no one knows better than you

+ some thoughts on Dry January

Two announcements (come hang out with me this month!):

Disrupt the Narrative: Writing Through Chaos is a 2-hour writing workshop on Sunday, 1/24 at 10am PST. During this time of great upheaval and unpredictability, let's come together and spin some yarn about how to make sense of this time we’re in. Who cares about new year's resolutions when the world's on fire? I teach these workshops based on the Amherst Writer’s Method, which means there is no critical feedback - it’s a very encouraging, supportive, and generative approach and I promise it’s wonderful no matter how much writing experience you have. There’s a sliding scale, but if dollars are tight just say the word and I got you.

Register here.

The next Sober From Bullshit 💘 Recovery Club is Monday, January 18 from 7-8:30pm, PST. This is an online recovery meeting where we check in, share stories and get support in sobriety. These events are virtual, so you can join from wherever you are. If you’re on the fence but maybe need some hand holding please email me and I can answer all your questions and give you all of the pep talks. You do not need to be sober or have accumulated any sober time to participate—I promise we will love you exactly as you are. Register here.

Hope to see you all the time everywhere at everything.

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My mother comes alive when we talk about our ancestors. We wonder aloud together if those presences we can still sense among us indicate that those folks still have unfinished business here on earth, and whether those we can only feel in wisps here and there have transcended, finally free. We draw connections between past and present, and we project into the future, weaving together threads of meaning. This is one of the few instances where neither of us are distracted by our phones, and I am often overcome with emotion. These are big stories, and I feel the weight and responsibility of them in my bones, in my blood, in my DNA.

Our entry point into this conversation is usually me asking her about my great-great-aunt, Herminia Bobadilla, a medium—yes, that kind of medium—who left Cuba with my grandparents and who my mother lived with throughout her childhood. Herminia never married, and regularly held sesiones at home, which consisted of groups of people coming over so she could channel the dead.

I am hungry for every detail.

Every single one of my extended family of a certain generation has their own stories of uncanny predictions, messages from other places, warnings, and rituals of protection from this tiny woman who has been elevated to the role of saint in my family mythology. I try not to translate her skills through my North American lens, I hold back from using words like “witch” or “spells,” though it’s also true that Herminia had certain capabilities, everything from predicting the sex of incoming babies to curing shingles.

Though I never got to know her before she slipped into her dementia, calling all us kids by the same name, I make her up in my mind, I want to tell her how I crave this type of knowing, I catch myself looking to her to bridge the gap between the old world of my origin and this one.

My mother, blowing out candles. Herminia is the older lady in the glasses, second in from the right.

*

In my twenties, I got tangled up a few different times in organizations that in retrospect bordered on the cult-like (tales for another time, for sure). The third time was the charm, and ever since, I have committed to fine-tuning my critical thinking skills, I want my sources to be rigorously evidence based, and I am hyper-weary of trends, bandwagons, quick fixes, magic pills, detoxes, and, um, basic rules.

During those searching-for-belonging years, I looked outside of myself for someone or something out there to make me OK. To grant me permission to exist. To tell me that I was on the right track, or to steer me in a different direction if I wasn’t. This was just another way I avoided myself, that I did everything I possibly could to avoid dealing with what felt like a gaping void inside but was really just my own self clamoring for my attention. Then I quit drinking and learned to stay, and I began to interact with that emptiness inside not as a void but as a blank canvas onto which I could create whatever the hell I wanted.

The work of getting sober is absolutely about schedules and routines and slogging through the tedium of making new choices and thinking about nutrition and a sleep schedule and exercise, and reading about brain science and figuring out how to be patient through the incremental and slow as hell hard-won shifts, and it’s about learning to say no and making new friends and ditching bummer ones and I could go on and on but do you know what the best best thing about recovery is? The best thing is becoming your own authority. It’s waking up to the truth that no one knows better than you what you need to heal. It’s owning every last part of who you are, it’s moving through the world as an unapologetic beast who can stand up for yourself no matter what chaos is swirling.

It’s also true, and what I wish someone would have told me, is that this is a lonesome dance. If you’re getting sober, absolutely take all the advice. Try all of the suggestions. Follow the playbooks - they exist because they work. And, I wish someone would have told me that a crucial part of all this is that it happens in the dark, alone. These are the moments when, in say, a Dry January, we might start to flail. To think something is wrong. That we are “doing sobriety” wrong, that it is supposed to feel other than how it does. And what I’m trying to say in this strange and meandering way is that no, these are the moments (because ha ha ha there will be oh-so many moments) when we have the chance to discover who we are and what we need, beyond what we think we are “supposed” to want or need, beyond the shimmer and glitz of sober social media. This is when we claim for ourselves that no one knows better than we do what we need to recover.

I needed to find a happy medium (heh) between the rational and the spiritual. Science and evidence are crucial. And, to cast off practices like prayer and astrology and tarot and talking to ghosts is to ignore the other ways we understand and navigate our lives, which is intuition. This is leaning into our own listening, that soft, feminine quality that we are often trained out of by dint of living in the culture we do. These are the practices that happen between you and yourself, that are ultra specific and personal, that are all around, waiting for the way only you can light up the expansive dark.

*

In my family, we practice different ways of knowing. We receive symbols from the natural world; we listen to dreams; we stay in conversation with those on the other side; sometimes, we can predict the weather. We light candles and pray to a whole slew of entities, honoring both the Yoruba and Catholicized versions of gods and saints; we douse ourselves in the same perfume, the olfactory brain connection bringing us back to childhood and sweet memories of being quiet under the rain of a bendicion; and now, with more and more of us transitioning, we keep those who are gone alive through storytelling, sometimes (always) exaggerating the details; we hold each other close even in death, even as it breaks our hearts to see the pantheon of our own familial saints grow far larger then we’d ever like; even as we stay quiet in the knowing that we too will one day count ourselves among them.

Tía Herminia as a teenager

Recovery teaches me that this life is far more grand and mystical than my little pea-brain can imagine. Sometimes, I get hits and glimmers, that big expansive feeling where coincidence and serendipity show up and I can feel all who have gone before me, all who are still to come, even as I keep up the game of answering emails and scheduling my life down to the lunch hour.

Herminia teaches me to make of myself a magnet. To trust my own wisdom, to listen and respond and to move like water, like smoke, around and through the edges of being human. My mother teaches me to adapt our traditions so they stay alive, and indeed create more life rather than whittling life down. I stand somewhere in the middle, creating my own rituals, my own bridge, my own joy, and I am unshakeable.

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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, facilitator and sobriety advocate in San Francisco, CA. 

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