The Lady in the Blue Box

Rachel Beth Ahrens is a graduate from Towson University with a Bachelor’s degree in Mass Communication/Journalism. She has written pieces for a number of local publications such as The Hunt online magazine, Shockwave and her college campus newspaper The Towerlight. In 2018 at age 30, she went back to college at CCBC to pursue a two year degree in business and quit journalism completely when she realized rock music reporting turned to hip hop stars and politics more than anything. The following year, her father was diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer and a staph infection in his left leg in the same exact week, leading to a major amputation surgery above the knee, massive amounts of chemo and radiation therapy, and selling her childhood home all before COVID19 arrived in Maryland, leaving Rachel homeless for almost a month. Between the years of 2019 and 2020, she had probably one of the greatest ideas to write a novel about her ongoing war with bipolar depression.

She lives in White Marsh, Maryland with her family and her 12-year-old longhair miniature dachshund Cinderella, who takes up most of her royal puppy-ness being Rachel’s spoiled red-haired sister in the household.

She finished writing her first novel about mental illness and suicide, Instant Infinity, on July 25, 2020 at midnight, her 32nd birthday exactly. It is now live on Wattpad.com and is in the running for the 2020 Watty Awards (#wattys2020) as well as #pitchwars on Twitter, and she is actively querying to seek agent representation for her new book. It has always been her passion to see her name on a bookshelf in the Baltimore County Public Library, not just bookstores or Amazon, the library, and to get on the New York Times Bestseller List, since she was in college.

Currently, at the ripe age of 32, she has dropped out of CCBC for personal, financial, and family crisis reasons, mostly because of her migraine disability that she cannot handle an online class, and due to health risks regarding COVID19. She currently has no dream job, no goals, no plans, no money, no prospects, and all she’s armed with is her crochet hooks and yarn, sewing supplies, her multicolored variety collection of ink pens and colored pencils, adult coloring books, other crafty things, and Dollar Store and Five Below quality notebooks for her daily writings.

She has no dream jobs and no job goals for the future, professing herself as the “ultimate life failure”, and her current job seeking plans are to find a job pumping gas at a Wawa or Safeway in Baltimore. She prefers to live her life vicariously through other people, just like the American Idol contestant Catie Turner’s song “21st Century Machine”, which is on the Instant Infinity soundtrack on her outdated iPod Nano that nobody makes anymore.

Since she was in theatre class in high school, unlike Lin-Manuel Miranda playing Conrad Birdie, for she was cast as the tiny part of Nancy in “The Telephone Hour” her senior year, Rachel Beth Ahrens was “always the extra or the back of the choir, never the leading lady.” The theatre and music choir kids in Perry Hall High School where she graduated were the most popular kids in her school (the biggest hypocrites, she found out at her 10 year reunion in 2016), and she ended up not feeling like she fit in anywhere, not even with the Goth kids watching anime, even when she brought her Sailor Moon videos. Which is why she continues to sing in empty karaoke bars, quitting performing in community theatre shows at the age of 19 permanently, and she hates singing competitions, preferring to sing on her own without the threat of any cash prizes or chances to be a lead singer in a band, or both.

But she still wishes all of her books were set to rock and punk music like a real movie. Maybe like My Chemical Romance lead singer Gerard Way’s Dark Horse Comics creation, The Umbrella Academy, now on Netflix.

See her first blog post here >>> and start your own story…

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Rachel posts updates regularly on Twitter (“Twittervale”, affectionately, named after her first children’s story idea when she was young, “The Vale of the Bunnies”), on @RachelBeth99. (my legal given first name, the shortened version of my middle name Elizabeth, 99 as in Agent 99 from Get Smart, not the year. I was born in 1988, says my State of Maryland Real ID.)

New Update on Corona Virus, September 2020: Rachel is a proud supporter of the Hispanic Heritage Federation for efforts during Black Lives Matter and the Hispanic and Latino communities in America and Puerto Rico that have been severely impacted by COVID19. She began donating during summer of 2020 during Phase 1 of reopening Maryland efforts by Governor Larry Hogan (R) (MD) in efforts of helping Maryland businesses recover from Corona Virus.

She also proudly supports the National Alliance for Mental Illness, at nami.org, the largest 501(c)(3) nonprofit grassroots in efforts of helping millions of Americans find amnesty and assistance with their mental illnesses to stop the stigma of bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, and other diseases of the mind and emotions, and especially help all mental illness patients prevent suicide during the horrible times of Corona Virus in 2020. Rachel has been living with bipolar I, severe anxiety, agoraphobia, and rapid cycling since June 2015, and has been living without any suicidal thoughts or actions for over five years.

On being Irish-German-American and a resilient feminist, she says, “I am a complete and total coward, because I either run away or give up too soon on multiple projects, and that includes my aspirations for a job or a career. But through my complete cowardice, I’m incredibly brave. Don’t give up until someone hears your story.”

“We are ever changing, magical, awesome creatures. Yes, go ahead and say it- I’m a special unicorn fully capable of kicking ass!” -Felicia Day (“Geek Goddess”, affectionately coined by Ahrens herself)