The Miracle
Peeling away our safety suits, one day at a time.
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“…if you try to be someone you aren’t… eventually some turkey is going to shit all over your well-crafted facade, so you might as well save yourself the effort and enjoy your zombie books.”
The year is 2016.
I have, in addiction-speak, hit rock bottom.
I’ve been travelling for 14 months. I’m on a small Indonesian island you’ve probably heard of, and have just joined a 12-step program. Like many people in their first months of recovery, I am goggle-eyed, raw with humility, and bowled over with gratitude. I feel like a newborn baby. I feel like I’m 120 years old.
I’ve rented a small cottage for 3 weeks, because I could never dream of affording such a place for 3 weeks anywhere else in the world. It’s by a ravine with a brook running through it, next to a farm. There are fireflies everywhere at night, and roosters crowing at 4am. I ride my scooter up and down muddy hills to get food and supplies, passing the village ladies and the chickens and the pigs.
When you start 12-step recovery, there’s a lot of talk about miracles.
“Don’t quit before the miracle happens,” they tell you.
They say this especially for newcomers, because recovery is fucking hard and the temptation to quit is astronomical. They know you’ll take whatever you can get to believe that shit is going to get better. They also know that without your addictions, the less-miraculous things about your life are going to start staring you in the face.
They are right. About all of it.
The owner of my cottage introduces me to a shaman from another part of Indonesia. The shaman comes over to visit, and in her kind and reassuring presence, I confess how hard I find it to be around people for more than a few hours at a time, even people I deeply love, and how much quiet time I need. I tell that I’ve been studying Buddhism and the Tarot, and how the more I feel called towards… spirituality? God? Something greater than myself? Something I’m afraid to say out loud because I’m terrified of being seen as a middle-aged whackadoodle spinster and being written off by society for good?…
… the more I feel like an outsider.
She tells me something I will never forget.
She says, “This will always be a lonely path.”
She doesn’t mean sad-lonely. She means alone-lonely. These are different, as I’m starting to learn in recovery. And her saying this gives me permission to stop trying so hard to be someone I’m not. It gives me validation that maybe I’m not broken. That maybe I’m just on a path, and maybe that path is going somewhere good.
Until finding 12-step, I had tried and tried to fix myself. I thought I needed to, to achieve All The Things You Are Supposed to Achieve as an Adult. To find love and be accepted.
And in that trying, I’d felt so lonely, so inadequate, that I’d attempted to dull the pain with relationships and situationships and careers and appearances. Needless to say, it didn’t work. The failed fixing and addicting just fed on each other.
The first step of the 12 steps is admitting that your life has become unmanageable.
The second is coming to believe that a “power greater than yourself” can restore you to sanity.
This power made itself known that day, through my new shaman friend. It appeared in the friendships I was making on this island, in and out of my 12-step group, and the in the compassion of my sponsor. And it had always been there as I studied the Tarot, and learned what a rich, beautiful tool of psychological and emotional support it was.
The power greater than myself pointed at one truth:
The sooner you stop running from who you are, the less lonely you’ll be.
Of course, I didn’t really stop.
I slowed down. I went back to Canada, and tried a semblance of a more grounded life, in a house in the suburbs, dating a kind father of three who also lived in the suburbs, doing work I was good at but did not particularly love.
I kept at 12-step. And I kept traveling, seeking out places where I felt connected to spirit/God/something-greater-than-myself—ancient monasteries and goddess sites and small mountain villages where people knew their neighbours and grew and raised the food they ate. But it wasn’t enough.
Then the pandemic showed up in all its glory.
I had just started working at a fancy job where I could not have fit in any less if I’d tried. (They planned team-building events and didn’t invite me to them.) They let me go. My ego was furious. My soul buoyed with relief.
Sitting 6 feet apart on a beach on the Ottawa River with a friend, I said,
“I want to to start using my time more meaningfully. But I have no clue what that would look like.”
“What makes you excited?” she asked.
“Writing,” I said, because obviously.
“What makes you most feel like a kid? What would you do if no one judged you for it? What would get you out of bed dancing in the morning? What do you LOVE?”
“Tarot,” I blurted out, without thinking.
She smiled.
I shook my head no.
“Why not? Why don’t you start reading Tarot?”
Because, I wanted to say, saying, “I read Tarot cards” feels like writing “I AM WEIRD” in red marker on my forehead, and then posting a photo on it on social media. Because no one in the real world would ever hire me or take me seriously ever again.
I did not say this, though, because that would have been admitting that I was choosing the appearance of normalcy over happiness.
We sat on the rocks and stared at the river.
A month later, I started reading Tarot.
And I started teaching meditation again. I loved doing that too, but some of the days of lockdown had felt so hard and lonely I couldn’t imagine spouting the wisdom of the dharma to anyone else.
Instead, teaching gave me back a sense of purpose I badly needed.
A couple of months after that, I admitted to my boyfriend that I didn’t want to live in the suburbs of Canada anymore, which meant I would be leaving him and his three kids, an unthinkably un-normal and selfish act, especially for a childless woman over the age of 40.
One year later, Django and I boarded a one-way flight to Turkiye.
In the movies, our hero realizes she’s weird, quits her normal life, runs away and joins the circus, and lives happily and weirdly ever after.
I don’t think it really works like that. We don’t change our lives in an instant. We peel away our safety suits gradually, stopping between layers, sometimes for months, sometimes for longer. We keep trying “one last time”to be the person we think we should be, or the person our families want us to be. Who wouldn’t want to do everything possible to avoid the terror of admitting we are not this person? Especially if it’s a matter of emotional or physical safety.
So we try to fix ourselves. And in that process, our life force ebbs away.
The year is 2023. (What?? I don’t know how that happened, either.)
I’m in the ruins of an ancient city. This place was inhabited by a number of civilizations over the past 4000 years. There are Lycian rock tombs towering over what was once a Greek amphitheatre, which is next to remnants of a Byzantine church remnants, and Roman columns scattered across the grass.
But for the echoes of tourists snapping photos, it’s so quiet.
The glow from the setting sun is reflecting off the stones. Some of the area looks fenced off, which I’m disappointed to see, until I spot a woman herding sheep on the other side of that fence. (One of the joys/frustrating things about this country is that its ancient sites are often not well-guarded.)
I find the opening, and I’m in.
I walk, treading over thousands of years of prayers and fears, of love, of art, of friendships. Of the worship of goddesses as well as gods, all of whom were as fallible and crazy and angry and lustful as real people. The very archetypes who inspired the Tarot.
I sit down on a broken piece of stone.
I say, quietly but out loud, the words of my childhood hero: “This belongs in a museum.”
I am so happy, so grateful, so… myself, I feel like I could glow in the dark.
I stay until dusk, then drive back home.
Home is hour away, in a small mountain village where I know my neighbours, even though we don’t speak the same language, and they grow and raise their own food. I read Tarot and teach meditation. I also do other kinds of work that are more conventional.
And I still do 12-step. Turns out you don’t complete all 12 and emerge into the world like a perfect butterfly, fixed and normal. It’s more that realize that you don’t need to be normal, and neither does anyone else. And the more time I spend in the recovery rooms, virtual though they may be, the more time I want to spend there, in the company of people who come together to tell their truths, admit that they need help, and make it their business to get that help and give it to each other.
Sometimes, I forget all that. I try to figure it out for myself. I get stalled and twist myself up in knots. I usually notice that that’s happening when I notice I feel lonely. And I remember, again, to stop running.
The English word for “mindfulness” is mistranslated. The original meaning, in Pali, was “to remember”.
As of today, this newsletter will available publicly. I know it will scare off some potential employers, potential clients, potential who knows who else. I also know that when I hear other people’s truths, I feel less lonely. We can all give each other the courage to be more real, and that realness makes for a more peaceful planet. So I’m taking the approach, as Glennon Doyle once described, of trying to make a world that could be one big 12-step room.
It’s not being weird that makes us lonely. It’s trying to hide our weirdness. Because our weirdnesses are our superpowers.
We just have to remember.
Beautiful sharing Natalie! Thanks and be well.
This gave me all the feels, as the young people of today would say. Weird is hard, hard and so magnificent! Thanks for your writing Nat. Xo