This is Day 47, the longest period in which I have not had an alcoholic beverage in roughly four years. Never has a break been so noticeably improving of my health and mindset. Dark clouds are fewer and further between.
So something is working in this process, which heavily comprises nesting. Thankfully, I have a partner who is supplying the fireside space where I now nest in yoga pants, watching snow clouds release enough tiny six-sided water crystals to cover a mountain range.
I take my comfort and cues from nature. I have always felt safer with animals and the elements than with people, but I don’t fully equate that with the incest, abuse and absence of protection in childhood. All people buzz with energy. If you need confirmation, step into an elevator with a large angry man.
I am exhausted by the energies of people—our unwritten stories, hidden motives, needs and wants, styles of communication, layers of aware and unaware, trigger points and general inability to just sit quietly and look out of a window at a snowstorm in the mountains.
Drinking helped me endure people and the predatory energies that victimization attracts. Uninformed people like to parrot the phrase, “stop being a victim,” but the transit from victim to survivor is different for everyone. It doesn’t come easy. It takes time, and the support of other survivors—many of whom are just now starting to speak up.
For me, recovery involves more “being” and less “doing.” “Doing” is how we think we pass the time while it’s actually passing us. “Being” is naturally aligned with time. It has no preoccupation future or past. Attention is brought constantly into the moment. This takes practice, particularly in a stimuli-addicted society where getting our attention for even a few seconds at a time generates an enormous amount of money for someone who is not either of us.
As with all practices, having an instructor helps. I listen to the mindfulness lectures of Borscht Belt Buddhist philosopher Tara Brach. I recommend her podcast to anyone who deals with depression and anxiety. If you’re a survivor, you probably do.
Mindfulness is the practice of noticing but not identifying with your own thoughts. As simple as it sounds, mindfulness takes great effort because the survival brain is constantly convincing us that we are our thoughts. Noticing thoughts in a non-identified way first requires recognition of one’s own ego and the occasional willingness to part with it.
The ego may project pomposity or anxiety, but both are based on false constructs, like the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. Mindfulness helps us remember to pull back the curtain when we’re in the grip of thought loops that drag us into depression and anxiety.
These loops—laid down into our developing brains like electrochemical grooves—cannot be re-recorded, but they can be replaced with a healthier habitual thought. One of the most helpful I have ever employed in my lifetime of negotiating depression and suicidal ideation is, “This, too, shall pass.” Not in terms of a dismissal, but with a stubborn perseverance that outlasts the depressive thought loop and thus reinforces itself.
Eventually, a space opens where depressive and suicidal thoughts no longer gain purchase, but float by like barely noticeable debris on the wind. When triggers fling us back into contact with them, we can always bring to mind the feeling of that larger space, where we know there’s room to contemplate that a snowflake is miracle of nature; a unique, ephemeral sculpture we have to look for to see.
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