I have a friend who can’t stop drinking. She said it all started the day someone gave her a bottle of red wine, and when she drank half of it she noticed the pain she normally felt went away. 

This was amazing to her! All she had to do was drink and the suffering ended, at least for a couple of hours. (When you are in pain, a couple of hours is a long time.) 

What’s amazing to me is that my friend who is in her thirties had not discovered alcohol sooner. This is what clean living gets you: no idea that alcohol can take away your troubles!

My friend drinks every night now, and the nights start when she gets home from work. She told me she often doesn’t take her coat off before pouring herself a glass. When she is at work, she thinks about wine, about not feeling her feelings, and she hangs until she can finally let go.

I have noticed that so many people swallowed the hook of you are not a good person when they were young. When you go fishing and the fish swallows your hook, you have to tear it out of the fish. It’s gory, horrible business. The hook is supposed to sink into the fish’s cheek, but it’s not that hard to swallow the hook when the bait is delicious. When a hook gets into the guts, the spine, the hook isn’t easy to extricate. The body is torn apart.  

A fish’s hunger gets it into trouble. 

Love is delicious. When a child looks to their parent, they are like half of a high five. They need that other hand to reach up and meet theirs to finish the gesture, otherwise they are just a body floating through air, unmet. A child needs to see love and wonder and acceptance and safety mirrored to them so they know they are okay to root, okay to be themselves, okay to grow up and move away someday and have a life of their own. The child is hungry for approval and understanding and acceptance just as a plant is hungry for light. 

We exist in relationship. We need another in order to see and understand ourselves, but if the “other” we get is emotionally unwell, we eat unwell and the bodymind suffers. 

My friend is ashamed of her drinking, and I wish I could go back in time and hold her and rock her whisper endlessly into her ear that she is safe and that everything is okay. I wish I could take the grown up her and sing into the fishing line that feeds the hook that is in her guts and let her body know she can let go, that the hook is a dream, that she does not need to feel pain to know she is alive, that she doesn’t have to numb the pain she feels in order to make it through another day. 

My friend is living the story that tells her she is bad, wrong, a terrible mistake. My friend is a little girl standing in front of a mirror that sends barbs back that go straight into her heart. The mirror says, You aren’t enough to fix me. You aren’t good enough to make me happy. The mirror is starving for affection, also, and it is so hungry it has gotten distorted by longing and self-rejection. 

My friend does not need wine. My friend does not need to get sober, at least not yet because sobriety without self-compassion is like hammering your hand to the table. My friend needs to get the hook out of her guts, the hook she swallowed when she believed the reflection she saw of herself in her mother’s eyes. You are not enough. You are bad. I wish you were not alive. What the little girl doesn’t know, of course, is that those thoughts were not meant for her. Those thoughts were from the mother’s brain to herself, and those thoughts had been passed down from her mother, and on and on, generational self-dismissal.  

My friend could change the world by blinking her eyes and clearing the slate. My friend could change the world by deciding that even though her brain tells her dark thoughts that make alcohol her friend and ally, that she was going to make it through these dark caves of confusion until she finally saw the light, the truth that she is who she is, a wonderful being, a blade of grass in a rolling meadow of grass, everyone moving in the wind with wild grace.

Life can be so simple when you believe in your own goodness. You don’t have the terrible hook of poison deep in your guts, destroying your peace and safety and health. You don’t have the belief that you have to do everything in your power to not let others see just how bad you are. You don’t have to hide, to shrink, to get quiet. 

 The good news is you don’t have to tear apart your own body to extricate your hook. The good news is that forgiveness—of self, of others, of the world—dissolves everything: hook, line, and sinker!

What would happen if, along with the medicine in the COVID vaccine, there was a dose of you are good in it? What would your day feel like if you did not have to fight or hide or endure the rottenness of not enough in your guts? What would you do with this lightness? What would you love more freely? What would bring you to your knees with thanks? 

How would you feel at night when you climbed into bed and prepared for sleep? 

How would you feel in the morning? 

Would like just be terrible if you didn’t feel awful? What would you do with all that freed energy? Would you even know yourself? 

Would you even want to?

If my friend accepted that who she is is okay, then she would have to live, and the strange, not uncommon thing is that I am not sure this is what she wants. I think she wants to stay in the place she lived when she was a child who felt small in front of her mother. I think she wants to stay in the familiar swamp of I am not enough because that place feels like home to her. I do not know if my friend wants to feel what life has to offer as much as she wants to hide in the shadow of what numbs her.

I get it. 

We are not taught how to feel, not really. In fact, we are taught that big feelings are trouble, dangerous, inconvenient. I wish instead of home ec in 7th grade I had taken a class called Big Feelings. I wish it had taught me it was okay to be myself, to feel myself, to feel the world banging up against the edges of me. 

Why do we teach our kids sex ed before we teach them self love?  

What do we get by hating ourselves? What’s the reward?  

What would happen if my friend stopped drinking? What would happen if I believed I was never going to be any better than I am in this moment? Could I settle in for the ride? Could I accept that thought? And what if I could? And what if I couldn’t?