It’s risky to write my story and it’s risky to read it.
Eliot Engel describes Shakespeare’s tragedies as beginning in the same way: we’re shown the characters’ fatal flaws from the outset. We know they’re going to get it, just not when or how bad it’s going to be.
I have a cautious go-ahead from mentors and counselors to write my story. They’re concerned that the effort to write – to dig deeply for the truth and to express it as artfully and clearly as I can – might exhaust, overwhelm and weaken me, and that thoughtless or even mean-spirited feedback* might undermine my morale, particularly since my subject of choice is the stigma-laden “A-words”: addiction and alcoholism. I will be forever vulnerable to relapse, but year two is a particularly dangerous one.
I have read hungrily the memoirs of people in recovery from addiction who have stayed clean and sober. They write their stories after many years of sobriety. They write them in toto, and if the manuscript is accepted, the publisher publishes the entire story all at once.
Addicts and alcoholics don’t start their stories at 16 months sober and share as they go, wherever the going takes them. If they relapse, what have they accomplished?
I don’t know, you don’t know, none of us knows how my story will unfold.
If I were reading my blog, I would probably wince as I clicked on the link to each post, maybe close one eye like I do at an action-adventure movie so I can shut the other quickly if things get too scary. “Agh,” I’d think, “what existential angst has Anne unearthed today? And will this be The Post where she confesses her relapse?”
I’m a writer. I explore deeply what I know, and discover what I don’t know, by and through writing. What I publish on the blog is always, always a news report on how far I’ve gotten as I probe and seek and explore and discover. It’s not where I’ll stay.
I did, however, understand better the risks of writing and reading a recovery story in process when I didn’t post the link to this post on Facebook. I thought of the question I heard at a workshop years ago: “Will we still be loved if we are truly and fully known?” – to which I have learned the answer is often “no” – and felt afraid. And I thought of my dad and how he might feel when he read of his daughter’s sore heart. And of my students who might worry about the soundness of what they learned from a teacher for whom self-awareness wasn’t enough self-protection. And of my friends who might think, “Hmm, is she okay? Enough with email. I’m going to call her.”
But I did publish the post. And I’ve linked to it in this post. Writers do risk losing everyone and everything. It’s just the deal.
I feel acutely and think intensely. Some might find such a state uncomfortable, even debilitating. I think the accompanying photo shows that I am fine.** Our startup will release an iOS version of our Android app in the next few weeks. To support my startup habit – and because I believe it is my current calling – I have a contractor’s position as an addictions counselor. I assist my father with his business. Except for ever-present desk chaos and a billion unanswered emails in my inbox, my affairs are in order. I attend to my recovery 24/7/365 because that’s what it takes: every conscious moment is a moment I could take a drink; every subconscious moment my addicted mind might double-cross me in my dreams. I practice self-care: I eat nutritious foods, I exercise, I take naps.
Even when I have awakened in the mornings heavy with sorrow, grief and despair, I have never, not once, not in my entire life, not gotten out of bed.
The beloved, luscious green glass of the vase of my beliefs about what is true and what matters and who I am is shattered on the brutal tile floor of addiction to alcohol. Little about these first 16 months of sobriety has been anything but hard and sharp and cutting. I feel betrayed and enraged and relentlessly determined to discern exactly what happened, how I stopped drinking, and how I stay stopped, so I can pass it forward.
I don’t intend to write or live a tragedy. But we do write and read at our own risk.
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*Responses to what I have written and shared on my blog have not only been movingly and overwhelmingly supportive, but have informed and deepened and inspired my thinking and writing. I find myself mentally conversing with the caring people, enlightened and enlightening, who have sent me handwritten notes, emails, and shared posts on Facebook and comments on posts. Comments by Dan and Janeson on this post, for example, are helping me zero in on what’s working and what isn’t and why. I want to reply to each response but I’ve got to write this story first. If you haven’t heard from me, please know I am thankful and grateful and you have, and are, helping me.
**I am fine, thanks to the help of many. In the photo, I am in a townhouse selected for me by my real estate agent, Tommy Clapp, and his boss, my sister, Margaret Galecki. The townhouse’s 1985 self has been transformed by interior designer Babs Chenault, including the wall design, painted by Jeff Proco. The dress is from Bonomo’s where my mother took us shopping when Jane Bonomo opened the doors in 1977. The necklace is a present from my new self, whoever that is, for the two-day apart December, 2013 anniversaries of 55 years on the planet and one year sober from Kent Jewelers. And the wild and crazy kitten was adopted from beloved friend Kelly Quiejo. I am a very, very fortunate person.
