Lately, I’ve been struggling a lot with what it means to be a woman. I lay awake at night and I think, “How did I get here?” I ask myself if this is what it feels like to be a real adult. I wonder if there are other women, in other beds, unable to sleep, questioning the relationship between their past, present, and future. Women who are teetering while trying to fill the four inch stilettos of their heroes and role models.

Here’s what being a woman has been for me:

Move from England to Southern California. Start high school. Stare open mouthed at all the blonde, all the skinny, all the tan, all the designer clothing. Wish desperately for invisibility. Wander aimlessly and shyly through freshman and sophomore year. Give up on trying to fit in. Put all your energy into academic success. Focus madly on applying to NYU. Get in. Plan your escape from superficiality.

Settle into your dorm. Wonder how the hell you got out of California without a raging eating disorder and full blown skin cancer. Tell yourself that this is college, and that you can be whoever you want to be. Decide to be sexy and adventurous. Start wearing heels. Fall blindly into a life of excess. Too much drinking. Too much studying. Too many late nights. Too many guys whose names you don’t remember and whose tongues you wish you could forget.

Share your living space for the first time. Think having roommates will be fun after a lifetime of being an only child. Forget to set boundaries. Try to navigate the complexities of the female friendship. Get jealous of each other. Choose passive aggressive behavior over communication. Lash out. Repeat.

Fall into an intense relationship. Forget to set boundaries, again. Lose yourself in his identity. Forgo your own achievements to help him reach his. Break up. Work out. Obsess about your body in the absence of anything else to control. Count calories. Have rebound flings. Repeat.

Put yourself back together. Wonder why you aren’t more competitive, why everyone around you seems to pulse with the fierce drive for success while you’re content to bake and clean your boyfriend’s apartment.

Write a 20 page research paper comparing past issues of Good Housekeeping magazine, from the 1950s, to those of today. Try to define modern womanhood. Hate yourself for wishing, just a tiny bit, that we didn’t have quite so many options in front of us, because trying to be everything to everyone is just exhausting.

Totally lose your shit. Decide to graduate early. Sign up for as many classes as they’ll let you take, plus an extra one that you talked your way into. Ponder how persuasive you can be when you try. Think about all the people you’ve manipulated. Feel disgusting. Graduate, with honors. Realize that the only two things that have ever really defined you are sex and academic achievement.

Land a job running a summer day camp. Think you’ll be good at it because it’s a position of power and leadership. Wonder instead if you should be focusing on the fact that it’s a position working with children. Aren’t women supposed to be drawn to kids?

Spend 5 years in charge of the camp. Play it fast and loose with your sexuality, flirting to get your point across, feeling high whenever someone new is attracted to you. Sleep with your superior. Sleep with your subordinate. Realize too late that mixing sex with work weakens your authority and destroys your credibility. Decide to stop using sex as a weapon, because doing so only hurts every single person involved.

Keep your legs closed. Wonder if it’s realistically possible to be both successful and in love. Hold everyone at arms length, especially other women. Isolate yourself in an attempt to not feel everything so damn hard. Walk the extremely thin line between trying to be strong and trying not to be a bitch.

Start blogging. Read other people’s blogs. Find women who are shining examples of what it means to live intensely with great passion, raw intellect, and wild abandon. Sit, awestruck, and wonder how you’ll ever keep up.

Spend two months traveling around the country. Meet new people everyday. Pursue adventure and newness. Get bored. Go somewhere else, with someone else. Realize how easy it would be to just keep traveling, reinventing yourself over and over. Continue on without any day to day structure and a nonexistent life plan. Have a truly crushing anxiety attack about the fact that you feel wholly unproductive as a person. Berate yourself for not accomplishing more, for not being on a shiny path to something incredible. Feel like you’re failing as a woman.

Read more blogs. Find people whose ideas make your mind scream in ecstasy. Almost fall on the floor when they seem to feel the same way about you. Grow stronger. Finally cut the people who are bringing you down out of your life. Set boundaries. Fall for new guys. Slip. Lose sight of the boundaries again. Stop yourself. Step back. Reevaluate. Listen closely when a friend says that not every guy is worth breaking your heart over.

Struggle with the fact that you genuinely love taking care of other people, because it feels like a weakness. Do you have to be selfish to be successful? Admit the truth: that you desperately need to find a balance between wanting to nurture others and needing to take care of yourself. Realize that the only way to do this is to settle down a little bit, to move somewhere, to put care and compassion into building the life you want for yourself. Feel apprehensive and fearful about having to do it all from scratch.

Lay awake one night and finally come to terms with the fact that being a woman isn’t about being everything to everyone. It’s simply about being whatever you want to be, unstoppably, and nothing more.

In the genre of “things you don’t talk about at dinner parties,” mental health issues rank higher than politics, sex, and religion.

But why? Why do we shy away from discussing the difficult things? Particularly when the difficult things, the things that make us the most real, are usually also the things that make us the most similar. There’s commonality in crisis. The rawness of our struggles can bring us together.

It only takes one person to start a conversation, even a tough one, and I’m starting this one right now. The life cycle of my mental health has been something like this:

Turn 15. Attend your grandmother’s funeral. Watch your mother spiral into depression over the ensuing months. Feel helpless. Ask questions. Get answers of silence. Depression isn’t something to be discussed. Live your mother’s day to day struggle. One medication to another. And then another. And another. Notice that your family is falling apart.

Graduate high school. Leave for college. Get sucked into the whirlwind of pressure and intoxicating freedom. Listen in shock to the news that 3 students committed suicide during the first week of classes. Question how anyone could take their own life. Feel sorry for them, people you don’t even know, but feel superior at the same time. Pat yourself on the back for having your shit together.

Spend the next 6 months living it up. Love that you’re having the time of your life. Feel a sudden shift in mood. Start to notice that your days are either sparklingly perfect or horrifyingly sad. Analyze external factors. Tell yourself that it’s college, that everyone must feel like this. Chalk it up to the combination of too much drinking and too little sleep. Too much stress and too little of everything else. Ignore the warning signs for as long as possible.

Start Junior year feeling pretty pleased with yourself, proud that you’re going to graduate a year early from such a great school. Continue to ignore the mood swings. Get rocked by a horrible breakup. Fall apart. Put yourself back together. Berate yourself for having so many bad days, even after you’ve gotten over the heartache.

Make an appointment at the NYU Wellness Center. Start using your 12 free counseling sessions, the ones the school started offering after the string of suicides. Sit across the room from a psychologist named Kathy. Feel supremely awkward. Keep telling yourself, over and over, that you’re fine and that you should be able to handle your feelings on your own. Lie to everyone about being in therapy.

Use up all 12 sessions. Refuse to pay for more. Wonder angrily why your insurance doesn’t cover mental health treatment. Feel embarrassed about needing help in the first place. Think that if your insurance company doesn’t consider this a real problem, you should be able to just sack up and get over it already. Cry. Hide in your room. Cry. Skip class. Lie to everyone about what you’re going through. Sleep as much as possible. Wonder if the world and the people in your life would be better off without you. Start to understand suicide. Drink a lot of vodka.

Switch from vodka to tequila. Go through a simultaneously coincidental shift in mood. Start to pick up momentum. Feel euphoric all the time. Sleep less, talk more. Think less, do more. Live impulsively. Love how raw and powerful your sexuality is. Get off on drawing people into your dramatic tornado. Drink more tequila. Hook up with people you shouldn’t hook up with. Spend money you shouldn’t spend. Do one thing after another that you aren’t coherent enough to know you’ll later regret.

Go from euphoric to irritable. Lose your shit over the smallest things. Get a referral to the National Institute for the Psychotherapies. Start seeing a doctor you call Hillary, due to her physical resemblance to Hillary Clinton. Talk to her. Talk more. And more. Get diagnosed with Cyclothymia, a mild form of bipolar disorder. Make an appointment to see a psychiatrist. Talk to her too. Fill your first prescription for Lamictal, a mood stabilizer. Hate the way it makes you feel. Hate hearing that even though you hate the way it makes you feel, it’s necessary. Fight your doctors. Fight everyone.

Take the medication for about 6 months. Feel dull the entire time. Continue to see both doctors. Talk. Feel dull. Repeat.

Stop taking your medication. Feel your impulsiveness spiral out of control. Watch as New Year’s Eve 2007 quickly turns into one of the worst nights of your life. Cry for days. Decide you can’t handle living in NYC anymore. Pack everything you own and move to California to get away from it all.

Spend hours laying in the middle of the floor, crying, when you realize the truth to that old saying that “no matter where you go, there you are.” Feel the mood swings picking up speed and aggression. Spend days in bed. Days where it seems like nothing will ever be okay again. Feel better. Tell yourself you’re going to be fine. Look in the mirror and reassure yourself that you have it all under control.

Go through a summer of extreme emotion. Experience real insomnia for the first time. Spend your days as high as a kite on sleeplessness and caffeine. Spend your nights pacing around in the dark, making list after mental list of everything you need to do to be as incredible as possible.

Spend the fall and winter completely breaking down. Make an appointment to see a new therapist in December of 2008. Pick her randomly off a list of people covered by your current insurance. Quickly realize that nothing is random because this woman saves your life. She asks the questions that need to be asked, and when you don’t answer right away, when you’re scared of yourself, she asks again. And she waits. She’s kind and nonjudgmental. She doesn’t put you back on medication, but tells you not to rule it out as a future course of treatment, if necessary.

You spend 8 months under her care. Halfway through that time, you’re forced to switch to a different kind of insurance that doesn’t cover mental health treatment. She sees you anyway, at an incredibly reduced rate. You’re more grateful than you have ever been.

She helps you in a way you never thought possible. She’s there for you when you lose a close friend to suicide. She works with you as you make the decision to go the nomad route, to travel and pursue your best life. She tells you to be careful, warns that a lack of routine could easily shift you back into crushing mood swings. She makes you promise to call if you need anything. You promise. You hug her goodbye.

You pack up and leave California, set out on the path of a professional nomad. You feel pretty damn stable. Then, late one October night during your travels, you learn that a former camper of yours has committed suicide, that she suffered from deep depression and that she hung herself the night before. You hear this, you understand it, and yet you can’t believe it. You cry throughout the entire night and wonder what could have been done differently to change the outcome.

You realize, finally, that mental illness isn’t something to be ashamed of. You admit that you have a mood disorder, and that luckily, because of the right help, you have it under control. You decide that you’re not going to be quiet about it anymore, that you aren’t going to pretend you have all your little ducks in a row, because you don’t. Because your honesty and openness, no matter how difficult, might inspire more honesty and more openness and that from it, we can work together to build a world where we’re not afraid to reach out for help, to be there for each other, to look each other in the eye and say, “I’m not okay,” and, hopefully, to save each others’ lives.

Here’s a fun fact about me. Actually no, it’s not as much fun as it is horrifying, but it’s a fact nonetheless so I’m just going to roll with it.

Fact: I’ve never been on a real date.

I know right?

Because being in your 20s in 2009 means growing up in the land of the never ending casual hookup, which goes something like this:

Meet a guy. Usually through a mutual friend. Or at a party. Or at work. Or in class. Check each other out. Do the eye contact thing. Do the chatting thing. The flirting thing. Get asked to hang out, but not alone. Meet up with him at a party, with mutual friends, in a group. Drink. Keep talking. Laugh. Get to know each other. Really hit it off. Exchange numbers.

Spend the rest of the weekend wondering if he’s going to call. Think about calling him first. Stumble over what the hell the rules are with this kind of thing. Sigh, frustrated that there are rules. Check your email. See that he friend requested you on Facebook. Jump around excitedly. Accept the request. Spend the next hour stalking him. Realize that before his first phone call, you already know what his exes look like. Decide that you wish he would have called you instead. Shut off the computer. Stomp around.

See him on campus on Monday. Or at work. Or having lunch with a mutual friend. Wave. Hug. Chat about the rest of your weekend. Hope he’s going to try for more formal plans. Feel crushed when he doesn’t. Wait to hear from him. Bitch about the rules some more. Stalk him on Facebook. Bitch. Stalk. Repeat.

Thursday comes around. Your phone beeps: text message. It’s him! Jump around excitedly. “What’s up?” he wants to know. You text back. You tell him what’s up. He tells you that his friend’s band is playing this weekend. He asks if you want to meet up and check it out. You say yes.

You meet up. In a group. Concert. Drinks. Back to his friend’s place for an after-party. Everyone’s a little sloppy. He kisses you. You jump around excitedly (on the inside). You kiss back. Weeks go by like this. Text message. Party. Hang out in groups. Hookup late at night. Do the walk of shame. Repeat.

Realize that you’re a grown ass woman and that you’re still single. Decide that that’s horse vagina because you’re pretty awesome. Contemplate wearing a shirt that says, “I’m fucking awesome. Ask me out already.” Promise yourself that you’ll stop doing the stupid hookup thing.

Drink. Do it again. Drink and do it again. Repeat.

Watch as some of the hookups gradually turn into relationships. Feel happy. Break up. Freak out. Repeat.

Complain that guys are lazy. Wish desperately that you lived in the 1950s. Fantasize about innocent courtship. Remember that you could never deal with that much Jell-O salad. Rule out time travel as a dating technique.

Continue to meet guys. Flirt. Do the occasional random hookup, but finally stop any sort of prolonged, messy, friends-with-benefits thing. Because really? you have enough friends. And you don’t see how sleeping with them is a benefit.

Start to daydream about something better. About a guy who meets you and gets your number right away. Who calls instead of texts. Who doesn’t rely on email. Who doesn’t poke you on the stupid Facebook.

A guy who tries aggressively to get to know you. Who, once he does, isn’t afraid to admit that he’s straight up and down crazy about you. A guy who finds it endearing that you’re a raging insomniac. Who will cook you dinner, even if he’s not great in the kitchen. Who will do things other than have sex with you, even if he’s killer in bed.

A guy who will ask subtle questions about your favorite movies, and then watch them with you. Your favorite foods, and then get them for you. Your favorite time of day, and then make plans around it. A guy who doesn’t back down from your intensity. Who comes up behind you and brushes your hair to the side, kissing you on the back of the neck. A guy who doesn’t follow the damn dating rules. A guy who you can’t help falling desperately in love with.

A guy who one day might grab your arm as you’re running for shelter in a thunderstorm, drop down on one knee, and say that he’s only asking for forever today, because there is nothing longer.

In your 20s, I think it’s pretty safe to make the generalizing statement that no matter who you are, things are often overwhelmingly confusing, and stressful, and that there is a lot of needing to talk oneself down from the crazy ledge on an all too constant basis.

I know that I’m about as deep into it as I could possibly be at this point, and that while everyone’s experiences are different, it helps to share. My own experience has been something like this:

Graduate from college a year early. Look around. Realize that despite 18 years of school, you’re not really qualified to do anything. Take that back- decide that you can, in fact, do one hell of a body shot. Get your diploma. Stare at it. Laugh hysterically that your student loans have just bought you a $50,000 piece of paper and a 20-year future of increasing debt. Make your first student loan payment. Stop laughing. Make another payment the next month, and the month after that. Start crying.

Get year-round job offers. Turn them down for the chance to run a summer day camp. Pick up part-time jobs to make things manageable in between. Work annoying retail hours. Ask yourself why you’re living in one of the most expensive cities in the world when you don’t have a full-time job. Feel broke. Eat a lot of pasta. Continue to party too hard with all of your friends who are still in college. Let the year slip by. Watch them graduate.

Pick up and move to California for the summer, for camp. Work hard. Make money. Buy stuff. Work harder. Make more money. Buy more stuff. Stuff you don’t need. Return to NYC at the end of the summer. Move in with your boyfriend. Live there during the year, and in California during the summer. Love him. Make plans. Notice suddenly that for some reason, like everything else you try to plan, this no longer fits. Move to California full-time. Have failed rebound flings. Get more odd jobs. Feel horrible about yourself. Live in the suburbs. Remain relatively unhappy. Repeat.

Decide to go to graduate school. Apply. Get in. Change your mind. Decide to be a writer. Get too scared. Give up. Wake up one morning and realize that you’re 24 years old with no real savings account and an even more meager life plan. Cry. Flip out. Call your mom. Cry and flip out to your mom. Repeat.

Start comparing your life to your friends’ lives. Question absolutely everything. Wonder desperately about the paths you didn’t take. Feel inferior about not having a career you love, a man you love, a home you love, or friends you love who live within driving distance. Climb up very, very high on the crazy ledge. Lose a friend to suicide. Hang from the crazy ledge by two thumbs. Then one thumb.

Force yourself to snap the hell out of it. Sort of. Decide that a predetermined-cookie-cutter spot just simply doesn’t exist for you in this world. Feel anxiety, followed by enormous relief. Empower yourself to carve out your own niche. Commit to living life on your own terms. Evaluate what’s been holding you back. Make lists. Lists upon lists. Hundreds of lists. Finally quit camp. Give up your entire safety net. Temporarily move in with your parents in Arizona. Realize how badly you want to travel and write. Make up your mind to just fucking do it already. Stop making excuses. Start putting money and resources where your big, loud mouth is. Get scared. Talk it out with people who love you. Realize that despite your often bizarre, alternative lifestyle choices, there are a wonderfully heart breaking amount of people who love you. Commit to daily gratitude.

Stop comparing your life to every other life. Know that the best that you can do is the best that you can do. Compose a personal mission statement. Try to make one good decision after another. Stumble. Beat yourself up over your mistakes. Take pause. Vow to be nicer to yourself. Grasp desperately for perspective.

Continue the daily climb up and down the crazy ledge. Think that with all that climbing, you’d better have a damn fine ass by the time you turn 25.

When you haven’t been through a rough break up in a while, you forget how soul shattering it really is.

Until someone you care about gets thrown into the depths of it, and then all of those forgotten memories tumble out.  You immediately hear your past pain echoing in their questions.  You remember frantically asking the same things, like how the hell you were expected to live without him and what, exactly, the purpose was of getting out of bed ever again.

I don’t know that I have an answer to those questions, but for me, the process went something like this:

Get broken up with.  Cry so much that you’re literally positive it’s never going to end.  Call your mom.  Question the purpose of life and every single thing you’ve ever done.  Call your dad.  Call anyone who will listen to you sob hysterically for 45 minutes without even attempting to form a sentence.

Feel embarrassed for being such a disaster case.  Call your mom again.  And again.  Have a nervous breakdown and consider admitting yourself to the local hospital for some sort of tranquilizer/coma inducer.

Realize they probably don’t induce coma on demand.  Decide instead to fly across the country and spend the weekend with your mom.  Cry more.  Obsess.  Email him and suggest being friends.  Cry when he says it’s too soon.  Cry more.  Stare angrily at people who tell you that “everyone goes through this.”  Attempt to cut people who go so far as to suggest that “whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”  Cry more.

Eat way too much for a while.  Eat way too little to compensate.  Cry.  Sleep a lot.  Whine to everyone who will listen about how you’re positive he’s over you and also positive that you’ll never get over him.  Ever.  Throw things at their face when they insist that you’re wrong.

Get wildly drunk.  Get even more wildly drunk and yell about the unfair cruelty of life.  Use lots of obscenities.  Pass out.  Repeat.  Hook up with inappropriate men.  Cry.  Repeat.  Think about him when you first wake up, and then think about him all day, and then again before you go to sleep.  Berate yourself for thinking about him so much.  Miss class.  Cry.

Agree to be friends with him because he’s ready.  Flirt.  Fly out to visit him without telling anyone, knowing that you couldn’t find a single person who would think it’s a good idea.  Sleep with him.  Tell yourself that you’re “totally fine being friends with benefits.”  Feel happy again.  Somehow manage to convince yourself that sleeping with him regularly while you’re both home on break is a glorious idea.

Completely lose your shit at the airport when you realize that in fact, you’re NOT FINE and it’s NOT a glorious idea.  Finally decide to stop speaking to him until you’re ready, whatever that means.  Cut him out of your life.  Put a little pink star in your planner for every day that you don’t talk to him. Feel insanely proud when you get to three stars.  Cry.  Attempt to move on with your life.

Get to 10 stars.  Cry, but less frequently.  Get to 20 stars. Realize he’s not always the first thing you think about in the morning.  Stop crying.  Get to 30 stars.  Literally throw yourself a party. Continue with the stars and the daily managing of the pain.

Realize that your mom might not have been a complete and total crack addict when she said that time was the only thing that could heal you.