Recovery isn’t a one-size-fits-all process. There’s no universal formula, no guru with all the answers. The only thing that matters is what actually brings you back to YOU, your true essence, your original wholeness.
In this edition of ESH we gather the flash moments —the split-second where a life turns, cracks, or demands the truth. Five writers. Five turning points. Recovery from anything that disconnects us from ourselves.
No More
by Paul Haney
When spring break came amid a blurry winter, and I went out that first Friday with my husband and some friends to a fancy dinner where I tipped back a few espresso martinis, followed by a couple boilermakers at the craft cocktail lounge, and back home hit that Romanian moonshine straight from the bottle our Irish friend had left us, and at 3 am crawled to the toilet to part ways with my stomach, I decided I wasn’t going to do it anymore, that I wasn’t going to spend my week off sick and hungover, full of self-loathing for how I’d misspent the energy I’d set aside for writing, and yoga, and mindful serenity while instead meting out the day’s dosage of brews and cocktails, the hair of the dog, and I resolved to quit for good this time, repercussions be damned – the strain on my marriage rooted in booze, the bar-scene friends fated to fade from my view, the long evenings on the couch watching basketball amid bouts of shallow breathing, ever-creeping fears, visits from gremlins I’d been sating since that party in high school, our parents out of town, my older brother tossing me a six-pack of Miller Lite and I drank them all before passing out on the bathroom floor; since rear-ending that car at 19 – four whiplashed passengers, swirling sirens, a hazy night in jail – fifty hours community service plus six months’ probation and I was back on the scene; since the serrated relationship with my brother, who must’ve felt at least as impotent as I did as we watched our father drink himself away – all those gremlins whose faces appeared toothy and taunting in the warped lens of my intoxication yet with time and patience revealed themselves not as gremlins at all but phantom selves, masquerading as who I was but couldn’t be anymore, so I said no, I wasn’t going to the bar with its patrons nattering over the Celtics game, or the craft brewery with its sopping hops and chuffing puppies, or the liquor store owned by the lovely Pakistani family who always called me “boss,” which was exactly what I wasn’t, not to the bottles clanging on the counter, and not to the chasm I’d been attempting to fill for two decades now with alcohol, because I was done with the punishment, the self-flagellation, and that’s when I stopped hallucinating.
I’m still waking up today.
Follow and subscribe to Paul Haney's Musical Meltdown where you’ll find Bob Dylan musings, original songs, contemplations on craft and creativity in writing, music, art and more. Originally from Orlando, Paul Haney is a queer writer and educator in the Boston area. His work has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Normal School, Rumpus, Fourth Genre, Potomac Review, and elsewhere. He serves as Executive Editor of the Dylan Review, a scholarly journal of Bob Dylan studies.
Two Worlds
There are two worlds within me. One, the rural place I come from, the place my soul knows best, is that of a summer sun that takes its time slipping away. When the stars emerge in a night sky that has remained dark all this time, they do so knowing that in far away places, city lights erase their shine.
This is also the place where I squatted with my mother in the cold, empty house that used to be ours. The house where my father left us after he succumbed to his vices, and by that, I mean he chose his addiction over us. The house where my sister and brother and I grew up beneath the press of his oil-stained thumb, learned to cower beneath his rage and bend to his will.
When the main diagnosis is generational poverty—addiction, abuse, and mental illness its side effects—social mobility seems the obvious cure. I thought if I moved away, earned money, outgrew my circumstances, and found “success,” I would be free.
In my new world, I dated a rich guy whose home had nine bathrooms. I worked in a corporate city office, drank expensive cocktails until I couldn’t stand. I spent my time and money on a façade, pretending to be from a middle class family like everybody else around me, and it worked for a time, until one drunken night took a wrong turn and I wound up in my bedroom at 4 a.m., lucky to be alive.
I finally heard the truth calling from the shadows, saying I’d never be happy in a world where I hid my past, because that would mean I’d never be known. If I really wanted to be free, I first had to stop doing what my father had done. I had to stop drinking the truth away.
I took a long trip and got lost—on a hike in the Austrian alps, where I saw what it meant to live simply and in peace; in the Australian bush, where I watched a group of wild macaws and ached for my family; on the sweltering streets of Sicily, where I wondered if my ancestors ever felt the way I did.
Nobody talks about how poverty leaves its grip on you. Because this erodes the very ethos of America, which is that hard work is rewarded with wealth. What I want to say is that the hardest working people I know are some of the poorest.
My mother with her willpower and talent in art; my brother, his humor and knowledge of cars; my sister, who can make anything with her bare hands. I might always be torn between the world I came from, and the one I’m in. Maybe there is power in knowing a greater breadth of struggles, in being able to code switch between social classes.
What do I know for sure? I never needed money to be free. I needed to see that love is what makes me rich.
Follow and subscribe to Michelle Polizzi on Sunday Drive for honest true stories about surviving hardship and finding meaning in darkness.
WHAT MY BODY WOULDN’T LET ME IGNORE
Today my massage therapist worked on my c-section scar from the surgery which initiated me into parenting a child with a rare genetic condition. My core tightens, reminiscent of the unsparing pelvic pain I felt five years ago after the birth of my fifth child.
I was on the cusp of forty and in crumbling health: my weight had ballooned well over two hundred pounds; I developed a persistent cough that flared my asthma; I often sprouted body rashes that set my nerves on fire.
But the pelvic pain left me clutching my abdomen and forgetting to breathe.
Five years ago I cooked dinner in phases, which went like this: wash and chop vegetables, then sit for an hour; rise to brown meat and rest again; later assemble the meal and serve seven people. While at the stove, I clutched my abdomen when the sharp, stabbing jolts ran through my midsection. Often, everything below the waist went numb.
Sleep eluded me. The pain never subsided, whether I lay down, stood or walked. I tried pelvic floor therapy with mixed results, temporary estrogen treatment for low hormones, completed a round of antibiotics for a cervical staph infection. My pelvic ultrasound appeared “unremarkable,” my OB-GYN had said.
When the waves of pain finally passed, I’d notice blood clots in my underwear or in the toilet.
“Totally normal,” I was told.
Not normal for me.
It took me six months to decide I’d had enough of abusing my body and ignoring its signals for change. When I walked into my OB-GYN’s office and demanded a hysterectomy, he hesitated. I made it clear I wasn’t asking; I had already decided. He finally agreed. After the surgery, he discovered endometriosis on my rectum. He also noted “a suspicious spot you might want to have a colorectal surgeon check out.”
Turns out, that suspicious spot was a precancerous polyp that, had I not undergone the hysterectomy, might still be growing unchecked inside my body.
Afterwards, I resolved to tend to myself, to become the woman I wanted to be. At the time, I bathed in a self-loathing that opened my days with five words, “Why are you still here?” I did not like my appearance or the fact that I was chronically fatigued or drowning in a meaningless existence. And always, the pain.
The pain became my guidepost.
I walked once around the block every day. Over time, I added another block to my daily walk, then three, then four, until I was trekking a mile a day. I cut caffeine, sugar, and gluten from my diet, started lifting weights. I wrote again. I took naps. I said no more than I said yes.
I read books about trauma recovery and found a therapist who accompanied me through repressed memories. I tried EMDR and psilocybin. I hired a functional nurse practitioner.
Today I know that resilience is what happens when I choose to rise every time I fall. Recovery is my pathway to rediscovering my inner strength, the truth my body wouldn’t let me ignore.
Follow and subscribe to Jeannie Ewing at I Grow Strong Again a refuge for those who feel vulnerable, raw, or choose to share their stories.
A Daughter’s Truth
When I was almost four, my mother was exiled from my home and my life. It was late at night — loud and volatile, my father full of rage. She had betrayed him.
We lived upstairs from my paternal grandparents, and my father quickly gathered his allies to cast my mother out of my memories. His family, friends, and neighbors all saw him as the “good parent.” After all, it was my mother who had abandoned me. She became the outcast that no one talked about except in hushed whispers when they thought I couldn’t hear.
My mother dared to show up on my fifth birthday and by then my father had remarried. His pacing and clenched jaw told me that my mother was not welcome there. I wasn’t supposed to love her anymore. I wasn’t allowed to.
My mother faded out of my life, eventually sending cards and letters that I never received. I was helpless to change the situation. I couldn’t ask for her. I couldn’t even grieve. It didn’t take me long to learn- to know- that my father’s love was contingent upon me rejecting her. I never uttered Mommy again.
But the secret I kept hidden was that I hadn’t rejected her. I may have been coerced into obedience, but I didn’t believe she was bad or worthless, or that she didn’t love me. I knew something sinister was at work, and it scared me silent, but I was sure my mother was not the cause. Decades later, a therapist would tell me I had dodged a bullet. I had held onto my truth.
It would take me a long, long time to speak my truth, and even longer to figure out who to speak it to, and how. When you’ve lived in someone else’s narrative for as long as you can remember, there are many people who would like you to stay there. They will insist you stay there. This isn’t surprising; you’ve known all along what you risk by telling your own story.
The threat of rejection loses its power over time, though. It’s not that I’ve built my strength as much as I’ve uncovered it. To be able to say to oneself, If I am made the villain by speaking my truth, then so be it, is a powerful antidote to trauma. Today, I can speak my truth without fear or anger.
Follow and subscribe to Minimal Monday and uncover your creative power. Dana Laquidara is the author of The Uncluttered Mother: Free Up Your Space, Mind & Heart and YOU-KNOW-WHO: An Alienated Daughter’s Memoir.
What Is Wrong With You?
What I Was Asked Most As a Child.
I was a boy born in the early ‘80s to a lower-class rural Midwest family. I was also the runt of the litter, born to 40-year-olds who partied hard their whole lives. There were things that were wrong with me - such as ENT issues that you develop growing up in a house of smokers - but those were not the problems.
The problem wasn’t even that I couldn’t play catch and baseball very well. It was that I wasn’t interested in it. “Introvert/extrovert” wasn’t a concept then. I was the greatest sin that could have ever been created. I was a left-handed, masc-neutral, bordering feminine, a boy who could think. I was treated as a wet blanket of a child.
Adults love little kids who are easily impressed. I didn’t care about that thumb thing you did, because the dude over there already done it. I was the kid who could ruin a joke by questioning why it should be funny. Nobody likes a child who can call their bullshit.
School was no better. I was from “that” family. Kids were told not to play with me by their parents.
I sold my soul to the Navy to get out of town, after high school. I scored well enough on the tests to make it into the prestigious Naval Nuclear Power Training Command. BEST DECISION EVER!
I was thrown into a hive of uber nerds. For the first time ever, I was the dumb one. It was a great wake-up call. It let me know how smart I was and exactly how smart I was not. I may have been intellectually in the Top Ten, but I was at the bottom of that. It’s good for a gifted to be humbled.
The best part, I got to be around people with similar interests. For the first time ever, I was connecting with other people over computers and technology. I learned that a lot of what I was told growing up was just a bubble of rural bullshit.
These new friends helped me realize that my interest was in writing. I loved music, I was great with rhyme, so I chose to move to Nashville to be a songwriter. I worked as a paralegal by day and made the rounds as a writer at night.
I wound up talking my way into an inner circle of writers, which led to me performing in theater, doing a little ghost hunting, and telling stories on stage at Nashville’s Zanies Comedy Club.
Sometimes, the only thing that is wrong with you is that the people you were surrounded with by birth were too limited to appreciate what you have to offer. Thank goodness for the internet, which allows us to find each other.
Neth is an award-winning paralegal who has turned his 20 years of professional research and writing into a full-time job. He has penned hundreds of articles for business firms, marketing companies, healthcare providers, and educational and licensing institutions. His poetry has been published in Stray Words Magazine (UK), Black Coffee Poetry (Australia), and Well-Read Magazine (US). His live storytelling can be seen on Youtube and his website. He has also performed on Nashville stages such as Zanies Comedy Club, the Center for the Arts, and Darkhorse Theater. He and his husband, Scott, have raised a daughter and are now caring for their three cats and three dogs while Neth is finishing his MS in Clinical Psychology. Follow and subscribe to Neth Williams at Nethwords.
ESH stands for Experience, Strength, and Hope
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Such refreshing real writing. Thank you. I am planning to make a note with this quote from Neth:
"Sometimes, the only thing that is wrong with you is that the people you were surrounded with by birth were too limited to appreciate what you have to offer. Thank goodness for the internet, which allows us to find each other" noting it came from ESH. Is ESH from the word fire in Hebrew AISH?
Thank you for these!