Remember a few short weeks ago when I said I was entering my phoenix era? I guess I’d conveniently forgotten that burning to death/spontaneous combustion is a pretty key part of the phoenix’s whole deal. Expressly what launches the powerful take-flight stuff.
Many friends and acquaintances had a particularly hellish holiday season this year. Shitty health stuff, absurdly tragic events. Lots of death, so much grief. LA went up in literal flames.
I was not exempted.
Remember back on May 25th when I wrote about how much I adore addicts? How I owned that I’m an addict but also said I’m fine as long as I’m making art? Wanna know what happened the day after I wrote that? I went to a small gathering of people I didn’t know well, poured myself a glass of wine and kept pouring all night “for no reason” until all the bottles were empty, then switched to beer or whatever else was available. I won a game I barely remember playing and was apparently an all-around great time.
None of that was unique. My cycles of “self-management” always brought me to the same place, a bad-but-under-the-radar-enough territory where I’d hover until I did something dramatic enough to warrant the next reset.
When I woke up the next morning, I had no memory of puking out of my bed and all over the floor of my adorable new cabin. I’d moved out of Ken’s a few weeks before, was newly “liberated,” free of the tethers of committed partnership that I was convinced were the main reason I drank so much.
I’d had countless moments of recognition before. That I “had a problem,” that my drinking had “gotten out of control,” even that I was an addict. But any proclamations of quitting were always motivated by intellectual comprehension or a promise to Ken.
This was different. As I laid in bed unable to keep down water, too sick to clean up the wine chunks drying into the cracks between the floorboards, I looked to the actual heavens. Said aloud to the empty room, “I understand. This is bigger than any circumstance or relationship. This is powerlessness to alcohol. I can’t promise I won’t kill myself or someone else. We’re done here.”
And it stuck. I decided to never drink again and I haven’t. Period the end, right?
There’s a story that rattles around in my head about the first time my brother Jesse had a psychotic episode. He tried to turn a dog inside out, my mom said. I was six then, unaware of events in real time, but I’ve repeated those words as a way to succinctly summarize my fucked up family.
There was more about Jesse believing he was the Messiah. Wandering out into traffic thinking he could stop cars. Maybe that was a separate incident from the dog, but it’s always been a composite in my mind: Jesse clothed in robes, face lit by headlights, serene as he holds up his arms. Incessant honking, then a snarling German Shepherd beside him. My brother, unphased by all that foaming at the mouth because he’s Jesus, reaches toward it. Incredibly—or because he’s Jesus—he gets his arm down into the slippery hot conduit until he finds the lining of the stomach. He sinks his nails in, gets a nice wet handful, starts to pull.
That’s what it felt like in my body Christmas week. An inside-outed sleeve, bombs going off inside me again and again. Spontaneous combustion indeed.
It’s easy now to see the cracks forming across the summer. The way I was glued to my phone days after getting sober, convinced I could win real money on casino apps. The way dormant feelings of abandonment and terror and despair began to surface within weeks, how easily I blamed Ken for all of it. How much my conviction that our family needed healing was about me.
I see the trigger moments piling up in the fall, the increased projecting onto others, the melting of boundaries I’d carefully built as protection. The search for healing solutions in sex and meditation and spontaneous trips and eventually energy drinks. The return of abandonment and despair as I found myself, for the second time in six months, stonewalled by someone I trusted. Sometimes we need patterns to recognize that the feelings are in us and have been all along.
I’d understood Attachment Theory—again, intellectually—that our close human relationships activate emotional patterns and traumas from childhood. But brought to my literal hands and knees, shaking and dry heaving, the understanding was deeper. The grownups are never coming. Curled up in a ball on the floor, waves of devastation unending, I got the memo. “Ok, now I understand. This is literal powerlessness. This I cannot manage alone.”
Graciously, this divine intervention waited to completely give way until Ken and our daughter went to Hawaii. For about a week I was free to act like an absolute lunatic, make the kinds of noises I made in labor, sob for hours on end. Trash my house, do some painting.
Healing is a motherfucker. I sure as hell wanted the pain to stop, but I was also determined to go through it. There were moments of wanting to drink and moments of wanting to die, but I understood I wouldn't take action on either. That these feelings that I had no idea existed had been waiting their turn for a very long time.
I did not do it alone. For years I’ve resisted formal recovery programs because I thought I was too evolved and creative and feminist to belong. Because I’d learned to manage myself and heal and be accountable to people and my DIY way was just fine thank you very much and conveniently didn’t ask me to announce to anyone else that I know I’m an alcoholic. Sometimes you have to get turned inside out.
In the throes of it, Lisa pulled a card for me from a brand-new deck. Putrefaction. Shadow Release.
Where are you projecting your own shortcomings, pain, trauma, and angst onto others?* Projection occurs when you are triggered and reactive to your outer world. . . . Putrefaction is the fifth phase of alchemy and one of the most emotionally challenging because it requires an honest look within. Scientifically, putrefaction is the decomposition of organic matter. Use your life as a spiritual practice and start to release unconscious patterns. . . . Handling difficult emotions is one of the most challenging parts of alchemy, and it’s best not to do this alone.
Remember back when I wrote about solitude as sacred commitment? Remember Permission? Remember literally all of it? All of it has been driven by a part of me few people really saw, fewer yet without reaction or judgement. I’ve been fortunate to always have community in spades, but I have also been supremely lonely for a very long time, trying like hell to manage a life I don’t know how to manage.
Calling myself an alcoholic has been the turning point of my life. Has given me the permission to be exactly who I am that I’ve been seeking for as long as I can remember. There’s no way to describe the relief I’ve found amongst a chorus of people who don’t see me as something to be fixed.
Another excuse I used to avoid seeking addiction support was a preconceived idea of forced religion. It’s patently untrue, btw, that you need to believe in God to be in recovery. As it turns out, for me, permission to be exactly who I am includes the fact that I’m actually pretty into God. Not like that, with the big G and rules and stuff. Something closer to the universe and magic and the muses and forces conspiring toward divine things.
It hasn’t exactly been a secret I like those things. But in all my struggles for permission over the past few years, for belonging as an artist and acceptance for ADHD, I’ve been after the same damn thing. It was all one giant quest for permission to prioritize god (consider the word a place holder for whatever mashup of divine things works for you). Not just include magic in my life. Center it. Remembering has always been about finding my way back to the lifeblood of Source from one half-death or another.
The artist in me is unimpressed. Yeah, no shit.
The other day I went to the beach and pulled a card from my archetype deck (my god might just be decks, all the way down). I laughed as I read about The Empty Room. Kinda sums up my entire existence. But there was extra resonance in this: Let others wonder what you are doing. It’s just between me and god now. No one else has to get it.
Typically, recovery is measured from the first alcohol-free day, in which case I’ve been sober for nearly 8 months. But that’s not what it feels like. I don’t think my recovery started the day I stopped drinking, I think it started the day I sought help.
By this metric I’m a mere 26 days into my recovery. Some days I’m mad I don’t get ugly rehab. I’m always down to be exempted from society and I could really use a written schedule for daily life. I’ve been trying to create my own weekly schedule for the past six years, a pretty good metric for an unmanageable life.
They say to start simple. They say to build routines. I’m in the baby steps stage of the baby steps stage, but one thing I know is that life now gets designed around magic, not the other way around. That prioritizing the divine means saying no to a lot of people. I’ve always been a yes gal.
For a very long time I’ve worked earnestly at becoming, have laid out thousands of plans and worked hard to secure foundations underneath them. I’ve been compassionate and creative and definitely fun. But there was never anything underneath it all. No consistent oversight, no bedrock.
Now I have bedrock. So let’s try this again:
Ultimate permission. To unapologetically devote myself to The Empty Room. To let others wonder.
Your Optional Assignment:
Find 30 minutes this week for The Empty Room. A half hour dedicated to doing nothing. Staring at a wall, being with the nothingness. Put it in the schedule now and let nothing take its place. Let others wonder.
* IYKYK.
Serena, congratulations on entering recovery. The rooms are such a special and healing and grounding and accepting place. Welcome!
BTW what deck of cards is that one at the end of this post? So pretty!
And I LOVE this concept of the Empty Room and letting others wonder what we are doing. I think with the onslaught of social media, we have started to feel like we are accountable to let all of our followers know our every little move. But no! Let us be free of that and keep the focus on ourselves. <3
This is very powerful. I’m happy for you to have come through so much, flames, barf, time, and to be on this side of a legit phoenixing. I admire your vision and force.