The mess is the truth

dispatch 14

Hey all,

Last week I made the terrible mistake of revisiting a piece of writing I wrote in deep depression and thinking “Wow, I have not been depressed in a while!”.

…

I know. Needless to say, as these things go my week was a light show of dumpster fires! After running hundreds of virtual events over the last four years, I experienced my first zoom bombing incident which really threw me for a loop. I am constantly surprised by the depths of useless nonsense that people actually do with their one precious life just to bring some havoc and chaos to a stranger’s day.

This, paired with some unwelcome news, a pain flare-up, some friend things that pressed on my rejection buttons, other hard things/general overwhelm meant that I all but crawled into this past weekend. Three days of intense snowed-in self-care later and I am feeling somewhat human again. Thankful for sleep, art, friends who send gorgeous seasonal bath salts, my therapist for reminding me that depression and wallowing aren’t the same, the Yellowjackets season finale, and Max for taking care of me through it all.

If you’re in one of those weeks you just have to survive, I am so sorry and I get it. I know it doesn’t feel like it, but they always shift.

That six months before you get sober, that six months after you get sober, and also every six months thereafter. (Image first seen on Instagram, pulled from this site.)

The mess is the truth

(CW: Talk of hangover-induced vomiting, and hangover-cover behaviors. If that’s not something you can read right now skip paragraphs 3 & 4 and pick up at the asterisk *)

There are things we leave behind. Things that we think are no longer ours and we watch them drift from our hands, water through fingertips. In sobriety, I gained so much more than I thought I would lose. It was something I could never have imagined until I truly let myself see it. I had to throw myself off the cliff of it, in order to learn that I wouldn’t fall forever. My life has had moments like this, where the impossible thing, the thing I am sure that I cannot do, is the only thing. The only option, though that doesn’t make it any less scary. 

Change isn’t gentle most of the time. It’s forceful and surprising, unfair and poorly timed. It comes when you are tired, lonely, broke, too depressed to move. Change is sometimes an invitation, but so often it is a reckoning. When I got sober, I was sick of living so many lives at once. I was exhausted from standing in the middle, between impossible realities, trying to push them further apart so they would not bleed together when in truth their separateness was an illusion that only I fell for anymore. 

My cover life, the one where I was a straight-A student, a good hostess, a pulled-together worker. All of these empty roles lined up on a shelf to approximate a shallow idea of goodness, a right to exist. And then the other one, the life where I stumbled to the toilet midshower to puke out a hangover, water on to cover the sound. Knees pressed into that cold tile, my skin hot with sick, water dripping lukewarm onto the floor, all shame and filth, convinced that this was all I was and that it might never end. That this was the truth of me that I must hide at all costs. I still remember everything. Like there is a small bit of myself still on that floor next to that shell pink tub, hearing the shampoo suds pop in my ears violently, the way any sound can be violent the morning after you tried to lose yourself in gin again. If you asked me what shame sounds like, it’s that leftover soap I didn’t manage to wash out of my hair. The reminder that even something as simple as a shower had become tinged by the drinking. Nothing was free, nothing was safe anymore.

On those mornings, everything around me felt unreal, vibrating at the edges, or maybe that was every nerve vibrating inside the tender and bruised shell of my skin. I had been a teenage girl and so I already knew how to vomit quietly, had learned that skill long ago like some people acquire scout badges. Here is a sash of all of the ways I have learned to hurt myself quietly and conveniently, see how they dazzle in the light. I have earned them all.

*I learned how to fold this feral part of me into the cracks of my shiny life so that it almost didn’t peek out. Both of my lives were real in that they belonged to the same person, but neither were sustainable; not on their own and not together because neither were true. I think in the end that was killing me more than the booze was. I had to find the part of me that felt worth saving, not because she was good but because she was real.

I got sober in pursuit of that one single life. I wanted to merge it all so that I would no longer have to hide one from the other, to stand in front of a mirror and see fifty versions of myself stretching back into fifty more, back into eternity. A single life where I wouldn’t have to press my other lives into the corners. Where I didn’t try to band-aid things with spending and booze and while I denied myself anything I actually needed. The one where I mistook sex for closeness, the one where I was drowning in credit card debt, the one where I weighed myself four times a day, the one where I was happily married. I tried many things in the search for what fit, became a Russian nesting doll of misdirection, so many versions of me hidden behind others until I was so small in the palm of a hand. Until I couldn’t even remember where the lies stopped and I started. I don’t think that’s unique to addicts, but we are just more likely to admit it.

In that first year of sobriety, I did live one life. It was fast-paced and joyous. I cried at the drop of a hat, mainlined coffee, and moved forward with incredible speed. I joined things, changed jobs, scheduled all of the space out of my life with all of this newfound energy. All pink cloud and sunshine, I was running so fast towards one destination that no one was more surprised than me to realize that I was not happy. Same problem, shinier package.

That is the thing about sobriety– it doesn’t fix everything around it by nature of what it is. That is not its job. It’s yours. I am still learning how to stitch all of the parts of myself together in a way that is honest. I am not easily taken in by mantras and platitudes; the self-help nonsense that has turned religious morality and self-denial into a cottage industry. Those things were tools for a while, but they could not endure. It’s strange to be learning yourself so many years after you were born. Like you have to practice. There are so many layers to understand, to forgive, to thank and undo. Before, the only acceptable version of my truest self was this sanitized impossibility. Some byproduct of all of what we are told sobriety should look like, if we are doing it right. But the mess is the truth. All the rest is something to leave behind. 

Assorted, rad things: 

• Towards a Less Fucked Up World by N. Riotfag: I read this zine online after seeing it referenced in another book I was reading and love their framing of sobriety as a choice in alignment with radical politics. If you’re Dry Januarying or just dig different perspectives on opting out of intoxication culture, check it out, it’s available for free. (Note: I’ve seen the author’s first name represented two ways and am unsure as to the correct one so sticking with the initial with the utmost respect and gratitude for the work!)

• Station Eleven: We started watching this on a friend’s recommendation and it’s one of those that really takes over your life/brain/consciousness. It feels like a combination of The OA and Revolution, with Octavia Butler vibes thrown in. It’s a show that a portion of my brain has been thinking about literally every waking second since we started watching. I’m already sad that it’s over. (Note: It’s about a pandemic apocalypse, so if that isn’t something you want to engage with right now given the state of the world, maybe skip this one.)

• Several People are Typing by Calvin Kasulke: Written entirely in Slack message, this book about a mid-level PR employee who accidentally uploads his consciousness to Slack while trying to share a spreadsheet is fucking hilarious, sweet, and bleak. If you use Slack for work or work for a start-up it will have you loling in a “wow, we are the worst” (think: "scope creep”, “sharing the brief, drafting the copy, circling back”, etc etc etc) kind of way.

Thanks for being here folks and I will see you in February because wow, why not? Time is weird.

love you lots,

lisa

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