The Transmutation of Awareness Over Time

One drink in celebration

I once read, in a book on Chinese Medicine, that to have one drink in celebration completely cancels out any ill effects of alcohol.

This was such a delightful revelation in me. I had spent a decade sincerely struggling with alcohol – as the completely socially appropriate paper bag that I wore over my head.

A few years before I found this book, I had become an unstoppable fountain at the Literary Festival when a lady presented her book on women and drinking. I approached the table where she sat to meet and greet afterward, still visibly pouring tears, and I asked her to sign the wet notes I had taken during her talk.

She asked me out to lunch.

Then with my full consent, she took me to my first and only AA meeting.

AA wasn’t where I needed to be and we didn’t stay in touch, but she celebrated my willingness in a way that turned the dial way way up.

I did seek a variety of support after that and somewhere in there, I made a pact with myself to alter my relationship with alcohol by age 25 and to release it from my life by 35. This agreement was slightly arbitrary but also intensely deliberate. I knew I needed not to punish myself – not to cut myself off from a substance as kin to me as breath in those days.

I knew I needed to celebrate what was possible and allow transformation. I knew there was a wise mind living inside the escape artist I was portraying – a very human being.

I cannot say how I knew these things but only that they came to me in waves of celebration during moments free from guilt and shame.

I am not thirty-five yet, and sometimes I still have enough drinks to make an adamant headache. The headaches these days have a spaciousness about them though. The spaciousness has replaced what used to be panic.

I used to wake up soggy, groggy, and often still wasted, full of fear and eager to try again at finding the line between pleasure and pain. I would sleep through the morning, wait out the afternoon, and enter the evening hungry for another attempt at tight-rope walking.

I could say that I failed so so so so so many times, however, this simply is not true. I succeeded in showing myself where the pain lived and revealing to others what it looked like and sounded like in me when liberated.

For years friends stood by me as I obliterated my conscious mind and regularly shouted obscenities focused on how much I hated them. This, in between occasions of oppositely outrageous presence – the life of the party.

The truth was I both loved and hated myself in equal measure. I was living a very balanced life.

In retrospect, I seem to have been shimmying myself into the narrow expanse between the lines of the equal sign. I was dissolving myself into the center point of the infinity symbol.

I was inherently involved in a mutative process of learning to appreciate the process and to release all expectations. I was learning to rave in a continuous way and get so high on life that substances would lose their shiny appeal.

But don’t tell that to twenty-year-old me, because she will flip you off… and maybe even spit in your face.

I’ve mutated beyond what I could have ever imagined back then – back then when I particularly inhabited bathroom floors and back then when I made that contract with my conscious self to adapt my relationship with alcohol over time.

I had no idea this expression of a person would emerge and I continue to have no real clue who she will become. That doesn’t scare me very much at all anymore, which is probably why the not-drinking feels fairly easy.

I’m not writing as some rampage against other people’s use of substances or as any kind of lecture. I’m writing this because it feels like a celebration inside me. And because when you search the word celebration the most common images are balloons or confetti and a pair or collection of clinking glasses.

So it feels important to me to note, as I contemplate the subject of celebration, how transformative life is, and how full of ease the transformation process has felt when anchored in celebration.

The word celebration to me now is much different than it was a decade ago. A decade ago I would have felt my stomach clench in anticipation of making choices at the liquor store and the ever-present worry that I wouldn’t obtain enough.

Today the word celebration still itches a place in me that loves to consume delicious food and beverage, at the same time though, it evokes a deep replenishing breath that underscores my life as a consumer.

Celebration is liberation in my life now – akin to gratitude. The kind of gratitude that unravels tensions in such a grounded way there is no hangover to contend with.

In celebration, the many riveting characters within me assemble to commemorate and honor with an attitude of joy.