writing to survive

Apologia

writingtosurvive — 2018-06-23T22:00:31-04:00

Even here I wake in the middle of the night. My brain is all future speak, past pretense. What goes around comes around. The books I read are dark. I skip ahead, past the spike in tattered vein to the aftermath of a rush, the interstitial self-loathing and compulsion to touch the purest fulfillment of desire.

Years ago an old acquaintance said my writing was myopic. He had a point. So I once called you a bullshit artist. What do I know? You hurt me long ago. I hurt you first. Here, run an eye over my bruises not of our making, discolored skin covering tender flesh. Delicately brush the places where wounds have healed, touch crisscrossed scars with calloused hands. You had nothing to do with this. I expected the understanding of a perfect parent, the anticipation and labeling of my needs, the acceptance of my cruelties. I was not safe and neither were you.

Here, I remember. Country roads and alcohol, a deep well of need, a body that could not name or acknowledge its wants. I let things happen, pursued wholeness through self-destruction. We were broken. Healing has become my life’s work.

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Image by me.

Restless me

writingtosurvive — 2018-06-04T18:10:09-04:00

J had a freezer full of goose breast riddled with shot. His family owned property on ------- with a duck blind against the water, where the menfolk, clad in camouflage, would sit on brisk fall mornings, guns poised. He showed me the blind that first summer, took my hand and led me through a tunnel of cornstalks gone brown. We sat close on the austere bench, hidden behind grass that had become hoarse with whispering over the years. I am sure he kissed me in that humid July air because we did a lot of that then, sweet lingering kisses in between fights and sarcasm.

So started the post (“Shoot him ‘fore he run now,” long excised from the blog) from almost 9 years ago, in the melodramatic, melancholic early days of wts, my writing permeated with a cloying nostalgia for the even more melodramatic, melancholic days of my early adulthood. Both eras ran on pure heat, one in action, the other in imagination.

The post, a post-mortem of my relationship with J, was in part about a night when I grabbed an unloaded shotgun and threatened to use it on myself. Obviously, I survived that night (and other serious flirtations with suicidal thoughts). These days I remind myself that hopelessness is generally temporary. Life is a gift. And I’ve become almost a caricature of even-temperedness. Over-emotionality and self-destruction have done a slow fade, elbowed out by sensibility and acceptance. When did I suddenly became so reasonable, so stereotypically middle-aged? This quote, the last paragraph of the piece, feels like something written about another person entirely, someone unfamiliar:

I’m sure he chalked the night up to my overgrown sense of drama, another mark against me to go with my unfaithfulness and love of alcohol. Thank god I've tossed aside those crutches for the most part, though I miss the drama sometimes. Drama sparks up the night, shines a little light into the abyss. Without it, you have only darkness, have to bravely perch on the edge until the abyss slowly creeps away. And that's where I seem to be right now for reasons that are unclear to me, dirging it out until the fog lifts.

Ah yes, that person. Clinically depressed, though she did not know it, isolated and itching for a fight, for bit of bruising on sensitive flesh. Since then and now, I went to school. I got a job. I started antidepressants and stopped antidepressants. I eliminated alcohol. I stopped taking over-the-counter sleep medication. I eat sensibly and keep my feelings in check. I’m good. I’m fine. I’m healthy in my body and my mind.

But I wake up before 5am almost every day a little restless.

In my own backyard

writingtosurvive — 2018-05-21T18:00:28-04:00

I’m on the chaise in the backyard, an intermingling of plants to either side, stone beneath my seat. Between the house and me are mulch and more stone, berries and deck, shed and little red (plastic) wagon. Where the dogs don’t run and leap, the plants root and thrive.

At the moment the place looks like the beginnings of a plant riot along the edges of a bark-shard wasteland. The claw-scraped wood chip desert is attempting to infiltrate the growing horde of colors pastel and electric. The hope is one of sweet botanical harmony cheek by jowl with “dog-friendly.”

The juxtaposition, stark but necessary, works. Still — the plants! In variations on green, we have four different varieties of lavender, a few types of gaura (aka bee blossom), borage, salvia plumosa, scotch moss, lemon thyme, flat-leafed parsley, chamomile, bee balm, Lenten roses, cosmos, astilbe, cranesbill geranium, euphorbia, creeping wood sorrel in burgundy with yellow flowers, two varieties of sweet woodruff, flowering maples, two fuchsias of very different presentation, a clutch of bamboo, pawpaws (slow to wake from winter’s sleep – that is, at least one of them might be dead), blueberries, strawberries, thornless blackberries, a fig tree, an apple tree, and a dogwood. Yowsa!

So the sun is out, there is just enough shade over me to allow for easy typing, and the boy, off from school for Malcolm X’s birthday, has been here off and on. I hear the highway, the sound of sparring hummingbirds, the back up beep of construction equipment, and the susurration (Grace!) of wind through leaf and branch.

And me? I’m sober, clear-eyed. My feet almost touch the ground. I’m touched with a touch of touché, of you can’t touch me, protected by an attitude of insouciance. Or so it feels in the sunlit afternoon in my own backyard.

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Picture of our backyard by me.

Dry, clear-eyed, and all there

writingtosurvive — 2018-04-29T09:00:20-04:00

Two weeks ago I put down the bottle, got off the sauce, began a dry spell. I’m on a sparkling water-fueled trip to purer isles, where the cocktails are virgin and the beers near-. It’s not like I was slugging back Kahlúa with my morning coffee or slipping off to nip off a hidden bottle of Cognac. I never missed work because of booze binges. I maintained the proper ratio of loose to uptight between 5 and 9pm, generally remaining in a sometimes-hazy equilibrium on one to three glasses of wine a night. .

This was my way to relax and destress, but also to absent and anesthetize myself. Alcohol muddles the sharper feelings into indistinct, blameless aches. My sleep was crap and my mornings cranky. I started to wonder about the function of the evening ritual, how the warm blanket of cabernet sauvignon helped me to deny, ignore, or disregard my internal world. I also worried about the example I was setting for the boy about alcohol and routine, stress and substances — and what my nightly escape said about my desire to be present. I wanted to be a better example, clear-eyed and all there.

Adolescence can be a shifting, unstable place, where the temptation to disappear, to sink into something that softens and obscures, is strong and potentially dangerous. I’ve been drinking in one form or another, usually on the side of a bit too much, since I was fourteen. It started as a way to cope and quell anxiety, to not notice I wasn’t being noticed. It’s been decades since I was a messy drunk, a self-destructive youngster who craved the attention of another, whose dives into naked vulnerability generally ended in shame and the headache of morning. I’ve had fallow periods (pregnancy and the early days of motherhood), more intense spells (depressions; dissolutions), and now this, a break, perhaps something permanent.

Or not. In theory I miss it, the blurring of the lines and deadening of sensibilities. Or I miss the anticipation of that first sip. Generally staying away from alcohol hasn’t been hard, which is confusing — if my consumption was ok-ish and taking a break not difficult, why stop forever? Why not allow bit of haziness on occasion? But it feels important to consider it, to imagine an alcohol-free future, facing the present as a full participant.

One day at a time, as the saying goes.

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Image taken by me a few years ago.