LOVE OR DIE
Hold nothing back.
✍🏽 October Writing Workshop is THIS SUNDAY (2 spots left)! Grab your spot here (Sunday, October 23, 10am - 12pm PST). Join us for a special HALLOWEEN themed workshop, based on the Amherst Writers Method. Come write!
🥰 THIS MONDAY: A VERY SPECIAL “ASK US ANYTHING” with Recovery Coaches Anne Marie Cribbin, Christina Hanks and Dani Cirignano (Monday, October 24, 5:30pm - 6:45pm PST). Join us for a virtual Q&A featuring sobriety and recovery. This will be a safe and brave space to ask the questions on your heart. Read more and register here.
🤘INTRODUCING: EVOLVE - a 12-week online course, community, and coaching program for people in recovery who are ready to leverage the gifts of practice into designing a life that aligns—sustainably—with who they really are and what they really want. This is a hybrid group and individual coaching program that kicks off on January 1st, 2023. To learn more click here, and check out the application here.
✋🏽 Over in the SELF MADE community, October is devoted to all things BOUNDARIES. Boundaries can be tough to define, because they are are unique to each of us - the way I need to enact boundaries is different from how you do. This week it’s boundaries with ourselves; next week, we’ll explore how we keep boundaries with each other (shudder!).
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❓Questions? Ask. I’m here and I’d love to hear from you.
Sometimes, when I’m thinking through something, I talk to myself. I talk to myself as I’m tidying up the apartment, driving around in my car, showering, and I do this because speaking things aloud helps me understand what I’m thinking. Occasionally, the act of talking something through—if only with myself—helps me make the exact connection necessary to move the needle forward or bring clarity to whatever it was I was mulling over. It’s a tool, along with morning pages and quiet time spent alone, that helps me stay in conversation with my higher self.
Once in a while, when I sense an incoming download so close I might pluck it out of the ether, I have to move quickly so as not to miss it. So I do this thing where I pull out my phone and record a voice memo. I rarely return to these recordings. But they are often key to me drawing connections I didn’t know I needed, or that up to that moment I’d only been circling around. I speak a new-to-me understanding into existence, truth falling off my tongue, and I know it’s truth because my entire body responds.
All this to say: I had an epiphany last week.
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Inside of my practice, certain themes persist, and because I am who I am, I seek to understand. The good thing is I’m no longer afraid of the reckoning, because I trust myself to turn and face the past without losing myself in a no longer relevant story. Mostly, I’ve been successful. I’ve traced most fault-lines back to their epicenters. Self-compassion and a general friendliness toward myself has taken the place of shame and self-loathing. I’m at a place where I define my story, rather than letting it define me.
And.
(Of course there’s an “and.”).
Once upon a time, I was a person who moved through the world beholden to what I can only describe as a black hole that took up my entire rib cage. Like clockwork, this proxy diaphragm would inflate to an impossible-to-ignore degree at specific moments, like, say, in the late afternoon hours at the end of a workweek grind, or basically anytime anyone invited me to do anything out in the world.
This was the source of my greatest shame. The hangovers, and the associated depression and malaise that would follow (not to mention the horror of having to trace my way back through any given night, doing my best to puzzle together whether or not I’d made a fool of myself), were bad enough. But everyone got hangovers, right? Reconnecting in the light of the next day and commiserating over pounding skulls and bottomless stomachs was certainly the norm in the circles I ran in. On the surface, sure, I wanted to relax and have fun, to take the proverbial edge off, to socialize and de-stress. But underneath I was at the mercy of a darkness that terrified and allured me in equal measure, a death drive that had me willfully seeking out my own annihilation.
What nobody talked about—and what I carried around, unspeakable—was the black hole. This was not a benign entity. Like a magnet, the void called to me, willing me to give over. The black hole made me capable of anything and everything and it was this split, this being one person by day, and something else entirely by night, that freaked me the fuck out more than anything else.
And I honestly feel so extra writing all of that, it feels so over the top and dramatic and borderline ridiculous at this point. But y’all, this is how it felt, for real. Like there lived in my system a beast that wouldn’t be satisfied until I murdered all the things within myself that made me yearn for a life worth living. And I write about it now (I’ve written about it SO much) because I know some of you know exactly what I’m talking about because you too are reckoning with your own version of this.
Long before I quit drinking, I tried “reframing” the void. I tried out different ways of relating to it, testing out different stories of how I might make sense of it. The emptiness is a blank canvas, I told myself. I can project anything I want onto it. This was a nice concept and something kinda sorta helpful to hang onto, but didn’t account for the fact that a blank canvas, though full of possibility and potential, is ultimately an inanimate object, entirely different from this thing that felt very much alive, ever at the ready to swallow me hole.
And the greatest mindfuck of all: I wanted to be swallowed.
Not always. Most of the time, I skirted around the black hole, casting glances in its direction, always aware of its presence but outwardly pretending everything was fine. Other times, the energy of the void coalesced into a dervish whirring to life behind my sternum, and on those nights I knew anything could happen. Often, anything did.
My most honest question: What was this thing in me that desired my own annihilation, that sought oblivion (and let me be explicit: This was not me seeking my actual death, but a metaphorical one)? What drove my destructive tendencies? Why did I willfully—thrillingly, actively—pursue things that caused me harm? And most urgent of all—what would it take to free myself, for real, from these impulses?
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In recovery, we begin a practice of tending. For most of us, this begins with examining and shifting physical, point-to-able things: We hydrate. We experiment with morning routines and evening wind-down rituals. We meditate, or journal, or return to our art. We assert boundaries with people, substances, places. We show up to meetings. We shore up our external supports. We cast a wide net, experimenting with different tools, keeping what works and kicking to the curb the rest.
A new wisdom arises from this expanded stability. We connect to new and different information about ourselves, inevitably arriving at a place where we’re ready to investigate all the things that kept us hooked in the first place (I’d also say that this is often the moment when, if we have the resources and access, we might get a therapist, or a coach, or other support, like, say, an energy healer 🤓). We begin to explore all the weird, subterranean, shadowy shit that we’ve spent however long ignoring or running from.
My great revelation was the discovery that I was moving through my everyday life operating from a wound of neglect. This is another way of saying, a profound lack of self-worth. The wound caused me hella pain, but also, it was familiar, which is to say, comfortable, and so there I was, dating and moving into relationships, making friends, getting hired at jobs, you know, existing, all the while with a sharp little claw in the wound, scrape-scrape-scrape.
What this looked like was never ever ever asserting myself or my needs. Instead, I was forever going with the fucking flow, a cool girl who could hang and make do with nothing more than shit-burgers for nourishment. I attracted partners who breadcrumbed me, entangling myself in dynamics that had me whittle my big bright self down, down, down. I got into a long-term relationship that I stayed in for years too long, even when I knew it wasn’t working. I worked SO MANY awful jobs—I have dozens of examples of working under extraordinarily stressful environments and with egomaniacal bosses. I had fucked up ideas about making money, which means, I never made any, instead passing all of my twenties and half of my thirties paycheck-to-paycheck. And then, of course, there were all the terrible thoughts I had about myself and who I was, all the stories I lived inside, all the lies I believed to be true: That there was something deeply wrong with me. That if the people I loved most in the world found out, I’d be banished for eternity. That I was irredeemable, unworthy of any of the good things I saw my peers attaining left and fucking right all around me.
Operating from a place of neglect translated to holding myself back from so much. How much of my precious life did I spend so hyperaware of myself, so concerned with how I looked, what I was saying, how the people around me perceived me, constantly grasping for external validation, someone outside of myself to assure me I was OK, and then seeking this validation from people who would be forever incapable of offering it to me?
When I became aware of the wound, my heart broke. Where did all this come from? Why did I treat my friends with the utmost love and respect, but didn’t view myself as worthy of the same? Why did I believe myself exempt from goodness, grace, tenderness?
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If I orient myself to the world through the lens of neglect, it makes sense that I would seek my own erasure.
If I have zero needs; if I minimize, or hold back, all of my desires; if I put my perception of other people’s well-being ahead of my own; if I prioritize pleasing others at the expense of my own pleasure; if I pour all my efforts into becoming less, smaller, more palatable, likeable; if I keep a neverending tally of all the things I hate about myself, forever fixated on how I might cut these qualities off, or excise them completely; if this is how I move through my life, then it follows that eventually, I would disappear completely.
Neglect is self-abandonment. It is a vacating of reality, and a rejection of all the unique characteristics that make me who I am. Shifting this feels like a “final frontier” for me, the hardest, most painstaking part of the path so far. There were (are) so many backslides and failures, so many times I’ve fallen short or slid back, forgotten myself. And, I knew (I know) that if I did not focus and attend to developing the long neglected parts of myself—if I did not take the time to heal the wound—the life I was desperate for would continue to be out of reach.
Slowly, slowly, over time (so. much. time!), I’ve fortified myself and developed a foundation of self-worth. I can sit here and say—and better yet, believe—that life is not about neglecting, or cutting off. It’s about healing; becoming whole. I no longer view backslides as failures, but instead, as points of integration. And I’ve done a decent job of inviting my dark parts to the table, learning to love myself for who I am, rather than in spite of. As I mentioned above: I am not longer afraid to turn and face my life.
And. That damn void! Sense-making continued to elude me, reframes continued to fall flat.
Enter the epiphany💡.
It came as they always do, during mundane, putzing around moments in the apartment. I was tidying up, listening to a podcast I don’t recall now, when something new slid its way into my consciousness and I grabbed my phone, started gabbing.
I am still driven by a strong—sometimes, overwhelming—inner force. The a-ha moment was recognizing that this force is no longer destructive, but generative. Shoring up my self-esteem, developing an authentic self-worth, healing the wound of neglect translates to the opposite of void, abyss, black hole.
Not only am I full; I am overflowing.
As I (finally) begin to interact with this part of myself in a new way, an unexpected truth: The degree to which I sought to abandon and annihilate myself has translated to an equally strong desire to give of myself, to pour myself out, to be generous and loving and expansive and self-expressed. It’s tender, this freedom, this learning to give myself over to something that isn’t going to destroy me, that is instead going to give me, and the people around me, and the world, more of me.
The death drive is now a life-drive. That thing inside me is still there, but the desire—you know, that force that when taken to either extreme, might kill me, or literally bring more life into this world—has morphed.
I still want to give over. I still want to give of myself wholeheartedly, devotedly, completely. It’s just that now, I’m giving over to the things and people and causes I love.
I don’t want to hold anything back.
If you see yourself here. If you still have talon in the wound; if you are working to crawl out of the hole of neglect, well. I see you, I love you. Keep going. I can’t give a timeline for transformation, but I know that transformation is inevitable if you keep going, keep showing up. The way that you reach, your desires, your longing for a different way is a holy thread, weaving itself into a previously unimaginable pattern, so beautiful you can hardly look at it. Trust the thread. You can trust this thread.
Keep going.
From the archives ~ this time last year:
⭐️Redwood Epiphanies + Spontaneous Healing (I guess mid-October is for epiphanies! -d)
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Thank you.
Dani I want to thank you for writing this what I will call “ essay on the enlightenment gain through recovery “ Knowing that you were writing about yourself but I identify with everything the black hole, the dichotomy of feeling you were two different people and being swallowed whole, and allowing it to happen, wanting it.
Seeing you as a person who ventured through the experience of living AF, and mind bending self-awareness that has led you to this beautiful place of love and giving of yourself. I am grateful for your friendship
Dani, your words are exquisite. I’ve carried “the hole in my heart that I can’t fix” for so long. While I no longer try to douse it with alcohol, I dream of getting to the place of which you so eloquently write.