I wrote this heading into my 28th sober AA anniversary about 3 weeks ago. I didn’t post it then but it needs to be published.
I am grateful to WordPress it has connected me with lovely people and that sense of connection takes me out of the deep dark isolated trauma place. It must have been my AA Birthday triggering me over the past day.. I was back there in Sydney in late 1993 and early 1994 finally putting down alcohol, newly married, seeking out a new job after starting to attend the 90 meetings in 90 days on a recommendation a few weeks in when I finally got the guts to stick around long enough after my first few weekly attempts to talk to someone. I then got to share and reconnect with a girl also recovering I had worked with before losing that job after the business was sold in September that year.
And yesterday I called another one of my best AA buddies from then.. We kept missing each other yesterday, but I had waves of memory over hearing her fourth step a few months in.. She possibly should have shared that with a long time sober member but she chose me.. I remember that night, going over to her house in Kings Cross and how hearing the things she had done made me realize that I was not alone and not as bad a person as I thought. Eventually when we moved to the UK in 1999 Mandy came to visit us and I see her now smiling in a photo I took of her attending the University Botanic Garden annual Apple Day in October of that year. I also have a card with a lovely recipe for a banana, date, walnut and yoghurt cake she gave me then that has a Winnie the Pooh theme..
We ended up losing touch after Jonathan and I split.. Maybe I wanted to connect to her too yesterday as the guilt over the end of my marriage rises up but as Kat said to me in therapy yesterday “in many ways you were not ready to get married”, As I look back at 31 I was still so very very young mature and vulnerable in so many ways. In fact as I look back to how my drinking and drug taking escalated in the years 1989 to 1991 when I tried to pull back I see how vulnerable I made myself and how one boyfriend pressured me a lot to take Ecstasy which was a big thing at dance parties in those years.. I look back now to how it supposedly ‘opened my heart’ only to dump me back in an emotional wasteland and grieve for my late 20 year old self so so lost then, so far removed from her own soul, real life and engaged emotional heart.. But I had to go through that as part of my journey, seeking in that way and by that artificial means an openness and high that no drug can really ever give us.. I found that later when I finally began to connect to inner and transpersonal as well as natural and deep mythic sources that spoke to my being heart and soul and as my feelings so long suppressed began to emerge from 1999 onwards, often with great difficulty.
I did not know anything of love then, only of the mythology of love we got fed collectively.. I saw my older sister abandoned, reduced to a cripple in a wheelchair and I hate even to write that when I think of the vibrancy she had as a young woman but her feminine soul got sold to the devil and in many ways its what happens to the feminine in the technological age that is hyper masculinized in its ethos.. Its like the young girl in the tale of the Handless Maiden who the father promises to the devil not knowing (due to a lack of attention) it is she not an old apple tree standing behind the mill that the devil asks for one day. As I share and cry more in therapy lately while also feeling great openings too at times to buried inner life and joy I know deeply in my heart I have lived every part of that mythological journey.
That tale resonates for me and I actually appeared handless in a dream after J left me.. I was standing in front of a mirror in the dream in a purple and green v neck sweater and pleated skirt like a school uniform and I had bandaged stumps where my two hands should have been.. and so it was for me metaphorically coming out of the dark ages.. maybe it is really only in these later years that I am finally learning how to grow my own hands back to find my missing power and agency.. Tears and fury and powerlessness and grief have played a huge part in this as they do in the healing part of that fairy tale where the Handless Maiden in that fairy tale goes to live : in the forest for years.. giving birth to a child and growing back hands.
My hands grow when I nurture myself and my garden and my home and my dog, when I find real friends also struggling to grow hands and a heart no longer made of straw. I thank God for these gifts and they bring me to tears. I am alive and l have endured all of that trauma and even those trying to tell me to get over it when I was trying so hard to do WORK MY WAY THROUGH IT IN A SOCIETY THAT DENIES THAT PATH SO OFTEN.. I have even survived the impact of trying to kill off myself somehow.
Surely December raises a lot for me but I feel better today on the back of yesterdays deep dive into grief..Possibly at every new year of sobriety I birth more of me and that comes with a dying off and pain as well as older parts atrophy or are shed like skins.. And yes, Jeff..my AA friend there should be dancing and happiness and pride and joy too but sometimes it all goes AWOL for a while..as I beat myself up with another stick or try to force myself back inside like Saturn in the face of Uranus.. but today instead I will spew it out in words onto a page and then press ‘Publish’ affirming my right to bear testament to it all..
Emerging From The Dark Night 