The Beginning of Recovery

Comment now » // March 3rd, 2010

From Part Two: Bastogne
Cult, A Love Story

I couldn’t know it at the time, but every road of my life up to this point had led into this time and every resulting road would lead out of it. My life would was divided into two halves: before New Year’s Eve, 1999, and after. This was my moment, my opportunity to consciously and purposefully choose who I wanted to be and what I believed to be true about the world, about God and about myself.

There is a god in the Hindu religion called Shiva, who represents both destruction and creativity. In my early twenties, in my emotionally immature way, I was never able to grasp this. “How,” I would wonder to myself, “can something represent both destruction and creativity? Those two things are, like, total opposites.” The early part of the twentieth century would bring home to me, in the most intimate way, the understanding that creativity sometimes sprouts from destruction. Like the new plant growth that can begin only when a forest has been destroyed by fire, sometimes our lives cannot grow in a new direction until we metaphorically burn down our existing life. Martha Beck, sociologist and life coach, describes this situation in her book Finding Your Own North Star as a “death you have to live through.”

I was dying. Not physically maybe (although there were days when I begged for that to be true) but emotionally, mentally and spiritually. The way that Limori had had Michael break up with me and the subsequent treatment by those at Wolf’s Den and in the Vancouver group made me feel like a splattered bug on the windshield of life. I spent the first few days after my return from that disastrous trip so shocked and stupefied that I could barely string a sentence together and found myself doing things like putting my car keys in the refrigerator and having to consciously remember how to tie my shoelaces. But the result of that messy impact was that I was jolted awake. I loathed and despised and despaired of every second of the subsequent months and years, but what I eventually came to realize was that this was the biggest blessing and greatest gift I’d ever received. It was a course correction, as pilots say, of such jolting and terrifying magnitude that it almost unhinged me, but I now believe it needed to be that big, that shocking, that devastating, in order to get my attention. Anything less and I would have skirted around it with cult rhetoric.

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For more on this topic please see Cult, A Love Story.