HUFFINGTON
02.23.14
THRIVE
get even more out of it.’ The caveat of this success, however, had
personal repercussions: I never
relaxed. . . . I was increasingly
stressed. . . . Not only was I posting
once every ten minutes for twelve
hours straight, but I also worked
for the two and a half hours before
we started posting and late into the
night to prepare for the next day.”
She finally decided to leave Jezebel.
“It took over a year to decompress
. . . a year until I was focusing more
on myself than on what was happening on the Internet.”
Since my own final straw moment, I have become an evangelist
for the need to disconnect from our
always-connected lives and reconnect with ourselves. It has guided
the editorial philosophy behind
HuffPost’s twenty-six Lifestyle sections in the United States, in which
we promote the ways that we can
take care of ourselves and lead balanced, centered lives while making
a positive difference in the world.
As HuffPost is spreading around
the world, we’re incorporating this
editorial priority into all our international editions—in Canada,
the United Kingdom, France, Italy,
Spain, Germany, as well as in Japan, Brazil, and South Korea.
I remember it as if it were yes-
terday: I was twenty-three years
old and I was on a promotional
tour for my first book, The Female
Woman, which had become an unexpected international bestseller.
I was sitting in my room in some
anonymous European hotel. The
room could have been a beautifully arranged still life. There were
yellow roses on the desk, Swiss
chocolates by my bed, and French
champagne on ice. The only noise
was the crackling of the ice as
it slowly melted into water. The
voice in my head was much louder.
“Is that all there is?” Like a broken record, the question famously
posed by Peggy Lee (for those old
enough to remember) kept repeating itself in my brain, robbing me
of the joy I had expected to find in
my success. “Is that really all there
is?” If this is “living,” then what is
life? Can the goal of life really be
just about money and recognition?
From a part of myself, deep inside me—from the part of me that
is my mother’s daughter—came
a resounding “No!” It is an answer that turned me gradually but
firmly away from lucrative offers to
speak and write again and again on
the subject of “the female woman.”
It started me instead on the first
step of a long journey.
My journey from that first moment of recognition that I didn’t
want to live my life within the