What Your Imagination Sees
On holding a vision & loving through all of this.
This is the season for making altars for ancestors, for lighting up the night with Día de los Muertos and Diwali and Samhain and Halloween celebrations. Where I’m living now in Portland, Oregon, people are celebrating by honoring their ancestors at community events and building ofrendas (altars,) including a pet ofrenda and one for old homes. My altar this season is tied to my commitment to vote in honor of all our ancestors’ struggles and contributions.
When I voted last week, I was thinking not just of my familial dead, but also all those I call kin, including those in my community threatened with being marginalized under a hateful regime, including the more-than-human beings who stand to be severely compromised by a refusal to acknowledge climate crisis. I’ve been watching women elders from all over America place their votes, telling stories of their mothers and grandmothers holding a vision of a woman President, a Black and Asian President, and of passing that vision to their descendants. I kept the faith with my children. This is a high art, the power of holding to a dream when circumstances are tough. Through this long election season, I’ve been doing persuasion texting and writing postcards and talking to neighbors and friends, focused on electing a woman to this country’s highest office, and of the potential of reshaping America through this collective choice.1 No matter what happens in the outcome, I’m here, my feet in America, organizing and protecting, taking care and fighting for sovereign rights for every body.
I feel what it is to receive that kind of support. This is a special season of transformation for me because November 1st is also my soberversary, 27 years in 2024.2 The most significant action in my life has been becoming and staying sober.3 I’m aware that this happened through a kind of grace, one that wasn’t available to very many in my maternal or paternal line. I don’t know another woman in my family who made it to recovery. And it’s one of the truly extraordinary moments, that after three years of trying to quit, in Memphis, Tennessee, I called a friend who led me to a table of women in a dark church basement, and they lit candles down the center, and told me their stories.
And that night began something essential, not the least of which was life-altering decades of meeting with drunk and sober women to tell our truths. That first year, I had intense cravings for alcohol, and I also began to write, hanging handwritten poems by clothespins onto ribbon around our home. Like author Kristi Coulter, I also owe my late blooming writing career to sobriety. I had tried to write prior to my mind becoming clear of substances but there was still too much chaos, not enough trust. In my thirties, I wanted connection and to live as an artist. Then, these things seemed nearly impossible with a limited skill set that had been acquired through shame and self-torture. Emotions were unruly. I was trying to express what I wanted without taking myself or anyone else down.
I think this is what’s meant by being sober in relationship, not just that there’s a capacity for honesty and vulnerability with another, but also of a kind of genius of acceptance when relationship wants don’t align. It’s easy to see the distress and avoidance in others but challenging to know that their escape isn’t ours to take on. In such moments, I hold tight to the words of this song, “Don’t ask me where I am going/Because I am not going your way.”4
There were bumps in relating in this becoming-fully-myself way. Author Alexander Chee says that “so much of writing a story involves thinking into the implications of what your imagination sees but has not yet brought fully into view,” and I think this is true of living a sober life too. There’s a kind of prismatic seeing, as our brain changes, and we grow capacity, and our hearts soften and there’s just new ways to be.
In these 27 years of sobriety, I have found that there are so many people adventuring, dreaming, visioning, suffering, collaborating, sexing, listening, grieving, creating, holding, shaming, reconciling, controlling, searching, ghosting, unfriending—and that I was capable of loving through all of it.
Happiness, which I feel as a kind of deep peace, doesn’t seem to be based on outcomes. Happiness is out there gallivanting, free, moving its shenanigans, a wild thing, the likeliest thing when you don’t need to own it.
If you’re trying sobriety, be in touch, and we can set up writing prompts and a time to meet with others in recovery writing their way through.
Before you go, a couple of things~
I have space for one more manuscript in December, and one in January, if you find you would like some support with your book or essays. Contact me here or via my website for more.
On December 2, at 7 pm, I’ll be reading for the first time from American Bloodlines: Reckoning With Lynch Culture, at Literary Nights, at the Issaquah Train Station near Seattle.
And A Few More Links:
Garrett Bucks of The White Pages writes on whiteness, and has a wonderful and accessible two-hour introduction to organizing through his Barnraisers project. Join in with small groups to learn how to be more curious about people and ask good questions. It’s one of the keys to making a better society in these polarized times.
Terese Mailhot always has terrific writing advice, and I’ve been loving her series on creative nonfiction.
“Not all the power and money, not all the weapons and propaganda on earth can any longer hide the wound that is Palestine. The wound through which the whole world, including Israel, bleeds.” Hear more of author and human rights activist Arundhati Roy’s speech given at the acceptance of the Pinter Prize at PEN.
I'm a queer, nonbinary writer, mentor, activist, mother, partner, sister, cousin, aunt, friend, and a sixth-generation Kentuckian. You can find out more about my work by signing up for my Substack newsletter, or learn more about me at my website.
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The podcast I did with my kid.
Despite the chaos of an election season, it’s been beautiful to watch VP Harris in the moments where she paid tribute to her roots as the daughter of an Indian woman and Caribbean man. How she told stories of the multicultural village of “aunties” and “uncles” who helped raise her in California’s Bay Area. Witnessing the relatives who joined her onstage at the Convention for the balloon drop including her blended family, descendants of Tamil Nadu, India and Saint Ann, Jamaica.
9,862 really fucking good days, or at least days with some introspection.
Your sober is your sober, that’s all there is to it, no matter if it’s California sober or point-in-time abstinence, or you’ve gone all holy roller on it. One of the best thinkers on this is Holly Whittaker, and you can find her on Substack in Recovering.
Sugarland by New Orleans guitarist, vocalist, songwriter, Papa Mali, features the powerful voice of Big Chief Monk Beaudreaux. Located near Houston, Sugar Land, beginning in the 19th century, was home to a large sugar plantation. There’s more I could say about this song, but its mystery ought to work on you.
Love this: "I’ve been watching women elders from all over America place their votes, telling stories of their mothers and grandmothers holding a vision of a woman President, a Black and Asian President, and of passing that vision to their descendants." That's how I feel too, Sonya, and when I talk with my ancestors as I walk in the forest, they assure me we will prevail. Congratulations, too, on your sobriety birthday. After lockdown, when I found I couldn't do Zoom due to lack of connectivity in a remote rural area and a dislike for screens, I set up a women's meeting in a community center. Turned out that around 2018, a Conference-approved book and a cool pamphlet too called Voices of Women in Recovery, appeared. I had no idea how much I craved women's stories. We read one of the pieces each week and then share around the table. We've been gathering for two years now, and what happens each week is more powerful than any previous experiences in my forty-one years sober and clean.
I stopped when I read: “I was trying to express what I wanted without taking myself or anyone else down.” It made me wonder if for many people it’s a matter of replacing sobriety, as is your case, with something else that creates that lack of clarity/self-sovereignty. I know what it feels like to write without wanting to take anyone else down, including myself. It was its own kind of self preservation. But I think, with time, we learn how to access the truth without the angst (hope that makes sense?) The writing shapes us.