Why? Because I have to answer to that too, or else I’ll miss at least half of what people need to tell me. Michelle has been the consensus wrong answer for most of my life. Even people who know me occasionally say it, catch themselves and correct it before I have to. People who know me less well can be more inventive. This month alone, I’ve been called Meryl and Miriam.

Why do I answer anyway? Because there’s no graceful way to interrupt a conversation just to announce that you aren’t the person everyone else has decided you are. I don’t like embarrassing people. I always intend to get to the correction after they finish their thought, and sometimes I actually follow through.

When I was growing up in the ’80s, I could at least understand the Michelle part. Michelles were everywhere. They seemed to multiply like Tribbles, sometimes two or three in each class. And why was the double-consonant rule tossed out for the random Michelles who spelled it “Michele”? As if hearing the name all day wasn’t enough, we also had to add, “Is that one L or two?”

During my 12 years of school, I never once encountered another Melissa. There were no other Melissas in my class, in the grade ahead of me or waiting somewhere on the attendance sheet to prove that my name had caught on.

But I suppose it did catch on, as now I meet Melissas all the time, which has ruined the only theory I had. My name is common enough. except to the people who are speaking directly to me. I’ve never polled any other Melissas, so I still don’t know whether this is a name problem or whether I somehow present as a Michelle.

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Eventually, I started shrugging it off. There must simply be something about Melissa, meaning the name, not me as a person. I didn’t know exactly what the something was, but the phrase made me laugh and gave me a response to a phenomenon I had no way to explain. It also proved versatile enough to follow me into adulthood.

The best example of all this came shortly after my then-husband and I essentially eloped. Most of his extended family learned we were married through the announcement we mailed afterward. It clearly said Melissa, but the congratulations cards from his relatives in the Midwest were all addressed to Michelle.

Not long after that, those relatives came to town for a cousin’s wedding. It would be the first time I met them. My mother-in-law politely corrected them before the visit, so by the time they arrived, they knew my name was Melissa and were prepared to apologize.

Naturally, the rest of us decided this was too good an opportunity to waste. As soon as they got off the plane, the New Jersey family started calling me Michelle. I went along with it while our visitors stood frozen. They had planned to apologize as soon as they saw me, but now they weren’t so sure.

We let the confusion continue for a few minutes before admitting it was a joke. Everyone laughed, and that should have been the end of it. It was not.

The next day, we all attended the wedding. I’d been asked to read the Love Chapter during the service. You know the one: “Love is patient, love is kind.” (Yeah, that one. Hey, give us a break. We were young, and it still felt cool to us!)

As instructed, I introduced myself to the priest shortly after I arrived. I told him my name and watched him write Melissa on the sheet he was using for the service.

When it was time for the reading, he stood before the church and announced, “And now, at the bride’s request, Michelle will do a reading.”

About 15 of us, including the bride and groom, burst out laughing loudly and long enough to halt the service. I had to preface my reading with, “Sorry, I guess you had to be there.”

To everyone else in the church, it must have seemed as though we all had such little faith in true love we found it hilarious. The priest knew nothing about what had happened the day before. He had the correct name right in front of him. Yet somehow, once again, Michelle was being summoned and I was expected to stand up.

The universe had not only understood the joke, it had managed to improve it.

At that point, I had to concede there really might be something about Melissa, and from then on I leaned into it.

Something About Melissa became my Instagram handle. Later, I used it as the DBA for my work as a freelance writer and producer. Eventually, I used it for this Substack too.

When I first arrived on Substack, I mostly lurked and read. Then, as I worked on my books, I started looking through what I’d left on the cutting-room floor. Some of the most personal stories hadn’t made it into the books. There was a lot of humor and a healthy mix of pain, joy, wisdom and stupidity. There was so much Melissa!

I decided to dust those stories off, polish them up and read them on the Gen X Jersey podcast. Now I write some of them down to share here too.

But I’m not changing my Substack identity to Gen X Jersey quite yet. Maybe I never will. Maybe there was always something about me, and it just took me a while to get comfortable letting strangers read about it.

P.S. If you feel as though you’ve seen me here or on social media under a different name, you’re not hallucinating. Something About Melissa is the name of this Substack and my longtime freelance business. Gen X Jersey is the name I use for the podcast, radio show and personal writing I share here. And, well, there might be a few defunct businesses with my name on them out there too. Don’t worry. I swear I’ve got it together now. It’s just the two names (for now!).

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🎧 Songs you know, songs you forgot and a few you might have missed.

Make a request: Call 732-455-9155

🎙️ Follow Gen X Jersey in Instagram @ genxjerseyshow

Click the player and come along for the ride, or copy/paste the link below it into your browser.

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Wait, NO! That didn’t come out right. Ahem, OK, let’s start here. I’m starting to wrap my head around the kind of thing I want to write about here more often, and weirdly, that’s the gist for today.

I haven’t done a lot of written Substack posts, which is slightly ridiculous because writing is what I do. My day job is ghostwriting for other people. I can take someone else’s thoughts, shape them into something that sounds like them, edit like nobody’s business and eventually mark the thing finished. My own thoughts are another story. I can revise myself forever.

That’s why I read things aloud on my Gen X Jersey podcast. When I imagine I’m talking to one person, I’m much more concise. I trust what comes out of my mouth more than what comes off my keyboard. I know when I’ve made the point. I know when to stop.

I do recognize that joining Substack and then largely avoiding writing on it may be a tad controversial. So today, this is me trying to write the same way, but in under 4,337 revisions.

And see? I came here to tell you how an Instagram account accidentally made this week’s radio playlist, and I’ve already spent several paragraphs talking about myself and writing. This is exactly my problem. So, anyway. The playlist…

I spend a lot of time following current events, but music is usually where I go to get away from them. By 10 p.m., I’ve had enough news for one day. My little radio show is the place where I stop thinking quite so hard and try to get people to listen to music with me.

This week, I found myself pretty deep into an Instagram account called PB Sandcastle, where the person behind it has been painstakingly working through the released Epstein files and cross-referencing redacted material with public sources to restore context, names and images where they can. It’s meticulous work, and I’m genuinely grateful that someone is willing to spend the time doing it.

The information itself was difficult to read. And yet, after every few Reels, my brain would interrupt with:

Oh damn, that’s a great song.

Then another one.

Wait. What is this?

Then another.

“I love this song.”

“Oooh, haven’t heard this one in a while…”

At some point, I realized I was reading one story while my ears were writing their own tale.

And by the time I climbed out of that particular rabbit hole, I had the beginnings of an hour of genuinely cool music. Which is probably the strangest route I’ve ever taken to my on air radio show playlist.

But that’s why I started doing the show in the first place. Gen X Jersey Radio isn’t a current-events show. It isn’t a deep dive into music history either. I play things you know, things you forgot, things you may never have heard and whatever else sounds good together.

The music is supposed to be the escape. The whole philosophy of the show is probably summed up by the way I end every week: “Good night and good music.”

This week, apparently, the escape came directly from the thing I was trying to escape from. So that’s given me a good guardrails for my writing here. Find the thing I’d tell a friend in the moment but would probably forget by the time I saw them. Come here and tell you instead.

Preferably before 4,337 revisions redact all the interesting parts.

Programming note: Those songs became this week’s Gen X Jersey radio show, airing Wednesday at 10 p.m. on Radio Garden State via Live 365. Paid subscribers can listen to the replay on demand here afterward. The Gen X Jersey podcast lives on all major streaming services and here for free and for all to read.

He told me he wasn’t going to go to any more doctors. Then he made me promise not to tell anyone else who cared about him that he was sick.

So I didn’t.

“In Sickness,” is my true story about the consequences of a promise and how far “in sickness and in health” is supposed to reach.

Listen to this short read here on Substack on Gen X Jersey, Episode 2.

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Spoiler alert: This is close to the ending of the book I’m currently shopping to agents.

I’m sharing it anyway.

Grief in Brief is a short work of literary nonfiction about the uneven path toward this conclusion. There are no shortcuts to it, and knowing where the path ends won’t get you there, only walking it can do that. I’d really appreciate your thoughts.

What I Say When There’s Nothing to Say

Many years ago, when I was quite young, a coworker lost her 16-year-old son to suicide. I didn’t have much experience with death then but I knew enough to understand it was heartbreaking and impossible to make sense of.

Like everyone else in the office, I went to the service. I remember standing in line to offer my condolences and feeling terrified. I didn’t know what to say. Nothing felt adequate but to my younger self, silence didn’t feel like an option either.

When my turn came, I told her the truth. I said I was so sorry and that I didn’t know what to say.

She looked at me thoughtfully, and then thanked me for admitting it. There was nothing I could say to make it better, she told me. All I could do was wish her peace.

She said all the talk about acceptance made no sense to her. It actually made her angry. She couldn’t imagine ever accepting what had happened. She doubted any of the familiar consolations she’d heard throughout the day would ever bring her any comfort at all.

Peace was different, and it was something she wished for herself and her family. Peace, she explained, might allow her to keep functioning because she still had other children who needed their mother.

I’ve never forgotten that.

Peace doesn’t require acceptance. It doesn’t ask someone to approve of what happened, make sense of it or stop wishing it had gone differently. It’s simply the hope that they eventually find enough solid ground to keep living and loving.

The ideas in this book have led me to that kind of peace. My regrets have lost some of their power. Still, I can’t necessarily prove the things I ask you to believe in the pages before this one.

Then again, can anyone prove love itself?

We can’t see or measure it, yet most of us organize our lives around it. After a lifetime peppered with loss, I no longer see grief as evidence that love has nowhere to go. I see it as evidence that I am worthy of love.

That idea has brought me peace.

Not peace with every loss or every circumstance. There are still people I miss, anger over how they were taken from me and moments I wanted to go differently.

But I have peace all the same. The kind that allows me to remember someone without being consumed by their absence.

We often say “rest in peace” when someone dies. I believe the people we love want that for us as well. Not someday when the grief is over, but while we are still here living our lives. If grief truly is one final act of love, then peace is the gift hidden inside it.

And peace is enough.

In this episode of the new chapter of Gen X Jersey, she looks back on the secret her husband asked her to keep, the help he refused and her decision not to tell anyone. A year later, the problem returned far more seriously, leaving her to question what her silence may have cost.

Against the end of a 22-year marriage, Melissa reflects on what it means to promise “in sickness and in health,” then lose the right to see that promise through. She shares what it felt like to stand outside the crisis, caught between guilt, relief and resentment while someone else became the person beside him.

🎧 Songs you know, songs you forgot and a few you might have missed.
Make a request: Call 732-455-9155
🎙️ Follow Gen X Jersey in Instagram @ genxjerseyshow

Click the player and come along for the ride, or copy/paste the link below it into your browser.

https://www.mixcloud.com/GenXJersey/gen-x-jersey-show-72926/

Tune in live if you like, Wednesdays • 10 PM • Radio Garden State
Listen on Live 365/Radio Garden State, Audacy or RadioGardenState. com

In this episode of this new chapter of Gen X Jersey, she shares the deeply personal story behind her writing, and why she’s still willing to play the long game. Melissa grew up believing that you did the work first. You wrote the book, recorded the album, built the business or learned the craft. Then, if the work was good enough, you found an audience.

Today, the order is reversed, they expect you to build an audience before you get support for your body of work. She shares why she still believes in the traditional publishing path and why Gen X Jersey is the place where the stories behind her new book can be told first.

This episode begins at the beginning, in the early 1970s. If you grew up Italian-American in New Jersey, this may feel very familiar...think Sunday sauce, Entenmann’s cakes and a little bit of multi-generational drama. And even if you didn’t, it might still sound like someone you know.

These early experiences drove the habits that led Melissa to become the writer, music lover, foodie, traveler, and observer she is today.

If you have something to say about anything in this episode, or if you’d like to share your own chapter, call 732-455-9155.