Like running, writing has always fit me and fulfilled me. Beyond defining my personhood, in all honesty it has helped me find my true self. A self that almost drowned in negativity and alcohol before it ever had a chance at adulthood. My first poems and diaries as a pre-teen got me started on this writer’s way just when I needed an outlet and just as my thoughts and emotions were becoming deeper and darker.
Writing came naturally, but I believe it also came necessarily. Feelings, especially difficult ones, weren’t freely expressed in the home I grew up in. Healthy intimacy and sharing weren’t modeled for us. In my parents’ defense, it is hard to model something you weren’t taught either.
No one directly told me “be tough, don’t cry, we don’t talk about that stuff” but that was my interpretation I guess. I ruminated on feelings my heart carried and on thoughts my mind harbored. Without writing, I wouldn’t have figured out the chains that bound me.
The poems that came out in my teens and early twenties were raw. The unabridged version of a young alcoholic’s pain and lack of understanding about the disease that had latched on with steel claws. Poems like these:
Fool
I am a weak fool
Destroying myself
Faster than I
Can find myself
Destroying confidence
Destroying respect
Destroying will
Hurting myself
So others know
That they hurt me
Putting on an act
Of emotional strength
When I really want
To break down
All I want
Is someone to listen
Someone to care
Someone to know
I have a problem
That is killing me
It all began
When I found alcohol
Before I found me
Now I am lost –
Just a coward
(May 6, 1984)
The Pit
I fell into this pit
Many years ago
And I’ve been fighting
To get out ever since
I’ve been to the bottom
Hopeless and as good as dead
But I’ve crawled back up
Almost enough to get out
Only to get kicked back down
Life in this pit is bad
But I cannot leave yet
Because I am not strong enough
I am just a weak fool
Who has no will power
Who has no desire to
Make the rest of her life
Better than the hell she’s
Been through in this pit
I’ve been clinging to the ledge
For awhile now
Trying to throw my legs over
And get out once and for all
But someone keeps stepping
On my fingers
I think it’s me
(January 4, 1985)
“Fool” came out just as I was finishing up my freshman year of college, not yet 19 years old. The truth was right there–I found alcohol before I found me. It was another year before I was confronted by others about my drinking (My First “Last Drunk”) and made my first real attempt to quit. I still believed it was just a matter of willpower. I was a failure in my own opinion, because I didn’t have the strength to quit. It would be years before I would understand it’s not about strength as much as it’s about surrender and acceptance.
“The Pit” was written a few months later. I was sounding less like a victim than I had in the first poem and starting to acknowledge what needed changing. It was not my life circumstances, rather me and the way I was handling or not handling those life circumstances. I still get a painful twinge in my inner being when I read “But someone keeps stepping on my fingers, I think it’s me.” Such writing drove this truth home–I can’t do this on my own. I need help. Today, that help is available and both tangible-people I share recovery with-and intangible-faith in a Great Spirit that guides and freely gives grace.
These poems and many others and the entries in this journal pictured below, which I received as a gift on my 16th birthday, were vital excursions into my brain and heart. They brought out the truth in the only way I knew to release what was in there: writing it out. The cover of this journal is sweet and tender. Many of the words within it were neither.
Though extremely painful at the time they were written, these words are a source of deep and ongoing gratitude for me today. They saved my life then. A life that likely would have been snuffed out early, intentionally or unintentionally. They continue to motivate me to keep writing and discovering the recovering person I am.