A week ago, I was a writer. I woke early, kept the baby in her bassinet, and put on a cup of coffee. It was the third day of writing my recovery story, and after another few hours of primping and grooming, it felt dressed enough to meet another pair of eyes. Specifically, my husband’s. A published writer with an MFA, he’d also had a front-row seat to the story I was asking him to validate. I mean, critique. Naturally, he was the most qualified to do so, while simultaneously being the person whose advice I would most quickly reject. And resent.
Three hours and a mere two suggestions later, I was no longer a writer.
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Yesterday, I sat and sipped my morning coffee. It was 9:30 a.m. and day five of my writer’s strike. I’d already tuned out the cable news anchors who serve one purpose in my house—to lull my three-month-old daughter to sleep. Then, I hit play on Brené Brown’s The Power of Vulnerability audiobook. A self-dubbed “shame researcher,” Brown has spent over a decade talking about vulnerability as the antidote to shame.
Even before my inner critic hijacked all my husband’s suggestions, I knew shame would ask me to pull over a million times before I could even reach the highway toward “Being a Writer.” It’d spent years stopping to hang out in every bar and liquor store on the way, even claiming those stops were part of the creative process called “living the story.” Rather than what it really was—an expensive (often dangerous) delay tactic to avoid ever having to actually tell a story. To keep us safe in the limbo of “Becoming.”
“… progress can look and feel an awful lot like failure sometimes. “
As fate would have it, Brown started speaking on the necessity of owning our stories, even the parts we most want to orphan. This, she argued, is how we reclaim the power we’ve given over to shame. She went on to say that our stories hold the worthiness we will spend our whole lives hustling (and failing) to find elsewhere. To trade shame for worthiness, we must “walk into the stories of our lives and… own them.”
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Shame will make you feel like an imposter no matter what anyone else says. As it turns out, my husband’s suggestions were quite helpful, even though it means my original story is not as ready for the world as my recovery is. More essay than blog, I’d trimmed its skirt to the knee and hacked off the most important part of the story: my actual recovery.
Strange that this is the part of the story I would orphan, but in many ways, it’s easier to talk about the pain of trauma and addiction than about the difficult work that is recovery. The truth is I’d much rather tell you about the bad shit that happened to me than how desperately I tried to hang onto it. And the hard lessons I had to learn in order to let go.
Like how progress can look and feel an awful lot like failure sometimes. Because for me, recovery was not a midnight epiphany or an overnight transformation. It was just thousands of mornings I awoke with the resolve not to drink that day. And as time went on, it was more and more evenings I met that same pillow sober.
Even the days I could loosely define as “wins” were dominated by shame. Why the hell wasn’t this easier? Why was I so very bad at it? Worst of all—wouldn’t a good mom be able to just stop? I existed in this shame loop for what seemed like an eternity.
“… I learned how to walk into my own story by watching a group of powerful women walk into theirs.”
Until finally, I came across a recovery community that helped me to see imperfect progress as progress, not failure. Day after day, meeting after meeting, I learned how to walk into my own story by watching a group of powerful women walk into theirs.
There, in this sacred space, our orphaned parts find a home where they, too, can belong. A place where a moment of vulnerability is as celebrated as a collection of sober days. Where we begin our shares by walking boldly, authentically into our stories.
My name is Angie, and I am in recovery from alcohol, trauma, anxiety, and depression. Most of all, I am in recovery from the shame that tells me I shouldn’t say those things aloud.
I am a writer, and this is my story.
For more information about the She Recovers foundation, online and in-person gatherings, and how to make donations, click here.
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