I started having panic attacks — breathless bouts of terror that left me feeling queasy, drained and hopeless — every day. I didn’t leave my apartment unless I absolutely had to, and because I had the option of working from home, I rarely had to. But while my actual participation in life shrank down to a bare minimum, I still responded to hundreds of e-mail messages and kept up a stream of instant-messenger conversations while I wrote. Depending on how you looked at it, I either had no life and I barely talked to anyone, or I spoke to thousands of people constantly.

Famous for 15 People

I started seeing a therapist again, and we talked about my feelings of being inordinately scrutinized. “It’s important to remember that you’re not a celebrity,” she told me. How could I tell her, without coming off as having delusions of grandeur, that, in a way, I was? I obviously wasn’t “famous” in the way that a movie star or even a local newscaster or politician is famous — I didn’t go to red-carpet parties or ride around in limos, and my parents’ friends still had no idea what I was talking about when I described my job — but I had begun to have occasional run-ins with strangers who knew what I did for a living and felt completely comfortable walking up to me on the street and talking about it. The Monday after my disastrous CNN appearance, as I stood in line at Balthazar’s coffee bar, a middle-aged man in a suit told me to keep my chin up. “Emily, don’t quit Gawker!” a young guy shouted at me from his bicycle as I walked down the street one day. If someone stared at me on the subway, there was no way to tell whether they were admiring my outfit or looking at the stain on my sweater or whether they, you know, Knew Who I Was. The more people e-mailed the Gawker tip line with “sightings” of me — laden with bags from Target and scarfing ice cream while walking down Atlantic Avenue — the more I was inclined to believe it was the latter.

Oversharing on Gawker

I didn’t want to go to Fire Island. The trip would take two hours, and it would involve the subway, the Long Island Railroad, a van and a ferry. For a month, I’d been doing my best to avoid any venture more ambitious than the trip to the grocery store a block and a half away, whose clerks were, besides Henry, pretty much the only people I still spoke to aloud on a regular basis. Whenever I left this comfort zone, I would be seized by one of my irrational, heart-pounding meltdowns, which I would studiously conceal from my fellow subway passengers or pedestrians. The panic attacks were about a desire to be invisible, but if I showed any sign that I was having one, everyone would pay attention to me. It was kind of funny when you thought about it, and if you weren’t me.

But Choire, my boss, urged me to attend the staff retreat at a house near the beach so that we could all bond as a team. Henry discouraged me from going — he didn’t want me to push myself, and we were comfortable, weren’t we, in our sad little world together? He was as surprised as I was when, the morning of the retreat, I managed to pry myself out of bed and get myself onto the subway. Walking into Penn Station, I saw Josh and his stylish duffel leaning against a pillar. He looked up at me and smiled in a way that immediately distracted me from thoughts of how miserable I felt. The freakout I was dreading never came, and over the course of the next few days, I forgot to always be anticipating its arrival.

We each wrote our allotment of Gawker posts in the mornings, and in the afternoons we went to the beach. The water was freezing — it was still early in the summer — and we all ran into the waves together screaming. At night Choire cooked us elaborate feasts, and afterward we played Scrabble and watched bad movies. Josh and I sat together on the couch, and I put my head on his shoulder in a completely friendly, professional way. The next day, I let him apply sunscreen to the spot in the middle of my back that I couldn’t reach. As a joke, we walked down the wood-plank paths that crisscross the island holding hands. I also remember joking, via I.M. as we worked, about us wanting to cross the hallway that separated our bedrooms and crawl into bed with each other at night when we couldn’t sleep. On our last day, I congratulated myself on having made it through the trip without letting these jokes turn into real betrayal. And then, 20 minutes outside the city on the Long Island Railroad on the way home, Josh kissed me.

The next few weeks eliminated every constant from my life except my job. I moved out of the apartment where I’d lived for four years with Henry, and while I looked for a place on my own, I stayed in a tiny room in a loft full of hippies who brewed their own kombucha tea. I quit smoking pot cold turkey. My parents moved out of my childhood home to a different state because my dad had a new job. My best friend, Ruth, lived a hemisphere away in New Zealand, and though we sent each other epic e-mail messages and talked on the phone, I still felt unmoored in the way you can only feel after a breakup, as if you’re the last living speaker of some dying language. But even though this sense of disconnection from my old self and my old life was confusing, it felt mostly good. After all, what was so great about my old self and my old life, anyway?

I immersed myself in my job in a way I hadn’t even realized was possible — I thought about Gawker, one way or another, 24 hours a day, thrilling to the idea that a review of the restaurant where Josh and I were eating dinner might find its way onto the site the following day; pillow-talking about the site’s internal politics and our hopes and dreams about what we would do next. Just a few weeks earlier, I was scared to walk down my own block. Now I felt totally comfortable posting a picture of myself in a bathing suit on the site, inspiring Josh to do the same. I felt blazingly, insanely energized, and the posts came more easily than they ever had before.