#18 Why recovery matters more than ever + my first and last beauty tip

The past few weeks I’ve been at a loss for what to say here, so I haven’t said much. There is so much pain and so much inhumanity and so much grief, so so much wrong, it’s made me question what the point of my own life is, or at least the point of my work which I sometimes confuse with the point of my life. I’ve felt out of my depth in trying to understand reproductive rights, gun laws, minority rule, gerrymandering, climate change, all of the things that are happening around us that swell and show up like a million points of dust blotting out the entirety of our existence. When so much is wrong, where does one even begin.

I’ve been thinking a lot about a thread I saw on instagram, posted by Slow Factory, which reminds us that patriarchy and its enforcers—misogyny, racism, sexism, capitalism, all the other isms—underwrote what happened in Buffalo and Uvalde and the 215* other mass shootings that have happened this year alone (*that number has gone up since I started this essay a few days ago). I haven’t been thinking about that post because it cracked something open, I’ve been thinking about it because it reminded me that larger horrors blossom from the smaller ones we let slide day in and day out, which reminded me that the smallest things matter the most; the seeds, the dots, the beginnings.

The world burning around you can make you think that the small things don’t matter, when it is only the small things that matter. There is a slow drip of accumulations that rob us each of our own humanity, and therefore our connection to the rest of it. What’s happening can make me feel like the subject matter I spend most of my time considering—that is addiction and recovery—seem frivolous. It is not. This system is built on addiction: to money, to power, to drugs, to materialism. It is a system that prizes production and things over human life, that counts on our emptiness (caused by that prizing) to be satisfied by an unending parade of cheap externalities that never satisfy because they couldn’t. It is a system that creates and then bets on hungry ghosts, and therefore bets on sickness, and therefor bets on detachment and survival and scarcity and self-interest and indifference.

I say none of this because I personally have figured anything out; I feel more confused about things than at any other time, more overwhelmed and more incapacitated. But the one thing I know for certain is that for us to move forward and move from this hell, it will require our individual and collective recovery. Recovery is a seed, so many dots, forever beginnings, that meets the system where it starts.

Which is to say, recovery is not frivolous. It’s the point. If you can’t figure anything else out right now, just don’t forget your recovery is what underwrites what’s possible for all of us.

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Eleven Things Right Now

Heartbreak, outrage, remembering the good, Pema as an antidote, a few good works of fiction, streaming as an addiction, my first and last beauty tip.

1. I’m re-reading Caliban and The Witch, which is a dense read that traces the transition to capitalism and the subjugation and policing of women’s bodies as a means of production as part of that transition. “Women’s bodies have been the main targets, privileged sites, for the deployment of power-techniques and power relations.” It is one of the best books I’ve ever read, so I am again. Hard recommend.

2. A sober power move.

3. “We saw how much extreme change our systems are capable in a short period of time - just not for Black lives.” Ijeoma Oluo on two years after George Floyd.

4. This article on psychic numbing (“connect with the victims, not with the numbers”) and this organization dedicated to overcoming it has stayed with me this week. I cannot relate or comprehend a million dead from COVID, a hundred thousand overdose deaths, even 21 or 10 or 4 killed in a mass shooting. I am numb in ways I never thought I could be numb and it has hardened me in ways I never thought I’d be hardened and that terrifies me more than most things. I don’t want to become a bot who eats statistics, a person who checks out, someone un-phased or whatever it is that happens when we are relentlessly served horror after horror; I am tired of being the person that automatically responds (to what should break me entirely) by sending a venmo and believing my humanity is intact because of it (even though: this is important action). What I can do: comprehend the suffering of an individual; each one. Look at faces, read stories, see bodies, feel for hearts. I’ve been reaching for Pema Chodron’s translation of Shantideva’s The Way of the Bodhisattva (titled both No Time to Lose and Becoming Bodhisattvas), and I’ve been trying to remember the point is to enter into the suffering of the world.

5. Psilocybin pulls ahead in addiction treatment; addiction to streaming services; there’s not enough resources for weed addiction.

6. Articles and other contents in the wake of Uvalde and Buffalo I found meaningful: “I think about a country surprised by the carnage it creates but continuing to feast”; AHP on living under minority rule; Roxane Gay writes about civility for the NYT: “The United States has become ungovernable not because of political differences or protest or a lack of civility but because this is a country unwilling to protect and care for its citizens — its women, its racial minorities and especially its children.” Finally, I’ve been having a lot of conversations with loved ones about whether we should see what an assault rifle does to one of our babies.

7. “How should I think of the good times if I go sober?”

8. Other current reads: Just finished Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead (couldn’t put it down), The Mind and The Moon by Daniel Bergner (just getting started, so far okay!), Stash (Spring 2023) by Laura Cathcart Robbins (manuscript, this was my third full read through, I can’t wait for this to be out in the world), Red Pill by Hari Kunzru (recommended by Dr. Carl), and finally, after years of putting them both off, History of Madness by Foucault and Origins of Totalitarianism by Hanna Arendt. I also discovered Courtney Maum’s bookshop.org page which will keep you busy forever.

9. I’ve been holding on to this Viola Davis article on criticism. It’s worth sharing for this quote. Critics absolutely serve no purpose. And I’m not saying that to be nasty, either. They always feel like they’re telling you something that you don’t know. Somehow that you’re living a life that you’re surrounded by people who lie to you and ‘I’m going to be the person that leans in and tells you the truth,’ so it gives them an opportunity to be cruel to you. But ultimately I feel like it is my job as a leader to make bold choices. Win or fail it is my duty to do that.

10. While the idea of providing my “beauty tips” feels a little lols, as a person who’s gotten botox since 2006, I do feel a little qualified to say “this is better than Juvaderm”: this gua sha. I’ve been using it daily for about one month straight and it’s performed better than a filler. Here’s some tutorials on how to use it.

    

    the Lanshin Pro Gua Sha Tool (avail here; I don’t take affiliate revenue on this site so all recommendations are just what I like)

11. An hour ago we recorded an interview with Sara Clark for Quitted, who reminded me we have to work to see the good, celebrate they joy, remember the beauty that exists all around us. Dani C. also reminded me of that in her Self Made newsletter from today. It’s been a long few years where at times it was either i was joyless, or feeling too guilty for my own joy, and I’ve been think a lot about how much that element is missing from this newsletter. So here’s to more of that in here.

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Announcements

I got to geek out with Dr. Carl Erik Fisher on his podcast, Flourishing After Addiction

I was recently on my pal Dr. Carl Erik Fisher’s podcast, Flourishing After Addiction, talking about the many, many paths to holistic recovery, and while I haven’t listened to it yet because at this moment I’m exhausted by my own voice, what I remember from it is he asked me about that article I wrote about the patriarchy of AA and what I think about AA or something like that, and since I’ve been asked about that a few hundred times, I told him it’s the last time I’m answering that question anywhere. So here it lies (RIP), along with a lot of other really good addiction and recovery stuff with one of my favorite humans ever.

New Quitted Episode: “Mar Grace Quits Trying to be Someone”

I’ve known Marlee for a few years now, they were one of the first folks I thought of interviewing when we were conceiving this podcast because they are (in their own words) a double black diamond quitter. They’ve quit heteronormativity, the gender binary, alcohol (“the classic”), workaholism, careers, underearning, marriage, social media (multiple times!), I could go on. We recorded this episode back in February, and I’m not sure how it was for them, but it was a pretty dark time for me; so dark I kept putting off listening to the raw footage and getting it edited for distribution—I didn’t want to hear myself in that state, and from what I remembered and what Mar was going through, they were maybe in the middle of some dark, too. What I feared would be a heavy episode turned out to be the thing I needed to listen to this week, and I’m appreciating the wisdom of past us.

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