DROPPING KEYS
The small woman
Builds cages for everyone
She
Knows.
While the sage,
Who has to duck her head
When the moon is low,
Keeps dropping keys all night long
For the
Beautiful
Rowdy
Prisoners.
—HAFIZ
I was never completely gone. My spark was always inside me, smoldering. But I sure as hell felt gone for a long while. My childhood bulimia morphed into alcoholism and drug use, and I stayed numb for sixteen years. Then, when I was twenty-six I got pregnant and sober. Sobriety was the field in which I began to remember my wild.
It went like this: I began building the kind of life a woman is supposed to build. I became a good wife, mother, daughter, Christian, citizen, writer, woman. But while I made school lunches, wrote memoirs, rushed through airports, made small talk with neighbors, carried on with my outer life, I felt an electric restlessness buzzing inside me. It was like constant thunder rolling right there beneath my skin—a thunder made of joy and pain and rage and longing and love too deep, scalding, and tender for this world. It felt like hot water simmering, always threatening to boil.
I was afraid of what was inside me. It felt powerful enough to destroy every bit of the lovely life I’d built. Like how I never feel safe on a balcony because: What if I jump?
It’s okay, I told myself. I’ll keep myself and my people safe by keeping my insides hidden.
I was amazed at how easy this was. I was filled with electric thunder, simmering water, fiery red and gold, but all I had to do was smile and nod and the world would take me for easy breezy blue. Sometimes I wondered if I wasn’t the only one using her skin to contain herself. Maybe we are all fire wrapped in skin, trying to look cool.
My boiling point was the moment Abby stepped through that doorway. I looked at her, and I could no longer contain myself. I lost control. Fire-red and golden rolling bubbles of pain and love and longing filled me, brought me to my feet, threw my arms open wide, insisting: There. She. Is.
For a long while I thought that what happened that day was some kind of fairy-tale magic. I thought the words There She Is came to me from on high. Now I know that There She Is came from within. That wild rowdiness that had simmered for so long and then turned itself into words and lifted me was me. The voice I finally heard that day was my own—the girl I’d locked away at ten years old, the girl I was before the world told me who to be—and she said: Here I Am. I’m taking over now.
When I was a child, I felt what I needed to feel and I followed my gut and I planned only from my imagination. I was wild until I was tamed by shame. Until I started hiding and numbing my feelings for fear of being too much. Until I started deferring to others’ advice instead of trusting my own intuition. Until I became convinced that my imagination was ridiculous and my desires were selfish. Until I surrendered myself to the cages of others’ expectations, cultural mandates, and institutional allegiances. Until I buried who I was in order to become what I should be. I lost myself when I learned how to please.
Sobriety was my painstaking resurrection. It was my return to wild. It was one long remembering. It was realizing that the hot electric thunder I felt buzzing and rolling inside was me—trying to get my attention, begging me to remember, insisting: I’m still in here.
So I finally unlocked and unleashed her. I set free my beautiful, rowdy, true wild self. I was right about her power. It was too big for the life I was living, so I systematically dismantled every piece of it.
Then I built a life of my own.
I did it by resurrecting the very parts of myself I was trained to mistrust, hide, and abandon in order to keep others comfortable:
My emotions
My intuition
My imagination
My courage
Those are the keys to freedom.
Those are who we are.
Will we be brave enough to unlock ourselves?
Will we be brave enough to set ourselves free?
Will we finally step out of our cages and say to ourselves, to our people, and to the world: Here I Am.
Key One: Feel It All
On my sixth day of sobriety, I went to my fifth recovery meeting. I sat in a cold plastic seat, trembling, trying to keep the coffee from spilling out of my paper cup and my feelings from spilling out of my skin. For sixteen years I had made damn sure that nothing touched me, and suddenly everything in the world was touching me. I was an exposed nerve. Everything hurt.
I was embarrassed to tell anyone how much I hurt, but I decided to try to explain it to the people in that circle. They were the first people I trusted with all of me, because they were the first people I ever heard tell the whole truth. They had shown me their insides so I showed them mine. I said something like “I’m Glennon, and I’ve been sober for six days. I feel awful. I think this awfulness is why I started drinking in the first place. I’m starting to worry that what was wrong with me wasn’t the booze; it was underneath it. It was me. It doesn’t seem like being alive is as hard for other people as it is for me. It just feels like there’s some kind of secret to life I don’t know. Like I’m doing it all wrong. Thanks for listening.”
After the meeting ended, a woman walked over and sat down next to me. She said, “Thanks for sharing. I relate. I just wanted to tell you something that somebody told me in the beginning. It’s okay to feel all of the stuff you’re feeling. You’re just becoming human again. You’re not doing life wrong; you’re doing it right. If there’s any secret you’re missing, it’s that doing it right is just really hard. Feeling all your feelings is hard, but that’s what they’re for. Feelings are for feeling. All of them. Even the hard ones. The secret is that you’re doing it right, and that doing it right hurts sometimes.”
I did not know, before that woman told me, that all feelings were for feeling. I did not know that I was supposed to feel everything. I thought I was supposed to feel happy. I thought that happy was for feeling and that pain was for fixing and numbing and deflecting and hiding and ignoring. I thought that when life got hard, it was because I had gone wrong somewhere. I thought that pain was weakness and that I was supposed to suck it up. But the thing was that the more I sucked it up, the more food and booze I had to suck down.