I’m no stranger to vulnerability. It has connected me to thousands of people. Those that have stories similar to mine, people that have been there, and even the people that haven’t but appreciate the fact that I’m willing to go there. I think finding relatability is crucial. We want to be seen. Baby Reindeer made me think long and hard what it means to see and be seen.
I let myself be seen and poked around on various topics and musings.
I wrote about the time I lost 96 pounds and was miserable here.
I have written about my therapist tying my sex-life to my mother here.
I’ve mentioned that I relapsed in various spaces. I knew what I was talking about but maybe you didn’t or maybe you wished for more context. Maybe you didn’t notice or maybe “relapsed” was sufficient enough.
It got me thinking about how I’ve let the light flood through my own cracks. I am known for putting it all out there but of course there are things I have kept to the chest. I could tell you I made it my mission to lose weight, but why I did I actually want to do that and was it really about the weight? Or I could tell you about the time I was living in Houston selling knockoff fragrances and came back a “mess” but what about that time made me that way? Nobody owes us anything in regards to telling their story but I would be lying if I told you that when someone is willing to pull out every single bag of tricks they have stashed in their body and let people rummage around and examine them? You get my attention.
When people give you tips on writing (book) companion pieces or “splashy essays”, it’s that they want you taste you. They tell you, “write about the most embarrassing thing that’s ever happened to you.” That line makes me think about the day I was diagnosed with a STI in a public hospital in Houston, alone, high, and with no less than 15 students hovered over my bare vulva. It was a teaching hospital, after all. They want to consume all of you. I understand this and I am aware I am this. I am them. I am also a consumer. A handful of homegrown peas are good, but have you ever seen a garden?
Consider this a self exam/reflection/portrait of where we go when we’re disconnected or soul-level tired or far from ourselves. This is generally where I wound up the moments in my life I convinced myself I has all the answers. The times I simply said I’m doing great! It’s about examining the murkiest bits of people. More than that, it’s about when people do their own murkiest uncovering out in the open.
This is about snowball effects.
xxx
I recently watched Baby Reindeer, a Netflix miniseries created by and starring Richard Gadd. Anaya and I were sick in bed and I had the type of brain fog that encapsulates every fold tucked in my skull- I wasn’t reading or writing and so tv it was. The series is based on Gadd’s real life experience of being stalked and sexually assaulted in his 20’s. The first couple episodes had me in the same lane as the other people we knew that had also watched to this point. We laughed and joked about how this dude has had two million opportunities to put a stop to the sheer madness, sadness, and what initially felt as potentially dangerous. We scoffed and rolled our eyes, is this dude for real? But then it shifts- the vulnerability of cracking wide open for the world to see. Not just vulnerability but showing your entire hand. The grotesque. All the parts, all of the pieces that coil around our cells. It was like bearing witness to something akin to birth but stickier and darker. I kept looking at Anaya saying, I can’t believe he is actually saying < >, and not from a place of judgment but a place of impression. I was impressed.
Listen, there were also parts of me that were and are both curious and critical over the fact that I was gushing about the cis white dude on the screen but I was completely captivated by the fact that not only did he write an incredibly soul-bearing miniseries… the dude was playing himself.
Have I been living under as rock? I hate to think that this level of showing vs telling done in this way that left a mark on me this way wasn’t first done by a woman or femme or anyone other than a cis white man. I have watched and read and listened to propulsive, provocative, moving stories and books and essays and poetry and movies and music. But am I missing something? Is there more like this in the same vein? Once I moved passed this guy is being a fucking moron I very quickly saw myself in him. Oh, I know this. It’s the snow ball effect. It’s how we get so lost in our very own translation, lost in the plot. Maybe you haven’t seen yourself in a space like this but I have. Many a time, in fact. Many more times than I would like to admit.
One thing leads to another.
xxx
When I started using cocaine again I was deep inside of my eating disorder, discomfort and sadness inside of my marriage, reeling from the type of postpartum experience I had, still in my postpartum experience for fucks sake- Moonie was only 18 months old. I had started a business out of my kitchen with zero experience aside from the fact that I could cook well in my home, while leaving a highly toxic environment (hairstyling/barbershops) as a manager of a barbershop that I truly had no business managing at all. I was profoundly angry at something I still couldn’t quite put my finger on. I was 28.
xxx
When I was 18 (until 20) I worked MLM, hawking fake perfume out of the trunks of cars all over the country. I had been raped, I had been evicted twice in two different states due to my rent not being paid (I was told it was being paid by my “boss” who had been “saving my money), I had picked up a coke habit, STIs, and a wrap sheet of debt before I even understood what debt really was outside of there’s people with money and there’s people that owe people money and I am the latter. My mother died two days before my 25th birthday and at this point I had been the shop-manager of sizable barbershop for less than a week. I was married when I was 27. I had Moonie when I was 28.
Snowball effects.
I was swimming and searching and desperate for stability. I wanted to rest but I wasn’t ready. I was too busy lost in the sauce and not in a good way. I was Moonie’s mother and it kept me here. Here was okay because if I was here I was her mother and I was with her. But here also meant all of the rest. The broken, the infinitely broken, broken and then again, shell of a human being that knew they needed something, could see the outline of soft, could feel the weightlessness of rest. But wasn’t ready.
So instead I made it about everything that I could physically control instead of the things that actually needed to be tended to. I decided I would lose a ton of weight. I decided I was an entrepreneur. I decided that the table I wanted to sit at was the kind that hosted athletes and champions and fit people that make recipes out of cauliflower rice and powdered peanut butter. The type of people that only listened to or read self-help and had Glennon Doyle quotes taped to their mirrors. I never stopped moving, I counted the gum I chewed after dinner as a dessert replacement into my macros. My marriage was over before it even started. It turns out when you put two deeply fucked up people together that are willing to do anything besides get their minds right, it doesn’t go well. I was starting to understand my sexuality, something that didn’t make me feel ashamed, but something that needed a significant amount of excavating. I traded food for booze. Then I traded both for coke.
I was a star mother during the day. I worked, I played, I hiked, I cooked, I spent the days at parks and libraries, I sang and danced with my baby, I read to her.
I put her to bed and stayed out until god knows when but always made it home by the time she woke up.
Rinse, repeat.
I was running from any and everything but especially myself. I knew once I started to do the unfolding that I wouldn’t be able to go back. I’ve said it before- the soft and well and curious and creative and safe and held and seen, it’s good and all. But when you’re used to the backs of hands and closed doors, that’s what you know and what you know is safe. Even when it’s precisely the opposite.
So I mentioned I relapsed. I’ve mentioned it before, it’s no surprise to folks that have been here a long time to know that I’m an addict. I have no shame in that. But for a long time I left it at that, everyone has their reasons after all.
For me, the idea of having my shit kicked in and kicking my own shit in were comfort like a quilt. That’s what I knew. Yes, I kept putting myself in awful financial situations and wildly unsafe situations. Yes, I kept going back to people that abused me. Yes, I was a taker. Yes, I was the actual definition of a fucking mess.
I absolutely hated myself, is the thing. I didn’t hate me, but I hated what had been done to me and what I had become. It’s easier to roll around in your own shit.
xxx
It makes me think about the food-adjacent memoir I have written and what it means to be a writer as a whole. It makes me think about how far we’re willing to go. How much of our story we’re actually willing to share. How many layers of filth are you willing to chip away at in an effort to expose? There’s merit in exposure but there’s more when we’re willing to go back and back and back even further to cut to the root. That’s the type of discovery that makes me weak. I am a voyeur of the underbelly inside of vulnerability especially when you’re owning your shit.
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