BY T AMM I SCOT T
Dear Love, I wonder if I'll ever stop running and hiding from you? I've learned it's possible to do both, to stand still in the face of love's offering. I can deflect with humour and self-deprecation. I can play dumb or obtuse and pretend you are not being offered. I can ignore or overlook you. I can even head you off at the pass to repel or sabotage you. Bob & weave, stick & jab, or just turn and push you away. It's not your fault I do this. I had mixed messages about you from a very early age. Love and pain. Love and neglect. Love and indifference. Love and shame. It fractured me and sent me in many different directions looking for safety, acceptance and belonging from mostly the wrong people, mostly wrong places, and mostly wrong things So many things. I looked to marriage and motherhood, to books and movies, to the right clothes and hair, to the flashy friends and acquaintances, to the right dance clubs and other men when my marriage failed. Deep down inside I think I gave up on you because none of the love, connection and belonging I looked for in real life ever resembled the romance or true connection in novels or the love stories in movies.
I mean sure, I had the solid gold love of my grandmother, Mimi, while growing up. She's a big part of how I survived my childhood. But my Mimi couldn't be my soulmate. No matter how many times she insisted she was my "boyfriend" as a little girl because she didn't want me chasing boys. So I gave up on you. Then a shockingly weird thing happened one day nearly 25 years ago. I walked into a 12 step recovery meeting for the first time as a condition of outpatient treatment I was directed to after seeking help with a psychiatrist for depression. It seems I was utterly clueless {in denial may be a better phrase} about the role of drugs and alcohol in my life since the age of 11. It was in the meeting where I admitted I was an alcoholic and an addict. I was as low as I'd ever been in my life, deeply dysfunctional and desperately unhappy. I was looking for help with my newly realized substance abuse and found you, i found love. A love I never knew existed because I'd never read about it, seen it nor felt it, so I didn't know to dream for it.
AUGUS T 202 1 • HOL A SOB E R |
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