Right before I met the guy who I’d decide was the escape hatch from a life I didn’t know how to live anymore, a couple of last-gasp moments in my music life happened. Having left the high-paying record company job to wait for what might come next, I sat in the apartment I couldn’t afford anymore and tried to look for next-step signposts. I suppose the keyword in that previous sentence is wait because I was nervous around the seeking. I still considered myself a writer even if my brain or psyche or whatever part of you it is that revels in planting seeds of doubt whispered otherwise. And while I was well aware that every month I was inching closer to financial disaster, what with my income primarily based on a plundered 401K and maxed-out credit cards, I was crap-ass at pitching story ideas to editors in order to get an assignment that would pay my bills. So I did what any self-respecting person avoiding reality would do: I went to the Union Square Barnes&Noble every day and worked on a modernized take on Peter Pan. I wasn’t in therapy at the time, but if I had been, no doubt the conversation would have included some drill-down into my “don’t want to grow up” “suspended in time” moments. I had no mythical Wendy to mother me back into emotional or financial health. I was in my late thirties and felt 100% shame around being a financial failure and confused careerist.

A couple of people did reach out with assignments, which not only helped bring in some money but also shone some light on where my career might be headed. I was asked to write a piece for the premiere issue of Jane magazine for a column called “It Happened to Me.” The article was my first-hand experience testifying for the prosecution at the SPIN/Bob Guccione Jr. trial and my editor, the awesome Bill Van Parys, was a great taskmaster, sending me back to the article over and over again until I brought the vulnerability that was needed to deliver the emotion of the story. The process was painful and also necessary. It was how editors work to bring out the best in a writer and it made me realize that as an editor at SPIN, I hadn’t often held my writers to the same rigor. Being conflict-averse did not lend itself to being a stellar editor, and that led me to crossing editor off my what-I-want-to-do-next list. I still felt a buzz around the writer’s life.

The issue with being a freelance writer though, was that I’d need to always be pitching. I’d have to come up with ideas that would then need to be sold (in theory) to an editor in order to be sold (for money) after they were written and published. The idea of contacting editors and pitching my ideas made me emotionally (&sometimes physically) nauseous. Terrified. In search of a small dark closet to hide in because somewhere along the way I’d decided I didn’t have any good ideas. This wasn’t just an I suck self-sabotage position. It was based on the larger elephant in the room. The one that had “I do not like music anymore” painted on its side. I’d had tons of ideas about bands and artists when I’d loved music but now I had zero interest in finding out what was new. I had no desire to ring up bands I’d known before to see what I could further wring from their life. The place in me that had been filled with the zing and seismic shake of songs, sweat, bombastic, slithery, soundscapes of chords and lyrics all mashed together felt empty, murky, not inviting at all. Yet I kept that a secret too.

When my old pal Jancee Dunn, who at that time was an editor at Rolling Stone, called in the early summer of 1997 and asked if I’d do a Q&A with David Grohl, I was thrilled because that was fun and like home. But by the time I went out on the road with the band Bush in July for a small book of tour polaroids and anecdotes during the band’s Razorblade Suitcase tour, I was starting to cross over from the Lauren I’d been and the one I was struggling to meet. Looking back, I call up how isolated I felt. Awkward, not in any way a part of the scene. The band wasn’t friendly, although they weren’t decisively unfriendly either. The crew were the ones I felt drawn to for conversation because the support staff is always the more human element of these tours and it was too bad I couldn’t shift the topic of the book to them. (Sidenote: If you can ever find Cameron Crowe’s one-season TV show Roadies, you’ll see why.)

By the time the book was published in August of 1999, so much in my life had changed: I remember unboxing those Bush on the Road books in Brooklyn and looking back on the year-plus since I’d been on that tour and feeling as if that span had been lived by someone else. I can trace 1998 as a kind of personal scavenger hunt toward an escape hatch. Next week, I’ll invite you to trip along the trail as we relive that summer in the 12th Street apartment, my final 1990s New York City–space, before the Brooklyn period and married life began.