normal is oppressive
I’m a day late 😩 with this essay and y’all KNOW I hate being late but you’ll forgive me and we can blame it on Mercury being in reggaeton again. (Also please forgive me in advance for all the run-on sentences—they mirror how breathless everything feels these days, you know?)
Onward:
Noun
Sobriety
The quality or state of being sober.
The quality or state of not being intoxicated.
The quality or state of being grave or earnestly thoughtful.
The state or quality of being unhurried; a state of calm.*
A state of moderation or seriousness.
Modesty in color or style.
Soundness of judgement.
*emphasis mine
I want to write about chaos, and calm, and holding this strange paradox where everything is shit but also so full of potential my teeth hurt and my fingers are clumsy and won’t type fast enough and I can’t-quite-yet look at the future head-on; I want to write about fighting against my urge to dissociate through the mess of the next two weeks pre-election and what I’m doing to stay present and awake, even though much of reality makes me nauseous and near-paralyzed with dread; I want to write about how fucking gorgeous California is at this time of year when the air is so clear and the light makes you swoon and there’s very little wind and how I’m not sure if there’s anything I’m more loyal to, other than my dog, and how this native Californian is sticking around no matter how completely we burn up; I want to write about astrology and science and tarot and evidence and all the different ways of knowing and connecting with truth and intuition, and how we need to call-in all the help we can to get us to wherever we’re headed; I want to write about how much I love my friends and how deeply I long to be partnered up through all this; I want to write about how embarrassed I am that this time in Pandemia has been a holy time for me (I know I overuse that word but I don’t have another one for how this feels) when so so many of us are suffering with no end in sight; I want to write about being disabused of the illusion that any of us ever had any modicum of control, and seeing clearly that everything has always been this uncertain; I want to write about the dislocation of living through a time where everything everything seems to be moving both at breakneck speed and excruciatingly slowly all at once.
Instead, I’m going to tell you a story.
When I first quit drinking, I went into project manager mode. I thought if I drank lemon water first thing in the morning and exercised rigorously every day and went to therapy and tracked calories and read all the “quit-lit” and reported my process to the world via blog and made sober friends and led sober meetups and yanked my self-esteem out of the shitter and ran it through a permanent press and left it out to dry in a field of French lavender that I would finally be the person I so badly wanted to be. This is not unlike how during my drinking days I approached “moderation” (in quotes because I don’t actually believe moderating one’s drinking is a thing), believing that if only I could hack my drinking, figure out some precise number of drinks I could drink “safely” (heh), that my life would be OK. That I wouldn’t hate myself anymore, that I’d arrive at a place where I wasn’t low-grade miserable all the time.
Then I had one of those cliché lightbulb moments in the shower where I realized that even though I was sober (yay me!), my inner critic was still running the show. When I finally noticed the way I talked to myself about myself—when I got present to an inner monologue that was constantly reminding me of what a terrible piece of shit I was, always at the ready to point out to me my faults and flaws—it broke my heart. Where did this voice come from? Why was I talking to myself in a way that I would never speak to a friend?
I realized if I approached recovery the way I’d been approaching life—that is, to bear down and do my best to control every possible outcome, to manage life rather than experience life—there would be no space for the mystery of transformation. Yes, I was healthier. But if I didn’t fundamentally change the way I talked to myself, then what was the point? I could have all the external markers of success and life would still suck. As I’ve said before - the drinking wasn’t the problem. Me hating myself was.
I had to slow down. Way down. I had to unhook from my tendency toward control. I had to train myself out of my habits, which meant (which means) doing the exact opposite of what my brain urged me to do when anything felt even remotely uncertain, little things like: pausing and going for a walk with my Tater, or calling someone who could help me shift my perspective, or, simply turning off the computer screen and looking out the window at the birds. There are always birds.
We say we want a different world. We recognize that The Before Time, or what was considered “normal,” was oppressive for more of us than not. And yet. We continue to do life in the same way that kept most of us oppressed.
I read that definition of sobriety and it reads like an emotional bucket list, not just for myself and my own individual path, but for the whole world. I imagine leaders who are thoughtful, calm, earnest, sound. All those words that reflect the opposite of how my inner life, and our collective life, have felt for as long as I can remember.
One of my most beloved people on the planet had surgery last week and her convalescence includes 4-6 weeks of total physical rest (she is doing well, thank you thank you). This woman is one of the most capable, intelligent, strong people I know. She is an amazing mother and a deeply wonderful friend and she has an amazing career and she’s sober and when we met it felt cosmic—like everything up to that moment transpired precisely so we could enter each other’s lives. And she’s struggling. Not from the pain. But because it’s so damn hard to slow down. To be still. We are not good at this.
Hers is a more extreme example of what we’re all dealing with. The discomfort of being still with ourselves. Of doing whatever the fuck we can to find calm inside of chaos. Of figuring out how to be patient in our quest to have transformation happen on a very specific timeline.
We are snakes shedding skin. When snakes shed they don’t like to be handled, they move far less, their eyes glaze over and their vision becomes cloudy. They are in a vulnerable state, and as they make their way into their fresher form it’s often preceded by a period of quiet and extended stillness as the skin sloughs off and they are eventually able to slither on into the future.
COVID-19 + the mess we find ourselves in politically—this is it. We are in conversation with catastrophe. You can feel it. So many things we used to shore up our lives are suddenly meaningless—time, even, is not what we thought it was. I’m writing about questioning our tendencies. I’m asking us to consider what the opposite of normal might be. I’m urging us to stay in the murk, to trust that birds will soon alight in the branches if we remember to look.
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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HAHAH..mercury in reggaeton.