I've been thinking a lot about algorithms lately. I have had the experience multiple times on social media of seeing someone complain about having too much of something they don't want in their feed. I always chuckle a little and respond with, “you know how algorithms work, right?”

We always find what we're looking for. 

Lately, my feed has had a lot of people either in the early days of recovery or still in active addiction, either talking about how hard it is, or how ashamed they are, or just plain needing encouragement.

One of the great gifts of my life is that I know what to say to those people. In my experience, the ability to utilize your own struggles to help someone else is often what healing looks like. My cousin Mary and I used to call it putting work boots on your pain.

The very first time I ever told my story of recovery at a meeting, I kind of… didn’t. I told a lot of sad tales of things that happened to me, a bit about my drinking history, and then basically concluded it with, “Then I went to my first meeting and now I don’t drink anymore. The end!” I was just barely a year sober and honestly didn’t have all that much recovery to share, so I shared what I did understand–how awful it is to be an active alcoholic, and the reasons I genuinely believed I drank. I was so grateful my life had stopped getting worse, but in many ways it hadn’t yet really begun to get significantly better. Not my circumstances, anyway. And, while I was beginning to wrap my head around the damage I’d done, I was still way too close to the mountain to really see it, let alone take responsibility for it all.

It was a good experience for me, though I'm not sure it helped anyone hearing it. I didn't really understand my own story at that point.

When sober folks are gearing up to share their stories, they’re encouraged to tell their listeners, ‘what it was like, what happened, and what it’s like now.’ As I’ve grown in recovery, the balance of the way I tell it has shifted. 

Less mess, more message. 

Don’t get me wrong, it’s all important. Even the early, muddled versions. But today, I have the perspective and some hard-won wisdom that only time, distance, and work can forge. I have learned to use my story effectively so that it can be of maximum service to the still sick and suffering alcoholic, and be a fellow traveler to those who are walking the path of sobriety with me. My goal as a writer remains what it has always been, that people feel less alone after reading my work. Because trust me, no one feels more alone than an active alcoholic. Except, perhaps, for the people who love us.

This morning, I woke up with a clear head and an unashamed heart. I gave thanks for my life, a life which has been redeemed. Today marks eleven years of sobriety. That’s 4018 days of showing up for life. A life that has been rebuilt from the ground up, because I was a gut job.

I always write an essay on this day. Every year, I reflect on where I’m at and what I have learned. And the reality is, I have learned a lot. I think I always knew I would write a book about the ruin and redemption of alcoholism and sobriety. Those annual essays were my way of working up to it. I was scared, though. It felt too vulnerable–which, if you’re familiar with my work, is saying something.

When I finally completed the book and began submitting the manuscript, I got the same feedback over and over again: It’s powerful and beautifully written, but no one knows who you are and non-celebrity memoir is not really a thing anymore. 

It makes sense that books written by famous people are easier to sell. We have decided that those people are special, and that their lives are extraordinary. I get that. Reading about big lives can be thrilling, offer some escapism, and feel aspirational. I’m just not sure how helpful any of that is for a regular person who cannot stop drinking. 

When I got sober and began hearing people tell their stories, I was taught to identify and not to compare. It was a difficult and powerful lesson, because I was still frantically looking for loopholes. I was desperate to be different because if I was different then maybe there was a way for me to stop annihilating my life without giving up alcohol. If the only stories I was listening to were of moguls, rock stars, or athletes snorting coke off an escort’s ass in Studio 54 or someone living under a bridge with a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20 in a brown paper bag, it would have been so easy to say, “Well, that’s not ME.”  I could and did disregard the experiences of people I thought were better or worse off than I was. 

I was taught this way of thinking stems from a belief that I am terminally unique. Initially, I heard the unique part without clocking the implication of the attending adverb. Now, I get it. In recovery, I’ve seen a lot of special folks die, because they were unwilling to accept that their disease is not different. They weren’t the exception, and neither, thank God, am I. Because the disease of addiction, unarrested, has one trajectory. 

As I stayed sober longer, I began to realize that being one of many, just like all of the other folks trying to live sober in a drunk world, was a gift. Now, when I mentor other women in recovery, one of the first things I let them know is that I don’t work with ‘special’ alcoholics. I don’t know anything about them, and have nothing to offer. Now, if they’re a garden variety drunk? I’m their girl. I can teach them what was taught to me. I have been in that same hole. I know that despair. They have to do the climbing, but I have a map and a flashlight, and I know the way out. 

A few months ago, I was visiting my mom in the nursing home. I was waiting outside her room while she was doing physical therapy, and an old man came scooting down the dreary linoleum tiled hallway in a wheelchair. As he neared me, he told me he’d been hit by a drunk driver. He followed that by saying, “This is Cape Cod. Everyone’s drunk,” which made me laugh. He gruffly told me he hadn’t had a drink in 37 years. I smiled and told him I hadn’t had a drink in over ten. He scoffed and said, in his glorious Boston accent, “That’s not that impressive, but it’s a good start.” 

It is.

I was born on December 15, 1970. I decided to live on June 16, 2015. I wrote the final page of this latest book on my anniversary last year, when I celebrated a decade of recovery. It chronicles my life from my first drink in childhood up to my tenth sober anniversary. I explore the awful depths of active alcoholism, and the difficult, beautiful, and transformational work necessary to climb out of it. My hope is that it helps those outside of addiction better understand the bleak landscape we alcoholics and addicts traverse, and that it demystifies the recovery process for those who seek to save their lives.This is an invitation to those who are still gripped by addiction, and a companion to those who are living life in recovery. I have been where you are.

I believe the very thing that makes this story a tough sell to traditional publishing is what makes it useful, but perhaps you have to be in recovery to understand that. I believe this book will find its way into the hands of the people who need it in the same way recovery is passed along in its purest form – from one alcoholic to another.

I came into the world an ordinary girl. Sadly, even the traumatic experiences of my life are ordinary. I wish they weren’t, but they are. Those things likely contributed to alcohol feeling like a solution out of the gate, but there are plenty of people who have been through what I've been through and don't drink the way I did. 

Maybe that’s because some of us are just born a little thirsty.

I became an ordinary alcoholic. That used to feel like a curse, but today, on this beautiful June morning, I’m not so sure.

Born Thirsty: The ruin and redemption of a garden variety drunk, will be available on December 1, 2026. I can't wait to send it out into the world.

As always on this day, I am wrecked with gratitude for the life I am living and the fellowship of people who have shown me how to live it with some measure of grace.

We do recover.

For now, if you are wondering if you have a problem with alcohol, come sit with me. If you know you do, but cannot believe your life can be different, maybe come rest for a minute. If you’re sober and need, as we all do, to be reminded you’re not alone, let’s walk together. My hand in yours.

Onward,

Laura

Archaeology is the study of past human life and culture through the discovery and analysis of material remains. Sometimes what’s being studied is grand and impressive, like the ornate and treasure-filled tombs of pharaohs or the pyramids of ancient Peru. But many times, the sites and artifacts are more mundane—simple pottery, tools, and art, often in shards or scraps. That’s the reason archaeologists sift. For every minute treasure, there is a metric ton of detritus and sand. They call it back-dirt. For every meaningful artifact, there are acres of useless rubble - but you have to go through it all to determine what’s what.

When I was going through my divorce, I was in one of the deepest seasons of grief in my life. When a woman loses her husband to death, there is an understanding that she’s grieving the life they had and also the life they won’t. When a woman loses a husband to betrayal, the grief is no less deep, and often more complicated. Because there’s more sifting. What was real? What wasn’t? Did any of this have value, or was this all fool’s gold? It was a deeply painful process for me, and left me in despair.

We all only know each other’s lives from the outside. Even with those closest to us, we know what they share. We know what we see. But there’s always more to the story. There’s context and nuance and secrets. There are unknown dreams, imperceptible pain, frustration, and disappointment. We all carry undiscovered ruins.

I’ve spent the past few days sifting through the remains of my mother’s life: going through boxes of notebooks, photos, cards, and recipes, and letting the utility bills, unused gift cards, and medical records slip through my fingers. I remember turning to my sister while we were sitting by my mother’s bedside and saying, “She’s had her last worry.” I was so happy for her. All those things that cause stress and loom large mean nothing in the end.

Some of this is treasure. Hours passed as I pored over my mother’s journals and notebooks. Several are filled with quotes—some grouped by author, some by topic. All in her elegant, slanted handwriting. The beauty of those notebooks is that because she took the time to write out these quotes and attributions, I know they meant something to her. I have similar notebooks. My first blog was titled, “In Others’ Words” and each post was inspired by a quote that was meaningful to me. Flipping through her collection, I was struck by how much overlap there was. The same writers, the same words. I remember a former partner once telling me that I was very like my mother. He said it to get under my skin and it worked, but surrounded by her art and her inspiration, I am left with the unalterable fact that I am very much Elizabeth’s daughter.

Some notebooks contain her own writing. My mother was known for the long letters she would write—she always called them epistles—but she also wrote poetry. I came across one of her poems and called my sister Aimee immediately to read it to her. I read the final version, but then went back and told her that our mom had eliminated a “you” and added an “ing” to the verb instead. My sister (an incredibly talented writer) chuckled and said, “That’s a good edit.”

My mother gave us the gift of creativity. Did we inherit some innate abilities from her? Probably. But the bigger gift was the way she centered creativity in our lives. She wrote. She painted. She read incessantly. She was really into photography for a while. And she encouraged it in us. She drove us to practice, rehearsals and performances. She attended our homespun plays and dance performances. There are likely plenty of people who would look at the way we grew up and feel judgment for the lack of some basic necessities. Hell, for many years I was one of them. Why pay for dance lessons when there’s no electricity? How do you make the case for flute lessons when there’s precious little food in the cabinets? I’m never going to cosign the notion of hardship doled out as an object lesson, but I will say that the gifts of art and music have woven tendrils throughout my life that are at least as impactful as the burden of scarcity has been.

I am who I am because Elizabeth is my mother.

I think we forget our parents are human beings. That they had whole lives before we were here and whole lives WHILE we are here. Lives whose borders extend beyond, above, and below us. We reduce our parents to the job we think they did raising us. Our review is myopic. That’s not a judgment, it’s simply a fact. Our parents have internal and external lives to which we are not privy. They have both dreams and trauma we know nothing about. We make proclamations that we’ll do things differently, and by differently, we mean right. We’re so certain. Then, often, we either repeat the pattern, or course-correct too drastically.

I did both.

I wasted so much time being angry, and there were years when my relationship with my mom was a struggle. Perhaps the thing I am most profoundly grateful for is that I stayed in it and did my work. I had things to own. I had to make my own mistakes and fail people. I had to find humility. I had to allow for others to be fully human. I had to accept that those people were doing their best. Always. Even when it didn’t feel that way. Even when harm was done. Even when feelings were hurt. I needed time and distance to examine my memories and the willingness to turn them around and look at them from different angles and with softer eyes. I had to be open to more generous interpretations of stories I’d become attached to, stories that had become part of my identity. Stories I’d attached value to. Stories I’d made precious.

Perhaps I even needed the experience of being an unforgiven parent to forgive mine. I am so grateful I didn’t tap out when it was hard or when I was hurt and self-righteous.

When my mother was in the nursing home, I saw how we treat the elderly and the sick. It’s unforgivable, really. We strip away their dignity. We reduce them. My mother was a spitfire, and gave as good as she got. She asserted her independence at every opportunity. She bristled when staff called her honey and sweetheart, and was furious when they talked about her instead of to her. I am grateful to have had the opportunity and ability to advocate for her, to stand up for her, and to sit alongside her.

When we were given her diagnosis of dementia, I turned toward her. I expected her to balk, but she didn’t. I reached over and took her hand. We locked eyes, and years of back-dirt fell away. All that remained was what mattered: love.

I asked the head nurse if I could bring in some of her paintings and hang them on the wall in her room. I wanted them to know she was more than symptoms and conditions. That she was a whole person, a person with gifts and talents who’d lived the width and breadth of a life.

When my sisters were packing up my mother’s apartment, they set aside her paint box for me. I’m so grateful for that. I’ve been stuck since she died. The motivation to be creative has felt inaccessible. I haven’t worked on my novel, I abandoned final edits on my recently completed book. I stopped querying agents. I set aside a painting I was working on. None of it felt like it mattered in the face of this loss, but the truth is, the death of my mother lends a sense of urgency to it. While life is fragile and finite, a legacy of love, beauty, and art is not.

I completed the painting the other day. I’m proofreading the novel. This morning I loaded my paints and brushes into the battered, stained, beautiful pine box that housed my mother’s tools.

I went into my mother’s Facebook page and found this, her last post:

I feel her presence almost as keenly as I feel her absence. Every day, I’m listening to the music she loved. I remember the times she allowed me to wear her high heeled sandals as we all danced in the living room to Donna Summer, and the way she endured us playing the Flashdance soundtrack on a loop for the entire ten-hour drive to Virginia Beach one summer.

I’m turning the memories around in my hands because I’m willing to see all of it differently. I know what’s valuable. My understanding of her has become more expansive and more generous. I am consumed by the beauty of the life she lived. This grief, this sifting, is a gift.

Yes, I am deeply sad. Maybe even depressed. But I am also filled with gratitude for this opportunity to re-learn my mother. To discover parts of her, previously unknown. To let anything that is not love, compassion, or beauty fall away like ancient sand through a sieve.

I am Elizabeth’s daughter. I am proud to be her daughter.

I think about her all day, every day, and am filled with gratitude that those thoughts are not regrets. I was taught in recovery that whatever I stare at is magnified. I have learned over time to stare at the right things, and, in doing so, those memories and gifts, those artifacts of life with my mother, have become priceless.

Maybe, in the end, grief is simply falling in love backwards.

I'm beginning to thaw.

It has been a long, brutal, cold winter for anyone paying attention.

I am a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and sexual assault. For many years those things were closely held secrets—shame stories. In January of 2015, I wrote a blog about reclaiming that story with my cousin Mary. The post went viral, and overnight the story I'd protected for so long, the story I'd made precious, became public content.

It struck a chord because people were dying for the conversation. It struck a chord because so many survivors never name what happened to them, so we—they—I suffered alone.

When my story became our story, survivors began to offer up their stories to me. I woke up to stories of deep harm and trauma in comments, DMs, and emails every morning for a very, very long time. Something about the middle of the night made it safe for these people—overwhelmingly women—to shed light on what happened to them.

I was not yet sober, and had zero boundaries to speak of, so I felt the need to read, respond, and resource in real time. The fact that I had no wisdom or perspective to offer yet did not seem to matter. I could bear witness and encourage and validate. And because I got so much affirmation for my victorious reclamation, I felt the need to maintain that narrative. I was empowered. I was unashamed. I was HEALED.

That none of that was true was beside the point.

I was also an active alcoholic, and the attention, pressure, and vicarious trauma I absorbed in the aftermath of going public was…well, let’s just say it was an extremely efficient route to rock bottom. That is not a complaint or a bid for sympathy, it’s simply a fact. It was a devastating and painful time, and while I deeply regret the pain my unwellness caused others, I am also not sure I would change how any of it played out.

As I began my work of recovery, I truly began to heal. Healing is exhausting and painful and takes the time it takes. My cousin Mary and I co-founded a non-profit that focused on helping survivors reclaim their stories as part of the path to healing. We shared our story publicly, spoke to parent groups, and wrote articles. It was exhausting, inspiring, and frequently triggering work and I am grateful for every moment of it. Every survivor who attended one of our workshops, every story I read, every photo we posted in our survivors’ gallery, is tattooed on my heart.

As time went on and I began to better understand how to identify and prioritize my own self-care, I found the work more difficult, not less.

And then the Me Too social media phenomenon occurred. I am intentionally not saying Me Too Movement, because that began more than a decade earlier with Tarana Burke, an incredible activist, advocate, and survivor who brought and continues to bring awareness of and support to survivors of the sexual violence that disproportionately affects Black women and girls.

I was an unceasing voice for survivors when Twitter became flooded with conversation, choruses, and community around the subject of sexual abuse and assault. Many survivors dragged their stories into the light and felt empowered. There was also the inevitable backlash and vitriol that always seems to follow when women tell the truth about their own lived experiences. I spent hours online, reading, commenting, lambasting, and connecting people to resources.

My inbox was flooded again. It quickly became overwhelming, but because I was healthier this time, I set up an auto-reply that I would read the emails as I was able to, and included links to general resources. Even with those limits in place, it was a lot. I lost sleep, couldn’t eat, and the nightmares that had begun to recede re-emerged with a vengeance. Eventually, I set up an auto-reply that I was stepping away.

Over the years, in my work in behavioral health, I worked one-on-one with survivors who were trying to get sober, and learned about the insidious and evil world of human trafficking. I found working individually with survivors a more sustainable way to continue helping, so that’s where I focused my efforts. I have not centered my trauma or my recovery from it publicly in the way I initially did for several years now, because that felt right and true for me, and honoring the little girl I was—the one who fought so fucking hard to survive—and the woman I am—who could so easily not be here—finally matters to me more than anything I can do outside of myself.

I am writing about this today, because I have been reading the Epstein Files. You know, the ones where they redacted the names of powerful men but not of their victims? Human error, my ass. A more accurate statement is that I have been attempting to read them. I’ve been microdosing them, because there is a limit to how much poison I allow myself to consume these days.

I feel a responsibility to bear witness and to help survivors seeking a reckoning. I don’t say seeking justice because there won’t be any—justice is not the answer to injustice, it’s the absence of it. Justice would have looked like those girls and young women never being violated and trafficked and manipulated. Justice would look like men—politicians and princes, billionaires and gurus, entertainers and athletes—never deciding that their need to demean and dominate was more important than the dignity, safety, freedom, and fundamental human rights of women and girls.

I have opened my laptop dozens upon dozens of times to try and write about this and countless other egregious and devastating recent events, but I have been paralyzed. Frozen. As I have done my work to heal, I’ve learned that many traumatized people react to trauma and triggers with one of these unconscious coping mechanisms: fight, flight, fawn, or freeze. I have experienced all of them, but my go-tos are flight and freeze.

I have not yet figured out how to walk that line, but I will walk it nonetheless. I don’t have the right to bury my head in the sand, and neither do you. How we can stay in the conversation safely is a work in progress, but I am not afraid of work. If these women survived it, we sure as hell can talk about it.

One of the most profound truths I arrived at in all my years of working with survivors is that overwhelmingly, the system will always prioritize and protect the system, not the victim. That system might be your family, the Catholic Church, USA Gymnastics, the military, or the executive office—it’s all the same. That’s why we don’t let the system investigate the system. I would love to live in a world where the status quo wasn’t more precious to those in power than the physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being of a young girl, but I do not and neither do you.

To the survivors: I see you. I see the weight and the cost of having your trauma dissected and politicized by those who would discredit, ignore, or silence you. I know what it is like to have your truth questioned and minimized. I know it feels like walking through jello some days. Heavy. Slow. Pointless. Endless. I know the work to heal is twelve full-time jobs and yet we work and raise children and lift up our friends and fight to change things.

You are all miracles, and I believe in miracles.

Thawing is hard and painful, ask anyone who has ever had frostbite. But you can’t stay frozen. I can’t.

I will find my way to stay in the fight. You find yours. Take care of yourselves and I will, too. If you need to sleep, I’ll stay up.

“I do know that I don’t want to be ruled by ravenous anymore, and that full life is not the same as a full calendar. Full life is lived when the whole system works together, when rest and home and peace live hand in hand with taste and sparkle and go. I’ve believed in the craziness for too many years, and while I still have a lot of questions,

the answer I need to be giving most often these days is NO.”

Shauna Niequist

Can you feel it? The ramping up that inevitably begins before the Thanksgiving dishes are even put away? I walked into a store yesterday and got punched in the face by Christmas. It initially did what it is supposed to do. My brain went on auto-pilot: what do I need to do, what do I need to buy? I could feel that familiar Yuletide anxiety start to creep in. Only a few weeks left!!!!!!

Now, I’ve always loved Christmas. All of it – religious and secular alike. Advent, the Nativity, twinkle lights, decorations, carols, food, movies, Santa, and snow. Miracles, wonder, mystery, joy. I’m a sucker for all of it. I’ve historically been Buddy the Elf.

“I KNOW HIM!!!!!!!”

What I don’t love, what I reject more every year, is the stress. The hurry, hurry, hurry, consume, consume, consume. The shoulds. The musts. The striving. The noise. And I don’t mean the noise of children playing or Christmas music- I mean the noise in our heads. All the rush here, race there, do the things, bake the cookies, eat, drink, spend, wrap. PROVE. EARN. ACHIEVE. COMPARE.

We frantically careen through a season built for stillness and reverence.

Society has a tendency to judge those people who choose to reject the madness. I mean, most good holiday movies have a character like that, right? We tend to chalk it up to being a grouch, or miserly, or having lost the meaning of Christmas. And sure, there are the Mr. Potters from It’s a Wonderful Life who are truly terrible, but, I don’t know… I’ve always had a soft spot for His Grinchiness.

I do love a curmudgeon. I think in many ways, the Green One was onto something. Listen closely to what he says- he’s not ranting about Christmas at all. He expresses dismay over “packages, boxes, and bags” and extravagant feasts. He rails against the “noise, noise, noise, noise.” None of that is Christmas.

‘Tis the season, all right. The season of HUSTLE.

These few months are when I hear more, “I have to” and “I need to” about things that are completely voluntary than any other time of year. This time of year, when we could be focused on faith and family, miracles and peace, we engage in the Hardship Olympics like it’s our job. Like it’s our calling. Like it’s the point.

It has changed for me in the past few years. I think it started when I got divorced and deepened when I got sober. My relationship with the season of light has shifted. My Christmases have become smaller, quieter, more contemplative. I still cook and bake, because I love doing it. I still listen to the music and watch the movies. But I don’t race around, I don’t overspend, I don’t act like Christmas is a plot to rob me of my serenity.

Everything at this time of year is amplified. Highs are higher, lows are lower. If you’re lonely, and your algorithm is a loop of romance and connection and joy—you’re lonelier. In recovery circles, we call the stretch from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Eve the Bermuda Triangle. Alcohol is glamorized and centered in most adult gatherings. For the newly sober, it’s treacherous.

This season can also be particularly challenging time for survivors of childhood trauma. So much of our abuse happens within the family, and holidays often mean going home to the scene of the crime. Literally.

There’s generally an uptick in survivors needing resources, feeling a lot of anxiety. It’s important, in particular, for that community to be aware of their choice and agency and what is mandatory versus what is optional about the holidays.

Be ready, because I am about to blow your minds:

It is ALL optional. EVERY SINGLE BIT OF IT.

Every single event? Optional. Every gift? Voluntary. Every tradition? Discretionary. The percentage of ways you celebrate over which you have total agency? 100%

All of that overeating, drinking too much, spending money you don’t have? Those are all classic hustle symptoms- and hustle is all about not believing you are enough. Hustle is the antithesis of stillness. It’s what we do when we don’t want to feel- and if we don’t allow ourselves to feel during this of all seasons, what are we even doing?

The holidays are not happening to you. You are not a victim of Christmas. New Year’s Eve is not a plot to undermine your sanity. Your holidays can be calm and bright, or they can be the fifth circle of hell. It truly is almost entirely up to you. The manic hamster wheel of consumption, busyness, and perfectionism is not mandatory.

Yes, if you start saying “no” people might not dig it. Actually, they are almost certain not to dig it. When you start identifying your boundaries and insisting on what you need for your own well being, people will be annoyed, frustrated, disappointed and perhaps even angry. Here’s the thing, though-

Annoyance, frustration, disappointment and anger are not terminal- that’s the big secret.

They are all survivable conditions.

Now, obviously no one wants to upset or disappoint people they care about, but if nothing changes, nothing changes.

What I’m guessing, though, is that you’ll find the person putting the most pressure on you this holiday season is you- and that is great news, because you are, in fact, the only person whose behavior you control.

I just watched a Gilmore Girls episodes on Netflix. There was a scene in which the divine Emily Gilmore is purging her house of belongings. She cites a book she’s been reading; Marie Kondo’s The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up. in which readers are encouraged to go through their belongings, hold each one in their hands and ask themselves,

“Does this bring me joy?”

If not, out it goes.

What if we did that with the holidays? What if we examined each tradition, each event, each “should,” and truly considered whether it brought us joy? What if we really questioned whether it deepened our faith, strengthened our connections, filled us up?

“I have to bake 7 dozen cookies for Mikey’s class party.” Do you, though? Bet you don’t. Trust and believe, Mikey would rather have a mom who bought cookies and is in full possession of her faculties and not a lunatic at his class party.

Now, if baking 42 billion cookies makes you happy, do it. If it doesn’t, don’t. If attending a bunch of parties fills you up in some way, fantastic. If you’d rather stay home in a Snuggie and watch Love Actually, do that. If the bustle energizes you, wonderful. If you need stillness and quiet to truly appreciate the season of light, then for the love of all that is holy, be quiet.

And I know some of you will say, “It’s not that simple.” It actually is. It might be hard, but it is exactly that simple.

Your joy doesn’t need to look like anyone else’s.

And if while you are doing this holiday inventory, you find that some of the things you have always done are depleting you, making you angry and frustrated- if you’re more Joan of Arc than Buddy the Elf about them? You can bid those ‘musts’ and ‘shoulds’ farewell, send them on their way, and say, “Don’t let the wreath-clad door hit you in the ass on the way out!”

You’re going to have the holiday you choose, one way or another. You can keep hustling. That’s an option. Or you can slow down. You can say no to hustle in order to say yes to joy. You can move through this season with intention and wonder. You can come out of the season filled up rather than running on empty.

You really can.

Good enough is good enough.

That’s no doubt, at least in part, because I’ve shared so many of mine publicly. It has been my experience when I share something vulnerably, it emboldens other people who have stories that are begging to be told.

Before I got sober, I read the work of Anne Lamott and Glennon Doyle and Matt Bays and was so drawn to their writing about their battles with alcohol long before I was willing or able to admit my hopeless addiction. I talked with friends about how funny and soulful and relatable their work was as I sipped a bottomless glass of wine.

In college, I sat perched on the edge of a dorm bed listening to Oprah Winfrey talk about her sexual abuse in childhood decades before I was ready to reclaim that story for myself. I agreed with the other girls watching that she was brave and incredible even as I swallowed down the acidic shame that rose in my throat.

Spectators of my life at those times would have said I was fine.

I am frighteningly good at fine.

When I was fine, no one really came to me with their heavy stories. Now, fairly regularly I will get the odd text, “Hey–how are you doing?” My spidey senses perk up because I know what’s to follow is really how they’re doing. So, I ask.

Then, the tell-tale stop and start of the rippling ellipses that indicate a text response in progress.

Almost universally, she tells me her life looks great from the outside—shiny and happy—but she is in trouble. She is going through each day, being productive, crossing all of the things off all of the lists. She’s a mom, a wife, a girlfriend, a friend. A doer and a giver. She is frequently a pillar of the community–a caregiver, teacher, therapist, businesswoman, nurse, student, coach. She moves through her day, she smiles. She checks in on everyone else.

Her outside, the face she shows to the world, looks great.

But if you were to really look you might see the cracks. You might notice that the bones in her wrists coming out of the oversized sweater might be just a little too pronounced. You might think, “WOW! Is it GLP-1? Crossfit?” Or you might see her on the elliptical at the gym at a pace that seems almost manic, and think, “I wish I had that commitment.” If you came upon her in the locker room and caught her unaware, you might catch a glimpse of criss-cross scars, shiny and feathered across her belly or her thighs.

Maybe an angrier, more recent one.

I don’t know though, she’s pretty careful.

You might notice she’s always the one to suggest drinks. Mimosas at the kids’ bus stop? Paint and sip? “Book club.”

If you were standing quite close to her you might pick up on the fact that her eyebrows were mostly drawn in with pencil and take note of the fact that you’re pretty sure that wasn’t always the case.

Our brains are miraculous. They really are. The more I talk to people, women in particular, the more I know that our pain will find a way to make itself known. As William Shakespeare put it,

“The truth will out.”

When we are in dark and desperate places and the way we feel in our hearts and souls is at odds with the face we show the world, our brains find some way to make our outsides better match our insides. And the genuinely fucked up thing is that often we get a lot of validation for the ways we are harming ourselves.

I had this photo as my profile picture for a while. People always comment on what a good photo it is, but that’s not why I trot it out from time to time.

The day this picture was taken, I was in the gorgeous backyard of my dream house, I had my two beloved dogs, including our newly adopted old lady dog, CJ. I was wearing a cute new outfit, the sun was shining and I had a big smile on my face.

And I was dying.

I hadn’t slept in I don’t know how long. I was almost surely hung over. I had no idea where my husband was. The concealer hid dark circles under my eyes. I was wasting away. At that point, I’d probably dropped about 25 pounds in two months. The new outfit was purchased because my clothes were falling off my body. The new dog, who was an angel, was a great decision made for terrible reasons. A distraction, a band-aid on a bullet wound.

But I was thin and I had nice clothes and a beautiful house. We had a nice car, the right countertops, and I was a PTA fixture. All of the messed up metrics that we use to measure well-being said I was okay. And if you’d asked me, I’d have chirped, “I’m fine! How are YOU?????” Deflect, deflect, deflect.

This next photo was taken smack in the middle of my last binge.

My family was devastated, my health was declining. I was so consumed by alcohol that it was my first thought in the morning and my last at night. Also, every moment in between.

But my makeup looked great, I was wearing a pretty dress. Big smile for the camera.

I was in serious trouble. I needed so much help.

My veneer of “fine-ness” was paper thin but it looked fabulous on Facebook.

If you are not fine and are exacting some measured punishment on yourself to try and control the pain, if you are trying to disappear or hustle or numb, this is for you.

The rage and grief and pain need a way to come out. You’ve tried the other methods. You’ve scratched and sliced your skin to feel the manageable sting, you’ve felt the surge of control when you deny yourself food until you see spots. You’ve bumped the acceptable hour at which to have a cocktail earlier and earlier. You’ve stayed up night after night until you are so tired you feel outside of your own body. You’ve overcommitted, over-functioned, and are overwhelmed.

I have been there. I have been you.

The thing is, it works for a while. It gives you the illusion that you are handling it. You’re not, though, my love. You are doing the only thing your brain knows to do, at this point. You are sending out clues whether you know it or not. Your drinking and starving and cutting and hustling are all desperate flares in the night – the problem is, not everyone understands the signals, or can be bothered to decode the messages.

I know. You’re thinking, “Better the pain I can control.”

What I have learned in my decade of sobriety is this. If you have to control it, it’s controlling you.

There is so much help to be had if you will just reach out for it. If you will find someone or someplace safe to out yourself.

I think we’re not entwined in each other’s lives enough anymore to be able to count on someone knowing when one of our community is fighting for their lives. We accept their carefully curated life on social media as the truth, because that requires nothing of us.

Ten years ago in June, I stopped hustling. I sat still for the pain. I allowed myself to feel it. I let it wash over me and I sat with it. I picked it up and turned it around in my hands. Examined it, held it close to me. Embraced it and then let it go.

I could take this opportunity to tell you it wasn’t that bad.

I won’t.

It actually was as bad as I thought it would be. At first.

When you put down your tools and have yet to develop new ones, you feel terrified and undefended.

I stopped drinking and running and the pain and fear felt completely unsurvivable. But then, the unexpected happened. I lay it all down and it has mostly stayed down. I say mostly because what I have learned is that the work of recovery and healing does not mean the pain or trauma is eradicated. It’s still near me. I’m still aware of it. It’s separate from me, though. From time to time I pick it back up in some way. Not the drinking, thank God. But other less than great coping mechanisms. And what healing has looked like for me is that I recognize it sooner. The delta between the setback and the return to the practices and supports that keep me healthy and happy is smaller. I can course-correct more quickly.

I wouldn’t have thought that was possible. I didn’t think it was possible. It is.

I read something once about this woman, a midwife. She was talking about how we do such an awful job preparing women for childbirth – especially in this country. We either terrify them and convince them they cannot possibly do what women have been doing since the beginning of time without massive intervention, or we paint a rainbows and unicorns picture that does nothing to prepare them for what they are about to go through.

She takes a different approach. She said she says the same thing to all of her clients. “You are going to have to be brave.”

If you are going to heal and transform your life, you’re going to have to be a little brave. If you are going to get to a place where you can lay down the dark and heavy things that are keeping you from being who you were made to be, you are going to have to be a little brave–but you are HERE, so we already know how brave you are.

You can do this. You can stop hurting yourself. You can reach back to that little girl or boy, the one who found ways–even if they were ultimately self-destructive–to survive. You can say goodbye to the voluntary pain, to the distraction of the self-imposed wounds, and get to work on the thing. The thing you’ve been avoiding. The thing you’ve been dancing around.

The REAL thing. The original pain. Your darkness.

You can say, “Hello, old friend. Sit with me a while before you leave.” And it will settle on you, dark and heavy. You will feel its weight, pressing. You will fight the urge to struggle, to run, to manage it. You will sit with the pain, and you will grieve the loss.

And then, acknowledged, it will lift. Bit by bit. Grudgingly, perhaps. But with patience, and love, and a helping hand or ten, it will go.

Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open?

Rumi

Autumn has always been my favorite season. I live in New England, and autumn in New England is spectacular. The crisp blue days, the smell of woodsmoke at night, and the brilliantly colored foliage that draws people from all over the country to drive 25 mph in a 55 mph zone. #JesusFixIt

I love the fall. I am energized by it. I tend to start new projects, set new goals. It's a very productive time for me creatively—and yet, there's a fairly deep vein of melancholy for me at this time of year.

Wistfulness has always been a part of my make-up, even though I'm generally a positive person. I always wondered why that was. Why, during a season that delights me so much, do I experience waves of something akin to grief?

I recently read something in a book about different seasons serving different purposes in our lives. It posited that the fall is a good time to take stock of where you are at, what you need to work on, what you have, and what you no longer need. An inventory, if you will. Now that may seem like a task more suited to spring, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. I also read a few articles about the Eastern perspective on seasons. They said that in Chinese philosophy the emotions most closely associated with autumn are courage and sadness.

That feels right to me.

All seasons are transitions when you think about it. If winter is a season of dormancy and gestation, and springtime is a season of newness and birth, then really, autumn, at its heart, is a season about dying.

All those beautiful leaves that the out of town peepers come to ogle? Thousands upon thousands of lovely, necessary little deaths.

I had the good fortune to hear Reverend Otis Moss preach at Wild Goose one year, and something he said has stayed with me. He was talking about the constant hand-wringing over the belief that the American church is dying. His take on it?

Then LET. IT. DIE. Some things need to die.

He went on to talk about how things need to die in order for something else to be birthed—something new, something better. Something closer to who we are intended to be.

I've been thinking about this a lot in terms of trauma and what we do with it. I think in order to truly heal we must be willing to let some things die.

Human beings are story-making creatures. As long as humans have existed, so has story. Since the beginning of time, we've sought to make sense of the world by taking the sometimes mystifying facts at hand and building story around them. The volcano erupted? The gods are angry. A bountiful harvest? Our sacrifices pleased the gods. An independent woman? Must be a witch.

When we endure trauma as children, we have neither the life experience nor the wisdom to put it into any kind of healthy context. We don't know enough about the world or human nature or the way people and institutions are supposed to behave to frame our abuse appropriately. And frequently, our abusers are people we trust, people who we believe to be infallible or all- powerful. That emotional and spiritual dissonance lends itself perfectly to story-building.

Children take a complicated situation and make a simple story out of it. We take the facts of our abuse, use them as scaffolding and then we build walls of story around them. We build a house out of that story and we live in it.

And even when the stories we build are overwhelmingly harmful, we can be reluctant to let them go.

I think we sometimes cling to long-held beliefs about our trauma and what it means because to challenge the validity of those beliefs is to set our houses on fire. It's a death. And even if the story you've been living out of is dark and toxic and harmful? It's still home.

In his brilliant book, Finding God in the Ruins: How God Redeems Pain, Matt Bays reminds us that redemption is, by definition, an exchange. In order to write a new ending for your story, you may need the willingness to offer up long-held assumptions, beliefs, and identities at the altar of healing. Maybe what you exchange in return for freedom from your trauma is the house of story you've lived in since you were abused.

What are you waiting for? Do you think tomorrow is guaranteed? How much time have you sacrificed in order to guard the house of pain you live in? Has it maybe been long enough? Look around at your story-house. Has it become a prison? If it has, and the walls are the story you told yourself about what your abuse meant about you, your family, the world, God... here's the good news:

Those walls may be tall and seemingly impenetrable, but the door is wide open. You need only decide to walk out.

If your old story needs to die for you to heal, then let it die.

Maybe this is the season for that. Drag it out into the sunlight and let it die, like the scarlet and gold drifts against the fence outside my window. Let the story in which you've been serving time die a lovely little death. It's necessary.

Toss a match and let it burn, like so many brilliantly colored leaves. Stand in the waning autumn light and breathe in the smoke. Hold courage in one hand and sadness in the other. Only then can you write a new ending.

You really can, you know.

You can strip away all that story, go back to the bones, the facts, and build yourself a new home.

___________________________________________________________________________TThis chapter can be found in my book She Wrote It Down

That’s the thing about pain.

It demands to be felt.

John Green

I have always hated my body.

I can name twenty things off the top of my head that I wish I could change- I wouldn’t even need to think about it. I hate my elbows. Who hates their ELBOWS? It is hard for me to accept compliments gracefully- I immediately want to deflect, or make a joke, or tell you the many things that are wrong with me.

Some of that is just the world in which we live. You don’t need to have experienced sexual trauma as a girl to be awash in self-loathing as a grown woman- we are bombarded with unrealistic beauty ideals and the constant repetitive beat of you are not enough, you are not enough, you are not enough. As a survivor of sexual abuse, those beats frequently fall in time with the rhythmic story you tell yourself, I am bad, I am bad, I am bad.

Those beats? They are the drums of war.

I’ve waged war with my body for as long as I can remember. Hate is a strong word, an ugly word, but it’s what I felt for my physical being for as long as I can remember. Hate.

I have had many conversations with people, women mostly, about the ways in which sexual abuse affects you long term. I think it is astounding, the ways we find to survive.

Some of us block out the memories. Our young brains determine that the trauma is too much to handle and they bury the truth. The mind compartmentalizes the memory. It puts the pain on layaway- you pay a tiny bit, over a long period of time- but eventually, the balance comes due. The pain demands to be felt.

So many of us battle with weight. Some gain pounds as a type of armor- a way to keep people at arms’ length, in an attempt to make themselves unappealing. A way to stay safe. Some deny themselves food, some purge. Some try, literally, to disappear. I did. I tried to disappear.

So many of us anesthetize, with food, or alcohol, or drugs, or sex- all in ways that are harmful to our bodies. Temporary fixes at best. Treacherous band aids. But still, eventually, the pain DEMANDS to be felt.

I had several women share their shame and guilt over their promiscuity. I had one woman tell me it was proof she had invited her abuse. If she was really traumatized why would she seek out sex? I can only speak to my experience, but when you are taught at a very young age that no doesn’t mean no and that you do not have ultimate dominion over your own body- you believe it. When you are taught that your value lies solely in your sexual being- you believe it. Some are seeking to reclaim their sexual power, or are chasing the temporary pleasure to stave off the crushing pain, pain that demands to be felt.

I think the mind and the body are miraculous. I think we subconsciously find ways to survive. When the body undergoes severe physical trauma it goes into shock. Systems slow, shut down. You are protected from the pain because it is simply too much to bear. The same is true of emotional trauma. Your body finds ways to protect you. But just like with physical shock, you can not live indefinitely in that state. The very things you are doing to protect yourself from the pain will eventually kill you. You need to come out of shock at some point. As Robert Frost said, the only way ’round is through.

To come out the other side, to feel the sun on your face again, you need to feel the pain. It is unspeakably hard to sign up for that. To know it’s coming and to stay still for it. To not find ways to numb yourself. It takes a staggering amount of bravery.

I am finally forgiving myself for the things that I did to survive. Those things that seemed foolish or harmful from the cheap seats. Those things that seemed self destructive and counter-intuitive from the outside. Many of them were, honestly, but I’m not sure I could have survived the pain earlier. I think they were desperate measures, but then, that’s what desperate times call for.

I am extending the olive branch to younger me. I’m calling a truce, and laying down my arms. I am going to stop blaming my body, and I am going to stop shaming my brain.

You can stop hurting yourself. You can shed your armor, and still be safe. You can be seen, and still be safe. You are so much stronger than you give yourself credit for. You are being held hostage. Meet the demands. Feel the pain. It will take some courage, but we already know how brave you are. You are so, so brave.

You are strong enough to walk through the pain, and into the sunlight- I promise you.

Freedom is just around the bend.

A procession of women makes its way down to the river. It is early in the morning and there is still a distinct chill in the air. The sun bounces off the low-lying fog and catches the dew on the long grass, causing the fields around them to seem to glow in the morning light. It looks warmer than it is.

They walk through the center of the village, the group growing larger as more women and girls join them. Some carry buckets, some washboards. Elder women alternately scold and smile at the children who in turns lollygag and run ahead. New mothers with babies strapped to their backs keep a watchful eye on their children and the children of others. They bark orders at the younger women, enjoying their newly minted positions of power over the ones who only a year or two before were considered peers.

They arrive at the river and commence the ritual of the wash. Linens are removed from buckets of lye and wrung out before being scrubbed on the washboards. At first, the icy water stings, reddening their hands. They grow accustomed to it and begin laundering their linens as if by rote, the repetitive chore leaving their minds free to wander.

And they talk. They gossip, they ask for and give advice. They console and commiserate. They laugh and lament.

In this, as in all their shared tasks, they connect.

They are in the room when each other’s babies are born. They witness each other’s joy. They are in the room when they prepare a loved one’s body for burial. They witness each other’s grief. The forced intimacy of hardship doesn’t allow for pretense. They know one another.

They are at the river for laundry and they are at the river for baptisms. The mundane and the sacred, up close.

They are a community in every sense of the word.

It’s funny when you think about it. All of our modern conveniences which free up our time by making tasks solitary and efficient, have seemingly left us even more stressed out and with less time to connect on an interpersonal level.

Daily chores we can accomplish in minutes by ourselves in modern times, took hours and more than one set of hands to complete in the past. By the time the wash was done the village women’s shoulders would ache and their faces would be sunburnt, but they would likely leave the river feeling less alone than when they arrived.

We needed each other.

We live in miraculous times. Our lives are much less demanding physically. Modern conveniences have made it so that we can operate with very little interdependence on one another. If your child is up sick all night it doesn’t mean four hours at the river’s edge cleaning linens against the rocks, commiserating with the other mothers about fevers and sleeplessness- it’s a quick toss into your front loading washing machine and maybe a tired emoji-laden post on Facebook.

We hire people to create and manage our lives, we outsource our rituals. It’s amazingly efficient and sanitary, but mark my words- we have lost something in doing so.

What we have gained in ease we have lost in connection. I’m not saying we should glorify the old days of grueling manual labor and forego modern conveniences. No one is idealizing a hard-scrabble existence and if you had offered those women bent over for hours scrubbing clothes in cold water an easier more efficient way to do that same work, they’d have taken it in a heartbeat. They’d likely think this was a ridiculous conversation.

We don’t need to return to a back-breaking daily battle for continued existence. No one wants that- and this is not an attempt to romanticize days gone by. There is a reason smart and inventive people spent time and energy coming up with ways for us to not have to do those daily tasks the hard way. So many good things have come out of those advances- indoor plumbing, for example, and the Shamwow.

Somehow, though, with that decline in our physical need for one another came an idealization of independence all around. Particularly in this country, we’ve created this whole mythology around “self-made” men and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. We’ve romanticized the notion of women who can handle everything by themselves, which has, in turn, created generations of martyrs and burned out women who see it as a sign of weakness or an admission of defeat to say, “This is hard,” or, “I need help.”

The problem lies here: we have not found effective replacements for the forced intimacy of needing one another to survive. In the absence of the physical need for one another, we’ve offered up our human connection at the altar of convenience. Without that intimacy–without being all up in each other’s grills on a daily basis–we’ve learned to fake it. We’ve come to settle for smoke and mirrors over substance, and the illusion of success and happiness over real community.

Real community is not formed in happy times and celebrations when everyone is dressed up and smiling for the cameras. Real community is formed in the trenches. Real community is born of the connection that comes from vulnerability. Vulnerability isn’t a surface thing. Vulnerability requires real intimacy or real desperation.

We go home to our self-contained little lives. We put up privacy fences and pull down shades. We post our pretty pictures on Instagram so edited and tweaked by filters they bear little resemblance to what actually happened when we snapped the photo. Then we hashtag our gratitude for a life we are not actually living and tag our friends who do not actually know us.

And we are modeling this for our kids. Look at any lunch table, any gathering of teens. You will find them all looking down, choosing to have the glow of their devices light up their faces over having real connection light up their eyes. Parallel play is no longer just for toddlers, friends. And we wonder how it is that a teenage boy can become so detached he can walk into a school lunchroom and treat it like a first-person-shooter video game. It’s not mysterious at all. It’s the real world application of disconnection.

Go to any kids’ sporting events and observe the number of parents who are busy on social media posting about how amazing their kids are while they are MISSING HOW AMAZING THEIR KIDS ARE.

Somewhere along the line it became more important to us to seem to have a great life than to live one. At some point we became more worried about the number of Facebook friends we had and how much they ‘like’ our posts than loving the actual people in our lives and having them like us.

We watch reality tv to get our fix of life up close- but those shows are to real relationships what pornography is to love. A fun house mirror version of life, with all the vicarious thrill of people living close up to one another with none of the real responsibility. We engage in pretend forms of connection where we can log off or change the channel before something true or deep is required of us.

That can be okay, for a while. When things are good. But life, whether we are doing the wash in the river or dropping it at the dry-cleaners, is difficult and often heartbreaking. And it is so much harder if you feel alone.

We are hardwired for connection. We are meant to live in community–physically, emotionally and spiritually–and we are STARVING for it. I mean it, we are literally dying. The lack of connection, the lack of honest-to-God real community, is at the root of nearly every single thing that ails society today.

Isolation. Addiction. Despair. Violence. Poverty. Infidelity. Suicide. Hatred. Judgment. Even terrorism is rooted in the lie of “other.” If you scratch just below the surface of many of those tragedies, you find isolation and heartbreaking loneliness. You find the back-breaking misbelief that we are separate, and that there is value in going it alone.

It took my life imploding before I was able to be vulnerable enough to build real communities for myself and my family. It took me losing nearly everything. It took the complete decimation of the pretty fences and the shiny life. It took the humiliation of my divorce, it took me telling the truth about my abuse in childhood, and me finally getting honest about my alcohol addiction before I was able to set aside the pretty veneer and let myself be seen, scars and all. It took me nearly dying in order to really begin to live, it took me being shattered for me to finally become whole. And only when I did that, did I find true community.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. We shouldn’t have to fall apart to come together. We don’t need more fences. We don’t need walls.

We need rivers.

Mary and I are in such different places now. We have done so much healing. We’ve used our experience to help countless survivors, which feels like redemption. Our experience with Officer Paul taught us the transformative power of owning your story and having someone bear witness. Officer Paul did that for us, and then so did hundreds of thousands of survivors who read it, and, in turn, shared their stories with us. They wrote them down.

I have an interesting relationship with this post. In many ways, it no longer feels as though it’s mine. The experience is, of course, but the post came to mean something to so many people. I wrote it quickly, didn’t edit it, and posted it without really thinking. I could not have foreseen the life it has lived.

I no longer have the website where it was originally published, but it feels like it should live somewhere. So here it is.

Our intention was to dance on his grave.

My beautiful cousin, who I’d not seen in 35 years, and I set out to dance on our grandfather’s grave. Our first dilemma was, of course, song choice. You have to have the right song. We bandied a few song titles about. Alanis Morrisette was a front runner.

Obviously.

We drove to the town where he lived and where he is buried. We drove to the town where we were abused. Driving down the picturesque New England roads, I felt a little faint. Mary felt a little barfy. We pulled into a store parking lot and Mary spent some quality time behind a dumpster, hurling. It happens.

We weren’t entirely sure where the cemetery was so we pulled into a police station to ask for directions. I said jokingly, We should go in and file a police report. Mary said, What would happen if we went inside and filed a police report?

I said, Let’s do it.

We walked in after Mary barfed again and there was a darling older police officer behind the glass window. Mary told him we were looking for the cemetery- and I had a moment of, We’re probably not REALLY going to do this. Then my beautiful cousin, who is the bravest person I know, said- And we would like to report a crime.

That got his attention.

She said, Our grandfather sexually molested us 35 years ago and we want to report him.

We were ushered into a conference room where a young officer came in to talk to us. He handles all of their sexual assault and rape cases. He introduced himself, sat down and proceeded to ask us questions about what happened. Names, addresses, dates. I called my sister and put her on speakerphone. We were all crying.

Sweetie, I said, He’s writing it down.

He wrote it down.

We said, This happened to us, and he listened. He WROTE IT DOWN.

I cannot begin to tell you how powerful that was.

He said several times, I don’t want to open any wounds, so if you don’t want to answer this, that’s okay. Finally, I said, The wounds are all still open. Obviously. What do you want to know?

I found myself saying to a police officer, I was raped. I never thought that would happen.

Then Mary asked a question I would not have thought to ask but the answer to which I really needed. She said, What would have happened to him, if someone had reported it? The officer told us the procedural things, he said he would have interviewed us, he would have interviewed our grandfather, he would have corroborated what he could. And then he said-

I would have driven down the street and arrested him.

That is what should have happened.

We know there is nothing to be done. We know there will be no consequences and no justice. Life is staggeringly unfair, sometimes.

But there is a record. We walked into that police station holding the jagged shards of our story, of our childhood, and said, LOOK. THIS HAPPENED. And Officer Paul Smith bore witness. He wrote it down.

In a few days, the police report will be available and Mary will go get three copies. Or, if she makes good on her threat to send it out in lieu of a Christmas card next year, maybe many more. But, at least three. We will each have a copy.

We asked Officer Smith if anyone else ever comes forward about our grandfather- because we know with absolute certainty there are MANY more victims- to please give them our information. We want to meet them.

At that point, we thought we were still going to go to the cemetery. Officer Paul offered us a police escort.

I think it is important to note, in the face of so much awfulness, that people really are mostly very good. He was so kind. He took it so seriously. He honored our loss.

Mary decided she’s not quite ready to dance on his grave. That’s okay. We’ve found each other again. We’ve got nothing but time.

That’s where this was supposed to end.

Then I got a call this morning, from Officer Paul. He said, Can you come in? I have something I want to tell you guys.

So.

Mary and I just got back. We were at the police station for hours. Talking to a mama. About her daughter. She told us what happened. Officer Paul wrote it down.

Guys, I don’t quite know what to do with any of this. It’s a LOT. I have a crushing headache, and Mary and I have made an agreement that we will spend the rest of the night talking about Adam Levine’s abs. That’s it. That’s all we’ve got. BUT- my world is lighter than it was yesterday.

Girl meets dog. Love ensues.

I’d only been in my apartment a few weeks when loneliness eventually led me to porn. And, by porn, obviously, I mean Petfinder.

Every night I would try to watch tv, but my brain couldn’t follow plots. And it seemed as though everything was Christmas related and the holidays were a big, steaming pile of CAN’T for me. Everything was stupid or sad or happy or medium. All of it was untenable. None of it could be tenned.

I kept trying to read and couldn’t, which had only ever happened one other time in my life. The year after my marriage blew up I lost the ability to read anything other than labels. Primarily wine labels, but whatever. I couldn’t focus, I couldn’t retain information. I took no joy in stories. When I got sober and reflected on that time I came to understand I was deeply depressed - and self-medicating with a depressant, which, as it turns out, is not terribly effective. The crushing headaches that accompanied every morning would only be alleviated by the evening, and by that point I’d be drinking again. Reading had always been my solace when I wanted to figuratively run away from home, and at a time when I most wanted to be in any story but my own, I’d lost the option of losing myself in the pages of somebody else’s.

I worked on the assumption that given the fact I spent most evenings lying awake in bed thinking about how nice it would be to not wake up, I was probably depressed again. I didn’t want to be, I wanted to do. I was fine at work. People needed me there. I was busy, and there were a million things that needed to be done. But then, I’d get home to the empty apartment and I had no idea how to do life. No point in cooking, because I had no appetite. Drinking myself into oblivion was no longer an option. No TV. No books. No social life because I hadn’t been single in so long I didn’t even know what that looked like. I hadn’t really been single since I was 21, the year I had my son. I’d become an instant family when he was born and had been a part of a family system ever since.

I had no partner, no kids. No pets. Just a couple of plants my cousin Mary made me buy. And as I’d been given strict instructions on how not to love them to death, they only needed me for 45 seconds once a week.

I needed another sentient being. Preferably, a four-legged one.

My perfect dog had died two years earlier, and I lost James’ dogs in the break up. Trolling for puppies was about the only thing I could handle. It was the first time in 28 years I was not responsible for another living creature and I felt adrift.

I came across a little doggo named Fred. He was white and looked pretty dumb, which may not be a laudable quality in a human friend but is actually a fairly solid character trait in a dog. The write-up said he had a great personality and loved life. I started to stalk Fred. Why wasn’t anyone adopting him? He was so cute! And his name was Fred! I started to romance the idea of adopting Fred. I planned to change his name to Kevin. I’d been saying for weeks that I would adopt a dog and name it Kevin, regardless of gender.

Eventually, I made the call to go meet Fred. Just meet him. Like a coffee date. Not dinner or anything. No big commitment. I reached out and made an appointment. He was at a rescue organization called Where The Love Is, in the next town. When I pulled up, I met Mike, the man who ran the place. He and I had been texting back and forth to arrange the meet and greet. He’d asked me if I wanted to meet any other dogs while I was there.

I’d written a whole love story for Fred/Kevin and me, but the guy was so earnest I felt like I should do my due diligence. Plus, dogs are good. More dogs = more good. When I arrived, Mike led me into the house where there were multiple crates. He brought out one dog named Ginger. She was cinnamon colored and very sweet, but neither of us was super drawn to each other. Then he said, “I think you might like Susie.”

He unlatched the door to the crate, and a skinny white dog with black spots, including a blaze over one eye and a giant polka dot on her butt right above her tail, came out. She was hesitant, and her ears went down and back, initially. She looked afraid. We made eye contact, and as soon as we did, her ears stood at attention, she ran over and jumped up on me. I laughed and started scratching those expressive ears, which were spotted and velvety. She looked straight at me with her beautiful golden brown eyes which were fringed in long white lashes. Then she leaned against me and put her head on my shoulder.

Uh-oh, I thought. Settle down, Susie. I’m here for Fred/Kevin.

Susie and I cuddled for a bit. She was a funny mix of timid and rambunctious. She was clearly smart and supermodel gorgeous. She was the Linda Evangelista of rescue dogs.

Then it was time to meet Fred/Kevin. Mike said that Fred/Kevin was “out back” in a special “shed.” Huh, I thought. As we approached the Special Area, Mike suggested I stand back, and mentioned that Fred/Kevin was “energetic.”

He opened the door, and a smallish white blur shot past me into the enclosed area. I didn’t think those color trails you see in cartoons were a real thing, but in true Roadrunner fashion, Fred/Kevin hurtled around the Special Area with a white comet tail behind him. The small, muscular, white entity careened around the pen, seemingly propelled by what I can only assume were booster rockets.

Apparently, a team of neuroscientists from MIT found that the human brain can process entire images that the eye sees for as little as 13 milliseconds. I am sure that they are right, but hand to God I’d not be able to pick Fred/Kevin out of a dog line-up because he wouldn’t stay still long enough for my eyeballs to relay any information to my brain. Mike looked at me out of the corner of his eye and chuckled. “The thing about Fred is, he might not be an ‘apartment’ dog.” I tried to imagine what I would come home to if Fred/Kevin was left alone while I was at work. The term “Shock and Awe” came to mind. “I just feel like… Fred maybe needs a… a farm of some sort? Like, with, 12,000 acres? Conservatively?” Mike laughed again.

It didn’t feel great to walk away from Fred/Kevin, but it didn’t feel as bad as coming home to a Fred/Kevin shaped hole in the wall of my apartment because Fred/Kevin had made a Mr. Kool-Aid style break for it during the day, which was the most optimistic outcome I could imagine. I said a prayer for Fred/Kevin’s adoption by an energetic farmer/scientist who might be able to find a way to harness Fred/Kevin’s specialness into some sort of renewable energy source that would save the world.

I walked back to the house making a mental note that “personality” on a dog adoption website is akin to “charm” on a real estate website. Trouble.

I asked to see Susie again and Mike smiled. I thought about gently reminding him that no one likes a know-it-all. I played with her for a few minutes and told him I wanted to think about it. I got all the way to the first red light on my way home before I texted him and told him I was a goner. He texted back, “I had a feeling about you two.” Whatever, Mike.

I sat on the couch that night looking at Susie’s profile on Petfinder. That was as close as I planned to get to dating apps. She was so gorgeous. I remembered how bright and curious and feisty she’d been. Susie was not going to cut it. And she certainly wasn’t a Kevin.

I looked over my laptop screen at the stack of books I’d piled on the ottoman in an attempt to get myself reading again. I’d pulled down a few of my favorites with the thought that perhaps something I’d read many times would be a good re-entry. A Prayer for Owen Meany, Bird by Bird, Pride and Prejudice, and various Brené Brown books lay there, unread. On the top of the pile was my dog-eared copy of To Kill A Mockingbird. I smiled.

I thought about the curious, sensitive, fierce little creature I was about to bring into my life.

“Scout,” I said out loud. She was Scout.

************

I went to pick Scout up on a rainy December night. She was being fostered by a sweet couple who lived just outside New Haven. When I arrived, they welcomed me into their home and it very quickly became apparent that they were more than a little in love with the dog they were about to hand off to me. Multiple times, they mentioned that if they were not about to move to Hawaii to live with their son, they would be adopting her themselves. I thanked them profusely for taking such good care of her and got their phone numbers so I could text them photos of her in her new home. They gave me a bag of her food, a toy she loved, and said their goodbyes.

We walked down the long, wet driveway to my car, parked in the halo of a streetlamp. Scout’s ears were down and it was hard to know whether she was nervous heading off with a stranger, or if this Texas born girl was just not here for the cold, New England winter. I opened the car door and helped scootch her into the front seat. She immediately got down on the floor and stayed there, peeking up at me.

I talked to her the whole ride home. A few minutes in, she hopped back up on the seat and curled up, putting her snout on the center console. I reached over and started petting her while I drove. She pulled her head back, unsure, and then sniffed my hand. I thought about how strange her life had been. She was a stray on the streets of Houston, then at the pound just days away from being euthanized. She was saved by a woman who was there to adopt another dog and when she heard Scout’s days were numbered, she brought her home as well and contacted a rescue organization that transports dogs from the South up North to be adopted.

She’d just probably gotten used to her foster family, and here I was bringing her to another new place. She had no way of knowing that she was going home, because she had no way of knowing what that might even mean.

We walked into my building and got on the elevator. Another tenant got on at the same time and said, “Oh, cute dog! Is she friendly?” Hell if I know, I thought. “I just adopted her, so we’re still getting to know each other,” I said. “Aw, that’s sweet! Her forever home!” Sure, I thought. Assuming there is such a thing.

The elevator doors shut and we began the ascent. Scout hit the deck. I crouched down next to her and rubbed her soft ears. “It’s okay, girl. You’re okay.” I knew that she didn’t believe that yet, and why should she? She didn’t know me, she was freaked out in this strange and scary place, and she had no earthly idea what her future held. We had so much in common already!

We walked into the apartment and I fed her right away. I put some of her new toys out and positioned her bed just so. She walked around the apartment, sniffing in all the corners. Every noise startled her. I sat and watched her. After she’d done some exploring, she came over to where I was sitting and hopped up on the couch. I scratched her nose and gave her a kiss on the blaze over her left eye. “We’ll figure it out, Scout. I promise.”

That first night we both slept on the couch, curled up at opposite ends. Alone, together.

“I know,” I said, dully.

We stayed for a few minutes and wearily climbed out. When we opened the front door, there was… nothing.

No click, click, click of her nails on the beautiful floor Shane installed. No sleepy head raised from her favorite spot up on the back of the couch, where she perched like a cat. No laughing because she dropped a tennis ball at our feet the moment we crossed the threshold.

Just silence.

Just emptiness.

An hour earlier, we both lay by her head, the linoleum floor softened only by a large fleece blanket spread out over a thin area rug. Her treasured grey fuzzy blanket was tucked around her and her favorite toy, “Tiny Baby,” a squirrel my coworker gave to her when I left my job, was nestled against her. We told her we loved her and that she was perfect. Because she was perfect. We thanked her for the joy. We stroked her beautiful face and kissed her over and over. We told her she could rest. We told her it was okay to go.

They gave her the first shot, and there was an infinitesimal release of tension. An imperceptible shift. If you weren’t looking for it you wouldn’t see it. Her bright, expressive eyes softened. He gave her the second shot and she was still. We petted her and kissed her. And wept. I had my hand on her ribs and I could feel her breathing slow and then stop. I could still feel her heart beating irregularly, as it had for the past day. The vet listened with his stethoscope and said, “There’s still a faint heartbeat.” That didn’t surprise me. Our fierce, sweet girl had the heart of a lion.

Moments later, the vet nodded and said, “I’m so sorry.”

It makes sense they call it a veil between this life and the next, between the human and the divine, because veils are barely there. The Scout on the floor between us as we sobbed looked just like our girl, but our girl was gone–and the space between the moment we kissed her and thanked her and watched her slip away and the moment she was gone forever was so delicate and fragile you could easily miss it.

I am so glad we didn’t.

The vet and the tech, both of whom were so kind, told us to take the time we needed and gave us the room to ourselves. They told us to press the little doorbell on the counter when we headed out so they would know we were leaving, but that they wouldn’t disturb us.

And then it was just us. Just me ‘n him ‘n her

Shane stood up and leaned over the counter, his head in his hands. We have been together for almost five and a half years and prior to this day I had never seen him cry. The love he and Scout had for one another bordered on the ridiculous. Every night she waited at the side of the bed for him to take off his socks, and every night she would delicately carry them over to her bed to sleep with them. Theirs was a love story for the ages.

I lay on the floor next to her, stroking her velvety ears. They remained at attention and alert. That broke something in me. She was so beautiful. We always said she was a supermodel. She had long white eyelashes, and one black nail on each paw. Trendsetter.

My gratitude for having had her was nearly unbearable, and matched only by an equally intense gratitude that her suffering was over.

Her pain ended, even as ours began.

She had a black blaze over her left eye that was unanimously voted the best place to kiss her. It was somehow always just a little bit warmer. We called it her kissy spot. I kissed it over and over, still telling her I loved her. Somehow it was already cooler. Her muchness was gone.

I have said many times that one of us was a rescue, and the other one was Scout. I found her in a season of intense loss–a time when nearly everything I loved had been ripped away. I did not want to be here anymore. She became my reason to get out of bed. My reason to eat. My reason to leave my apartment.

My reason to stay.

Scout died on her seventh birthday. We thought we’d have another seven. We’d talked not even a week earlier about how she was probably at her midpoint.

I’d prayed for healing or comfort and peace, but really, I’d already been given healing. She healed me. The gift was to be comfort and peace. She deserved the seven more years, but even more so, she deserved ease and rest.

When I said goodbye to my last dog, I was alone in it. It was too much for the person I was with. It was too much this time, too. But we both stayed in it. We both stayed with her. We both stayed with each other.

I don’t know how long we lingered, but when it was time to go, Shane pressed the doorbell. I hung back a moment, and waited for the vet to come through the door. I didn’t want to leave her alone. Even then.

When my sister’s husband died, her therapist offered her this wisdom. She said, “The grief mirrors the relationship.”

This grief feels deep and wide, uncomplicated and powerful, beautiful and transformative. So was the love between us.

We are going to pick up her ashes today, and eventually we’ll scatter them along her favorite hike. She was always a little much, but she was the most herself, there. The Scoutiest. Treeing squirrels and chasing chipmunks, romping through streams and climbing boulders. Running ahead and then waiting for us, with bright, clear eyes and a full heart, to catch up. We couldn’t lose.

There was one rock ledge that she always climbed and once on top, she’d stand triumphantly on the overhang, and peer out at the pond. And every time Shane would say, “Pride rock.” Every time I would say, “That’s right, Scout. Everything the light touches is yours.”

Every time.

The pond is where Scout learned to paddle board. I insisted she would never go for it. I worried about it. Shane just got on his board and had me throw the ball near him. She swam after it and when she was within reach, he grabbed the handle on the back of her life jacket, picked her up, and plunked her on the board. She looked back at me as if to say, “I guess I paddle board now.”

I’m so glad Shane was a part of her life because he is better at adventure and fun than I am. He wants to go, go, go and do, do, do. When it became clear Scout was really sick, he brought that same energy to it. He kept trying to get her to get up and play, and to go for walks. He has a tendency to push through, and was so certain, so confident we would fight off whatever this thing was.

The last morning, I lay on our bed with her, my body curved around hers, and the reckoning settled on my heart. I told him I needed him to be in this with me, because she was telling us and we needed to listen.

His broad shoulders dropped. Accepting defeat is an anathema to him, but he could see our sweet girl was just so tired of fighting. I called the vet and made the appointment.

Later that afternoon, I sat in the chair in the corner of our quiet room. Shane came in and said, “We need to do something to cheer ourselves up.”

“No. We don’t.” I said. This grief isn’t the opposite of love, it’s a part of it. It’s sacred to me, and I intend to feel it. It’s not a problem. It requires no solution. He looked at me and nodded. And stayed in the room.

She needed both of us. She needed his energy and daring, and my sensitivity and intuition. And we needed her. She has always been a part of us. She brought joy and fun and laughter. During the dark days of the pandemic, we hiked the hills and forests of Connecticut, and we became a family.

We’ll scatter her ashes and return her to the earth. I read somewhere that humans are made of stardust. Humans like Scout. I joked to Shane that Scout is going to be seriously pissed if that movie is right and all dogs go to Heaven. My friend Jen said she will have a special corner with the humans. That feels right.

And even as she becomes a part of the trails we trod so many times, we’ll begin to see her in all of it. We’ll see her in the trees she tried to climb and the other dogs she hated. We’ll see her in the squirrels and the streams and the rippling water as we paddle.

Everything the light touches.

We’ll see her and every time we hike there, it will still be us.

Me ‘n her ‘n him.

I tell the truth for a living. I write about hard things—life, loss, addiction, beauty——what breaks us, what mends us, and what’s worth saving. I believe stories can save us. This is where I tell mine—cracked, real, and stitched together with gold.

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