"I’m only just starting to talk sense to the bullshit I’ve been feeding myself my entire life."

story spotlight // guest post

I met Ashley almost three years ago through The Sober from Bullshit Recovery Club’s original iteration - Bridge Club, previously hosted by Tempest. She, along with a handful of others, became part of a group of regulars who still gather twice a month to this day.

When we met, I was immediately in low-key awe of this beautiful, independent, creative woman who was kind, and empathetic, and deeply honest, but also, shared a similar (naughty! raunchy!) sense of humor. Ashley is a person who shows up for her friends, who’s up for anything, who gives great advice and also listens attentively, who will kvetch and commiserate *and* lift you up when you’re blue. She always texts you back, and knowing that I can lean on our friendship is a great joy and true delight that’s only deepened in Pandemia.

It’s my honor to share her story with you today.

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The months before I quit drinking were not uneventful. For instance, it was November 2016. How it unfolded that election night was unexpectedly jarring, yet how I coped with it was entirely unoriginal. At one point, while not one, but two of my pant-suited, the-future-is-female friends were in the bathroom having panic attacks, I was doing what I did best: Sitting on a San Francisco stoop, boozing and sucking down cigarettes. In this case, I’m sure it was a bottle of Nasty Woman red and a pack of United States of American Spirits. It was a fucking theme party after all. I spent the majority of the night garbling through conversations with strangers walking by, tossing one liners, attempting to make any sense at all. My friend Larkin was visiting, and thankfully she was there to shovel me into an Uber and put me to bed as I fell asleep drunk-crying to the headlines.

An old roommate and I used to have a shtick. We’d use it in the bar on 16th Street downstairs from our apartment, which we referred to as “the living room.” Introduce yourself with your name, and one qualifying statement, short and pithy. For example, hers was, “Hi, I’m Grace. I wear leggings as pants.”

Mine? “Hi, I’m Ashley. I drink beer and talk shit!”

Also in November 2016: I celebrated my 35th birthday in a mountain house with no fewer than twenty-five of my closest friends and family, a lifetime highlight of feeling loved and celebrated. I was mildly-to-very smashed the whole time, out of habit but also, isn’t that how you honored cherished memories? By erasing the edges and poisoning yourself until you can’t even sleep?

I had always wanted to be the cool girl. A cool girl talks good shit. She tells jokes, she laughs it off. And I made it. I could hold my own with the best of them. In Spanish, too. You want to learn a language really well? Just go to Spain and sit in bars, drinking beer and talking shit for seven years like I did, and I promise you’ll be fluent. I was the Renaissance Woman of talking shit: Any fat you got, I’ll chew on it, bonus points if it was at a loud bar and it involved shouting. Topics ranging from politics, sports, that guy who just came in, Shakespeare, that one TV show, British accents, horrible genocide at the hands of Franco, sure! Court was always in session. I was there to psychoanalyze, make grand declarations about “who I was”, and who “they think they are,” and I would always reach BIG important conclusions about my relationship failures.

Also that November I was still in love with a man who had, almost a year before, told me he just wanted to be friends shortly after he had told me he’d “never felt like this with anyone before.” That summer, after running into him in the park with his new girlfriend—who was also his polyamorous old girlfriend—we started hanging out again. I was keeping it cool, channeling my inner cowboy, drinking bourbon on a barstool, spouting some bullshit about how cool I was with him being in an open relationship. It was a boozy dreamworld, some sort of body language buffet, Ashley, on a platter, do what you want me? I was only seeing what I wanted to see—my handsome soulmate who just hadn’t gotten the memo yet. One night, I took myself off leash and let the self-desecration run its natural course, first kissing him at the bar, then on the street corner, until finally I lured him back to my lair of self-abandonment for no less than thirty-seven minutes of sweet sweet kissing, the stuff of dreams, people. But, it was to go no further, he said. I would have to get her permission first, he said.

Back to November. Still high on love, and probably drugs, from my birthday, I talked him into drinks, cool girl style, thinking this time, I was going to tell him how I really felt. This time, I thought, he won’t be able to resist me. He showed up late, talking his smooth shit, casually segueing into how he couldn’t believe it but he’d met a woman named Sabina, and he had fallen hard. 

Somehow, I managed to pull myself out of the chair. Somehow, I mustered up the courage to go, to finally read the writing on the wall. I walked out, leaving the bill like they do in the movies, feeling the familiar sting of the kind of rejection you only feel when you co-create it, when you actually set out to destroy yourself. This is a special kind of rejection.

Looking back, though, the only part surprising anyone about how that whole thing went down was that I left an almost full glass of wine behind on the table. 

After that came December. I think I drank a lot, and in January, I got an IUD—in case birth control was taken from us—and I marched in Washington DC with my sister in the name of all the grabbed pussies everywhere. Afterwards, I drank a beer in the train station and nearly fainted. Back in San Francisco, I dated a guy for a few weeks who was embarrassed of his penis and eventually stopped calling.

The night I took my last drink, February 20th, 2017, I sang karaoke at the Mint. I can’t recall what I sang. I stood outside, smoking, talking some more shit, doing my thing. I was there with two sets of my couple friends, me firmly positioned as their fifth wheel. I remember waking up the next day thinking, “Is this it?”

I decided to take a week off. I was traveling to teach at a conference with my mom, who also drank a lot. It felt like a good opportunity to exercise some boundaries, to “model” or whatever the hell that means when it’s your mom. She wondered if I was pregnant, which was literally impossible because well, the IUD, but also, that guy’s penis didn’t work. I had the best night's sleep of my life that week. One week turned into two, then three. My friend Tiffany was also quitting, and just knowing she was there, also attempting to cure the cool girl syndrome, was enough for me to push on. Then I discovered the Home podcast, Holly and Laura, this community.

Where am I at today?

I’m so fucking excited for the next phase of sobriety. My first eight months of being sober were truly magical. I rode that pink cloud high to the sky! I discovered my love for writing, for myself, for this WORLD.

You know what I also noticed? People talk a lot of shit.

Maybe my bullshit card is full after twenty-something years of running my damn mouth, or maybe it’s the clarity of sobriety. But the one thing I cannot put up with any more is nonsense. No longer do I want to sit around a bar table and talk in circles until last call. No longer do I need to have a witty one liner in order to feel included, no longer do I want to drown my week at Zeitgeist until I pass out in a Lagunitas haze at 9pm every Friday.

But. 

I’m only just starting to talk sense to the bullshit I’ve been feeding myself my entire life.

The truth is: The drinking was only the tip of the holding-me-back iceberg. The real work for me lies in how I do—or do not, as it were—show up for myself, particularly in relationships, and particularly with regard to what I honor about myself. I was told on so many occasions that I was too—something. Too emotional. Too much crying. You want too much. Too tall. Too independent! All the while convincing myself that I was doing a pretty good job of playing it cool and not being too...anything.

So I took my “too-muchness” and I fermented it inside a bottle and poured it down down down until my poor little bleeding heart was too drenched in cabernet to know how badly I was hurting. But then, I stopped doing that. Four years sober, yet still abandoning myself, that is the real wake up call.

So now, motherfucking emotional sobriety. I am four years sober and only just beginning to honor myself fully, to be cool with my SELF. 

So. What is my new introduction? Hi, I’m Ashley, here in my literal living room, and I don’t want any bullshit.

Ashley lives, works, dreams, and writes in San Francisco. A creative soul with a career working in schools and teaching sewing classes, she is also the proud author of one quilting book and a cardholding, sword-yielding member of the Sober From Bullshit Recovery Club community. Find her most easily on Insta, @alphabetashley. Say hi!

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