The thing about hitting rock bottom is you don't know you're there until you wake up on the other side of it and realize, holy shit, that was ugly.

If you're anything like me, waking up on the other side of rock bottom may also involve one hell of a hangover headache compounded by three extremely loud children and two dogs, none of whom know the meaning of personal space.

There is a picture of my husband and me on my desk. It was taken last summer, as we approached eight years of marriage. It is the only picture I have of just the two of us since our wedding. Taken reluctantly at that. My hand is on his stomach, but my fingers are curled under so the tips of them disappear into their lower halves. I remember consciously doing this, not wanting my whole hand captured in that 8-years-overdue picture. They used to call me monkey fingers. I could reach a full octave on the piano by the time I was five or six. I heard my piano teacher tell me what an advantage that was for me, but I didn't listen. I only listened to "monkey fingers."

I look at that picture and all I can see is someone wanting desperately to hide.  Not just her fingers, but her whole self.

There are cliches about not living someone else's life. But no one ever warns you about not living any life at all. Until you wake up on the other side of rock bottom and think that you can't remember the last time that your life didn't feel like one extended hangover--moving only when necessary and always slowly and methodically enough to not exacerbate the pain. You can't take ownership of anything in that kind of stupor. You can't inhabit joy when all you're trying to do is keep yourself from feeling pain.

It hurts to wake up and realize that you have been hiding.  You've built a life that you're not sure is your own, but rather, one you created because it was the path of least resistance.  And it's terrifying to think about the alternative, the coming out of hiding, taking ownership, and having to do something about it.  What if I fail.  What if I can't hide.  What if there is no joy.  What if I don't want this.  What if...

I have been trying for months to finish this.  To figure out what comes next.  The problem is that I don't know.  Oh god, how I want to step out of this, to change things, to feel some part of living again.  But then there is the uncertainty, and there is so much right now in my life that requires me to be certain and solid and responsible even when all I want to do stand in the middle of a wide open space and scream because it is all too much, too beautiful and too scary and too overwhelming and too perfect, and I don't know how to possibly experience each drop of it before it has all slipped away from me.