A Full Life

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Tag: recovery

  • love, enough

    [fiction short] An hour before I am supposed to leave, I start crying. I’ve had that fluttery, controlling, rigidity-soaked fear for two days now, and underneath that there are always two forms of grief – the actual grief, which hurts, and the tender grief about being so hard on myself, that the New Age Buddhists call radical…

  • Squeaky Clean

    I can remember the first time I felt truly clean, and I think I went off and wrote a poem about waterfalls and the color blue. Nerd. I was trying my best to express what it meant, that feeling of a freshly scrubbed inner space. Like linens washed in lavender water, or what I imagine a…

  • To Thine Own Self, Be True AF

    My guess is that if Shakespeare were alive today, he’d be all about not giving a fuck what others thought. (You know, in the healthy, anti-codependent, non-sociopathic way.) Let me declare, just to gain even more credibility here, that I used to be sort of obsessed with astrology. Give me a break, I was fifteen. And though I…

  • I’m Serious!

    You might not believe this, but I used to take myself very seriously. If you had suffered the way I had, well, then you would not be laughing at my tears. (Or drinking them, like Jessica Valenti.) I mean, my mom told me I was bad at soccer! My dad was too busy working to hug…

  • Zoloft in High School

    somewhere in 2003, a girl   I am seventeen years old, and I am depressed, and I think it’s a cliche. I want so much to be good, but I cannot outrun, outdrink, outfuck this fear, and this fear is making me bad. I can barely get out of bed in the morning. Warning: May…

  • Transportation

    Nothing transports like a song. Nothing evokes such memory. Like Proust’s famous madeleines, the hearing of one song has transported me back twelve years and sixty-two miles away, to a world I no longer inhabit, to best friends and lovers I no longer know, to places I will probably never see again. At nineteen I bought…

  • The Thinker

    “The less I think, the more I love.” -My friend I have come to trust, despite dubious moments, that there is no solution in rough and tough self-talk and obsessive thinking. You know. The thinking that warns and threatens. That runs the black and white tapes of rigidity and scarcity. The bad girl tales. Those are beyond…

  • Miracle

    If you have ever had an eating disorder, then you know. You understand what it feels like to be consumed with thoughts of food and weight at every moment. You know the calorie count of every single item at the store, and if you don’t, you could probably venture a guess. You know the fear…

  • Above All, Compassion

    There’s this old Peter Gabriel song that really cracks me open, not only for its beauty and power but because it reminds me of a time in my life that was particularly dark and stormy. I remember listening to it on repeat in my old Honda Accord, driving home on Sunset still drunk on whiskey and coming…

  • The Inside of Loneliness

    I have come to find that the feeling of feelings is the first step in surrender and moving toward growth and change, from whatever it is we need to surrender to, grow toward, and change from. Spilled tears, gasping sobs, clutched knees and calls to friends are part of the deal. Moments of self-pity, complaint,…