Microaggressions

Me: If we ever move into a bigger house, I want a studio. For my art.

Husband: What’s your art?

Me: What do you mean, what’s my art? I write, I paint, I play music.

Husband: I know, I know, I’m just wondering what do you consider to be your main art?

Me: My writing, duh.

Husband: Like, your books? The ones you haven’t written?

Me: Sure, those, and you know I am working on them, but I’m thinking more about my essays.

Husband: You mean your blog posts?

Me: Yes! The creative non-fiction I post on my blog.

Husband: Huh. I didn’t realize your blog posts were…art.

Me: That’s because you haven’t read them.

Quarantine Diaries Day 425: End Days

Tomorrow, May 14, marks fourteen months since my city’s shelter in place order went into effect. My grandma will turn 88. I will turn 36 a day later and the world I’m being re-birthed into is bigger than the one I was sinking into. The time to start thinking about wrapping up this series is here, if not a bit overdue. I’m not exactly living like a monk anymore. In last few weeks alone I’ve been to my office twice, eaten in a restaurant, taken my family to the aquarium, taken myself to the art museum, shopped at Chicago Music Exchange, hosted a birthday party, attended a birthday party, been to multiple in-person medical appointments, had an energy healing session, taken my daughter to school, enrolled her in summer camp, walked maskless with a friend, stepped inside another friend’s house, and purchased plane tickets to see my family in June. All of it has been eventful, but not in the way that venturing out of my house last year was the height of drama. COVID protocols are only a minor irritation. Other people don’t freak me out. My challenges now are in helping my daughter navigate emotionally charged and socially challenging situations without projecting onto her my own baggage and fears, dealing with my physical and mental health, making time for my marriage, reconnecting with family and friends, taking my career to the next level, and figuring out what I want to write next. In other words, my problems are back to what they were before the virus dropped into our lives.

I get that the pandemic isn’t over yet. In the last few weeks that have seen me practically frolicking through town, I’ve also worked mostly from home, attended a virtual conference, pitched new clients on Teams, hosted birthday parties on Zoom, Facetimed with family, texted with friends, supervised my daughter during remote learning, felt awkward talking to people with different COVID risk profiles, been annoyed at people still wearing masks, been pissed at people not wearing masks, searched desperately for reasonable, science-based, non-alarmist guidance about COVID protocols for kids under twelve, fretted about what school will look like for my daughter next year, and zoomed right out of a store when I heard a wet, hacking cough. We’ll be living with COVID aftershocks for a long time, but I’m training myself to stop bracing for them, and to stop second guessing the ways I respond to each new wave. All I can do is what I learned over the last year, which is to make decisions that are consistent with my values and within my capabilities, even if they take me out of lockstep my friends, family, neighbors, and the amorphous crowd of peers and perceived authority figures of whom I used to live in fear.

It’s time to turn my creative mind to other topics. The way this blog goes, I’ll probably have something to say about life in what I hope will be COVID’s end-days the week after I close out the series, sort of the way I, embarrassingly, ironically, keep writing about spirits months after shedding the moniker Sober Mormon. When I started this series, I asked, “how many more identities I will take on and shed before this thing is over?” How much of what I claim to be today will fall by the wayside?” You could say I’ve changed a lot. I would say I’m fundamentally the same person except that I see and move through the world in fundamentally different ways. I also figured out I want to try my hand at fiction. I think it might be a way to tell even more of the truth. I’m sure I’ll be back here, though. I’ve been swearing I’ll stop writing on the internet for almost as long as I’ve been at it.

Quarantine Diaries Day 308: New Domain Name, Who Am I?

When I started this blog five years ago I was two days from my last drink and two months out of the Mormon church. Sober Mormon was less description than projection. I wanted to be a person who didn’t need alcohol to feel alive. I wanted to experience life outside what I perceived to be the confines Mormon church. I’d slipped out a side door with no intention of ever going back, but I still considered myself Mormon to my core. I’d heard other people describe themselves as Recovering Catholics/Evangelicals/Baptists, and I thought the application of terminology from the world of addiction to religion made a lot of sense. The last few years before I left, being a feminist in the church felt like being a junkie. Try as I might, and believe me, I tried, I couldn’t stop obsessing over everything I thought was wrong with the institution. I didn’t want to see sexism and racism and bigotry every time I opened the scriptures, everytime I went to church, but I once I saw it I couldn’t put it out of my mind. Fixing the church was a fixation and it was also how I got my fix. I never thought I would be able to leave and when I finally did, I thought I would spend the rest of my life deprogramming from beliefs I never thought to question, grieving the loss of a community I never thought I had, healing from the wound of losing my my worldview. That would be my punishment. That was what I deserved. Six months after I left I went to a yoga workshop for women in recovery. The teachers told us about Akhilandeshvari, a Hindu goddess who rides on the back of a crocodile and whose name means Never Not Broken. I understood that they were trying to convey the power of being broken to pieces and coming together again, but I changed the words around in my head. That’s me, I thought. Never not Mormon. By that logic and the transitive property, to be Mormon was to be broken. Mormonism was my original sin.

The biggest surprise when I left the church was how easy it was. I did so much pre-grieving there was nothing left to recover from when I got out. I’d stopped believing the most gripping doctrine–the One True Church thing–years before. My husband was not a member. My family did not threaten to cut me off. My livelihood was not tied to my membership. I didn’t even have any friends in my ward. Nothing was keeping me in the church except me. Life after Mormonism was just life, but better.

For some time, I tried to connect with other ex-Mormons, but I found little of my own experience in theirs and I imagine they saw not much of theirs in mine. That was the other big surprise about leaving. I realized I’d spent my life identifying with a church I’d barely been a member of. I wasn’t a real Mormon. I didn’t serve a mission. I didn’t receive my endowment. I didn’t wear the garment. I wasn’t sealed in the temple. I drank and cursed and fucked around. I loved coffee and tank tops and R-rated movies. No wonder the church hardly recognized me. I’d been stripping Mormonism off in layers since I was old enough to choose my own clothes.

The other thing I couldn’t stand about the ex-Mormon communities, at least the online ones dominated by ex-Mormon men, was how all they wanted to talk about was the church the church the church. They proselytized against the church with the zeal of a nineteen-year-old in the mission field. The railed against the saints with the vigor of a convert bearing testimony. I’d burned off all my anger sitting in the pews on Sunday and scribbling on the internet at night. Now that I was free, that shit was boring. This was supposed to be a blog about leaving Mormonism, but by the time I left I had nothing left to say.

This was also supposed to be a blog about getting sober. I’d sworn off alcohol because I was tired of thinking about drinking. I’d been doing battle with a beverage for thirteen years. I was waiting for things to get bad enough that someone other than me would step in and revoke my drinking privileges, but on January 30, 2016 I woke up thirty years old and nursing the same hangover I had at seventeen and realized that even if it never got worse, I didn’t want to spend the next decade doing the exact same thing.

I had a lot to say about getting sober, and about doing it as a former Mormon. Having religion will go a long way to support a recovery program that is fundamentally religious in nature, like mine was, but it will fuck it up, too, because you wonder if you would have had a problem without the religion and when you leave the religion you wonder if maybe your problem is gone too. That was the question I asked in my very first post in this blog.

I spent most of the last five years sober but I sure as hell didn’t stop thinking about drinking. Was I doing sobriety wrong or was my belief that I could control my thoughts as misguided as my belief that I could control my drinking?

When I started posting Quarantine Diaries nine months ago, I wondered “how many more identities I will take on and shed before this thing is over? How much of what I claim to be today will fall by the wayside as my life is stripped to the bare essentials?”

Anyway, I drank. Relapse played out exactly as I figured it would and is probably not at all like you’re imagining it to be. Am I sober? I guess so, but it’s more complicated than it used to be. I’m sober today, but not drinking 24 hours at a time is not an identity you can package up and sell (though I know quite a few people who have done just that). For what it’s worth, I am okay. Better than I was before. For the sake of the art, I don’t want to have to say even that, but I’m offering it out of respect for the people in my life who might worry, the ones who’ve heard me talk for the last five years about being in recovery from a deadly disease. I am tired of talking about drinking, though. I don’t want to be doing this five years from now. I realizing that it will take as long as it takes to get through, that this might be my thing for the rest of my life, but this shit is getting boring. I have almost nothing left to say, unless it’s to someone like me (you know who you are).

Sober Mormon is retired, but I’m still here putting words into the world.

Quarantine Diary Day 191: Crafty Bitch

When I was a baby lawyer I made a friend who made music for people at death’s door. 

I felt a kinship because the guidance counselor who discouraged me from applying anywhere but State U told me that was a job for someone who liked music 

and I guess I looked like someone who liked music. 

My new friend told me she was in a crafting group for girls.

Like a book club with glue! 

Newly domestic, rolling napkins and making placards for our first Thanksgiving dinner for two, I asked if I could join.

She cocked her head and smiled, quizzically, 

a crafty beaver,

and my friend who was not a friend asked, 

But what would you make?

***

Bitch, I don’t know. A painting? A song? A pile of tiny clay foods? 

A poem? A collage? A bracelet made of plastic beads? 

A book? A blog? A life? A love?

***

It took ten years and tens of thousands of words to see she was the one 

without any imagination. 

Quarantine Diary Day 94: What Even Is This?

Something about my quarantine diary has been nagging at me. I keep worrying that the day counts are slightly off. I don’t write every day and my entries aren’t always chronological, so it wouldn’t be obvious if my entries were off by a few days. Hell, I could be off by weeks and nobody would know. The piecemeal nature of the response in the U.S. means you don’t know when I went into lockdown mode, and human nature means that you don’t care about the minutiae of my life. I pulled out my calendar this morning to count up from March 14 anyway and confirmed my suspicions. My count was off, but only by one day. It was bound to happen, especially since fudged the numbers on purpose once or twice. What can I say? I wanted to write about my daughter’s birthday on on Day 40, and I needed the heft of a godly history behind me. I know you get it.

Lately, something else has been bugging me, too. The failure of leadership from the federal government and the resulting state-by-state, town-by-town, person-by-person reaction to the pandemic means that you don’t know what quarantine means to me. What am I even doing over here? Quarantine diary was never a wholly accurate moniker, but it’s starting to feel strained now. For the last two weeks, my daughter has been playing outside with neighbor kids without strict regard to social distancing. This weekend, I met up with friends and went for an early maskless run. I’ve been sheltering-in-place for 94 days, but what does that even mean? I mean, I’ve been trying to tell you what it means to me, but I can’t tell you everything.

What else haven’t I told you? How often I cry. How much it hurts.

What kind of diary is this anyway? I bend the timeline to my will but am compelled to fact-check myself later. I play fast and loose with people, places, and things but find it imperative that I communicate my innermost thoughts, feelings, and desires so accurately and absolutely as to leave no room for possibility that I will be misunderstood.

In the parlance of first year English lit, I tend to think of this diary as being closer to Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography than James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, by which I mean: Could a scholar of my life find some inconsistencies between the way I lived and what I wrote? Probably, but I’d stand by it as memoir even if Oprah herself tried to take me down.

In deep-Mormon vernacular, I’d say that this diary is more like the Doctrine & Covenants than the Book of Mormon, by which I mean: Look at this extraordinary life I lived, the people I’ve known, the things I’ve built. You will know my history. Can I prove I talked to God? Probably not, but you can’t disprove it either.

In my heart of hearts, I believe this diary is more like the Bible than anything else, which is to say: I’ve got a lot of fear, a lot of love, and a lot of nerve.

I am Eve in the Garden, the Woman at the Well, the Boy in the Grove. I am the Finger pointing at the Moon.

Quiet

It’s been quiet around here, no?

I started this secret blog because I had an ocean of stories I needed to tell, a loud head I needed to quiet, and, honestly, a violent interior life I needed to quell. I had nobody to talk to and no way to make sense of what was happening in my life or my mind except to write it out. I expected this to become a diary of my recovery, something I would be able to look back to and track where I was at on Day -29, Day 90, Day 180, and so on, never mind that I didn’t have a clue about the concept of “recovery,” and certainly didn’t think it was something I qualified for, or was capable of, or deserved. Today is Day 704 without a drink or a mood or mind altering drug. I’ve had so much to say this last one year eleven months and four days. I had so much to say in the ten, twenty, thirty years that led to my last Day 1. I still have so much to say. And yet, this place has been quiet.

I want to account for my silence. Not because I need to. I know I don’t owe the seven readers of my anonymous blog anything. I know even if I had a lot more readers, I wouldn’t owe them an explanation as to why the record of my emotional life on the internet is not as meticulous as it could be. The truth is, I want to write about about my silence because it is interesting to me that somebody as verbose and teeming with creative energy and intellectually excited by and curious about the radical spiritual journey I’ve been on these last few years as I am would consciously avoid the blog she set up for the express purpose of channeling that excess energy and exploring those wild ideas. I mean, something’s got to be going on there, right?

There are two basic reasons for my absence. The first one is pretty straightforward.

I started the blog because I thought I needed it and I did need it, until I didn’t. I posted my last big milestone post when I was six months sober. Then I almost relapsed and got my ass into AA. And you guys, AA meetings don’t consist solely of coffee and donuts and folding chairs. There are actual people there, and they are nice. Also, as it turns out, if dredging up your past and regaling a crowd with drunkalogues and agonizing over your relationships with everything from booze to food to your mom to yourself to your obnoxiously well-dressed co-worker is your thing, AA is, like the perfect place to do that. I occasionally see advice to newcomers along the lines of, “Don’t worry, you don’t have to talk, just listen,” but after over a lifetime of thinking that I was the only person in the world who walked around feeling like a stranger in my own life, that nobody enjoyed that first drink, the one that turned the lights on, quite as much as I did, that I alone struggled with the apparent inability to drink like a grown up, I was desperate to talk. I used up every bit of the three minutes or so I got to talk at meetings. It was enough just to unload on kind-eyed strangers, and it was like Christmas morning when I saw women nodding when I talked about trying to figure out how to nurse my baby after I’d had to much to drink (forced to choose, literally, between feeding my addiction and feeding my child) because they got it. Forget about making a roomful of people laugh with a story about my unsuccessful suicide attempt; that was like gold, because they understood that it was tragic and funny. In AA I found a place to excavate my past, to shine a light on my drinking behaviors, on all that shamed me, really, and, as a result, to arrive at the conclusion that, yes, I really did have a problem with alcohol and, yes, I really did need to quit and, yes, I might actually be able to quit and not be too mad about it, if I just did the things that the darkly funny people with the kind eyes did. Once I had those things, I didn’t need to muddle my way to sobriety via a blank page and an internet connection.

That’s not the whole story, though. I may not need writing the way I used to, but I miss it. I want to tell these stories, to layer my experiences and memories and ideas together with words and, in so doing, make them into something more than what they were. What I really want is to give them to somebody who might need them, but I’ll settle for somebody who might find them halfway interesting. So why do I go months without writing anything longer than an Instagram caption?

The answer is that writing here doesn’t feel good. Or, more accurately, it doesn’t feel right. I certainly try to write. I’ll open up the computer, spool out a few lines, and spin out, triggered. Writing about my drinking days, more often than not, makes me want to drink. Writing about drugs makes me to get high. They don’t scrape out your taste buds when you get sober; I will always like these things. Or, I’ll labor over a piece for days, or weeks, and hit publish, only to be seized with anxiety. Should I share it with my online recovery community? With my friends? With my family? If no one is reading my work, why am I even writing?

That this is the reaction I have to my own writing, to the act of writing, baffles me. I see so many people navigating the waters of recovery by writing about it. Writing seems to bring them a measure of relief, even freedom. This is not my experience. Why not? I see that these people call themselves truth tellers and I worry. Do I not tell the truth when I write? Is that why it makes me anxious? I see these people using their platforms to carry a message of hope to others suffering in addiction. Are my reasons for writing too selfish? Is that why writing publicly fills me up with guilt? Or maybe the guilt comes from the fact that anonymity is part of twelve-step philosophy. I used to be comfortable being out-of-step but lately I’ve found more peace falling in line.

Another theory is that a lot of the sober writers I read lost their voices in addiction, or never knew the joy of speaking freely in the first place. Not me. I’ve been speaking my truth for years. Not the whole truth, and certainly not to the degree I do now, but I have been writing online about uncomfortable topics in one form or another for years, from the Xanga and Blogspot accounts where I explored my nascent sexuality to the WordPress site where I documented my feminist awakening and ensuing critiques of the Mormon church. While I’d be happy if the drivel I wrote in my angsty teenage years never saw the light of day, I’m pretty proud of the writing I did about gender and marriage and religion and identity over last ten years or so. So much so that it pains me to admit that much of that writing came from the same place as my drinking.

Take this clever feminist critique and see how smart I am.

Peruse this painful account of sexual harassment and see how hard I’ve had it.

Absorb this liberal manifesto and see how progressive I am.

Read this funny account of a road trip with my husband who is not Mormon and see how happy we are.

Listen to me delineate the travails of breastfeeding and see that I am a good mom.

Hear my plea to the Mormon church to change–to acknowledge LGBTQ relationships, to person women–and change your mind about everything you’ve ever believed.

My writing was an exercise in character defects: grandiosity; self-loathing; arrogance; self-pity; anger; fear; pride; intolerance–the list goes on and on.

And here’s the rub. My writing, as often as not, is still colored by, maybe even rooted in, these same defects.

Take this critique of a hackneyed recovery aphorism and see how smart I am.

Read this alcoholic’s experience of drinking culture and change your views on booze.

Parse this painful account of one of my many bottoms and see how hard I’ve had it.

Enjoy this tale of triumph over drugs and alcohol and religious dogma and see how strong I am.

Hear my plea to lookatme lookatme lookatme and know I am special, or least a damn good writer.

I write because I can’t not, because it is how I understand my place in the world, but I can’t stop myself from using my writing to seek validation, to control how people see me, to make myself into somebody I can like myself.

It’s all futile.

Writing like this won’t give me what I need and it won’t feel good in the end but it still gives me something so I guess I’ll see you here until something changes.