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  • The Relief of Vulnerability

    Note: As I share this I realize there are multiple layers to the vulnerability I am speaking about, and here are two – the actual act of being vulnerable with my husband that you are to read about read below, and the vulnerability of writing it down and sharing it on my blog and social media. I am still sometimes wildly uncomfortable with sharing my writing and the truths I have discovered. Why? Because somewhere along the way some voice inside of me starting saying, “it’s a bit too much – cease the overshare.” What do I say to that voice today? Don’t be such a coward. 

    And what the hell else can I write about on here except that which has shaped and transformed my life? (You can find my fiction somewhere in the bowels of my computer documents.)

    I admire writers today who tell all their murky stories about drug addiction, eating disorders, toxic relationships and failed marriages, troubles with parenting, problems with career, and cultural and political woes. I especially admire writers who not only tell these stories but talk about their conflicting thoughts and feelings surrounding these issues. I like when they don’t sugarcoat it or wrap it all up in a nice bow. I really like it when they don’t tell you what you want to hear. They say, here is the resentment, rage, fury, grief, self-pity, sadness, and overwhelm that took over my life. Here are the crazy coping mechanisms I picked up along the way. Here are the insane thoughts of giving up I had, of running away, of ending it all. Here are the irrational beliefs I have had about life. Here is my suffering. Agh, does it get me going! Such raw human emotion. Not colored and filtered and tidied up all nice with image-awareness and perfectionism. Just pure unadulterated icky sticky honesty. And what comes through that honesty? An even sparklier jewel than before.

    Sure, it makes us uncomfortable. Have you ever been in a meeting at work or a family affair where someone breaks through the facade of niceties and lays it all bare? You want to hide inside yourself, don’t you? You want to look down or check your phone or say, hey now, come on now – it’s natural to bristle against cold hard reality. And sometimes we should. Civility is highly necessary. But so is telling the truth. So is normalizing humanness, lest we mistake it for some Instagram-storied airbrushed and filtered slice of life striving for a certain image image. You know what I mean.

    Even my disclaimer of being uncomfortable putting my writing out there is still a bit of a railing against vulnerability and honesty. As if I am asking permission or at least saying, warning, this piece is going to tell the truth about how I sometimes cry myself into a puddle. Baby steps, my friends. Feel the fear and do it anyway.

    —

    I spent a full hour the other night sobbing to my husband, who, gracious man that he is, did his best to comfort and console me through the swinging ebbs of anger, sadness, and fear. My tidal of emotions came from out of the depths, triggered by a rather mild incident, and I was immediately thrust into a swirling range of feeling that bounced from homesickness to loneliness to overwhelm to irritation-inspired resentment, to fear of such intensity, to tender hearted sadness at the humanness of it all.

    I have always been one who is visited by giant looming feelings, though I spent many years of my life desperately outrunning actually feeling. I learned quite young to repress my strong reactions to life. When the repressing lid was no longer fitting on quite tight enough and the emotions were threatening to erupt and seemingly break my heart, I learned to drink, do drugs, eat, exercise, cut, shop, work, study, obsess, and fear – anything to prevent what felt like a danger zone in my guts and chest, ever-rising.

    And then I learned through many years of recovery to allow the feelings and let them bowl me over, let them make me feel as if I had no skin or was being boiled alive, until I then learned to tolerate them, until I naturally allowed them to come, until they came on their own and spilled from me and took me on a wild ride to eventual relief. It is a big fat fresh breath of liberation to allow the feelings to move through me. And they move through a lot faster when I’ve welcomed them home.

    But oh the yarns I’ll weave about their being there. I sometimes wonder if I am two selves, two brains, two dueling organisms of experience. It might really be what Freud and Jung understood, that I have an ego and a superego telling the little id child in me to knock it off, calm down, toughen up, and quit overreacting. Maybe it’s a parent’s voice from long ago, or a societal message, or something I learned in school – who knows. What I do know is that my instinct is to judge myself and immediately assume that there is something wrong with my heightened experience of emotions and that I ought to do something about it. My instinct is to tell myself that I am overreacting, being dramatic, am forever too sensitive, overblowing issues, wallowing, being negative, not looking on the bright side, not taking care of myself – when the actual reality in the moment is that I am just having normal human emotions and reactions to life circumstances, and jeez, it just is what it is. Drop the story. For once, let my love of fiction and drama take a backseat.

    When I allow myself the space to have all the feelings, (even the pesky judgment of feelings), they pass by and I’m washed clean, and then I can reevaluate and see if maybe there is some truth to my judgmental thoughts – maybe there are areas of my life where I can make changes that will support my mental and emotional health. Do I need some outside support? A good talk with a friend or mentor? Some exercise sessions? Some time outdoors? A more nutritious meal? A bit of prayer or meditation? Maybe more fun? Or less of something? Better sleep? Maybe I need to change nothing at all and the feelings are simply what they are anyway – a moment. Making the changes can be important, but they come second and they need not alert the critic and the task force to start setting about making plans  – first I just need to let the feelings be there and not be so rough with myself about having them. They are usually telling the truth anyway, even if the truth comes through wails and salty tears and a sinking feeling that everything is falling apart. 

    In many circles today, they call this vulnerability. Me wailing to my husband is me showing my humanness and taking a risk – that I might overwhelm him or scare him or that he might not comfort me exactly how I want, that I am showing a part of myself, a fragile, sensitive, delicate part that was once told to stay hidden because she was a bit much. Who was once told to toughen up. Who was once taught to stop complaining stop crying stop feeling just stop. And risking that she might be told this again, especially now that she is an adult. But I picked the right man, because he doesn’t tell me this. He holds me, he tells me I’m brave and wise and beautiful and wonderful and that everything is alright, and he makes a few jokes, and he gives me the time to keep talking and keep going and then eventually catch my breath.

    I am an adult, today, though, not a little child, and I’m not in the business of doing this to my husband night after night, nor do I have these strong moments of feeling night after night. It’s not his perpetual job to rescue me from my childhood fears or sometimes bottomless pit of emotions. As an adult, it is not the world’s job either to cater to these feelings. What a mess we’d all be in if that were the case. It’s my job to tend to them and to build enough of a support system so that I am not all alone and out to sea when the going gets tough. But it’s never perfect. It’s always messy. It’s uncomfortable. But it’s the way.

    I still sometimes forget this and belief in the firm hand, the tough rawhide of love. There is a place for that, but not in how I treat and talk to myself while in the midst of pain. Self-compassion has nothing to do with self-pity or self-indulgence, nor does it mean I’m going to wallow for days on end or throw in the towel of dusting myself off and trying again. Quite the contrary, it allows me to treat myself gently and delicately so that it all can pass through, and then I am more likely to get back up and get busy living. It is natural for those of us who struggle with vulnerability and self-compassion to deny it to ourselves out of fear of being unproductive, lazy, or maudlin. We are the ones who need it the most. It has only ever been the denial of emotion that has kept me stuck.

    I still can find myself thinking there is more pride or reverence in the toughen up honey path, but the truth is that everything that blocks me – fear, self-pity, pain, isolation, addictive tendencies – arise more when I am hard on myself and instead delicately fall away when I give myself self-compassion and lovingkindness. A paradox perhaps, or maybe just the deepest truth. Something shifts within, a quiet awakening of relief and absolute capital L Love in the midst of sincere vulnerability and sweetness that makes the higher-self path more prevalent – forgiveness comes, perspective comes, softening comes. It is less about the little stories that keep me weak or victimized or stuck in the slow burn of fury and more about the common humanity that we all share.

    We all share the understanding of the presented acceptable civilized persona vs. the deepest truth of being human, and hey, maybe some more in the others. Personalities differ, family systems differ, astrological charts differ (hardy har har). Do what you want with the experience that you have. I’ll be over here feeling it all, writing about it, and then taking three months of mustering up the courage to post it on my blog.

  • The Loneliness of Aloneness/The Taboo of Needing/ (The Irony of this Post)

    Summer 2017

    For the past week I’ve been playing on repeat Lorde’s fantastic sophomore album Melodrama, and though I’m not exactly twenty years old and not exactly a famous singer/songwriter and not exactly partying in clubs any longer to tend to broken-hearted wounds, I know to the bones what she has written and recorded and applaud her for arranging the album in such a way as to shed light on a very special, sacred truth – we must fall in love with ourselves and learn to be alone, but that doesn’t mean we don’t get goddamn lonely and want to fall in love again.

    In the first track she’s struggling to get over a failed relationship – “oh I wish I could get my things/ and just let go” – and by the fourth she’s back into the rushing magic (and the suffering) of getting “caught up just for a minute” and falling flat into a love that will inevitably crumble. By the fifth track she laments that she is better on her own and has learned to “go home into the arms of the girl that I love/the only love I haven’t screwed up” (meaning herself), and though she is “so hard to please” she tries to be her own lover, care for herself the way she once cared for him. She croons oh so beautifully that she “loves it here, since I stopped needing you.” Her relationship with herself is beginning to thrive, the humming high of grasping at nothing, at loving oneself so much that it’s just enough, and there’s no frenzied search to fill the void with someone else. And so it goes. That refrain, that in between, that time alone to collect and go inward, or look upward to the stars – but not to someone else – to try a little tenderness with our own vulnerable selves is a sacred thing, a gentle thing, a difficult thing.

    I certainly had to learn how to have a kind, lover-like relationship with myself and not be so dependent on the attention and support of others. And it’s a beautiful walk home, to learn how to cradle ourselves and rock ourselves to sleep, because even though we are social creatures and need each other, if we can’t fully tend to the one in the mirror, it’s hard to let someone else chip in.

    But the album goes on, and she spirals through the resentment of broken love and the intrusive memories of past relationships – the “supercut” of euphoric recall – and by the final track she shouts, “now I can’t stand to be alone.”

    And so it goes. We are only human. And it can get so lonely being alone.

    I spent my late teens and early twenties in the “serial monogamy” turnstile, boyfriend after boyfriend after boyfriend, absolutely incapable and unwilling to learn how to have a relationship with myself and be on my own for even a month. I was in the beginning stages of discovering sobriety and was stripped bare enough – dear god I am not just going to feel it all. It would have been too brutal. I didn’t know at the time that I couldn’t be alone – I just kept taking the cheater back and finding the next one when that finally crumbled and wobbling in and out of savage relapses and shoving shoving shoving down the giant stockpile of suffering underneath time with men. I wrote a lot of poetry and smoked a lot of cigarettes and listened to Tori Amos and Ani DiFranco. Oh, brother.

    But then I did learn. The latter half of my twenties I danced on my own, I stroked my own cheek, I found out who I was without a love interest. I spent good stretches without boyfriends or serious dating. I explored who I was with just a career, with just a family, with just a group of friends, with just me. I learned I liked being alone and was at peace alone and did my best creative work alone. I was proud I learned. It felt meaningful and it was necessary, and I wasn’t in any hurry.

    But I’m only human, and I can’t always stand it – to tuck only myself in, night after night.

    I met someone in another city recently and, romantic that I am, I fell a bit in love with him over a weekend. That might not actually be true – what is falling in love anyway? – it may have just been temporary infatuation and getting caught up in the “rush at the beginning.” I did rush, and we moved a bit fast, and none of that helps the logical rational part of the brain pace itself and see things clearly. Or hell, maybe it was a bit of falling in love. I certainly hadn’t felt that way with someone in a very long time, even my last boyfriend. The truth is it was probably both, but the answer doesn’t matter.

    What matters is how I tended to myself afterwards when I arrived back in Los Angeles, and when I heard from him only a handful of times until the screen went dark, and I knew he was gone and it was simply an early summer fling, and that I couldn’t stand to be alone. In came the fears and frustrations and fates and furies. Where is my husband, why does no one love me, if I don’t meet someone soon I won’t ever get pregnant, this is all so unfair and nothing ever works out, and it’s all my fault, I shouldn’t have moved so fast, had I played my cards better this guy would be asking me to move to be with him, and it’s because I’m not this enough or I’m too much of that, and on and on spiral spiral spiral.

    And in came the defenses, too, the anger that always masks vulnerability and grief. Fuck him, he wasn’t THAT great anyway, et cetera. You know.

    Maybe, finally, it just was what it was, an experience that happened that made my heart flip and reminded me of all of my goodness and all of my frailties and all that I so deeply love about myself and all I’m so sick of and how, at the end of each night, I still want what most of us want – someone to hold me and love me and build a life with. And there’s nothing wrong with that, and that doesn’t go away just because I can hold my own hands now and not squeeze too hard, and it isn’t as if I’m not strong or independent. I’m human, and I let someone in, and I’m glad I did, even if he didn’t feel much like staying.

    And if right now, I can’t stand to be alone, I’ll just write about it. I still come home to me and take good care of me. I’ll never stop doing that. I think I just want someone to show all that off to.

    Winter 2018

    I wrote the above piece before my long distance romance with *Jim blossomed and eventually turned into big fat true love, and I keep it there and a part of this piece because I think it reflects an honest and oh dear so sweet snapshot of what many of us go through when we think something isn’t going to work out.

    But sometimes, I tell you, things work out.

    I think it also reflects how longing for something can feel incredibly risky, especially when there is a whole history behind that longing that tries to convince you it wouldn’t have mattered anyway.

    Sometimes, I tell you, it matters.

    For a stretch of time in my mid to late twenties, I got it into my head that to desire a partnership with a man, to long for marriage and children, to potentially be somewhat supported by a husband, was a shameful and old-fashioned mindset. Sure, I could ponder those things, but did I need them? Hell no, not me! I was a strong, independent woman who could certainly make it on my own. (Where the kids would come from was something I’d deal with later.) And why did I want them to begin with? Surely it was oppressive society that had brainwashed me into believing I needed such mainstream trappings in order to be happy. (Then again, I now wonder what takes precedence over those “mainstream trappings” of love, intimate connection, and family as you grow older, [which are, by the way, probably much more biologically inherent than societally encouraged than we are willing to admit, but I’ll save philosophical musings for another time.])

    So I got defensive about it all. I read ridiculous asinine untruthful articles on Salon and Jezebel, I considered myself a victim to the “industrial beauty complex,” and therefore rejected putting much time or energy into looking and feeling beautiful, I judged and blamed men for possessing certain masculine traits (which I now revere), and I stayed nice and alone. Was I happy? Meh. Mostly, I was exhausted from teaching full time and sorting out all of my early sobriety inner demons in AA and Al-Anon. I wasn’t unhappy, but I wasn’t exactly fulfilled. For all that teaching has to offer in terms of personal connection, often being a soul-level rewarding career path, any career in and of itself, for me, simply cannot triumph over intimacy. It just can’t rock me to sleep at night. (In fact, it kept me up plenty of nights.)

    Truthfully, much of that alone time was needed and nourishing. The only way out is through, yes? As I declared in the former portion of this post, I learned how to take good care of myself and stand on my own two feet. I was moving through the push oneself out of the crusty eggshell phase of your twenties, which I consider an excruciating decade. (I also wasn’t getting hammered for most of them, which is perhaps why they were ultra up close and brutal.)

    But when I began to emerge from this somewhat solitary portion of my life, when I saw the light around much of the feminist ideology that I no longer believed to be telling the truth, when I left the teaching world and caught my breath, when I started dating again in an actual way and tending to my overall appearance with more effort and care, I noticed how many odd beliefs and behaviors I had about women and men, which I now consider misguided, and that these beliefs and behaviors seemed rather common. Namely, that there was something taboo (and therefore guilt was readily available to cling to me like sludge) with admitting that two might be better than one, that feminine and masculine might complement each other, that needing a man and committing to a man was a lovely thing.

    So as I dated haphazardly and bitched and complained about it all with my girlfriends, I felt this strange paradox that I had to somehow feel put out by love, had to keep justifying I didn’t actually really want or need it, while all along I actually did want and need and believe in and felt I deserved just as much as the next happily married person – a partner. How dare I!

    So, yes, as I dated haphazardly, I had to kiss some frogs first – some benevolent toads I just couldn’t have a future with, others dangerous poison tipped slimers who seemed hellbent on making me suffer. Still, I wanted, still I needed. (Perseverance and resilience, priority one!) I had a lot of rules about the type I longed for, even though I was beginning to understand that how you felt with someone was far more important than the appearance or the stats. Love is a feeling and an action, not necessarily what you see in an Instagram post (except for the ones about puppies.)

    But when you’re getting better, it’s a jagged line, and I think this applies to any period of change and growth. Up, down, two steps back, whoa look-y here, I’m different! I had quite a personal evolution, a few years in the making, around certain fundamental outlooks strongly correlated to men, women, and relationships, and this, I believe contributed to my ability to be receptive not defensive, hopeful not cynical, when an eligible man, a prince instead of a frog, came along and sat next to me at a bar in Chicago.

    When I met and fell in love with Jim, I knew. But I also kept getting the sense that to some, I was foolish for putting quite a bit of stock into a man I hadn’t known in real time for very long. Again, women are taught today, for better or for worse, that we don’t need men, that there is now something inherently shameful about chasing love, and especially rushing into love, and as I explained above, I believed this once, too. Yes, women don’t need men like they need oxygen and food and water, and we can do any damn thing we want on our own thank you very much (well, mostly) but it’s also just fine if we do need a little bit. I dare say that many of us do better with a (healthy) partner by our side. I also believe rushing is only rushing if you are fighting against what is naturally unfolding. For Jim and me, it just naturally unfolded quickly!

    There were those who questioned (no doubt with good intentions) my decision to travel to see him more than he came to see me and my ultimate decision to move to another state to be with him and start our life. Risky perhaps, but I just knew, oh god did I know. Luckily, most were highly supportive (or just really good at keeping their opinions to themselves), and some shared with me their own whirlwind romances that blossomed into highly successful marriages and families. As Harry once declared to Sally, “when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.”

    Though the taboo of needing had me a bit freaked out at times, I went with how I felt in my heart, mind, and soul – not only how I felt with Jim but I how I felt in general about moving and knowing that my entire life would change. I felt pretty darn dandy. Calm. Secure. Not anxious or fearful that I was making some terribly stupid and impulsive decision that I would regret a month later. (Which I haven’t, for a second.)

    Ultimately, though, this was about my learning process, my experience of changing my beliefs and attitudes, my willingness to be honest with myself about what I actually valued and where my faith resided, and my saying yes to something that seemed to land at my feet wrapped in a big bright bow. There is sacrifice, sure, to letting go of the single life – which often brings a fresh-air sort of freedom and possibility – and the stroke of dreamy yummy solitude, but that sort of equanimity also comes with more depth and staying power, from within an individual, regardless of external circumstances. Perhaps I was just more comfortable within.

    Yes, the taboo of needing – if Jim were to exit my life suddenly, there would be a giant gaping hole – the mere thought of it threatens to break my heart. And I consider that a pretty grand success. Especially because, well, I wrote a whole damn essay about how it was just a random fling that would never amount to anything and how I guessed I was sort of alright with that, or at least had to be, and wouldn’t you know – there is so much that I don’t know.

     

  • Could You Be Loved

    George Bernard Shaw wrote, “if you can’t get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you best teach it to dance.” Oh how some of us toil to be rid of our pasts or our character flaws or our deepest, darkest secrets. Maybe instead, we ought to hang out and have a little fun with them. Doesn’t the ghost leave when you’re nice to it?

    There’s sometimes a bit of a catch when you’ve spent most of your adult life in a twelve step program or any recovery-related system; sometimes it can turn it into a game of self-improvement, some type of pathway to enlightenment that, until you’ve reached it, you’re not quite “ready.” Not quite ready to move or get married or have children or start a new career or go back to school. Not quite ready to let someone see you, because, after all, you’re still a great big mess.

    I  believed for many years that until I was “fixed,” no one could really love me, that if they saw what was actually rolling around in my heart and soul and mind, they’d go running for the hills. But like the famous cat said, we’re all mad here.

    There is merit in taking the time to initially address glaring issues and apply some healing balms to festering wounds. A time to every season, right? We do sometimes need to say no to a relationship or not take the job or walk away from someone who too deeply and regularly triggers us –  I know I had to build a basic foundation of unconditional faith and self-love before I could really do much else – but then I think after a while, we just have to live, and we have to trust that despite our many flaws or quirks or issues, we are lovable, and not just according to the heavens or our higher selves but to others.

    I have noticed more and more the perfectionism steeped in our culture and the attempt to avoid at all costs making the “wrong” choice. Aziz Ansari has a great joke about how even buying a toothbrush becomes a very serious and intense task – one looks to Google write-ups and Amazon reviews for the best toothbrush possible. I guess we’re a nation of control freaks, terrified of doing it wrong. But it is impossible to avoid mistakes or pain, and the more we try to avoid through control, the worse it gets. I’m guilty of this constantly. Closure and control and planning make me feel safe. The trouble is, so much of it is an illusion, and I don’t mean that in some woo-woo way. Nothing ever reaches absolute closure (when one problem ends, another pops up), we cannot control much outside of ourselves (even our minds do their own goddamn thing as they see fit, whether we like it or not), and you know what they say about the best laid plans of mice and men…

    Such perfectionism often leads those of us it prays upon to thinking that we have to be flawless or healed or “strongly improved” to be worthy. Somewhere along the way, I picked up the idea that no one could ever really love me once he discovered how sensitive, impatient, worrying, prone to depression/anxiety/chronic pain/addiction I was. That in order to be loved and cared for, in order to be a dear friend or girlfriend or wife or mother I would have to treat all that darkness to the point of nonexistence – to the point of perfection.

    But that is an impossible task. Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic, our personalities are pretty much what they are (though we can change in certain ways)  and sensitivity, while sometimes a liability, can also be a profound strength. That’s a common paradox, too – sometimes our most threatening monsters eventually transform into our strongest allies. Our culture can still demonize (though it has come a long way) those that struggle with mental illness or addiction or who aren’t remarkably extroverted and happy-go-lucky – but suffering isn’t necessarily an illness, and we can’t all be high school cheerleaders. And why the shame about the human condition anyway? This is why we must read Russian literature. ha. ha.

    The solution then, is not self-improvement, but self-compassion, boundless kindness and what I consider faith, but what one might also call optimism or growth mindset or loving awareness. And of course, vulnerability. The natural inclination when one has skeletons of which they feel ashamed is to pretend and shine it on or else grow defensive and resentful, blocking off the possibility of being truthful and open with oneself, wart after wart after wart. We all have warts, in varying shapes and sizes, some more widespread or unsightly than others, but we all have them – we are all human, and no one here gets out alive.

    I feel basic as hell paraphrasing Friends, but I love when Chandler remarks to Monica, after she expresses fear that her extreme high-maintenance quality might push him away, that he likes maintaining her. With those we are most closely bound, we must feel safe to be ourselves and share ourselves – otherwise it comes out sideways, or we people-please (which is basically lying) or put walls up and grow to resent all the pretending we have to do. That’s not to say we lay it all out on table immediately, a la the weepy drunk girl at the bar (been there, done that!), but we put our trust in knowing that being human means that we are flawed and broken and have issues and stories and sometimes we’re getting better and sometimes we’re not, and that it’s all ok. And when you let others love you while seeing what’s behind the curtain, I swear, magically, a lot of those demons soften to angels. Didn’t Kanye say something about loving the flaws of his woman the most? And Lou Reed, about the light getting in through the cracks? You get what I’m saying. We don’t have to hide so much.

    Could you be loved? Yes. Love would never leave us alone…even when it sees first hand all the mess. It bends down with you and helps you tend to it.

  • The Boy I’m Gonna

    .. a (semi) fiction short ..

    My first complaint was that Jim didn’t hold my hand in the back of the cab. Granted, he had already held other parts of me (and held them pretty well) but we were dressed in our finest – he in a nice grey suit and navy tie, me in a sheer dress decorated with cornflower blossoms – and I thought it would be ultra romantic if our hands touched on the way to a celebration of hopeful, supposed love. Alas, my hand remained alone and, as if I were a fairy tale princess whose only chance to break her spell of loneliness was to to grip fingers in the back of an Uber, I stared dramatically out the window at the skyscrapers, wondering if my prince would ever come.

    We walked against a balmy wind up East Randolph Drive; it was late July, and I still had not a clue what was to become of Chicago in the guttural trenches of January. Jim moved briskly, as was his manner of walking, and stayed slightly ahead of me (my next complaint.) I smiled though and craned my head up the length of the eighty floor building, tossing aside my melancholic princess bit, veering toward feeling like a bright-eyed nobody just off the Greyhound in Manhattan – nothing could keep me in a sour mood on this occasion.

    I had on fantastic and impractical silver heels, which I fantastically and impractically splurged on, knowing they would likely be worn again only once before, out of spring-cleaning impulsivity, I would sell them off to a thrift store. I hadn’t been sure that my dress was right for the occasion – this was a “black tie optional” affair, and that sort of invite to a wedding in the thick of summer leaves all women shaking their heads and agonizing about skirt length and color schemes. I took a risk with my floral number, and as if I were some plucky protagonist from a 1920’s novel playing attire Russian Roulette, I fretted until I was ready to go and checking myself out in the mirror; whether I was underdressed or not wouldn’t matter – I felt beautiful, and feeling beautiful transcends appropriate garb.

    We arrived to the hall minutes before the ceremony was to start and snagged two seats in the very last row. When two even-later comers sauntered in during the middle of the officiant’s opening remarks, I entertained the idea of showing off my well-raised good graces and offering my seat, but I thought better of it – it would come across too pleasing, and I finally knew better than to be that girl. Plus, I didn’t at all feel like standing.

    My hand, by the way, remained un-held, hence dry and clean. I would have gladly settled for a sweaty grasp from a man who I was beginning to gaze at from my periphery wondering what is it about this one? but no bother. I was enjoying myself. I had a bit of extra confidence about me, seeing as I was the only blonde in the whole outfit (dyed as hell, so what), and I’d been flown in on the dime of my – lover? – from wild child California to demure Illinois to be his rarefied smoking-hot plus one. I felt as special as the bride (and her dress was a disappointment, putting my own garment worries ever more to bed.) We laughed at the officiant’s pleasant jokes and the music that ushered in the bridesmaids and groomsmen – the title theme of our shared favorite television drama – and occasionally I reached over and brushed the back of his neck, as was my way. I can’t keep my hands to myself.

    In the cocktail hour before the main reception, I stood drinkless and met his friends, more than comfortable in the autumn of my sixth year of sobriety, and filed complaint number three – that he didn’t wait in the tiresome line to snag me a Pellegrino or a Coca-Cola. His friends took an immediate shine to me. My easy wit and (though always an appropriate degree reserved) geniality, and my now obviously perfect frock made quite the impression. It might have also been the stellar timing of my joke that I was a high-class escort whose specialty was weddings and whose weakness was midwestern gentlemen, hence the discount. Or perhaps it was because, despite Jim’s fast-walking and lack of handholding and drink-fetching, he had already told these fellas about me, with that unmistakable tone of this one is different.

    I finally took my parched mouth and wild west femininity and got in line myself, proceeding to double-fist ice water and a can of ginger ale. The promise of a magical night was burgeoning.

    It wasn’t my exact taste, the reception, a nondescript ballroom with low lighting and a generous waitstaff, but it was a fabulous reception no less. We had the best table in the house, what one might coin the cool table, sitting with his host of friends and their lovely wives, right next to the dance floor and above-average band. I was hungry enough to start nibbling at the piccata and cheesy potatoes – Jim cleaned his plate, and fast – complaint number four – as the father of the bride rambled on mawkishly about the joys of having a daughter. (My father would have given similar sentiments, and they would have been truthful, but he also would have moved the crowd to thoughtful, reflective emotion rather than trite niceties and clandestine eye-rolling. Such was his way. Such would be mine.)

    Jim was getting good and liquored up, as were his buddies and one of the wives, and I was fine with it. It’s not everyday your friend from high school gets married, or even if it is, it’s a hell of an excuse to tie one on. Plus, I had the distinct awareness that he was nervous.

    Here was a man I knew was falling for me, and yet I had been the one to kiss him first (or at least get him into the position to fin-a-ll-y pull me toward him) and I was the sobered up drunk with the checkered past, and I was fairly clear on the fact that I had a touch more experience. I got the sense that he’d dated a good share of women and had a few serious girlfriends, but none so attractive, none so sexy, none so undeniably Californian as moi, at least, in his eyes (this, all according to my overthought assumptions.) Which, to a midwestern bloke, can prove to be quite an intimidation. Especially when we turn out not to be catty ditzes with our heads in LaLa Land’s clouds. Men still seem to think that the pretty girls are dumb or at least, shallow as a puddle. Au contraire. But then again, I identify with the Ugly Duckling parable, and my roots are forever grounded in feeling invisible or else too visible and average at that – but that’s another tale.

    And so if he was a little intimidated or felt a little out of his depths, I took it as a good sign, as well as a weighty compliment – and I didn’t for a moment take advantage of such power. I was in the business of helping a man feel like a man.

    When he had the sense to set down his Miller Genuine and loosen his tie, he took us for a spin on the dance floor. That was when a chamber of my heart beat back to life, the one that had been deadened since I was fourteen and turned away from the world, and I let go of my shallow complaints for a moment and decided to offer him the good old tried and true blank slate (which for me meant, nearly blank.) He was a damn good dancer – confident and enthusiastic, and he never let go of my hands (about time.) He picked me up and spun me around like I was Baby in Dirty Dancing – try to let that not awaken your deadened chamber. At the end of the song, he dipped me so low that my curled dye job Cali girl hair nearly grazed the floor. It was the sort of dancing that gets you noticed (and resented) by the other guests. When I came up for air, I was more alive. The heart, you know.

    It dawned on me (not for the first time), that while we encouraged the band with our showoff-y moves, nothing about Jim’s behavior suggested that he was after my body alone, or even after my body as the main attraction. I understood that what was said about those midwest boys was true – especially in comparison to the male denizens of Southern California – that they were a little more gentle and a whole lot more wholesome. I had danced with many men, and they were always in one way or another trying to grope my (rather ample) front and backsides or lead me off the floor into a car and then a bedroom. Insecure young lady I once was, I thought the way to a man’s heart (or at least to a man) dwelled mostly in a constant open-for-business air. Jim was teaching me it wasn’t so, and not just on the lit up floor. It just wasn’t that way with him (though I was open for business, and he had already shopped a few times, successfully.) This was all so different, and I had the sneaking suspicion that, just as he had (in my imagination) alluded to his closest friends that this one is different, this one was different.

    Being with him reminded of when I first began to know a deeper, more transcendent love, the sort that makes you feel clean and delicate and wholly good: My little brother and sister would visit me from Texas, and we’d while away the hours playing, and when they hugged me goodbye and left, I cried until I felt renewed, that happy, loving, thankful sort of weeping. It all felt like a sacred gift, because I knew my heart was being crowbarred open. And this, with Jim – twirling in a ballroom on the eightieth floor of a downtown Chicago high-rise – was that. Innocent. Sweet. Open. So I knew, last chamber a thumping, windows jimmied wide, that he was due to become much more than a lover – he was to become family.

    Then again, we were at a wedding, and that always confuses the senses and the heartstrings. I let the complaints linger sotto voce in the background, just in case.

    When he’d gotten good and sweaty and I was due for another ginger ale, we decided to brave the eighty floor ear-popping descent and go out for a smoke. Favored hits were reverberating in our heads – “Stand By Me” and “My Girl” and “Bring it On Home to Me” by Sam Cooke, and we both knew all the words and were singing together while standing close in the elevator.

    When we first met our bond was catalyzed over a shared love and erudition of all the same music. He could sing and play the hell out of a guitar, and I could sing even better, and so we had spent our first weekend together having a two-man audience-less gig in his apartment in the West Loop. Like all young idiots who can carry a tune and play a few notes, we joked about starting a band. Really though, it was the music we listened to, lying around his loft. Every song we put on for each other – you gotta hear this! – we both already knew.

    Departing the elevator and clicking our jaws, we moved through the turnstile door into a flawless Chicago night. The whole world felt like A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Even my dress matched the flowers in the courtyard’s garden, and we sat beneath a white gazebo and shared Marlboro Lights, singing loudly enough to garner some stares (then smiles) from the nearby security guards.

    I decided at this point to do a bit of detective work, prodding him about what exactly his friends had said about me. I had a hunch I knew what they had said, but I wanted to hear it from the horse’s mouth.

    –We like her. Don’t go screwing it up

    and

    –How’d you land her, Jim?

    and

    –You should marry that girl.

    It made me almost love him, knowing he was in such good, wise company and had the guts to tell me so.

    –How’d I land you, I would later say.

    But you know, weddings, pretty dresses, sultry summer nights. Sam Cooke songs and dancing cheek to cheek. Maybe it was the inevitably romantic ambience and his parade of Jack and Cokes. The promise of grasping youth once more when surrounded by lifelong friends. But even under those glittering facades exists truth, and truth can’t help but rear its pesky head to either sink a stomach or launch a lifetime, and plenty of couples call it in, or worse, under the haze of booze and tear-jerking vows of forever.

    So I remained hopeful. I remained supposing of supposed love. One must train the mind to look on the bright side. I let the meaningless complaints (which could easily become meaningless doubts) linger even further back, not to where they were completely forgotten, but where they would get a little lonely from my lack of attention.

    And there was, of course, the way he looked at me, when he reiterated what his friends said. If you have ever had the privilege of being looked at by a man the way Jim looked at me that night, count yourself lucky. It reminded me to cut him some slack, because in that look I knew he felt afraid, intimidated, and out of his depths, but I also understood that he felt courageous and eager – to give it all a real whirl. And what is more human, more honest than that, giving it all a whirl in the face of possible collapse? It was the same look he gave me every time we were alone, undressed and pressed together – like he couldn’t believe his luck.

    There was to be an after party after the party, and not for one second did I entertain the thought of going. Grown up confident little old me politely told him, I don’t want to. I apologized one too many times about it, feeling a surge of guilt for pulling him away from his old clique and six more drinks, but we had bigger and better fish to fry, namely getting the guitar out and a Google search for the tabs of the songs we’d been singing. I wanted to be in my long dress and barefoot, tucked up on his couch in a haze of cigarette smoke, singing my heart clean until the sun peaked through the windows, and I knew he wanted the same – his shirt untucked and loyal dog at his feet, and some bites of the cookies I’d baked and schlepped on the plane – and that is exactly what we did.

    And I understood – halfway between Elvis’ greatest hits – that I would move to Chicago and marry this man, waste my dough on bulky winter coats and desperately miss my mother, because family is like that. A host of complaints (and doubts and sacrifices) forever trumped by raucous, hip-shaking, groundbreaking Love.

  • Widening Rings

    When you first start feeling less afraid, you want someone to pinch you. Is this real? And do I deserve it? After the exhaustive stretch of hyper-vigilance and over the shoulder gazing, of expecting lurking danger at every turn, the realm of trust and serene neutrality can feel like a trick. Sleight of hand only, though – just smoke and mirrors. You’re awake and it’s real and you actually are less afraid. Then, you just want to test it out. You want to venture out. You want to go out or move out or rock out. You want to look life squarely in its big bold face. And if you’re lucky enough to do that testing and find that, damn life is still scary but so what, onward! then you have figured out at least one truth of life that holds depth and weight.

    All that can be observed on the larger macro/societal level also makes sense within an individual. At every turn I notice extensive yeah buts on all issues, most closely ones related to hatred and fear. And this is what happens within me, too; some stubborn staunch voice chimes in with the insistence that there is a catch to every attempt to get free. To not be afraid – but there are endless things to fear! To forgive a villain – but think again of what he did! To treat myself with unconditional love – but what if you start getting lazy! To assume the best out of life – but tragedies happen everyday! And they do. This is true. Fear is of course justified and called for, as is hatred, but what is the end game? Just endless stretches of misery, I tell you. And long ago I decided to sober up from my addiction to suffering.

    I lived my life for many years in, not widening circles like Rilke but shrinking ones like – Winnie the Pooh? Rabbit, too? And Eyore… sheesh, they all apply. I sometimes think I would have made a great architect (or at least a constructor of walls and drawbridges) because I knew how to make my life enclosed, hidden, protected. Even after I pulled myself off my bathroom floor once again and started to get my act together at twenty five, for the next five years, I stayed quite afraid. Naturally, though. When you’ve relied on hydrocodone and vodka just to shop at the market, it takes some time to do the rest so stripped. And you know what they say about the broken shoelaces – sometimes grocery shopping is a helluva lot harder than finishing the degree or starting (and quitting) the career or falling in and out of love. Maybe it’s just life, and it’s all of us. Widening or shrinking rings. One can go on limitlessly it seems; the other eventually collapses into itself and has no place to go but out anyway. So this must be the place.

    I remember when I started to feel afraid most of the time. I woke up one morning at nine years old, and I didn’t feel happy. I was supposed to go to the beach with my best friend and her dad, and it didn’t fill me with that hopeful everything is possible feeling. What if it’s cold? What if they pack ham sandwiches instead of turkey? What if I get a sunburn? I just wanted to stay in bed. Tall order for a fourth grader.

    By fourteen I had reason enough to feel scared and reason enough to feel sad. And angry. Drugs, alcohol, just what the doctor ordered. Rebellion, music, boys, bring it. Cynicism, doubt, come on down. Not that I really was cynical. I always believed in the transcendent and the hopeful; I always favored the innocent. I was a bit too sweet and sensitive for the big bad world of running it all down the drain. Even Valium, of all things, made me anxious. But I was afraid and angry, and the sunlight hurt my eyes. I learned how to wall as much as possible off so that I could keep out what I perceived to be threatening. And by default, I kept a lot out.

    I was never much of a risk-taker and instead sought control and guarantee at every turn. Actually rather nice of some faction of my psyche, because it was just trying to protect me from danger, but it also kept me far from adventure and great leaps of faith. I see it all the time in the world, how afraid many of us are, and it is always those who never throw caution to the wind who ought to. (Those who live in constant rebellion might benefit from a dose of healthy fear.) I have slowly over time learned to take more risks. Step by step. Bird by bird. I have learned that everything I have ever feared hasn’t exactly happened, and even the actual scary things haven’t been so bad. Fear and worry are, for lack of a better term, huge lying assholes.

    It’s cliche as hell, but so much really makes sense only in hindsight. We have experiences and they’re pure – they just are, totally free from maps and connected dots, but then we have more and look in the rearview and see, huh, that’s a bit changed now. Huh, I did that with such a different spin. Huh, I guess I’m not like that these days. Huh, fancy that, I feel so much less afraid. I noticed it at first in tiny glimmers here and there – moments of peace in the midst of hand-wring anxiety and dread of having to do anything that seemed remotely uncomfortable or tricky or unknown.

    I think if we expand in widening circles it’s because something in the center of us is softening. And what a paradox it is, because only by growing in strength and resolve do we soften and allow and take it all a little slower. I think we see this most powerfully when we let ourselves be loved.

    I always thought that suffering made it difficult to love others – au contraire. It makes it difficult to let others love you. The hedges are high, the walls impenetrable stone. Fear makes us defend, and everyone becomes an opponent. What’s your motive? My strongest transition from fear to love was when I started crying instead of getting angry. That vulnerability, that tenderness, helped me be so much softer and gentler with myself, and in return, I could accept someone being soft and gentle with me. I could accept and then say of course! to someone loving me. And you know real love when it’s there, when you’ve really let yourself be open to it; it’s not exactly comfortable and it’s different than the sort that came before, the ones that you thought were grand but were really just time-passing parlor tricks. There are no excuses or bargains or conditions and you just let it rip, and it still scares the hell out of you because to be truly loved is the greatest risk of all. 

    But like an expanding circle – think the rings of a Sequoia – the experience of resting in light instead of dark is a procedural one, time over time. Light, brought to you most starkly by the dark, takes practice and getting used to, not just because human beings have evolved to scan the environment for clear and present danger but because danger is out there, and we know it, and we have to live and love fiercely anyway. Life opened wide is a great big gamble. But contracting and collapsing into all that may never actually happen – that’s a fold straight out of the gate. So I’ll play a hand. Might even go all in.

  • Valentine

    In the wake of tales of you
    I root for you, I love you
    You you you you

    I met my first serious boyfriend when I was nineteen and roughing it in rehab. Relax. It’s not as dirty as it sounds. Nick was a southern gentleman from the outskirts of Atlanta. The first time he spoke to me, sandy at the beach beside a campfire in Dana Point, my thoughts were, oh brother. He had cracked a joke about penises, and penis jokes have never made me laugh. I didn’t write him off, though, accepting, enlightened, sober chick I was becoming. A friendship began to build between us over our months together in the house. We both loved comedy and knew every line from Chris Rock’s Bigger and Blacker. He loved watching sports, and I loved men who loved sports. I appreciated his southern roots, given my own lineage of down to earth and wholesome Texans. There’s a warmth there that is unmistakable. He was a decent, authentic, middle of the road sort of guy, and he treated me with the utmost respect. In fact, our connection and romance was so real and, by rehab standards exceptionally healthy, that even when the administration found out about it, they let it slide and let us do our thing.

    We spent a year together, and a chunk of it was done long distance. I visited him in Georgia a couple of times, and he came back out to Los Angeles. Though his dad thought I was a whacky California liberal, he took quite a shine to me. Nick was six years older and ready to inherit the family business – not for a second was he considering living on the west coast. And not for a second did I consider moving to the south and wifing it up. Splitting was painful, because we loved each other, but our glittering stars were ever crossed. I was barely twenty. I had more relapses in me and school to finish. I was a California girl, through and through. Our parting wasn’t easy, but it was dignified and kind. It was a good place to start.

    I stayed in Orange County and started school. I sobered up again after another horrific slip into drinking (and one of the worst nights of my life, which I won’t yet share here, but you can check out my maudlin poetry blog – the story’s somewhere in the scraps.) I knew one thing, as I began counting days again: I cannot be alone. 

    When I first saw Matt at a meeting in Mission Viejo, he was wearing a grey bandana, Birkenstocks, and little silver hoop earrings for crying out loud. A Sierra Nevada t-shirt, which was a couple sizes too big, and some pair of ridiculous hippie pants that were a cross between cotton and nylon. Luckily, I didn’t let any of that get in the way of my attraction, and it was attraction of the magnetic swallow you whole variety, where I was pulled to him from out of the depths as if we were meant to intertwine in each others lives and create a big mess of love and sex. Which we did. There was something in his face that first time I saw him, an earnestness, a broken hearted visage, a drama king quality; it wasn’t all that sincere – truth was, he was a bit of a phony, even my dad saw that – but at the time, I wanted to know what it was all about.

    I pursued him, and I did it quasi-desperately. I was coming off of Nick, and I couldn’t stand to feel the empty stretch of me. I did everything wrong (pursuing him for one) and we would go on to be together for three tumultuous, gobble you up, lie to your family when you get back together for the twentieth time years. 

    Like any solid beginning, we texted each other back and forth, on LG Verizon flip phones circa 2005 no less, and we drove to the beach where he played “Sugar Magnolia” on the guitar (are you getting that he was from NorCal?), and he was upfront from the beginning about the fact that he was still halfway in love with his hippie dippy ex-girlfriend and would likely not be available for a relationship. But I didn’t hear that clearly, I only thought, yeah yeah, we’ll see. Then he kissed me, doo wop da dooby doo, and it was one of those glittery bubbly high as a kite time stops perfect tongue pink starbursts type kisses, and that was it. I was done for. That kiss and everything that came after would make me forgive every lie, cheat, betrayal, and transgression, every pit in my stomach the world is crashing down atop my head feeling for the next two and a half years. Until finally we admitted we were doomed, we had never built a foundation, and nothing could be created on such a smoking pile of rubble. It took me going back to drinking and drugs for a while to fully shake him off and look again to the horizon. 

    From him, came the next, Kris with a K, but I wouldn’t call it love – I’d call it friendship with a little intimacy thrown in and mostly someone to drink and binge watch shows with, before binge-watching was even really a thing. (I had all the DVD’s of The Sopranos, The Office, and first three seasons of LOST. We also watched quite a bit of VH1 reality TV. We’re talking Bret Michaels Rock of Love here. Thanks, marijuana!) He had a dog that I came to truly love, and he helped me move back to Los Angeles to start at UCLA, and then after a year I broke up with him, because I was desperate to get clean again and desperate to be understood. Stop taking all those goddamn pills, then you’d feel better. He thought my need to sober up dramatic. I knew I had to go. And I had the perfect opportunity to start seeing Cal.

    Cal, who had a few years clean under his belt – I heard it through the grapevine. His older brother was a part of this community of guys I knew from high school who were devoted to underground hiphop and performed around L.A. We connected via MySpace. Oh, youth. I thought I was going to marry him, in my naive twenty-three year old head, because we had this very innocent best friend type connection from the beginning, and when it all unraveled it was debilitating. He broke my heart, but I think I broke his first, however accidentally. He cooked me Valentine’s Day dinner, and I wouldn’t take a bite. That’s a whopper of a metaphor, if there ever was one.

    So yes, without getting into a bunch of recovery babble, I was pretty screwed up, and he couldn’t fix me, and I had lost myself in brutal eating disorder territory which made me (literally) cold, shut-down, obsessed, and very un-frisky, and it was only a matter of time until he would call me and say, enough. (I was at UCLA when it happened, in blue jeans and a purple top, walking to my car from my favorite Shakespeare lecture, and I just nodded into the phone. I knew.) I loved him. I loved him so. There is no doubt about it. He used to write me these beautiful letters, and he was intelligent and handsome and “deep” like me, and I adored his family. We would sit and study together and listen to The Smiths and Velvet Underground, and we were sober and in some kind of love. It was an old souls comfort, it was you and me baby, but my tornado of addiction had yet to even gather dust. I had work to do. He had to leave.

    In came the gut-wrench and fetal position. It took a good nine months to stand up straight and push my shoulders back, to stop looking for him or some kind of reconciliation. I watched him on Facebook date other women, and I had a few instances of soul-crushing humiliating begging for him back on the phone fiascos. I tried myself to go out with a couple of people – those collapsed faster than I could say, go away/don’t leave! When you still love someone and you’re with another, it’s a very sharpened sort of loneliness. And then – it lifted. You know how it goes with love and the death of love. You wake up one day, and it’s softer. He was eighty percent out of my system. And onto the next. Because, you know, I. couldn’t. be. alone. Bring on the tall drink of water from San Diego.

    Taylor still weighs heavy on my heart, because we were near-perfect compatible, just totally kindred spirits, and he was my “type.” Tall, athletic, unfussy, masculine. He got my irreverence and snark and sass, and he was the least full of shit guy I’d ever known. We had this short lived, loving thing, but I missed Cal a lot of the time, I would feel homesick for him out of the blue, and it was difficult to grow to love someone new with that simmering in my stomach. Taylor couldn’t stay sober one bit, and I was still demolished within, despite appearances and my stellar GPA, and so it fizzled before we even lifted off the ground. And damn, could we have lifted off the ground.

    What a romantic start we had. One of my best friends and I used to go to a meeting in Santa Monica and then to the Coffee Bean after to smoke and analyze the world, and he and his buddy Joe came by a few times to join in on the fun. My friend described the connection between us as “mega sparkle eyes.” We were exploring our exasperation and contempt toward the men who wore those deep V t-shirts, and Taylor, this sweetheart 6’3 volleyball-playing junkie stud looks at me and goes, all confident, “so you’re saying you want a cowboy.” I died. If that isn’t the pickup line of the century, I don’t know what is. (And yes, I did want a cowboy.) Then we all played pool, he asked me on a proper date, and the rest is history. He’d say, baby you’re the most.

    We would go to the Starbucks by his apartment and drink lattes and play Gin Rummy. It remains one of my happiest memories. He drove me all the way to San Francisco to see some quack back doctor who invented a special machine that would “cure all chronic pain.” (I was desperado. It didn’t.) I never slept so well beside a boyfriend before. Not a snore to be heard, praise the lord. I met his folks, he met mine. It was the best ever, a whole new level, an ecstasy, a delicious dreamy sleep. And yet: I was a miserable, suffering, selfish, eating disorder-riddled, chronic pain-enduring twenty-four year old just starting graduate school and by most accounts, lost. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, and I was too chicken to find out. How fascinating it is to have such gorgeous love inside a greater hell. The damn center cannot hold. When he called me and confessed he was drinking I left him, and I was cold about it and impulsive. I got scared. I don’t exactly regret it, because who knows where I’d be, but I wish I had handled it with more grace. I had been having my own thoughts of relapse for a while, and I knew if I stayed with him we’d be shacked up in a seedy motel in Mexico, smoking crack and playing with needles (such was his pattern.)

    I relapsed anyway, and down into the depths I swirled. Same charade. This isn’t about that.

    When I came up for air again at the start of 2011, I intuitively knew the boys needed to be off the table for a while, and I had a hunch it was all going to removed from me anyway. I was right. Serial monogamy was completely blocking me from having any real relationship with myself and space to comprehend, who am I without a lover/boyfriend/constant companion? What happens when I try to be alone? Maybe I need to make some more female friends and start writing again… and that’s exactly what I did. And damn, did I learn how to be alone and make friends and start writing. I got extremely good at befriending myself, after the initial feeling of having no skin. I came to know peace, party of one. I. could. be. alone. It is one of the greatest things I have ever done, finding my own path without a boyfriend as the sole part of my identity. It transformed everything, and it gave me a raucous, gorgeous voice. It also taught me what I will never again put up with and how I will never again treat a partner.

    And then, maybe I got a little too good at it. Because I just didn’t care anymore, and I was having too much fun focusing on my career and recovery and friendships and travel, that dating just wasn’t at the forefront. I had soul surgery to do, don’t you know, because my astrological chart is all water and earth and I’m not good at lightening up when it comes to meaning and purpose. But you know, we work with what we’ve got. (I hope you get my humor.)

    I spent about four years mostly single, dating a bit here and there, summer flinging, the online turnstile. I noticed that actual dating and getting to know someone in a healthy, slow-paced, functional fashion seemed like a certain level of hell. I couldn’t stand the vulnerability and the lack of grabby addict-type connection. Without my previous armor and defenses, I was putty. I saw that a love addict/avoidant style was often at play in much of my relationships (but really, when is it not), and that I didn’t dig guys who weren’t alcoholics or some brand of screwy, and that shady narcissists were irresistible. So I got to practice with that. Dating jerks and saying bye. Seeing my patterns, my motives, my stories. Continuously unearthing the truth and what I really wanted, (while avoiding as needed the endless barrage of women and their weddings, full coverage courtesy of Facebook.)

    So that brings me to the last valentine thus far, David, who I met on a dating app but soon discovered was a fellow sober drunk like me, a broke-ass comic (his words), and a hot (and I do mean hot) mess. I was like Edna in The Awakening having a physical and emotional Renaissance, being born again as a woman in the sea foam. On our first date we met at a hipster cafe, I was parked on some narrow street off Melrose, and a driver broke off half my side mirror; I thought, jeez what a sign. Maybe I’m still not seeing clearly. I watched him perform regularly at the Comedy Store and random places about town; I admired (and still admire) his courage and willingness to chase his artist dream. I rarely chased my own. He let me cry in front of him (which I did at least twice a day) without getting weird or telling me to calm down. He was with me when I was starting over and fumbling around, and we fumbled around together. He left every twenty minutes to suck on a Marlboro Red, and he liked the Marvel movies just a little too much, and he never spoke up, and he was thirty-one going on twenty, but it was love. And it was good. And we are still friends. There was nothing I hesitated to share with him, and I still tell him everything, and we still dance around our innate attraction to each other because the timing just isn’t right in terms of the whole Serious Relationship thing.

    And there it is. The cascade of boyfriends. The story of, the glory of love. I was like Tori Amos – looking for a savior beneath these dirty sheets – until it became white hot and startlingly clear that I had to save myself, fall in love with myself a bit (eye roll, oh I know) then hit the proverbial town. Nick is married with three beautiful children, and Matt passed away, and Cal got married, too, and I have no idea what happened to Kris, and I think Taylor is in San Diego still using, and David is my friend. I like being on my own and doing what I love, with or without you. And rooting for all my past loves. And future loves. And just, Love. The messier the better. 

  • the story and The Story 

    Long before I set out on a spiritual path of recovery, I felt some sort of kinship with some great beyond. Even as a child who had little interest in Sunday school and no discernible relationship with God in a religious sense, I prayed all the time. I prayed out loud before I went to bed and I prayed in the writing of my journals and I prayed under my breath during difficult times. I felt loved by some Creator, even when I didn’t know exactly what that meant.

    I was always a fan of the mystical and magical, even the downright superstitious, poring over astrology and numerology books and learning about intuitive healing. I loved mythology and the great big metaphors of life. I saw metaphor and meaning in everything. I loved getting high because it gave me that profound connection, false as it was, with nature, with other, with self. Music was transcendent, as was film and literature. Ridiculous and dramatic, certainly, but I sometimes cried when looking at pieces of art in museums. Something in me would come alive and squirm to the surface, the earthbound silly matters of human interaction would drop, and a richer plane erupted and negated all else. I think it’s what you might understand if you have ever wept tears of joy.

    This, I believe, is The Story, capital T, capital S. It is The Story that tells the truth about the spiritual condition of humanity, the inevitable limits of knowledge, power, and control, and the absolute mysterious wonder of being alive inside a body, while being so much more than a body (and so much more than a mind.) It is about the transcendent and divine and ineffable and arising. It is the oldest story in the world.

    Many today don’t like to believe The Story and think instead that, since the much needed Enlightenment, we finally came to know better than to abide by anything beyond reason and rationality. I like reason and rationality as much as the next guy, and I have great respect and reverence for the achievements of the Enlightenment, especially in the realm of philosophy and science; but I also don’t want to throw out the mythology and spirituality that existed for thousands of years prior and that dwells, I believe, deep inside each and every human being, whether they want to admit it or not, whether they want to break it all down to chemical reactions or not.

    One may use reason and rationality to transcend suffering, but that has never worked for me (and the truth is that spirituality might be the most “reasonable and rational” choice of all, since it seriously works and is seriously true and takes some of the edge off of meaningless misery.) There is always something bigger than what my mind can figure out (my mind, in fact, can get me in a lot of trouble) and I don’t experience it in my mind, anyway. It’s in my chest and heart and hands and stomach, and it’s the great beyond I’ve known since I was a kid.

    You can find it through religion, but you don’t have to. It’s there anyway. It is in the mythology that dates back to the Sumerians, and it is in nearly every story since, somewhere. Good and evil as a living, realistic duality isn’t just a random made-up idea. Such arrogance of our secular society to throw out thousands of years of oral and written tradition, that, despite many flaws (humans are irrevocably flawed) refined humanity and spirituality to its perfect point in terms of goal-worthy livable principles. (Good and evil dwells in all of us on some scale – perhaps there is a roadmap to transcend being corrupted by the darkest depths…)

    Surrender, faith, humility, acceptance, gratitude, forgiveness, love, and service take the cake as The Story’s Top Five (ok, eight) manifested spiritual principles. Live life by these principles in an earnest and wholehearted way, and prepare for connection and meaning. Easier said than done. I live a lot of my life caught up in the story, lower case. We all do.

    I can easily spend my days angry, resentful, blaming, worrying, in self-loathing and self-pity, weaving tales that may or may not be true, comparing, criticizing, controlling, setting conditions and rules, refusing to let go, refusing to set down my sword. What a pain in the ass it is to live in such a way, even if it seems justified or necessary or helpful or true. Some anger is justified, sure. Sometimes we understandably feel sorry for ourselves or down on ourselves, and we need to just feel that for a while. Sometimes we build great defenses because, when we were children, they kept us safe. But when the default becomes all the little stories inside the stories inside the story, there is no protection, just a nightmare. I do not recommend it. (Apparently alcoholics are pros at the story – no wonder we drank!)

    My opinion on the way through and out of the stormy experiences and icky thoughts and emotions is to allow them, to understand they are universally human, but to counter them with the spiritual plane, The Actual Story. To not stay stuck for days, months, years in the fury and worry (which believe me, we can do. I am sure you have some long drawn out scenario of a wrong done to you that you still can’t release … no? Good job, spiritual master!)

    I have been in recovery since I was nineteen, and it basically took me until about yesterday for this to become startlingly clear: in general, do I want to live mostly in the story or The Story? Do I want to live clouded with justified resentment and self-hatred, or do I want to live with acceptance and forgiveness and gratitude? Do I want to have a yeah but for every situation, (which I can feel creeping up in me as I write this and also in what I assume many readers could say, shaking their fists – yeah, but what about this!) or do I want to have a foundation made of Truth, and only fight the battles that absolutely need my might? (For which, trust me, there are few.)

    I am as stubborn as a mule on this stuff. My thinking totally gets in the way. My toughness and sense of justice and defenses and need to be right. my story. Because I could hand you several tomes on all the suffering. I could fill oh so many ears with why my suffering is still valid. But jeez – to be or not to be in forever pain? – that is the question!

    This does not mean ignore suffering. I am a big believer that we must slay the dragon, go into the belly of the beast, look closely at the chaos before we can move through. You can’t sugarcoat life. Examine it, feel it, suffer suffer suffer – then awaken.

    I write this with a sense of confidence, but I am also aware of all the embedded paradoxes and nuances and how one must come to find the spiritual world, or God, or The Story, on their own time and also over and over and over. And over. Spiritual awakenings are not forced, nor are they done once and voila! but daily, each morning, each hour, each breath, each time we choose to look beyond and above the little woven yarns of our hurt to what is so much larger and truer. Some wake up as children; others after a long life lived. There’s no contest and no timeline.

    When I was getting sober in my mid-twenties, I had a giant reservoir of emotions that I had neglected and medicated and eating disordered away for years, and they demanded my attention. I couldn’t just “spiritually bypass” years of grief and depression and buried rage with a bunch of faulty gratitude and forgiveness. Even when you try this route, you find it doesn’t work. It’s inauthentic and you won’t be changed. We’re human. We need to let the feelings out in some kind of way. We need to be kind to ourselves. Spirituality, like recovery, or like anything we are working on really, is a jagged line. Little improvements with plenty of failure and back to square one agains, all the while slowing moving ahead and up.

    I had to allow the feelings as much as possible, and I still have to pretty regularly. I sort of had to become a child again, given endless permission to cry and complain and feel so sorry for myself. It isn’t pretty, the sloppy tears and waves of rage and below that, deep sadness, but I believe it’s necessary for the third degree wounds. To meet our suffering with compassion and tenderness, not guilt or shame or judgment. (There is also a supreme difference in feeling the trapped emotions versus toiling in endless indignation and thought over them.)

    If you’re on the spiritual path with an earnestness to surpass the suffering and the earthbound story, it will come. One day you do wake up and you’re not so angry, and your heart feels fuller and more open, you feel cleaner, and there’s more peace in you. And I think we just keep doing this. Over and over and over. Up up up. Down again. Up.

    Building a life on humility and acceptance and forgiveness is, I believe, the most courageous human act, and it takes work and consistency. It can be annoying. It can, at first, feel like giving up or failing, being weak. I guarantee it is a strong and mighty bedrock. There is so much faith and trust in it, so much richness. It is choosing to say, the world is goddamn scary – I’ll forge ahead in the light anyhow!

    Arrogance and resentment are cheap and unstable. They make for a terrible, dishonest, flawed foundation. They also feel and look like shit. They tend to tumble into outright destruction of self and others. We usually grab hold of them because they’re fast and easy and work in the moment. Learning to live a life built on spiritual principles takes time and patience. And it isn’t that sexy. (Or maybe it is!)

    It took me a good five to six years of sobriety and work in the recovery and spiritual world to get to that place where I could have deeper and lasting forgiveness for the “big offenders.” It took me five years to stop saying, “yeah but they did this” and own my part, through and through, and sincerely and honestly want to amend my part. (We all have parts, 99% of the time, even if your part is just clinging too tightly to the story.)

    It took a period of time where I had to assume the world was full of haters and I was a lover and then realizing, we are all haters and lovers.

    It took looking very closely at “toxic people” and wanting to throw them all out of my life, finding allies who had the same worldview so I could feel justified in disliking eighty percent of people, and then realizing it was a bunch of bullshit and just resentment disguised as self-protection. (OK, yes, there are dangerous people we have every right to walk away from and should walk away from. I ain’t no Pollyanna. But there is a difference between a true blue sociopathic narcissist and someone who is rude and self-absorbed and annoys you on social media. As Danielle LePorte explains, have an open heart with a big fucking fence. Pay attention and listen to that gut.)

    It took being offended by the world before I realized none of it was personal, and it was my life to live with as much joy and celebration as possible, regardless of politics or family circumstances or my dress size or social status or income or hair color or time sober or romantic life or blah blah blah.

    It took understanding that the people who I resented the most, I actually loved the most, and missed the most, and wanted to connect with the most. And even if we couldn’t connect in the way I wanted to on the earth and in the day to day, we were connected on the spiritual plane in a form far greater than personality quirks and miscommunication. Sometimes much of the forgiveness lives inside a parallel universe.

    It took (and takes) deep investigation into God and the spiritual world, and then practicing what I learn out in the real world. Which sounds simple and is absolutely the greatest challenge. I can be quite forgiving and empathetic when tucked up in my bed reading spiritual books and hearing some inspiring podcast or in a meeting where we’re all oozing gratitude. How do I carry this out into the world, where everyone everywhere is making mistakes all the time? My date flakes on me, my friend won’t forgive me, I hate my job, I’m full of fear and anxiety, I don’t like myself, I’m plagued with depression, I can’t sleep, my family member is sick, social media is hell, the news is hell, the world is on fire?

    What do I do?

    First, I get caught up in the story. He did this and she did that and this is unfair and why me and oh god and I hate everything and what’s the point and if only – 

    – then, pause.

    Then, maybe a prayer on my hands and knees.

    Maybe, I tell someone about it who I trust. Maybe I write about it.

    Then, maybe it shifts and I come back to that through line of faith and acceptance and eventual forgiveness and amending. I listen to that Story. I try to hang out there. Then, I do it all again. All the time. Over and over and over.

    I recently made amends to someone I have known and loved much of my life, who I have also resented and blamed much of my life. I saw so clearly the story and The Story duking it out. She did this and she’s like this and it caused this to happen and it isn’t fair and it could have been this way and she thinks this of me and I’m like this and on on on my mind did spin. But there was also: I love her more than I could ever say we are exactly the same she has hurt like I have she seeks like I do she is innocent and loving and loved and precious we are the same and we love each other and we are doing the best we can. The rest is just filler and doesn’t matter anymore.

    So I hung out there a while. And it felt so much better. And even when my mind tried to creep in and morph it back into a story, the forgiveness was divine. The Story wasn’t louder, but it sure was a much prettier sound. To let someone off the hook, when it’s long past due – what a gift. What a spell-breaker. The oldest Story in the world.

    I still do this, mind you – get all locked up in the story and resentment, the defensiveness and walls, the blaming and self-pity – all the time. We cannot transcend being human, and such locked up-ness is quite human. The difference, I suppose, lies in the awareness and the willingness to get out of it and tune in to what actually matters and is a more refined Truth. To extract a functional meaning from a seemingly endless array of life interpretations is a choice, and it is a choice to extract a joyful, unshakable, devoted to love one as opposed to a meaningless, arrogant, perpetually armored to the cruel cruel world one. Armor gets old. It’s heavy and rusts and pierces into the skin. Why wear it when there is so little to fight?  There is so often no there there. No real story but The Story.

    But, you know, thank you to all the little stories for leading me back – over and over and over – to the One I’ve loved to hear the most and trusted the most since I was a kid, praying in journals and in my little bed, crying at songs and books and paintings, for crying out loud.

     

     

     

  • When the Rug is Pulled: Humility, Identity, and Other Such Things

    When I first began my teaching career in 2011, I prided myself on two things: my ability to connect with students and my classroom management. I wasn’t always the best lesson planner or designer of rubrics, and I certainly wasn’t always fired up about professional development and the state of education, but I could create and run a pretty healthy, happy classroom, where, in the past tense words of Sister Sledge, we were family. 

    Since I was a teenager, I have connected well with children. I have a younger half brother and sister who have often felt like my own kids to me, and participating in their lives has been a joyful highlight of my own life. I spent my teens and twenties babysitting and nannying, working at camps and assisting in the classroom. Kids always gravitated toward me and wanted to talk. I made them laugh. I told them not to worry. I was never cruel. I knew how to wrangle them, and I knew how to speak to them.

    When I first entered the teaching world, I will admit I had a bit of an ego about being a “favorite teacher.” Chalk some of it up to starting my career so young (while in my first year sober – am I a masochist?) and not being as comfortable in my skin; of course I wanted to be liked, and of course I wanted to be the best. But I also knew I was good at it and that to many students, I was a favorite. I remain deeply passionate about literature and writing, and I’ve got presence as an educator with a creative, silly streak, and I believe these traits carried into my ability to make learning in middle school English inspiring and rich. So yeah, the kids dug me. At least most of them. Classroom management also came naturally. My room was calm, students redirected well when off task, I rarely had to raise my voice, and the environment felt safe and positive. Not always, but pretty darn often.

    My last year of teaching at my former private school in 2015 was, in terms of student connection and creating a remarkable classroom environment, the highlight of my career thus far and an experience I will never forget. I formed incredibly special bonds with the majority of my students; a handful of the girls in particular did become a sort of family. One had me over for family dinner and (lucky her) I took her to Disneyland twice. I attended several of their birthday parties and bat mitzvahs, and a group of them dropped by one evening while in my neighborhood to say hi and catch up. Dozens of them have kept in touch with me regularly through email and social media. They have been consistently warm, kind, interested, and so so dear. What a blessing to have such a positive impact on students just entering high school. I have tried my best to always be supportive, loving, and a positive role model. I believe I have succeeded.

    Now, there is plenty I have done that hasn’t been perfect. I can be moody and reactive when tired and worn out, which isn’t easy to manage when you’re handling full-time teaching and dealing with parents, colleagues, and administration. I’m introverted and prefer to work alone and therefore am not the world’s best collaborator. I still don’t get crazy hyped about the next new craze in education. (Must we keep reinventing the wheel?) I am well aware of my weaknesses as a teacher and individual – but I was pretty darn confident I had the student thing down…

    Well. Expect the unexpected, and don’t get too comfortable thinking you know your place. The rug can get pulled.

    I left teaching in 2015 to take a nice long break and explore some other options. Needless to say, I found myself taking on a job this past January as a long term substitute for another sixth grade English class. The gig was to be four months, decent pay, not too far from work, and totally my wheelhouse. Middle schoolers loved me. Sixth grade curriculum was a breeze. I could see if I really did in fact miss the classroom. It would be awesome.

    It has not been awesome.

    It’s difficult admitting that. Not only does it go against the whole be always positive and grateful! shtick of today’s recovery culture, of which I am a (grateful) member, but it is hard to not feel like a complete and utter failure for not having the same experience with my current students that I had in the past. It has been painful, in fact, because the connection is what I am good at, and the connection is why I do it, and the connection has not, at least with a large chunk of the students, been there. The overall vibe has been aloof.

    I’d say it’s the perfect storm type of situation for why this current position has been such a trying task. I came in halfway through the school year as a long-term sub and didn’t get to set the tone and structure of my classroom. Much of the curriculum was not my own creation. The school culture was, in many ways, very different (and in major need of overhaul.) The community just wasn’t the same. The kids weren’t buying in. Most of them couldn’t care less about establishing a connection with me or other teachers. All of this made me feel super shaky, not on my A game.

    Despite of course having unstable moments in my past position, I was mostly a highly confident teacher, strongly rooted in my presence and voice and command of the classroom, as well my warmth and spirit. I was also at a school that put tremendous stock in building community, respect, and positivity. I look back on it now with such reverence, and though I don’t regret moving on to travel and try out some other ventures, I certainly can knock myself in the head a bit for having gripes about too much “social/emotional learning.” Tedious as it might have been at the time having morning advisories and assemblies on a daily basis, damn it if it didn’t get the job done.

    Or you know, maybe it wasn’t just that. I taught eleventh grade for my graduate work, and there was zero of the fluffy stuff, and those kids threw me a party and baked me a cake when I left, and told me how much I had changed their lives (and a handful of them still email me today to let me know how their early twenties are going.) So, who knows. Who knows why it hasn’t gelled in this current position. It is likely due to a variety of factors or maybe simply a humbling experience I needed to have.

    I think, mostly, I needed to learn to be less swayed by external circumstances and how people respond to me, to not let codependency seep so insidiously into my teaching. I needed to learn to stand strong in my conviction, rather than be overly accommodating; I did try too hard to adapt to the culture (of which I am philosophically opposed) and so I never quite found my footing, and then it deflated me and took my power with me.

    It’s no easy task, to stand so strong. I’ve always been an empathic, mercurial, chameleon-like creature. The outside world can zap me, and I feel too much of everything, and though that’s a certain type of strength, it’s not the best recipe for running a classroom. (Even with my beloved classes, I was regularly drained.) In many ways, I feel I have done a very, very average job. I haven’t had the energy or fervor to go above and beyond. But maybe that’s the lesson, too – sometimes not being so good at something, and seeing that this has nothing to do with my inherent worth or goodness.

    Do I love my current students? You bet I do. (Most of them.) They’re kids. They rub off on each other. A few bad apples can spoil the bunch. But has it been awful at times? Indeed, it has. They have broken my heart with their meanness and cynicism, their eye rolls and back talk and smirky defensiveness, their missing manners and absent appreciation, their entitlement, complaining, and lack of warmth. it has, at times, made me cold and angry and unappreciative. I have tried so hard to transform it or else not let it get to me, but I am only human, and when you try and keep failing, it gets to you. Teaching is a hard enough job when the kids are loving and happy and on your side.

    Do I regret it? Of course not. It has been a supremely humbling learning experience, and it has helped me ask myself, who am I when I’m not a great and loved teacher? Well, I’m still me, and I’m still loved. I have grown more in the past four months as an individual than I have in quite a while. It has forced me out of my comfort zone and to confront some old demons and difficult patterns, as well as to learn even more how to be kind to myself while in the midst of discomfort. It has shown me how much better able I am at withstanding something difficult; in my first year of teaching, it would have leveled me. I didn’t yet have the sturdy internal foundation and faith to transcend difficult emotions. And it reminded me that I don’t quit or give up, and that even when I don’t do my best job and the stars don’t seem to be aligning, I can still do a pretty good job. I can still show up, because that’s what I’ve learned to do when I make a commitment, even when every inch of me wants to run and hide.

    I’m done on Friday. I hope to finish with gratitude and kindness in my heart. Who knows, I might walk out of there with barely even a thank you and burst into tears in my car (again) or curse my way home on the 10. Whatever happens, I can say thank you, and I can carry it with me for the lesson it has been, make some space for it with the students who loved me so and told me so, because sometimes it all needs to be contained.

     

  • The Through Line

    “The stable solution is the individual who tells the truth.”

    Like any relatively young person stumbling along and thirsting to learn, there is plenty that I don’t know and understand. Because I tend to write so personally and from direct experience, much of what I state on here vacillates and changes. As I have grown up a bit, progressed in recovery, developed in my overall education, and encountered a variety of experiences, my feelings and ideas have subsequently shifted. I consider this mostly a good thing, although I do believe I’d be nearing ridiculous postmodern subjective moral relativism (which I mostly loathe) if there wasn’t a basic fundamental anchoring lying beneath my conscious ideas and diverse writing pieces.

    I have written on this blog about alcoholism and eating disorders, codependency and narcissism, mental health and “emotional sobriety,” friendships and relationships, education, philosophy, bits of short fiction, and various cultural topics. I have written, be as angry as you need for as long as you need, and I have written, forgive everyone everything. I have explained, my feelings matter the most, as well as, my feelings don’t really matter. I’ve stated that to heal the trauma you must go within, to heal the trauma you must get out of your head. And onward with paradox, I have gone. All of these messages, though different and sometimes in outright opposition, are true. The human experience is grand and complex, a theatre with a varying cast of players, but underneath these sometimes conflicting ideas (that dwell within, I suppose, “the great globe itself”) are three things I revere, now and always: truth, individuality, and faith.

    I have written without fully understanding, grasping for clarity with each click of the keyboard. I have attempted to tell the truth while (sub)consciously writing for a specific audience. I have been afraid to share certain ideas, lest I offend someone. (After all, I started this blog in 2015.) I have attempted to align myself with the status quo, fully knowing that there is always more to the story. Even through these forgivable (and understandable) maskings of honesty, truth was rearing its head, at least inside of me, the writer, if not between the lines of language.

    The fact that I have had a sometimes fluctuating message that I am trying to weave into coherence and consistency is good news – it means that I am willing to keep growing and cycling through ideas that have grown stale, to redevelop and strengthen my point of view. And this has everything to do with individuality rather than collectivism and blind ideology. Absolutely I have learned from and been influenced by others, but what that learning always returns me to is my own personal effort to have internal understanding and comprehension; as individuals on this earth, we each have the sole privilege to continuously transform our inner landscapes. At the core of what I write is reverence for self-actualization and integration of Soul, or Self, or character, developing an inner foundation built on universal truths (and being true to thine own self.)

    This personal honoring and earnest truth-seeking connects directly to faith or what could also be coined meaning. What is the point of doing anything at all, were it not for some kind of meaning? Then we could all be nihilists and seek to destroy instead of build, or to find everything endlessly subjective and open to infinite interpretations (which many in our current culture think is some sort of revolutionary act) rather than find purpose and the creation of an actual functional roadmap. The belief in something larger and profound, the belief in purpose and meaning, coupled with the respect for the individual and seeking always to understand and tell the truth, runs through everything I write about on here, even if I do sometimes change my opinions on what is the best path of recovery, how to deal with difficult emotions, or what it takes to reconcile past and present suffering. They all point to the same ultimate goal, and they all flow along the same river.

    Let me tell you the truest truth. Even when I have been in the depths of darkness, and believe me I have been there, something in me was beating beating beating. It was alive and thriving and this is the through line that I am talking about, and it is nearly beyond words, because it is actually more like an embodied visceral happening – it’s the Soul stretching, inward and up. It is me, and it is something bigger, too, and I’ll say God, because I’m tired of feeling like I might bother someone for writing about God. It is a whispering of, you’re here. It is an invigorating thump of, you know. It is life, energy, force, and it is mine. We all have this, of course, but I’m not concerned with your self-actualization, and I mean that as a wholehearted and weighty compliment. That’s your business and your right to tend to –  I’m here for mine. It is faith that teaches me I can go exploring the Underworld and still be rescued, that I can play a part in my own rescuing, and that I can create meaning from suffering and surviving that will continue to propel me forward. That is my story. That is every story, if you pay attention. And I will keep telling it.

  • Unmapped

    Unmapped

    “When you’re getting better, it’s a jagged line.” -Jenny Lewis

    Maybe it’s just what happens in your mid twenties, but shit, I highly doubt it – there was this black jumprope I had tangled up with the wires of an old Nintendo 64 shoved deep into my closet, and for a year I imagined it wrapped round my neck, squeezing the life out of me. See, I sort of wanted to die.

    Let’s back up, though, and let’s get clear. I didn’t completely want to die, I actually mostly wanted to live, but I had no idea how to live and I was stuffed to the gills with suffering. Mind you, this was in “sobriety.” I had a couple years clean, I hadn’t put any drugs or alcohol into my system, but I was dirty as hell, infected in my mind with that deep dark deluded thought process that drives so many of us back to addiction and, tragically, sometimes suicide.

    Yeah, I had work to do. They don’t give you maps for this.

    That was eight years ago. And instead of coiling that jumprope round my delicate neck, I relapsed, and I let my life crumble, and then I crawled back through the rubble to start again. Sometimes you have to burn it all to the ground to start over.

    I used to think that if I could spend my life hooked up to a machine that numbs me out or gets me high and glittering, I would gladly do it. I always wanted to be so close to death, so blacked out and obliterated and viscerally leveled but awake enough to feel it – to feel nothing and everything delicious all at once. From the time I was fourteen years old and got trashed on keg beer and puffs from a joint, that was all I wanted and all I cared to do. It felt like God to me, like some spiritual reverie, to ride the wave above the cloying angst and feel connected and up up up, to transcend the earthbound realm. Dissolving the layers of me that were angry and heartbroken (and by fourteen I was pretty angry and heartbroken) with something as simple as liquid and plant and tablets of talc – it was as if I had found the Holy Grail, got a golden ticket, held the magic key to unlock the vault and step outside of myself. Oh, how I had found a miracle to cure me!

    But it was a lie, a sleight of hand – the emperor wore no clothes. By sixteen, I was fairly certain I had crossed that invisible line; it wasn’t hell yet, but it was bad enough and getting badder – I just intuitively knew. I was a blackout drinker and I drank alone, and I shoveled pills into me, and the whole world scared me, and I was already trying to control it all. I didn’t quite enter recovery then, but I knew – something is really wrong. Something is really wrong with the way I drink, and even then I knew, with the way I think. Why was I so paranoid, anxious, depressed – “chemical imbalance?” that’s all you’ve got? But I never said a word to anyone about how I really felt, I said what I was supposed to say. Everything’s fine! Where I had learned such a strong game of pretend? I was a champion of shining it on.

    I went to college for one semester, straight out of high school and without a clue, and it’s still almost too painful to talk about, write about, revisit. But you know, sometimes you have to burn it all to the ground to start over. (I’m a phoenix rising type of kid, and I like to repeat myself.) I still will never reconcile the leap from seventeen to eighteen, the summer after high school, the transition into another world. It was the final surrender of childhood, and it still breaks my heart, and if I think about it too much, I either can’t remember or else I cannot bear the loss. I do not understand it. I hope someday I do. Sometimes we have to just accept the broken pieces of our hearts. Isn’t that where the light gets in, or something like that?

    By nineteen I’d done a few months at a rehab in Orange County, and at twenty-one I relapsed after a year and a half sober, and then I did that again at twenty-five, after almost three years sober. I had settled into a pattern. Get a little time clean and do it all “right,” don’t you know, be a good AA kid, get the boyfriend who becomes your life, get good grades, get cute clothes, enter the gates of eating disorders, insomnia, depression, chronic pain. And this was how it went in my early twenties, because it’s just how it went, because I had zero clue how to be vulnerable, and in fact, I didn’t know that I wasn’t being vulnerable, wasn’t really feeling, was still just running, still refused help and wouldn’t be caught dead asking for it, hid in the toxic relationship, with my head in the toilet, in the thinking I had felt the wounds and forgiven my parents and childhood, all the ways I had to be brave and take care of myself when someone should have been taking care of me; the wounds hadn’t healed, they were just scarred over, puffy and tender, and by the time I was twenty-five I couldn’t stop thinking about that goddamn jumprope.

    But: some tiny needlepoint size glimmer of hope, faith, god, whatever was inside of me as I stood on the back porch at my mom’s house smoking a Parliament, wondering, where am I headed, and how in the holy fuck am I going to do this? I had a forty a day Norco habit and got drunk every night and snorted coke and slept with strangers and drove hammered and reckless, and I was bulimic and had chronic pain and was deeply depressed and full of rage and in my second year of graduate school, and I could see myself in my mind’s eye bound up in a wooden box held tight with thick ropes and how do we get ourselves out of a mess like that? But there was the tiny needlepoint size glimmer, in my heart or chest, and it was whispering, you can do this. And I knew: I can do this.

    I am six and a half years sober today, and I got myself out of that box. Pure magic. What a mess it has been. What messes I have continued to make, mere mortal; mapless and lost, but subtly aware of some quiet internal guide. And oh heavens, the ways I have transformed and grown, it’s deep in me, the gratitude and weight of it all, the way I fell in love with myself finally and learned to tend to my wounds with gentleness, and learned to be forgiving. The tears come, the ease of feeling, because I’m just not so afraid, and I can rest in the reflection of how I was dying and then came to live again, triumphant.

    In my first couple of years sober, this go around, which I consider the real go around, the big shift, the final rising, it was a brutal sort of wake up. I started to feel for the first time in my life, and it was a seemingly endless stretch of rage and fear. I swear it took me nine months to even take a real deep breath, and then, to weep. Grace swooped in and took all my old coping mechanisms, the boyfriend, the dieting, the bulimia, the thin chase, the distract distract distraction game that prevented me from feeling. All that was lifted, and I was left with me, and I started to look at God. What the hell is It/Him/Her? I got interested in all of that. It saved my life and let me transform it. I could sit on a cushion on the floor for two minutes before I wanted to claw my own eyes out. Then three, and on. I was back in twelve step programs and meetings, and I went to small ones with women and felt disconnected and apart from and hated everyone until I started to love them. Until I started to connect. And tell the truth. And rage. And weep. My heart would thump in me like a mallet, and my skin would flush and that tiny needlepoint glimmer started growing. And I kept going.

    I had a party to celebrate one year sober with at least twelve fellow sober women. Me! And at a year and a half, I had to get more help, because I didn’t know how to keep living sober and I couldn’t forgive and I couldn’t say no and I had no sense of self. I kept searching, and I found. I began to really rebuild my insides. I also read hundreds of books.

    And then something burst, and I could tell I had killed whatever black oily snake was inside of me, trying to choke me from within, like the black jumprope I imagined could choke me on the outside – I had broken free, and I knew there was a force taking care of me, that there wasn’t actually anything to fear, that I was lovable and precious and so brave, and that I could still keep going, though I had no idea where I was going. The toxic goop of hate and anger loosened and let go and started to leave me, and I will never forget the first time I felt the cleanness of my insides, I felt like a waterfall, like the freshest air, and there was love in me exploding. That was around year three. I knew I was getting better, and that I was wandering about and expanding in, as Rilke said, widening rings. There was largeness in me.

    I never thought about drinking or getting high. I wanted to be sober. But cleaning up the eating disorders and distorted body image house of mirrors, shaking those monkeys off my back, took years. And how could it not? Like love and sex, it’s primal and of our very essence to eat, to be in our bodies, it’s deep in the guts and bones and skin, and it’s a rocky terrain, climbing through all that. And yet: another miracle. Though the bulimia and intense bingeing cleaned up pretty early on, I still had so many issues around dieting and overeating, weird rules and restrictions lodged in my brain and other strange compulsions with food, but around four years of sobriety, because of whatever the hell I was doing to get better, all of it and none of it, it all softened. One day I woke up and there was no trouble. There was just no more trouble. None. And sure, like how nothing is static, old mean voices can rear their monstrous heads sometimes, and old diet tapes can try to get on the shuffle, and I let ’em roar and let them play a minute but then switch over, because mostly I fell in love with my body and mostly food is fine, and I don’t really care about it. I laugh to myself often – I learned I was so not a foodie when I let myself eat.

    And then the boys. (I’ve yet to date a man.) The narcissists and codependents and cheaters and love avoidants, emotionally unavailable and mirroring back the oldest belief, that I am unlovable and ugly and average, I have said goodbye to so much of that; and even though every inch of my body wants to run into the arms of a guy who won’t ask me to be vulnerable and open, who’ll just get me high and make me feel young and reckless, who will hurt me so I can say, see?, I don’t run into their arms. I don’t stay with them anymore. The last one, a true blue narcissist, I was out the door and slammed it shut at six weeks. In my early twenties I spent three years with a liar. Progress. Because I love myself today, and the core of me just cannot stand the way I feel around disguised wolves, who don’t respect and understand the depth and sensitivity of a woman. I try then, to keep knowing women and loving women and knowing men and loving men, and going where the love is and letting myself be loved, because sometimes it’s me who shuts down or wears a mask. I keep learning and stretching on my toes to glimpse the horizon.

    And all of that space, all of this space that I have now, from drugs, from food, from mean boys and denied resentment, from obsession and self-hatred, allowed me time with myself. With my precious self. To sit and write and read and feel and befriend this kid in me that has always been in me, and shake her hand and say, I’m not leaving. And then I could move out into the world. I can go out into the world, without armor, and try to do what I think it is that we’re meant to do – to make a connection, amend the suffering, tell the truth.

    I do not always feel happy and I do not always feel safe – there are remnants of childhood that still stick to me or took pieces out of me, and maybe that’s just being alive, being a human – but I often feel happy and I often feel safe, and nothing outside is creating it, it’s inherent and deep. It’s the tiny needlepoint that grew and grew and embodied all of me, the undeniable truth that I am being carried and cradled and that even when I screw up and hurt someone or get hurt, or get scared or worried, or so very angry or so very selfish, I’m still lovable, still forgiven, still safe.

    Recovery doesn’t look like any one thing, I don’t think. It’s different for all of us, why we choose the sober path, the feeling path, the attempts at authenticity and vulnerability, and why we stick to it when we certainly have the choice to fall back. It’s because it cracks you open, it lets you stretch your arms and legs and heart, and it lets you inside of yourself again, and again, and again, and it lets you put your feet up, leave the dishes out, make a mess, laugh at the absurdity of it all. It lets you be, and it loves you anyway or simply because – it gives you yourself back or for the first time maybe, and says, chin up, go exploring.