LAST SPRING I was lying crumpled up in bed, crying and about to phone my mother for the third time that day, when it occurred to me that my post-breakup situation was funny. It was like one of the scenes in the beginnings of romantic comedies, right before the brokenhearted future couple meets in some cutesy way. I was Bridget Jones, drinking in Christmas pajamas. If she could get up off the couch and put the vodka down, so could I – and I could make it funny. And public.

(And he would see it, the fucker).

I sent an email to my staff at NYU Local, the NYU blog where I’d been serving as the Multimedia Editor, explaining my idea to make a series of videos documenting me getting over the incident with the help of other people from NYU Local. Friends from different sections of the blog would act as my “grief counselors” in different situations – the sports guy would be my personal trainer, the girl who wrote the “NYU’s most eligible bachelor” series would set me up with someone, etc.

We started with movies. Here’s the first video, in which Dan, Local’s film critic, tries to cheer me up with a flick:

Rosie Gray Is Blue: Part One from NYU Local on Vimeo.

Get it? It’s not actually that funny, really. But it was fun to make. The reason we seem drunk is because we are. The Carlo Rossi was not just for decoration. Dan climbed through the window ten times to get the shot right. After that, he went to class drunk in a suit. When the crew left, I crawled back into bed.

The video got a lot of positive feedback. Here I was online, in sweatpants, clutching a jug of questionable wine, crying. People like to see people struggle. We Live in Public, and all that.

After Part 1, we got to work on Part 2. In this one, I was to move past the lying-in-bed-not-showering phase of breakup recovery into the getting blitzed phase. I recruited Suri, who writes about booze for Local and was doing a Drink of the Week column at the time. She came up with a strongly alcoholic drink –- Rosie’s Breakup Cocktail –- and here’s what happened:

Rosie Gray is Blue: Part Two from NYU Local on Vimeo.

You know, it’s kind of hard for me to watch these now. Partly because it’s embarrassing in the same way that footage of your eighth grade ballet recital is embarrassing, and partly because I was so sad and blah then.

The script for recovering from a breakup didn’t always to include blasting your heartbreak all over the Internet for all to see, even if you upped the tongue-in-cheek factor. Now there are so many outlets with which to publicly display how wretched you are, it’s impossible to avoid them all. And if you’re like me, you find heretofore-unused ones most likely against your better judgment.

Did these videos actually help me get through that emo, dejected  phase of my life? I like to think that they did, but I probably would have been fine without them. But the fact that I even had the idea to make them is kind of, let’s face it, weird. Actually being a disastrous, depressive mess was too hard for me to deal with, but playing a disastrous, depressive mess for other people’s enjoyment was just fine. If my situation couldn’t be funny and shareable, I couldn’t deal with it.

It was also about being a control freak. I had been dumped, and so I wasn’t in control. But making these videos put me back in control of the situation (or so the reasoning went in my clearly fucked-up mind). I wasn’t functioning, and needed to do something. Where other people might take up a new hobby or adopt a cat, I made oversharey videos.

What the hell, the videos are sweet in their way. But if I had to go back and do it all over again (God forbid), I’d just stay in bed with the Carlo Rossi, cameras not included.