Good Morning, F*ckface
we're not made to keep it all inside.
It’s Thursday night, and I’m talking on the phone with a stranger.
She talks for three minutes, and I listen, my microphone on mute. It could be about difficulties in her relationship, her fears about her financial future, or a general feeling of insecurity and not-enoughness. When she’s done, if she asks me to, I offer feedback—not advice, but perspective and empathy, because no matter what she’s shared, I relate to how she’s feeling.
Then I talk for three minutes, and she does the same thing. After we hang up, I feel like a 30 pound weight has lifted from my shoulders.
It will be gone until tomorrow, if I’m lucky. Maybe until later tonight.
Then I’ll call someone else and do it all over again.
In recovery speak, this is known as an outreach call. If you’re freaking out, raging, drowning in shame, lost, stuck, confused —or maybe having a great day and want to share some love—you reach out. Because the opposite of addiction is connection. Because we’re not meant to go through keeping everything inside.
These days, that is so easy to forget.
It’s September 19, 2009: the morning of my wedding day.
I am terrified.
I am striding through the woods, talking to myself in the only way I know how. You shouldn’t be feeling like this. It is not good. You love each other. You had a fairytale romance. You knew that you wanted to be together forever. Everyone you both know is going to be here. They are all expecting this.
YOU are expecting this.
Since I was old enough to understand how unhappy my parents were in their marriage, I swore I would settle for nothing less than huge, movie-level, forever love. I was determined to succeed at marriage. But the months leading up to this day hadn’t looked like success. We argued. We yelled. I wanted to be as far away from him as possible. All while planning this enormous event. “The Best Day of Your Life.” (™)
I have told no one about this.
As I storm along the forest path, hours away from a lifelong commitment in front of 325 people, I turn a corner and see two parents and a little blonde girl standing on a small bridge. The girl looks up at me and beams.
Suddenly, I imagine my young self, looking at this present version of me, on this day.
She does not say, “Stop feeling how you’re feeling, you idiot, and just get married. ”
She says, “No matter what happens, we’re going to be alright.”
The day was beautiful. I can say that even now.
The marriage was extremely challenging, becoming more so with time.
I talked about it with almost no one.
It’s a summer morning, 4 years later. I work for one of the most well-known entertainment companies in the country. My job is to develop ideas for reality TV shows.
I’ve just arrived at my office—the first private, mine-and-mine-alone working space I’ve ever had—when one of my colleagues leaps joyfully through my door with a cup of coffee.
“I know!” he yells. “How about a series about really stupid people?”
I grip the sides of my rolling chair and force my face into a smile.
I’ve always wanted to write. But I thought I should do it in a socially acceptable way, i.e. where you actually make money. I became a journalist, then started working in television. Then I started working here. I never thought I could work at a company like this one.
I hate it.
Not the people, but the work, which is the creative equivalent of manufacturing landfill. If this were the fashion world, I would be designing wear-7-times-and-dispose clothing. If I were a chef, I would be making spray cheese.
I’ve never made this much money in my life.
I am about to travel alone for a month. My husband and I are trying to have a baby, and I wanted one last solo, responsibility-free adventure.
I do not know now that near the end of my month of traveling, on a boat taxi in the middle of—believe it or not—Fethiye Bay, I will realize with a flash of electric clarity how miserable I have been for how long.
I will leave my job, and my marriage.
I will travel for almost 3 years.
I will pursue… happiness? Fulfillment? Inner peace?… like it’s my job. I will meditate like a motherfucker. I will do prostrations. I will travel to New Zealand to study with a spiritual teacher. I will visit temples and monasteries. I will meet shamans and medicine men. I will do silent retreats. I will pray next to a stupa built by a Burmese monk under a full moon.
Because I will believe, still, that if I do the right things the right way the right amount of times, I will be free. I will believe that all my neuroticism, my neediness, my insecurities—even my health issues, which clearly stem from the fact that I am not calm, sane or spiritual enough—will disappear.
I will try to have another relationship during this time, with someone very different from my ex-husband. Our dynamic, however, will become shockingly similar. I will feel more miserable and like more of a failure than ever before.
I will talk about it with almost no one.
It’s almost 3 years later, and I’ve just walked into my first 12-step meeting.
The terror of my wedding day feels like nothing compared to this body-gripping, throat-blocking fear. I’m sure my heart is going to stop. But I know, too, somehow, that this is a different kind of fear. It’s the kind you get when you do something that’s good for you, even if you know it’s going to hurt like a sonofabitch.
I say, to a room full of strangers that I am addicted to relationships and validation the way some people are addicted to alcohol or drugs.
To my utter astonishment, they love me anyway.
I ask one of them to sponsor me. I start to work the steps. I start to get smidges… then hours… then whole weeks of happiness. I’m overjoyed. I’ve found it! The missing piece! If I just recover enough, I’ll never feel unworthy, needy, neurotic, or awkward again. I will fall in love with myself, and eventually with someone else, too—someone un-anxious, un-neurotic and unneedy. I will succeed at couplehood. The credits will roll.
It’s October, 2021. I’ve been living in Fethiye for 2 months. I have a little rented cottage by the sea, where I walk Django every morning. Because the low cost of living here and the Canadian dollars I earn, I only have to work a few hours a day. I am dating again, too.
I’ve never felt more anxious and unworthy.
My brother, two months clean off drugs and alcohol himself, gently suggests I return to my recovery program, which I’ve fallen away from over the past few years.
By some miracle, I listen to him.
I find a new sponsor. I start the steps again. And finally, painfully, incrementally, I start to get it.
There is no missing piece.
There is no success. I will never be issue-free, and believing I should be is why I have these addictive tendencies in the first place.
My obsession with getting life right has been a recipe for misery: a recipe I’ve been brainwashed to try again and again with different ingredients every day for forty-something years. Being ruthless and gruelling with myself to become a perfectly mentally healthy person has not made me any happier than being ruthlessly gruelling with myself at being married or being a fancy TV executive or anything else. It has, in fact, been the same as trying to drink away alcoholism or fuck away loneliness.
People have just accepted it more.
There’s a scene in the movie A Beautiful Mind when Russell Crowe’s character understands that the imaginary people he’s seen and spoken to his whole life are never going to go away. Instead, he has to remember that they are not real.* For me, this is the same with perfectionism and shame.
That voice, for example—the one who spoke to me on my wedding day— starts talking to me every morning before I open my eyes.
Good morning, Fuckface, it says.
You’ve slept too late. (Or: You’ve woken up too early—now you’re going to be tired all day and look even older than you already do.)
Here are all the things you need to worry about. All of them, including the genocide and global warming, are happening because you haven’t done enough about them. How in god’s name are you going to figure that out? You can’t even wake up at the right time.
Oh, hi there, I say, now. It’s you.
Sometimes I let the voice say what it needs to say through pen and paper, before I get out of bed.
Sometimes, I pick up the phone and call someone in my program.
I’m on several virtual groups for this purpose, which is why, a lot of the time, I end up speaking to a stranger. But whoever they are, they almost always have a voice in their head, too, and we remind each other that these voices are not The Truth.
Which reminds us that we are enough. That happiness is not about having, getting and achieving, even when it’s “spiritual” getting and achieving.
It’s remembering that we don’t have to do all those things in order to be happy.
And it’s about talking about it to someone if we forget.
*I do not intend to in any way undermine the seriousness of schizophrenia.
Just keep on being you my wonderful friend; you are way more than enough, you’re a positive inspiration to so many, including me.❤️❤️❤️
This is a wonderful reminder, dear Pen Pal. Strange -- although you were writing about your story, somehow it was actually MY story. (It's all about ME ME ME ME after all!!)