Will embracing my inner artist derail my recovery?
Or: Is there a place beyond the terrible things we tell ourselves we are?
As I write to you, my lower back hurts something insane for reasons inexplicable. I have to roll out of bed and roll back into bed in ways that are both hilariously and excruciatingly ungracious. I wince throughout the day all alone in my home as I make coffee, write, change the bedsheets, grocery shop, and do all the normal physical things necessary for people with backs who are also being alive. I truly don’t know what I did to my back, but it’s pretty pissed about whatever it was. For this and various additionally unwelcome reasons, I am coming to terms with the fact that my forty-five year old body is (eerily and surprisingly and suddenly) “different” from my previous bodies.
The good news is that now I listen to my body, and I love being inside of her (how creepy does that sound!) no matter how she feels, because I know no matter what, I’m alive and accounted for. And while obviously I do not love being in pain, I do think it’s commendable that I am willing to be with the pain and listen to what it might be offering me. Just kidding, I curse it dramatically aloud mostly. But I try to be less annoyed by it. I really do!
It’s humbling. I mean, it’s tempting to rail against pain of any kind, in the body or mind or spirit. As though we don’t deserve it. As though it’s not fair. As though we should somehow be able to avoid it, fix it, or escape it faster. As though we can maintain our humanhood and somehow also crush it out at the same time. Maybe that’s the most real and basic lesson of my recovery from addiction: this is what it’s like to be human. To have weaknesses and limits. To be mortal (and deteriorating!). To not have forever to do whatever it is I’d like to do. And to accept that.
It turns out, to accept that is honestly more freeing to me than hearing all the lofty self-help, motivational rah-rah, you can be anything you want, the sky is the limit, make your dreams come true—no!—not just your dreams… your wildest dreams!!! Christ, man. There’s a lot of pressure in that. I’d like to just be, if that’s cool. Because I once took those lofty messages to heart and almost drove myself mad over it. Thinking that to be a regular person who just learns to love herself exactly as she is, who just is okay to smile at the joy and cry with the pain, that that was not going to cut it if I wanted to be accepted and loved and respected by the outside world. But I’m wary of those kind of extreme messages now. Probably because I only ever operated inside of them for so long. I was worth everything or nothing. I was the best or I was nobody. I was to be loved or hated, wholesale.
There is perhaps no more boring sounding word than ‘humility’ tho, right. I get that. In fact, I better come up with a more inviting subject line for this post because currently it uses the word humble, which sounds like grumble, which sounds like why would anybody want to think about this shit at all. But the thing is, humility is one of the greatest things that has happened to me in recovery. Or at least my becoming aware of how the act of humility has sort of crept into my psyche and character without my really trying to put it there on purpose.
I find I surprise myself with how much other people’s stuff just rolls off my shoulders, because I realize my place in the world is only to be me and let the rest be not mine. I keep my side of the street clean, and that’s plenty to keep busy with. I do what I can, and I’ve stopped forcing myself to do or be or accomplish or handle things I just honestly can’t. And even some stuff that I could—but won’t. Not everything that I could do has to actually get done, let alone get done by me. This is all breaking news to me.
I’ve picked up the book The Artist’s Way again after having worked through it well over ten years ago. I had completely forgotten it’s a recovery book. The author Julia Cameron got sober and then wrote this book about recovering your creativity, which is fascinating in a whole new way to me now. Now that I too am sober. Now that I too have had to accept that I got fucked up inside of an addiction that I didn’t understand, and that the only way I could have arrived here to a much healthier and happier place was to go through the grueling work of recovery, and maintaining my sobriety.
What is on my heart now is that I want to again allow my inner artist to come forward. But I’m afraid. Like I was afraid to get sober 800 days ago, because it felt like what I wanted but it also felt impossible. I’d have to be someone different to do that, I told myself. But it turns out I didn’t have to be someone different, I just had to be willing to let myself become someone different, whatever that meant. One day at a time. There’s a unique kind of faith and trust in that. A faith and trust in your own ability to discern and adapt, and to stay with yourself the whole way through. To not get derailed by other people’s opinions or reactions or inputs or even their “help.” It has been humbling in every sense of the word. To recover requires your steadfast commitment to reclaim the parts of you that some people don’t like, maybe even you don’t like. You have to accept and integrate all of who you actually are.
And this book The Artist’s Way is all about that. In twelve chapters, all titled “Recovering a Sense of…” in order: Safety, Identity, Power, Integrity, Possibility, Abundance, Connection, Strength, Compassion, Self-Protection, Autonomy, and Faith. All of these things are front and center in recovery from addiction. It’s just that when you are recovering from addiction to a poisonous deadly substance, the stakes are a lot higher than whether or not you can—say, for instance—write a poem again; but in some very real ways, both kinds of recovery are very much undertaken in order to save one’s soul.
My intention is to explore this book week by week and see how my recovery from addiction perhaps parallels the recovery of my inner artist, now that I’m sober. There is something about the way I used to create before I stopped drinking that was so brutally, hopelessly faithful to who I was then, even as lost and numb as I was. I love and admire that so much, even the parts that were clearly desperately in need of my own compassion, love, and respect. There are so many things I am aware of now that I just wasn’t back then. I couldn’t have been. And that I put down the bottle and am now so present and willing is such a gift, a gift that I was somehow able to give to myself, but I do believe it was also by the hand of something “not just me.”
A lot of us recovering from addictions are also artists, creatives, and generally folks who have been through a good bit of personal hell because of growing up in a world that crushes creativity, originality, and the beauty of full self-expression (unless it makes a ton of cash! and can be scaled, packaged, and optimized! and then it’s fine). I’m hopeful that by sharing what I’m learning by following The Artist’s Way back to my creative self, it might allow us to share how brave we have had to be on our journeys back to our true selves.
Because the medicine and the science of recovery and addiction are one thing, but our own personal artistry in the way we live our lives and express our inner most visions and vulnerabilities, that’s where our essence is. That’s where no text book can show us the answers. That’s the heart of our uniqueness; the place where our sensuality and spirit come to our conscious awareness and cross over into this world. It’s where we dare to witness ourselves in all our naked ambition, exuberance, and ecstasy. If we can go there. If we can drop all defences and really go there. To that place we aren’t quite sure really exists (or is allowed to exist), but we want to go there anyway. A place beyond the terrible things we tell ourselves we are.
So far I have thought of my recovery mostly from the point of trying to “get better” meaning to heal my body, to heal my cruel and punishing thought patterns. I am hopeful that by intentionally folding in creativity and the humility it requires to stay sober and safe, another dimension of my recovery will begin to reveal itself. Because the thing about humility is that it requires you to accept all of your humanity including your flaws, but which also means you cannot let yourself shy away from your creative power and joy either.
Maybe everything my addiction tried to keep locked away is the very stuff that my recovery wants me to embrace? I really don’t know. But I think I might be finally ready to (maybe) find out.
Thank you for being here. It means so much. x
Sorry about your back Allison. I suffer intermittent lower back issues. I’ve never injured it and was kind of perplexed on why it would flare up. I think I figured it out; if I drink to much tea before I go to bed I will have to go #1 at about 3:00am but not bad enough to wake me up. I will ‘contort’ myself in my sleep to take the pressure off the ol’ bladder and viola’; tweaked back!! Solution: stop drinking tea at 7:30pm so I’m purged by 9:30pm bedtime. Thought I’d share that.
On humility….yep, I kinda got burned out hearing that word in recovery. They kind of inferred it meant to not be egotistical. I read a morning meditation by Richard Rohr that expained humility as ‘humus’ which is earth, dirt, ground. I liked that!!! So, humility is nothing more than returning to the source, the dirt, the earth….grounded in my origins…the true me. It makes sense and really just brings everything home.
Loved this article Allison!! 🙏