From Sh!

tshow to Afterglow Putting Life Back Together

When It All Falls Apart

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Stallings, Ariel Meadow, author.
Title: From sh!tshow to afterglow : putting life back together when it all
falls apart / by Ariel Meadow Stallings.
Other titles: From shitshow to afterglow
Description: First edition. | New York : Seal Press, 2020. | Includes
bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019042541 | ISBN 9781580059633 (hardcover) | ISBN
9781580059626 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Adjustment (Psychology) | Change (Psychology) | Self-
help techniques. | Life change events.
Classification: LCC BF335 .S663 2020 | DDC 155.2/4—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019042541

ISBNs: 978-1-58005-963-3 (hardcover); 978-0-30687-432-1 (ebook)

E3-20200612-JV-NF-ORI
 CONTENTS

Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction: Welcome to Your Shitshow

part one
MIND: WHY YOU CAN’T OUTTHINK A SHITSHOW
Chapter 1 Shock
Chapter 2 Ugly Crying
Chapter 3 Sleep
Chapter 4 Talk Therapy
Chapter 5 Mindfulness
Chapter 6 Shame
Chapter 7 Gratitude
Chapter 8 Panic Attacks

part two
BODY: GETTING BACK TO BEING HUMAN
Chapter 9 Attachment Theory
Chapter 10 Makeover
Chapter 11 Burlesque
Chapter 12 Self-Care
Chapter 13 Connecting
Chapter 14 Exercise
Chapter 15 Daily Devotional Dance
Chapter 16 Surrender

part three
SPIRIT: WE’RE ALL ONE, BUT IN A SECULAR WAY
Chapter 17 Sound Healing
Chapter 18 Reiki
Chapter 19 Nesting
Chapter 20 Visualizing
Chapter 21 Violence
Chapter 22 Tattoos
Chapter 23 Listening
Chapter 24 Spiritual Awakening

part four
ONWARD: INTEGRATING THE AFTERGLOW
Chapter 25 Existentialism
Chapter 26 Self-Reliance
Chapter 27 Community
Chapter 28 Epigenetics
Chapter 29 Service
Chapter 30 Closure
Epilogue Dismantled and Wide Awake

Acknowledgments
Discover More
About the Author
Sh!tshow Reading List
References and Citations
 To Octavian Orion.
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Especially the weird stuff.
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 introduction

WELCOME TO YOUR SHITSHOW!

OH, HELLO. NICE TO SEE YOU HERE. I WISH WE WERE

MEETING UNDER DIFFERENT CIRCUMSTANCES, but here we
are.
If you’re reading this, chances are that shit feels pretty messed up in
your life. Things may have collapsed. A slap in the face painfully
announced that who you thought you were just doesn’t line up with your
current life. Where you thought you were going is no longer on the map.
There’s disorientation in the atmosphere. There’s probably a lot of crying,
maybe not a lot of sleeping (or too much sleeping), and freaking out. Your
life may have fallen apart last month or last year, or maybe it was a decade
ago and the janky old Band-Aid just fell off and you realized that the injury
never healed.
Regardless, this much is sure: something has shifted, drastically. You
may not have seen it coming, but even if you maybe sorta did, you didn’t
think it would feel like THIS… like your skin’s being peeled off and your
mind is filled with screaming monkeys. Like every bone in your body has
cracked and yet somehow you’re supposed to keep walking. Like you don’t
know who you are anymore. You thought you sorta had life figured out, but
it suddenly became clear that you really super didn’t.
Life may feel so off that your brain can’t handle it. You find yourself
bumping into walls, dropping things, missing the last step when you go
down the stairs. Maybe you felt like you had your situation handled, but
now you wake up each morning and as you remember your new reality, you
think, This is my life now? Who even am I?
This kind of existential life-crisis shitshow is like a freeway: there are
a lot of different on-ramps, but once you’re on it, things move whether you
want them to or not, and you can’t really slow down. However you found
yourself here, chances are decent it wasn’t just one precipitating incident.
For me, it was a triple punch.

MY SHITSHOW, YOUR SHITSHOW

It’s a good setup for a bad joke—did you hear the one about the divorced
wedding expert? Did you hear the one about that offbeat lady who wrote a
book about her offbeat wedding and then spent a decade supporting other
people planning their offbeat weddings, who believed in nothing more than
offbeat love, who then had her offbeat marriage abruptly end in the most
on-beat way possible? HA HA!
So yeah, hi. I’m Ariel, and I’m the butt of that joke. I’m also the
ventricles and bile and tear ducts and open palms and broken eyelid
capillaries of that joke. That joke was part of my crisis, but just one part.
I’m lots of other things besides that joke… but many of the other
things also sound like punch lines. I’m the forest-raised child of hippies
who grew up to be an urban-condo-dwelling entrepreneur. I’m the brainy
honors student whose stoner college goal was how little effort I could
expend to maintain my A- GPA. I’m the daughter of an herbalist midwife
who spent five years failing to get pregnant before having IVF and a C-
section. I’m oh-so-iconoclastic with decades of rainbow-colored hair and
weird clothes living a totally typical middle-class American life: education,
career, wedding, home, family, divorce, aging.
So yeah: I’m the offbeat lady who’s exactly like everyone else.
I got married in 2004 and wrote a book about it called Offbeat Bride
while working a corporate day job. In 2007, I launched offbeatbride.com to
promote the book, but the site turned into my job so I went full-time with
my tiny digital media company in 2009 while breastfeeding my newborn
son.
I spent years building my business, jokingly named the Offbeat
Empire. It’s a publishing company for nontraditional people going through
traditional life passages: committing to a partner, creating a home, starting a
family. I first shared my story and then the stories of thousands of other
people, weaving a web of personal narrative and relationships and online
community and empowerment and support all focused around one core
belief: being offbeat could save us all! I handled my logistics like a boss,
did a li’l therapy when needed, cuddled with my family on the couch,
gossiped with friends, balanced my company’s books, traveled a bit. Life
was good! I felt like I had things sorta figured out.
Then 2015 happened.
In January of that year, my left ovary exploded while I was on a cross-
country business trip. I thought it was food poisoning, so I went ahead with
cohosting a five-hundred-person wedding expo in a silver dress and a
bouffant, gritting through the pain and sweating off my red lipstick. I made
it back to Seattle and ended up in the ER for emergency surgery, sliced up
the middle with an eight-inch incision and a drainage tube hanging out of
the side of my abdomen. I spent a week in the hospital, another month
refiguring how to walk, and then a few months after that I turned forty. The
milestone birthday was a gentle slap in the face, your classic midlife
mortality check.
Then in November of 2015, my partner of eighteen years sat me down
on the living room floor and told me he didn’t see a future for us. I felt
blindsided.
The year that followed was the most excruciating experience of my
life. Already disoriented from my mortality check, I was completely
leveled. Nothing made sense. I walked into walls. I randomly threw up. I
barely slept. I couldn’t digest food. It was a complete shitshow. Then,
because I couldn’t figure out how to fix it, I wholeheartedly surrendered.
Here’s what no one tells you about surrendering to a shitshow: when
you’re in the thick of it, naked onstage forgetting your lines (even worse,
you’re not even sure what show this is, or whether it’s a comedy or a
tragedy), spotlight burning your bare skin, you don’t know that in the
surrender, you’re already starting to heal. In the middle of a clusterfuck, all
you know is that it’s awful and that it’s probably getting worse.
And it does get worse… but then, somehow, if you stay with it and
keep paying attention and staying awake even in the awfulness, things go
around some “even worse” bend and the mind-bending disorientation shifts,
and you start being able to eat again, and your sleep gets a bit more
normalized, and at some point you start bitterly laughing and can’t stop, and
then you start crying again but it feels cathartic instead of bad and you
realize that you’re somehow still alive—and maybe it even feels GOOD?
Then, if you roll up your sleeves and really get into it, maybe it feels
more than good. Maybe it even feels great sometimes. That’s the emotional-
catastrophe survivor’s high, the post-traumatic transformation that no one
tells you about, the afterglow you can bask in after life fucks you HARD.
That afterglow is when your new self looks into the gaping hole that
used to be your life and realizes, I might be able to grow some amazing
things down here if I really try.
And, oh, it felt like I tried everything. Once I got my sea legs back, I
decided that every moment I wasn’t working or parenting would be
invested into learning and growing. I would roll up my sleeves and try my
best: I would learn all the things, examine all the internal lies, read all the
books, take all the classes, date all the people, push all the edges, do all the
healing. I would try every therapy I could find, and a few that I made up.
Therapy is everywhere!
A shitshow can become the best worst time of your life. The shock and
pain can become fuel for growth. I’m here in these pages because I want to
help you find your afterglow. I can’t change what happened to you, but just
maybe I can support you in making the most of it.

WHAT EVEN IS A SHITSHOW?

Let’s get clear about what I mean by shitshow. It’s a cheeky term, but refers
to a very specific kind of life crisis with a few key ingredients:

Uncontrollable change in foundational life structures like

your career, relationship, family, home situation, or health.
Somehow it’s never just one at a time. It’s shit dominos, a chain
reaction that feels out of your control.
Intense identity shift so acute that you feel like you really
don’t know yourself—your self-definitions are stripped and you
lose your core concepts about who you are and where you’re
going. It’s just identity death, but in the thick of it, sometimes it
feels like actual death.
Confusion like whoa. You feel disoriented and baffled AF.
How do I human? Where the hell? How did I get here? Who is
this person I’ve become? Everything feels in-between and
liminal.
 Physical symptoms like your sleep being jacked (too much,
too little), messed-up appetite (again: too much, too little). You
might be extra clumsy, or prone to injury. If grief is part of your
experience (and it often is), you may even hallucinate or feel like
you’re losing your grasp on reality. If shock or trauma are part of
your personal disaster (and they often are), you may randomly
puke, sweat through your clothes for no reason, or have
debilitating panic attacks.

While a shitshow is messy and feels devastating, it’s not usually life-
threatening. It might include a major illness or the death of a loved one, but
it’s not typically your own terminal diagnosis. This isn’t a book about
genocides or mass shootings or surviving an assault—to refer to a life-
threatening situation as “a shitshow” would be insulting.
It’s one of the things that’s awkward about this kind of crisis: it feels
like your life is ending, but when you’re able to pull yourself back and get
some perspective, you know your life isn’t in danger. There’s often a
measure of shame; you know this isn’t the end of the world—it just feels
like it.
It’s embarrassing to feel like you’re overreacting, but here’s the deal:
your nervous system doesn’t care if your life isn’t actually being threatened.
Once trauma reflexes kick in, you and your smarty-pants brain can try to
rationalize all you want—you can’t outthink your reaction.
Only you know whether your life is a shitshow. It’s not cool for
anyone to tell you whether or not you qualify. If you feel like you do, then
you probably do. If you’re still holding things together and you’ve got a
sense of control, then it’s probably not a shitshow. A shitshow makes it clear
that control is an illusion.
If it’s a shitshow, you can no longer hold your shit together. Access to
shit-holding has been denied.
WTF CAN THIS BOOK DO FOR YOU?
This book is for people who want to make the best of a messy disaster. It’s
for folks who want to actively invest in their own healing, who want to
funnel their suffering into change, transmute their misery into growth. We
all have different styles of learning, and this book will probably feel the
most useful for those who learn like me: through experiences and effort,
through seeing how others do things, from contemplation and self-inquiry
and a strong desire to be proactive. You need to want to get balls-deep in
this—I’m not here to twist your arm.
This book is not here to be super prescriptive, telling you exactly what
to do. One of the humbling lessons I’ve learned is that I don’t have any of
the answers. Before my life fell down, I really thought I had things figured
out and loved to tell people what to do. But—surprise!—I wrote wedding
and relationship advice for a living, and then my marriage abruptly ended!
HA HA, JOKE’S ON ME! Now I understand how little I know.
I don’t even have the answers to all my questions, so I can’t pretend to
have all the answers to yours. That said, I do love questions, and so this
book wants to support you in digging to find answers that are already inside
of you right now. This book isn’t here to tell you exactly what your
recovery should look like—I just want to support you in finding your
afterglow.
The material is broken into four parts that loosely translate to mind,
body, spirit, and integration. In each chapter, first I’ll tell you my story as a
sacrificial offering (because I don’t think you should ever follow the
guidance of someone who isn’t willing to be vulnerable about their own
struggles), and then I’ll weave in bigger-picture context—stuff like research
about why the methods work, and quotes from folks who are way smarter
than I am.
Then, each chapter will wrap up with prompts to help you find what
your afterglow might look like. It likely won’t look like mine, because even
though experiences of loss are remarkably similar, each of us will find
recovery in our own way.
I strongly suggest you grab a notebook and journal through the
questions at the end of each chapter, or dance through them, or draw
through them, or sing through them in the car! Take the process seriously,
and treat your healing like your art, or a sport, or like you’re starring in the
pilot for an inspiring Netflix series. Find ways to express your progress
through writing, movement, assembling little piles of rocks in the park, or
whatever mediums help you get out of your body and mind and out into the
world. Better yet, find a shitshow buddy and share your progress.
I’m going to do my best to share my experiences responsibly and offer
the research-backed guidance to help you peel back the layers of your
emotional onion… but it’s important to me that everyone reading this book
be safe out there and get real advice from real people who really know your
real-life situation.
This book wants to be your friend, but it is no substitute for folks who
know you and can help you recognize if you need in-person support or
treatment. I am not a doctor, a counselor, a coach, or a spiritual guide. I’m
not an academic—I’m just an autodidactic writer in Seattle with a BA in
sociology from a state school! I offer my story up for your entertainment,
and I’m stoked to offer resources so you can learn about where to go next…
but I am unqualified to tell you what to do with your mental, physical, or
spiritual health.
In these pages, I hope that you find comfort—but if my story at times
becomes the butt of the joke, I’m okay with that. If you’re in pain, you
probably need a few laughs and I’m down with you having a few at my
expense. Like all of us, I’m a deeply flawed human, and this book shares a
profoundly messy time in my life. This story is about falling down, trying to
recover, failing, trying again, failing again, and trying something else.
ONWARD, I shouted over and over again, face-planting in a steaming pile
of my own ignorance and failures and blind spots and self-sabotage and bad
choices.
I offer up my story not because I think it’s especially unique (Eat Pray
Love, Portlandia-style, anyone?) but as a sacrificial consolation,
reassurance that as long as you’re grieving forward, you’re probably doing
the best you can. Even if it feels awful, as long as there’s movement,
chances are good you’re doing it right.
If you’re in the thick of your shitshow right now, my heart (and one
remaining ovary!) go out to you. This book is me in the middle of the night,
sitting in a chair next to your bed, holding your hand while you wail, my
bodily fluids leaking all over the upholstery in sympathy with your
suffering.
 This book is me in the dark with you, encouraging you to feel all the
feels, because only then can you make the space for the new ones to come
in. This book is me trying to help you carry the load.
Thank you for allowing me to share this awful wonderful time with
you. It’s an honor to get to be with you as you find your afterglow.
Let’s do this.
 part one

MIND
WHY YOU CAN’T OUTTHINK A
SHITSHOW
 chapter 1

SHOCK
AN UNWANTED INVITATION TO THE WAILING LODGE

I KNEW I HAD ENTERED MY SHITSHOW WHEN TIME AND

SPACE BENT AND I STARTED tripping balls.
A shitshow has a way of doing that—one minute you’re living through
the pleasant tedium of the life you’ve known, the one that you’ve crafted,
the one that might not be perfect but you’ve got it sorta figured out… and
then the next thing you know, it’s a Tuesday afternoon and you’re sitting on
the living room floor being informed that your marriage is over.
In that moment, I vortexed. Time slowed down. My vision got
strangely sparkly. It was like I’d taken acid, except it was a heroic dose of
abrupt life-changing news that challenged my core sense of identity. I didn’t
understand it at the time, but I was in a hallucinogenic state of shock, my
mind bent by emotional disaster.
I mean, it had been a tough year, but that moment was the official
shitshow on-ramp. When you experience that trippy, sparkly, time-warped
feeling? That’s your brain struggling to comprehend that life as you’ve
known it is over. There’s no going back.
On the third night after my shitshow officially began, I called my
father in tears at 3:30 a.m. (I never called people in tears. I was not a crier. I
took care of myself. On this side of the fissure in my life, though, I didn’t
know what else to do.)
My father picked up on the second ring because he’d had the phone
next to his bed, waiting.
“I’ve never known this level of pain,” I sobbed. “I had no idea how
physically excruciating something like this could be.”
“I know,” my father said on the other end of the line, and he does
know because he and my mother split up and went through their own