chaos is a friend of mine
electric and terrifying all at once.
chaos
1a: a state of utter confusion // the blackout caused chaos throughout the city
b: a confused mass or mixture // a chaos of television antennas
2a // often capitalized: a state of things in which chance is supreme // especially: the confused unorganized state of primordial matter before the creation of distinct forms— compare COSMOS
b: the inherent unpredictability in the behavior of a complex natural system (such as the atmosphere, boiling water, or the beating heart)
There was a time when Friday nights were dangerous. Like clockwork, in the antsy afternoon at the end of the workweek grind, the familiar spin of what I came to call the dervish would whir to life inside my gut, fluttering like a moth frantic for a lamp. I’d head out into the night, my lizard brain whispering, anything could happen, and often, anything did.
I was a binge drinker. To say I was familiar with “the inherent unpredictability in the behavior of a complex natural system” is the most eloquent understatement. For so long, my behavior confused me. I didn’t know how to deal with the chaos inside me in a non-harmful way.
I don’t drink anymore, and I’m grateful for every day that I don’t find myself inside the messy rendering as in the image above. The dervish lies dormant, mostly.
*
Last Friday night I was buzzing my head. After I was done I popped off the comb to clean out the blade and had one of those moments where the wires crossed and without thinking, I slid the clipper over my head one more time. Right down the almost center of my skull, a shorn-near-down-to-the-skin line cut smooth like a fresh track across a baseball field.
I texted a selfie to my sister. “Yeah,” she responded. “I don’t think you’re going to be able to fix that.”
I’ve told this story to some friends and copped to it on Zoom calls to make it not weird but the part of the story I haven’t said out loud was that I was buzzing my head for no reason. My hair was already so short. I wasn’t due for a cleanup. But that thing was whirring inside me and the feeling was way too close and I’m so sick of Friday nights stuck at home alone and the guy I’m dating can barely be bothered half the time and I’m tired of distracting my life away on screens and all of this is a slick icing on the relentless cake that is 2020 and yeah, there I was, a shudder of restlessness.
I needed to assert some sort of control over my body. I needed the tactile sensation of a clean line under fingertips; I needed a physical manipulation of the edge between where body ended and ether began; I needed a boundary, damnit, I needed to feel myself here, in this animal body. I wasn’t here; I had to feel myself here.
My eagerness with the clippers was a silly mistake. But it was also a signal. These moments are signals, now. It didn’t always use to be this way. Subtle signals would have never stood a chance.
When the dervish whirs her wings, my skin is too tight. I fantasize about unzipping myself, stepping out of my casing, blood and organs and viscera pooling out. I imagine myself edgeless. The color is red and the element is water and the quality is that of a big gross mess and I am boundless, which is all I’ve ever wanted.
That’s why we did the things we did, remember? To take the edge off.
*
The opposite of chaos is order, orderliness. And order has been, is, an important part of my recovery. Indeed, I’ve spent the last three years plugging up the holes in my leaky periphery. Who knew that I would thrive inside the quiet quotidia of the everyday?
Chaos is obviously not the aim. But neither is order, right? Life can’t only be about “finding balance,” can it? I wasted so much time chasing moderation. Is “balance” as good as it gets?
I want more. I want to go beyond. I want to trust the inherent unpredictability of my beating heart, and all the parts of my animal body that keep me alive, that give a home to my yearning and my hunger, that allow me to keep my fist raised in the fight. I want order only insofar that it expands my access to freedom, and never threatens to tamp me down, close me off or hold me back.
In my quest toward boundlessness and freedom, I reject established definitions, synonyms, antonyms. I refuse to tumble through the type of chaos that would only ever deliver me to a place of orderliness. If chaos is “the confused unorganized state of primordial matter before the creation of distinct forms,” then let the confused state be made of potential, not annihilation; let the metamorphosis bring into being that which would render us unrecognizable to ourselves, to each other, to the whole planet.
A twelve-second search into chaos reports: Chaos is not simply disorder. Chaos explores the transitions between order and disorder, which often occur in surprising ways.
Even though I know better, I still cling to binary thinking. Maybe that’s the problem.
*
There are so many themes here I want to explore in a deeper way—a rabbit hole is opening up beneath my desk as I type—and, all I can do today is ask that you humor me as I meander through an extrapolation.
I am confused by our behavior. Collectively, we do not know how to deal with such sustained chaos in a non-harmful way. And I’m not going to pretend that I know anything about transitions, aside from the truth that we humans tend to lose the thread of grace just when we need her most.
In my little life, it took years of riding the pendulum back and forth between order and chaos until I made a surprising-to-me choice that finally allowed the swing to find a mostly still center. I believe this is possible for all of us. But it’s going to take time, so much more time. Which means our task is to make a home here, inside of chaos. To let go of all attempts at prediction. To keep all bodily senses open to possibility.
Here we are, in that “anything could happen” place: electric and terrifying all at once.
Slow Motion Sober is a newsletter and community for creative types who are sober or curious about sobriety, and all the life-y intersections along the way. It's written by me, Dani, a writer and sobriety advocate in San Francisco, CA.
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“I want order only insofar that it expands my access to freedom...”
That edge you speak of, the feeling of skin being too tight and wanting to unzip it and step out of yourself—I see it as our power to fly, if we can only figure out how to focus it. Your writing captures it vividly.