Click play to hear me talk this through. :)
There’s so much I haven’t shared with you yet, and so much I’d like to. For all my writing life I’ve told myself I had to only show one side of myself. I was a fashion writer (once upon a very long time ago) or a poet or a prose writer or an essayist or a coach or a sober person or an inspirational speaker or an artist or a spiritual guide. Labels, labels, labels. And with each label came a prescribed way of expressing myself, through just that one lense, just that one way of seeing the world, and also in the back of my media trained mind: an attempt to streamline “content” for my “ideal audience.”
Thinking about this now feels a little bit gross. I mean I’m happy I did it all, it was my way of understanding myself and the ins and outs of developing an online “presence” but what strikes me these days as part of my recovery from addiction and trauma, and my newly undertaken artistic recovery, is that dividing myself up into slivers might not be how I’d like to proceed. It feels so disjointed compared to how I live the rest of my life offline. It feels like: Ok pick one theme, one topic, one whatever and then just show that part from every imaginable angle and when you run out of stuff just start over again.
But I don’t think that’s the kind of creativity or artistry I want to work with or on anymore. I think now I’d prefer to create, write, share, express myself through and about many things.
I don’t really want to speak or think or share from a marketing mentality. Or even an influencer mentality, if that makes sense. I mean if my sobriety and recovery has taught me anything it’s that I am not just allowed to be all of myself but even lovelier: I’m meant to be all of myself. Everywhere, all the time. It’s no wonder I’ve literally written and rewritten all my online bios a thousand times over the past few weeks. Ever since I deleted all my old stuff from all my old blogs, Instagram, and Twitter (I can’t stomach the move to “X”), I’ve been mulling over how I want to re-enter the creative life as myself, as is, right now. And how do I do it in a way that welcomes all of it. As a woman, an artist, a cultural commentator, a wife, a mom of an adult child, a woman going through perimenopause, a person who experienced and is recovering from addiction, a sober person, a thinker, an empath, an HSP, all of the ways I am newly experiencing all aspects of what I choose as my values, beliefs, and interests. My flaws and my talents.
Lest this all sound grossly self-centered, as it sounds to me most likely because I’m not accustomed to sharing my whole self yet, there is a bigger reason I’d like to share from this place of fullness and expansion versus the limited way I used to show up online. My hope is that to empower myself in this way, to be able to talk about all the things that interest me — knowing that without even really ‘trying’, all the things about which I share will be infused with all the ‘parts’ of myself anyway—will inspire and empower you to cherish yourself as a complete being, too. We aren’t just “parts” (body, mind, spirit) we are complete beings within which we can choose to compartmentalize these things in order to study each, for instance, but in our real lives we are operating as an entire system of energy that moves through the world we live in as a whole world within ourselves.
So there is such a thing as the mind-body, and the spirit-mind, and the body-spirit, and the single mind-body-spirit which is our being, our essence, our person as we exist as a unique individual. Maybe if we embrace our whole selves more often, we will not be so easy to sell stuff to, you know what I mean? As long as we can be marketed makeup or skincare as though only our body matters, we are susceptible to disassociating our body from our mind and spirit. If we think we are defined by our intellect, we will be sold every last class and book and certificate on earth as though it didn’t matter that we are bodies and spirits that need rest, fun, relaxation, time away from our screens and out in nature doing nothing.
There’s a really fascinating podcast I listened to about influence and online influencers called Rethinking Wellness hosted by Christy Harrison (tag line: Critical thinking and compassionate skepticism about wellness and diet culture, and reflections on how to find true well-being). The episode I listened to first was with author and former brand strategist Jessica Elefante, and how there’s so many calculations behind whatever someone wants to push or sell or manipulate people to do or buy or feel. Add on top of all of it how the algorithm immediately tries to nail down exactly who you are based on exactly what you like and then you get narrowly defines to that avatar and then pummelled by content that force feeds it to you like drinking from a firehose. OH YOU LIKE FLOWERS HERE’S 47 THOUSAND PICTURES OF FLOWERS AND DO YOU STILL LIKE THEM AND HOW ABOUT THESE KIND AND THESE AND DO YOU STILL LIKE THEM HOW ABOUT NOW STILL???? Fuckkkk. Enoughhhh.
We are so constantly sold to, marketed at, and generally encouraged to like what we are told to like as according to trends, etc. It’s sort of this idea of not just do as you’re told, but LIKE as you’re told. Nothing showed this to me more glaringly than when I quit drinking. The alcohol industry, though, is just one huge monster of a force among many that absolutely clobber women (in particular) with messages non-stop about how beautiful / sexy / smart / badass / spiritual / clean / fit / well-adjusted / woke / and self-aware we should be, and could be, but aren’t yet because we are just one product or masterclass or new career or lip injection away from nirvana. This has all seeped into our psyche. And so perhaps not surprisingly, in order to continue on with the natural trajectory of my recovery from alcohol addiction, I am now confronting the broader culture from which I must recover.
After all: we get addicted for reasons AND few of them are accidents.
This is a long riff on a random Friday, I guess. I love sharing with you. I am so happy and encouraged that you enjoy listening and reading and hanging out with me. I'm wondering where this all might go if I show up as my whole self. If I open up and share things with you that you maybe don’t know yet that make me ME in particular, my nuances, quirks, hang ups, studies, interests and fixations.
I’m 45 years old and my husband is 64. We’ve been together over 20 years. Our age difference is a fascinating thing to me. It’s rare. I’m retired from corporate, already, even at my young age. We will be retired together. There’s a lot of reasons we have been able to achieve this as a couple such that we get to spend these next many years together (heaven willing) in good health and adventurous joy. I know some cool shit about money. I know the power of opting out of culture where it counts and playing along when you must for the security of the future you want.
I had my son when I was eighteen. My mom died when I was 28 and she was 53. My life has always been outside the lines of what is expected around age. When to become a mom. When to be single, when to be married, when to stay married even when it’s really hard, even when you hit major rough times. When to lose your mom. When to be a student. When to be a grandparent. When to have a “career” and how to fit in with the norm of pretty much everything around age. In some ways being out of sync with the norm age-wise screwed me up, stunted me and caused me to miss out on certain experiences. But in so many more ways it has opened me up to myself, out of necessity, curiosity, courage, and faith. I know how to stretch a dollar around the block if I have to. I know self-reliance. I know how to fuck up. How to get into trouble and danger and get out. I know what lengths I’d go to to express who I really am, and what depths I’d go to to avoid that at all costs.
I learned how to (and how not to) take responsibility. Shame and fear were very real for me but at the same time, I was defiant in how I taught myself to love myself no matter what. It’s been a wild journey and getting sober was just the beginning of being able to look with clear eyes out over the landscape of all I have learned, all the ways I’ve grown. Before the internet and after. Before social media and after.
Where is this going, I’m not sure. But finally, finally, finally, I’m not forcing myself to be sure or to label or to optimize or make myself small, palatable, or ‘marketable.’ I don’t want to pick one thing to be. I want to be all of it. I mean, for instance: I really do like flowers. But the real ones on my table — as I sit around that table talking with my loved ones about travel and culture and ideas and art and dreams and family and everything that interests us, on a random weekday because my schedule is now entirely up to me — bring me a thousand times more joy than the 80 thousand flower reels that Instagram keeps shoving into my eyeballs when I’m stuck staring into my phone and missing all the actual life around me. Social media culture can turn anything you love into a nightmare if you give it enough of your mind, body, and/or soul.
Maybe that’s the very difference I’m hoping to explore in this more expanded place. I could try to keep showing up as flowers on a table over and over again because I know flowers and I know people like to see flowers, or I could do my best to embody and express the wide open energy of the wandering conversations we get to be part of among loved ones around that table. Where I get to be all of myself, and you get to be all of yourself, too.
Thank you for being here. It means so much to me. x
LOVE all this Allison! All your reflections and insights. And YES to embracing our whole selves and showing up as our whole selves. I am on a loooong journey with that - reclaiming the shadow parts I've exiled. A lifelong journey I imagine. I'm coming up to 4.5 years sober. I also lost my mum young - I was 14, she was 50. (And my dad died aged 69 when I was 31) It meant I have absolute clarity around how short life is. And sobriety has given me endless gratitude for just being alive... I am also, like you, highly sensitive and find life very often feels very intense and it gives me a huge sense of their being something 'wrong' with me that needs to be fixed (you should see my book shelf full of self-help books!!) But again, that brings me back to what you share here, about embracing all of ourselves.
Beautiful Allison. We want the whole you 🙏 The journey continues apace!