When We Say We Want to Live

We choose the darkness and the light.

November was a lot to carry between my mother’s surgery (she’s healing, thank you), learning that Gertie has lung cancer (she is OK for now, thank you), and the disappointment of the election (not sure many of us are OK). Late in the month, I attended a group meditation at a new friend's beautiful home in Brooklyn. It was warm and crowded, yet cozy inside, art was hung on the walls, and four brightly colored Le Creuset Dutch ovens simmered with a vegetarian chili waiting for us to eat. After thirty minutes of shared silence, we began to speak. One by one, people offered their stories of grief and gratitude, many finding solace in this moment of community amid shared despair over the country's direction. I breathed in their stories and processed mine.

When it was my turn, I found myself sharing reflections that spanned decades of recovery, beginning with the darkest moment in my life. After years of running from myself and my pain, harming anyone in my path, and seemingly hellbent on killing myself, I had a moment of clarity that I had to change every single thing about my life in order to live. And I wanted to LIVE. It took me years to learn what that would really mean.

I was reminded of this feeling while watching 'It's a Wonderful Life' this weekend with Ben and once again witnessed George Bailey's annual transformation. After seeing a world without himself in it, he races back to the bridge crying out, 'I want to live again!' His desperate plea echoed across decades to my own moment of clarity. Standing before the mirror, I saw myself clearly for the first time – caught in the same destructive patterns, playing the same scenes over and over again, heading toward a tragic ending I couldn't outrun anymore. Like George, it turned out I wanted to live.

The thing is, what I thought I meant by wanting to live all of those years ago is not what living has actually meant. Like George, I had to learn that choosing life meant choosing all of it – the Building and Loan's financial troubles along with the dance by the pool, the drafty old house along with the moon lassoed around it, the mundane and profound grief along with the profound realizations about what makes a life rich.

Once I accepted that I could be saved, that I could live, I mistakenly believed life would just stop being hard. I'd picked myself up from the floor and took some steps to create a semblance of a real life, one with a job and a home and a relationship with my boyfriend and my loved ones. Life would “feel” good all the time, because I was good. I was wrong. As a friend in my 12 step program once told me: "Things will get better, then they'll get worse, then they'll get better. Then they'll get real."

A few years into recovery, an old timer and dear friend gave me M. Scott Peck's "The Road Less Travelled," which begins with the line, "Life is difficult." I remember thinking it was a funny book for this sage individual who had so many more years clean to give someone who was just figuring out how to make things work. Years later, I have given this book to many friends in recovery, including my own brother when he was struggling with his own path to recovery.

Peck writes, 'Fearing the pain involved, almost all of us, to a greater or lesser extent, attempt to avoid problems.' As I have sat with these words over the years, their truth continues to reveal itself. In addiction, I had been pretty bad at avoiding problems. In recovery, I became better at not causing problems, and yet, they still came. People died, jobs were lost, friends got sick. Life was difficult.

What I began to realize was that the problems were not the problem, it was how I was relating to the problem. The more I resisted the experience of living, through numbing (TV, food, the internet, social media), deflecting through the creation of a new self-imposed drama (I'd been very good at that), or wallowing in self pity and resentment, the more I deepened the suffering.

When I said I wanted to live all those years ago, I didn't understand that wish held all the complexity of a genie's grant. In saying I wanted to live, I was destined to receive the full spectrum of emotions and experiences that make up the human condition. Only by truly receiving it, not merely enduring it, could that cosmic swirl of emotions make me "feel" alive. Wishing for constant happiness, or even the belief that it was attainable, was not only like believing my drug of choice would "cure" me of the pain of living, but that I could somehow be good enough that I could avoid that suffering.

Since 1998, when I stopped using drugs, I have watched nephews and nieces grow into their own people, I have held the babies of friends and the long-awaited child of my dearest cousin. I got married, planned for babies, lost pregnancies, bought an apartment, bought a car, another house. I achieved and I achieved and I achieved. I lost my grandfather to cancer; my grandmother to Alzheimer's; two of my closest cousins to horrible accidents; my childhood best friend to suicide; my brother to a cycling accident along a stretch of highway in New Jersey that still has no sidewalk or bike lanes to make it humane and safe for pedestrians and bicycle riders to navigate the car and truck congested streets that lead to bigger and bigger big box stores and warehouses and give me environmental grief as I remember the trees and nature that used to fill the fields and forests of the newly paved parking lots. I have felt my way through that all. And yet, I'm still standing. Look, Ma, no hands.

This hard-won wisdom came to mind the morning after the election when a friend in recovery threw her hands up in the air: "This is what I got clean for?"

"Yes.” I breathed deeply, feeling so much compassion and recognition. “To feel it all. To live."

And that’s what we do. Last week, I participated in my first commencement services for graduation at the school. I’ve only just gotten to know these students as they began their studies last year (it’s a 16 month program), but I still found myself overcome with emotion watching their beaming beautiful faces, and that of their friends and family in the audience. As I sat on that stage with the other faculty, I teared up as I imagined what it took for each of them to get to this point, and what they would face in the coming years, the challenges and the growth. I felt alive witnessing their living. I felt joy.

I write these words while nursing a cold, baking and watching the snow fall on the shortest day of the year, the winter solstice, I hold this deep knowing: I got clean for the pain and the joy, the boredom and the surges of excitement. I got clean for the bone-crushing weight of despair and grief, the confusion and questioning. I got clean for it all.

As the days get brighter tomorrow and next week and in the months that come, I will practice holding that lightness and darkness at the same time in deep gratitude for every breath, every connection, every love and every loss. May you too hold that truth in the softest part of you and join me, each of us carrying our own beautiful, tragic, joyful and soulful complexities alongside one another.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and Happy New Year, dear ones. I send you love and grace.