On endings as beginnings

dispatch 4

Hi there.

This dispatch finds me coming off my very first camping trip, which somehow took until I was 32 even though I am gay and still read Boxcar Children books. I drank coffee from a tin cup, sat at a campfire made by my very favorite person, read 2+ paperbacks, and got absolutely covered in bug bites. It was glorious and I wouldn’t change a thing.

Camping is weird in that it involves a lot of work, but also a lot of down time. You’re doing something or you’re doing nothing…there is no in-between. I mostly stayed off my phone and instead found myself reading, watching the flames, exploring with the dog, cuddling, or napping. My head felt clear. My anxiety mostly left me alone. It felt like real rest, almost immediately. I can’t remember the last time I experienced my brain letting go so quickly.

I originally started this newsletter to talk about rest, but in truth, I am still learning what that means. I’m still trying to figure out how to make space for my brain instead of filling my time with “restful” tasks (Kind of like how I want to be a minimalist and totally will be the second I buy all of the minimalism books, organization products, and accessories you know? Capitalism, whatta drug.). I’m still trying to parse identity from productivity. That’s a little of what this piece is about.

More to come, but in the meantime, I hope you’re all hanging in there. Get outside today if you can. Maybe leave your phone home.

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[Image Description: A close up of reeds coated in ice, forming a lattice of tiny icicles on a sandy riverbank.]

On endings as beginnings…

Lately, I’ve been leaning into Norse myths and sagas, an exploration of my ancestry. In the Norse story of the world, things are cyclical. The world begins. The world ends. In between there is life. In the chaos, in the destruction, when you are your most tender and vulnerable in the world, you begin again. 

 In the last few months of my most recent employment, I was revisited by that inescapable 3am wakefulness of my drinking days. My brain, trapped in a body that was screaming a warning I could not hear. That’s a lie. I could hear it, I just didn’t want to.

My body knows about endings. My life, a kaleidoscope of their different colors, of the places where their shapes intersect and become something new. For a long time, my life has been long stretches of white-knuckled, approximated normalcy, punctuated by moments of emotional arson. It’s so much easier to recognize an end than it is to find the beginning, but they are a part of each other. A part of me. Sometimes you have to facilitate the end to get to the beginning.

I got sober in late 2017. Booze had long been a kind of escape hatch, a temporary exit from a life that felt increasingly small. A convenient scapegoat for every way I was scared to be in the world, a shroud of empty belonging. In the end, booze left me like an unfaithful lover, like a monster that I created but just couldn’t love. I had not realized I could be left. I had not realized I could leave.

What no one tells you about getting sober is that it won’t stop your life from falling apart and stitching back together. Next month, I will be sober for four years. What I am realizing is that for nearly the entirety of my time as a sober person, I have given myself to someone else’s vision. It was dazzling in ways that bounced the light away from the big questions that no one seemed willing to answer. It was shiny, but it wasn’t mine. The rabbit was never in the hat. An illusion can be both magic and a lie. 

I told myself that I was channeling my energy in a meaningful way, marred in that generational obsession with making a difference. And I did, we did. But when something, some sort of ideology, some way of thinking or mission becomes your life, when it starts to spread into all of your waking hours, when the edges of community, family, relationships become blurry, something is wrong. Nothing should take that much. Nothing should demand that much. It was just a new monster. Something that I deitized and gave myself away to, a new way to jump into a beginning so I didn’t feel the pain of the end of my drinking. 

For four years, my sobriety has existed in a kind of zoo, as a caged idea of itself for viewing. Still a lion, but only in name. What will it become on its own? It feels like starting over on something that I thought was set in stone. There is fear there, and possibility threaded through. 

I am unpacking the beginning so that I can understand the end. I am sitting in the finish so that I can start to weave a start. In these years of change, divorce, sobriety, falling in love, an unraveling of identity, I feel the tendrils of what I will become stretch out. In this ending, I can feel the grief and the pain of finding hurt where you were sure you would find salvation. In the chaos and the destruction. The final death of one kind of dream. In the claiming of every, single beautiful part.

In between, there is life. The in-between is all we get.

Assorted, rad things: 

The section of this newsletter in which I share what I’m reading, consuming, loving this week! I’m trying out little blurbs around what I took from each thing…do you like this? Do you just want the links? Let me know!

• The Jean Swallow Project - My brilliant love launched the teaser for their own creative work and I couldn’t be prouder or more excited. If you love queer sobriety history then trust me, you won’t want to miss it.

• Wintering by Katherine May: This book found me in the library at the exact right moment and I’m still reflecting on its gentle power and what it means to rest when so much our identity is about what we DO.

• Maintenance Phase Podcast: I can’t get enough of this pod. The hosts are truly funny, both incredible researchers AND storytellers and it’s really helping me as I continue to navigate orthorexia recovery/being a human in a body.

• The Art of Drowning by AFI for extra pre-teen Lisa emo 4w5 vibes (Fun Gay Fact: Davey Havok is how I learned the word “bisexual” and came out as queer way back in the aughts!)

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always,

lisa