initiations, part 1

Everything I write funnels back to the same place after a few paragraphs. I'll start out writing about travel or gender and it all comes back to the life-altering experience of having cleanly exited my body for a decade and a half. When I'm writing, I'm always writing about—whether obliquely or explicitly— not living in my body during my adolescence and young adulthood, and how this has profoundly affected everything about my life. It led to disordered eating, dangerous drinking habits, relationship struggles, buried gender identity and sexual orientation, and above all, the deep and panicked need to always be plotting an escape from my life. I search, like many do, for the one cohesive storyline of my life. I long for a clear narrative, salient themes; above all, I long for meaning and its pursuit. The thing about having lived an arms-length from one's own body (hence, self) for so long is that being buried, being silenced, being absent, necessarily negates any possible meaning. Because to live a meaningful life, one must be present to one's life. One must be in one's body. One must be oneself. You can't create meaning in absentia; you can't lead a meaningful life without participating. I'm always only ever writing about a frightened, young person with one foot out the door, with one hand on the handle. I'm always and forever just looking for the way back in (to myself; to my life); I'll walk down every dim corridor; I'll try any door. The hard thing is that intimacy—with self, with life, with other—after so many years living at an arm's distance, has long ago started to smell dangerous, like a place that could lead to death.

The first real way that I started to come home to myself, to choose to be present in my own life, was when I stopped drinking five years ago, a few days after turning 31. Drinking, for me, was a primary way of departing, of traveling a safe distance away from myself. A blurry and interesting way to exit my body and life and become someone 'interesting' to perform. It took the wheel from me at a time when I couldn't otherwise find any inner driver.

I hesitated so much over making the choice to stop drinking, stuck mostly on how it would make others feel. The decision felt dangerous, fraught with consequences. I mostly kept it to myself, trying to present it as a casual change that wouldn’t stand out as an act of extreme resolve and meaning. Deciding to stop drinking was like throwing open the castle doors and draining the moat; I had the vague sense that a lot of other things previously held at bay would now come tumbling into my life. It had become intolerable to exist in such a blurry, disembodied way; I didn’t understand what had been happening to me but I knew that drinking had something to do with a growing separation from myself. Becoming sober was a necessary first initiation into my life as an adult. Over the next period of five years, it all started to flood in  (and still is), sometimes as Trojan horses that I’d need to observe and wait to reveal themselves, other times as obvious truths that rocked my foundations. I drank as a way to leave myself, and so I stood still - raw, sober, uncertain -willing up the courage to withstand the full onslaught of my life rather than look the other way.

I must have had some sense that it was a momentous decision on that day, May 15th, 2018, and I'm happy that I snapped an awkwardly solemn selfie of myself.