May I Please Be Excused is reporting live from the audacity and thrill of modern existence.
ABOUT ALISON
On paper I’m a 42-year-old single woman with no children who splits her time between upstate New York and where I was raised on the Gulf Coast of Florida. I am also the creative director and founder of my remote design, content and branding studio, BEST.
I began public journaling during art school via my blogspot, Life of a Harpy (foreshadowing!). My love affair with New York City was undocumented as I fully immersed myself in living with abandon. Social media was invented, I started BEST originally as an artists’ group, and worked visually through my late twenties and thirties. Overstimulated, I moved to the country (alone) and began MailChimp correspondence to my friends downstate. Those letters eventually developed into three volumes of self-published pieces entitled News from the North — the grueling, sometimes inspiring adventure of arriving at the woman I am now.
As a young snowbird in the middle of my money-making years and on the brink of wading in perimenopause* I have adjusted, at first reluctantly, to this unexpected life completely of my own making. I was blindsided by what I came to know as grief and shame over not “finding” a husband and not “having” children, “becoming” a mother. Seemingly all of my friends went on to live their real lives while I subconsciously waited for mine to start.
So what else to do but take out a second mortgage on an island home in Florida. Now splitting my time between the Eastern North and South, I report on the cultural and personal nuance of living in this specific moment in time.
MIPBE is a work-in-progress, an experiment in finding my voice, and a record of the frankness of life.
I write this recognizing my privilege as a white woman to even explore topics like this in a safe, supported space (for now). While my experience is very much my own, I hope there will be relatable information or at least the offering to see things from a different perspective and in turn, more kindness and empathy. In this, as in all of my work, and with immense gratitude, I work toward a more equitable collective.
*perimenopause (listed here under “conditions and diseases”) was flagged as a misspelling.
