on edges and freedom and radical love
"We need to create a humanity where every one, and every thing, is allowed to exist. Because we already do." Ravyn Wngz
Hey friends, happy Friday.
First things first! Thank you so much for your contributions last week to what I’m calling the “Pandemia Pump-up Playlist.” Over 3.5 hours of the most random smattering of musical genres I’ve heard, maybe ever.
Check it out here, and let me know if there’s anything you’d like to add!
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The post below kind of took it out of me, so we’ll be back to double posts next week. I love you all very very much and I hope you’re taking good care of yourselves and each other.
Late summer 2017, after a very very dark night, I quit drinking after ten years of knowing something wasn’t quite right with my relationship to alcohol but feeling utterly unable to stop. A daily journal keeper, I was about six months sober when I decided to revisit these notebooks that were piled up on a high shelf in my closet. I wanted to retrace my steps; I wanted to put together a map of my past, to understand and make sense of how I’d gotten from there to here. I was curious how I’d gotten so stuck for so long.
I’d been struggling in the dance of moderation with two left feet in shoes that didn’t fit for years (PSA: it’s a shitty, shitty dance), and I knew that by paging through ten years worth of journals, I’d be revisiting this struggle. What I didn’t expect was the degree to which alcohol featured in those pages. When you journal every day, much of it is mundane, boring, day-to-day life stuff. To see how much I agonized over my drinking, and how desperately I wanted to quit and how many times I failed spelled out on page after page, year after year, was too much for those starry-eyed, full of wonder days of early sobriety. I re-shelved the journals and there they shall remain (until I burn them on my 40th birthday in a few more years).
I think that when people hear statements like “I was utterly unable to stop” they imagine that I was a person who hid my drinking or drank all day every day or whatever other images we associate with being a “functioning alcoholic.” It wasn’t like that for me. By the time I quit, I was barely drinking. What made me utterly unable to stop until I finally did was that I could not imagine a life for myself without alcohol. I couldn’t imagine socializing without it, unwinding without it, celebrating without it, grieving without it. I still associated drinking with being pleasurable and I couldn’t imagine giving up something that brought me pleasure, no matter that when I really got honest, the pleasure only actually lasted about an hour at best, until the warm punch of the initial buzz wore off and I either continued to chase it with more drinks or went home feeling low-key bummed out, either way waking up the next morning feeling ambivalent and tired, which is ultimately what I struggled with and is what got me to finally quit—I knew that there was more to life than just tolerating my life.
In the story of my own transformation, like other tremendous changes that occur slowly, then all at once, quitting drinking wasn’t an option until it was the only option. I could not imagine a life without alcohol, because the stories I’d been told about what it would look like to be booze-free were so limited. Until I stumbled upon Holly’s blog and saw a new vision for what was possible, the specter of sobriety loomed like a prison sentence. The story was incomplete, limited by a lack of imagination. After a lifetime spent beholden to a certain story about alcohol, suddenly, by stepping away, my imagination stepped forward.
I drank because it made me “edgy;” I drank to take my edges off. Both sides of the edge are stories I am no longer interested in participating in.
There is a freedom inside the act of transforming something that was once impossible into something possible. A confidence emerges, hones, strengthens when that impossible thing integrates, and becomes second nature. Faith in ourselves develops as we begin to trust that nature. Then one day, something happens—we are triggered, or a challenge arises, or our backs are up against a wall—and we find ourselves responding in ways that keep us well rather than destroy us. We look around and our lives are unrecognizable. We have been made anew. But we have to be willing to question our stories. We have to be willing to examine and move beyond our own limitations, to actually walk the edge rather than throw ourselves off it or shy away from it completely.
I share the details of my individual story because it’s in my nature to constantly toggle my attention back and forth between the micro and the macro; the individual and the collective; how I might make sense of the grander scheme or current events by filtering them through my personal experience. The murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others by the state has set into motion a series of uprisings that have lead to the type of change until very recently mainstream America would have considered impossible. We are questioning our collective stories. We are bringing history long whitewashed and covered up out into the light. We are tearing down monuments to hate. This is a time of great unrest but also great imagination—every single one of us is living into what’s possible.
I stand in the story of abolition. I imagine this country operating under a government that loves us, under systems that seek to make us well rather than keep us sick. I imagine widespread communities of care, I commit to the end of white supremacy. I want all of these things out in the world. I want to give myself to these things. For me, abolition is synonymous with love (along with defunding the police and eradicating the prison-industrial-complex and universal healthcare and worker’s unions and so much more—this is a great article that lays out the work of abolitionists that’s been building for generations). I want more freedom, evermore, for all of us. But freedom isn’t possible inside a society that is so sick. It’s just not. Any sense of freedom will be incomplete, limited in the world of so much suffering.
These are dark days. We have more dark days to come. The days might get darker still. The maniac in the white house might get four more years.
Some questions I am spinning:
How will we sustain ourselves though these days?
How will we keep ourselves and each other well?
How do we take care of ourselves so that we can care for each other in a way that is generative rather than depleting?
Where might we find joy, and laughter, and pleasure?
What stories are we still beholden to that might be limiting us unnecessarily?
A big part of recovery is taking back agency over our stories, and giving ourselves permission to change the narrative we tell about ourselves. Recovery is like activism in that we have to find ways to sustain ourselves inside a complicated practice for the rest of our lives. Once we are past the initial tumble in the whitewater of early sobriety, how do we then swim into deeper water? How do we stay? Recovery and activism go hand in hand for me now, because both call me to do the work of making love visible out in the world. Of breaking down any barriers inside me that keep me from loving my neighbor. Of having difficult conversations. Of reconciliation and forgiveness and accountability and reparations. Of holding a vision for a new world, even in the midst of so much trouble and pain and grief.
What story are you living into? What questions are you asking?
I humbly bow to the following teachers for the way their work has inspired this week’s piece, and my own imagination:
adrienne marie brown
This is so powerful Dani. I have been going back and forth between the individual and the collective a lot. You put words to my feels as usual. Sending lots of love.