It’s dark outside my window. The sky is deep navy blue, predawn. I’m fucking around on my phone, the way they tell you not to first thing when you wake up, and I say to you sincerely: I don’t care.
We all live inside various stages of falling.
Into the traps they set all around at every turn. The world is on fire. No wonder it’s so hard to identify the separateness of our own inner glow. It isn’t too dark out, it’s too bright. We are an extinction engulfed in a gaslit flame. No wonder it seems so dark inside our minds, our bodies, our bones. (Could you imagine saying this anywhere else out loud?)
Perhaps not all light is kind. Perhaps not all dark is merciless.
I scroll past a post about confidence and a post about shame. We are supposed to be strong and supposed to be breakable. I still don’t know how to feel. The sun will soon rise. I can see the first light rising ahead of its gigantic star. There are red flags, there are warnings. Everything that screams goes quiet again.
I have lived through my second Christmas in recovery. It was like a war inside my head. It was like hot tears cried silent in my bed. There was no way to explain the fury or the freedom that was born of it. I keep so much beauty to myself, though not for lack of trying to show it to everyone else. I’m tired of saying I’m “sober” when so much more than that is the case. What about the fight. Who will talk to us about the battleground. Who will cut through the noise of it. When will we finally be honest about what it really takes to stay your own.
You only ever truly know what choice is in the dead air of your soul. The truth is there will be no one around. You’ll be standing alone in the kitchen in the middle of your life. Hungry, barefoot, restless, and willing to surrender. Who would want this anyway. A voice in my head has been on repeat: Give it all now. Give it all now.
Here is the raw material: the way I see things. And the way you see things. Sometimes it dovetails. Sometimes, we drown each other out.
When you know what addiction is, you know it when you see it. You recognize its pattern and the way it seeps out from nothing at all until it grows multiplying heads. Limbs shoot out in all directions. I’m writing to you from my bed.
I am drinking my coffee black like always and I don’t know who I am anymore. What a brave and ridiculous thing to say. Like hurling yourself off a cliff as though we don’t all do so every single day.
I am in a “stage of recovery” but it’s off the proverbial grid. Of falling in love with who I am no longer. There is no human experience of intimacy more crushing or magnificent than: “I love you forever; goodbye.” If you can live through that then you are getting somewhere. Really. Maybe that’s the artistry in me. It helps. I can identify the quality and usefulness of negative space. The sky outside my window is turning gray blue. It is a giant birdwing spread across my lone sliver of a universal neighborhood.
When I get like this—poetic, detached from this world and cradled by the next—I find it fits in fewer and fewer places in the outside world. I used to drink too much. Perhaps it was innocent. I mistook annihilation for poetry (I wouldn’t be the first). But I could never write when I drank. Nothing hits when you’re numb. I used to need things I didn’t need. I am learning what it means to have a singular voice and it scares me. I like it.
Over Christmas, it cost me.
Inside traumas and beyond the way expectations tangle with confusion, terror, and the stupidest little things that can detonate explosives on the slightest trip of the most delicate wire, there is so much guttural pain. Inflicted almost by accident. Almost. Like flicking a cigarette and setting a thousand acres of dry forest on fire. You can hurt dead things.
When I think about a new year, I think about the way a self can fracture, split, and wander off in a million possible directions. I think about how I write, what I’ll say, and if I even have a place here among my own words anymore. They tell you that getting better will mean that things around you will get worse. But I’ll tell you a secret: you can’t know what they mean. Both better and worse will mean something different when held in your own hands.
If there is a Creator, the creator is you. God is a place you are creating all the time. The sky is now a soft pink skin. The trees are charcoal spindles, calling out wordless toward the cold and motionless air. Perhaps in the winter, in midlife, in a recovery a long way off the shore, it’s no wonder I am lost. When you can see what no one around you can see, because your eyes are only ever yours, only you will know what to do. And even then, you won’t. Certainty and uncertainty are the same empty room. But I’m doing okay. (It is possible to say that and mean it.)
The holiday decorations have (mostly) come down. The radiator clicks, clicks, clicks against the wall. I am sunk deep into the earth of my body; my halls of blood and discontent.
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Allison Marie Conway is a published author (Love Me Sober, 2023; Luminae, 2018), wife, mother, and addiction recovery coach, mentor, researcher, and advocate. Allison currently lives in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, with her husband, John, of seventeen years.
“Who will talk to us about the battleground. Who will cut through the noise of it. When will we finally be honest about what it really takes to stay your own.”
I will continue to. 💪🏻
Thanks Allison!
“God is a place you are creating all the time..”
Yes!! You nailed it!! That’s how it works for me!!! If my mind is here and now, creation flows. If my mind drifts to the past or future...no flow. It really is that simple. Not easy though!! Not easy at all!!
Good post Allison!!