A Beautiful Thing Will Grow Out of This Very Hard Thing

Sometimes beautiful things live inside the very hardest of things.



Yesterday, for the first time in a very long while, I ventured outside alone to go to the corner store. I wanted to see if it was open so that I could buy something cheap and sweet, but the store was closed. It was only a short block I had to walk to get there, but I felt so exposed, so far from my nest of safety, that my collar bones ached with the tightness in my throat and chest.

I am sometimes afraid to leave my home.



This fear happens when I am shifting, when I am changing my patterns of thought or behaviour. I panic, and my panic turns inward, where I question all the good of which I am capable. I have spent a week sure that I cannot write or make or do valuable things, that my faultiness far outweighs my abilities.

This insecurity is usually followed by the hatred of my own appearance, and this week was no exception. I became convinced that my own appearance was so terrible, so below acceptable standards, that I did not want to be seen by strangers who did not already love me.

"I can't go out," I sometimes say. "Strangers will see my face, and I can't have that."



I came home from my harrowing trip to the corner store with that familiar burn of shame running up the back of my neck while I tried to catch my breath, and I immediately asked the Palinode to come for another, slightly longer walk with me. I knew that my well-being depended on killing this thing in the moment.

I know my mind. If I let leaving be so terrible that it scares me back, and then rest into my safe spot on the couch again, I will more deeply train a pathway in my brain that confirms the messages that Leaving Is Bad and Staying Is Good. I imagined myself in the future on a talk show saying "I don't know how it happened, but one day I just stopped leaving, and now it's been 17 years since I walked out my front door."



The Palinode and I walked to another drugstore further away, and as we chatted about things like whether grease is wet or dry¹ and what the actual elements of moisture are, my chest loosened. The stuck feeling in my throat eased up.

That pathway in my brain, one that could have so easily become a deeper groove, unkinked itself a little bit. I bought myself some more time with freedom.



I haven't said much about my depression, anxiety, or addiction issues over recent months. As much as I've written about them before and talked about them in front of audiences across two countries, I am afraid to write about them here.

I am afraid that no one will believe me anymore that shame can be used to see rather than punish yourself, that your courage is bigger than you know, and that fear is surmountable. I am afraid that I don't have what it takes to stay on this path I have fought so hard to find and bushwhack my way through. I am afraid that people will second-guess hiring me, thinking that I am not up to the job.

Part of my job on this earth, though, and I deeply hold this to be true, is to be very publicly human.

I do have the strength, though. We all do. This is a bones deep knowledge I can't shake.

I'm just experiencing retreat after battle, or, as Brené Brown calls it in I Thought It Was Just Me, a "vulnerability hangover". You shouldn't trust someone who hasn't lived their subject, and so I'm treating this phase of change as intensive study. I'm diving in.

In the end, Ghandi said it most succinctly²:

We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.

This course I take repeatedly through anxiety, depression, and the hard work of sobriety is difficult and terrible at times, but the most beautiful parts of my whole life grow out of the soil it helps me to turn over.

Fear is gripping, but love and belief birth hope, growing capital-c Courage larger than the self.

And, so, a beautiful thing will grow out of this very hard thing, and you will not see me on a show in 17 years wondering why I never left my home again in all that time. This, I can promise you.

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<sup>1. It turns out that grease is a non-Newtonian fluid that can be both wet and dry. Thanks goes to brainiac @jannymarie for the information. ↩

2. This paragraph is often paraphrased as "be the change you want to see in the world", which is an unverified misquote that Ghandi never actually said, because he didn't speak Bumper Sticker. ↩</sup>

Robots Need Love, Too

Shanan took me to see The Rural Alberta Advantage and Dan Mangan on Friday night.



Since I quit drinking over two years ago, Friday nights and I have worked out a new relationship where other people go out and I order in heart attack food, sit on the couch, watch bad tv, and poke around on Twitter. That sounds more pathetic than it feels. It's not, I swear. I love my bad tv and take-out burgers far more than I actually enjoyed spending $50 so I couldn't remember any of the meaningless conversations I had with people who made increasingly less sense as the night went on.



Damn. I wasn't going to mention anything serious today.

I went to bed last night making mental notes about this hilarious story I was going to tell you this morning, because I spent the whole day yesterday questioning the basic meaning and worth of human existence, and it felt brilliant to finally be thinking thoughts that wouldn't freak out mental health professionals, but then, as usual, I woke up a blank slate, because no one remembers late night idea events. I blame this serious topic turn on my lack of note-taking at 1:00 a.m.



I'm very taken up with thoughts of anniversaries and evolution these days. In July, I celebrated being five years cancer-free. In August, I was officially two years sober. In September, I hit three years since my last cigarette. I mentioned the cancer-free anniversary here, but I didn't mention my addiction-related anniversaries at all. I don't know why exactly.

The Palinode and I also moved into our first owned home in September, and this fact is messing with my whole view of myself as an adult, as a wife*, as someone who is turning 40 in December, as a freelancing creative.



So, I'm a technically cancer-free, sober, home-owning, freelancing ex-smoker who really needs to lighten up. You'll be happy to note that my NatureBright SunTouch Plus Light and Ion Therapy Lamp should be arriving this week. (That's not an affiliate link. I just like referring to it by its full, given name like it's a bad child late for dinner.)



I was something else five years ago, in a lot of ways, and I feel like I've landed after taking a very long, flying leap that started with facing my fear of death in the concrete here-and-now and carried through facing addictions and maturation and more fear, and that leap dropped me here in this home of ours where I feel more secure in some ways than I ever have in my life.

My mother once said to me: "You keep jumping out of frying pans and into fires when I don't think you should even be in the frying pan in the first place."

This relative security has completely thrown me off my game. I don't trust it. The fire might refine, but it keeps on being a goddamned fire.



I just keep asking what now?, as though the thing that's coming matters more than what's happening right this moment, as though there must be something large and terrifying looming over my near future, like there's still another addiction I need to kick.

I think I like fires. No, I know I like fires. I'm also afraid that I have an affinity for the jumping part, too.

So, what now?

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* When I mention my view of myself as a wife changing, I do not mean that I am questioning being a wife. The Palinode's stuck with me, and I am still obsessively in love with him. I'm his in-house stalker.

Ask Schmutzie: Is There A Point Where It Won't Feel Like I Should Just Give In?

Yesterday, I asked you to ask me questions about my sobriety. This is my first answer in response.

13 days sober here. I did some serious binge drinking in the weeks leading up to quitting, way beyond my then-normal nightly drunk. I was using alcohol as a crutch after finding out my mom, (my best friend), has pancreatic cancer and is now receiving end-of-life care. Ended up scaring myself into quitting. But the pain that the alcohol took away is ever-present. Is there a point where it won't feel like I should just give in to the easy abyss of drinking?
     — Scared

Scared, before I say anything else, please know that I have been carrying you in my heart since you commented yesterday. And I don't mean that in an angels-and-daily-affirmations way. I mean that in a deep and honest and meaty way. Your emotional load is truly heavy and terrible, and I wish I could lift some of it from you.

First, and I'm going to assume that you're still sober since yesterday, fingers crossed, congratulations on your first two weeks sober. It's a bittersweet thing to say, because gaining your sobriety, especially in the earliest days, is a hard place to be, even without the other pain you are carrying right now.

You must know that you have immense strength to be able to choose your sobriety at this point. You maybe don't feel it, but you do, because you did it and you are here. You made that choice and you have come this far. That is powerful. Over the first few weeks of my sobriety, I knew logically that this was an ongoing act of strength I did not know I'd had before, but I felt naked and vulnerable. Nothing filled me up. I'd stripped away the only coping mechanism I thought I had.

I want to point out that I'd stripped away the only coping mechanism I thought I had. I found out that I had underestimated myself and my ability to find new ways to cope.

At the beginning, I was a raw nerve. I had so much sadness and anger and self-loathing inside me, and I spent a lot of time trying to eat or sleep it away. I had only ever felt joy when I was drunk, and I had no faith in my ability to find it sober. Something happened, though, during those first few weeks as I crawled out from under the hazy cycle of drinking and hangovers. Maybe it was that my body was finally stabilizing itself or that my brain was learning new ways to deal with the world, but my initially unbearable anxiety and depression started to loosen its grip on me. I still felt roundly terrible, but there was hope at the edges and something akin to happiness.

I remember the first time I felt really good, good in a way that drunk couldn't even do. It was late September. I had been sober for maybe a month, and I was up early in the morning, a first for me in a long time, sipping coffee at the kitchen table. Sunlight suddenly broke out from behind a building and hit me through the window, and I felt that light. I felt it there in my chest where the horrible tightness usually sat. I felt the joy that I thought I would never feel, that I thought I didn't have the ability to feel.

That first month was hard times, and then out of nowhere I had strong feelings completely unconnected to alcohol or the pain I used it to hide from. It felt brilliant.

It does get better. It absolutely does.

What I'm about to say sounds like it could be complete bullshit, but it isn't: actually feeling the pains in your life, genuinely touching them and wrestling with them head on while not numbing them out, makes your life a happier and richer place to be.

There is so much guilt and shame and weight that comes along with drinking it away, and what I'm slowly learning is that it is almost a relief to feel it all and even collapse under the heft of it sometimes, because then that pain is allowed to change, to mature, to become something else, and even occasionally to leave me. When I was pushing it all down with alcohol, none of the pain had a chance to become anything better. I was keeping it all for myself and stunting its natural movement through and out of my life.

I want to tell you that right now, right away, things will be easier, but I won't. It's going to be hard and it's going to be painful in ways that surprise you without the veil of alcohol to dumb it down, but this is how you get to the brilliant parts. This is how you start to find your way to genuine joy.

You are not alone in finding your way through, and there is a strong community of sober people out there if you look for them. If you haven't already and you feel you need more support, please check out Alcoholics Anonymous or Secular Organizations for Sobriety groups in your area, whichever group best suits your needs. Go to your doctor and talk about options for dealing with your new sobriety and the emotions that come with it. Reach out. I had no idea how rampant alcoholism was until I wrote about it publicly, and, believe me, we are everywhere. You can find us, and we will support you.

To answer your original question, at over seven months sober, I do still crave a binge now and again, but not all the time. The pull to do so is weaker already than I thought it could be, and it is completely out-matched by the happiness I'm finding outside the pint glass. There is a point where it won't feel like you should just give in to the easy abyss of drinking. There truly and honestly is.

And, on behalf of me, and I'm sure everyone else here, I'm sending what good thoughts I can to you and your mother. Be well.