than dread. I now know for certain that I can handle, 1) having a bad time, 2) initiating difficult conversations and 3) seeing my friends with their still-alive moms. (Sitting on a public bench, not so much, but contamination OCD is beast of disorder, and I am chipping away at it at my own pace.) I am intentionally not trying to build my life around good vibes only. I am trying to build my life despite all the bad ones.

Grief is a form of discomfort that never goes away. It is the ultimate exposure therapy. But if I can stay engaged in my life despite that gnawing pain, I can probably do a lot of other things I didn’t think I could do before.

xoxo,

Allison

P.S. It would mean a lot to me if you hit the like button to increase chances of engagement! Also, if you are able to upgrade to paid subscriber or share my posts with a potential reader, I would be incredibly thankful! Thank you for reading!

P.P.S. If you are interested in working with me as a relationship coach please check out my website for more information.

WHAT AM I WILLING TO DO TO HAVE A BABY?

In the early months of my relationship with my now husband, John, we had a frank discussion about kids. We were standing by the kitchen sink of my old apartment, and I had very strong opinions about something, at the time, I knew little about. Without hesitation, I told him that while I was interested in having biological children, I was absolutely not open to invasive fertility treatments, IVF or surrogacy. So, if in the future I didn’t get pregnant easily, that would be the end of the road for me.

These were bold claims to make in general and in particular to John, who was conceived via IVF after many (many) attempts. But at the time, I felt certain of my certainty, which should have been a red flag. Since that conversation, I have come to understand that predicting how I will feel about something in the future is unnecessarily constraining. Especially when it comes to something as complex and emotional as family planning. That’s why when I found myself at a fertility acupuncturist last week, I didn’t know how to respond when she asked what I was willing to do to have a baby.

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