You are so loved

On grace

This week, for the last of my posts about addiction, I want to speak about grace.

Meme by @fucking_sober on Instagram

In order to speak about grace, I need to first be very clear about something. It’s true that I just celebrated ten years sober, and I’m very proud of it. But my path to this point has been an absolute mess. For the first eight or so years (!!!) of my sobriety, I was pretty much a dry drunk—meaning, I wasn’t drinking anymore, but I hadn’t recovered from the emotional and spiritual emptiness that had led me to drink in the first place.

When dry drunks quit drinking, they simply find other ways to try to fill the hole, other ways to keep checking out, and in my case, it was overwork. I’ve told this story here before: I would wake up at 5.30 or 6 every day and lock myself in a cupboard to write fiction for two or three hours, then do a long day’s work and hustle as a freelance writer and editor, then “unwind” in the evening by reading something as research for the novel I was writing.

My baseline feeling was despair—a desperate grasping for control. I was constantly straining away from the present moment, living for a future that didn’t exist and might never. I was barely more present in my life than I had been during my years of active alcoholism; I had simply found a more socially acceptable addiction to replace the alcohol.

And yes, there are mitigating factors. Los Angeles is an expensive place to live, and my skillset as a writer and editor isn’t particularly lucrative, at least not the way I was going about it. I was struggling to keep my head above water, and I was all too aware that there’s no safety net in the United States. Meanwhile, I wanted to keep my creativity alive; I didn’t want that part of me to be chewed up by the American economy.

What I didn’t see was that the creative work I was producing was not good; that because I was straining so hard against the truth of my life, I wasn’t able to create work that said anything valuable about life. I could have saved myself hours of useless toil every day by being honest with myself, by admitting that none of this was working.

And so even though I had quit drinking, my life was slowly falling apart. I played a very large part in destroying my marriage through my monomania about work, and I was also making myself sick, developing an autoimmune condition and extreme hormonal imbalances in response to the stress.

But what’s all this got to do with grace?

This week, I was reminded of the beginning of Dante’s Inferno:

     Midway in the journey of our life
I came to myself in a dark wood,
for the straight way was lost.

Every time I read that stanza, my heart stops. Because oh, that moment. When you look up and see—when you finally admit—that you’re lost in the dark woods. By that point, some part of you has probably known that you were lost, perhaps for some time. Subconsciously, you’ve been registering the darkness; the fact the path petered out long ago; that you don’t seem to be getting anywhere. But you’ve kept your eyes glued to the ground, kept reaching for the bottle or setting your alarm for 5.30, determined to find a way forward anyway.

Having come to himself, Dante realizes he has sleepwalked into precisely these dark woods, and that he now finds himself at the foot of a steep hill, with no way forward and only dread and the dark, wild, rough forest all around.

Sound familiar?

But this epic poem is a comedy—a story that ends in resolution and harmony—and the resolution begins right here, in the dark woods. Because now Dante looks up, and he sees the sun’s guiding light—and he turns. He turns back to look at the dread, dark pass he’s just been walking. He looks at it from a different angle. And in that moment, a different path begins to open itself to him.

My former teacher and friend Valentin Gerlier notes that the most important word in the whole Divine Comedy is “turn.” Dante’s path changes—he begins to find his way out of the dark woods—when he turns. Later, when he takes his tours of hell and purgatory, the only difference between the sinners stuck in hell and those in purgatory is that the latter have repented. As Val points out in his teaching, the Ancient Greek concept of repentance—metanoia—literally means to change your mind. It’s simply to turn around and look at something in a different way.

And you can turn at any point in life.

At any moment, you can look up and admit that you are lost in the dark woods and you need help; that you need to find a different way.

And when you do that, the sun is always waiting to reveal itself to you. The light-filled path is waiting to open.

This is grace. This is the world rooting for your flourishing. This is the unfaltering light and love that are the deepest truth of life, beyond and beneath all the violence and suffering and trauma responses.

And it’s so hard to believe in. Especially if the Christian connotations of sin and repentance and grace bring you up in a rash. Especially if you were born in a culture where sometime in the past, God was conceived as a punisher and a place in heaven was conceived as something you had to earn through hard, unceasing graft.

I know how hard it is, because I’m only just beginning to believe it myself. That’s why my path to recovery has been so long, so tortured, so circuitous. That’s why I had to turn so many times—once when I quit drinking at 29 and again when my life fell apart at 36 and in countless mini attempts in between—before I was finally able to let in the light, to accept help, to believe that I was never alone all along.

It’s so hard to believe that life itself is waiting to love us and embrace us, as soon as we choose the path of life—and yet I know now that it’s true. I know it because I’ve felt it myself; and because I see it happening every week in twelve-step meetings, when people finally admit they are powerless and their whole lives change; and because it’s been happening in my inbox these last few weeks.

Several of you have responded to these letters to say that you’re struggling with your own addictions; that you’re at the bottom of a dark well. And I hate knowing that anyone has found themselves there, but I am also overjoyed that you emailed. Because that’s it. That’s you, turning. That’s you, looking at things in a different way. That’s you, taking a step towards grace.

It’s never too late to turn, to admit you’re lost, to seek a different path, to ask for help.

It’s always a good time.

The sun is always shining, somewhere beyond the dark branches.

You are so loved.

xx Ellie