An irreverent guide to rebounding after loss, grief, and all the other cruel crises life throws our way

Sometimes your foundation crumbles. Sometimes you realize there wasn't a foundation to begin with.

Maybe your relationship ended in a breakup or divorce, or you lost your job, or a loved one died. Whatever crisis showed up to screw with you, it brought everything else crashing down, and suddenly life became confusing, disorienting, out of control.

A total shitshow.

You. Need. Help.

Therein lies the problem: Traditional self-help guides just aren't for you. You're an individualist, an iconoclast, a follow-your-own-drumbeat kind of person. The typical sunshine-and-rainbows, "live your best life!" books in the "personal growth" aisle aren't going to speak to your worldview–you need an embrace-your-weirdness vision for growth and rebuilding.

Enter Ariel Meadow Stallings, who has experienced a few life catastrophes of her own and emerged from them with newfound clarity and strength. In From Shitshow to Afterglow, she offers a lifeline of support and outside-the-box thinking for times of crisis and confusion, sharing plenty of tactical tips for getting your shit together.

Along the way, Ariel never lets readers forget that sometimes a life has to be taken apart before it can be put back together better than ever.

Without sugar-coating how deeply it sucks to have your world shattered, From Shitshow to Afterglow gives readers a reassuring plan to for putting the pieces back together and emerging stronger than ever.

💩➡️🌅

Read an excerpt from the intro of From Shitshow To Afterglow...

It’s a good setup for a bad joke—did you hear the one about the divorced wedding expert? Did you hear the one about that offbeat lady who wrote a book about her offbeat wedding and then spent a decade supporting other people planning their offbeat weddings, who believed in nothing more than offbeat love, who then had her offbeat marriage abruptly end in the most on-beat way possible?

HA HA!

So yeah, hi. I’m Ariel, and I’m the butt of that joke. I’m also the ventricles and bile and tear ducts and open palms and broken eyelid capillaries of that joke. That joke was part of my crisis, but just one part.

I’m lots of other things besides that joke . . . but many of the other things also sound like punch lines. I’m the forest-raised child of hippies who grew up to be an urban-condo-dwelling entrepreneur. I’m the brainy honors student whose stoner college goal was how little effort I could expend to maintain my A- GPA. I’m the daughter of an herbalist midwife who spent five years failing to get pregnant before having IVF and a C-section. I’m oh-so-iconoclastic with decades of rainbow-colored hair and weird clothes living a totally typical middle-class American life: education, career, wedding, home, family, divorce, aging.

So yeah: I’m the offbeat lady who’s exactly like everyone else.

I got married in 2004 and wrote a book about it called Offbeat Bride while working a corporate day job. In 2007, I launched offbeatbride.com to promote the book, but the site turned into my job so I went full-time with my tiny digital media company in 2009 while breastfeeding my newborn son. I spent years building my business, jokingly named the Offbeat Empire. It’s a publishing company for nontraditional people going through traditional life passages: committing to a partner, creating a home, starting a family.

I first shared my story and then the stories of thousands of other people, weaving a web of personal narrative and relationships and online community and empowerment and support all focused around one core belief: being offbeat could save us all!

I handled my logistics like a boss, did a li’l therapy when needed, cuddled with my family on the couch, gossiped with friends, balanced my company’s books, traveled a bit. Life was good! I felt like I had things sorta figured out.

Then my 2015 happened and everything exploded...