19

The Big Do-Over

THEY SAY IT TAKES seven years to change every cell in your body. Don’t ask me who “they” are. I’m just telling you what I heard. If that’s the case, then it makes a certain amount of sense that I had been sober for seven years before I was ready to try writing stories again. I’d completed a degree in English Lit and was working at a publishing house. My last relationship with a creative type had collapsed under the weight of its own inappropriateness.

Perhaps I had to switch out every cell in order to flush the damage done to my imagination or perhaps I had to have a complete cellular change in order to be strong enough to face the rigours of the writing and, god save me, the publishing, life. As soon as I sobered up, I seemed to make it a firm policy (though an unconscious one) to date only sober or straight-edge musicians or artists. Obviously, I was drawn to the idea of creating something but not willing to take the plunge myself. I spent most of my twenties fretting over my boyfriends’ artistic processes: Is Andre getting enough time to think? Does the smell of oranges interfere with Juan’s ability to access his emotions when he plays “Hallelujah”? And I accommodated myself to their moods. Again, it was easier than picking up a pen. Until it wasn’t.

One day I flipped open a boyfriend’s copy of Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way and read about the daily pages. These are daily stream-of-consciousness exercises intended to help the writer free his or her imagination and get writing. They are also meant to help people make writing a part of their daily routine. The relationship with the boyfriend foundered, but I took the daily pages idea with me. I was working two jobs and had a busy social life and a lot of strange hobbies, so I felt I didn’t have time to waste with writing that was just writing. I decided I should try to turn the pages into something, if I could.

Of course, I had to overcome my abhorrence of the blank page. As Margaret Laurence said, I had to make the torture of not writing worse than the torture of writing. This was not an easy task for someone who wasn’t sure she had anything to say and who was embarrassed by nearly everything she put on paper. I decided that the key was to put myself in a position in which the alternative to writing was to be alone with my thoughts or, equally heinous, to have to stare at strangers.

Instead of my usual novel, I took a blank journal on the bus ride to work. Sure enough, I started writing. In fact, the first words I wrote in that journal ended up in what became, miracle of miracles, my first novel, Alice, I Think. It was as though the character had been waiting in my consciousness for me to listen to her. She’d been tapping softly and getting no answer until I sat down with that notebook.

Almost immediately, the writing I did on the bus ride to work became the highlight of my day. I reclaimed my driver’s licence and bought a car and started driving in the early morning to an all-night coffee shop called Calhoun’s on Broadway. There I continued Alice’s adventures. The stories poured out of me, a collection of absurd, skin-crawlingly embarrassing episodes in a teenager’s life.

I felt the same way about my writing as I did my sobriety— secretive, a bit tentative, both of which were balanced out by a surprising sense of satisfaction. It was another private revolution. When the book was done, and I shyly presented it to publishers, it was rejected for being “too raw” by many children’s book publishers and as “too immature” by many publishers for adults. Finally, in 2000, I found a press willing to take a chance on it. That was a very great day indeed. The book went on to be published in several countries and was turned into a television series. But when I look back on that book and the ones that follow it, the greatest thing of all is that writing has allowed me to reinhabit the years I lost to drinking. I have literally rewritten my adolescence. Several adolescences, in fact. I’ve written characters with integrity, I’ve created characters who are socially gifted (in a funny sort of way), and characters who are disciplined and principled. All I need now is to write about an adolescent who can touch her toes and do a back flip and all my dreams will have come true.

In sobriety, I’ve even had the chance to revisit my many squandered hobbies and passions, like horseback riding. I decided to write a book about two young dressage riders. One is a talented, hard-working, responsible young rider. The other is extremely wealthy, unfettered by parental supervision, and owner of a world-class dressage horse. Between them they pretty much fulfill every fantasy and regret I have about my riding life.

I discovered that I wasn’t the only girl to give up riding for a combination of romance, drugs, and alcohol. Since I sobered up, I’ve met several other young women who were “into horses” before their addictions knocked them out of the saddle. It makes a certain amount of sense. Horses and substances both offer thrills, escape from the real world, and that elusive feeling of closeness. Both can kill or maim you. Both require the sort of focus that shuts out everything else. If you want to work with a horse, you’d better keep your attention on it. If you’re going to be an alcoholic or an addict, there’s no halfway about that, either.

A few years ago I got to know a girl who at first kept herself hidden inside a tightly drawn hoodie. Over the course of a few months, she slowly emerged. Her skin gained some colour, and the sores on her face healed. When her eyes came alive again, she was extraordinary. Like a lot of addicts, her stylishness emerged only after she cleaned up. We went for coffee and walks and she told me that show jumping had been her great passion. She’d been good at it, too, going almost as far in the sport as a person her age could. Then she discovered partying and graduated from blackout drinking to using crystal meth. The barns she rode at were wild. Cocaine use was rampant among the people working at them, and she and some of her fellow young riders were trailering horses to faraway shows, smoking crystal the whole way. The thought of those young girls on the road, towing ten thousand pounds of horses and steel, was not a comforting one. When I met her she was in treatment. By the time she left town, nearly a year later, she was a different person. Like me, she regretted the loss of riding and horses as much as anything her addiction had taken from her. We talked about her “getting back into it.” If she stays clean, I believe she will.

I did. Get back into it, I mean. As I was working on the book about the young dressage riders, my first novel was adapted into a television series, and I received a handsome payout, which I promptly spent on a horse and lessons. Once again, the best part, other than the joy of owning a horse, was the chance to redo a part of my life about which I felt such regret. My new horse, Tango, was magnificent and a heartbreaker, and in the few years I owned him before he died, I gained a full and explicit understanding of how much it had cost my mother in both work and money and emotional commitment to maintain a horse. The more I think about it, the more surprised I am that my mother didn’t kill me at that fall fair.

I’m not suggesting that everyone who sobers up will become a writer (or would want to!) or an actor or a rock star or even get a pony. I am saying that those who stay sober for the long term often get a chance to redeem themselves in the areas they’ve truly messed up.

Take my squandered friendship with Giselle, my first best friend, for example. A while ago I got together with her sisters Christina and Denise for dinner and I told them how bad my memory was. They tried to stimulate recollections of our childhood together with a photo album. I saw pictures of us playing dress-up and stick and rope and belching in harmony to the soundtrack of The Sound of Music and some of it started to come back to me.

The flip side of not remembering the good times is that, as noted, I don’t always remember the bad very clearly either. Sometimes it feels as though my poor memory is a tactfully dark blanket pulled over the corpse of my unappetizing past. I still don’t remember the exact moment Giselle and I stopped spending time together. It was around the time my escapism started to be accomplished through chemical rather than imaginative means. It was around the time the games in my life became far more serious.

“Don’t you remember the rabbit funeral?” Christina and Denise asked at our dinner. The proffered photo showed the four of us, in all our stick-thighed, straight-haired, tomboy glory, bowing our heads and pinching the bridges of our noses, paying our respects to four Old Style beer cases that served as coffins for the bodies of four black and white spotted rabbits.

“What happened to the rabbits?” I asked.

“The bear got them. It was our fault: We left them out in the hutch all night.”

Several years before, when Giselle was sick the last time, we played Remember When at the hospital as though our lives depended on it. Friends and family tag-teamed memories, trying to surround her and protect her with a comforter of childhood recollections. I felt disjointed, not sure of my place. I’d been sober for nearly ten years at the time and was still coming to terms with who I used to be. When my turn came to stand over Giselle’s bed, I tried to talk about the old times we had shared. But I felt like I had almost nothing to offer. I’d only recently come back into Giselle’s life, and so much of what she’d gone through in the years between middle school and her illness was a mystery to me.

On the second to last night, Giselle’s mom and I stayed with her. Giselle’s mother used to call me her fourth daughter, and she didn’t seem to hold my defection against me. Together we washed Giselle and massaged her feet. Freaked out by my old friend’s pain and my fear, I tried a New Age patter, hoping she could still hear me through the red rush of the morphine: “You are in a green field. The sky is blue …” But I couldn’t remember the goddamn meditation. Then it came to me. That other game we used to play. “You are in the green field. A gentle breeze is blowing. You are dancing the Hungarian Bulgarian Goodguy dance to that song with all the jungle noises on the Mellow Moments eight-track. You are wearing your most hideous brown-and-orange-striped leotard. You are winning the Hungarian Bulgarian Goodguy Dance Competition!”

Giselle made a low noise, laughter slipping out from under the pain. “That is so shut,” she whispered, remembering. Being with her at the end didn’t make up for my long absence, but at least I was present and I will never forget.

The redemption process that people in recovery go through is slow and sometimes painful, but it’s often as powerful as the dawning of the sun, and it’s a process I see happening all around me. I’m certainly not the most dramatic or shining example of sobriety. I was not the most desperate case; nor have I become the greatest success. In fact, I believe that my story, in all its pathetic ordinariness, is a fairly typical example of the type of changes that recovery can bring. I’ve offered it here in the hope that other young people (and not-so-young people), mired in the seeming hopelessness and helplessness of addiction, might in some way identify and come to believe as I do that within us all is the possibility of profound change and the chance for an epic redo or, at least, the chance to be present for life.