#28 The part where you finally open your mail and pay your taxes
In May of this year my friend Katie came over to my house to co-work. She answered emails on the couch and I sat at the kitchen table with a very large box of mail I hadn’t opened since April 2021, which was the month I gave up trying.
When I say the box of mail I hadn’t opened, I mean literally not figuratively all the mail that came to my address from April 2021 until May 2022 (when I started trying again), I did not open, I threw into a box. Christmas cards. Birthday cards. Valentines cards. (Lots of cards?) Bills. Tax documents. Parking tickets. Bank statements. Checks for money made out to me! Utility statements and credit card bills and renewal notices for the magazines I didn’t bother opening, either.
Thus in May began my very long slog of cleaning up a mess that was pretty unnecessary, and reeked of regression. Years ago I had been a person who didn’t open her mail. Years ago I had transcended that version of myself. Then last year I became her again.
When I got sober nearly a decade ago, I had a similar box1, only it contained 33 years of unopened things. A collection of shames I could not face: maxed out credit cards, unpaid taxes, loans to cover loans to cover loans, collection notices, the whole thing. I started the process of slowly picking through my pile mid-2014, but it honestly wasn’t until 2017 that I started to make any true dent in that box, or to feel like a person who had her shit even somewhat together. I started as a person who did almost everything but look directly at her life, and somehow, bit by bit, I became a person who could look at it all (even the grossest, heaviest parts), who opened her mail when it came, who’d made the necessary arrangements to handle the mess she’d let collect over decades, who faced life and all its terrifying requirements2 to be a functional person. It took four years of recovery to be able to truthfully say, and truthfully mean: “My shit is together.”
Becoming A Person Who Opens Her Mail When It Comes and Does Her Taxes on Time started small, in that excruciating moment where I sat down and just started tearing open envelopes. From there, I did a lot of work, either through the painstaking and terrifying confrontation of what was in that pile, or in the making of phone calls and arrangements to problem solve the pile, or through meeting head on and working through the fears and emotions that gave the pile so much power (weird ideas that money was bad, beliefs that I wasn’t allowed to have any, thoughts that I would always be a mess living paycheck to paycheck or credit card to credit card; so much scarcity stuff). Becoming APWOHMWICADHTOT was a practical overhaul. It was also a completely emotional one. It wasn’t just the clerical work. It was having conversations with dollar bills and thanking them for sticking with me; it was blessing my bills as I paid them and thanking God for the means to send a check; it was changing the belief that money would always allude me into the belief that money wanted to find me and give me relief. It was a lot of bullshit like that! And also, it was just fucking opening my mail.
When I stopped opening my mail last April, I’d already done my 2020 taxes (a month early!). My bills were set up to pay automatically. I have alerts set up to monitor balances and my credit score. Etc. Meaning, because of the work I’d done starting in 2014 as part of my recovery, when I stopped functioning in 2021 and couldn’t get it together until May this year, it wasn’t financially ruinous. Nonetheless, that growing pile of mail wasn’t not on my mind almost all the time for those thirteen months, physical evidence that there’s something broken in me that can’t manage the real world. Like the first time I met that box in 2014, the second time this past May revealed that the stories I had about it and what would happen if I actually opened it were far worse than anything contained in those envelopes. It’s the refusal to look that gets you, that owns you.
Last week when reading Laura McKowen’s second book, Push Off From Here, I read about how in her second year of sobriety she and her daughter Alma got pulled over because her license was suspended; she was a young, single mom and newly sober and just starting to get her life together and then there she was with her kid in the back of a police cruiser. I remember getting that call when it happened; I remember this being the point where she finally started opening her mail, looking at her own shame pile.
This week, my friend Mar was on my other friend Nic’s podcast talking about money (Episode title: "I didn't do any taxes from 2015 until last year. Why? The money was there the whole time.”) on the same topic, the whole not paying their taxes for years, the whole not opening their mail thing. On Instagram, Mar blessedly did an Instagram Live where they just…opened… their….. mail…… to make it less scary for other people who might also have a box, a stack, a shame. The comments are revelatory.
I’m writing about this mostly because I think practically speaking, a good majority of people I know in recovery (outside of it? all people??) have that same actual box. I know many, many people who had a step called “open my mail” that came somewhere after “say no to a drink without explaining” and before “go to dentist for first time in seven years.” So I’m here, in a way, to say me too. I had one of those boxes, I had that step. I confronted it and my life opened up! (HUGELY!) Then I made a box again.
I could go off about a lot of things here. About how cyclical we can be, or how we sometimes zoom through the same lessons to really nail them or go deeper than we could have gone the first time. I could diverge into the lessens I’m picking up from the book Existential Kink and talk about how the part of me that is sexually attracted to organizing chaos is ultimately responsible for creating messes so my shadow gets its thrill. But I think the point of this was made a few paragraphs back: it’s the refusal to look that gets you, that owns you. It’s never what’s in the actual box.
The point is also this: I think there’s a really big juicy lie out there that we’re supposed to have it all together in order to be happy. We are not. Life’s a fucking entropic mess, and everyone has a box.
Ten Things Right Now
A song to run to, how to become a psychedelic therapist, how 12 step programs became a fixture of the US hospital system, an exploration of whether diagnoses are helpful or problematic, a guy feeds raccoons hot dogs.
Oregon, a state that had twice as many alcohol-related deaths as it did opioid overdose deaths in a one year period, hasn’t raised taxes on alcohol in four decades. It might.
Training the next generation of psychedelic therapists. It’s here, it’s happening, it’s funded: a multi-university project to develop fellowships and training programs in psychedelic therapy
What I hope is coming for the alcohol industry and what already came for the alcohol industry
“Any person who attempts to answer the question ‘Am I the insane one, or is it society?’ — whether they come down on the side of biological or social factors — ‘presumes the impossible: that the self can be divorced from the society that shapes it.’” This piece was RIVETING. It also briefly touches on Thomas Szasz’s work who is often cited for his book The Myth of Mental Illness which IMHO isn’t his best work, Pharmacracy and Ceremonial Chemistry are (which, as with all of the books I recommend, is part revelatory and part problematic; your own individual discretion is always counted on when I’m recommending any book, but here w Szasz (the first real anti-psychiatry activist) it’s important to double down on that suggestion since he is an overeducated white man who was very pleased with himself and allergic to nuance)
San Francisco decriminalizes psychedelics
How 12-step programs ended up in US hospitals. This guy interviewed me years ago, as in probably one of my first interviews ever, and I remember feeling both like it was my big break and then also hoping no one would ever hear it (and I’m pretty sure no one heard it)
I’m 43 and I’m still blown away when a man steps in and says “not cool” to any kind of sexist or objectifying or misogynist statement/joke/whatever spoken by another man, or (audible gasp) explains why it’s problematic. It’s shocking to me when men correct other men so I don’t have to and by shocking I mean I’m still waiting for it to happen. Reading about these middle school boys who started a Discord to track the problematic behavior of their predator teacher toward girls in their class is the hope of all hopes.
“This feeling of not quite knowing how to perform adult life was familiar, but combined with the guilt inherent to motherhood, it became unbearable.” ADHD diagnoses have spiked among women but then I also wonder, is it maybe not us and maybe what the system demands? When so many people struggle to “perform adult life” should we maybe try and redefine what performing adult life is?
I want to be him when I grow up
It’s important for me to disclose that in terms of money I have benefitted greatly from unearned privilege. I have always had a home to live in and even during periods of extended unemployment being unhoused was never a threat for me between my family and friends. I was able to take out a lot of credit in the years when I was starting Hip Sobriety (despite a low credit score, despite a lot of existing debt), I had a severance from my previous job that covered months of expenses, plus an apartment to AirBnb out, that all provided time without a job and time where I was able to figure out how to build a business. I had a mother who could co-sign loans for me, which she did until my mid-thirties. While I put myself through school and worked 30 to 40 hours a week during that time to do so, I was able to take out loans, I understood how to consolidate them upon graduation at low interest rates, and I paid off my college loans years ago. Meaning, as you read this, please understand that I have had head starts, safety nets, and while I definitely fucked my shit up in my twenties and thirties, I have had relatively painless consequences because of unearned privilege.
I don’t measure my or anyone’s “togetherness” as being really good at capitalism or a white supremacist patriarchy that literally assigns us a number (credit score) that is supposed to signal our reliability and credit worthiness which is entirely rigged based up on class, race, ethnicity, gender, ability. The point is the looking at the things that scare us, what that signals, vs. being the kind of person that wins late stage capitalism. There’s a distinction there.
Great writing Holly. It really, really resonated with me. I too have this same part that likes to avoid (making decisions, work, simple tasks, chores, even fun). I call it my avoidant part. It usually becomes active during times of stress or when I’m afraid of making a mistake. Therapy (Specifically, a type of therapy called Internal Family Systems or (IFS)) has helped me get to know this part of me much better so that it’s not so paralyzing. I understand why it’s been working so hard all these years- out of protection and with positive intent. Check it out, I think you’d dig it. It will have a place with the future of psychedelic assisted psychotherapy. Keep up the great work and thank you!
"Everyone has a box." Yes, yes, yes--and in my case, it's a Book, which I voluntarily abandoned just about a year ago, in the same way I abandoned so many pieces of myself that I have slowly, painstakingly, recovered in recovery. So, thank you, thank you. I didn't realize my book was the Box until I read your painstakingly honest piece (which are like all your pieces, emphasis on metaphorical implications). I didn't even know how to begin to put down the drink (Eliz. Gilbert's turn of phrase?) until I read your book--like, a thousand times; and in the process I began to put down the food (biggest box of all, I thought); until I got what the food and drink uncovered--the box inside the box inside the box, like nesting addictions, fit in the order of what killed me the most, literal and meta- emphasis--the primal belief system that I was no good. Reeking of shame.
So again, thank you: because your turn of phrase, "reeking of regression," made me realize yet again that this entire process, what you might call the Heroine's Journey, reeks of old belief systems, grounded in shame-based myths. You--I, all of us--may be in that period of voluntary, even violent isolation that Her journey requires. Sloughing off the masculine-based myths and systems of power, rooting out the feminine sources and expressions. That's a new box for me: and not a whole lot has been written about it (hint, hint). Or podcast about it ('nother hint). (Have you ever read into it, beginning maybe with Maureen Murdock's book, the Heroine's Journey, which really is just a rudimentary beginning?)
At any rate, your box, your books, your book-in-process reek of wondrous Pandorian powers that you're brave enough to unleash into the world. Thank you, thank you. You are a gift and a light on my journey, and I can't wait to dive back into my Box. Fuck what the world thinks of its contents, its weaknesses and wonders: it's mine and worth the world to me.