Sobriety Advocate, Writer, Author, Speaker.
Some of us had to crawl on our hands and knees for years just to say those blessed words out loud. You arrive at them carried mysteriously by a heart that won’t give up, though it’s been strangled by fear and slashed again and again by sheer exhaustion. Or at least, that was me. I almost couldn’t believe I was finally saying “enough is enough.” And meaning it.
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Moving on is a very weird thing. Even if you have longed for it in one way or another for what feels like an eternity, when the time comes and you are really sure you are sure – there’s something in you that’s still not totally sure. It’s like 100% is just maybe not a real thing in any decision or situation in a human life. There’s always a teeny bit of your inner workings – your heart, your mind, your nervous system – that’s afraid, or hesitant, or resistant, or holding on tooth and nail in some kind of desperate last ditch effort to keep you from heading on out the door. Even if that is exactly what it’s time to do. And not look back.
It so happens I find myself in such a place right now as I make plans for the next phase of my life. My writing life. My work life. My sober life. My life life where all of the things that once felt so disjointed are finally starting to come together under the same umbrella that is me. The biggest driving force behind my sobriety has ultimately been my deep desire for integration of myself. Alignment of my values on the inside – my intentions, beliefs, world views – with my actions on the outside.
But just as there is no such thing as duality, there is no such thing as being in the new life and out of the old life with just the snap of a finger, or a change of address, as it were. Transitions take time. There is liminal space between what is dead and gone, and what is coming soon. I am in liminal space now, in every conceivable sense of that idea. A very big season of my life is over, never to return. Hiding inside of an alcohol addiction is a long and painful chapter which has mercifully come to a close. Hallelujah and praise fucking be.
To stop abusing of myself (it isn’t substance abuse, do you see what I mean there? you can’t hurt the wine, the wine hurts you) means not only to stop drinking but also to stop hiding who I am at my center, at my core, as it becomes clearer and clearer to me. And while removing the wine from my home was one thing, a tangible visible thing, what I am left with now to manage are the murkier realities, traumas, and disordered thoughts, which are all but invisible to the outside world. People can see that I am sipping Pellegrino now instead of (… god fuck, even to write these words causes a sick taste to slick the back of my throat) Sauvignon Blanc, but what they cannot see is what’s going on inside my mind as I take in my surroundings at a party or concert or picnic. While I’m thrilled to bits to enter holiday season entirely hangover free, I’m also so nervous my heart is right now racing in my chest.
Liminal space. The storm is over but the river is still swollen, still muddy, still turbulent. It will be some time for all to settle into its new way of flow. We must first die fully and completely. No going from summer right to spring. First autumn. Then winter. Winter, winter, winter.
As I type this, a heavy rain begins to fall outside my writing room window. I am reminded of how many times my writing has evolved with me over the years. How many absolutely beautiful, kindred souls have stuck with me through all the changes. I’m so damn grateful. Let’s keep going. I’ll still be writing. It’ll be new and new, right now, for me, is a very very good thing.
You can follow my new writings on my new substack account at allisonmarieconway.substack.com
I’ll see you there. I’ll see you so soon.
For the record, even as I tell this story – my own story – I still can’t hardly believe it. This is the bizarre nature of addiction, of alcoholism. It was described to me as ‘having a disease that tells you you don’t have a disease.’ Which sounds insane to me. But when I tell my story it proves true. Which makes it quite challenging to live with because your head tells you one thing but your actions display another. And you only get one mind and one body to make sense of each other. I know that sounds confusing. Confounding, even. Welcome to my life. My name is Allison and I have no problem saying I am an alcoholic. For me, after 20+ years of wrestling with this monster inside me, it feels like a relief to name it. It helps me sort of contain it, study it. Over the past 9 months of my sobriety, I have been trying to put the pieces of my past together by looking at what has happened to me through a new lens. The lens of: I have an addiction and this is how I know, this is what addiction looks like.
I am someone who cannot have a lick of booze for the rest of my life. I know that much. For some people, that sounds scary to say or admit. For me just a year ago it was terrifying for me to even think about, hence why I didn’t get sober for over two decades. I started drinking at age 21 and immediately it was the thing I wanted more of as often as I could have it. And pretty much right away, I started having situations. Going home with strange men, having no judgment or discernment whatsoever. Blackouts where I would get kicked out of bars for passing out or I would pass out at dinner tables in restaurants, having no clue how to pace myself or moderate. Later on I’d start fights with my husband on vacations where I just drank as much as I felt like and didn’t stop. It was really very very bad and very very scary and stupid and sick.
But I would just try to ‘cut back next time.’ In hindsight that is plain insanity. I was never going to cut back. I was never going to be able to. Alcoholism was having a field day with me and I couldn’t even see it.
Ultimately, two things happened that led to my getting sober on January 1, 2022. The first breaks my heart to pieces and I will only tell it briefly because while the story involves me it involves me only as a sidebar character in someone else’s story. I don’t have any right to tell. In April of 2021, my uncle died from multiple complications, one of them was alcoholism. He was a beautiful, complicated, loving soul. He was only 59. He left behind my dear aunt and three beautiful amazing cousins. There is way more to the story, as there always is when telling the story of how your life intertwines in intimate and unique ways with ones you love so very much. Please do not think I tell this story to make my precious uncle and family seem like a one-dimensional plot point in the story of my life living with addiction and going through recovery. I have kept my uncle’s funeral prayer card with me in my journal since he passed. Something in me believes he’s looking out for me, even now. He knows what addiction is. And I bet he knew, too, how terrifying the thought of ever quitting was.
Every story of addiction and every story of every person’s life is for them to tell. I only share this story about my uncle because it was so deeply, deeply jarring to me to lose him that fast. Once it was revealed that he was gravely ill it was only about two months or so until he passed away. I guess in my mind, in my whole body, it was a flashing red light. Warning: you do not get infinite tries to get better. The thing that is secretly hurting you can absolutely silently kill you, too.
Whether or not you say it to yourself, admit it to yourself, whether or not you want to look at your darkness – your darkness is there.
So that was the first thing, in April of 2021, that truly shook me to my core, in a way I had never been shaken awake before. Suddenly my denial of my own disease was not so easy to deny anymore. I saw the pain, I felt the deep pain and sadness of what alcoholism does to its victim and to his whole family. It is not fair. But it is very, very real.
The second thing that happened was that I was on an overnight vacation get-away with my husband during which I proceeded to get very drunk on gin and tonics before, during, and after dinner. Somehow I annoyed him so much that he left me alone in the hotel room. Just walked out. I guess once it dawned on me he had left me, I ran after him out of the hotel and down a very dark deserted street. I ran so fast, fueled by so much alcohol and fury, that I tripped and fell and busted up my knee. I do not remember how I got myself back to the hotel room. I know I did it alone. The next morning I woke up hungover and livid, my knee throbbing for reasons not apparent to my foggy brain yet. I remember saying to him something like, ‘You cannot get me all liquored up and then just abandon me. It’s not fair. It’s not okay.’ and he apologized. How pathetic a display from both of us. So sick. That was August. 2021.
That incident scared me in a new way. I am still doing this shit. The sheer magnitude of of the weight of spending my whole adult life fucking around with booze until I was completely out of control. And telling myself that ‘next time will be different.’ Next time? What on earth? Why in the fucking fuck would should I ever get a next time? And why on earth would it ever be different after 20 years of the same nonsense?
Addiction is deadly. It may take decades or it might take a few years or months, but alcoholism is a disease that aims to kill. That is 100% the only goal. A thousand drinks is never enough, will never be enough. It’s the nature of the beast. It will kill its host. It will kill anyone around who gets in the way. It does not care. It will never go away.
So by the time the December holidays rolled around, the husband and I were set to go away for yet another few overnights. And as I was packing my suitcase, it downed on my that I could not be 100% sure that I would not pull some alcohol-infused stunt as I had in the past. That I could not promise I would not get drunk and do something stupid, dangerous, or destructive. And yet here we were going right back at it. Denial, denial, denial. But this time, I knew I was denying. And something in me was calling bullshit.
We did go away. I did drink. But I sipped slow, cut to water every other drink, calculated and and managed every drop. It was annoying and exhausting to think that hard through each drink. We had a fight anyway but ‘made up’ over shots of whiskey.
New Years Ever was set to be a boozefest, too, and it was. Many Manhattans, much wine and much champagne. It was a hectic night for other reasons which included a Covid scare and last minute cancellation, yadda ya. but we still managed to slug down much of the liquor intended for more than just the few of us who remained. The next morning’s hangover was brutal. I felt like death. We all laughed it off. I never drank again.
For a month or two, sobriety was very cringey. But I slid in with the Dry January crowd at first and the pink cloud of euphoria was very real, which helped me keep my momentum going. Waking up each day without a hangover felt like I could fly or do anything. Like I had my whole life back, all of me returned to myself. And I was more glorious a being to inhabit than I ever realized. I was amazed. Grateful. Stronger than I ever realized I was all along.
I think there were 2 major drivers for me to stay sober. Number one was myself, my health – my mental, physical, spiritual, and relationship health. Number two was that I felt (and still very much feel) deeply compelled to break the silent cycle of addiction. Because I really do want to do right by myself, my family, and the audience I have gathered to me through my writing over the past many years. I just want to finally be clean and come clean. Say, Look, here is what I have been up against. It’s been monstrous and I have been trying to hide it and hide from it. It’s been hell even though I ‘held it together’ all this time.
What gives me the courage to come forward? Self respect. And I know alcoholism isn’t my fault. I did not ask for this. I never wanted this. I did not even understand this. But it happened. As Laura McKowen, author of We Are the Luckiest, would say: This is my thing. Drinking. Drinking was my thing and alcoholism always will be. So. I do not drink anymore.
I do not fuck with alcohol. That is how this has to go. There is no more questioning the truth. It is real. It is honest. It’s just brutally, brutally honest. And the weird thing is, I now realize, you can be brutally honest about your addiction and still not hardly believe it. Not hardly believe you have it, not hardly believe how crippling your active struggle with it was, not hardly believe you actually carried yourself to safety. But maybe that is where my disbelief meets my new found faith. Faith that there is something inside that wants me well. And even though that thing was only a whisper, it was loud enough to deafen my silent killer. I have faith in that small knowing voice. And I do believe if I stay sober and stay close, it will guide me from here to much brighter, more spectacular times to come.
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*All of my Sobriety Audios are collected for you here (or go to the top of this page and click “Sobriety Audios (Free Downloads).” You can listen as often as you want, anywhere, anytime, for free, forever.
Here is a wild story about where I am right this minute at my nine month sober mark. If you had told me this is where I would be at nine months sober, or even told me last year that I’d be sober this year, I’d have said you were a fucking maniac.
The funny thing is, I have wanted to be here for a very long time. Like, over a decade. I fantasized what it would be like to be sober and in my wildest fantasies I simply sat in a darkened coffee shop sipping my cappuccino alone at a table during happy hour on a random weeknight in winter time, as a light snow fell soft and glittery outside the frosty window. I was writing away on my laptop, doing work I treasured, listening to the chill music they always play low and smooth at coffee shops. I don’t know why winter. I think I just love the idea of the holiday season and twinkle lights on pine trees indoors.
Flash forward to: I get sober on January 1st of this year (2022) in a way that feels very real but also very, extremely highly unlikely. Like a big wind turned me around in a completely new direction and even though I welcome it I am also not fully convinced it can push me all the way down the street and into the new life of my dreams.
Flash forward nine months to: I broke down at my big fancy office job just last week. Although it surprised me how fast it sort of all happened, it also felt like a dam had burst. Or, one could say, it felt not unlike when my water broke and rushed down my legs suddenly in the middle of a cold afternoon in late January of 1998 right before I gave birth to my son that night. It was a sort of out-of-body experience as I sat there at the big fancy conference table, hot tears streaming down my perfectly made-up face, as I told my boss that I had been sober all year and that the truth was, no I could not see myself staying in my current position. No, I could not take more ‘responsibility’ because to be honest I’m barely holding it together as it is. And even though I was tactful and respectful, the truth I held tight to in my chest was that I should have left years ago but I was too ashamed to admit it. I was too scared to own it. I was too intoxicated every night to allow myself to feel it, let alone fix it.
But something in me had had enough of my own lies. Something in me that was finally crystal clear enough to rise up and out of my body in the form of my own voice said: It is not safe for me here. I am still in my first year of sobriety so I am still learning but one thing I know for sure is that my triggers are acutely apparent to me now. My number one job, above all else, is to respect myself which means to respect what I know and follow its lead.
Here is what I know, and knew in that moment as deeply as I know my own name: If you can see your triggers so clearly you could reach out and touch them , if you can feel them breathing down your neck or hear them knocking on the other side of the door – they are too close. Overwhelm, burnout, sacrificing your dreams to service someone else’s, none of that is compatible with a healthy sober lifestyle. I may have sucked it up before, lord knows it wasn’t the only thing I swallowed down that was killing me. I was addicted to alcohol which is another way of saying I was addicted to the false illusion of security.
My boss was poised and compassionate as everything I tried to hold back and keep hidden for so long just came rushing out of me in tears of sloppy wetness.
I told the truth. I don’t belong in here anymore. It’s familiar which gives the illusion of comfort. And where at one time it was nourishing, now it’s too tight. I can’t stay. I’m too grown.
That is the wild story. Thank you for listening. Now here I am on a leave of absence which is a health benefit most women use as maternity leave to care for a newborn child. At exactly nine months sober, I gave birth to a new life, too. One grounded in the brutal, honest, cold light of reality, but I am warming in blankets and soft feels, too. Painful and miraculous at once. This wild divine human life is at long last in my own hands, my own arms, caressed to my own bare chest. The new life that was ready in its own mysterious time. I couldn’t have rushed it. But as I kept growing it one day at a time inside of me, eventually, inevitably, there was no more holding it in.
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*All of my 60+ Sobriety Audios are collected for you here (or go to the top of this page and click “Sobriety Audios (Free Downloads).” You can listen as often as you want, anywhere, anytime, for free, forever.
Today is the very first day of building a very new life for myself. Well, I guess technically the “first” day would have been the day I got sober on January 1, 2022. But up until now I haven’t asked anyone to make any special accommodations for me in order to help me truly recover. I stopped drinking but I still hurt (I’m still messed up) in ways that need much deeper attention and care. So in that regard, today marks the first day I have to file actual paperwork in order to officially and very outwardly disrupt the pattern of my rather destructive old life in order to establish the foundations of a new one centered around sobriety. One where integrity comes first and only. Which sounds very lofty and lovely in my head but is rather disconcerting and a bit scary to execute in actual real life.
Today I will take a leave of absence from my day job. While I am surrounded by good people there, while it is a good company to work for and I have been there literally my entire adult working life (21 years), while I have it privileged and blessed and lucky and better than most by far, none of that being true can negate the fact that staying in that position, in that environment, in that way of life that requires me to pretend to be someone I am not, has been making me sick for almost a decade.
It’s sad in the sense that it’s so cliche. You get some money and proximity to power and even though you say it’s crushing your soul to give up your whole day (week/life) in service of an industry that means absolutely nothing to you, you keep doing it because you like that people like you for having money and prestige and security and fancy shit. It’s so stupid and yet it’s the foundation of just about everybody else’s life, too, which makes it all appear normal which makes it even worse. Collective delusion is still delusional.
In any event, this has been one hell of a year, man. Jesus baby christ. And even though it feels jarring and strange to sit here on a Monday morning and not go into an office, it’s more than that. I’m not pretending I’m fine. I know I need to fix some things and everybody else knows now, too. Because I stopped. I stopped faking. I stopped my life from bleeding out all over a false narrative. I have a chance now to make it right according to my truth, my desire, my dreams. It’s so good I almost can’t believe it. Almost. But I do believe. Because now I know one thing better than ever before: if I don’t believe, no one else will either.
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*All of my 60+ Sobriety Audios are collected for you here (or go to the top of this page and click “Sobriety Audios (Free Downloads).” You can listen as often as you want, anywhere, anytime, for free, forever.
I have been alone but seldom lonely. I have satisfied my thirst at the well of my self and that wine was good, the best I ever had, and tonight sitting staring into the dark I now finally understand the dark and the light and everything in between. Peace of mind and heart arrives when we accept what is: having been born into this strange life we must accept the wasted gamble of our days and take some satisfaction in the pleasure of leaving it all behind. Cry not for me. Grieve not for me. Read what I’ve written then forget it all. Drink from the well of your self and begin again. Charles Bukowski
I don’t know that there is any better way to express how I feel right now. Where my head, my heart, my tremendous pain, and my healing are. I am a recovering addict. That is as real and true as is earth, fire, water, and air. Whether it is acknowledged or not by others. I know. My soul knows. The one well I couldn’t bear to drink from is now the only one I want. The well of myself. It’s dark and deep, cool and life giving. And no one else can see into it but me.
He’s prolific – writing like a gushing faucet that just won’t shut off – and my writing mind is dried up as an old seed. Just as well I guess, at least someone is writing even if it isn’t me. And he’s a better writer anyway, although I guess that could mean anything at all. Or nothing. Nothing at all. We write or we don’t write but either way our minds are always going, going, going.
I scroll through images of women of various ages all sporting hair cropped in fresh pixie cuts. Only they aren’t called ‘pixies’ anymore they’re called mixies or bixies or some shit. God i would love to chop off my hair just to have done it. Just because it’s such a foolish ridiculous freeing thing to do and most people who think it through at all come to the inevitable conclusion that, logically speaking, it’s a bad, bad call.
Anyway I might still do it.
I know this might sound crazy because while I am now 209 days (!!) sober I can’t help but feel everything but also, at times, like now sitting alone in the morning light, I feel the realness of total nothingness. And not the poetic kind either. Not the sensual exoticism of a languid sort of freedom or the feline-like stretch of aimless curiosity. It isn’t arty or inspired or visionary or any of that. It’s just the kind of dead as if maybe somebody shot some Novocaine into my spirit and so even though I do believe I’ve got a spirit in here someplace, there’s absolutely no hope of actually feeling it.
We were at this party the other weekend, an outdoor summer whatever, and as I sipped my sparkling water the guy next to me was rambling on some misogynistic bullshit like a sixth grader when come to find out he’s sixty something. He’d been drinking all day slow but steady. And all I could think was this was also probably why I drank. Sure I have my own unhealed trauma and whatnot and I’m working on that but then there’s this foolishness of just having to live around other people who are so obnoxious it makes you want to scream. I think I drank to dull my natural impulse to slap somebody.
Just living is hard I guess is what I’m saying. We are surrounded by so many lies, so much ignorance, so much relentless focus on things that not only don’t even matter but which are crushing us underneath the weight of a culture that abuses us constantly. We are immersed in toxicity, submerged in it, steeped in it. No wonder when you stop numbing out the world, it all comes crashing in over you like the kind of thunderous waves you know no matter what you do you can’t escape or control or even try to push back against.
There are thoughts you think about but would die if anyone knew. You spend a lot of time hoping those thoughts are not you. That what you cannot speak about in public doesn’t mean you are a freak in private. Lust. Desire. Shame. Weakness. Cruelty. Confusion. Disgust. Hatred. Fury. Disconnection. Indifference. Dishonesty. Incompetence. Frustration. Fantasy. I’d love to talk about them all. I bet you would, too, if only anyone would give you the time of day or night or ever. People won’t though, they don’t know what the fuck to do with themselves let alone what to do with you and all your bizarre shit. But don’t you ever think that the more we hold back from each other the less we have access to ourselves? I mean are there some things that just have to come out, right, or they get distorted, crushed into regret or denial or addiction.
Or do we just like that feeling of those dark messy things scratching just below the surface of our palatable exterior. Do we get off on shoving them in, pressing them down. Like not being who we truly are, but revealing something just shy of that, is some kind of emotional edging. How explosive, how euphoric it would feel to burst into a trillion sparks of light, to come clean all over every damn thing that’s ever held you back or kept you quiet all these years. How long has it even been? Can you remember a time when what you were matched what you said you were? Before you started contorting yourself to fit in, to make a living, to raise the kids, to keep the peace, flash the fancy car.
Sure there’s the stuff you do all day and the silliness you soothe yourself with like booze or smokes or coffee or chocolate or whatever but underneath all that, below all that, in a place you think about like clockwork when the silent privacy of evening settles in all around, and the dust on the empty air twists and twinkles in the sifting, dimming light, do you ever wish you could touch yourself in soulspaces you have never explored before? I’m not talking about sex or sexual seduction, that’s so fucking tired and pedestrian the way it is , it’s so predictable and useless, it’s stress release, it’s not transcendant. I’m talking about something nameless, timeless, something so mindbendingly beautiful and haunting, almost frightening, at the same time there is no way of describing it coherently. Only the exceedingly rare artist or poet or musician can get you there but even then it is not the same as getting there yourself, by yourself. Doing it with and to yourself.
Someplace inside that has yet to be understood because it has yet to be uncovered. But it is there waiting, breathing. That thing you are meant to create. The words you have been meaning to say if only you could get at them, pull them up from the well inside that is you. And won’t stop being you, calling you, driving you mad with the living deadness of unrealized possibility. That deep deep well that you keep praying and wishing would stop because it isn’t you, isn’t you, isn’t you.
In real life I despise the guy and everything he stands for. He hates women but disguises his hatred with grand performances of fake affection and by ‘disguises’ I mean hides it in plain sight for anyone who is paying the slightest bit of attention to notice which admittedly seems to be few and far between. But in my dream, I’m hugging him tight and crying on his broad sculpted shoulder as he soothes my hurting heart. I couldn’t tell you why it hurts so much exactly but I tell him it’s because no one understands me and that’s close enough to the truth if I have to use words to convey the jumble of emotions which lies tangled in a ball of ache somewhere between my chest and my throat. I’m inclined to explore the chakras there for clues to unlocking my highest potential but don’t because I am exhausted. I don’t want to lift a finger or even my head from the pillow when the day rolls out and tumbles in through my window, splashing me with its somber gray light.
I change my tampon and its like a fucking murder scene. They say these days in these times I shouldn’t put this information onto the internet but I am old enough now that my cycle is all kinds of over the place so whoever is *tracking* the intimate details of my very basic life can fuck all the way off. I pull on my hooded sweatshirt in an attempt to disappear my bloated creaky body entirely, put the coffee on in the hopes of feeling less dead inside, and wonder about all the girls out there who are already pregnant against their will and staring down the barrel of carrying a life to term in a way that can only end their own. Forced smiles have become forced births and we act like that is such a stretch from one to the other. We have made the girls and women into machines.
Across the street, the neighbors have strung-up a shimmery pink sign that reads Welcome Home Baby Girl and there are pink balloons everywhere, too. We all congratulate the young father who is hugging his little three year old before returning to the hospital to tend to the new mommy and I feel sick to my stomach. Maybe it’s because I’ve got my period or maybe it’s because the thought of getting pregnant literally physically sickens me. It always has. Baby making was never my calling and by calling I mean my desire. There is no such thing as a ‘calling’ we just want certain things for ourselves so deeply they won’t stop bugging us until we either get them, do them, or breathe our last breath trying to make happen one or the other. The problem is that capitalism tells us what we want is a cute sundress delivered overnight, the sexy glimmer of immediate satisfaction thereby stifling our much grander more beautiful, imaginative, and dangerous cravings long enough to bleed us dry of the cash it might require to obtain them.
Increasingly, and I am not about to say anything shocking mind you, the “United” States has become a most menacing place to live out one’s life or what remains of it. While you are so busy being secretly terrified of getting caught unsuspectingly in a mass shooting as you go to collect your Cinnamon Toast Crunch at the local grocery store, the high court slashes a line across your rights to do with your body what you decide is best for your body and that’s the end of it. Everything is a lie built on top of the biggest lie which is that white men get everything they want because they are entitled to take it and women are nothing at all except decorations or easy bake ovens meant to either pop out infants or die in the process of attempting to fulfill that duty. We are little pink balloons and ribbons which adorn the bloodiest of battlefields.
I was away for a week on vacation which was nice. I’m glad I am home now to sit alone with my laptop, my thoughts, and my words. Not writing for a week always feels very strange and sad. Even the morbid thoughts need somewhere to go. Especially the morbid ones. When I speak to people about the dire state of the situation here in the States I don’t seem to get anywhere. People are tired and they have developed a callousness or a fake facade so they don’t have to feel the obvious way we should. I get that. I do that sometimes, too. But I feel rage of a quietly destructive kind. Not the kind which takes screaming to the streets but rather which stands in the corner watching and plotting and seething with acute disregard for obedience. I feel like throwing away everything I have just to try to remove the stench of the life I have surrounded myself with. The life that made all of this oppression possible. All the shit I have bought and nonsense ‘safety’ I have bought into which made me such an easy target. Patriarchy chugs right on along because for the most part, you trap yourself inside of it all on your own. As is so often the case, the women do most of the work by gruesome design.
Sunday morning. Church goers, murders, theives. Liars, beggars, winners and losers and little to be done to change any of it. People post to Instagram their happy little ideas and bits. Photos no longer being good enough to really capture the essence of nothingness, each and every share is now a whole movie reel complete with intro and finishing credits. My god. I do not understand what we have become but it feels much too small and far too distracted like we are animals obsessed with pouncing upon a beam of light. Not because they know where it came from or why or what they need to catch it for, just because the illusion of something solid to hold onto appears to be climbing up the wall that happens to be in front of them. Much like this writing, in fact. It wanders and goes nowhere in circles and I know any editor would curse it all to hell. But these are my circles which may be nothing more than spirals of death and hot air yet I am so sick to death of dancing to any other person’s tune. Least of all those with any authority in this fucked up world at all.
It’s not about babies or life. We aren’t stupid, we aren’t blind, we all know it. The overturning of Roe is about oppressing, dehumanizing, ruining, raping, and killing women. With heavy emphasis on the girls and women and all people who can become pregnant who are already the most disenfranchised. When I got sober it was in many ways a great big Fuck You to the patriarchy we live under that can only exist if it keeps women numb, weak, and terrified. Well. I am not numb or weak or terrified anymore.
Pissed? Yeah I’m quite entirely pissed.
But I’m not surprised. Yesterday’s ruling hit like a gut punch to my every internal organ. Knocked the wind out of me. I cried I screamed I lost my shit. But I didn’t drink. I stayed. I stayed here in the goddamn middle of this hellhole shit storm of what doesn’t even pretend to be a democracy anymore. I felt every rage-filled thing. What “conservative” radical white supremacist extremists are doing to the people of this country is calculated and disgusting. It is the most pathetic, easy, cheap, vile thing to go after the women who are already broken, abused, and left for dead by the richest society in the mutherfucking world.
And I felt all of that hatred course through my veins yesterday. I felt all of it in this body that I now know fully and certainly and completely is my own.
Fuck your laws. Fuck your annihilation of my protection, my safety, and my sanity. I own myself and I answer only to me.
Allison Marie Conway 