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B-SIDES

Part of an ongoing B-Sides Collection series, where I’m resurrecting and reviving old things I’ve tucked in my journals, but have never shared. Each piece I write feels like a person to me; a character with a story, personality, and a personal history. It’s interesting and rewarding for me to revisit these old friends, and see how far we’ve come and how much we’ve grown since I wrote it, 4 years ago.

Welcome to my Big Fall.

Written February 19, 2019, on a private writing retreat in a tiny cottage in Washago, Ontario.

“Something very beautiful happens to people when their world has fallen apart: a humility, a nobility, a higher intelligence emerges at just the point when our knees hit the floor.”

– Marianne Williamson

For as fragmented as my memories are spanning my two-decade-long-day-drinking-career, none are more solid and crystal clear than the day I hit my lowest rock bottom.

The day of impact.

I know that I’ve come to accept the events that took place – and have forgiven myself for them, too – since my stomach no longer backflips when I turn my mind to it. The reality that I am sitting here today writing this book is evidence of how I’ve managed to turn the worst day of my life into something that can, I hope, help others.

It's magical alchemy at work again, transforming shit into shamrocks.

I didn’t hit rock bottom in the classic cartoon falling from the sky sort of splat, where you know there’s a piano landing on your head three seconds later, followed by whirling lines and dizzy little yellow birds.

Oh no.

I sort of banged and bounced off boulders jutting from the pit I had dug myself, rebounding off all the sharp-edged consequences I had built into my own grave.

And then I sort of came to a flesh-burning face plant where I skid until I landed smack into quicksand, and stopped, but didn’t stop sinking.

It was, without question, one of my least graceful moments.

Looking back, I see that I needed to crash with such force because the gentle taps on my shoulder from my exhausted conscience were going ignored. It’s almost as though something long dead inside me was resurrected at the very moment my face hit the floor, knocking it awake from its slumber only to realize, it too, was as trapped as much I was.

Except it was trapped inside me.

Sometimes it’s only when our nightmares come to life that we’re able to remember our sleeping dreams. Sometimes it takes the monsters under our bed to climb right under the sheets with us before we’re able to see how haunted we really are.

The exact circumstances around my epic fall from grace are irrelevant – what’s important is what happened next.

I cracked open.

Not enough to let all my demons escape, but just enough to smell how rotten I’d become, holding them all inside me for so long, pickled with wine and denial.

What no one tells you, is that rock bottom is made up of mirrors.

I was forced to stare into the heart of my inability to control myself and made to see myself for what I truly was – a fractured, bruised, and now seemingly broken shadow of somebody I used to know. I saw myself through the blood and the bruises – but that didn’t mean I recognized myself.

I was suddenly surrounded by reflections of my every action, and no matter where I turned it was impossible to avoid meeting the truth of my very sad, very scary reality.

The only thing that felt solid was the ground of this new lower low beneath my feet, while everything around me was shifting and moving, reminding me not only of my surroundings, but of my company.

My lack of company.

I was alone; nobody was coming to save me, and I was stuck having to stare at all the discarded facets and fragments of myself I’d tried so hard and so long to avoid – and there was no avoiding them now.

It’s almost as though at the moment of impact, when it felt as though my whole world was rushing up and away from me in a dizzying blur, all the veils were lifted and the sharp reflection of my reality was revealed; smoke, fractured mirrors, and all.

My magic act and all its illusions were over.

Navigating my way through the disorienting realm of rock bottom felt, to say the least, next to impossible.

Next to impossible – but necessary.

Staying there, thankfully, was not an option.

Funny things start to go through your mind while you’re falling, after you’ve pulled the ground out from beneath your own feet. All the times you ignored your better judgement replaying missed opportunities on loop; all your loose ends flapping around you just out of reach; and every dreaded future nightmare firing up in an angry inferno of ten thousand possible, devastating outcomes.

It’s like how they say your life flashes before your eyes in the moments before imminent death or injury – except it was sort of in reverse.

All the life you didn’t live, all the memories you wish you could forget, every lie and misdeed all come rushing to greet you and start prying the demons free from the broken shell you’ve become.

Instead of life replaying before my eyes, it was rewinding, unravelling, and unstitching itself into a massive pile at my feet, reminding me of how much life I’d avoided, how much life I had wasted – my own, and the lives of others. There was so much of it the floor became covered and it all began clawing its way up the walls.

I was no longer just stuck at rock bottom, I was drowning in consequences.

Another thing that no one tells you is that rock bottom isn’t a place you enter – it’s a place that enters you.

It’s suddenly feeling not unlike the pit of your stomach feeling bottomless, and all your limbs turn numb in the same way you wake from sleeping and your arms are paralyzed.

Frozen and lifeless, no longer responding, and seemingly possessed by forces you can’t control, somehow attached to you, but suddenly refusing to listen.

But, you know they’re still there.

I became a fly on the wrong side of a moving car window. Trapped, though able to see clearly where I wanted to be.

Shrinking behind me.

Further, further, far down the lines leading to the horizon that were pulling it away from me until it became nothing but an indistinguishable fleck in my past – a place you long to be, but can never go back to.

Back where I used to be when I was flying; when I was free.

Back before I fell.

And now, I was stuck, imprisoned by my own faulty navigation, and being taken somewhere I didn’t want to go but I flew myself into, watching the entire world as I knew it disappear in front from me.

Forever.

This wasn’t just a wakeup call. It was an ultimatum from the Universe. I was being deported from all I had taken for granted and transplanted into a backwards Oublier where instead of being left to be forgotten, I was being held so I had no choice but to remember.

I was being left with nothing other than the shaky ground beneath my feet, and I had no choice but to stay there until I stopped viewing it as the floor that caused my fall to stop, and begin seeing it as the foundation on which I needed to rebuild, instead.

I was being held to remember everything that was at stake.

I was being held to remember everything I’d already lost.

I was being held to remember myself again.

All along, I had been tossing what I couldn’t accept into what I thought was a bottomless well, where my troubles and aversions would magically disappear into the depths. What I didn’t know is that they would all be there waiting for me when I threw myself, my life, and the rest of my disowned parts down it, too.

So that’s where I started – at the beginning of another end, building a new foundation from all the pieces of myself I had tried – by intent or accident – to throw away.

Pieces I could never be rid of because those pieces were me, and now I needed to learn how to accept and use them to build my own escape.

Falling so completely and painfully was a gift.

It delivered me to exactly where I needed to land, shattered, so I could start over again, with all the missing pieces that had left me feeling hollow and flawed.

Pieces that I was responsible for trying to hide and deny, tossing them willfully into neglect, down the very same well made up of mirror that I didn’t imagine I, myself, going down as well with such violent force to be reunited with them.

Out out sight does not mean out of soul.

They were the same limbs of myself that I’d now need to learn how to use as tools, so I could stack them up, one by one on the very same floor that stopped me dead in my tracks. Stopping me not quite enough to kill me, but definitely stopping me more than enough to wake myself up into a startlingly, painful new awareness.

Thank heavens for karmic gravity.