From suffering to sobriety, how recovery taught me to make room for fear and use my experience to live creatively.
For 2023, I have a goal. This doesn’t seem like much of a sentence, let alone a big deal, but for someone like me, someone in recovery, someone who has wasted years drinking, drugging, and swirling in a storm of anxiety and depression, having a goal is a very big deal.
I should specify, having a goal that isn’t centered around scheming, scamming, or satisfying some immediate impulse is a big deal. In fact, having a goal that will take planning and preparation, diligence, self-confidence, and just the right amount of risk is a huge deal. The fact that my goal isn’t entirely selfish or based on fear is another massive point to make but we’ll get to that in a moment.
First, let me explain my recovery goal…I finally have the courage to share my story and that is exactly what I plan to do.
Learn from the suffering – recovery is experiencing the story.
This is a goal I’ve toyed with for years, since I sat on the front porch of the playhouse my Pappap built to write my first poem, at Pitt when I covered my dorm in poetic post-it notes and changed my major from communications to creative nonfiction, and again, recently, after I sobered up and realized my life was not over. Rather it was finally getting good. I had to learn from the suffering to experience the story I’m now ready to write.
Recovery has given me back my sanity, emboldened my relationship with my kids, and even helped ease me into some financial security. Recovery has taught me how to slow down and listen to my body while I check in with my soul. That sounds a little woo woo but there is no other way to put it. I spent years numbing pain and stimulating myself well beyond exhaustion because I was afraid to find out my truth. I didn’t want to admit I had limitations as a mother or a writer and thought that to succeed I needed to forfeit sleep.
Rest was for those who had the luxury of time.
I thought that because I wasn’t without flaw, I’d take a shortcut via some prescribed stimulant, stay awake working to the point the words no longer made sense, and then reward myself with a bottle of wine. (And I wonder why I could never reach down deep enough to write something real?)
While this explains my motivation for using and drinking and why I eventually stopped setting goals, it still doesn’t reconcile my objection to seeing myself for who I was. Why wasn’t I able to see myself as someone inherently worth working on? Why did I think I could skip the hard work of self-improvement? It certainly wasn’t that I thought I was already my best self. My self-esteem barely existed and the tape I played over in my head would have most sane and confident people in tears.
As I remembered the social anxiety I smiled my way through, the feelings of inadequacy began to bubble inside. The fear of not being enough ruptured to the top and I recognized that all along it’s been fear holding me back. I told everyone I left my MFA program in San Francisco because it was too expensive, that my dream of a boho artists’ sanctuary was ruined when my best friend’s girlfriend moved in with us, and those things may have been true, but really, I was afraid I wasn’t good enough. I ran away. No matter how beautifully the words worked together on the page, I was afraid my story didn’t matter.
With sobriety, I’ve learned how to deal with fear.
I’ve found peace within myself, made a space for fear to safely exist without taking over and crushing my creativity (along with all the other good that exists inside of me). With my therapist, I’ve explored and processed the trauma that drinking and drugs never quite blotted out. I’ve learned to breathe when I’m feeling unsteady, that the cloud of insecurity passes and sometimes I just need a drink of water. What’s more, I’ve started to recognize my own reflection without wincing and focusing on the flaws. I see myself more wholly and with some radical acceptance, I’m comfortable in my own skin.
My experiences are real, what’s done is done, but my story is just beginning. As I continue to grow in my recovery, I am finding the words to invite fear to the conversation and without (as much) reservation, I am sharing its whispers in the dark so that we might all live a little more fully in the light.
What Is Radical Acceptance? – Forbes Health: Recovery and being brave: how to set goals and live creatively.“It isn’t always comfortable or easy – carrying your fear around with you on your great and ambitious road trip, I mean – but it’s always worth it, because if you can’t learn to travel comfortably alongside your fear, then you’ll never be able to go anywhere interesting or do anything interesting.”
Elizabth Gilbert “Big Magic”
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