Erasable

Excerpt from my memoir, Erasable, available out on 1/11/23:

I find darkness. I find myself half-conscious riding in an ambulance. I can hear the voices of the paramedics assuming the worst of me. I am probably a prostitute and got beat up and left in a park. Or I took a drug and fell asleep on a park bench. All the assumptions add to the uncertainty that I am not me, and this is a nightmare. I am alive but dead. I am with people but alone. I am disoriented and scared. I am asleep, but I am awake. With the oxygen mask on my face, I doze off again. I am here but I am not.

I open my eyes to the lights of an emergency room. The lights hurt my eyes. I feel raw and naked and over exposed. Panic and anxiety rush in again forcing the heart to push up against my throat. I pull the oxygen mask off and call out for a nurse. I see one passing by. I have an ID band on my wrist, Band-Aids on my elbows, and an IV running from my arm. I am in a hospital gown. I can see the redness in my arm where they drew blood. I can hear the chaos of the emergency room. I am here, but I am not. I can’t remember what they’ve done to me.

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Have you ever experienced a different life? It only takes one moment to change the way you see yourself. It only takes one single event to shift the trajectory.

I wrote the majority of this book while dealing with amnesia. I had six children and had zero recollection of them, or my partner. I woke up in a park and had no idea how I got there or what happened to me.

That was the beginning of a new life, while the mourning of my old one.

I love you…Millie