Elul Day Nine: Hear

There's a cacophony of noise going on in my head. There are a thousand conversations happening, all at the same time, about everything. Or about nothing. A thousand? Sometimes it's ten thousand. Sometimes it's infinity. The sound swells and recedes like the ceaselessness of the ocean. I can't remember the last time my head wasn't filled with sound.

I would really like for the noise to stop.

That's a wish pulled from the depths of my earliest memories (and I have a memory bordering on the ancient, trust me): please, just make the noise-- that dull, droning, sub-vocalized, just-at-the-edge-of-hearing noise that sets your teeth on edge and your skin buzzing-- make that noise stop. Please. That may be my wish, perhaps my prayer. Thing is, I've never been quite patient enough to wait. I've never been trusting enough to believe that my prayer would be answered (at least, not answered with a "Certainly, Stacey, coming right up!"), or my wish granted. I've always felt the need to help it along.

And help it I did. At least, that was the plan. I threw everything I could at the problem, mostly none of it healthy. Addiction is an insidious creature, whispering of a redemption bought with self-destruction. One more seductive voice (in a myriad of voices) added to the chaos in my head, and I chased that siren song with desperation-tinged despair that I could have sworn was hope.

But that was long ago and far away. Right? Right? 

Still a wish. Still a prayer: please make the noise in my head stop. And I still step right up, to fix it, all on my own. And every time I shoulder the burden of my own prayer, all I manage to do is turn the amps up. To eleven. 

God, but it's noisy in here. It's an ocean of sound and I am drowning in it. Writing helps, some. Singing, too. And prayer. I still have a few dark and twisty places inside, so that my manic attempts aren't always quite so healthy as that. They all tamp it down, make it less whinging and relentless, bring some melody to the disparate notes I hear. That I always hear.

How ironic, then, that the prompt for today, day nine of this holy month of Elul is Hear. Hear? You have got to be kidding me. All I do is hear, ceaselessly, endlessly without respite. All I want is quiet, a moment of silence, a chance to breathe, to think, to be. Just be. 

But this is Elul, and I am called to use a different lens through which to pass my all this: to bend ideas just a little, so that the light reflects and shines differently than before. So that I can see-- or hear-- a new song. And when I do, when I bend all those voices through the prism of Elul, something new:

I am terrified of silence. 

I am afraid to get that quiet, quiet enough so that I can really hear. Really hear the sound of my heart, the song of my soul, the music of God. To be still, to be quiet, to hear-- myself. To hear my hope, my despair, my prayer. And then to wait, in quiet stillness, to hear God's answers. To let the fear go, in my quiet, that there will be nothing there, a cavernous, echoing silence, to realize, in fact, that I am alone.

I surround myself with noise-- a great cacophony, a glorious, messy din, so that I can avoid hearing my fear. I avoid the breathtaking beauty of silence. And for all of that, I miss out on the brilliant sound between the notes-- and it is there that God's voice lives. 

So, on this ninth day of Elul, I am given (I offer?) a new prayer: please-- let me learn quiet enough to listen, let me find courage enough to be still so that I can hear, finally, the music between the notes. 

And into that glorious stillness, I will say "amen."

Simple Stories: in honor of a couple of decades sober

You'd think that after 20 years, this would be easy.

Well, maybe not you, but I did.  I thought that after 20 years it would be easy to tell the story of these past 20 years.  I am, after all, a writer.  I do the words.  That's my thing.  More than most other things, I know how to tell the stories-- some filled with wonder and light, some much harder, all twisty and dark-cornered, with frayed threads, but which, with infinite and practiced patience, can be woven together into a threadbare whole until a new story can be found.  Sometimes wonder, sometimes hard and tinged with light.

You'd think, after 20 years-- of living this life and mending all these frayed and broken threads, of finding purpose and dancing with God, of unimaginable pain and unbounded joy-- of living this life, actually living a life filled to the very edges with life, with everything: love and anger and doubt and fear, failure and triumph, all the stuff of a life jammed together and barely contained-- you'd think...

So why isn't this easier?

Why is it so difficult to strip away the artifice and just tell the story, spare and unadorned and achingly simple?  Why can't I just say: There was a time, a long time ago, when time was stuck, when nothing moved and nothing changed and nothing filled me and everything failed me.  And this is the story of how that all changed.

I was taught, early on in Alcoholics Anonymous, that when you tell your story, you say what it was like, what happened, and what it's like now.  Simple.

So, what was it like?  I like to believe that that's where the story takes a sharp left turn away from simple, passing complicated in a few easy strides, never looking back.  That's the story I tell myself.  I like the drama of that, the hint of darkness and the veiled promise of lurid disarray. As comfortably as I live in that drama, I remember what a friend told me one night, early in our sobriety, as we sat in my car under cover of a midnight sky, just learning the rules of friendship in a sober world.  I told him  my stories through the lens of my living chaos theory.  And my dear Jonathan, my new and newly sober friend, he listened, allowed me to rant, took my hand when I'd finished and said "Stacey; you're not as evil as you think you are."  I may have hated him in that moment.

That's the thing, really: I want complex.  I want drama and license and chaos.  But the simple story, the easy story is this: There was a time when I was empty, and in my emptiness, time stood still.  No light.  No sound.  Just an eternity of empty. Who needed chaos when I had despair?  Who needs hope when you can chase more-- more anything, take your pick: alcohol, drugs, sex, money.  Strange, but no matter how much I drank, the empty never got filled.  All the despair, all the hopelessness, untouched.  Untouchable.  An infinite void fed by subtraction stew.

And after twenty years of forever, twenty years of standing motionless on a roiling sea of empty, I was done.  That's the "what happened" part.  I was done: I got sober.  Easy-- got sober.  Ha!  Just don't drink, right?  Easy?  How the hell do I do that?.

They told me, those people in the rooms, from their vantage points of a decade, a year, a day, an hour of sobriety "Don't drink and go to meetings."  Don't drink?  What?  How do you not drink?  How do you not chase that thirty seconds, where you finally sit in your own skin without feeling the need to crawl out of it, that singular instant of time where all the noise in your head stops and you can breathe, really just breathe? Thirty seconds-- that's all you got, ever.  Thirty seconds, where you fit and the gears didn't grind against you and you could just be.   And God, what I wouldn't give-- what I didn't give-- to chase those thirty seconds, again and again, with every sip.  Don't drink?  How the hell do you do that?

And they all of them smiled, and they nodded, and they knew-- all of them, from their lofty vantage point of a decade or three, a day or two, an hour or so--- "Don't drink.  Go to meetings. It gets better.  Simple."

I used to not believe in miracles.  I used to believe that God, if God really existed, had set me up to fail my life.  I used to believe that I couldn't live a life without drinking.

It's amazing the changes that happen when you finally can't imagine having to take one more drink.  It's amazing how infinitesimally  the universe shifts when the pain of drinking becomes more than the fear of not.  How profoundly simple life became: don't drink.  Again and again, one second, one minute, an hour or three, and you just don't drink.  No matter how much the pain of sobriety threatens to swallow you whole; no matter how exposed and raw you feel-- every minute of every day, with not even an ounce of anything standing between you and the rest of the world; no matter how much you're tweaking and want to crawl inside that bottle. 

Again and again: don't drink, go to meetings, and the seconds crawl into minutes and stumble into days and bound into years and you suddenly have time.  And you breathe, finally breathe.  My God, you breathe and the air is cool and pure and fills your lungs like light.  You breathe, and  suddenly you have a life, that moves and leaps and dances.  And you look back, and it's twenty years later.  Twenty years, and you say: simple. 

And now?  Now I have a life.  A life by no means simple or easy; it wouldn't be mine if that were the case.  It is a complex and rich tapestry that is filled to its very edges with life-- with love and light and pain and hope.  There has been despair enough to fill a thousand lifetimes, and hope enough to bring me to a breathless stop.  I have been given gifts unimaginable.  I have sought redemption and been offered forgiveness.  I have learned to live with doubt, and revel in contradiction.  I live in the miracle of a day, a day that stretches before me with infinite possibility and endless hope, filled with simple stories waiting to be found and told and lived,   I have found a life that is mine, that moves and breathes and is filled with all the stuff of a life.  I have found God, and I allow God to be.  Just be, just as I believe God allows me to just be.  

There was a time, a long time ago, when time was stuck, when nothing moved and nothing changed and nothing filled me and everything failed me.  And this is the story of how that all changed. This is the story of how it got better.  This is the story of how I came to believe that I was never empty.  This is the story of how I learned to breathe.

Simple.

For all the blessings that fill me, for God's grace that lifts me, for all who teach me, simply, to live a sober life and hear God's voice, I give thanks, with humble and profound gratitude.