Reprise: What's Allowed?
you tell me
Today I’m republishing my most-read post, originally written last September. I was 4 months sober at the time, not yet counting days or examining my life through that lens. It would be another 3 months before I’d admit I couldn’t do it alone.
Today marks 9 months of recovery. The moment I quit drinking was powerful and important, but what I’m most fiercely proud of is my time in active recovery. 9 months of the bone-on-bone work that is facing myself. Isolation and despair, new levels of powerlessness, remembering to surrender, to trust, to get out of the damn way.
It makes sense this post resonated with others—permission to play is so very rare—and it’s a notable reread for me. This time last year I was taking baby steps toward my new life. I allowed myself a day to “let others wonder.”
But now? Now I’m making it the whole damn life. Among the steadfast pillars of active recovery, I’ve found the permission I’ve so long tried to extend to others. I’m allowed to be me in all that means, to tailor a life—a creative life—that makes sense to me even if it makes sense to no one else. To live it every day.
A friend told me back in February that something shifted for her at 9 months of sobriety, noted that it was the length of a pregnancy. It didn’t resonate at the time, but it does now. Because it’s all one big spiral of remembering, I open the tattered copy of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet I’ve been toting around for 20 years to this, underlined again and again:
Everything is gestation and then bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist's life.
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It’s been six months since Ken and I separated. I haven’t written about it here because it’s been fragile in different ways and also because that story belongs in essays I spend months on, revising and reconsidering until I trust editors at respected publications to assess them on both substance and craft. Essays about my real human relationships are the loftier works, the stories that are also my vocation. Substack, for me, is for the reminders and musings—daily shit.
Our separation after 11 years was and wasn’t a surprise to many who know us. I have, after all, been transparently wondering if I believe in partnership for years. If I’m “supposed to be” single for life.
Six months into singlehood it takes restraint to not say, “100% yes, the answer is yes!” I know, we have no idea what the future holds, blah blah. But I do know there are three things I’ll unequivocally never attempt to “share equally” with another again.
Home. Where I live and sleep can’t be a space in which I’m expected to cede any amount of myself (except to my child).
Money. I will always have and maintain at least one account of my own money.
Sex. My body (and the fun things I do with it) will never be an implied or assumed aspect/asset of any future human relationship.
This list isn’t a reaction to Ken, or our relationship even, it’s a broader knowing. What it means to me, to not have to share these things, is the freedom to be generous. This has long been one of my complaints in partnership, that the baseline expectations cause most of us, over time, to operate more and more from a place of deficit, of not enough. I love giving, love sharing, it’s actually a huge part of who I am. But forced generosity is absurd. I’ll bet no one’s ever said, “You should want to give/share that” and gotten what they were after.
America has a weird relationship to individualism. Independence and freedom are supercharged words in this country, often get interpreted as violently anti-something and/or totally selfish. I’ll spare you a feminist rant (for today) about how successful patriarchy has been at denying women the right to a sense of self, but suffice to say it’s easy for most of us to get righteous pretty quickly on this issue.
I’m currently reading Mark Matousek’s Lessons From an American Stoic: How Emerson Can Change Your Life.* Since adolescence, “self-reliance” has resonated with me. Not overextending ourselves for others, not letting others take too much from us. Matousek is quick to clarify that “self-reliance has nothing to do with selfishness,” sums it up with a simple bullet list. A few of my favorites:
Life without self-knowledge is not worth living.
There is no me without you (interdependence is everything).
Obstacles can become opportunities.
Wonder and awe are the keys to the kingdom.
Yesterday I gave myself permission to “not be productive” and make a PERMISSION banner to hang over my door. It was productive, of course, just not like that. Permission is self-acceptance supercharged, indulgence even. For me it only feels indulgent to begin with, since there’s defiance in overriding my perceived sense of what’s “not allowed.” But slowly it softens into baseline listening. To myself. An acknowledgment of who I actually am. Acceptance of my limitations, sure, but also enthusiasm for what I am capable of.
I’m capable of a lot, have a lot to give. I regularly override this knowing with eye-rolling about ADHD and losing things and walking in circles. But my inefficiency with time no longer needs to impact anyone else (except, and only sometimes, my child). I give myself permission to walk in circles. To make things to hang above doors. To paint my nails and eat ice cream for dinner and record voice memos full of strikingly-clear thoughts I may or may not remember to make into essays. To not wash the dishes. Permission to listen to the same song on repeat all day. Permission to fill my days with long walks with people I like, long talks about all the deep things. Permission to call none of this “doing nothing.”
ICYMI: Last week I added the option to become a paying subscriber to this newsletter (last week’s glitches are fixed). There will be no paywall or difference in content. Think of it as a way to support my writing life in a general way if you feel like it. It’s largely a personal exercise in tempering anti-capitalist stubbornness. Read more money thoughts here.
Optional Assignment:
Start your own Permission List. If you need a jumping off point, pick something about you that’s annoying (to you and/or others) but probably isn’t going away. Give yourself permission to be that way. Get more indulgent from there. Share below if you want.
Self Permission is my fave thing. This week I am indulging in my alone time.
Annoying, oh yes, I am skilled at that. At 76, I’m really more annoying to those younger and smarter and talented. How am I annoying? I have seen a lot and have an intuition that (I’ve finally ) believe in AND the audacity to say what I want. It fascinates me that it furthers me not, but I don’t give a good gad dang. Life is too short and I still have a long path to go down. I stumble, I fall, I trip, I slip, but I keep going. I don’t need permission, it’s my human right!