Tag: grief

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Moving On and So It Goes (audio 72 / day 286)

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.

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The Power In Walking Away (audio 64)

Sometimes there is power in walking away from a fight. We rarely hear about this, of course, in our battle obsessed culture. Because we are taught to be strong and by strong they mean: fight back, stand up for yourself. They mean: be stronger than the thing you are fighting with. We are taught never to back down. We believe that in order to be powerful we must fight to the death. If we admit defeat we must be cowards or losers or just not trying hard enough.

Each day for many days during many years, I would hope to have a chill drinking experience. I didn’t want to fight, I just wanted to mess around a little. You know like the kind of good go-around with the drinking they advertise to you with the glass of crisp white wine and the smiling, sexy, sophisticated lady and her lover sharing dessert in an outside garden or the laughter and cheer as she frolics about with her girlfriends as they live their best lives in some Tuscan vineyard and all that shit. What a great time wine always is! How relaxed and cool it makes us all. Except that wasn’t it. It was, in fact, the opposite of that. Because after the fifteen minute happiness, it became more dull than chill. And then after the first two or three glasses, an almost imperceptible agitation would slither in and as the wine kept flowing that subtle irritation just keep blooming and blooming larger and larger like the flower of a nuclear explosion.

I poured wine on my anger and anxiety like gasoline. On a good number of occasions, I was completely out of my mind by the time the bomb went off. Didn’t care. Didn’t even know. I had to come-to the day after and feel the pain of realizing some of the destruction caused. Assessing the scene. Piecing together fragments of what I could remember. How often it was a hell of a fight before I inevitably got knocked out. Wine glass left half full on the coffee table. Me, face down on a mattress and the wine quite literally still standing. As long as I could pry my eyes open and peel myself off the floor, the wine was ready to go another round.

The power in the face of that scenario is not obvious. Or should I say, what seems like the one with the obvious power is the wine. The alcohol, when I crawled into the ring with it, “won” so to speak. I get that now. It shreds my heart to pieces to think about, but I get it.

But to say I was powerless to alcohol, while true and while very necessary to admit, I agree, is not a full enough statement for me to leave at face value. Women are relentlessly reminded of their powerlessness in this society. This culture reminds us incessantly that we should stand down, watch our mouths, bite our tongues. Our human rights are under constant threat. It is exhausting, being bludgeoned over the head again and again with our “powerlessness.”

But in a much broader sense, there are many kinds of power. The power to destroy is alcohol’s kind of power and the only one it inherently possesses. But there is power in walking away from a battle you have no business engaging in. This is true if the opponent is far stronger than you, but it is also true if the opponent is beneath you. If the opponent doesn’t deserve to engage with you in the first place. In my case, the power exists in my ability to lay down the fight entirely. I do not fuck with alcohol. I do not answer its calls to get in the ring just one more time to see if I can finally get the upper hand.

We are done here. This ends here and now. No more fighting.

There is power in the peace of that. To lay down that fight is to stand in a kind of power that is entirely my own. No shame. No guilt. No fuckery. There are many kinds of power: the power to destroy and the power to rebuild, recreate, resurrect, reorganize, reevaluate, regenerate. Alcohol only has one. But I have them all.

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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 originally posted this article on June 11, 2022. I have re-release it today as an audio. I do think it is worth the reminder, even if only for myself.

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Drink of Me

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. 

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The Monster That We Are

The amount of tired that I am today has nothing to do with lack of sleep. I am well rested. It has nothing to do with lack of caffeine either, lord knows. I’m on my third mug of coffee and feeling quite alert. Sitting here in my little writing room gazing out the window as the neighbors get into their cars and head to work. Wherever they work. I should be working, too. But fuck I am so tired. In my bones and my mind and my soul, heart, being. The children are dead. This country is a waste. A whole mother fucking waste. And I used to cry. And I used to march. And I just voted the other day, like a whole ass joke. Like a fucking fool. For whatever the fuck any of this bullshit is worth. I feel helpless, useless, hopeless. Worthless. I do not even feel anger. I can’t feel anything anymore. All the empty words. Words won’t fix this. Voices won’t fix it. All the sickening politics. Bloodthirsty. That’s what we are right here in the richest most fucking bankrupt country in all the world. It’s all murderous nonsense from every side. We have become a wasteland where no life is valued. It’s all traded for money or guns or power. Where kids don’t even want to exist. No one who can actually prevent this slaughter of children will do it. There’s no conscience. There’s just emptiness. I wonder what on earth matters anymore. Perhaps this is what despair feels like. Right here in the palms of my soul on a regular Thursday as the news reels roll on and on and fucking on. Perhaps this is what it’s like at the end of the emotional line. It’s just the same as any other day. Only where there used to be anything else, now there’s just hollow. And I’m too tired to write because there’s nothing to say. People are monsters. I saw a bit of a poem somewhere online yesterday as the poets took their swings and misses at effecting any kind of shock or awe or response to little or no avail. It said We are a monster. Yeah. That’s it.

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Fucking with Sober People on the Internet (day 104)

Watching as the nearly-full April moon sinks lower and lower in the black morning sky, I am still snuggled underneath the blankets as wild springtime bird chatter rises and falls through my open window at 4:35am. It is still pitch dark out but already 71 degrees. My sheets are damp with sweat which smells a little salty and a little sweet. A little like fresh shampoo and a little like the soft nuzzle of warm sleep. The moonscape is like something from a movie or a painting. The perfect yellow-baked glowing disc swathed faintly in thin pewter fingers of cloud, which move slowly away away to reveal the shadowed craters of giant rock surface. It is a moment of pure intimacy between the moon and me and no one else in the entire world. Like peace, handed to me on a silver platter. I take it. I smile and it sinks all the way into me.

It has been a weird fucking week. A day or so ago, someone on Instagram published one of my quotes on her page and she took all the time, care, and effort to erase my name from it before she share it. Right out in the open. Like this was just a thing one does. Just like that. My words were stripped from me, or I from them, and regurgitated by a whole ass stranger. It is hard to describe how that feels. It isn’t the first time it has happened to me but this was the first time my quote and my caption were about my sobriety. Yes, indeed, she stole my caption, too. Without mentioning me at all anywhere. And I thought to myself, how pathetic. How absolutely tragic that this human wanted to say what I had said but instead of searching herself for her own wisdom she just took the lazy way and ripped me off. Plucked my genuine personal thoughts and passed them right along as her own. How brilliant. How classy. How plug-and-play a life she must lead. I asked her why on earth she would do such a thing. She responded by deleting her entire account. Even just typing that makes me laugh aloud.

What a strange fucking thing to waste one’s time with. Her for doing it and me for even bothering to call her out. It’s just the internet. It’s just petty bullshit. But I think what really got under my skin was that I didn’t get to that quote she stole without a lot of fucking hard soul work. And you’d like to think people would respect that about a newly sober human. But the truth is that everything you create can be fucked with and everything you hold sacred can be desecrated in the time it takes to figure out how to erase someone’s name off of their own intellectual property. lol. Like seriously how do you even do that. It’s almost clever if it weren’t so goddamn stupid.

But ridiculous as it may sound, there is a secretly breathtaking truth inside the sting of being violated like that. Slicing someone away from their own sobriety hurts like hell because sobriety is the ultimate intimacy with the self. There is no other feeling or relationship, no other promise or vow or commitment or bloodswear that can be compared to it. When you can say you are sober, you are saying no one and nothing else comes between you and your truest self. Sober is the closing of the gap between what you say you value and what you actually do. What you want and what you make sure against all brutal odds you maintain. Maybe that’s a good mini-thought to share on social media. Sometimes my little bits get shared a fuck lot of times and I guess that’s how I know they are worthy ones. Or if they get stolen. I guess that means a thought was damn fine, too.

I sip my second cup of coffee as the sky lightens from rich navy blue to velvet sapphire. I write my blog post, I design my ‘content’ and I think about the absurdity of all of it. I am grateful to the sprinkled twinkled stars in the heavens above that I get to even talk about any of this beautiful mess at all. It is everything to me. Because they can say what they want and steal what they covet and talk trash on the internet until they get their little tiny rocks off. All I know is that I haven’t had a hangover in one hundred and four days. And only a person who knows what I know and does what I do and has been through the hellfire I have can ever truly say that.

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After Life

We will bury my uncle today. I sip coffee in the early morning air alone. To be with the trees and the cool grass and the little birds which flutter here and there. Processing. He was too young and as I say it I know it isn’t true because the only way you know how old you really are is if you know the day you are going to die and nobody can ever know that shit. I think about death which is a way to think about life in reverse. What could you have done and all that jazz. What will you do now. How will it feel to burn beneath the tears. How will the rain smell as we stand around embracing and not embracing. Speaking and holding back. The human condition is so strange in ways we pretend we cannot see because we don’t know the words to say. There are the things we know, the things we believe, and the things which are entirely a mystery. These are all woven together even though we keep trying to pull them apart. To touch the face of God. To Rest In Peace. To leave, to be gone. To be over. To be left behind with life beating soft through your veins like a time bomb. Like a gift. Like a joke. Like a complete stranger breathing from your own lungs. I grip the hardness of the coffee mug. I walk upstairs to my darkened study and light what is barely left of a lilac candle among my plant covered makeshift altar. I stare at the chipped veil and hands of the virgin mother statue my grandmother gave to me long ago. The sky is brightening behind her as if morning is a thing that will never stop rising over the treetops and the creatures and all of us. I see a robin upon the wire outside my window and as I watch him fly off into the heavens all by his thin-winged lonesome, the tiny flame of the candle burns out.

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She Was an American Girl

Breathing is harder than it should be.

I have to remind myself to do it.

I watch the sunset. A giant white glowing orb sinking into the veins of the dead winter trees. They aren’t in fact dead, of course, but their gnarled bare branches, snaked shadow fingers creeping toward the gray sky could fool you.

Graveyards. Concrete. Insurrection. The year that won’t seem to end hasn’t really ended, I still feel it lumped in my throat. Pricking at the back of my eyes inside my skull.

There are seasons but this one is more stubborn than the rest.

And we choke on the things we try to run from. And the sky blooms darker than it ever dared before. As we shuffle our feet and ignore the signs.

I remember to breathe but only because someone on Twitter reminds me to by accident. I shut off my phone and light up a cigarette in the quiet, watching the twilight evening descend. I haven’t been able to write a goddamn thing since I don’t know when.

Time exists on some alternate continuum which has little care for we human beings and the monsters we let grow out of control.

I don’t know how anyone does it. Keep the faith. I think about the ones who died believing in something which killed them.

I think about how he does not mourn, not anything. And the endless possibilities that leaves him in the end.

My love brings me wine and a kiss as everything we do not say falls around us like a kind of grief we aren’t sure how to hold because we don’t know if we are at the end or the beginning of the pain.

Taking a drink, I count the first few glimmering stars and swallow the fear and think about all the people out there who seem to be dealing with this so much better than I am.

For all the hype and optics and posing, dry January sure picked a hell of a month.

And somewhere out there across this land, this earth, this hellish place which is so lost and so broken and so angry and so cold, the sun is coming up.

Somewhere, as my tears won’t come and my heart won’t stop, it’s morning.

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Photo by Can Şerefoğlu

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Fourteen Years Ago Today, Time Broke Away from Itself

On this day fourteen years ago, my mother died in the back room of the house we opened and closed our lives in. When it was all over, the pine trees stood in the front of the house, reaching, heavy, immobile in the terrible heat.

I want to say the sun was setting because I am certain it was. How could it not? How could it be any other way at the end of everything. I want to say it was dinner time.

But then, suddenly, somehow, it wasn’t.

It was supposed to be something else, it was supposed to be a different time. A longer time. A time so much farther off that we shouldn’t have been able to see it. Let alone hear it in the ringing in our ears as dishes were done. Prayers were prayed. Let alone touch it, here at the center of the heart in our trembling hands.

We will be back, we whispered to her just moments before she made her departure from us forever. Forever, arriving and departing, at dinnertime.

But there would be no eating, for there was no time any of us could understand. No breaking of bread, no explanation, no dinner. Time. There would be tear stains searing down the skin which covered the numbness. There would be I am so sorry, there would be drinking late into the night on the back deck, voices, both familiar and unfamiliar, in the darkness, as she was taken away.

Taken away from us.

Grief moves through you, in and out of each of the shattered windows in your soul, like wind, empty, hollow, invisible, whistling.

Looking for something it cannot name, it cannot find, it cannot see.

For years and years.

 

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Photo by Kristina Tripkovic

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I Just Wanted to Tell You This Right Now (audio)

Click play to hear me speak it, read below for transcript. I’m here. You’re here. This is it for now. I’m thinking of you. Please stay safe…..

So hey there. I don’t know what to say except that I wanted to write a fantasy fiction prose piece but what kept coming to the front of my mind and heart instead was to just say hello to you and tell you I am thinking of you and I hope you are okay. Over the years I have written for so many different reasons. I have written and published two books of poetry and prose for people who like dark stuff, and witchy stuff, and spiritual stuff, uplifting and mind bending and inspiring stuff. I have written multiple blogs, some about art, some about business, some about teaching and learning and social media and all kinds of things. I am interested in so many things, I like sharing so many things. As my tastes change, I have changed my content, my audience has changed. Been through some changes. And people read my works for so very many different reasons. To express, move through, explore or experience love, pain, regret, abuse, fear, dreams, hopes, grief, sex, erotica, fantasy, fiction, non-fiction, what have you. So many many things, for so many reasons.

And up until today, up until this very moment I thought I knew what I wanted to do which was keep writing and reading and sharing as I always have, these short pieces that have brought you into my little wild orbit. Stuff that makes us think and feel and sweat and beg and cry and dig deep down into our bones. And I do still want to do all that. But today as I sit here listening to the wind howling outside my writing room window, and watch the little pink petals falling off of brand new spring flowery trees, I cannot help but think that this pandemic is changing all of us on some very fundamental level. Nothing feels the way it used to feel. What felt right before feels all distorted now. And it’s this weird time where we are forced indoors, afraid to go outside and for good reason. The world has not ever seen anything like this. We have not experienced anything like this ever before. All day wondering what the fuck is life, what the fuck are we gonna do now, and after this is over. When will this be over, right like when. Nobody knows.

And I have no answers. All I know is I couldn’t write anything but this right now and I think it is because I am usually the first person to check out of this world and fantasize or imagine or tell stories about alternate lives, random experiences. But there is no getting away from myself on this day. In this moment I am so very present, so confused and angry and afraid and hopeful and scattered and suspended somewhere between the coffee hours and the wine hours and I am not sure exactly what to write for you. What to say for you. What to offer for you to feel a little better, a little bit like there’s a candle for you here in the dark.

I like to write so we can feel the things no one in our regular life lets us feel. I can’t help but think that people who write and share like we do do it because this is the only place, or one of the very few places, on the planet where we can be ourselves without labels or judgments or explaining ourselves to anybody. I don’t normally just riff but today, I can’t help it. This was the only thing that felt real and tangible to me. To say I’m here, and I’m glad you are here, and I am sending you every heartfelt wish for health and safety and the preciousness of sanity in this absolute world gone absolute mad. Please take good care of yourself and the ones you hold dear. I am thinking of you. I am hopeful that I can get my head on straight soon and be able to write some prose that you will enjoy. Meanwhile, feel free to scroll through what is here, there is some written stuff, some audio stuff, there is my book Luminae on Amazon which I honestly do not know if it will ship right now physically but there is the Kindle version you could download if you’d like. Maybe if I make another one of these random pandemic fire side chats, I could read from my book a little bit for you, share some stuff from it, tell you why it is called Luminae, what kind of mood it is, why I wrote it, that kind of thing.

I don’t know. I’m here. I’m trying to take this all in and figure a way through. Just like you are doing. I salute you in your creative endeavors right now. It’s funny – well not really funny, but – it’s funny because before this crisis hit, very few people in the “real world” gave quiet time, or artistic endeavors, or writing or poetry the time of day. They thought art was a silly side bar after thought. But now, look. Now, watch and see. The artists are so important in times like these. So maybe that’s all for today. Let’s just be gentle and humble and honest and if we can, let’s just go make some good art.

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Nothing So Vulgar

As the tired voices fade from my blurred memory of yet another day gone by, I can hear the traffic sifting below my window. Pouring a glass of wine, I remember a poet who used to think I was quite something special and then just as quickly lost interest and moved on. We float in and out of lives and nothing sticks, nothing at all except random flashes of light across an empty bedroom wall. Even the silence comes and goes unless you hold onto it with everything you’ve got to keep the demons at bay. I write about things which matter to me but I don’t really know in the grand scheme of things what good it is beyond soothing my nerves. Or igniting them. Writing is strange that way, you never quite know if it’s the beginning or the end, the matchstick or the spark. Shuffling through a stack of books on my writing room floor, I come upon, perhaps rather eerily, Ariel, a most devastating, sinister, and gripping collection of poetry by Sylvia Plath. I must have read it a hundred times. How could a creature so cold spin poetry that scorches the skin with every syllable, every breath between beats black as a raven’s wing hung suspended from the ceiling. Plath died on this day fifty seven years ago. Gone almost twice as long as she was here, a tortured soul to be sure. Still her words reach from the grave and grip you hard by your throat, stare down the whites of your eyes. Even after all this time, the maps of terror are the same in the human heart. We recognize them in the purple lines of our veins, the grooves in our brains where the fears settle in. I wonder why we fixate upon those who end it all at their own hands. You think those who write are telling you everything but I guess even, try as we might to come clean or climb our way out of the darkness through the words, there are some things which even the most gifted writer cannot tear from their burdened chest. Cannot break free of the claws in the marrow of the bones. Some hauntings are too bitter, too malformed, disfigured, to convey outright. Wrapping a blanket around me tight, the air coming in through my window is suddenly chilled with winter even though all day it felt more like a springtime February, a sweetness threatening to bloom before nature was ready. Ill prepared. Awkward, and out of place.

“In any case, you are always there,
Tremulous breath at the end of my line,
Curve of water upleaping
To my water rod, dazzling and grateful,
Touching and sucking.”

-from Medusa by Sylvia Plath

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