The DNC was a never-ending orgy of joy.

Personal reflections on the single most surreal week of my life.

As I reflect on my week in Chicago, I’m sitting here realizing that I was basically living what I’ve since come to refer to as my “Barbie” life.

Let me see if I can explain…

You see, I was one of those kids who played with Barbies a tad longer into adolescence than most. I guess I have that in common with Ben Shapiro, although unlike Ben who has yet to, I stopped playing with mine when I was 14.

I’m certain that I played with them well into my teens because the realm of my imagination was always a far more fabulous and fun place than my actual reality. My Barbies didn’t have to contend with a wickedly manipulative and abusive step-mother, a sister struggling with an eating disorder or a big brother in the early days of the addiction which would ultimately claim his life. They got to be movie stars and sports reporters and world-famous chefs. They lived in penthouses overlooking Central Park and dated professional hockey players. They had everything they ever wanted, no matter how implausible or ridiculous it may have seemed. And I never bothered to hold my own life up to those impossible standards. Things like that only happened to my teeny-waisted, big-boobied, perfect blonde hair coifed plastic dolls, not to frumpy, dumpy, lumpy, class clown tom-boys like me.

I could never dream to have a life like theirs. So I never dared to.

Decades have passed since I hid on the side of my bed creating those elaborately perfect and wonderful worlds for the dolls I so often retreated to when the world around me was otherwise so inescapably dark.

Decades of my life unfolded largely as lives do for a very long time. I grew up, went to college, got married, had kids, moved to the suburbs. And then, real life, seemingly “normal” life, started to take an ominously familiar turn towards darkness.

I found myself alone. Stuck in a painful, lonely, isolating and frightening reality I couldn’t escape. There were no Barbies for me to run away to. It was just darkness, on a loop, all day, every day, and I didn’t have anywhere turn. No realm of imagination to retreat to. I had my kids, thank God, and into them I poured every ounce of whatever fabulous and wonderful hopes and dreams I was still capable of dreaming. But when they were asleep, or when I was alone, it was just the darkness. Surrounding me. Drowning me.

Nearly ending me.

And then something happened. Something so strange, so bizarre, so preposterous, it could have been, and really should have been, confused with parody at first glance. But it wasn’t, it was real. Somehow it was real. And it nudged me just enough that a sliver of a crack of light suddenly appeared off in the distance of that all-encompassing black.

An orange-painted moron came down an escalator in his gaudy gilded tower, with his vacantly staring, cat-faced trophy wife comically floating behind him on the moving stairs, and he said some of the ugliest things I had ever heard anyone say in public. And he said them completely unapologetically. It was shocking. I mean, I still found much of it laughable, yet shocking at the same time.

You know, back in those simpler, more innocent times when we could still be shocked.

And a week later, he said something worse, and a week after that something even worse, and then it was daily, and hourly and sometimes it felt like there was something outrageous to react to every second, and every single time he did that, the woman inside of me who mere weeks earlier, was struggling just to stay above water, was filled with so much rage and so much disdain and disgust, I didn’t have the time to dwell in the shadows of my pain anymore.

Rather ironically, being too busy fighting Trump and all his awfulness, turned out to be the key to me finally escaping the hellscape that was my marital life.

His endless evil saved me so to speak.

That’s how I found my way to Twitter. Where I was suddenly surrounded by like-minded people. Not batshit insane people. I found MY people. And then, little by little, day by day, tweet by tweet, I found my voice.

I got out. It was wonderful. It was freedom! I was jubilant. For about 5 minutes that is. And then I looked around at the house I couldn’t afford and the groceries I didn’t have the money to buy and the braces I couldn’t save for, and the oil tank I couldn’t fill, and I thought, “Oh shit. What do I do now?”

I was an aide to autistic preschoolers making $14 an hour before taxes. And I couldn’t work summers because my kids were home in the summer and childcare wasn’t even on the map of shit I could afford.

I was stuck, and I was freaking out.

And then came an email that changed my life. A friend put me in touch with a non profit organization that wanted me to interview for content creation…

I sent a script. I made a test video. They liked them. And they hired me.

And that was when everything started to change.

Before I knew it, I was at the White House and infamously describing over there on Twitter, how Joe Biden smelled like a cup of hot chocolate on a snowstorm night. (It really is true btw).

I won’t go into all of that now though, because while it’s wonderful and life changing, I need to get to the Barbie week I referenced at the top, and I promise that’s where I’m going now.

So I guess I’ll start with the fact that as I was boarding a flight to Chicago, a city I’ve never been to but always wanted to visit, I had a friend sending me live screenshots of my account on the verge of hitting 1 million followers.

I was boarding a plane and heading to a convention I’ve only dreamed about attending, in a city I’ve long since dreamt about visiting. And I was hitting one million followers on an app that had changed my life.

It was fucking weird.

And while all I wanted to do was to focus on how cool and weird that was, I had a problem. A very Jo problem.

My flight was two hours behind schedule. And that meant that my arrival at my hotel, where I was supposed to change out of my PTA mom bake sale dress, do my makeup and my hair and emerge looking like a rockstar ahead of a live show I was loosely a part of… was, not, going, to, happen.

I’d have to head directly to the theatre. Where I was told I’d be meeting, of all the people on the planet — Mark Hamill.

In my PTA gingham and fork-stuck-in-a-socket hair.

Oh fuck.

I resigned myself to it all being fine. Maybe I’d get lucky and sell him some homemade scones or some shit.

As luck and fate would have it, there was an ample dressing room in the basement and I had 15 minutes to make myself “glamorous” and you know what, that’s just what I did. As glamorous as I can look anyway. Which isn’t Barbie glamorous but it’s not bake sale mom either.

I threw on a dress that would’ve gotten me bounced from that bake sale. I did my makeup and even curled my hair.

I was ready. Well, as ready as one could be after that ordeal.

So, moments later, I was standing backstage when I heard that voice. You know the voice. We ALL know the voice.

It was Luke Skywalker. And he smiled at me. “Hi Jo!” He said.

And that’s when I about died dead.

Luke didn’t just say my name? He didn’t know my name? Did he? Could he have? It sure sounded like he had. I’m insane. This is insane. I’m dreaming. This is not happening. I’ll wake up so…

“So, Jo… is it weird that I feel like I know you when we’ve never met…” he said.

To my mind he carries a lightsaber and can use the force, so… weird is relative.

And before I blinked, in walked JB Pritzker and Jamie Harrison and and and…

We spent the night laughing at the show and hanging out. Which is insane to me. But no matter how many times I pinched myself it was still real. I wasn’t dreaming.

The original Star Wars trilogy has always represented a deep connection for me to my dad. It was all so special to him, and my memory of seeing Return of the Jedi with him is one of my clearest, most meaningful memories I have. I cherish it.

So, to meet Luke Skywalker, in real life, and for him to know who I was, and tell me that he was a fan, instantly reduced me to tears.

That was the Barbie moment of my life thus far.

But then I got to the convention. And that’s when shit got real.

Everywhere I walked, someone said hello. There was a creators lounge which was very, very VIP, with swanky soft-seating and snacks, which was way hipper than me, although I was very much down for the free snacks. I got to record for my own podcast and joined John Fuglesang’s radio show and Steph Miller’s show as well, and I got to meet so many wonderful, beautiful, impactful people my head was spinning.

I was doing what I love, surrounded by people that I love, in a place I had fallen in love with.

I was full-on living my Barbie life.

I have the BEST Michael Cohen story for another day, I promise.

With all of this said, the truth of the event, is that the star was the crowd. Ok, yes the speakers were phenomenal, but really it was the crowd which blew me away.

The energy in that arena was palpable. It was unlike anything I have ever known. People really were excited. They were optimistic. They were proud. They were happy. And above all, they were, well, we were — joyful.

I was too.

Although, confessedly, I didn’t know how I was going to feel about Biden’s speech on Monday night. I knew it was going to make me incredibly emotional. I didn’t want say goodbye. I was still feeling pangs of guilt for being excited about Kamala, and on some level, I guess I needed to hear him tell me it was all going to be ok. That I could let go, that I could fully embrace her candidacy.

And that’s just what he did.

I don’t tend to think of all of this as him “passing the torch” which to me feels truncated and final. I have come to think of it instead as him giving us all a comma in the middle of a sentence which he had started. One she will now get to finish. And then whomever it is that comes after her can begin the next sentence, and so on and so on, as each of them adds the paragraphs and pages of who we are, where we’ve been, and where we’re going in the never ending story of America.

And for me, the fact that I had the opportunity to witness that speech, to witness so many incredibly powerful speeches, in between meeting Governors, Senators, House members and Party Chairs, and hanging out with pundits, reporters and politicos, was the stuff my Barbies would have gotten to do. But not me.

Only I did.

It’s ok for me to dream about those kinds of things for myself now. They’re not just for the big-boobied Barbies I hid under my bed.

I can dream big. I can live a consequential life. I can have a front row seat to watch history unfold. And maybe, just maybe, I can leave my mark — for the better.

So, now that the DNC is behind us, and the real work begins, I promise you all, as I’ve promised my kids and I’ve promised myself - I am only going to work harder. I’m going to fight harder. I’m going to continue to believe in myself, in my party, in my country and in the promise of this Democracy.

And I will not quit.

Because just like Kamala says, when we fight, we win.

And we are going to win.

The Barbies have prophesied it.

They even saw the orgy part.

I told you they lived fabulous lives. 😈