Hey,
I'm SARAH Z.

Hi, hello!

 

Thanks for reading my words.  

 

I started writing said words when I was doing clinical rotations for a Physician Assistant graduate program in 2007. I needed to document when I witnessed the 2am call to the oncology unit to pronounce a death, the teen in the E.R. who lost his hearing snorting heroin, the first time I was trusted to hold a scalpel in the O.R. and all of the times I didn’t know things I was meant to know, how it felt in my gut. The pain, hope, and fear was so thick in the hospital it hung in the air...I was witnessing humanity at its breaking points and I found it exhilarating and confusing. I had to write it all down.

​

Then came infertility and miscarriages; my husband, Robb, and I trying for years to make and keep a pregnancy. I had to write about that, too. Each month, each cycle felt like a failed lifetime. Meds made me sweat and rage. Pregnancy, finally, but then blood and emptyness. The experience of being a patient instead of a provider. The excruciating grief and fear, despair, doubt…I found other women who knew those feelings, who’d been there in those bathrooms looking down at their blood, who understood life being broken up into 30-day chunks and everything depending on the results of a plastic stick. I had to write it all down.

​

​

​I wrote, and it helped me heal.

I wrote, and it helped them heal, too.

​

​

Eventually, I had two kids, and I had to write about the exhilarating, terrifying feelings of pregnancy and birth, and parenting real actual human people (dear Jebus- they're old now and it's still hard). After completing my Physician Assistant Master’s degree, I worked for over a decade in surgery and gynecology and later owned a vegan ice cream business. I currently reside in Northern California with the two kids, one husband, and a Greyhound dog named Abel. 

 

In the struggles and successes, in taking apart and rebuilding who I am as a person again and again, I've found the need to share it; the messy, impossible, tender, aggravating, and exhilarating moments. I have to write it all down.

​

So, now, I've been writing for fifteen years and not just for my friends and my mom (hi, mom!) anymore.  In addition to the two novels I've completed (publishing pending), I've written relatable, humorous, personal and informative essays on sex and marriage, parenting, identity, mental health, and women's health for P.S. I Love You, Giddy, Ravishly, Cafe Mom, Pregnant Chicken, The SEAM, and more, and have been recognized for humor writing by The Erma Bombeck Writer's Workshop and The Mark Twain House.

 

Here at Sarah Z Writer, we'll talk marriage, sex, parenting, mental health, career, woman-ing, aging, and injustice...all with a healthy dose of dick and fart jokes...because that's the seasoning in the stew of life. I don't make the rules. ;)

​

We are in this together. We feel less like failures, less alone in our uncertainty, suffering and fear when we share it all. ​In sharing my pain and joy, I aim to give words to our shared experiences.

​

l promise to show up authentically, vulnerably, honestly, and regularly.

​

Thank you for joining me, 

​

​

Sarah Zimmerman

 

​