Coming To

Coming To

The shift was gradual

Like stepping onto an airport walkway

Traveling quickly

Without seeming to move

Anywhere at all

After the initial footstep

Made its point of contact

Looking left and right

Everyone is speeding by

Or am I the only one moving?

Is it they who remain still?

I don’t know anymore

Confused and alone

Yet surrounded by crowds

Everyone is laughing

Blissful and serene

And then I catch a glimpse

Of my own reflection

Quick and fleeting

Before I’m drifting

Further and further along

Stuck and spinning

The black conveyor belt

Pushes my suspended feet forward

The shift was subtle

I eventually come to realize

That I’ve reached somewhere else

In another place and time

Wondering how much I’ve missed

When I was gone

 © Laura Weston

I wrote the poem titled Coming To, the inspiration behind this post, to describe what it felt like after finally addressing my own progression along the continuum of twenty-five years of drinking.

DISILLUSIONED

This is a raw portrayal of my own experience and how it felt in the moments after realizing I needed to make a change. That my drinking habit was taking me to places I no longer wanted to go. The metaphor of an airport walkway came to me as I began thinking of the ways that I was still moving forward, in years, and yet everything felt eerily the same.

I was comfortable in that familiarity. I was a drifter, a passenger, allowing forces beyond my control to navigate my life while I strongly believed I was actively choosing this path.

Everyone around me seemed to be walking it too. Time eluded me while I continued focusing on the faces of the people around me. I was conditioned to look externally for reassurance. The illusion that everyone was moving with me in the same direction kept me stuck on that trajectory for a long time. My fear of abandonment by others kept me from questioning where I was heading.

EASY STREET

Drinking was an expressway for fitting in, feeling desirable, and allowed me to fill in the gaps of emptiness I felt deep inside. With all of those perks, it was no wonder it made the most sense to hop on for the ride!

I learned that the moving walkway was super-efficient. At first, the pace was slow enough that I was still able to hop on and off effortlessly. It was a newly discovered on-ramp that helped me coast through awkward social situations, tolerate small talk, and impress the crowd with my typically out of character karaoke skills. And yet, inevitably, at the end of those drunken nights, the excess build up of suppressed emotion would spill out on cue to several sappy songs I requested on the jukebox.

I developed a false sense of emotional intimacy while drinking. It was easy to have heartfelt conversations with strangers in a bar. However; I would eventually come to discover that it takes intentional work to sustain meaningful connections in the light of day. While moving with the ever-revolving floor underneath you, it is hard to gain any sort of traction. Without the stability of solid ground, the results are just a bunch of nameless faces, hollowed-out acquaintances and the endless void you continuously attempt to fill with them.

TRAVELING LIGHT

Eventually, I discovered that in order to continue moving forward at this pace, I had to leave a few things behind. First, I had to check my sense of caution at the door. As a highly sensitive person, I am hyper-attuned to sniffing out danger. I was forced to abandon this heightened sense of awareness that would allow me to warn and remove myself and others from unsafe situations.

In a matter of a few drinks, all red flags instantly turned into green.  

I cringe at the amount of risky situations I found myself in while under the influence of alcohol and feeling invincible. It turns out that the cost of preserving my ties with others, also meant leaving my own voice of reason behind.

I also had to lose my ambition. I did things but felt no sense of accomplishment. Anything that required effort and focus eluded me. It was disheartening to admit how unmotivated and stuck I was. My reasons for drinking were quickly stacking up. I was now also numbing the pain of my discontent coming from the fact that I was not where I wanted to be in my life.

THE LOST YEARS

The shift was gradual. Moving from weekend parties, to having some wine on Monday nights while watching my favorite shows, to beers with dinner on multiple weeknights, to having no clear boundaries around drinking anymore. For me, life had been experienced through the steady flow of alcohol for so long, weaved into every social gathering, stocked in every refrigerator, providing me with consistent rewards as well as escape and comfort. Days of the same tired saga turned into weeks, then months. And years later it was like waking up from the haze of a dream wondering what happened, just trying to regain my bearings.

For a long time, there was a sense of acceptance in it, despite the confusion and gut feelings that kept trying to tell me that something was “off” as time continued on.

The shift from drinking socially to drinking by myself to numb uncomfortable emotions significantly increased the speed of my life starting to pass me by.

STEPPING OFF

The moving walkway came to an abrupt halt for me after discovering Annie Grace’s book This Naked Mind and reading it within two days.

Choosing to step away from it was quite disorienting at first. In the aftermath of the numbing, comes the thawing, where everything begins to come back into focus. Sometimes at an alarming rate. I found myself feeling mostly sad and scared. Mourning for the part of my life I was leaving behind, afraid for the unknown future and yet unable to go back.

There is loss at the crossroads of change. And with that, there is also incredible hope and possibility.

Sometimes the nudge of coming to can visit you in gentle yet persistent waves of discontent. A tiresome repetition of the same old routine at odds with an underlying pull or yearning for more. It may visit you in the tug of war occurring in your mind. The one where your voice of reason says “not today” while your rebellious inner teenager fights to take the reins, sending you cowering in defeat once more. It may even come to you abruptly in the form of a loss or impactful event that forces you to re-evaluate and question everything.   

It is a call for us to question where the moving walkway will continue to take us and realize that instead of drifting to somewhere beyond our control, we can choose the direction we want to head in.

I’m sure all of us have experienced FOMO at some point in time. Ironically, while we are distracted by things that we have been illusioned to believe are adding value to our lives, whether it be drinking, social media scrolling, excessive shopping, over-working etc, we end up missing out the most important things—awareness and choice.

UNPACKING

The phrase come to means to recover consciousness as defined in the Miriam Webster dictionary. It is a call to presence. Coming to our senses and re-connecting to the world around us.

Coming to requires radical honesty.

Coming to forced me to admit that once the effects of my continued drinking became increasingly clear, I could no longer feign ignorance to what was discovered.

Coming to summons us to face the quick Band-Aid rip sting as we examine our wounds in the open air and we realize that in seeing them clearer, we can now focus on gathering our own special mixture of salves to begin the healing.

As a result of my own coming to I am learning to create safety within myself to feel again. I am teaching myself, and my body, that it is safe to feel sadness. It is safe to feel grief. And it is safe to speak and write about it, which has become one of my own potent healing salves. We only become who we want to be if we allow ourselves to feel it all and be open to what our pain has to teach us. 

As we choose to step off the conveyor belt, we feel the roughness of the ground against our feet as we begin to gain our footing once again. And as we start to breathe in deeper and look around, we begin to fully take in everything we were missing when we were gone.

©Laura Weston 2023

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