I started writing a few months later, so that I could tell my truth recklessly to more people. After reading a few of my essays, my dad, Bubba, called and said, “Glennon. Don’t you think there are some things you should take to the grave? ” I thought hard for a moment and said, “No. I really don’t. That sounds horrible to me. I don’t want to take anything to the grave. I want to die used up and emptied out. I don’t want to carry around anything that I don’t have to. I want to travel light.”
• • •
When I got sober, I woke up and stepped out into real life for the first time. I was twenty-six years old, but because I’d been in hiding since I was eight, I saw the world through the eyes of a child. I was awed and afraid. My heart opened to the world’s beauty and brutality. I looked closely at humanity and all of its brokenness and decided to forgive it and myself. Since brokenness is the way of folks, the only way to live peacefully is to forgive everyone constantly, including yourself. I decided that I had nothing to be ashamed of. I’d done the best I could with what I had. I’d do better now. Mostly.
This new-found state of forgiveness and hope allowed me to trust another human being with my whole heart, so I got married. It became clear that marriage was hard and holy work. I learned that I could do hard things. I learned I was worthy and capable of being another human being’s constant. And this confidence helped me widen my circles. I had Chase, Tish, and Amma. I became an active part of my community. And I reached out to God: the ultimate circle—the One that holds us all together.
I realized that these widening circles—accepting myself, my partner, my children, my community, and my faith—were the only layers of protection I needed. These circles were my life, and I was at the center: naked and honest and sober and broken and imperfectly perfect. A work of art in constant progress.
The more I opened my heart to the folks in my circles, the more convinced I became that life is equal parts brutal and beautiful. And/Both. Life is brutiful. Like stars in a dark sky. Sharing life’s brutiful is what makes us feel less alone and afraid. The truth can’t be stuffed down with food or booze or exercise or work or cutting or shopping for long. Hiding from the truth causes its own unique pain, and it’s lonely pain. Life is hard—not because we’re doing it wrong, just because it’s hard. It’s okay to talk, write, paint, or cry about that. It helps.
This book is my story, and I hope it’s yours too. It’s about how I built my circles—how I built a life—and what it means to me to carry on.
WAKING UP
Sisters
My decision to get sober was more like a weary surrender than a bold march into battle. After I had allowed my life to fall into a thousand pieces for the thousandth time, Bubba and Tisha planned a loving intervention. Then I found out I was pregnant with Chase, and I realized that I was running out of people and options. At the time, the path of least resistance seemed to be sobriety.
It’s not somebody who’s seen the light
It’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah.
I called my sister and said, “Sister, do the thing you always do,” which is to figure out what the hell happens next, and then make that thing happen. A few hours later, she gathered up my broken self and we drove to our first AA meeting.
Sister held my sweaty, shaky hand and walked just in front of me, scanning for problems or people from whom to shield me, like she always does. She took an AA brochure from a table so we’d have something to look down at when we sat and joined the circle. On the front was a list of alcoholism warning signs:
Do you drink more than four servings in a setting?
One time I didn’t.
Do you ever drink in the mornings?
Only on weekends.
Do you ever black out?
Can’t remember.
Have you suffered negative consequences from drinking?
Being here seems like a pretty negative consequence.
Neither of us said a word until my sister leaned over and whispered, “I don’t know if AA is going to be sufficient. We might need Triple A.”
After the meeting, we came home, sat on my bed together, and stared at the disaster on my bedroom floor. During my drinking decades, I lived like a pig. My room was a hazardous pile of stilettos, tube tops, wine bottles, ashtrays, and old magazines. I valued nothing. Everything that came into my life was disposable: clothes, opportunities, people. My bedroom looked as if my insides had spilled out onto the floor.
After a few minutes of quiet, Sister climbed down from the bed and started picking things up, one piece of trash at a time. She threw away the wine bottles and the cigarettes, she folded the tube tops, and she gently tossed the magazines. I watched for a while and then joined her. We hung up every piece of clothing, wiped down every gritty surface, poured out every hidden bottle of booze. We worked silently, side by side, for two hours. Then we sat back down on my bed and held hands. My room looked so different. It looked like a place where a girl might want to live. I wondered if my head and my heart might one day be places I’d like to live too.
It was the beginning.
Holy Holes
Life is a quest to find an unfindable thing.
This is the problem. Life is a bit of a setup. We are put here needing something that doesn’t exist here. And that, as my friend Adrianne says, is some bullshit.
The writer Anne Lamott (St. Anne) calls this unquenchable thirst our “God-sized hole.” People of faith believe that God put us here yearning for what will only be found in heaven: him. I get that, sort of, but it still seems a bit twisted to me. What if I put my daughter Amma in a playpen with her pacifier dangling just out of her reach? What is the point of this life if we can’t have what we need? What are we to do with our God-sized holes in the meantime, before we die? How are we ever supposed to be comfortable down here with a big old hole in the middle of our hearts?
Since I’m a slow learner, I tried to fill mine with poisonous things for twenty years.
When I was very, very young, I started trying to fill myself with food. Food was my comfort, refuge, and joy. Food was my God. But then I realized that my emptiness was also the need for beauty. I thought that beauty meant being thin and dressing right. Of course, those things don’t have a lot to do with beauty, but, as I said, I was young.
Since I didn’t believe I was beautiful, I wanted to hide. But when you’re a kid, there’s no hiding. You have to go where they tell you to go, looking how you look, wearing what you’re wearing. So every day, I was pushed out the door, all imperfect and greasy and roly-poly for everyone to see. Showing up just as you are seemed a ridiculous thing to ask of someone so young. I decided that if I had to be so visible, I needed to shrink.
But how do you fill yourself with thinness when you also need to fill yourself with food?
I learned the answer when I was eight from a TV movie about bulimia. The film was created to be a warning, but I accepted it as a gift. Here was a way to fill up, to allow myself to continue using food for comfort and escape without paying any consequences. After the movie, I binged and purged for the first time. Bulimia made me comfortable because when I was in the midst of a binge, I lost consciousness of my discomfort and my emptiness. When the purge was over, though, and I lay exhausted on the bathroom floor, my hole felt even bigger. That’s how you can tell that you’re filling yourself with the wrong things. You use a lot of energy, and in the end, you feel emptier and less comfortable than ever.
Bulimia was hard, but it was easier than real life. I felt safer there in my own little dramatic food world. So I dropped out of life and into Bulimia. For almost twenty years, I binged and purged several times each day. Fill the hole, empty the hole. I didn’t come back to life until I was twenty-six. But life went on anyway, as it does.
One night in seventh grade, I slept over at my friend Susie’s house, and we snuck out to a high school party. It was
the first time I’d ever had a beer, and I drank so many that I blacked out completely. I don’t remember being at the party, but I was later told that some seniors tried to microwave my hands. After the party, I slept at Susie’s and threw up all night. The following day, I called my mom to tell her I had the flu and she needed to pick me up. She was sympathetic. I was hooked. Beer: another way to become unconscious, to drop out of life a little bit more. I quickly became an alcoholic because of bad genes and the fact that you can never get enough of what you don’t need.
I spent time in a mental hospital during my senior year of high school. I’d been a bulimic for nine years, and therapy wasn’t helping, especially since I spent my sessions discussing how fine I was and wasn’t the weather just lovely? Then one random Wednesday, I ate too much at lunch and thought I was going to die. To me, full equaled death. But I couldn’t find a place to throw up. So finally, right there in the middle of the senior hallway, I decided I was not fine, not at all. I walked into my guidance counselor’s office and said: “Call my parents. I need to be hospitalized. I can’t handle anything. Someone needs to help me.”
I was a student government officer to a class of close to a thousand. An athlete too. Relatively pretty. Smart. Seemingly confident. My Senior Superlative was “Leading Leader.” I was nominated for homecoming court and hosted pep rallies for four thousand classmates. People who need help sometimes look a lot like people who don’t need help.
That high school counselor called my parents, and they came right away. They found a place for me to get help. I often think about what that day must have been like for them. Maybe they desperately wanted to say: No, no it will be okay! Not a hospital! We are your parents! We can fix this! But they didn’t. The moment I became brave enough to admit I needed help, they believed me, and despite the shock, pain, and stigma, they gave me the exact help I requested.
There weren’t many eating disorder clinics back then, so I went to a real mental hospital. There were only two of us in the unit with eating issues. The others were there because they were schizophrenic, drug addicted, depressed, or suicide risks. Many of the patients had violent tendencies. I do not remember being afraid of any of them. I do remember being afraid, in one way or another, of everyone in my high school.
There was art therapy and dance therapy and group therapy. It all made sense to me. The things the other patients said made sense to me, even though they weren’t things that my peers in real life would have ever, ever said. There were rules about how to listen well and how to respond. There were lessons about how to empathize and where to find the courage to speak. I enjoyed these lessons much more than my high school classes. They seemed important. We learned how to care about ourselves and about each other.
I trembled the morning of my release. I knew I wasn’t ready, but that I had to go anyway, because I would never be ready. Inside the hospital was so much easier and safer and surer than outside the hospital. Life made sense to me in there. On the outside, it seemed every man was for himself.
I did leave, though. We all had to.
I graduated from high school and went off to college, where I added pot to my list of hole-filling strategies. That did not go well either. My friends and I would sit down and start smoking and everyone else would giggle and munch and RELAX, and I would immediately panic. My eyes would dart frantically around the room, and I’d begin peeking behind the door every forty seconds, certain that the police or my parents were on their way. Everyone would laugh and say, “What is WRONG with you?” and I would cry because everyone was laughing at me and I didn’t know why.
My purpose in bingeing, drinking, and drugging was to stop thinking, and smoking made me think hard and crazy. Also, being stoned with other people is excruciating for a naturally paranoid, high-self-monitor like me. It has always been important to me to act right. I’m a people pleaser, a dancing monkey, always concerned with how everyone is feeling about me. But when I was stoned, I couldn’t remember how to act. I think that might be the point of being high—to stop acting and just enjoy yourself already—but this was an impossibility for me. I was completely paranoid about what I should do versus what I was actually doing. I made my friends pay close attention to me and offer frequent updates while I was high.
Pull your earlobe if I’m talking too loud. Check every ten minutes to make sure I haven’t peed my pants. Should I say hi to that person? What would I do normally? Would I stand up? Shake her hand? Hug her? Stay seated? Do I like that person? Does she like me? These pretzels are making me thirsty!
Pot did not fill the hole. It stretched it even wider, made me more insecure than ever. It was time to move on to hallucinogens. Enter magic mushrooms.
If pot made me paranoid, shrooms made me completely insane. One night I stayed home, shrooming by myself, and I spent the entire evening conversing with Carmen Electra. She jumped right out of the poster on my boyfriend’s wall and sat down in her hot pants to keep me company in my hot pants. We were both concerned about our life choices and confident about our fashion choices, so we found some real camaraderie. Nice girl, that Carmen. And although I really loved and appreciated her that night, it was clear (the next day) that she was not God.
Then one day, like an evil prince on a white horse, cocaine trotted into my nonlife. Cocaine was the one I’d been waiting for. Cocaine was a Dream. Cocaine came damn close to filling me up. For a few hours, it erased my insecurities. It made me funny and energized and fabulous and charming, and like I was in on a secret. When cocaine was available, which was always, ten or twelve of us would gather in the back room at a party and do lines all night. The party would rage on outside the door, but we wouldn’t leave that room until all the cocaine was gone. Then a friend and I would sneak away to his room, crush his prescription ADD pills, and snort them. I have no idea what effect this had besides helping us concentrate on how wasted and wired and incredibly stupid we were.
I’d do anything to stay UP, because when I came down, I’d remember my hole, and it’d be bigger than ever. But no matter how frantically I’d fill myself with whatever was available—booze, drugs, boys—the sunrise would come. I hated the goddamn sunrise. The sunrise was God stopping by every morning to shine light on my life, and light was the last thing I wanted. So I’d close every blind and try to sleep through daybreak. I’d lie down, heart racing from all the speed, bed spinning from all the booze, and I’d stare at the ceiling and think. I’d think of my parents getting up to go to work to pay for the classes I wasn’t taking. I’d think of my friendships that were falling apart. I’d think about Sister, to whom I wouldn’t even speak, since I couldn’t answer her simple question: How are you doing? I’d think about how I had no money, no plans for the future, a deteriorating body, mind, and soul. My brain would torture me for hours, while that sun rose, while the rest of the world started their day. Their day. I had no day. I only had night. Those were the worst moments of my life—those sunrises in my college boyfriend’s bed.
During one of those sunrises, I sat on the couch alone and looked around the filthy, dark room. I was living there with him because all of my friends had graduated and gone on to careers and life. They were leading their light-filled lives, and I was still in a dark basement. I thought seriously about killing myself that morning. Suicidal thoughts are a neon flashing sign that you’re using the wrong hole filler.
• • •
I like to compare God’s love to the sunrise. That sun shows up every morning, no matter how bad you’ve been the night before. It shines without judgment. It never withholds. It warms the sinners, the saints, the druggies, the cheerleaders—the saved and the heathens alike. You can hide from the sun, but it won’t take that personally. It’ll never, ever punish you for hiding. You can stay in the dark for years or decades, and when you finally step outside, it’ll be there. It was there the whole time, shining and shining. It’ll still be there, steady and bright as ever, just waiting fo
r you to notice, to come out, to be warmed. All those years, I thought of God and light and the sun as judgmental, but they weren’t. The sunrise was my daily invitation from God to come back to life.
But I wasn’t ready. Not yet. So God and the sun continued their vigils while I continued to scoop food, alcohol, and drugs into myself for nearly a decade. I graduated from college, which makes me simultaneously grateful to and suspicious of my alma mater. I became a teacher. My love for my students filled me up for eight hours a day and I won awards for teaching. I was what they call a “highly functional addict.” It’s worth repeating that sometimes people who need help look nothing like people who need help. Outside of school, I continued to self-destruct. I maxed out my credit cards trying to fill myself up at the mall. I confused sex with love and wound up pregnant. I found myself home alone, after a bewildering day at an abortion clinic. The hole just kept getting bigger, and I was disappearing inside it. I met Craig, but after a few months, I started wondering if we were taking each other down. We were both drinking and drugging constantly.
Then one day, several months into our relationship, I woke up sick as a dog. It was Mother’s Day, 2002, and I was twenty-five years old. Once again, I stumbled to the drugstore and bought a pregnancy test, came home, and peed on the stick. I stared down at my shaking hands for three long minutes and thought: Nothing. I thought nothing.
I looked down at the test and saw that it was positive. Positive. I was pregnant. I was a hopeless bulimic, alcoholic, drug addict who was about to become a mother. And I prayed something. I don’t know what. I just prayed, there on the floor. Help me. Oh God, help me.
Carry On, Warrior Page 2
