Thoughts on Sobriety

I've been thinking the last couple of days about being sober.
I'm in a place right now that's pretty alright. And by that I mean I'm not constantly being tempted to fall back into my addictions.
It's like after a storm, when the rain begins to let up a little bit. And you look to the sky and the clouds are beginning to part and the rain is still falling but not nearly as heavily and you turn to the person next to you and you say "I think the worst of it is over."
I don't want to say the worst of it is over, because it feels like knocking on wood or something. I still have struggles in my life but they feel minor compared to the hell I walked through a few years ago, even a few months ago. It's this moment when the rain is letting up and I'm looking to the sky and thinking maybe the worst of it is over. Maybe I get to be happy now, for good.
To be honest, that phrase both completely thrills me and completely terrifies me. Because I don't know how to be happy. Because there is this lull, the break in the clouds, and things get scratchy underneath my skin and I look to the sky, almost begging for there to be another hint of a storm cloud. Because I don't know how to handle being happy. All of my life, I was trained for chaos. One crisis followed another, head over heels, and I got good at dealing with it. And the stillness, the silence, the lull, scares me to death.
I look at my life now, and I feel the squeeze of normalcy tightening around my chest and I want to run from it. I don't ever want to forget where I came from. I don't, for a second, want to forget the hell I fought through to get to this point. The label of being in recovery is one of the ones I am the most proud of, and I never want to forget what I went through to earn it. I want every word I speak, every move I make to be a living memorial to the hell I went through and survived. I don't want to be detached from the pain that made me who I am. I guess in essence what I am saying is that I never want to forget where I came from.
Where I am now, the pain is mostly fallout pain. It's the aftermath of death, the aftermath of my body fighting against me, the aftermath of the addictions. The fog has cleared just enough that I can see where I am going and live my life without being acutely aware of all these things that happened to me. I'm working out and I'm not constantly being sucked into the hatred I had for my body. I'm in my relationship, happy and loved, and not constantly thinking about all the times when I wasn't. I'm sifting through the aftermath and finding out what I believe and seeing the truth about things and it is good and hard and it is all part of recovery. But sometimes it seems the farther down the road of recovery I get, the more I want to turn and run the other way. Back to my addictions, to my self hatred, to the deep dark depression that clouded my days. Because it was comfortable. because in the thick of it all there seems to be an air of worthiness.
I heard a comment by Russell Brand in an interview he did once where he was talking about addiction, and how no matter how far you went there's always the one thing you wish you'd done, the one drug you wished you'd taken. Because then it might make recovery feel a little more earned.
I'm in a place now where I'm finally reclaiming my voice. I'm telling the truth about my story, even if my voice shakes. Even if finding out the truth sometimes reveals cracks in the solid foundation I thought I had. Even if it makes me uncomfortable and I have to draw boundaries where there wasn't any before because I am finally learning that what I want matters.
I guess what I'm saying is that this is recovery too. And I never want to forget the hell I fought through to get here. I always want in recovery to be one of the labels I am most proud of wearing. I also want to learn how to be grateful for the good moments, to enjoy the beauty that I have. And I never want to take for granted what I have, to think that I have reached a spot where I can stop being insistent upon my recovery and being brutally honest about what I feel, think, experience and need. There's no recovered for me, always in recovery. There are ups and downs because that is life, and its a journey. A journey that matters more than the destination. There's always more stories to be told, more layers to be shed. And I never want to stop being in recovery.

Here Be Dragons

I sat across from a girl who told me her story
With wide eyes, a face weathered by wars unspoken, exhausted and weary she sat before me, unfolding her life's story like a road map
Her hands, they told a story as they skimmed over the map, pointing out the roads she's traveled, the diners and run down motels she went into looking for a night's rest and refuge but only finding more monsters.
She said she was tired , and I could tell by the look on her face that she meant it. She looked hesitant still, hesitant to unload her baggage and her crumpled, torn road map and allow me to look over the outlines of highways and river banks.
She told me about the storm.
How this area here, the pale icy blue blob in the corner was where it began. When you're small, you do the best you can and this stain in the corner is where her hands shook and if you look closely you can see where she tried to paint the blue into an ocean, a lake, something, anything worth looking at but in the end it's only a stain.
Everyone told her the stain wasn't her fault, that just because the corner was ruined didn't mean the roadmap was useless, and she tried to believe them. But as she drove from one ghost town to the next the blob seemed to get larger and she couldn't escape it's looming permanency. She knew that her own crooked hands had been wrapped around the paintbrush, and even if the spill didn't drip from her fingertips she had tried to paint it away.
The rest of the roads, curvy and winding, seemed to be dictated by this stain.
She showed me the small towns and truck stops she'd sought as she ran away from the stain, in each one searching for love and refuge, in each one finding only more rain.
And the water began to fill her lungs, and the whole thing felt like a rainy Seattle sky and she believed them when they said the sun never shines in Seattle.
She showed me where she tried to make her own sun, roads marked brown and faded burnt orange, close but never shining vibrant. Twisting, shrinking, running, extracting, taking in, covering, revealing.
The roads, she said, never shone promised golden sunbeams.
She showed me the trees, the forest, the night. She referred to it as the moment when her body gave in, when the sickness riddled her bones, when pain became an every day fight.
Her stomach clenches tight as she tells this part, how she became another anomaly, another unexpected detour.
Her fingers trace the rough edges of the darkest days, the unmarked path traced in black ink. There are ink dots, each one representing a marker.
the day he fell, the day she cried, the day he left, the day she finally admitted she had wandered off the map into uncharted territory and there be dragons.
There be dragons
She said it's what they say when they've reached territory the map hasn't yet covered, because who knows what could be out there.
And the dragons that lurked in the unknown, they prowled at night. Some were friendlier than others. Some she learned to see behind their glistening eyes and treat kindly, others reared their ugly heads whenever the occasion presented itself.
And she, she tells me about the time when she learned to live with dragons. How everyone was afraid of this. How sometimes she was afraid of the dragons too.
How the dragons represented the storm, and all that followed.
I watch her, this dragon warrior.
She points to a spot on the map, painted a green blue with flecks of reddish gold and I ask her what it means.
She says this is now. Now, still marked by the blue paint that once stained the map, but now there are other colors too. The green is the grassy fields, the semblance of peace returning to the dark lines of the map. The reddish gold are flecks of sunbeam, of learning to be joyful.
Abuse, addiction, illness, pain, searching, empty promises, heartache, lost, darkness, dragons.
She doesn't quiver when she tells these parts of the story anymore. She used to, she says.
Now her eyes show fatigue, show pain as she runs her fingers over map lines, but there is something else too.
the knowledge that here be dragons, but this is not the end of the map. There is more map, more space, more road untraveled.
The stain at the beginning, the forest in the middle, the dragons that emerge from the shadows, they are not the end.
I get up from the mirror and walk away

Manifesto: You were made for something more

Hand holding, elbows brushing, hips swaying, feet stomping.

The world has come alive, awakening from it's winter, and I am awakening with it.

I can feel the revival stirring inside of my body, feel the rhythm as my heart beats in time, resounding against my ribcage

I want to be free

I don't know anyone but no one feels like a stranger

There is music, and laughter, and dancing, and the world feels like it has been lit on fire, and I want to be on fire too

I want to glow, emit the light that has been cooped up inside of me for so long

I want to shine like the sun as it peeks through the clouds, warming my shoulders, reminding me of miracles

The hot lemonade is warm on my tongue, but comfortably so. It tastes like honey, like promise and sweetness and hope. It is warmth and comfort.

We watch as people move like they were born solely to exist in this moment, like nothing else matters besides this awakening, and I can feel my heart awakening too

I am coming out of a long, cold winter

My bones are still rusty and don't quite remember how to dance but the echo of my heartbeat (sounds like a symphony) is a persistent partner, always inviting me to dance no matter how many times I step on his feet

She says my confidence is coming back, he says the light is returning to my eyes, and I feel it all as I am shedding extra layers

I want to experience what it means to be alive

I play a game of feeling everything, letting it be absorbed into my skin like it is medicine, letting it wash over me like the promise of hope

It makes me giddy

Reminding me what it's like to have a voice, to break free from the shackles of darkness, to grow my own set of wings

It reminds me of being seven, when I still fiercely held on to my light, when the whole world made me insanely happy

Ten years have passed, and I have become more jaded, hardened by the world, and yet I still feel that same awakening inside of me

the same hope and potential and possibility

this could be the start of something beautiful

And I want to fall in love with this moment, and these people, and myself and the birds and the trees and the hills and the sky and everything that seems to call my name, begging me, for this one moment, to be alive

I am poetess, story teller, belonging to the universe and the One who created it all, created to marvel and wonder and be fully alive in every moment while my heart is still beating like a drum inside of me

I was made to feel something more than the weight of the darkness as it wraps itself around my shoulders and calls itself warmth

I remember a few years ago sitting at a kitchen table in a house that didn't belong to me, writing on the back of a grocery list that I want to be enough for myself

I didn't know then that those words would become my cry as I wandered through these next few years of my life

I was, and am, searching for ways to be enough for myself

I am realizing now I don't have to do anything

I just have to exist

in wonder

in grace

in love

there is nothing I can do or not to do make myself enough, I just need to accept that I am

I was

And I always will be

I'm still learning what that means

I'm coming back to that place where I live in honesty, not belonging to another human being but myself, marveling at the world

Sometimes it's easy to write from this place

It's not so easy when you are lacking connection, when the pieces don't quite fit, when you spill your coffee and spend the afternoon in bed and stub your toe on your way out the door

I am learning this too is it's own kind of beautiful

If this is crazy than I want to be that. I want to fall in love with every moment of my one wild and beautiful life, I want to see heaven and God and the divine nature of it all in everything, I want to finally learn what it means to embrace my enough-ness and be free

I want to use these wings to fly

Where I stood

The sun warmed my shoulders as I sat at the kitchen table, listening to Missy Higgins and writing about nostalgia and hope and grief and everything beautiful.
March has been good to me, in a way I never expected.
The first words I wrote this month, as it came to me full of untold secrets, were "I'm not great at ending things."
It began quietly unfolding as I wrote of bad haircuts, watching Julia Robert's movies and saying goodbye. I wrote about grief, pain, still (always) trying to analyze the hole in my chest that came from losing too many people and things that I love.
I fought with myself, constantly wrestling against the idea that there had to be something more, examining my pain under a microscope and trying to make sense of it.
I tried to find myself amidst the unknown, often stumbling over my own edges.
And then there came a moment, and maybe they all come something like this, where I tripped over myself and fell into what I had been looking for.
For a brief moment in time, there was nothing left to say. No apologies sneaking out in the form of poetry, no love letters slipping out of the pen every time it hit the paper. There was just the sound of my heart, and I was learning how to listen to it.
During this month of March I often fought between my heart and my head. I felt like I needed constant reassurance that everything was ok and that I was ok.
And I encountered something I am still trying to explain, and can only describe as radical grace.
In my running away from myself I ran face first, full speed into radical grace, radical faith, radical love and hope.
I had some real, honest conversations with people about my life and where I've been and where I want to go, and maybe I was a little bit surprised by the responses I got. Because sometimes if you give people a chance, they will surprise you and it will be great.
For the first time in forever I realized how loved I am (even if that's something I am still trying to understand)
I laughed and cried and struggled and fought against myself and for myself a lot this month. I got real, got scared, got excited, got honest, got loved.
And I made some big decisions about my future, which are slowly unfolding into something beautiful.
For me, I think March was about beginning that journey to find myself, and listening to my heart and being honest about that. And while that's been my intention I definitely experienced it in a really real and crazy way.
Listening to Missy Higgins and writing in the sunshine was a perfect way for me to wrap up this beautiful, crazy month of grace.
And while I don't know what the next month or few months or year will hold for me I can only hope it involves more of this radical kind of love, and grace and faith. I can only hope it involves more of this being cracked open, because this, I am learning, is how the light gets in.
Even if it's painful
Even if it's hard
I am learning to open myself up to the light and to love and to others and to myself


Sit down on the top there. After all, you climbed all the way up. You did that. Not me. Not your past. You: here and now. It was a steep climb and you almost fell but you didn't. Go on and sit down. And when the trees ask you to stay awhile, tell them "yes, yes, I plan to. In fact, I have always been here. I have always been the light

"Soon this place will be too small"

Writers scribbling in the midst of grief have noted the ways in which writing about the experience from the inside creates something new, namely, a safe or safe-ish place to rest. A net, a landing point, a dock from which to view the turbulent and troubled waters without having to wade in it every moment of the day. In a word: relief. The act of creation forces the creator to establish a new world with new rules and structure and form, an act that is sustaining not only in an emotion and a human way, but also in an artistic way."
From Still Point of the Turning World by Emily Rapp


For as many times as I've done it, you would think that letting go is something that comes easy to me. And yet I still find myself fighting against it, my heart suffering from whiplash and weathered by the elements.
There is something they don't tell you about the moment when you alter your position to the universe.
My hands and feet are cold, I am filled with reckless ambition, I have avoided mirrors and sharp corners and acidic foods simply because this is what you do when you have been stripped down to a new layer of skin.
Sometimes I think it would be easier if I could plot my relation to the universe with a simple formula, putting things into neat little boxes.
I am angry because...
I am sad because...
But sometimes there is no explanation, only still silence. It is in that silence I can hear my own heartbeat like a machine gun as it slams into my chest wall.

Don't write if you don't feel up to it, people cautioned me when I told them I had started to write {about Ronan}. But it didn't matter if I felt up to it. It was my responsibility; it was my job. It ordered chaos, focused energy, provided a way of "bearing up" that no period of restfulness could possibly accomplish. In other words, rendering loss was a way of honoring life

I have spent months writing about grief, running it over in my hands, preserving it in every way that I can. I have spent days chasing after life, wondering what exactly constitutes life, and love, and always altering my position to both.
I have said the words I love you many times, and most of them meant Please don't leave me here alone
I write in my own blood, until my heart is exposed on the page. Sometimes I wonder if this also constitutes as art. I wonder if there is something beautiful in being so exposed and fragile.
I have been digging through my own ashes, pulling the gore from my chest with my bare hands, staring at myself and realizing that my horror and my wonder are colliding in this very moment in a place under my skin, that I am both.

After a second suicide attempt, Mary awakens on the bank of the Thames, having just been rescued from the water. This event marks a kind of rebirth for her, an awakening.
'We must go on living' Mary concluded, 'It is our duty'

And so, in the darkness, I am working to build a life for myself. I am capturing moments of beauty, storing them, treasuring them. I often feel like I am laboring long hours, and in the end I can only hope the outcome has been worth the heartache.
There is great heartache that comes with letting yourself be loved, I have decided. I am continually altering my place in the universe, constantly shifting, expanding and shrinking, pulling in and releasing with open hands.
There is nothing left inside of me to offer right now. My hands are empty, my body turning in on itself, my eyes always looking for glimmers of hope.
Somehow, as hard as I have tried to hold onto the past, this feels like starting over.
As much as I have made myself believe I must hold onto the pain and grief, never forget the extremes it has taken to become this person, right now it feels like I am awakening into spring, a new beginning.
There comes a time when you must taste hope for what is really is, and open your heart once more to the potential.
I have held things (people, pain, stories, grief, moments) close to my heart claiming that I would never let go of these that have impacted me so greatly
But sometimes it is time to let go
And you must stand in the wind with your arms raised to the heavens and trust that this is how it is, how it is supposed to be

I stared at him and tickled him and kissed him and wished that my words, anything, could save him. But no, writing would not save Ronan. But, I thought, it might save me

Gilead

There are nights when I feel weak
Depleted, lacking, always reaching for something that isn't there, trying to get a grip
My hands are cracked from all the hurt I have tried to hold in them, my throat is hoarse from all the words I tried to say, there is a hole in the pit of my stomach the size of a peach pit from everything I've tried to swallow, tried to stuff inside, tried to grow inside of myself
There are days when I pause and ask if it's all worth it, this whole living honestly thing, because living with a heart wide open means you are wide open when the stones get thrown
Sometimes I wonder if this is what healing feels like, this lacking, trying to hold everything with arms getting tired, heart chapped by the wind because it's been on your sleeve, exposed to the elements, for quite some time now
I feel an evident lacking tonight
Lacking motivation, lacking wisdom, lacking the ability to turn simple words into something poetic, lacking blood
I think this is all part of living with your heart wide open, living from that place of honesty. It is incredibly hard, and your heart gets bruised and there are times when you want to take back your open hands and close your fists so tightly nothing can get through, nothing can hurt you
Living honestly means sometimes there is crying, messy crying, and there are meltdowns in the bathroom and there is standing in front of the mirror trying to get yourself together and there are sleepless nights and evidence of lacking and weakness
Living honestly, openly, engaging in this give and take with myself and the people around me and the universe, it is depleting, and exhausting, and hard. Being real and looking myself in the mess and accepting that, it's one of the hardest things I've ever done. Sometimes I look in the mirror and I see a girl who doesn't know if she's worth loving today, with all the imperfections, when I'm not nice, when I am selfish and exhausted and depleted.
And then I take a moment, and I step back, and I realize there is beauty in this too
Because now I can write pages and pages on his eyes, her laugh, being surrounded by people and witnessing beautiful words and moments and conversations.
And if I acknowledge the hard parts of living honestly, I also must acknowledge the good
How it has allowed me to love myself and accept myself, even when it's messy
How it has allowed me to become a beauty seeker
How it has given me moments of connection and interactions with amazing people
Living honestly means you take the good and the bad, and I guess you set up a monument for both.
You acknowledge the good and the bad
I have books filled with memories of all the good things, the beautiful moments that made me so grateful to be here and to be alive and to be human
And I have a box filled with all those painful reminders, the physical and metaphorical scars I wish I didn't have to carry around with me but are such an important part of my story
Lately I've been hearing a lot about monuments, and naming the important things in your life
A while ago I came up with a word I wanted my life to embody, and looking at it now I think it's starting to blossom into existence


Gilead: A place of healing