Freedom to Breathe

Let America be America, where equality is the air we breathe. – Langston Hughes #BlackLivesMatter #ICantBreathe #artist

Drawing by: Yours Truly @madilcarr, Madeline Carr

Stones

It’s been a while since I’ve written which, I suppose, is a good thing because my life today is busy and full of people with whom I can honestly confide in. However, I have missed my writing. I’ve been getting lazy with my journaling which I believe is something I really need to maintain in order to keep sane. Writing gives me perspective and awareness, seeing my thoughts listed on paper awakens me to the reasons behind those thoughts and rational resolutions to my daily problems. And without my journaling, I’ve noticed that I haven’t been as in-tune with myself, as authentic with myself and others.

In the past couple of months, I’ve started a new job and moved to my own apartment. My life has nose-dived into the immediate needs for independence, bill-paying, financial stability and responsibility. I’ve worked and lived on my own before so these are not novel concepts for me, but it has still taken me a while to adjust back into autonomy.

More recently, over the past three weeks or so, something else has caused traffic to build up on this road of transition, causing me to slow and to swerve along my drive. A recent romantic relationship has brought up some emotions that have long been hidden about past traumas and shameful incidents that happened during my addictions. Flashes of these events have clouded my reality, bursting into my mind during the least convenient times. Many of these flashes have left me physically sick and others have left me completed disassociated from the present. In the last few weeks, I can’t remember having a night when I didn’t wake up gasping and sweating in the aftermath of a nightmare.

It has been painful and disconcerting to have the past, yet again, demand attention from my present self. I have to repeat over and over to myself that today is not then, that I am not there, that I am not the person I once was. Being that these events are in the past, I am working hard not to dwell in the self-pity, fear and loneliness that arises alongside these flashes. But at the same time, I know it’s important to acknowledge them, to let my younger self know that she is heard, respected, and loved.

While vacationing near Lake Superior this past weekend, I took several walks along the shoreline by myself, trying to be attentive to the beauty that surrounded me and the blessings in my life today for which I am so grateful. At several points during these walks, I looked around me at the rocks along the shore or in the shallow waters around my feet. The sand was decorated with beautiful stones, many of which I took out and held in my hands while I looked out at the lake.

Holding something so solid and firm in my palm held me still for a while. Stones may not seem so fascinating in the minds of others, but I find them to be beautiful metaphors for endurance, wisdom, stability. I found that the most interesting of stones were those in which I could see small cracks or fissures. I wondered if perhaps, many years ago, these stones had been broken or chipped by some geological movement or change in the earth. But even if they had been broken at one time, the stones remained intact. Not only were they no longer broken, but their edges had been smoothed over time, the pressure of the water on their surfaces molding the sharp edges into an even and almost-glossy appearance.

In a way, these stones gave me hope. Though these recent traumatic memories make me feel newly broken, I know that with time, I will heal. My heart will once again be whole, the faded scars and cracks making it appear even more beautiful in its endurance.

Better, Not Bitter

  

It. Will. Pass.

Something that’s taken me a long time to learn about pain…

is that it passes.

Everyone has felt pain. Physical, from a paper-cut to a gunshot wound. Emotional, from a high school break-up to losing the love of your life. Mental, from overworking yourself before taking final exams to feeling like you’ve lost your identity, your capacity to live and to overcome pain.

So many times, I’ve been in a place in which I was convinced the pain would not end. My body literally felt heavy, my shoulders cowered, my back arched. I could barely hold myself upright. The mere lifting of my eyelids in the morning took the utmost effort. Getting out of bed was a battle that could take hours. Addictions, disorders and traumas had stolen my identity, my purpose and will to live. I had lost my direction. I had lost all confidence. I had lost all hope.

It seemed unfathomable to me that I would ever feel “okay” again.

And yet today, though life is far from perfect, though I am forever imperfect, I can say that I am okay. I still have fears, anxieties, periods of depression, occasional urges to use old behaviors… but today, it’s different. And what makes it different is my knowledge and awareness that these things pass. I don’t have to act on them, to let them reign over my every thought and impulse. What’s different is that I have experience from years of believing I’d never make it out of the darkness…and now living a life in the light.

In my early days of recovery, I did not yet know or accept that my pain would end. I believed (and still sometimes believe) that the smallest problem or inconvenience is a crisis. Others have told me to “just relax,” to “stop overreacting” or to “stop being so dramatic.” These comments used to hurt me, to infuriate me, because what they didn’t know was that even a glimpse of fear, heartache, failure, made me immediately believe I was once again, lost in the endless abyss of pain, self-loathing, terror. To a person who hadn’t lived a long period of their lives in such a place, a tiny problem seemed ridiculous to even be concerned about. But to my newly-recovering self, my negative feelings felt like I was falling backwards in time.

Recovery is (excuse my french) fucking hard. It is not merely stopping a behavior, getting clear or sober, forgetting old traumas. It’s almost insulting when others tell us to just “get over it.” Recovery takes so much more than just getting over something. Our identities are rooted in our addictions, our pasts. It takes dismantling our former realities and accepting an entirely new perspective. It’s about become vulnerable, naked, when you’ve spent your entire life hiding every glimpse of weakness. And every second of early recovery is spent constantly battling against the old version of yourself who just wants a drink, a drug, a purge, a cut, a moment of numbness, relief. Most of all, recovery is abandoning the will to give up, to die… and replacing it with the will to live.

People without these battles often minimize the effort it takes to overcome them. It’s not their fault of course, because they haven’t experienced it. But what I needed to know to get through, was that I wasn’t alone, that I wasn’t terminally unique, I wasn’t the only one who had given up.

Each time I felt the old pain, it became easier and easier to remember the relief that comes afterwards. Knowing that it wouldn’t last forever made enduring it so much more bearable.

Today, I can remember and accept that moments of pain, loss, fear, flashbacks, depression, dissociation… will pass. How do I know this? Because they have passed. And they still do.

A Part of Me

My past will always be a part of me. Everything I did, everything that was done to me, everything I’ve been through… That story will always live on inside of me. But what I’m starting to realize and actually believe is that it doesn’t have to define me anymore.

I’ve carried a great deal of unacknowledged shame about my past. I lived in fear that when others found out what I did, where I’d been, who I once was… they would never see me as anything but broken, dirty, weak and unloveable. But I see now that that fear was a projection. Others weren’t as cruel as I was to myself. Even if they knew everything about me, they still accepted me. They looked at me and saw strength, even as I threw daggers at my own reflection.

A lot of that shame has recently been unearthed for me. I guess I always knew that it couldn’t stay hidden forever.

I drew a picture yesterday in ink, of a mirror dividing two girls who faced each other. Their palms touched, but their arms belonged to two entirely different people. The girl on the left was me, today… the girl on the other side was the person with whom I identified for so much of my life. She was naked, scared, bruised, covered in dirt… She was what I believed myself to be because of my past.

…and I’m only just starting to realize that I’m no longer her.

I’m still in the process of honoring that broken girl, that girl who had been through so much, the girl to which I’ve been so ruthless and abusive. She deserves to be respected because despite the past, she carried me through. She survived. And though I may look back at her sometimes and feel guilt, disgust, sadness or even fear that she’ll become me again, she is not unworthy. She did the best she could. And by letting her rest after all that she’s been through, by living on for both of us, I can honor her. I can continue the fight for both of us.

My past will always be a part of me, but it will never again be all that I am.

“Enough.”

I heard a speaker last night at a meeting I hadn’t been to in about a year. Something I love about recovery and also something that I’ve had to work on over and over is to “look for the similarities and not the differences.” For so long, I was convinced that my story was unique, that no one knew what it was like, that I was entirely alone in my suffering. But as time passed and I was reminded by others in the rooms to seek those similarities, the more I found, often in the stories of those to whom I least expected to relate.

The fact is that yes, our pasts hold many different situations, home environments, specific tragedies and traumas. There are parts of our stories that are circumstantially unique. But those are details. Underneath the tiny kernels of technicality, beneath the exquisitely-decorated armor that we’ve crafted to hide the pain, are the scars and bruises that we all share, the feelings that have been neglected for too long.

The woman who spoke last night had a story that brought many of her listeners to tears. Like many of our own, her past was one of tragedy. As if she were echoing my old thoughts of feeling unique and isolated, she spoke of feeling that because her story was different, she hadn’t earned her place in the rooms of AA. Looking at the details, the specific events that set her apart in her mind, she walked back out seeking to prove to herself and others that she wasn’t the same and therefore, didn’t have a problem.

Several months later, still digging and waiting for her shovel to bang against her acceptable and “deserving” perception of a rock bottom, she attended a meeting. She walked in, fairly intoxicated and sat down.

This part of the woman’s story resonated the most deeply with me:

As she sat in one of the circular formation of chairs and waited for the meeting to begin, a man walked up and started to talk to her. The stranger, having guessed correctly, asked whether the woman had been drinking to which she responded, “yes.” He nodded understandingly, asking one more question: “it just doesn’t hurt enough, yet, does it?”

This question became a pivotal message in the woman’s story, motivating her to stop trying to find this mythical state of “enough,” and to accept that “enough” might not exist for her. If it did exist, she would likely die trying to reach it.

I, too, spent a lot of time looking for this point of having had “enough.” It’s almost as if I expected an internal timer to go off when I was ready to stop drinking, to stop hurting, to stop killing myself before I actually succeeded. I was waiting for something or someone other than myself to tell me that I was done, that I could stop. My dad used to wrestle with me and tickle me, refusing to stop until I said the dreaded word, “uncle.” The game was about seeing how much I could take until I gave in, surrendered. I didn’t expect that game to become a metaphor for my life. In the midst of my dysfunctional past, there was no “enough.” I guess that’s what made me an addict. I had too much pride, too much stubbornness, to admit I couldn’t handle any more.

Looking back now with sober eyes, I can see where this quest for “enough” would have led me.

There was never enough alcohol in my blood.

I was never numb enough.

I could never weigh low enough.

I was never empty enough.

I never had enough scars, enough pain.

What was enough?

The trajectory of my defiance would have led me to my grave, a place to which I came dangerously close on several occasions. My “enough” did not exist, at least not in my lifetime. It existed only in death.

I’m grateful, today, that I stopped looking.

I’m grateful that I never had enough.

A Moment

I think a lot of us have a fear of time. We fear it because it’s a factor of almost everything in our lives: age, maturity, career, education, investments, current events, relationships… mortality. Sometimes, it seems that time moves at a snail’s pace, our eyes fixed on the second-hand of the clock, waiting for it to pass so that we can move on to what’s next, to escape from the present moment, to move on to the future. At other times, it seems to fly past us, to pass through our fingers like sand or water as we try desperately to hang on to every last second. And sometimes, time passes us by without us even realizing its gone.

My fear of time, though ever-present in my life, has evolved.

For most of my life, I was daunted by how much of it I possessed. I feared how much was left, how much more of it I would have to endure. I was blind to the gift that was this life, the time I was wasting by not appreciating the present moment. In this phase of my life, I didn’t care. I wanted the clock to stop, I yearned for the last grain of sand to fall through the hourglass. I feared having to continue living… because I thought it meant that I had to prolong my misery. I never imagined that this fear could change.

Today, I no longer fear having too much time. I fear wasting it. I fear that I won’t be able to do enough with this life before my time runs out. But then… what is “enough”?

Lately, I’ve started to realize that no matter how much I fear it, I can’t control time. It will pass at its own pace and I will do the same. There’s no slowing it down, speeding it up… there’s no pressing “pause.” I’ve learned something from both of my fears. I’ve learned not to be afraid of having too much time, but instead, to appreciate that I have any. I have a future, I have opportunities and ambitions and I have the time to pursue them. I’ve also learned not to fear losing time or not having enough, because that fear and anxiety will only take up the time I have now. That time I spend afraid could instead be spent in gratitude, in peace and serenity.

So…what is the solution to our fears? How do we overcome our anxieties about time?

Maybe it’s to pretend it doesn’t exist.

Because in truth, we don’t know how much or how little time we do have… and as scary as that is, it’s reality. It’s life.

All we can do is live as if today is our last, but also to live as if there is no limit to the future.

Time is not guaranteed, but that doesn’t mean we should give up on living.

Even if all we have is this moment, we do have this moment. And maybe, that’s all that really matters.

It’s time…

Migration

It’s usually at this time of year that I start to envy the birds as they migrate.

…envy for the freedom of taking flight and leaving the world behind.

…envy for the escape from the familiar, the routine, the people, feelings, events that hold me captive.

…envy for the ability to flee from my problems.

But today, though I still have problems, I don’t feel the need to flee. When I look at the sky and see the v-shaped migrations flying south, I’m no longer filled with envy. I no longer need an escape. I no longer feel trapped. I no longer see the appeal in ignoring my reality, in abandoning my life.

Though there’s beauty in the idea of traveling the world, the wind beneath my wings, led by my instincts and innate sense of direction, I’ve realized something. I’ve realized that what I envied all along in the bird migrations at this time of year was…change. I wanted change. I needed change.

Birds migrate for several reasons: tropical food sources, breeding and safe habitats for offspring, avoidance of predators, or inability to survive in certain climate changes. As it gets colder, some species of birds don’t have the plumage (feather insulation) to survive low temperatures. Every one of these reasons supports one thing: survival.

…and like the birds, we need to change to survive.

The past was my winter. The dysfunction of my addictions created a habitat that was unlivable, perilous. The more I stayed in that noxious environment, the more feathers I lost, the colder and sicker I became. I envied the birds then, because I envied change. I wanted to fly away, because I knew I didn’t belong where I was.

But today, the sight of a bird flying south reminds me of the changes that I’ve already made in my own life, the battles I’ve fought for myself, for my own survival. If I look back to a year ago, so much has changed not only in my life, but inside of myself. I’ve grown stronger, less afraid, less doubtful and self-loathing. I’ve built up my feathers and know now that I can survive another winter if it comes again.

I’m alive today because I’ve changed.

I no longer look to the skies in envy…

…because I know today, I no longer need to fly away to change.

I have been flying for years and across great distances… but today, I’m grounded in the present. I anticipate change and I embrace it with every new day. Because I know today, that change is what keeps me alive. Change is survival.

…and I intend to keep surviving.