I’ve been in some spaces lately with people, mostly but not always women, who highlight their anxiety as something they want to change about themselves. They are angry with their anxiety for holding them back, for making things difficult that they don’t want to be difficult. Often when they describe their circumstances, the anxiety seems like the most obvious consequence. I’m struck over and over again by the cruelty of turning away from our bodies as they try so diligently to process and release a hard experience. I’ve found myself wanting to say: What if your anxiety is your most tender, loving friend? A protector of the smallest, most fundamental part of you. It is not always convenient, certainly, but what if we make the effort to be conscious of why that is? Is it capitalism, telling us that we must work and that our humanity is a burden, an obstacle, rather than the thing that connects us most tenderly to each other? Is it patriarchy, telling us there is one way to be good, and that is the way that is most in line with a culture of domination and, yes, capital?
For a long time I forcefully transmuted anxiety in my body into excitement. I learned to do this best through travel, because there was also excitement there, easy to access. Through travel, I learned how to break my body’s boundaries, how to ignore all my body’s plaintive, gentle signals, pleading with me to stop, to pause, to wait and get a little more information. I rushed forward and called it boldness. I called it desire. I taught myself to love sex and forget intimacy. And periodically I would break down, and often I would use some substance to pick myself back up and keep going.
In sobriety, I am learning to witness my body and its messages. To try to release my frustration, all the stories I tell myself about how pathetic it is to grieve a man for x amount of time, my angry defensive patriarchy-shaped desire to be a Cool Girl ™ to be super Chill ™ to not care because caring is so feminine and corny and embarrassing. The cruelty in all of that. The sheer fucking patriarchy of all of it. Caring is fundamental. Caring is the entire fucking point of the human project. Caring is the only reason to wake up in the morning, the only reason to leave the house, the only reason for any of it. Who but patriarchy taught me to hate myself for caring? Who but patriarchy taught me to shame myself for wanting caring?
The men to whom I granted access to my body.
In sobriety, I am learning to witness my body and learn: I guess this is how long it takes for a feeling to move through my body. Or even: This is how long it is taking this time. This time, the first time sober, meaning the first time in which I am allowing all the feelings, all the pain, and all of the old stories, too. All of the ghosts come to the dinner party and we sit and stare at each other and I try not to flinch from their cold faces. I try to look back, directly and with compassion. How hard it must have been, all these years, sweet ghost, to hold that message for me, and for me to push you back and back and back again.
Last summer I was sleeping with someone for the first time in a long time and I picked someone who was an admitted alcoholic and slightly less admitted cocaine addict. It was exciting and delightful and then it was shocking and painful, the way experiences can be like the ocean, the way it can buoy you up and it can also smash you against the rocks. And one day after it stopped being buoying I was standing and I was looking at this person, drunk and probably high, and I was feeling so bad. And I texted my friend Mary-Kate this sentence that I was feeling in a profound, dizzying way, a story that felt like it was pushing me down into the earth beneath my feet: “I have never mattered to anyone.”
There are so many inquiries to be made here. What pattern was I reenacting by giving my body over to someone to whom I knew full well I would never matter, at least nowhere near as much as alcohol or drugs? But I think in the moment the only thing I had access to was that story and how it felt in my body, how heavy and old and blitzingly, painfully true it felt. How every person to whom I had ever given access to my body rippled through my mind and each one of them checked that box. I did not matter. At some point a few years ago in my attempts to try to heal in earnest, I emailed an ex-boyfriend and asked if I’d been depressed when we were together. I was trying to figure out when it started, what might have been the catalyst. He wrote back that he didn’t know, he’d been so self-absorbed when we were together, he had no recollection. It was, I guess for him, an ostensibly admirable amount of self-awareness and maybe humility, but it was pure cruelty on the receiving end. I had reached out thinking, here is someone who must have known me, someone I’d revealed so much to. And when I think about that thought—I have never mattered to anyone—I also think about that exchange, and I forgive myself for holding such a dagger of a story against my own chest for so long. And I try to rewrite it because even if it is true that I did not matter to these men, or to that man, it is not true that I did not matter. I mattered, intensely and profoundly. And the gift of this moment in sobriety is a slow and a painful gift, but it is a gift nonetheless: to learn to matter, immensely and profoundly, to myself.
I have this sense that the preceding text could be an essay, I mean an Essay, like one I send to my editor and say, here, I finally did something again. But I am butting up against the problem that always makes me doubt my place in publishing, which is how to package it. What is the hed, what is the dek. What do I tell the editor when I say, here, I wrote an essay about _______. Befriending my anxiety? Not quite, not entirely. Something about getting access to the stories driving the anxiety, and how somehow sitting with the painful experience of letting that story come up to the surface without getting drunk or high to push it away somehow neutralizes it, or allows this old hurt to finally be released. It’s the theme of most of my writing on sobriety: I don’t always know it is happening, but every time I stay with my pain instead of running away from it, something is healed. I guess I could write my editor and say that—I wrote a new sobriety essay—but still, it feels too mushy. Your feedback is welcome. I shared it with my little library writer group and they were encouraging and kind and took my self-description of mushy and rebranded it as complex and human. “It’s not all nicely packaged like a little Atlantic essay, but that’s not a bad thing,” one person said. And I thought “not packaged yet” but also what a nice gift to have readers who are not in the business of packaging, just of reading. Maybe that is healing something too, quieting the voice that tells me I failed at Being a Writer. Another essay, for another time.
A bonus recommendation: The animated movie “Wendell & Wild” on Netflix. One of my very dear teens told me about it and it’s stunningly beautiful and also sweet and meaningful and profound. And also a thank you to those of you who wrote me sweet messages, comments and emails. What a delightful way to re-enter this space. I’m so happy to be communicating with you again. And hopefully soon I’ll get better about answering my emails and email each of you back. Know that I want to!
Love,
Danielle