This is about when Anne Hathaway struts in looking all foxy in designer clothes after looking heinous for the first half hour.

Oh look – ashes! How about I rise out of them like some sort of flaming bird?

….a phoenix, you assholes.

Yes, I’ve pretty much pulled my shit together again after taking a total nosedive on life and it feels good to be back. As much fun as it was to veer so far away from all the things that make me ME that I couldn’t even remember what I who I was in the first place, I much prefer being able to sleep at night, digest food properly, and ohhh you know…smile from time to time. Let’s face it, tragic is not my colour. My colour is clearly Marc Jacobs.

I’ve basically been alone for the past ten days. The newf retreated away from Ben’s Ground Zero to visit his family back in the Promise Land for a while (he comes back tomorrow – finally someone can deal with the insect situation we have going on here. I swear, bugs are getting way too sinister), leaving me to press Ctrl Alt Delete on…well…everything that was getting in the way of the life I wanted to be living. That’s basically a fancy way of saying that I’ve been watching a lot of cartoons, dancing in my underpants, finding mental and physical breakthroughs with a totally granola chiropractor/life-coach/magic woman, and consistently cramping Theo’s style while he tries to be all aloof because I won’t let him go to third base on my eardrum.

So as I move out of the sad and pathetic recovery phase into the progressive rebuilding phase of overachievery, I’ll leave you with a short survival guide to ensure that when you become a living, breathing disaster out of nowhere for no particular reason, your transition is smoother than my own.

1. Get off the grid. Turn off your phone. Shut down your email. Do whatever you need to do to make your own bubble of solitude. Then take that bubble and fill it with a streaming 80s radio station and internet porn. You’ll feel better eventually. Then a little worse. Then a little better again. But mostly worse. It’s all part of the process.

2. Tell someone off who doesn’t deserve it. Think children or the elderly. Or a puppy.

3. Make sure your friends know the difference between Upset You and Loner Zombie You. I chose to communicate this through a series of subtle and cryptic facial expressions that when examined under a blacklight, showed signs of distress beyond the usual, “Lauren Conrad is a bestselling author. My brain refuses to comprehend a world in which that can happen.”

4. Buy something new. Preferably something frivolous that will get you in trouble with the spouse. Like a Brazilian pool boy. Or cocaine.

5. Regurgitate a year of pent-up feelings in obscenely long emails to people that you met through the internet. This is mostly to make other people feel better about the fact that their lives aren’t as off the rails as yours. I mean, just because your life is falling apart doesn’t mean that you can’t make someone else feel nice. IT’S NOT ALWAYS ABOUT YOU.

6. Send me flirty pictures. Hotties only please.

7. Hate a lot of people. I’ve always found the grocery store to be a good place to get this one crossed off the list. Stupid people should all have to shop on the same day. If people need a license to operate a vehicle, they should at least have to perform a written test and interview before being given a shopping cart.

8. Vote for LiLu so she can be the first ever MTV Twitter Jockey. Once she wins, she’ll just have whoever you hate killed. Or at least that’s what she told me.

9. Experiment with your diet. If your life is going to be thrown into upheaval, there may be no better time to give up lattés. You will clearly have nothing to lose by adding a massive, four-day headache into the mix and you’ll appreciate the reduced dairy once the nervous poops kick in.

10. Remember that we’re rooting for you. It can be tough out there. You’ll get through it.