Reprobate's Guide to Pancakes

Welcome to McReality. Would You Like a Side of Heaping Pain with Your Newfound Sobriety?

WARNING: GRAPHIC PHOTOS OF DENTAL PROCEDURES BELOW

Stop doing drugs. Go to rehab. Get a job. Be a good dad. Be a good sister. Work out. Go back to school. Volunteer at the animal shelter. Gosh, just stop. It’s so easy, why can’t you just do this? Do it for your kids. Do it because I want you to do it. Do it because here is a book that tells you how. Stop being stupid and do it. Don’t you love me? Here is some money, go do it. You don’t want to go to jail, do you? Do you want to lose your kids? You love your grandma and this is killing her. If you just stop I’ll make everything easy, I’ll be there, I’ll help. You are so smart. You are too smart for this. Are you better yet? I hate you. You are a loser. You can’t do anything right. Are you better yet? I prayed about it and God told me you were going to be fine.

We don’t have drug problems. We have thinking problems. We don’t have drug problems, we have emotional problems. We don’t have drug problems, we have family problems. We don’t have drug problems, we have physical problems and spiritual problems. WE DO NOT HAVE DRUG PROBLEMS.

Removing drugs from the equation doesn’t fix an addict. They remain the same ill equipped human being that they were when they last got high. They will not suddenly become capable of making good decisions or holding down a job or fostering good relationships. Those skills come with time spent overcoming challenges, not just because you want it to be so. And the challenges, they are fierce.

I was sitting on a couch in the common area on my first terrifying day in Rehab. I had spent the weeks prior in the psychiatric unit, loaded up with Depakote, Thorazine, Flexeril and Ativan and this was my first full day without any of these medications to sedate my mania. I was a statue on the outside and a lunatic bouncing against the walls of my skin on the inside. My first interaction at the facility came as a ‘girl’ who was really much more of a monster in vaguely girl like skin than a real girl, looked at me, noticed my hands were purple and yelled, “Damn, that bitch is already dead!” and then let out a vicious laugh. The laugh was a wave that just kept coming and it was at my expense. I looked down at my hands and this was the first time I realized something was wrong. I had been in so much misery through withdrawals that I hadn’t even noticed something was seriously wrong with me. My hands were purple. It would be eight more years before I was diagnosed with an autoimmune condition but the symptoms were already there and on day one of rehab I received this first dose of the harsh reality that every recovering addict wakes up to at some point or another. You are fucked up, you are broken, you have a huge mess to clean up and this is going to be the hardest journey of your entire life.

You can ignore a lot of things when you are using drugs. I once sat on a hotel bathroom sink facing a blood smeared mirror with a pair of pliers in my hands and attempted to wrench an infected tooth from own jaw. I didn’t stop because of pain, I stopped because I couldn’t get a good grip with the pliers. Take the drugs away and you feel the years of abuse to your body and spirit bury you in a mountain of pain like it had all been waiting for this moment of vulnerability to tackle you. On top of my undiagnosed autoimmune condition, I suffered prolonged withdrawals for well over a year (yes this can happen) and I suffered never ending tooth infections. This is the luck of the draw. The fact is, when you play this game with drugs, you do not know what you will have to face if you are lucky enough to come out of it to face it.

These are just a few things no one told me when I was getting high:

Drugs will ruin your pretty little face through a myriad of mechanisms.
If you ruin your teeth, Medicaid will only pay to pull them and give you dentures
When you pull teeth, your bone structure will reduce over time until it permanently changes the shape of your face (not for the better)
Dental reconstruction can cost many tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars
Dating with dentures or partials is pretty awkward
Dentures and partials are prone to causing agonizing ulcers which make it impossible to eat or engage in regular activities
Every year that you delay reconstruction, the cost goes up and availability of restoration options goes down
Private dental insurance covers very little to no reconstruction
Restorations can be incredibly invasive and painful. They can also be dangerous and very time consuming.
When you lose bone in your upper jaw, your sinuses can fall which not only changes the shape of your face but will require surgery before your can have implants
Shifting teeth can cause debilitating TMJ
Tooth infections can lead to brain, heart and blood infections that can seriously injure or kill you.
There are no free or significantly reduced rate services available for people who need full dental restoration. YOU WILL PAY OR YOU WILL SUFFER

Below is a visual walkthrough of my dental journey which will continue on for many years to come. It began in 2013 when I had 11 teeth removed at one time with only local anesthetic. I had a tooth infection which makes local anesthetic not work, which means YES, I felt an entire tooth as it was being removed and YES, I was ready to die for those horrifying minutes. I also happen to be allergic to Novocain so the alternative anesthetic they use for me is short acting and must be injected very deep within my jaw repeatedly throughout any procedure. I’ve twice had a nerve injured which caused prolonged numbness, once to my tongue and currently to my lip and chin. In 2021 I had a severe blood pressure and/or blood sugar crash during a procedure which required I be put on oxygen and drink fruit juice, which I almost choked on because I was so numb I couldn’t swallow. I am never prescribed pain medications because I am very forthright with my doctors that I have a history of addiction. I have paid for all of my own procedures with the exception of my first major extraction which was provided pro bono via my amazingly compassionate dentist Dr. Dennis Coleman (of Davidson, North Carolina), who I can never thank enough.

In a future post I will explain how I’ve been able to pay for all of this work and much more. All work was completed by Dr. Dennis Coleman with exception to the extractions which were completed by his nephew, Dr. Michael Coleman and dental implants and bone grafts, which were completed by Dr. Dalstrup (Dr. Coleman’s business partner). To these three men I am eternally grateful. Through their partnership I have restored my smile, confidence and health.

This was my second procedure. Before this, I had 11 teeth removed at one time

First partial dentures.

I was thrilled to be able to chew

Root canals and crowns

Upper bridge and crowns

It costs a lot to look this bad

Getting the permanent upper bridge & crowns

Lower crowns

Here we are again

Final lower crowns

Bone grafts and dental implants on lower

Bone grafts and implants, different angle. Not allowed to pull back my lip to show due to stitches

Frequent ulcers

Autoimmune thrush

Bone loss and dropped sinuses which will require surgery

When you ask someone to get clean, you should know what you are asking of them. You are not inviting them into some grand future full of easy days running through the meadow. You are inviting them to open a door to a bigger mess than most a human could ever imagine, look upon that mess and say to it, “Motherfucker, you are mine! I will destroy you!” You are asking someone who struggles just to do the dishes or pay their phone bill to dance with a hurricane and come out the victor. You are asking them to not only be stronger and more courageous than they have been to date, you are asking them to be stronger and more courageous than most people ever will be in their entire lives, because to tackle this mess, you must be a warrior. It is achievable, but it doesn’t happen the moment a person gets sober and it doesn’t happen without a tremendous amount of pain and sacrifice.

I didn’t get to this place because people expected me to have it all figured out when I got to rehab. Maybe they did expect that of me, maybe I let them down by being human, but I got to this place because I admitted that my journey would be hard and long and I accepted the challenge and I told myself that I would do this for me, no matter what it took and then I asked God to make that possible in a world where I was impossibly crippled.

If you are on this journey, take no prisoners. You and only you will decide how much you are willing to sacrifice to achieve your goals. It is up to you to design your future. You can have it all, you can. What will you give to have that? You can take shortcuts and shortcut your future or you can have it all. Does ‘today you’ matter more than ‘tomorrow you’?

If someone you know is on this journey, you need to let them grow or fail at their pace. You have absolutely zero control over their choices and you won’t be the one to face the biggest consequences that come with their sobriety, they will own that alone. The sooner you let them take ownership over their lives and the subsequent consequences, the faster you will all arrive at whatever the inevitable conclusion is to be.

Some of you may be thinking, “Rachel, this isn’t going to make anyone want to get sober!” But I will tell you, someone who wants a better life is better off informed. Anyone who is swayed by these photos was ready to be swayed away from sobriety before they saw them and they are better off relapsing now. You can be swayed by a McDonalds filet of fish sandwich. Reality. This way is not the way for Maybe-I-Wills or Half-Hearted-Harrys. This path is for the grit, for the great, for the grind. Anyone can get into rehab, I’ve seen it hundreds of times. But when it all comes down to just you, your mess and the God you probably aren’t too fond of, that’s where the warriors are sifted from the Fail-Fast-Freddies. I’m a proponent of fail fast. It works in technology development and it works in human development. Run that shit into the ground so we can learn lessons about what works and what doesn’t. When Freddy is ready, he will look at these pictures and say, “You are mine, motherfucker! I will destroy you!” and you won’t have to tell him that he needs to do it for you, or his kids, or that he is smart or any of that other manipulative shit we do to save lives that doesn’t work. He will already know because he will love himself enough to give anything to live and live well.

Four Dreams

I am fifteen. I have woken from a deep sleep, but I am not in my bed. Rather, I’m in my mother’s bed. It is the middle of the night and I must use the bathroom. I stumble down the hall but when I reach the bathroom, I sit with the toilet lid down. A spirit, entity appears before me. I cannot see it, but I can see it. It is both there and not there, both having form and no form. It is as a cloud with a face, or a person made of wind. It is hovering inches from my face and says with no words but in some manner which I still clearly hear and with resolve and hate “If you speak of it, I will rip your teeth out.” I awaken suddenly in my mother’s bed. I had not gone to sleep there.

I would lose most of my teeth in the next fifteen years. Prophecy or threat exacted?

I am twenty eight. I have laid down for a nap with my toddler daughter sleeping beside me. I have not yet fallen asleep when I feel a pressure, a sudden force at the base of my spine. It was as if the strongest man had taken the base of his palm and with all possible force, popped me where my butt meets my back. And though I felt the most incredible force, I felt to pain. I have POPPED up into the air above my bed and then have slowly been laid down by some invisible force on the floor beside my bed. I peer up and see my daughter there in the bed. Confused, I stand and walk to the bathroom but as I reach for the door handle, I cannot grasp it. My hand goes right through the handle. I turn and walk to the bedroom door, becoming scared now and try to open that door but again, my hand cannot grasp the handle. I step back and realize, I am not in my body and must only think that I want to open that door and it will open. As soon as I think this, the door has opened, but not into the rest of my house. Now I am standing just within a room I know from when I was fifteen. I am in my high-school best friend’s home, in her old bedroom. It is no longer her room. There is a bed and on that bed is a baby. A young woman is playing with the baby. She is my friend’s sister, grown up as I have never seen her. She picks up the baby and leaves the room. I follow her down the hall, through the living room and just to the threshold of their kitchen. There she stops and turns but now she is a very small girl, also as I have never seen her. She looks directly at me and laughs maniacally. I am suddenly back in my room, awake, but I am on the floor looking up at my daughter who is still asleep in the bed above.

I have not seen that friend or her sister since well before this. I may never again, but I have walked through there house. Maybe this is a place where I took a turn, where something led me down a path and laughed maniacally when I followed. Curiosity.

I am thirty two. I have been sober for roughly five years but my children’s father, who I am still dating and living with, is not doing so well. At the time I could not know why he acted as he did, but my life was consumed by one destructive act after another. I spend my days trying to survive, my nights burying my face and fists into the floor, crying out to God. I can find no relief, see no way out. I am too poor to leave, too attached to send him away, too hopeful to upend my children’s lives. I am waiting on God who has become so quiet or I so deaf. This theme will repeat itself. I have fallen asleep, feeling betrayed and alone.

I am in a home which I know is mine, yet I have never seen it before. It is small and quaint, a farm cottage, no pretentions. I am sitting at a small table in my kitchen and there is a door just off the room looking out into the world. The world is not well. A great flood has come and the waters are rising above my windows. I am marveling at how the windows have not broken, at how I am somehow still alive. I am more amazed and curious than scared, but I am scared. There is a window in the door I am facing and through it I see a man in a small boat. He is rowing in the raging flood waters. I think to myself, I should let him in, and suddenly with that thought, my door has opened. I watch as he rows his boat into my home. His boat is now there in my kitchen, floating at the level of the water, yet no water has come in with him. I am marveling again and somehow I know I have made the right choice to let him in. He has long hair and a kind face that I know. I know this man and I love him and he loves me and he is peace and hope. His eyes are so kind and without fear or judgement. He can hear me thinking, thinking amazement and wonder and curious thoughts and without moving his lips or uttering a sound he says to me “Your house floats”.

I awoke and knew I had met Jesus, a name which hadn’t come to me in the dream because in the dream He was as He truly is and should be known — as love, promise, kindness, hope, a friend — not a name or a thing that was but ceases to be. Since that day, I have clung to this promise. Every storm that I have encountered, I have survived. The home is my spirit. Inside I am simple, quiet, alone and observing. Outside, the storm rages on, always threatening to devour me, but by allowing Him in, I have accepted his promise that I will continue to float above it. And I will.

I am thirty four. I am being chased by an elephant down the street I grew up on. This elephant is a prehistoric breed, a female and it has been transported through time to this place. It is charging me and I am running for my life. I cut through yards until I get back to my mom’s house and I am so tired I can barely continue on. My youngest daughter is hiding behind a tree and cannot move from fear. Suddenly it has gone from day to night. I am standing on the porch and the back door has been smashed in. I grab the glass and my hand bleeds. but I continue to hold on. I feel no pain. Suddenly there is a genderless and ageless person standing with me. I do not recognize them. We are looking out into an adjacent yard where a man is standing. He appears as a king with long purple robes and a crown. This man is hunting the elephant. He cannot see us but he can hear us and he has stopped to look our way. I tell the genderless person to yell out to the man. Then the king lifts his staff and points it at the genderless person. When he does this, a lasso of light extends from the staff and around the genderless person and now the king can see us. We tell the king where the elephant has gone. I notice that he has a few young boys standing at his side and he can see these boys.

I believe I am now, in my waking life, asking the genderless person to call out to the king. I have been running, running for my life, holding on to things that are cutting me, without acknowledging pain or letting go. But today I stand looking out at my King. Lord, you hear my prayers and you see the one who stands beside me. Please hunt this elephant.

Larry Had a Face

At times in my life I look back and see signs I missed. Glaring messages later written in the nightmares of mothers, memories of survivors, they were there whispering to me or screaming, I can’t know. I missed them all the same. In brief unwelcome moments, I can see a face looking at me differently than I saw at the time, silently begging me to turn back or wishing they could explode upon me the wealth of pain they knew better than themselves, the same which would soon barrel down upon my back. These faces, I think, saw warnings of their own and missed them the same, or saw them too late to disown the path. They left clues in their wake, tokens of the demons they couldn’t shed, littering my own path.

Larry was my friend. Larry had a face and occasionally the thought of it paralyzes me. When he died, junkies raided his knapsack and left him to rot on a couch. That isn’t what hurts me, though. People die and I’ve become accustomed to the occurrence. Larry had a face and sometimes I’m sure no one saw it but me. Now, I wish I could go back and explore his eyes for everything he never said. Where did it all go so wrong?

I woke up to find a package of syringes on my kitchen table. I was an addict but not a storied one — yet, and I didn’t ask the right questions. I didn’t know the questions. No one claimed it and I dismissed the entire event. I don’t remember Larry’s face that day, but if I did, I suspect I would see something tragic. Something dead.

We met in a hole in the wall country bar and despite years of flooding my brain with damaging substances, I will never shed this memory. My girlfriend lifted up her skirt to show him all of her fancy girl parts under the table. Obviously, he came home with us that night. How could he have known that she was a raging Xanax junkie with deep rooted insecurities and tendencies towards manic outbursts of violence and destruction? We locked her out of the bedroom and spent the night talking. Larry had a face. When we woke, she had slung thousands of sewing needles across my apartment and left with my car keys. The needles were embedded in the carpet and we played hopscotch to get to the door. After her mother returned my keys, I let him drive me and my Volkswagon Cabrio convertible at 100mph over 30 miles down country roads and highways so he could make it to his nephew’s high school graduation. This was our friendship, 12 hours in.

He was shorter than me, nearly as wide as he was tall, his muscles well defined if not imposing. His dusty blonde hair and cherub face belied his recent release from Prison. Sometimes I imagined how difficult that must have been for him with his stature, fending off perverts and psychopaths with his thumbs or a bed post. I never asked. He had the obligatory tattoos, I might recall a swastika, and that deep, thick Carolina drawl that made me feel safe from God and man. I’m not painting a pretty picture, but this is reality, not a fucking Hallmark card. Generations of poverty and drug addiction had shaped him into a stereotype, but he had a face with eyes that saw and had seen and testified, which is more than I could say for most.

Larry and I never had sex, although this would become a topic of dispute after his death. We spent time spending each others time, in movies or talking about life or just lying in the bed listening to each others breathing. He would hold me while I slept, his own sleep elusive. At the time, I quietly questioned myself as to why our relationship was so severely platonic, yet surprisingly intimate. It would be years before I fully understood his sexless, needy state. Larry had a face and somehow I missed it, the sadness, the hole in his sky. I missed his addiction, I missed that he was nearly dead as he lay beside me. I missed that he was grieving his own departure and gripping me as a last farewell. I only knew we needed each other.

That year, Larry died. They brought him back and he suffered for it. He spent weeks in the ICU, his lungs filled with blood clots. He couldn’t blink without the threat of death. Bound up by tubes and wires of all sadistic medical variety, they kept him alive. Every life saving measure lengthened his sentence, chained to the black hole that was devouring him from the inside. I looked down at his face and desperately wanted to save him, too. I didn’t know I was looking at a man who wished to cease, at a portent of my future self. He was frail and gentle and broken in the ways a man only breaks beneath the weight of his own ghost. When I saw him next, he was ancient. All life had left him and he carried a bag of grapes and looked at the floor. I hid under my steps and cried. Larry and his face and his spirit, they were leaving me.

That day, under the steps, I saw something I didn’t want to see, didn’t want to know. I learned what death felt like when it stood at the door and there was nothing I could do to stop it from walking inside. I watched him ascend the stairs and exit my life.

It wasn’t long before I walked up those stairs myself for the last time and walked away from that part of my life. A few weeks after I learned I was pregnant with my first child, Larry died. They didn’t bring him back to his black hole this time and I didn’t go to see them put him in the ground. He died alone, like he had lived. His mother called and asked if my child was his. I wanted desperately to be able to tell her it was, to give her a piece of him to hold on to, but it wasn’t his child. That week, Larry’s demon jumped from his corpse and on to my back. I took up where he left off, addicted to heroin, desperate, destitute and on a collision course with my own death. In my memories, I like to tell myself that he tried to tell me not to follow him. If I’m being honest, I don’t think he did. I don’t think he ever tried to say a thing, but it feels better to remember it wrong, to remember him like I saw he wanted to be.

I don’t want to romanticize him. He was a fucked up mess of a person who had, at times, done some pretty terrible things to other fucked up people. Once, I watched from the car as Larry called a meth junkie and convinced him there were people surrounding the house. We were the people. The guy ran out into the woods and hid in a tree. While tree guy was doing tree guy stuff, Larry walked in the guy’s house and stole his meth. After the guy came down from the tree and his high, Larry sold him his own dope back (minus a little). Oddly, that is the only night I recall doing drugs with him. Maybe I’ve revised that history as well, but I like it better this way.

What makes him compelling? What makes me think of him over someone more deserving? He is, was, an over-exaggerated version of all of us. His life and death were the product of so many external inputs, his fucked up parents, poverty, the shitty little town he came from, people who sought to teach him and others how to be as sick as they were. He was born for prison, born for death, born to be written into my blog and my memory and as a phantom in the mind of some young boy out there who will never know his father. Larry has a son, he isn’t mine and he isn’t Larry’s because Larry and his face are dead. What makes him compelling? That his condition was greater than me, that I couldn’t save him, that is the draw. That I can see and yet remain impotent. That these matters rest with God and the Larrys of the world, hashed out without my consult. And when I sat beneath the steps and grieved the man and his grapes, God didn’t rally for me. I’m not angry, I just wanted a vote.

I just wanted to be a good friend

I just wanted to save Larry

I just want to write him into existence, even if only for a moment.

Larry had one album he listened to habitually. One song, specifically, and I would watch him as he listened, investigating his eyes for answers to his condition. It doesn’t fit the tone of what I have written, but I can’t refuse it, as it is permanently imbedded with the image I have of him. When I hear this song I am overcome by tears as the moments all flood back. It’s not beautiful, it’s just everything. Larry’s face had a song and I want to scream it.

Heart, Mind and Hammer

My parents taught me to love, to question, to challenge. These three lessons helped me to rebound from the thousands of others that came later. Whatever damage they did to me, they gave me this, a heart, a mind and a hammer, without which I would surely be lesser.

When I was eight or so, I filled my pockets with gum from the counter of the local Soda Shop. I don’t recall caring much for that gum. It lost its flavor too fast to keep me interested. It is worth noting that this is one of my brother’s favorite stories to tell to my new friends, simply because it is so demonstrative of my personality. When I came home, I dumped the gum out on the counter with pride and declared that the people running that shop were idiots. This was my proof! Evidenced in the fists full of gum, those people didn’t know what they were doing. There was a sign that read “10 Cents” and nary a soul watching the goods. My eight year old self probably didn’t say ‘nary’, but that was only because someone had neglected to introduce her to such a fine word. Regardless, I had taught them a lesson, and a harsh one, those stupid, stupid people. This was the first moment I can recall challenging the inane. I was a winner! I was smarter, I was triumphant, I was the champion of common sense and I had slapped them with the consequence of their naivety. What in the world did they think they were doing, expecting people to honor their little defenseless sign? Didn’t they know that people are sheisty and untrustworthy by nature? Not me, other people. I stole out of obligation. I’m a gem. My mom, however, being a mom, didn’t give me an attagirl as I had expected. Instead she demanded I take every piece back immediately, which I promptly did not do. Instead, I pretended to walk back downtown, all the while chewing every last disgusting spoil of my victory. There wasn’t a chance in hell I was going to go ingratiate myself to the same people who had just let me rob them blind. If I told you I did this yesterday, I doubt you would be surprised. If I told you they still have the same gum and the same little sign (only with a higher price), would you understand my position?

From a young age, I was well aware of things that most kids weren’t exposed to, or at least not with intention. I knew that blind trust was a request for injury, that nobody had every answer and that those same nobodies were doing a lot of not saying the things they were thinking while saying many more things they didn’t actually believe. I knew that my best friend’s father was a child molester and that the machinations of the adult world allowed him to continue to unleash his evil on helpless beings. I knew my best friend was one of those beings and that no matter how many toys I gave her, no matter the songs we danced to or the hours we spent climbing trees, pretending to be children who didn’t both know what we did, she would step back in the door each evening to find that monster. I knew he was scared of my mom and I never had to fear for myself, but my friend, my friend. I knew, when he sent the toys home, when he barred me from the house, then the yard, when he stopped her from coming to church, that he was closing in. That the manicured lawn across there street was the place where nightmares began by turning little hearts in prisons full of secrets no babe could tell, not even to their best friend. I knew evil looked like an architect. Question.

I watched the monster drunkenly dance with my childhood friends, atop his beer stained rug in the dining room of what was once a distinguished manor. He held their hands as he two stepped, greater than six feet, they maybe four and I sunk back into the recesses of the room and myself, wondering how this could be and how they could not see. I thought of the dungeon and the skeleton keys, the rats and the open mouthed lions that waited like omens at the threshold. I thought of my friend and how she quite literally fell to her deafness as a baby and the weighted look she always wore and how unfair. Unfair for her to live, unfair for me to know and be so impotent. Her mother stood aside at all times, letting the monster prowl and groom at will and I hated her and her blank face. Love.

I told our mutual friends about him. I told them in the most diplomatic way that any eight year old could. I told them what I had known for so long but had not uttered. I told them so that they wouldn’t be devoured, so that they wouldn’t dance or look at him stupidly like he wasn’t the scaly, slimy, slithering horned monster that he was. We were never friends again. Challenge.

Sometimes people don’t want to know the truth. Sometimes they don’t want to know that their gum is easily stolen or that their architect is Satan or that they’ve delivered themselves over to the world as a meal, or worse, have been delivered by someone they love. Sometimes people glance your way, share themselves utterly with a look and retreat as fast, because they know there is nothing you can do to save them. Sometimes you can’t save them, sometimes I can’t, sometimes I cry at night. For my friend who isn’t a little girl anymore, I cry and I question. For all the little girls, which I never was but saw, I love. For all the institutions and rules and states which defy sense, I challenge. And if there’s a super power I’ve been given, it’s this.

Thank you Mom & Dad

I Forgive You, Seventeen

If I said it was surreal to be here, I’d be understating it. I never thought I’d make it to thirty-four and I certainly never thought I’d have survived a long war, a thousand battles, a handful of converging and confounding lives to enjoy the awe of my own existence. I have to remind myself constantly that when people meet my awkward irreverence, they don’t have the context of the first few books. They don’t know that I’ve cried bathtubs of tears over the loss of time, opportunities, dear friends and loves. They weren’t there when, blood staining my neck, craze gripping my eyes, I crouched in the mirror and worked to wrench my own tooth out with pliers. Anything to stop the pain. They didn’t see the concessions I made for a moment of peace, the submission to a devil who couldn’t be satisfied. Most days I forget my past, but it never forgets me. I am the product of this conflagration and it seeps into all aspects of my life.

Yesterday I was seventeen years old. I had no anchor, no compass, just the want and wander that led me to strange new places. If I close my eyes I am still her, gasping for air and grasping for someone to pull me above myself. If I wanted a good thing, I certainly didn’t know what it looked like. I stopped writing and gave myself over to a man who didn’t know what to do with me but to abuse. Systematically he destroyed, masterfully like all thieves. He pulled the switch, first stealing my heart, then my joy and lastly my sanity. His brain was sharp, dangerous and uncommon. He could have done anything, he could have had it all.

Ed had an unmatched confidence, but I wouldn’t say it was unearned. He had survived 1000 doses of LSD intravenously administered, being a drug runner for John Gotti Jr. and most extraordinarily, a family full of fruitcakes. A few years before we met, he had been pistol whipped in a gang initiation and left for dead. He had total amnesia and when his mother came to visit him in the hospital, his head swollen to the size of a healthy melon, he demanded to see her ID. Unappeased, he threatened to turn her in to the FBI for impersonation. The most remarkable part of this experience was that, according to his sister, as he relearned how to walk and talk, he turned back in to the same fucker he was before. Even amnesia couldn’t set him back right.

Sometime around 2001 (who can remember?) the course of my life changed. It changed and I wasn’t even remotely aware. Ed, being the entertaining moron he was, jumped off the roof of his house during a party and landed on a cement slab, breaking his back in multiple places. When he fell his phone auto-dialed his mom. I like to think she heard his moaning and the chaos of the party and just hung up, because that’s the type of heinous bitch I knew her to be (later). Ed’s friends gave him ecstasy, propped him in a La-Z-Boy and left to lick their own drug induced wounds.

While Ed was suffering a back brace, I was just being seventeen. I had dropped out of high school, enrolled in college early and was working a crap job at a packaging store. I also had the most amazing dog, who I had rescued from death not long before. She could open our front door and let herself out. I had no way of knowing she was making her way around the neighborhood everyday, jumping fences and playing with other dogs. Then our new neighbor’s mom (heinous bitch) hit her with her car, and my life changed. That was the moment I met Amy, Ed’s sister. We met the same day I was fired from my job and it wasn’t long before she was asking me if I’d like to fill in at Ed’s business, since he had stupidly leapt from his roof and couldn’t walk. Looking back, it seems impossible that the dominos fell as they did by mistake.

Ed hated me. He hated that his sister had hired me on his behalf. He hated that he was in pain and in a back brace. He hated that he didn’t choose me, that I was whatever I was, that he needed the help and that he wasn’t mobile enough to get trashed at the Men’s Club. He took to giving me the worst possible duties at his jewelry store. This meant I stuffed the batteries, cleaned people’s disgusting gold grills, got cussed at by customers and occasionally he bested me with a Greco-Roman wrestling move, right there on the store floor. Obviously I fell in love, or the closest thing I knew to it. He told me about his girlfriend and how she was run over by a dump truck, got fat and withheld sex. It only makes sense that I would fall for that, right? But he was and still is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met and looking back, I can’t blame my seventeen year old self for being so easily groomed.

We eventually bought a home on the lake, a sports car, a jet ski and another business, and by we I mean he bought them and put the car on my credit because he had too many DUIs. It took me years to realize that my existence depended on him, and by the time I knew I was too far in. Thousands of dollars every week went up our noses or walked out the door in a thief’s hand. Our commingled drug problem was just a symptom of our converging mental issues. My dad had left me, his was a drunk with tons of money who’s affections couldn’t be earned. My mom had found a new life that didn’t include me and his was a cold, heartless bitch. Together we dragged what they had created, us, straight into the mire. Sucking on fentanyl pops, I shivered in the cold of our house as I crafted little bows for our Christmas tree and he sorted through mounds of dusty DVDS, all the while we died. Every day runs together as something wholly unworthy of remembering, but still I do. Dog hair on the couch, the floor littered in lottery tickets, oxycontin dust on the bathroom counter, splices of hose clamps scattered about, the sounds of asian porn and there’s a fiend at the door.

One day, somewhere along the way, I left him. Then I came back, somewhere along there also. One day, somewhere along the way, he told me he had cheated on me, was getting married, his mistress was pregnant and oh, I was fired. Somewhere along that path she had lied and I went back to him and to find her pants in my bedroom. Somewhere along the way I took the wrong medicine and tried to drown myself for three days of hallucinations as my sister held my hand and my mom prayed and the doctor said I was a junkie and sent me home. Somewhere in that time my friend murdered a man and dumped his body under a bush and ran from the police on live TV and sometime this month he comes home. Sometime back then, near the end of the chapter, Ed’s hands around my throat, my head slamming against the wall, I can recall his mother calling me a bitch. Bitch.

Somewhere along the way the years slipped by me and when I awoke, I found that I only knew how to live this way. Seventeen was a broken girl.

When I left that house, I thought I’d seen the worst. I thought the dysfunction was his and I had been lucky to walk away unscathed. I was wrong and I wasn’t unscathed. It was only preparation. The death and dying and demons waited for me. If I said it is surreal to think this time in my life was only the precursor to hell, I’d be understating it. Had I known that a few years later I’d be a far greater monster than Ed could have ever dreamed to be, I would have finished what I started in that bathtub. There is mercy in not knowing the future. Today, when I laugh at things that ought disturb or hope for people seemingly beyond redemption or try for better than I deserve or talk to you like you are more than what your words pretend, reference this book and the one you’ve lived and haven’t told. Because I’m reading it without your consent. You can thank Seventeen.

Eyes in the Embers

Take a deep breath and repeat after me, “It’s all just shit and I will survive.”

Nobody was there to tell me that the first time I lost it all. To be clear, I’ve lost it all five times and each time, I had less items, yet more to lose. I promise, it gets easier.

The first time is always the worst. I woke up with fists being pounded into my face and I knew that I had to let go of all of it. In that moment I gave up my relationship, my home, my job, the supplier for my dope habit, all means of financial support, the illusion that I was a functioning drug addict, many of my possessions and my good credit score.

The second time I gave up an apartment that I had meticulously painted and designed, any semblance of self-sufficiency and my recently acquired sobriety.

The third time I gave up my record as a good tenant, my granny’s bible, furniture my mother had beautiful upholstered, hand-made Christmas stockings, medical equipment from my daughter’s time in the NICU and both of my children.

The fourth time, I gave up my freedom. I gave up all management of my life and entered a rehab facility.

The fifth time, I gave up the father to my children and the man I had prayed, wept and fought for. He left with a demon on his back and I left with my children, my faith and all of the ‘stuff’ that meant nothing to me.

It is astounding how we can adjust to continually deteriorating conditions. At one point in my life, I was a princess. I wore gold wedding bands as toe-rings, spent far too much on lottery tickets, ate take-out nightly and had pills hidden throughout the house. And then, as if suddenly, I was living in an 8 x 5 ramshackle shed, woken up by competing roosters each morning, shitting with the chickens and selling dope to Richie Rich.

The more of our space we fill with things and people, the less room we have for God. Others might fill their space with gadgets, nights at the club, PTA meetings or a career. I had chosen to fill my space with dope and dope seekers. When I went to rehab in 2011, every creature comfort was taken from me. Phone calls and interaction with family were eliminated, there was no TV in my room or friend to complain to. I had no cigarettes, chocolate chunk brownies, internet news, video games or Facebook. I was given a single room which contained myself, my two children and a few necessary possessions. Outside of my room existed an institution of women who had been abused, neglected, forgotten and discarded, each of whom would have rather run me down with a dump truck than see me succeed.

It hurt at first, the separation from my things, from my enablers and cheerleaders. And then, as if suddenly, I learned to do without. And in the without I found God waiting.

It’s all dust. All of it but the people.

Until 2017 I worked in a jewelry store. Can you imagine how difficult it was to sell luxury items when you have no attachment to ‘stuff’? Everything in me wanted to scream out, “Go love someone! Save your money!” My coworkers would get emotional about particular items, feel a sentimental attachment, but all I saw was glass. The love, the memories, they didn’t exist in a ring or brooch. They couldn’t live or die in metal and stone. Memories, feelings, joy and attachment exist in the perfect preservation of our hearts, but when we turn our joy over to things, it is given an expiration date. All will fall.

I amended this piece, as it was written well before I lost it all for the fifth time. I suppose I held on to it, knowing I was likely on the precipice of another. It is all dust. The home, the sconces, the albums and letters. I’d gladly pitch it all into a fire for the people I’ve lost, if only it worked that way.

Un-Dying is Hard

Some losses are so big that you can’t even cry. Or you cry and you can’t feel. Or you feel but you can’t compute. If you compute you wish you were too daft to see the thousands of connecting consequences. Some losses are so big that they defy the logical steps of grieving and you jump straight from shock to insanity. In the past eleven years – seven years – six months – three weeks, all of the above, I have vacillated between all states of grieving. I held what I cherished, or the idea of it at least, in my hands and watched in slowly leak between my fingers until all that remained were the sticky remnants a death I couldn’t delay. Talking about it fixes nothing. Neither does spending money, but lately I’ve chosen the latter. I’ve given up on a human who failed me and taken to things that can’t.

I can afford to do that these days, medicate myself with mustard tunics and television stands. I can level this back-country carnival of emotions out on my credit cards, and watch me. My creditors thank me for it, actually. Every day a new credit card offer arrives in the mail. I am beginning to wonder if they know something I don’t. Can they see that there are more spiral cut french fried roads in my future? If I load my wagon down with enough crap, I might just stay on the road, eh? I’d buy an anvil, but I already have one.

Maybe that’s it, an epiphany in the midst of my meandering thoughts. I have carried someone’s baggage, since I was a teenager, before maybe. Every man I’ve ever dated loaded down my wagon with so much that I never had a void to inspect. Before those men it was my dad and before my dad I lived without care. Now that I am loosed of their things, their sufferings, the constant gut-punching of their acrid existences, I am left feeling like I’ve lost something integral. An arm? Can you buy an arm on Amazon?

I’m in a type of neither-world. This is not the place you go after death, nor is it the place you go in life. It’s the place where you sit quietly on the porch, your PTSD slowly inching away but still well within biting distance. This is the place you go for neither joy nor sadness. I just accidentally inhaled cinnamon, but in this place, your senses are just a hair above mute. Mace me and I may blink. People have tried to join me here, but the door isn’t well defined. You can be a foot away, but you cannot sit with me in the neither-world. It takes years of sifting through garbage days, finding things less redeemable by the minute, for you to reach the bottom where your hopes and dreams have withered into some perverse monument of what will never be. You find your joy, a mangled twisted mess of corrosion. You toss it aside, you lift your dead dreams away, cast to the heap, and then suddenly you have found the floor and in it a door to the neither-world. It takes all remaining strength to wrench the door loose. You claw at it, the beds of your nails bleed, hands crack, face contorts and it is not until your tears have swept away the seal of dirt that the door gives way and with it, your ability to feel anything.

I don’t really know what to do here, though I’ve been here before. Every face looks strange, every word seems empty. I am perched high above my life, now seeing how small it all really is. Someone out there is looking for me, but I can’t be found. Someone is calling me, but my voice has taken leave. I suppose I am the undead, and it feels dangerous.

Some people don’t know what they want, so they spend years wandering down every alley looking for a thing they might not recognize. Some people want what they aren’t willing to work for, others what they don’t understand and couldn’t appreciate. For me, it’s so simple. All I wanted was to have, as an adult, the family, the home, the type of secure cloaking that I didn’t have as a child. I wanted a quiet study, a neatly decorated hearth, warm sweaters, a man who would grow with me, or better yet, a man who would inspire me to grow with him. I wanted that for my children too, to avoid instilling within them a sense that everyone in the world is unreliable. I guess I want magic, but the kind found in cozy low lit corners instead of well choreographed movies. And even as the undead, I still believe.

I don’t know the way out of this place. I’m feeling blindly for the door, calling out silently to all things for a way, a psychic embrace, a tether to the outside. To my hearth.

Long Departure

I was born a ship, island, salt
I was born to be the whip, bear and halt
I came intent to wear a thing to its least
I am the winter without a feast

There’s an unraveling hem that is undoing the thing that was born within
Learn where the blood travels
Go where the blood pools
This is the cry of a dull tool cutting into things that won’t be mend

Discard me now
All my love is spent
Wondering where you go when my ship is moored
And patience lent
On God

By day I’m a desert, by night a well
Unwell, well you see
The looters grasp upon me
Bough bent
Adrift tilt
The seas of lover’s hilt

The anchor draws me
And no one forbids
My departure

Lament, lament, lament

The Day My Engine Stopped

I used to think that saving my own life was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and would ever have to do. That’s what I get for thinking. I’ve since learned that watching someone else destroy their life is much harder. However out of control I felt to stop my own suffering was illusory, but the inability to stop another’s suffering is soul-crushingly concrete. When you are the conductor, you can stop the train at any point. Yes, you can, lying brain. But have you tried to stand on the tracks and stop a train? I’ve smiled at that train, wagged my finger, reasoned with it, prayed for it, screamed at it, greased it’s gears, held it in a loving embrace. Every time it went off the tracks, I used my might to set it right, saying “Now, you go slow this time.” I supplied diesel, new paint, sign posts, warning signals, and always a push off when need be. “Good train! Good train. You go be good now, OK?”, ignoring the reality of the man at the controls. I’ve gone weeks with no sleep, worrying that it would run me over at any point, all the while spending precious resources to build more means for destruction. Then I would lay down on the tracks and wait, as only the most hopefully stupid person could. The conductor is a madman, but the psychopathy is mine.

I’ve had years to think about these things, to put them in pictures and forms that I can understand. In my experience, everything is much simpler than we estimate and the more we complicate, the farther we get from the solution. It may be comforting in some sense to determine that a solution is so complex that it is nearly unattainable. There is an absolving element to that belief. The truth is, people make choices and we don’t always get a say in those choices. The truth is, our control is limited to our own being. Anything beyond ourselves requires either an act of force or an act of agreement. We can limit ourselves, we can limit our participation, we can limit our resources, but barring force, the final say is out of our control. If you are as willful and determined as I am, this will be a hard reality to accept. As I write this, part of me still believes I can stop a train, if I try hard enough, if I devise the right plan, if I change my approach and hold my tongue just right. I don’t like to lose. I fucking hate to lose. But some games have no winners.

So what do you do? This is the question I’ve asked myself a thousand times over. I just finished reading Atlas Shrugged, and the irony that I am Dagny is not lost on me. I’ve been using the train analogy for so long that Dagny’s focus was almost a foregone conclusion. One of my greatest takeaways was that existing within a destructive society and existing with a destructive individual requires the same approach; total removal of one’s participation. If you haven’t read the book, I highly recommend it, but if you have, you will know that Dagny fought to maintain productivity and normality despite insurmountable obstacles, and she did so until there was absolutely nothing left for her to save. This is what I’ve done, like so many other enablers. I’ve repaired the tracks more times than I can count, forgoing my own well being for the well being of the system which was designed for good but has been used for evil. But a tool is only as good as what it produces, therefore I have produced evil. I have enabled it in every way. Swallow that pill.

I think our primary failure, as enablers, is that we seek to make people into what we need them to be. Sometimes we need them financially, sometimes we need them emotionally. Maybe we just need them to be what they used to be, to restore our faith or sense of security. Maybe we assume they are a reflection of us, of our choices, abilities, devotions. Maybe their failures open up a wound within our ego, causing us to reflect on our own failures, which we don’t want to acknowledge. Regardless, our reliance on these people, on these trains, is our Achilles heel. It is the need to bring about change by which we are held captive. Suffer another analogy. Two men are held captive in an unlocked, unguarded prison. Neither are handcuffed or restricted in any manner, save for their own willingness. One wants to leave, but will not leave without the second. He cannot imagine his life without the other. The second will not leave for reasons which cannot be explained. Both will remain captive, neither will have life. This is not martyrdom, this is submission to death.

I realized recently that my prayers have, for some time, been completely contradictory. I have asked God to protect the conductor, but simultaneously I asked him to make him a better conductor. Assuming God behaved like Dumbledore, this might seem like a reasonable request. He could just wave his wand, fix everything and soon we’d be dancing through the tulips. “Enabler, The musical.” Disney worthy wishes. God isn’t a fairy godmother, though. He can protect you from your choices and simultaneously protect you from growing through experience, or He can allow you to face consequences, thus allowing you the opportunity to improve yourself. I italicize opportunity because it is just that, a chance, not a guarantee. Remember, there is force or there is agreement. Force removes freewill and won’t lead to growth. The other day I mentioned to a friend of mine that miracles happen when willingness meets opportunity. I fully believe this two-part recipe is what separates successes from failures. My willingness only matters if it’s my opportunity, but no matter how willing I am on behalf of another, I cannot accept their opportunity for them, nor can I force it upon them. I don’t like these truths. In fact, I hate them. I want to be so strong that I am strong enough for anyone whom I choose, willing enough for them also. I want to be able to give my hard earned gifts to people who don’t even want them, but desperately need them. This doesn’t work, of course. Something is only worth what it costs to attain it. Attaining it without cost doesn’t give you it’s worth, it only gives you the illusion of the worth. The worth is in the sacrifice, the resources used, the hours spent, the tears cried and knowledge gained. For this reason, I’ve amended my prayers, removing a plea for protection and focusing solely on growth. Hard won growth. You can’t utter this prayer without feeling deep pangs of sadness. What could be harder than to ask that the world come crashing down upon someone you love?

I, like Dagny, have spent my resources down to the last. I have exhausted all options, waited out all of the others, made ways when there were none and suffered to see one more day, knowing that even one more day was a gift that I would pay dearly for. The lights are out, the world is in ruins and now I retreat, removing my participation. I will not replace one more track, hammer one more nail. I will not waive the lantern or signal the approach. I will not be used to bring about my own destruction. This is the one place where I do have a choice. This is my opportunity to say no, this is my willingness to be unwilling. Welcome to Galt’s Gulch, Rachel.

The Life of a Thought Without (pictures)

I’m a little neurotic, but only in the most amusing ways. I’m chaos reordering chaos, dizzyingly destroying unseen boundaries only to redraw the line with dots and hyphens, hanging chads and discarded vowels. Step over. I’m an eternal optimist until you are and then I’m assured of your impending failure. I can do a wrong thing right as well as a right thing wrong but you can’t make a right on red without breaking your stride, can you? Look, you broke it. I use words that flatten your banana and inflate your ingrate. I’m the CEO of no, head mother of kill your thunder. I pocket facts for arsenal, I table feelings for the upper hand, I take the stand for the guilty man. I’ve eaten plenty of regrettable meals but never uttered a regrettable word. I’m a fool for kicking things that might be dead just to check with the hopes they are, or aren’t, which one requires less work? I like run on sentences but not the kind made by people who make them naturally. I planned to leave and never come back, then I found drugs, children, the Constitution, in that order. Here I am.

I dated a guy who was straight edge. Late 90’s, coffee shops, Daria diarrhea dispositions, combat boots and how depressing is this story? Straight edge was the precursor to my belly flop into the underground. No drugs here, no meat, no leather, no alcohol, no CHEESE! Not me, that weird pre-emo kid with the VW bug and gaping earlobes. One day he drove past a McDonald’s, smelled a filet of fish and that was it! The next week he was a meth addict. Never saw him again. That was fun, wasn’t it? He’s probably your senator now.

Only recently did I realize that everyone didn’t freebase hydrocodone in high school, have dates in the graveyard, find Iranian boyfriends on the internet that were clear across the country to bring home to dad, perform interpretive dance during the movie introduction or pay (literally & figuratively) dirty men to let you bathe them. Nope, I swear, there are people who went to school and came home. I shit you not! They did homework, chores and never once received compromising photos from their local rock DJ. Mind blowing stuff right there.

When I was twelve I could hold my own with a forty year old. I know this because I was prepared to marry an old man I met on Compuserve. Do you remember Compuserve? If you do, you are old too. Also, if you had a phone relationship with a man named Chris Cox from Iceland, you should probably see a therapist yesterday. Not me. I count it as proper preparation for things to come.

One time, which was many more than one time, I did enough ecstasy to completely deplete my natural resources of dopamine and serotonin. One day, which was more than one day, I screamed and ran out of 12th grade 20th century history class. One time which was only one time, I enrolled in college and the screaming stopped. There I learned absolutely nothing except that you don’t shower your hopeful boyfriend with bongs because he will just break them and then pawn you off on his friend with the same name. Daniel, Dan. Who can remember which one I destroyed private property with during that ice storm? The ugly one. Nice ugly Dan. They are always nice, aren’t they?

I am on or I am off. I am inserting myself in a dog pile of violent car salesmen or I am asleep. I am arguing my point or I am silently arguing it and letting you run off unawares. I am completely befuddled until the moment I master it all instantaneously. I am stockpiling pieces for sudden synergy. I demand justice, I decry your version. I laud morality bathed in reality, detest formality sheltering depravity. I see the value in a lab rat, the entry level, one’s long-suffering, yet grieve their necessity. I can’t create a character I hate or hate a thing I’ve done or do a thing I can’t justify or justify a thing another did which I wouldn’t do in like circumstance.

Once I thought I’d write a book. I put all of the people who wrecked me on to the page and learned God is the greater story teller.

This is the life of a thought without