I gave up television in 2003 but was eventually knocked off my no-screen high horse by my love for the internet and its non stop flow of information and entertainment. I pored over CDAN with my morning coffee. Aging actors paying aspiring young actresses and models to be their PR dates during premier press runs, casting couch and gatekeeping gossip, entire PR families, the drug addled restroom scene at the Oscars - every blind item a possible glimpse into the many parts that make up the entertainment industry and what seemed like a mission statement of exploit and discard. That’s how I learned about Hayden Panetierre.

The first few blind items about her were standard faire but over the years the blind items changed. The life of the beaming talented child star had taken a dark turn. Suggestions of addiction, allegedly being trafficked to powerful men, a supposed love triangle with her abusive boyfriend and his brother. Some speculation came to a halt when Diana Jenkins successfully sued CDAN in 2022 for alleging she exploited Hayden and forced her into prostitution but the blind items continued to paint a spiral. Hayden died on August 16th at the age of 36. She was found in an apartment in South Carolina. She’d recently flown there from LA with her abusive boyfriend whose restraining order was lifted just 4 months earlier. Her boyfriend and his brother were both at the apartment when paramedics were called. It’s reported that the boyfriend had administered Narcan before calling for help.

There were 66 revealed blind items referencing Hayden posted the day after her death. We’ll never know if they’re true. What we do know is that she had been working in Hollywood since she was an infant and wrote a memoir to tell her side of the story. Now she’s dead from an apparent opioid overdose.

Her death is tragic. I know good people close to her who are deeply mourning her loss. They have posted beautiful tributes, centering Hayden and her advocacy work. She spent almost twenty years advocating for marine life. Along with other activists, she paddled in to disrupt an annual dolphin hunt in Japan. Through media reports and tributes I learned that Hayden was also estranged from her mom, who served as her manager early in her career. In her memoir she described the fear of disappointing her mother in auditions, calling it a “fate worse than death”. She talked about walking on eggshells and being hypervigilant to her mothers moods. When she was 19 she asked her mother to step down from managing her and says her mom’s reply was “you owe me.” I suddenly understood Hayden’s need to tell her story through memoir. I understand the chatter of blindsided people who wonder how someone could be so promising and full of life and make choices that destroy them. I understand how a mother could make her love conditional on the compliance of her child.

Unresolved trauma can make someone vulnerable, repeating toxic patterns and wholly unaware of what love actually looks and feels like. We accept poor treatment because it feels like love and belonging. For many children of parents with narcissistic tendencies, addiction is a survival strategy. A study called “Personality of mothers of substance-dependent patients” notes in its discussion:

“Schweitzer and Lawton¹² and Brook et al¹ have independently reported mothers assessed as cold, indifferent, controlling, and intrusive were a major risk factor for the development of adolescent drug use. Similarly, Andersson and Eisemann³ reported that parenting perceived as rejecting was linked to maladaptive psychosocial behaviors, including drug abuse.”

In the days after Hayden’s passing her mom made a statement that Hayden had “sadly lost her way” and that she wished she “stayed true to herself because she had many incredible attributes.” Paired with Hayden’s accounts in her memoir this feels less like mourning and more like deflection paired with controlling a narrative about someone who is unable to speak for herself. To me it feels like a form of DARVO, a term coined to name manipulative communication: deny, attack, reverse victim and offender. Which is…an odd way to frame the death of ones own daughter. In contrast, Michelle Trachtenberg’s mom did not release a public statement. So far, Hayden’s mom has done interviews with NBC News, People magazine and Good Morning America. I can’t help but wonder if Hayden knew she had to publish her own story. There are reports that her doctor warned her that her life depended on not drinking. In a selfless act, she relinquished custody of her only daughter knowing she was not able to get sober. Maybe she felt a memoir would at least give her a voice after she was gone, knowing that her voice could be contorted by her mother to fit her own narrative. Because maybe that was a pattern she learned to recognize in her attempts at recovery.

One dynamic that seems clear is that being raised by a disordered parent leads to disordered relationships. I experienced this not just in romantic relationships, but in friendships, employer relationships - any bond that held the potential for exploitation by a toxic person in power. To some, this might sound like victimhood. And that’s fair. I’d also ask you to consider how and why we get stuck in this cycle. Or maybe this all sounds kind of familiar and you want to make sense of inconsistencies and patterns in your own relationships. Here are some behaviors that having a narcissistic/disordered/abusive parent sets us up for:

We confuse abuse with love - as a child we are conditioned to believe that our family loves us. And that we should love them. Understanding that our parents love us, we absorb their abuse as love. We don’t have the ability to make a distinction between the two and our survival depends on not doing that. From belittling to physical abuse, we internalize these actions. We abandon ourselves to survive.

Inconsistency equals safety because it’s familiar - the phrase “walking on eggshells” is not an uncommon way for us to describe how it felt growing up with inconsistent parents. One minute you’re getting warmth, the next you’re getting pain. There is no way for a child to clock this, much less connect any of their behavior to a certain outcome. That relationship doesn’t exist. Largely because it’s based on the whims of a disordered personality. We rely on the inconsistency of the disordered personality for safety and fold this into how we relate to others.

Earning love - to describe disappointing a parent during the audition process as a “fate worse than death” is the perfect example of this. Nail the audition, you’re mommy’s favorite. Fail the audition, meet your fate.

Trained to chase - one of my first therapists had a really useful way of framing this. Parent dangles the carrot (love/support/etc), child chases the moving target, child eventually gets slapped away. Time passes then the carrot reappears. This is the culmination of the other behaviors listed above. Eventually we are released out into the world as adults trained to chase. We see a break up as abandonment that can be remedied by going back and trying a new approach. And we are re-traumatized each time.

There are ways to escape this vicious cycle and there is a reason those who do are called survivors. The first thing we have to do is identify the cycle and that can be the hardest part. Even after my therapist told me about the carrot and I tracked the next several interactions with my mom as following the exact same pattern, I refused to believe it. Wouldn’t that be confirmation bias? After all, she was constantly reminding me that it was my dad who was the problem, not her. The more therapy I got, the more educated I got. When I started speaking up for myself and setting boundaries, she disappeared. Her life was “easier without me” and I agreed. Boundaries, healing, accountability - none of that is easy. It’s much easier for the disordered person to eliminate the healthy person in a relationship - be it romantic, professional, casual, etc… In my experience, setting a boundary and calling out inconsistencies doesn’t serve as a catalyst for them to step up and grow - it serves as an indicator that their act is in jeopardy.

Going no contact allows people to eliminate the mechanism that perpetuates the cycle. There’s a deep dive in my article about it here. Sobriety and recovery also allow us to create new healthy relational habits with ourselves and others. With hard work and a bit of luck, the discarded learn discernment, allowing them to discard the relationships that don’t serve them. Some aren’t so lucky…and that is why we survivors share our stories.

Since finding freedom from addiction I have been very open about letting my people know that I am available as a resource. I get messages from people battling just about every addiction imaginable. But every once in awhile I’ll get a call from friends and loved ones of addicts asking questions like “what is it actually like in there? “ or “how did you actually quit?”

An old yoga student I haven’t seen in ages recently sent me an email. Her daughter was on her eighth rehab visit, the mother had exhausted her life savings and lost her marriage trying to save her. She had moved 7 times in three years to different states to remove her daughter from “bad environments”. Another friend was on a medical journey with his wife looking for the source of her seizures when he found out they were from alcohol withdrawal when he didn’t even know she drank. She insists her drinking isn’t that bad. He wants to believe her so that’s what he’s choosing to do but the part of him that knows is seeking answers.

Neither of these friends drink or have ever come close to struggling with substance misuse and they weren’t calling me for a diagnosis or a treatment plan. They simply haven’t ever been where the people they love are standing. They wanted to get inside it for a minute because they truly love their person. They want to try and understand how their loved one is thinking - what it looks like, sounds like, feels like.

I try to share snippets of my experience. I don’t even have to go that deep, really just the tip of the iceberg insight is enough to make a non user recoil.

“Why would they choose to do this???”

That question is an entire universe - even those of us who deal with it will never truly wrap our brains around addiction, especially the part where we talk about whether it’s even a choice. What feels most helpful in these conversations is insight for navigating the day to day when discovering a loved one is in - what I have come to call - late stage addiction. It’s the phase far beyond experimentation and recreational use and where you might be now: the part where you’re seeing visibly destructive consequences from long term use. What follows are some things I’ve discovered with the help of friends and I hope these things will help you if you need them.

Empathy Is Not the Same as Believing the Story

Let’s start with the lie, because there’s always a lie, and you’re going to hear one. Or two.

“I only had one,” or “It was the first time I did it” or “This is the last time.” My friend’s wife told him the alcohol that was causing the seizures must have gotten into her system without her knowing, as if she’d been eating too much tiramisu. At first he believed her. The alternative is simply too unbearable for the nervous system to process immediately.

Here’s is something I can report back from the front lines: that lie usually isn’t calculated. In the moment, it’s often the addict trying to make the fear go away for his/her/their self as much as for you. The lie helps them believe they aren’t the kind of person this happened to. It’s not that they think you’re stupid enough to believe it. It’s that for about thirty seconds, they need the relief of believing it too.

Understanding that doesn’t mean accepting it. You’re allowed to hold all the things at once: “I understand, I don’t believe you and I can’t pretend I do.” Empathy is not the same as believing the story.

What It’s Actually Like In There

You might be picturing willpower. A line we could just decide to walk up to and not cross. No. It’s so very much not that.

It’s closer to this: imagine a substance has quietly rewired what “relief” means to your nervous system and become a part of the whole relief mechanism. Relief from boredom, relief from the bodily alarm of trauma and intrusive thoughts. So when they say they can’t stop even though it’s wrecking their health, they’re not choosing the drink/substance over their own life in some calculated cost-benefit sense. They’re choosing the only thing that currently allows them to live without a pain that has been made out to be worse than the addiction through the use of that very addiction. It’s an abuser you can’t leave because you also live inside them. This was one of the most complicated, unexpected and powerful parts of my initial abstinence.

We are asking someone to kill off a part of his/her/their self. But it’s not like removing a foreign object. It’s more like chemo. Abstinence is a toxin in the system of an addict and we have to hope it kills more of the disease than it does the person carrying it. There's no clean line between "the addiction" and "self." It's grown into the same tissue as the coping mechanisms, the sense of relief, sometimes even the joyful parts. Recovery isn't an extraction. It's a process where someone has to survive a treatment that can’t tell the difference between what's killing them and what's keeping them alive. And to keep showing up for round after round of it, with no guarantee, just the hope that more of them comes out the other side than doesn't.

Nothing anyone could have said would have prepared me. There were many failures before I succeeded and no one could have forced me or manipulated me into sobriety before I was ready to fight for myself.

So What Do You Actually Do With That?

So now we’ve identified two things that happen when someone’s addiction gains visibility through disease, legal problems, medical emergencies, lifestyle impacts, etc. There’s a lie (or lies) the addict tells for relief and that moving toward abstinence is unbearably painful. You can’t just slip back into not knowing (denial). And you also can’t “fix” them. But there is some in between stuff, which feels less satisfying in the short term but does help with your own best long game:

Say what you want to say to them ONCE. Not as an ultimatum or a lecture. Just whatever YOUR truth is: “I know what the report said. I love you. I’m scared, and I’m not going to act like I’m not.” You don’t have to do anything else and they don’t have to respond. That last part can often be the hardest but you do have to let go of the expectation of any response, explanation, apology or whatever you might want to hear. No accusations. Just let it out and let it go.

Grieve the version of the conversation you wanted to have. The one where they hear you and it clicks. Let yourself be sad about that.

Find your own lane. Al-Anon exists specifically because loving an addict does something to you too. It’s not just the crisis of the addict, it’s yours, and you deserve support that isn’t secretly still about managing them. Find a group and/or a therapist to work with.

Watch for the moment empathy turns into cover. There’s a line between understanding why the lies happen and quietly doing PR. Smoothing things over to family, explaining it away to yourself, going on like nothing happened…if you notice you start managing the story, take a time out.

The Actual Takeaway

Learning about something doesn’t always lend itself to understanding, in fact it often ends with more shock and disbelief. But it can add a layer of empathy and an understanding of why it’s important to focus on the only thing you can control: you. It doesn’t mean that you’re excusing something. It means the thing is going to happen the way it’s gonna happen no matter how you choose to engage with it. Stay in the lane of “person who loves an addict” and try not to swerve into the lanes of “person who can fix an addict” or “person who manages an addict”.

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Since learning this, I have had an easier time drifting through society (at the cost of constant exhaustion) but sometimes the packed bandwidth of a neurospicy brain prevents me from deciphering riddles in real time. You can imagine the social repercussions of this. In fact I’m learning that my anxiety is not a fully inherent trait, rather one that developed from the constant fear of having no idea what to expect in a social setting and even less of a clue around how I’d fuck it all up and become scarlet lettered. Especially as a woman.

Saying “no.” instead of apologizing or making up excuses.

Introducing an idea in a work meeting without cushioning it with “You’ve probably already thought of this….” or “I’m probably way off base here, but….”

Enforcing a boundary instead of dancing around it or changing the subject.

I had no idea. The antidote to that social anxiety was drinking. Now that I’ve learned to find my way through these situations, the hiccups are less frequent but a recent interaction reminded me I’m not fully done and I will likely never escape the hall of riddles. Most of the time I can decode the riddle eventually. The problem is that social interactions happen in real time.

I was at a local coffee shop for an open mic. At the counter, I ordered my usual little treat and as the barista was making my drink she asked, “So what are you sharing tonight?”

While this is likely small talk not intended to get an actual answer from me, I actually answered that I’d recently seen a songwriter I love and one of her beautiful tracks had been in my head for weeks so I wanted to share it with the community. Her response caught me off guard: “Oh. Have you talked to the host about it?”

“No?” I was puzzled. “We usually just sign in and don’t run things by the host. Do you think maybe there’s an issue?”

“Well, we don’t have our license to play cover songs here, so you’ll have to just maybe talk to the host about it and see.”

She continued to make my drink. At this point, I was already lost in a sea of overthinking. I’d forgotten that it was original work only. I understood the rules that venues had to pay a music publishing company for the rights to have cover songs performed in their space. It’s a serious and enforceable thing with intense consequences. Since she works there and the host doesn’t it was likely that she had authority to tell me no. She returned to the register with my drink.

“I’m confused”, I said.

“Oh, well we don’t pay for the license to play covers, so it’s originals only. In fact, we were fined $10,000 a few years ago. You might want to just run it by the host.”

My next move sent me into villainous territory because genuine confusion comes off as anything but.

“Oh, I completely get that. I guess what I’m wondering is how my talking to the host is going to be productive. Is there an option the host provides that would allow me to play the song? Because what it sounds like you’re saying is that I cannot play the cover. I could be wrong but it seems like my talking to the host will only have us both back here talking to you again.”

At this suggestion, she froze. Then her expression softened a bit and she seemed almost relieved.

“Yes, thank you for clarifying”, she said. “It’s just so hard to say no. I don’t want to tell people what they can and cannot share.”

For a neurospicy mind, this is a hellscape.

The expectation was that I should have heard “no” inside the sentence “you might want to ask the host.”

And that’s the part that fascinates me. Not that she couldn’t say no. Not that I didn’t immediately understand. It’s that we were both expected to participate in a social translation exercise instead of exchanging information. I figured this out back at my table while I nibbled on my cinnamon roll. But all I kept thinking about was if I was the owner of the coffee shop. I would rely on my employees to enforce guidelines and would honestly be livid if I had to pay ten grand because an employee couldn’t directly say what was needed.

And then there’s the extra labor for me to track down the host, re-explain the situation that they might not even be privy too, and lengthen this process even more just for the host and I to regroup with the barista to enter another circular conversation where no one actually says no? It’s like navigating an insurance claim over the phone. You just keep getting transferred and no one can give you an answer to the situation you explain over and over and over.

What separated the coffee shop situation from insurance wasn’t that she didn’t know the answer. She knew the answer immediately. The answer was no. What she was trying to avoid was the discomfort of being the person who said it, so the discomfort got redistributed. Instead of one awkward moment, there would have been a scavenger hunt involving the host, another conversation, and eventually the same answer.

The rejection would still be there but it would be outsourced at the cost of others time and energy.

Somewhere along the way we decided that saying no directly was the rude option. That the polite thing was to send people on a little quest first and make them earn the rejection. As if the no itself isn't the problem, just the efficiency of its delivery. I think about the collective hours of human energy spent decoding sentences that already had answers in them. I think we could have cured something by now.

I get it, I do. "No" is uncomfortable. I spent twenty years drinking so I didn't have to say it either. But at least my coping mechanism was honest about what it was. The scavenger hunt method just outsources the hangover.

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I recently reconnected with an old friend. I’d broken off our lifelong friendship pretty suddenly after getting sober. Not because my friend lied to me, hurt me or crossed any line between us. I ended it because of who she was sleeping with. More specifically, because of who she was unknowingly becoming.

She was one of those women who could not exist without a man in her orbit. I say that without judgment, because I understand the shape of that longing. We shared it for most of our lives. But the trouble with needing someone that badly is that you stop vetting who you’re letting in. You just need the warmth. And whoever is providing it gets access to your home, your world, your people and your information.

Her new man came from somewhere else. He didn’t have much, just the usual stories about a crazy ex. But she had plenty: our local music scene, a network and a reputation built over a lifetime of performing in our community. Within weeks he’d moved in with her, took over her band and was calling himself a local musician. He hadn’t earned any of it. He’d simply gotten close enough to someone who had. Being a loving person, she handed it all over to him. He was an opportunist: ready and willing to colonize her network, rebrand himself and use a woman as social infrastructure. That's when I understood something I hadn't had words for before: it's not enough to vet the people in your life. You have to vet their orbits.

I’ve known her my whole life. She’s talented, generous, funny - the kind of woman who lights up a room and genuinely wants everyone in it to feel good. But there’s a current running underneath all of that warmth, and it pulls her toward men who need something from her. Not men who have something to offer. Men who need something to take.

She doesn’t see the pattern because she’s always inside it. Each new man feels like a fresh start. Different face, different story. But the dynamic is the same: she gives, they receive, and somewhere along the way she mistakes his need for her as love. It isn’t. It’s hunger. And hungry people don’t just feed off the person closest to them. They look around at what else is on the table.

He came from a small town where things hadn’t quite worked out. He arrived with lavish gifts and immediately recognized she had a music scene, connections and trust she’d spent years building with real people doing real work in a small mountain community that welcomes artists.

Within a remarkably short time he had inserted himself into the fabric of something he hadn’t helped weave. A band. Festival connections. Introductions to musicians who were eager - the way artists always are - to collaborate, play and be part of something. He called himself a local. He was not a local. He was a man who had found a local and gotten close enough to borrow her roots. This was not collaboration. This was not community. This is social parasitism dressed up as love.

Here is the thing about my friend that broke my heart a little: she had no idea.

She was not conspiring with him. She was not feeding him information about people she cares about with any malicious intent. She was doing what women in love do: sharing her life. She mentions a musician friend who might be good for a collaboration. She talks about who’s playing where and who’s connected to what. She answers his questions because they seem like innocent curiosity. Because to her, they are.

But to him, every conversation is a map.

This is what I call the conduit problem. A conduit isn’t a bad person. A conduit is simply someone whose openness, trust and inability to imagine that the person they love might be extracting rather than connecting makes them a pipeline. Information flows through them without their knowledge. Access flows through them without their permission. And the people in their orbit - people like me - become exposed to a threat we never agreed to. Her inability to vet her own orbit made her a liability in mine.

That sentence took me a long time to arrive at. Because it sounds cold when you say it out loud about someone you love. But it is not cold. It is honest. And there is a difference between cruelty and clarity. The fault here does not lie with her. It lies with him and with the dynamic she kept recreating because somewhere along the way she learned that love means total openness, total access and total surrender of the self. That is not love. That is a vulnerability that certain kinds of people are very good at finding and exploiting.

But understanding where the fault lies doesn’t change the practical reality. A leak doesn’t have to be intentional to cause damage. And I had to ask myself honestly: how much of myself was I willing to leave exposed through a pipeline I couldn’t control?

The answer was not much. Not as a sober woman who’d finally started to find herself and wanted to protect that space for growth. But again, I knew where she was because I lived it then outgrew it. In fact, I was living it just before quitting drinking and closing the door on her.

I was dating someone kind, attentive and genuinely good. What he was not good at was recognizing the difference between someone who cared about him and someone who was obsessed with him. His ex was still very much in the picture. Not in the way he understood it to be - harmless catch-ups, old friends staying connected. In the way I eventually came to understand it: she was gathering intel. She wanted me out. Not because she loved him, though she may have believed she did. But because I represented a closed door and a future she hadn’t been invited into. So she worked the only angle available to her. Him.

She would ask him questions that sounded like casual conversation. How was I doing. Where did I work. Who were my friends. What were my vulnerabilities, my sensitivities, my soft spots - though she was far too smart to ask it that directly. He answered openly because he trusted her. The questions seemed innocent and he was the kind of man who believed the best about people even when the evidence suggested otherwise. She would take what he gave her and use it to quietly erode my reputation in circles where it mattered.

He was not complicit. He was a conduit. He didn’t understand the level of her obsession because obsession disguises itself as concern, friendship and lingering affection. That experience changed the way I move through the world. I stopped asking only: can I trust this person? I started asking: can I trust everyone they trust? Do they have the discernment to protect what I share with them, not just from themselves, but from the people circling them?

I call it orbit vetting.

Orbit vetting is the practice of evaluating not just the people in your life, but the people surrounding them: satellites, exes who never quite left, new partners with unclear intentions. We are taught to vet the people we let in directly. We read the room and watch for red flags. We take our time before we trust. But we almost never apply that same scrutiny to the people our trusted people have let in. We assume that their judgment covers us by extension. It does not.

Your friend’s orbit is not your orbit but it does overlap with yours. Any information, access and vulnerability you’ve shared lives inside that overlapping space and is potentially reachable by people you never chose and never vetted. Think of it in terms of proximity. There is your inner circle: the people you’ve chosen deliberately, whose character you know and whose judgment you trust. Then there is the next ring out: the people your inner circle has chosen. You didn’t choose them. You inherited them. And beyond that ring are the people those people have chosen. Each ring out is one more degree of separation from your own discernment.

Orbit vetting is the act of paying attention to those rings.

It doesn’t mean paranoia. It doesn’t mean treating every new person in a friend’s life as a threat. Most people are unremarkable, well-meaning folks living their own lives with no particular interest in yours. Orbit vetting is not about suspicion. It is about awareness.

It means noticing when someone in your friend’s orbit seems unusually curious about you. It means paying attention when a friend’s new partner asks questions that feel like reconnaissance. It means recognizing when the person you’re dating is an unwitting pipeline to someone who wishes you harm. It means understanding that a friend who cannot or will not examine her own orbit creates an exposure that extends beyond herself.

It means being honest about this: some orbits are manageable. Some require distance. And some people, through no fault of their own but through a consistent pattern of poor discernment, become liabilities in the lives of the people who love them. You can love someone and still recognize that their chaos has a radius. Protecting yourself from that radius is not betrayal. It is not coldness. It is not a failure of loyalty. It is wisdom.

So what do we actually do with this? Knowing something and acting on it are two very different things, especially when the person at the center of the orbit problem is someone you care about. Naming the problem doesn’t make the solution any less painful. Here is what I’ve learned, imperfectly and over time:

Assess before you act. Not every problematic orbit requires a friendship breakup. Sometimes it requires simply becoming more careful about what you share. You don’t have to burn the relationship down, you just have to stop leaving your valuables in a house with an unlocked door. You can love someone at a distance that protects you. You can stay in a friendship while quietly removing yourself as a source of accessible information.

Stop expecting people to have discernment they’ve never demonstrated. This one is hard because it requires you to let go of who you wish someone was and deal honestly with who they are. My friend was not going to suddenly develop the ability to critically examine the men she falls for. She needed to do significant internal work to get there and she did! She reached out because she is now one year sober and starting to see her patterns. I could not have done it for her. I could not protect myself through her. I could only protect myself from her orbit.

Make the call that your peace requires. Sometimes that is a quiet withdrawal where you see each other less, share less and let the friendship thin naturally without a dramatic confrontation. Sometimes it is a direct conversation (though those rarely go well when the other person cannot see the pattern you’re describing). Sometimes it’s a clean break. Not because you’ve stopped caring but because caring about someone does not obligate you to remain inside the radius of their choices.

That last option is the one we tend to resist most because we are taught that loyalty means staying and real friendship means weathering everything together. But there is a version of loyalty that asks too much and requires you to absorb damage that was never yours to absorb, caused by people you never chose, flowing through a pipeline you cannot control.

You are allowed to step back from that. You are allowed to protect yourself. You are allowed to decide that your reputation, safety and peace of mind are worth more than the discomfort of creating distance.

Orbit vetting is not about being guarded. It is about being honest about where the risks actually live and making conscious choices about how much exposure you’re willing to carry.

I am so happy to get reacquainted with my friend. She is finding her way to a clearer pattern. The man in question is long gone but there were several others that followed and eventually led her to get honest with herself. Like me, she knew that clearing her head by getting sober for a little while would help and she chose to keep going with the abstinence.

In explaining my distance to her, I found myself rambling about this concept that I hope you find helpful. Recognize that the people in our lives are not just individuals. They are ecosystems. And every ecosystem has its own weather, its own risks and its own creatures that have found a way inside. Some of those ecosystems are safe to be close to. Some require protective gear. And some, as much as it hurts to admit, you have to watch from a distance.

The next time you’re assessing someone new in your life, don’t just look at them. Look at who’s in their orbit. Look at the ex who’s still too present. Look at the new partner with the convenient access. Look at the friend group that seems to traffic in other people’s information. Look at the satellites. The threat rarely comes from the person standing directly in front of you. It comes from someone circling just outside your line of sight: close enough to reach you, far enough to seem harmless.

Vet the orbit.

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“Do you want to meet me at the dump and break dishes?”

Yes. That was exactly what I wanted to do but hadn’t yet found the language for. I drove the forty minutes north and pulled up next to her van where she slid open the door to reveal boxes of plates, mugs and bowls. For the next hour we indiscriminately chose dishes, walked to the edge of a huge concrete pit and threw dishes into its walls. We watched as they broke into thousands of pieces and landed with the rest of the garbage. It was a well earned and satisfying release of stress and frustration.

I am not someone who throws things by nature, but there are times in recovery that I mentally return to the dump and fling plates into concrete walls. Here are my big three in no particular order.

$17 Mocktails - You can’t be serious. You’ve created an entire column on the menu dedicated to non-alcoholic ‘craft beverages’ that equate to club soda with a splash of juice and you’re charging the same price as a cocktail? I’m not talking about an NA beer or a mocktail that uses an NA spirit. That’s understandable. I’m talking about a club soda with pineapple juice and a splash of lime. It’s absurd, I don’t like it and I want to throw things.

“Are you okay? You seem…different.” - this is a well intentioned question asked by lifelong friends who love me. It’s actually two very separate questions. I’m okay. Some days I’m ecstatic, some days I wallow in my particular brand of treatment resistant depression but if we were to average it all out, I am okay. And here’s the thing - I am also different. I have stopped a life long habit of having chemical and behavioral crutches. That changes a girl. It’s supposed to. Pair that with the fact that five years of abstinence can change the brain to resemble that of someone who has never used drugs or alcohol. My brain has been replacing itself while I still am relying on it to run the show. This is an all hands on deck, monumental shift of a lifetime. I am different because of it. All of my priorities have changed right along with the way I move through the world. So many of the things I was occupied with before have vanished. Of course, I had no idea how much things would change and it’s the kind of change that’s hard to grasp if you haven’t lived it. I understand the concern. But how could I remove a fundamental, chemical, behavioral aspect of my survival and not change? The question hits on a core need of being seen. And it feels like you’re saying I owe you my sameness. After nine years, it still makes me want to throw things even though I know my people love me.

No escape hatch - The cycle of self sabotage and rebuilding the familiar was a really big one for me. But now I can also see it as a self protective mechanism. It can be harrowing to raw dog reality. The solution was always to check out when things felt overwhelming, let off some steam, then return to the scene. Then wait until it got overwhelming again and do the same thing. And overwhelming isn’t just the bad stuff. I also had no idea how to handle successes without checking out. Now I’m dealing with life in real time from the front row while also facing the things from the past that led me to check out. Eek! I’m still finding my escape hatches through things like exercise, creativity, nature and healthy relationships. But the loss of the ease of drinking it away has me thinking of throwing things.

I recently stumbled upon a quote that captured a feeling I couldn't articulate myself:

“I had crossed the line and I was free; but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land." Harriet Tubman

Being somewhere new without a map or company is hard. Sure, there are groups of people in recovery spaces who we can share our experiences with and relate to up to a point. But we are the only ones living our story from the inside out and the outside in. It’s hard, it’s lonely and I’m still figuring it out. Maybe a trip to the dump is in order.

Thank you for reading - if you liked this article, please consider sharing, becoming a subscriber or buying me a coffee. Thank you!

I made a whole show out of my chaos, I talked about it in my previous post. I took the disasters, the drinking, the cities I left in a hurry - lots of stories - and shaped them into something with a beginning, middle, and end. After years of sobriety, healing and making sense of the past, I wanted to give it all form for a proper send off into the ether. But art doesn’t really let you close the door and be done with things once and for all. You just find yourself in a new place, at a new desk, listening for the next thing.

And somewhere in the quiet of that desk, a question keeps circling:

Do I have it in me to go another round?

Not with the chaos. I’ve already done that work. The real question is newer and stranger than that:

What is waiting to be created instead of excavated?

For most of my adult life I felt like I was playing a game that everyone else had the instructions for. It took me a long time to understand that was by design.

I grew up in a family system built around a kind of invisible gravity; one that pulled everything toward one center and left the rest of us fumbling in the dark, people-pleasing our way through every room we entered. I didn’t have a name for it for a really long time. I just knew that I was always slightly off-balance, always trying to read the room and always a little surprised when kindness went wrong.

And then the disasters came. Not metaphorical ones. Actual ones. The kind that take your homes and leave you with FEMA numbers. The kind that robs you of hard won traction. Every time I started to restock my life, my confidence, my sense of self - something else would arrive to empty the shelves again. I once heard it described as a “continual dismount” and it’s so true. Two steps forward, a hundred steps back. It’s impossible to build without a foundation. You’re not only constantly trying to restock your life, you’re grieving the things and community you’ve lost while dealing with the PTSD of things you never thought you’d see.

What I didn’t know then, and only understand now, is that when you are carrying unhealed trauma, people can tell. Some people meet that frequency with compassion. Others meet it like an opportunity. And the loneliest part isn’t the predation itself; it’s that the people who aren’t targeted rarely believe you because they’ve only ever seen the other performance.

So I isolated. Not out of defeat. Out of necessity. I needed to get somewhere quiet enough to hear my own voice. I needed less people jumping around me on the trampoline as I was trying to stand up. So I left a city of four million people for an island of 70,000.

Music has been the place I go since as far back as I can remember. I didn’t know then that I was building anything. I was just a kid in a bedroom with a Casio keyboard and a diary, building a world that belonged entirely to me. I couldn’t have told you what I was doing in there. I just know that when I came out, something was slightly more bearable. That never stopped being true.

Two years ago I stepped back from music. I was burned out, dealing with a stalker, successfully representing myself in court with a grand finale of spraining my ankle. But the writing wouldn’t let me alone. While bedbound with an elevated foot, I went back to a memoir I’d started and set aside at six months sober when I was too close to it to see it clearly. I felt I finally had some distance to be more objective. And somewhere in the rereading, an idea arrived: what if the excerpts and the songs lived together? What if I let the funny parts be funny, and the painful parts be exactly that?

I took a stand up comedy workshop when I quit drinking. A lot of people go to AA, I enrolled in a comedy workshop in Santa Monica. I needed a challenge with writing and sorting out my feelings. I needed to learn how to say the true thing in a room full of people and have them stay with me. Turns out that’s not so different from songwriting.

There’s a strange thing that happens when you make art out of your own wreckage. It stops belonging to you in the way it used to. The cord gets cut. What was once the whole story becomes just one chapter you can perform and then leave on the stage when you walk off. But it is an odd feeling to go forward. I liken it to losing all my clothes when the house burns down. We don’t realize how much of our identity is wrapped up in our look - the shoes, the favorite sweater, the comfy jeans. Without a wardrobe you’re just roaming around in a patchwork outfit until you can get it together enough to put a new look together, but it will never come with the memories and broken-in-ness of your favorite pants. The way we look affects how others perceive us. I’ll always remember the weirdest gift I received after my second house burned down: a friends mom bought me a beautiful Coach purse. It seemed so silly but she knew something I didn’t at the time. I could have nothing in this world but a few well placed, high end accessories will open doors. I never would have spent $500 on a purse even at my most successful heights in life. But letting go allows us to consider: was that look I’ve been sporting for decades in need of an update?

I’m still getting this show to the rooms it belongs in. That part feels like a last step, or maybe a debt. Not because I owe anyone my pain, but because the work deserves to be witnessed and sharing my experience has often been a life raft for others. I want that to continue on. And while I’m building that show, I’m still playing sets on bills and writing new music. But I am done excavating. The well may not be dry but there is a real draw to create something without having the drive to have that thing carry THE message that will make it all make sense. I’ve spun the straw into gold (rather, lossless audio formats and jokes). Now I want to follow the thread and the wonder.

Somewhere in the clearing out and alchemy, something shifted. I’m sitting at my laptop with a new song half-formed in front of me, and for the first time in a long time it isn’t coming from a wound. It’s coming from sheer curiosity.

The path was always the material.

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But a couple of years ago I peeled myself away from it. Because in addition to writing, performing and recording and at the onset of my path of sobriety, I thought it would be a good idea to start a band. I wanted to build off the momentum of the previous decade, put an album together and start touring through places I’d lived, played and had connections. Since I’d recently moved to a new state, I also wanted to create community locally. So I started promoting local shows, bringing in bands from other cities, friends who were touring and local people who weren’t getting the stage time that the regulars were getting. That’s a lot of things.

And I burnt out. Because along the way I did with music what I’ve done with every relationship in my life: I overextended and I slowly disappeared inside everyone else’s needs. And then there was the misogyny. The kind women learn to absorb so naturally we stop noticing its even happening. I was working harder, giving more and getting paid less. I was tolerating comments and behavior that walked right up to the line and crossed it with a smirk. And somewhere along the way I had decided that it was all rolled into the cost of simply being able to participate.

So one day, two years ago, after driving home from a festival I decided to step back. It wasn’t something I announced. Just that little voice inside that landed with such authority I knew it wasn’t a suggestion but a need. I didn’t post about it or make it a thing. I just pulled back and stopped showing up for everyone else. Ironically, in this relationship, doing nothing taught me more than any of the overdoing I was doing. Over the next two years, out of the dozens of people I had put on a poster after building shows from nothing, two people reached out to ask me to be on a show or do something else that required nothing from me but my presence. Aside from those two people, the silence was deafening. It was a gut punch to learn that I wasn’t building community at all. I was simply a workhorse. It wasn’t the realization that hit so hard, it was the “oops I did it again” of how familiar the feeling was. And that became data. Because something about sobriety and a clear mind pushes me past growth edges where I’d usually dismount, self-sabotage, make a mess then start over from scratch on the same worn down path. I couldn’t do it again.

I took a break instead. A break from overdoing, a break from being useful, a break from comparing social media numbers, a break from my identity being bound by things that weren’t me anymore. I took a break so I could hear my own voice. It was the most productive thing I’ve ever done.

Two years is a long time to be quiet, especially after almost two decades of constant shows, recording, herding others and burning through energy that should have gone into my music just to navigate the low grade misogyny that women in this industry learn to treat as background noise.

Long enough to write, to reflect, to sit with the uncomfortable things I had been too busy to look at. Long enough to remember that music was never supposed to be something I managed. It was supposed to be something I lived.

I prioritized my memoir and got back to my blog. I went back to therapy. I started devouring books again. I joined a gym. I started venturing out to intentional spaces where, instead of playing music, I was reading passages and poems I was writing. I watched what drew people in and what didn’t. And naturally, the stories and the music found their way back to each other and a new idea came bubbling to the surface.

And then one day I decided I was ready. I pitched a show to a venue, booked a date and the show sold out. And the morning of the show, four friends who’d made specific commitments to be there texted to say they weren’t showing up. Not one. Not two. Four.

I stood in my kitchen that morning and felt the familiar gut punch of it. And then I recognized it for what it was. It wasn’t a crisis or a sign that I had made a mistake. It was information. More data. The patterns always repeat until the water runs clear. This was the same pattern showing up one more time to see if I would respond differently, if I had learned anything.

I had. So I took my dog on a hike in the forest and cleared my head. I loaded up my car, did a self care thing and prepped a late night post-show dinner for afterward. I got dressed and went on my way.

I walked out in front of a room full of strangers who had paid to spend an evening with me and I gave them everything I had. The memoir. The music. The comedy. The whole strange, complicated, hard-won story of a woman who had to stop showing up for everyone else before she could figure out how to show up for herself.

The show was the best thing I have ever done on a stage.

Here’s the takeaway: taking a chance doesn’t guarantee you won’t get hurt. It doesn’t guarantee the people you trust will show up. It doesn’t protect you from the familiar gut punch of old patterns arriving right on time. But it does guarantee information. And if you’re paying attention, that information makes you more yourself, not less.

So if you’re in your own quiet period right now and you’ve stepped back, dropped off, stopped showing up for everyone else and you’re wondering if that makes you a quitter, guess what? It doesn’t. It makes you someone who is paying attention.

The music will find its way back to you.

Thank you for reading. Please consider supporting my writing by sharing, becoming a subscriber, following me on Instagram or buying me a coffee. Thank you!

I have retired from shouting about conspiracies and have accepted a tenure-track position. Moving forward, I will operate as a Gentle & Nuanced Conspiracy Analyst (GNCA™). This is my second publication in the field.

This new single has already been nominated for a Grammy in the “Best Dental Hygiene Used as Existential Accusation in a Vocal Performance” category. So honored and humbled. This isn’t just a song to me. It’s a nervous breakdown you can sing along to.

Find it on Bandcamp here. Or visit my website for links to streaming platforms.

Thanks for listening! If you liked this piece, please consider sharing, becoming a subscriber or buying me a coffee. Thank you!

I’m not an expert on the subject. I’m not academically trained in behavioral psychology. I’m just someone who has been through it and identified it. I’ve spent many years nourishing my inner landscape in order to override my upbringing and sobriety was the final step in facing myself head on. I chose not to have kids because I didn’t want to continue the cycle but also a big part of my childbearing years were spent being hit by and recovering from natural disasters. Starting a family was the furthest thing from my mind. But during those same years I was completely caught up in what I thought was curiosity about the world around me: becoming a yoga teacher, working and studying in a Vedic monastery, learning to play guitar, taking classes in anything from philosophy to literature, experimenting with drugs and being a workshop junkie. Turns out it wasn’t just curiosity about the world around me, it was me trying to bubble to the surface of my own life.

I was an embarrassing number of years old before I learned that I was not only capable of having my own opinions - there was also a Self within me that required tending to. Authoritarian parenting is defined by the National Institute of Health as “a strict, high-demand style defined by “tough love” where parents prioritize obedience, set rigid rules, and offer little warmth or negotiation. Often using a "because I said so" approach, this style emphasizes control and punishment over nurturing, frequently resulting in well-behaved but anxious, obedient, and less independent children.”

And let me tell you, sending a young woman out into the world at 18 years old as an anxious, obedient and not at all independent person is a death sentence. Even making it out alive, there were years of being dead to myself and everything around me. And that’s where the substance abuse really took center stage - it wasn’t so much to stop the pain, it was a response to understanding the damage, realizing that not everyone does the right thing when you’re an easy target and no one is looking, and mourning all the could have been’s.

But I didn’t stay stuck in victim mode for long. Today I’m living a life I have carved out that is not quite in alignment with the status quo. As I wrote in a previous article about my own radicalization, “My radicalization developed over time as more information led to changes like living with less, ramping up the reduce/reuse/recycling, dropping out of the credit system, growing my own food, eliminating television and following my heart as I created my own career path. My radicalization is about making waves - asking tough questions, doing things differently and standing strong in the face of adversity and judgement.” So how did I go from dead inside, obedient people pleaser to asking tough questions and holding my ground in the storm of opinion?

Well first the pendulum swung toward rebellion as a teenager. School breaks were spent locked inside the house because that’s much easier than parenting: setting boundaries, trusting and working with outcomes. So I started sneaking out the basement window at night. I started running away from home. Consequences were severe - in some cases, criminal. Eventually the pendulum would swing back to being good and obedient, but just a tad less than before because, well, that’s how pendulums work. This went on until my my late 20’s. Eventually I landed somewhere in the middle and made the choice to stay there and fully heal. That’s when the path to finding myself began.

What makes this path so appealing to an audience right now? It’s not the road itself; we all have our own yellow brick road to follow. The difference is that some people are planted in fertile soil, carefully watered and nurtured along the way. Their challenges, while real, may not run as deep. Others are buried far beneath the surface, pressed down by heavier layers, not even aware that there is light above them waiting to be reached.

That depth changes you. When you’ve had to fight for air, you learn how to breathe in tight spaces. When you’ve had to search for light, you learn how to not only recognize it but how to create it. Those who have survived deeper trauma often develop a hard-won clarity, resilience, and instinct for navigating uncertainty. In moments of political turbulence, that lived wisdom becomes guidance. I know how to endure, how to organize, how to read shifting power, and how to keep moving forward even when the ground feels unstable.

This isn’t about whose struggle was greater. It’s about recognizing that hardship can cultivate perspective, courage, and clarity. When we listen to those who have navigated profound challenges, we gain more than stories. We gain strategies. In a shifting political landscape, that collective wisdom can steady us all.

Thank you for reading - if you liked this article, please consider sharing, becoming a subscriber or buying me a coffee. Thank you!

If you’ve been out in public lately and you have eyes, it’s not hard to see that our phones have taken a majority of the population captive. The other night I was waiting for a table at a restaurant. Every single person in the waiting area was on their phone - friend groups, families, even the hostess was scrolling in between guests. As a Gen X’r, I’ve watched this harrowing takeover. I remember when the phone was a thing on the wall, a receiver attached to a base unit by a long twisty cord and maybe, if you cared, there was a separate device attached to it called an “answering machine” that took messages from missed calls. Then came the fascinating cordless phone that blew all our minds. A few years later we were introduced to a brick-like contraption called a cell phone, which was too expensive to buy but could be rented at the customer service desk of the local grocery store. Then there was the flip phone, monthly payments and now, the smart phone - a place where we can do everything from access the internet to store our credit card info, check the weather, find directions, listen to music, watch movies and argue with strangers and bots on social media. You could also call people if you really feel up to it. We were eased into addiction gradually and now we are all walking around with our very own remote control/tracking device.

Because it really is remote control. Somewhere out there, far beyond our personal bubble is a team of people working overtime to keep us glued to a screen. Or, as The Friends of Attention spell it out in their book, Attensity, “we are up against trillions of dollars of military grade research and thousands of the worlds most talented and highly paid engineers aligned behind overpowering our intentions.”

I guess my first question would be, “Why?”. Why trillions of dollars toward keeping us glued to a screen instead of, say, housing people? Or educating them? Or providing healthcare? Wouldn’t a thriving society look more like every being having the opportunity to cultivate the unique gifts only they can bring into this world? Who are these people? It is a curious and wildly infuriating conundrum.

Alphabet, Inc - the parent company of Google - took home 134 BILLION DOLLARS last year from collecting your data as you scrolled and selling it to advertisers. Your attention is the commodity. And you give it away every day. Actually, maybe “give it away” is the wrong way to put it. You invest your energy everyday in a system that is profiting off of you in exchange for voluntarily placing a ceiling on your intelligence, creativity and productivity. Or, as the book puts it:

“Over the last 30 years, the explosive growth of the internet and the global proliferation of data devices have converged with a series of short-sighted political decisions. Along the way, the shrewd initiative of a generation of tech entrepreneurs has produced, in fact, an ostensibly free digital universe whose hidden operating cost is the depletion and pollution of the minds and senses of its users.”

As someone who has spent a significant portion of my life studying consciousness, meditation, neurobiology and astrophysics, I understand why our focus is such a hot commodity: Mind Is The Builder. Energy is Everything.

What you focus on expands.

Keeping a population in a digital prison keeps a population building the digital prison.

Alphabet Inc’s profits have risen 30% year over year since 2022.

We are winning the war on our own infinite potential.

Attensity is a labor of love for humanity or as they put it, “A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement.” With chapters like, “Call it human fracking”, “all this is the triumph of a catastrophic lie about what it means to be human” and “attention activism is a fight for justice”, this book breaks it down much better than I ever could. It comes in hot with data that indisputably demonstrates that we are being robbed of the experience of joyful human-ness.

Your attention, your emotions - all of it is being used against you. It is up to YOU to do the inner work to take your power back. This book (along with their online resources) will show you how.

Read the book.

Thank you for reading - if you liked this article, please consider sharing, becoming a subscriber or buying me a coffee. Thank you!

After a two-year self-care hiatus from constant performing, releasing the song feels a bit vulnerable. The world has changed. I’ve changed. Yet this song still knows what it wants to say. It feels like re-opening a door I never meant to close. It’s a reminder of why I started making music in the first place: to question and stand with people who refuse to stay silent.

I am releasing it today for Bandcamp Friday, a day when all proceeds from purchases go directly to the artist. As music bookings ramp up and my day job as a dementia caretaker to a special lady I’ve supported for six years comes to an unexpected halt, your support is deeply appreciated right now as I navigate the next steps of my creative path.

Find the song and more of my music here.

Thank you xo

I clearly remember my first demonization. A girlfriend and I told a dear friend about his unfaithful girlfriend. We’d welcomed his new girlfriend into our circle with open arms and over the course of a year we all grew very close. One night, after many glasses of wine, she spoke openly about her practice of hooking up with her ex when she was back home. This generally is not an arena to be poking around in - what someone else does in their relationship is no ones business - but another detail made alarm bells go off. She also spoke openly about the ex being an IV drug user - with an emphasis on carelessness. My best friend and I got in the car after dinner and endured an awkward silence before we simultaneously blurted out varying versions of “So did you hear that one part?” We decided together to carefully suggest to our friend that he get tested. It did not go well. He accused us of never liking her, which we quickly debunked by demonstrating how we’d welcomed her into our circle by inviting her along for every friend group adventure. When that didn’t work he accused us of looking for drama. We tried explaining that we had nothing to gain and that his health might be at risk. He grew increasingly furious until demanding we leave his house and never speak to him again.

It’s a practice that’s well embedded in our society. The actual news being delivered falls by the wayside and we project our discomfort onto the messenger. A team of Harvard psychologists concluded that this reaction is triggered when a situation “violate[s] the commonly held beliefs that the world is just, predictable, and comprehensible.” In 2013, CIA employee Edward Snowden blew the whistle on increasing, illegal government surveillance practices. Ironically, many of the people whose information was being compromised labeled him a traitor. In 2010, Chelsea Manning leaked classified military documents, blowing the whistle on civilian torture -resulting conversations focused more on attacking her character than on the actual information she revealed.

Rejecting information that forces us to face reality allows the receiver to avoid facing unpalatable conclusions that would threaten their beliefs that the world is safe and - in these cases - that their government is honest and acting in their best interests. That’s a big, big scary thing. Labeling Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning as traitors relieves the receiver of having to think critically. We are wired to seek the familiar and to rely on an illusion of control. The tendency to shift into fear and blame mode outweighs the opportunity to elevate to growth mode. It’s easier to dismiss the person carrying the message than it is to grapple with our own wiring or face discomfort. It wouldn’t surprise me if the people who demonized Snowden and Manning are the same people in crisis on social media right now in hysterics asking, “HOW DID WE GET HERE?!?!?!?”

So how do we combat this phenomenon that none of us are immune to? First we should build the case that its beneficial to do so. Being open to information that contradicts our beliefs is important because reality doesn’t care about our beliefs. Reality persists whether we want it to or not. Being aligned with reality is a good thing, even when reality is bad.

Considering new information is also a fast track to dissolving ego. When we get out of our own way enough to say “I hadn’t thought of that” or “This goes against everything I know, but I’m interested in your take” we not only learn more, we maintain healthy connections with people we care about.

Personal growth is a really positive thing and isn’t limited to just changing our minds about something. It’s about who we become in the process of simply being open to having our minds changed. Growth means becoming yourSelf - it does not mean becoming whatever fictional “them” you’ve created. It means owning your own mind and moving beyond conditioning that isn’t serving you or the collective anymore.

Also, we start to look foolish when we dig our heels in in the face of facts. Yesterday I watched two friends commenting and arguing on social media - one parroting slogans and buzzwords with no substance, the other responding with opposing facts and sources. The parrot gets angrier and resorts to personal insults while the regulated person remains calm and continues to invalidate every false claim. We can’t see when we’re doing it, but everyone else can.

So how do we stop this kneejerk reaction? One tool that comes in handy is “practicing the pause”. We create a little space between the news we just heard and our conditioned reaction. In this space, we can separate the person from the news. We are consistently conditioned to consume and respond to rapid fire information - that makes the pause a bit challenging. Cultivating a daily meditation practice is a good way to increase self observation and help slow down our reactions. When we reject a culture of non-stop information flow, we naturally create space to think critically. It’s almost a form of activism.

There is no need to respond to the news immediately, instead we can say something like “This is new to me and I’ll have to dig a little deeper.” Then do your own research. And don’t just google the phrase you were delivered verbatim. Learn to research. Digest the information presented, ask new questions and poke around the periphery of the subject. A self inquiry like, “If this were true, what would things look like?”. The results of covering up war crimes against civilians might look like journalists getting killed in the line of duty while reporting on the war crimes. That establishes a thread to follow.

An environment that shoots the messenger discourages people from speaking out. At the very least, we owe it to ourselves and our future to do the internal work that allows us to consider that things aren’t always what they seem - or in this technocratic era: rapid fire information curated by those who want to stay in control is worthy of scrutiny.

Thank you for reading. If you’d like to keep me caffeinated, click here.

All of that

just to be able to

without trembling

look out

into the world

and announce

fearlessly

intentionally

knowingly

“yes”.

Thank you for reading. Keep me caffeinated here. Please.

“I read your post in (group). You said the scapegoating doesn’t get to you anymore, do you have any tips on how to get there? I have distanced myself but the rumination continues. I can’t stand it. Thank you.”

Every so often I open my messages to find a question from a stranger. I’m active in a lot of online groups that discuss things I’ve lived through in the realm of narcissistic family dynamics and child abuse. I post and comment when I think I might have a hard won key that would help unlock something for someone who is struggling. I went through a labyrinthine hellscape to find the language to describe my experience, label it and reroute. That labeling was 20 years ago and the rerouting is constant. These days there’s a lot more online resources and conversation but there is no catalyst like human connection to seek answers on the war path of being human. I am so grateful when people send a message to reach out and further help themselves.

Growth necessitates boundaries. Through our growth, we work hard to cultivate a strong self of self. To maintain the solid foundation needed to build on that growth, we create boundaries to protect it all. Naturally, the distance between us and what isn’t good for us will increase. But physical distance and emotional growth does not equal automatic mental cessation and peace. We don’t stop thinking about what isn’t good for us just because we’ve moved on. Rumination is an obsessive thought loop. It can replay and keep us stuck in a cycle of anxiety and depression.

A scapegoat is a human dumping ground for projection from individuals of a larger group all are a part of - a workplace, family, church, etc. The lore of the term ‘scapegoat’ comes from the days when a goat would be burdened with the sins of a community then be led off into the wilderness to carry the sins far, far away and out of sight forever. The rumination of the human scapegoat who is blamed for every mishap and inconvenience in the group might feel a lot like PTSD flashbacks, like a bad dream can that never be escaped.

If rumination was an Olympic sport, the walls of my home would be lined with gold medals. Not so much anymore but in my prime I was unstoppable. I have always been highly sensitive. I could feel family dysfunction before I knew how to identify it. There was no public internet when I was growing up. Therapy would have blown the lid off the whole operation of silence and abuse and was therefore avoided. My survival depended on the people who were creating the chaos inside me. Their survival depended on creating chaos. As a child, my mind was constantly spinning - replaying scenarios and responding differently in order to fix things, imagining different outcomes, wondering what I could be doing better. Years after putting it all behind me and walking away, my mind still spun creating solutions, putting pieces together and visualizing being seen and heard in my truth. Here’s how I stopped ruminating and reclaimed my mind:

Distance. We see from the original question above that this person has already distanced themselves but I’m making it the first step to really drive home a point. Going ‘No Contact’ can be a 30 day experiment, a lifetime or anything in between. The important part is that you create space. Disrupt the dynamic and create space. Renegotiate it later. Or don’t.

Patience. This healing work is a complete life overhaul and lasting change is not going to happen overnight. It’s a lifelong path of inquiry. So really you can just kindly ask your racing thoughts to disperse themselves over a lifetime. Soothe your thoughts and let them know there is no rush. Therapy, meditation and exercise can be good partners. You have reached THE path. Exhale, relax and assure yourself that the efforts of continuing forward on this trail will accumulate and free you. Slow and steady wins the race.

Return to yourself. I call this the continual reframe. Whenever thoughts take off, reel them in by asking what they have come to teach you. Whether its a nostalgic flashback or reworking the dialog of an entire scene, there is something YOU are needing from this thought loop. Look behind the thought. Begin with the handy HALT tool and ask: am I Hungry, Angry, Lonely or Tired? It’s usually one of those things. This disrupts the loop and sets you off on a little adventure that’s all about self-care and growth. Start a journal and when you’re feeling good, make a list of all the healthy things you can do to respond to HALT - favorite snacks, physical outlets, friends to call, places to hang a hammock for nap. Having some choices handy helps the solution flow and starts to rewire your brain.

Grieve. Speaking of anger. The grief process was the thing that really tied everything together and allowed me to move forward. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross defines the five stages of grief as denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Recognize where you are in this cycle and camp out there for awhile. Write, sleep, cry, eat comfort foods - let the grief move through you. Like childbirth, grief is a process we surrender to - it’s going to happen whether we are prepared or not and its going to happen on its own terms. Surrender to it, it’s here to help. Grieve your losses, your past selves, what could have been - address and process it all. In his poem, The Guest House, Rumi teaches us that we are hosts for the transient feelings that arrive as messengers and leave us with wisdom, gratitude and acceptance:

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

The ruts may be deep. It takes tools and strategies to start to reprogram our minds but the main ingredient that eases progress along is the desire to heal. You are so incredibly deserving of a healed mind, heart and life. The scapegoat can win in the end.

Thank you for reading. If you’d like to submit a question, send it to LaurenMakesMusics@gmail.com. I also teach remote meditation and yoga classes that help with focus, concentration and overall wellness. Find more info at LaurenFlynnYoga.com. Oh, and keep me caffeinated here.

All of that

just to be able to

without trembling

look them in the eyes

and say

politely

firmly

authoritatively

“no”.

Thank you for reading. Keep me caffeinated here.

Vibes Were Off

It just stopped resonating with me. Like the end of a relationship that’s just done but there’s so much to untangle it feels overwhelming to even think about beginning. We live together. All my stuff is there. We’re going to a wedding together next month. All this entanglement but a total absence of harmony in the relationship, the type you feel in your bones but also in the way every day interactions feel more and more awkward. Every cell in my body started rejecting every part of the ritual - from getting ready to ubering home. Eventually the misery overruled the joy and took up space in my body in ways I couldn’t justify anymore.

How You Spend Your Time Is How You Spend Your Life

I love these little sayings, especially when they turn out to be true. It was about a bigger choice I was making with my time. I was centering alcohol in my social life. Now my time is structured around self-care and social commitments in ways that feel more appropriate for how I want to spend my life: in growth mode. One of the big things I’ve noticed is how alcohol kept me stuck - I didn’t notice this while I was staying stuck. Removing alcohol has been like taking my foot off the brake. There’s a lot more life coming at me but let go or be dragged, ya know?

Just Entirely Too Old To Be Doing It All

I know there are people who can have a few glasses of wine with friends and call it a night. I am not one of those people. My nervous system required me to feel like I was constantly jumping out of a plane. That level of thrill seeking gets harder to maintain and even harder to recover from. These days I get a rush from trying to solve the Wordle with my battery on 8%.

Alcohol Was the Sole Cause of Every Problem In My Life

I really thought it was the final step of achieving my ultimate form - that quitting drinking would eliminate every lingering challenge in my life so far unmoved by a steady stream of therapy, workshops, self help books and retreats. Like magic, every obstacle would disappear along with the bar tabs, empty bottles and hangovers. It would be like hydrating once and for all. That’s obviously not how it turned out. But I’m glad I believed that’s how it would go. Without this level of delusion I may not have persevered.

I Wanted To

Our will is powerful. Quitting only worked when I was truly ready. For me it was outgrowing a whole lifestyle. I shifted from “I don’t want to drink” to “I don’t want to use drinking to solve the discomfort in this situation'“. The first one is a statement. The second one is a statement and an invitation to find an alternative. I wanted an alternative. That’s what it took for me, as a woman in my 40’s who started drinking as a teenager. I really had to want it because it required a complete restructuring. In past attempts at quitting I really fought to keep so much the same but all those failures taught me that it would never work unless I went straight for a complete overhaul.

So far, so good.

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Eight years ago right now I was waking up after an intentionally sober 24 hours. Day one of 2,922 without indulging in even a cigarette. Cigarettes were the constant. I remember starting in sixth grade. I was the new kid at a small town middle school and instead of forcing myself to be social, I’d walk down the block to the cemetery at lunch to sit under a tree by myself and smoke Marlboro Reds. When drinking went, smoking had to go too. Both habits had lost their appeal, but not their grip. It was an unbearable space to inhabit.

In my final couple years of drinking, I bounced between really wanting to quit and being confident that I didn’t need to. I was frustrated that I kept falling back into “I don’t need to” mode. I needed to. Everything in my life was signaling that it was time to kick the habit.

At the end of my relationship with alcohol, I was curious and lucky enough to start to notice what would trigger me out of the latest clean streak and back into chaos. Not as excuses for my misuse. These are patterns I started to spot that led me to identify triggers. And by triggers I mean external stimuli enticing enough to disrupt my momentum and send me back down the road to chaos. And instead of defaulting to protective boundaries or walking away in response to a trigger, I went right in and made myself at home in hopes of influencing a different outcome by acting different. I was wired to take the gamble. It never worked. It’s not necessarily destructive, but its not productive - meaning literally, no evolution is achieved by going back in that room and getting comfortable. The frustration of that stagnancy and powerlessness of re-living the same experience of defeat was the trigger to coaxing me off the straight and narrow. Discord led to comfort seeking which led to drinking. I’d slink right back into the familiar but awful world of rapidly escalating discomfort, hangovers and missed opportunities. So why was I choosing that reality? Why would I willingly walk into the same outcome over and over? Because I hadn’t made the unconscious conscious.

Eight years later I’ve cracked the code a little. Success has come from committing to the inquiry. Before I could stay out of the room, I had to absolutely convince myself that my purpose for existing has nothing to do with changing situations or other people. An initial glimpse of order in my mind came somewhere around the thirty day sobriety mark: the swirling mess of dust and particles in my head condensed into a star, the star became an insurmountable sun anchoring thoughts to a steady orbit. This new lens provided both order and form. I made it my new mission to orbit the star, to not go back into the comfy room where no change happens.

The battle to stay out of the room is its own journey: making the unconscious conscious. Now in the moment, the path in front of me can be broken down with one question: do I want to be coaxed into this room or not? I don’t. I’ve learned there’s nothing for me in there.

None of this could have been seen from inside the room. In fact I had been told this by a therapist a decade before I quit drinking. He instructed me to visualize a friend stuck a revolving glass door, putting themselves in a non stop roundabout, panicking and missing the exit on every rotation. It would do my friend no good, he insisted, for me to go into the revolving door and shout the solution for escape through the panes. He swore that by standing outside the door, I’d show my friend it was possible to find an exit. Doing so would allow my friend to uncover the inner resources needed to go beyond the door. And I’d save a lot of energy.

As I embark on year nine, I think about how I learned to effortlessly navigate the glass door without getting stuck. I reflect on how I would never think to enter the revolving glass door to retrieve someone. I would have in the past for sure. That girl is long gone. I think a lot about all the necessary losses we must accept in order to grow. The loss of our innocence, our success, our youth - each comes with a grief process and then a rebirth. In her book Women Who Run With the Wolves, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes suggests a practice she calls descansos. Roll out a long sheet of butcher paper and mark the descansos - the Spanish word for roadside memorials and resting places - of all the deaths of self along the path, to be acknowledged and left behind. All of the heavy grief emotions - sadness, rage, denial and guilt - deserve to be acknowledged and put to rest.

That’s where all these years have led. For some people it’s not ten paragraphs deep. Lots of people can quit without making it their whole personality. Lots of people can drink and still have healthy lives. Eight years of abstinence and introspection has given me a lot of time to feel heavy emotions, space to put things to rest and tools to tend to the rebirth. At eight years I’m at a place where I comfortably surrender to auto-pilot and orbit. It’s a nice contrast from the first few years of confusion and the swirling mess of dust I started with.

There’s no better way to sum it up than these words from a friend: “8 years is a big fuckin' deal”

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A few months ago, in honor of National Recovery Month, I wrote a series of posts describing how I quit drinking. I’m compiling them all here in one place and posting links below.

This time of year can be a time for getting introspective and using the momentum of the new year to set goals, grow and make changes. In order to move into another version of ourselves we need to let go of the current one. It will be eight years tomorrow that I woke up hungover, saying “never again” for the hundredth time and somehow it stuck. None of this is personal or medical advice. Everything else is explained in the links below:

Part One: Winning at Failing “Eventually I moved forward without folding. The first step to quitting was the act of trying and failing. It’s part of the process. The act of quitting it all and taking a few steps forward cleared a path that helped me go further each time. On the other side, I started to hone in on the ways I was bargaining with myself to stay stuck. This went on for years.”

Part Two: That First Big Moment “But what was different about December 31, 2017? How did I identify I wanted to quit and make it stick after years of failing at quitting? There were new awakenings that got me to this point. Again. There were insights that led me here. Again. I woke up thinking “never again”…again. What did I do differently that morning that I didn’t do the previous “never again” morning?”

Part Three: Night One “My first order of business was me: I would head to the store in broad daylight to stock up on everything I’d need to make it through the night. I knew from experience that heading out after dark was too tempting.”

Part Four: “People with goals succeed because they know where they’re going.” -Earl Nightingale

Part Five: Meetings — To Go or Not To Go “A shift is a shift is a shift. You get to choose how to handle it. All routes are valid.”

Thank you for reading - if you liked this article, please consider sharing, subscribing or buying me a coffee to fuel my writing. Thank you!

Social Restructuring. Drinking and partying was a lifestyle. The names of the clubs are different but inside each one is essentially the same scene. I spent decades moving in and out of clubs — every city offered the same navigable havens whether I was travelling for fun or work. Having a scene, no matter how dysfunctional it got for me, was safety. Taking that away affected my identity like losing a career or marriage.

Losing the plot. I was fortunate not to lose too many friends when I quit drinking. Those I did eventually lose fell off because I discovered boundaries, not because I quit being fun. I feel truly blessed to have kept so many friends from over the years — people I’ve done super fun, preposterous, once-in-a-lifetime things with — and continue to grow with. But a lot of get-togethers still center around bars and alcohol and at some point, as the sober person in the group, I naturally detach as the night takes on a life of its own. Antics, conversations, decisions — lots of things that are central to the experience are things that I just can’t keep up with once the gap between groupdrink and Sober Me widens. Even though everyone understands when I leave, even though they make it abundantly clear that they still love me, I can’t help feeling boring.

Not being fun. Comparatively, I’m just not as much fun as I was when I was traipsing about, uninhibited and flooded with dopamine. Resetting my reward center means dialing it way, way back. It’s so slow and so so boring. Eventually things will recalibrate. It’s true what they say about patience being a virtue.

Losing friends forever. In the almost eight years since I quit drinking, I have lost six friends to addiction-related deaths. Two more are in prison for a very long time for the ways their minds betrayed them in addiction. It used to happen to other people with a few degrees of separation, not my inner circle. The intersection of prolonged addiction and aging probably has a lot to do with it. I quit drinking at 42. People I used to do harmless, silly shit with kept going and things got very real and very ugly. It’s hard to see this trajectory and not be mad at everything and everyone. It’s hard to wonder. It’s hard to witness. And it’s hard to grieve and process without checking out. It’s less about survivors guilt and more about unbridled empathy. Understanding oneself can often mean a deeper understanding of others — seeing friends suffering and seeking comfort at any cost while they are being mislabeled and mishandled hurts.

Emotions. Repressed ones. They are insistent. I feel like all my feelings prior to sobriety were superficial. In fact I know they were — I made them that way. I was so sensitive as a child that it was truly paralyzing at times. I remember exactly when and where I started drinking and how it felt just like lifting the bell jar. Feelings were overwhelming and drinking kept them at bay. For 27 years. That’s a lot of years now demanding to be acknowledged all at once: grief, rage, shame. Managing every repressed feeling while also acknowledging day-to-day feelings can be paralyzing.

The social thing again. I am a bonafide introvert. I prefer solitude to groups of people and I am okay with that now. I no longer force myself to be social to appease others — that led to a life of anxiety, discomfort and self-medicating. I still like being part of things though. But early on I underestimated how quickly I was catching up on lost growth. I’d meet people and join friend groups only to rapidly outgrow them. With all my inner resources focused on just staying sober, I had yet to get to the part where I update my toolbox to handle growth within relationships. Pair that with a drive to consistently be better than I was the day before — dodging comfort, facing challenges head on, setting boundaries, making logical but unpopular decisions — and you’ve got a recipe for inner peace by way of social disaster.

Clarity. As a woman, clarity can be especially perceived as rebellion. Attitude. Being difficult. Clarity exposes a lot of obscurity that keeps unfair, exploitative and oppressive systems rolling. Clarity demands things like accountability and cause and effect. Clarity means having choices and doing the very hard work of walking away instead of sabotaging an environment or oneself to stay stuck in something that isn’t working.

None of this is black and white. And I purposely refrained from my usual Pollyanna, silver lining resolutions in writing about these issues. I’m okay if people misunderstand this article and accuse me of being a victim. I kind of am — the victim of my own lack of vision to truly understand the weight of one decision to quit drinking. My intention here is to shed light on some things that I would not have predicted when I made a quick decision in survival mode to save my own life. Like I said at the beginning, the benefits of sobriety far outweigh the drawbacks. But there’s a reason ‘sobering’ is an adjective:

sobering

/ˈsōb(ə)riNG/

adjective

1. creating a more serious, sensible, or solemn mood.

2. “a sobering thought”

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It’s funny how something that defined so much of my direction now feels like something that didn’t even happen to me. I can’t help but think of the Ani DiFranco lyric, “You look like a photograph of yourself taken from far, far away.” Like I’m remembering a movie, or a crazy story someone told me about a friend over coffee a long time ago.

It also feels like yesterday. Just the idea of writing about it brings me back to that space and time - the visuals, the sounds, the smell of smoke. It was seventeen years ago but its right there in the next room. All I have to do is jiggle the doorknob a little and I’m back.

At the time, I was 33. However, I was a late bloomer and only a measly four years into a life of individuation - differentiating myself from an authoritarian family of origin. My family role was scapegoat, which meant most of my life felt like trying to stand up on a trampoline with a dozen people jumping all around me.

I didn’t know I was individuating. What I did know was this: for the first time in my life, I was my true self. I simply crawled off the trampoline and found solid ground. For the first time ever, I felt like my life was the result of my own choices. I’d quit corporate career life and left a 9-5 structure for a patchwork lifestyle centered around creativity and activism. I’d recently gone back to school to pursue astrophysics. I was teaching yoga. I was learning to play guitar. I was hiking everywhere - a solo adventurer with a dog. I felt free, safe and I was in a beautiful place. And then that life came to a crashing halt.

In an instant, the life I’d chosen was wiped away while I taught a yoga class. People ask what it felt like to have my house burn down. It’s hard to put the experience into words. Best I can do is tell them to imagine heading to the store to grab milk then coming back out to your car and checking your phone to find that your house - and neighborhood - all went down in flames while you were out. You have no home to go back to. You own nothing. You have no neighbors anymore. You’re just a person sitting in a parking lot, in the only clothes you own, with a gallon of milk and no idea where to go. It was all just there 20 minutes ago and now its gone. You still have the same song in your head as you did when you left the house. It’s all very sudden. And it’s very, very weird.

What even are the first steps? Do I have to go to work tomorrow? Do I have to buy new textbooks? Where do I get my mail now? Trauma and shock will have you doing a lot of productive thinking with no useful action. The onslaught of urgent needs - where to sleep, qtips, toothbrush, food, phone charger - turns every day into a frazzled, never-ending nightmarish maze. The pressure and energy it takes to stay afloat while searching for daily needs to be met in a place where hundreds of other households are in the same boat eats up all the bandwidth you have. My personal need for routine and tendency toward sensory overload had stress levels soaring. I was an introvert without a door to close at the end of the day. My brain was in frenzy mode. Somehow, I made it to the end of the semester with passing grades but my brain fog got so intense that I opted out of the next semester. I had every intention of going back but it still hasn’t happened and I’m unsure if it ever will.

In the same ways it feels like both forever ago and yesterday, the experience feels as liberating as it does heavy. FEMA-provided therapy funds, financial support from my community and work/school falling away gave me the time and mental bandwidth to access therapy. The stress of knowing I’d have to re-enter the world and act normal again took a backseat to showing up every week to gain clarity on everything from the fire to childhood. I learned about boundaries and self care. It would be another decade before I chose sobriety, but the foundation for growth and healing I received from this natural disaster is still one of life’s greatest gifts.

I learned how to receive. At first I declined every donation, every offer of help. I was just a renter. I felt awful for homeowners and families with kids who lost all of their kid things. Plus I’d just lived off grid for a year - I can thrive with very little. In fact it might even be fun. It wasn’t all that fun after a few days. And a friend watching me decline a donation gave me some wise advice afterward: when you say no to something someone is offering you disrupt the flow - it kills a little something in the giver. Just take everything and give away what you won’t need. Keep it flowing. They were right. I quickly became part of the largest nonstop giving and receiving storm I’d ever been in the eye of. I lost everything, but all my needs were met. I had nothing but somehow had plenty to give. And no one is “just a renter”.

At its core - and the reason I still write/talk/think about it - was a very dark and scary mess that lasted for years. I was not prepared for the number of times I would turn around and drive home over the next several years to be sure I turned the oven off. I took my dog everywhere with me. I lived with my things in different types of bags that would be easy to scoop up and evacuate with. My body seized up at the slightest hint of smoke in the air. My nervous system crashed any time ash would fall like snow. There was anger at watching a life I’d worked so hard to find and create be taken from me. It was unsettling to not have control over my brain and emotions.

It is a very dark and scary mess that is happening more and more. A 2023 University of Colorado study “found a 246% increase in the number of homes and structures destroyed by wildfires in the contiguous Western U.S. between the past two decades, 1999-2009 and 2010-2020”. That’s a big increase! Where I used to be the exception among friends, it’s more and more common for others to have experienced this particular brand of loss. The January 2025 California wildfires caused incomprehensible devastation. Even as I write this, floods are destroying towns in Washington just an hour away. Looters are kayaking in. I’ve learned from my disasters that looters wait in the wings for places to be evacuated and it’s so puzzling that there’s not a standard for preventing this highly predictable byproduct of disaster. But I digress.

Digress from what, I really have no idea. What I do know is every year I have the opportunity to mourn loss and celebrate resilience. To choose to be bitter or grateful. Every day is a conscious decision to live in fear or thrive in trust. To hold on for dear life or let go. To take it for granted or receive it with profound gratitude.

Life is full of these unplanned events. I have no idea why the passing of this anniversary hit so hard this year. Some years I don’t even remember it until weeks later, if at all. This year I couldn’t do anything else but think of the parallel reality where I’m tucked away in a lab somewhere looking through telescopes. It’s interesting to think of all our unattended lives still moving along their trajectories somewhere. Lately I’ve been “unlearning” meditation, mostly by taking focus off a subject that distracts from thought - like breath or a mantra - instead, allowing thoughts to flow like a faucet. This month there have been a lot of thoughts. Some will resolve. Some will land. Some will linger. They will all be used to create.

At the end of it all, I’m brought back to this quote from Mike Dooley that I’ve carried around with me for twenty years now: “For every physical adventure there’s the possibility of loss. That’s what makes it an adventure. For every spiritual adventure, there’s only gain. Which totally spoils the adventure, and is why you choose to forget that all physical adventures are really spiritual adventures.”

Thank you for reading! I write about things like this in hopes of helping people connect dots and feel less alone during big life shifts. If you liked this article, please consider sharing, becoming a subscriber or buying me a coffee. Thank you!