Recovery Is Practiced Not Performed

Healing is about engagement, not perfection.

Photo by Daria Nepriakhina 🇺🇦 on Unsplash

Sometimes I imagine my addiction was like a tsunami, gaining strength so slowly it was nearly imperceptible at first, until it was too big and too late to out run. It always had its own way about it, its own mysterious momentum. It started small and though it was a gradual progression, it was always increasing in its power to take more and more of me away from myself. And as that giant wave pulled back, as it gathered its strength by retreating from the beach, it was collecting everything laid out on the wide open sand that was my life, along with it. All the ways I already knew how to hurt myself were laid bare before my addiction, and my addiction swallowed it all up so it would have even more devastating force to hurl back at me when it finally slammed into me completely.

My alcohol addiction had help, I guess is what I mean. It sucked into itself all the maladaptations I had already developed during my childhood and teenage years. It exploited my insecurities and my self-hatred. It exacerbated my fears of punishment, my body, rejection, abandonment, inadequacy, and failure. It grew stronger by feeding on my already ripened forms of self-loathing and constant anxiety. It reinforced all the ways I thought I had to prove myself to get love. Love was always sort of like an object hanging on a wall in front of me. It was close, but it was mostly decorative. It looked a certain way and that way was attractive (hence the hanging upon a wall to be looked at). Love was mostly outside of me. I know because I was always reaching for it. Hoping to be able to grab hold of it, take it. But love was also reserved for certain kinds of people and the ‘right’ ways they behaved. Love was finite, which meant it was also a competition.

I didn’t know that love (by love, I mean: acceptance, care, non-judgment) was already mine to give to myself. I always thought the only thing I was allowed to do with love was give it away to somebody else. A bit of a hot potato, you might say. If I had the slightest sense that maybe I was loveable, I quickly offered it up to ‘test’ if it were true. Something in me was afraid to believe love was meant just for me, so I became very good at performing what I thought was loveable in order to try to get real love back in return.

Maybe that sounds confusing. But I promise you that in my mind, in every cell of my recovering body, that sick logic not only makes sense to me- it also feels eerily familiar. Performing love feels so much like ‘me’ that I go to therapy, attend daily sober support meetings, practice daily and nightly mindfulness rituals, and recite multiple mantras to remind myself it is not me. That a performance of love is not who I am, and it’s not what I want my life to be. A performance is about entertaining other people. Delighting them. Meeting their needs. Pleasing, soothing, and not ever upsetting them. There are expectations. There are lines to memorize. There are lines not to be crossed.

Performance, for me, was reaching out for love, affection, validation, and attention in the hopes that it would make up for reaching in. It was skipping over the work of learning to give myself what I need, and instead trying to get it from other people. Maybe they will teach me how to love me. If they say I am worthy, then I’ll know I am worthy.

Performing always felt somehow hollow, empty, and devoid of meaning. Meaning. I kept searching for meaning in all of it, even as I drank more and more to try to not care so much about lofty things like ‘meaning.' What is the meaning of these roles I perform, this love I am supposed to offer. In my home, in my work, in my family, as a mother, as a wife, as a friend, an assistant, a daughter, niece, aunt, cousin, neighbor, artist, writer, creator. I knew I loved people and myself to a reasonable degree. But being a performer is not the same as being a practitioner. When you practice, you must engage. Practice, by its very definition, requires your presence and attention. It requires you to care, to accept, to love and to work with what is. To be where you are and to let things take the time they take. But when you perform, you can dissociate completely. You can perform an act with your body and not even be there at all in your mind or spirit.

I know because I’ve done it. For decades, I did it and kept doing it. I know that place. I know that very lonely spot-lit stage. I’d stood on it trembling for a very long time trying desperately, ironically enough, not to be seen. I needed to perform well in order to get love, which was confounding and scary because all I really wanted to do was hide. Drinking was how I could hide in plain sight. Drinking was how I could stay on stage and disappear. At first, that seemed like magic.

Hiding while performing is what my addiction taught me how to do. But I did not start off addicted to alcohol, though that would eventually become my drug of choice. I didn’t have a sip of alcohol until my 21st birthday. Before I became addicted to alcohol, I was already addicted to hating myself.

When I look back on it now, I cannot help but wonder if my addiction to ruthlessly punishing myself as some twisted way to beat love into me - that faulty trip in my repetitive thought-cycle that kept telling me I sucked and nothing I did was good enough - is what helped ensure that when alcohol was introduced to my dysfunctional thought system, the poison found something already inside that it recognized. It had something to latch onto. Alcohol and self-loathing were a match made in perfectly harmonious hell. They clicked together like the two sides of a seat belt that fastened me into an amusement ride I was told would be great fun.

But I had never thought about the fact that I was strapping myself into a machine that had a fast, dangerous track all its own. I didn’t know where it was headed. I didn’t know how much it cost. I didn’t know how long it would last. I didn’t care. I just knew that once I felt the rush of that ride, I was thrilled to be on it. I loved the rush. I craved the rush, the speed, the danger. It was a perfect escape. I wanted to hand over control to something else - anything else - because having to control every move I made on that performance stage was exhausting. The thrill ride of addiction whisked me away from all of it. And I think I thought I was happy. Most of it was just a blur.

There’s a lot of analogies in this story, but this is how it is to recover. You try to make sense of things that are so tangled and mixed up together, it is quite mind-bogglingly tricky to talk about it neatly. It can get confusing. And while I could have waited to talk about my recovery until it was all sorted out and cleaned up so that I could hand over something more organized, I don’t want to perform my recovery for an audience. I just want to show what it is to practice recovery in real time.

I’m not performing perfection or love or tidiness or solutions or worthiness or enlightenment. I can’t do it, do you see what I mean? That way of living is triggering, tiring, lonely, and meaningless. And it makes falling into addiction look like an easy, sexy, attractive escape. But I am finally in a place now where I don’t want to do anything except be myself. Be myself not on a wild ‘joy’ ride and not on a lonely stage either. Just me. Showing up. Not having all the answers. Not fixing or arranging or polishing a thing that can only be lived out imperfectly, one day at a time.

By the miracle of some miracle, I am starting to know who myself is, and starting to really love her enough to let her cry, laugh, make mistakes, fall short, not know, try and laugh some more. And I am learning the infinitely magnificent gift that this is. To come to actually, truly love yourself instead of attempt to prove yourself worthy of love. To learn that it is safe to embrace your hurt, your pain, your addiction, your fear, your confusion, all of it, just embrace it. Acknowledge it. Embrace yourself. Embrace your happiness. Embrace, feel, trust, and experience love honestly, without feeling you owe something. Without performing it. Without selling your soul to a substance to try to forget about trying to win it. Without ever leaving yourself. Without ever needing to escape any of it. Without even having to reach.

To recover from an addiction is to practice self-love. You just keep coming back and showing yourself as much compassion as you can. Repeat, repeat, stumble, laugh, repeat.

And maybe this is all like trying to read a plate of spaghetti because I am in the middle of healing. I am in the middle of a process that loops and twirls and piles on top of itself. It has no end, which makes it pretty comical in a way that relieves the pressure. I have heard it called the ‘messy middle.’ That’s cute. But I’ve got news: it’s all the mess and it’s all the middle. Addiction, recovery, healing, relapse, stumbling, falling, rising, figuring, holding on, letting go, it’s all happening all at the same time and the only thing that really helps is to stop performing like it’s otherwise. Like it’s ‘supposed to be’ otherwise. It isn’t.

I know a good bit, and yet there is plenty more I don’t know. I know I will not drink today. I know that the more days and nights that I spend not drinking, the more I love myself all the way inside my core. All the way deep down in the places I could never get to before because I was too worried about that spotlight shining on me on that stage. I was too worried that what people would see about me was not worthy of love. That I was not allowed to be loved. Drinking, at first, felt like love. It felt like acceptance, like soothing, like a warm welcome back into myself. But what it really was was the beginning of my drowning. The tsunami didn’t crash on me once. It pummeled me over and over in relentless waves for years. That’s what made it so hard to finally stand up.

In just this little essay alone, we have imagined addiction as a tsunami, my previous life as being performed on a stage, and the marriage of alcohol to self-loathing as locking me into a joy-as-terror amusement park ride. Oh, and the trying to make sense of it all like reading a plate of spaghetti. It’s all too much, isn’t it? It is too big and too disjointed and too unwieldy. Because we want a clean beginning, middle, and end. We want one story, one issue, one problem at a time, please. Because we have been taught to believe that “beginning. middle. end.” is a thing that is possible, but it isn’t. Nor can you compartmentalize addiction recovery as though it is one area of your life you are working on. It’s all of your life. Recovery is all of it.

There is no completed package to hand over so that my experience with addiction and recovery can fix everybody else’s from here on out. My old self wants to perform healing as love so I can offer it up like a gift in a box with a bow and a card that says, “Happy Alcohol Free Life! Here’s how to do it right!” so then you can put it on and smile because it’s soft and cozy and fits just right and never gets dirty or itchy or worn out or torn, and therefore that’s that. No more struggle. No more questions. No more confusion. No more search. But the new me, recovering me, knows we can’t do that.

Trying to make this perfect is what robs us of our own curiosity and engagement.

Trying to perform recovery perfectly is what robs the practice of the meaning we seek.

This is the messy middle. I was addicted to self-loathing before I was addicted to alcohol. And in hindsight, addiction in all forms looked a lot like success to the outside world. In some ways it looked orderly, neat, linear, and ‘correct.’ Self-loathing was a lot about making sure to color inside the lines, and then punishing myself if I crossed one. Breaking my addiction to alcohol means alcohol can no longer abuse me. Breaking my addiction to punishing myself for not being perfect means that I can no longer abuse me. That whatever is in my mind, body, heart, and soul needs to be held, accepted, and loved, just as it is. Even the mess. Especially the mess.