The Bottom Is A Door

Why empty is an opportunity and pain is a pass-through.

I often think about those chaotic last few months before I got sober. I wasn’t partying particularly hard or experiencing any especially heinous outward consequences. There were no DUI’s or arrests, no public humiliations, no debilitating physical symptoms, no legal nightmares or threats of homelessness. Aside from a couple of people in my inner circle who were privy to my mental sufferings and regrettable text messages, no one would have known about the incessant languishing within. I appeared “normal,” “fine,” and “chill.” I was not chill.

I had spent a month in Italy chasing the pipe dream of a semi-permanent bandaid instead of facing and grieving what I had lost. A baby. A fleeting romantic encounter resulted in a pregnancy that resulted in a miscarriage that resulted in a level of self-loathing even I had not yet known to be available. To sit in that, to acknowledge what had happened to my body, I just could not. I ran away, flew actually, to another country where I spent my afternoons sipping aperitifs and noshing on little toasted nuts and cured meats. Turns out, there were not enough varieties of salami or the Italian spritz to cure my malaise. After a few weeks and a semi-concerning emotional breakdown, I bought a ticket home to Tennessee and a few weeks after that I took the last drink I’ve had in over four years.

It’s funny how something becomes a defining moment in our lives, in our healing, in our story. I had put myself in so many compromising positions in my twenties and certainly earned far worse rumors for my behavior than, “Kristen ran out of money in Italy I guess, she’s back.” Of course, no one knew the full story, they never do. Hadn’t I seen far more unfortunate days? I’d been wildly more unhinged during a three month stretch in New York a few years back. I remember hangovers that felt like certain death and embarrassment that would have finished the job, but still, I trudged on. Why was this experience so different? What was it about this particular string of events that shattered my fragile hold on reality so definitively? I had finally reached the bottom and the door cracked open. There was something on the other side.

I think there’s a sort of freedom that comes with emptiness but only if we can survive the initial agony. The loss of my mother, for example, was the most heart-wrenching experience I’ve known, a unending void of pain, yet, the most terrifyingly free feeling I’ve ever had. Something about her “goodness” had subconsciously kept me from writing about the most terrible moments of my life, afraid I’d ruin some part of her by admitting that something or someone had, at one time, if only for a moment-ruined me. I was suddenly untethered. After her passing, a new urgency to write found me, I laughed out loud each time I hesitated to put something vulnerable on the page, “Who’s gonna stop me now?” Mama sure wouldn’t. I’d like to think she’s cheering me on now from some other realm, urging me to burn it all down. I think we have to become empty sometimes to refill, use up all the old to make room for the new, else the new would be contaminated and rendered useless.

Any woman who’s experienced the loss of a pregnancy understands emptiness. The finality of it. The heaviness of it. The width and breadth of it. The betrayal of it.

It was such a short time, my being a mother, but something changed within me the instant that I saw the positive pregnancy test. Suddenly, I was hopeful. I had no problem turning down wine or buying fresh fruit and vegetables, I was high on expectation, on the promise of a new life. You don’t realize how desperately you want change until change presents itself at your door. All the past hurt and my terrible choices made sense for a split second, it had led me here. The relationships that didn’t work, the cities that chewed me up and spit me out, all this time, conspiring to bring me to a beautiful, fated, happy-ending. Motherhood. A fresh start. One week later it was over. Gone. I was broken. I went to Italy. I drank a lot of Campari. I cried. I came home. Saving the gore for the memoir.

The weeks between my return from Europe and my last drink, end of February, were quite boring. It was as if a bomb had gone off and after coming to I was just sort of sweeping up the place, unsure of where anything belonged or if I even wanted to keep the things that remained. I shuffled around with friends, got drunk with a guy I had convinced myself just wanted to be friends, and then bolted out of his house when he tried to kiss me. I flailed for a bit, a death rattle perhaps, knowing somehow that a complete rebirth was the only way to survive to see my 35th birthday. Friends thought I was fine, I was not fine. I was empty. I was finally completely empty.

The bottom is a door. It is not a trap or a prison. It’s an opportunity. Only when we reach it do we realize it was never the end, it was always the way through. All the lovely lies we feed ourselves, all the excuses we make to stay put, all the language we create to justify our self-destruction, it must fall away. We sift through the remnants and sort out the wash, light some other shit on fire, let it all go, and take a seat on the floor. Now what? Try the latch.