“I don’t believe in the self in the way that people determine it here in this capitalist society that we live in. I don’t believe in self-care: I believe in collective care, collectivizing our care, and thinking more about how we can help each other.” – Mariame Kaba
“The universe is an impossibly vast symphony of cause and effect. The endless comings and goings of galaxies, stars, and planets create a melding of songs that you are part of too.” – Adam Frank
I recently reconnected with an old friend, one of the dear magical beings I had the privilege of knowing in my wild era. In the years since we’d lost touch, we’ve both gotten sober and gone to grad school for social work, delightful synchronicities. He asked about how I got sober, did I go through a program or do it on my own, and I said on my own, but that’s not really accurate. I mean, with a certain framing, it’s not untrue, but I’ve just been thinking a lot about the whole story of it. I don’t really believe I do anything on my own. I know that I am only here because everything and everyone else is here. I only exist because my parents existed, because their parents did, because particles collided longer ago than I can comprehend. I only persist because someone is growing the food I eat, someone built the rooms that shelter me, someone treats water and directs it into my home, because people I’ve never met make me laugh, because friends and family hold me.
Turning points for me, both in 2016 when I quit drinking, and in 2021 when I got sober, involved relinquishing any will or control associated with Western concepts of the individual, the self. I was only able to free myself from the harm of alcohol once I accepted that I could not control how I used it. I was only able to get sober once I stopped trying to do it through sheer force of will and accepted the possibility that I might never succeed. I had to relax into the utter lack of control I had. I had to accept things I absolutely did not want to accept.
I keep coming back to an understanding that we are not as willful as we may imagine ourselves to be, that our consciousness does not grant us control but rather observation, that magic is in the observation, in noticing, in our attention, in our ability to make connections. The current systems excel at keeping us distracted and separated, and they feed our illusions of control, constantly blaming us for the ways they’ve disempowered us, convincing us we can access power if we just make better choices. (And I’m saying we but it’s always targeted to an I.) It’s such a strong undertow I feel I’m always trying to resist, and being in that constant state of resistance is exhausting. My sense of possibility often only comes in moments when I have been sucked so far out to sea, where although it is finally calm and I no longer have to resist, I realize I am totally alone and can’t survive that way, way out there.
I have been feeling cynical. I truly believe that the people in power have become soulless husks! I don’t think any amount of science, statistics, or stories will move them to do anything differently! No one in power is going to save us! These systems that are shaping our experience of the world cannot be transformed and are destined to fail! Unfortunately, when people get dollar signs in their eyes, when they experience the intoxicating illusion of safety that comes with wealth, they become truly unbothered and unconcerned. I have no hope in the Supreme Court because I have no faith in that entire system. These are ancient, crumbling structures, and the universe will metabolize us all, bunkers or no.
I don’t feel cynical about everything. I don’t feel cynical about life and living. I am so full of love I could burst! And despite what I just wrote, my job revolves around trying to transform systems through sharing science, statistics, and stories. But I don’t do it thinking I’m going to stop the impending disasters. I do it in the spirit of collective survival and out of a love for life lived in the midst of trauma, in the wake of loss, a love for the full spectrum of this existence that includes death. Recently at work I met with an environmental scientist and counseling psychologist whose work focuses on community resilience, and we talked about the inevitable traumas of the ongoing climate crisis, how we are looking at a future where the ability to meet people’s basic needs will continue to be destabilized. We already live within systems that deny basic needs. It makes sense that those same systems are causing environmental changes on such a scale that the Earth itself has begun and will continue in even more ways to disrupt us. And it’s no wonder that a culture grown out of that foundation of competition, scarcity, individualism, oppression, is a confused and chaotic culture, a stressed and distracted culture. I know we’ll never find liberation in these systems, that they cannot be reformed but have to be reimagined entirely, that the clay has to be reclaimed. We also talked about how hope can be found in community, coalitions, relationships. Part of my job is coordinating the trauma-informed community networks throughout the state, and it is my favorite part of my job. We are collective creatures who rely on cooperation for survival. Even if we can only build small systems with our small collectives, we have a better chance of surviving. Every seed of a plan to help each other is an ark.
When I reflect on my substance use, I end up back at my dad’s death. I see how his death rippled out in ways I can only understand from this vantage point of sobriety. I’ve always been drawn toward intense experiences, and I think that a lot of my extreme behaviors as a teenager and young adult were rooted in the extreme suffering I experienced as a child when my dad died. The whole world became a surreal terror that night, and I coped by seeking equally visceral pleasure, and it worked for a time! It worked for so long that when it stopped working, it took nearly just as long for me to process and accept the change. I had to experience and observe over and over and over again the reality that something I’d used to alleviate my suffering was causing me harm. In coming to terms with the harm I was perpetrating against myself, I had to become very present in my life in a way that was extremely uncomfortable. I realized that in my natural and understandable impulse to avoid pain and suffering, I had developed a dysfunctional relationship to pleasure. My experiences of pleasure were mostly immediate, ecstatic, overwhelming, short-term. I have had to cultivate - slowly, painfully! - a relationship with pleasure that is quiet and underwhelming but grounded, consistent, calming. Peaceful, if you can imagine! Accessing that in the culture of collapse is a challenge to say the least. It’s no coincidence that the harm of my substance use intensified as the machinations of the systems intensified, as I became more alone and felt more alienated. The culture of collapse prefers me to be collapsing too. It prefers me untethered from any sense of community, spiraling, grasping onto whatever I can consume. My dad’s death happened in that culture, and my coping happened in that culture. What might have happened if I hadn’t been relegated to the nuclear family, if that family had been held by an entire community? It’s hard to imagine because my notions of community exist in the context I’ve grown in, this petri dish of empire. But I’d like to imagine something else. I’d like to imagine it together, evolved pleasure, before the next death knocks us over, before the next disaster pulls us under. I know I still have so far to go, I know I can’t control what happens on the way, but I am using every ounce of influence I have to move in that direction.