Gathering Oneself Back Whole

In the last issue, we focused on healing, becoming, returning to oneself again. I want to be clear that this is not the focus of this article (or any of the articles in this issue, for that matter). However, ever since I became fully sober three months ago, that’s pretty much what my life has consisted of. I spent two months in an intensive outpatient treatment program that focused on cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavioral therapy, relapse prevention, and a whole slew of other content centered around different coping mechanisms and rewiring the brain. It helped, but it was a lot of work, especially at nine hours a week. In addition to that, I also completed two workbooks: a shadow work workbook and Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way workbook (I’ve always loved workbooks). For those unfamiliar, shadow work is a concept developed by renowned psychiatrist Carl Jung, aimed at uncovering our unconscious patterns and behaviors and integrating them into our conscious self. WebMD defines it as “the process of exploring the unconscious reasons behind your feelings or behaviors, particularly uncomfortable emotions that seem out of character or beyond your control.” As for The Artist’s Way, there were aspects of shadow work involved, but this workbook was more about aligning oneself with one’s values and uncovering/pursuing creative goals. It has you start doing “morning pages” every morning as well, which I began to get back in the habit of in addition to my nightly reflections before bed, so I started journaling twice a day. Overall, I have done a lot of inner work over the past few months, and that’s not even close to everything I’ve had to do to gather myself back whole again.

For the most part, when I was using, I wasn’t living. And I used to escape the feeling of emptiness I felt from a lack of fulfillment from not living. It was ironic, really. I knew that if I just stopped using and changed my lifestyle, things would be better, but for some reason I was unable to for a long time. Then one day this past summer, I had a seizure that somehow relieved me of my cravings – there’s a lot we don’t understand about the brain, and maybe it was psychological, but I returned from the hospital without wanting more. However, I kept drinking alcohol and smoking weed socially, albeit I didn’t consider myself an alcoholic nor did I have a problem with pot anymore. After a month sober from my drug of choice, I didn’t think I needed treatment, because I wasn’t using anymore. But I went through with it anyway, and they had us abstain from all substances throughout the length of the program, testing our urine periodically to make sure we were being honest with them (the attendants at my local LabCorp began to know me on a first name basis after a while). Once I did this, I realized how much I had relied on different substances throughout my life to numb my feelings of pain or unfulfillment, and if I was going to stay sober, I needed to recreate my life entirely. That is, I needed to start living.

Healing is one thing, but actually living your life is another. By happenstance, I was lucky enough to be able to go on a trip to Europe with my mom for a friend’s wedding right after I stopped using, so that helped break the habit and also regain some vitality within me. What helped the most though on that trip was the mass amount of walking we did – I had gone from an average of maybe 4 steps a day to an average of 12,000 steps a day in the span of a week. It was hard to return to my old life of stagnation once we returned home, so I began forcing myself to get into the habit of taking a loop around the nearby park while listening to the ‘Hidden Brain’ podcast – and then, as time went on, I started doing two loops, and then three. The feeling of being outside in the sunshine, enjoying nature, and listening to Shankar Vedantam’s calm, soothing voice interview renowned scholars about different psychological topics produced the endorphins I needed to keep returning every day. However, walking was the first step – there were many other habits I needed to implement in order to realign myself with myself.

I know not everyone can just go to Europe nor has the ability or time to go on long walks daily. What I really needed was structure, and the beauty of structure is that it looks different for different people, so anyone can have it depending on what their life looks like. Really, what it comes down to is how you organize your time – and as a self-employed writer and artist, my time is my own, so it can be hard to have structure sometimes. When I wasn’t taking care of myself, I would stay up all night writing and sleep all day, missing appointments and important family events – I still have voicemails from my parents checking in to see if I was awake yet. It wasn’t sustainable, obviously. So how do you get structure when you don’t have any? You create it. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the help of certain self-care apps in building the morning and evening routines that I’ve started to follow to create that sense of structure in my life – namely ‘The Fabulous’ and ‘Finch’. Both are great for different reasons: ‘The Fabulous’ focuses on slowly building routines over time via habit stacking, and ‘Finch’ is a gamified goal-tracking app akin to a Tamagotchi. I highly recommend both if you’re feeling stuck re: routine building and habit tracking.

I won’t list all the habits and elements of my routines, because I don’t think it’s necessary. But I will say that it didn’t happen overnight – it was a slow process. If you try to do too much too fast, it’s easy to fail and want to give up. So when I became comfortable with a new habit, I’d add on another to my routine, and when I became comfortable with that, I’d add yet another, and so on, until I finally reached a point where I felt proud of both my morning and evening routines and could them accomplish with ease. And I’m not even close to completing ‘The Fabulous’ yet – I’m only on the second mountain. All that to say, my morning routine sets a certain paradigm for me to be able to accomplish my goals and other tasks during the day, and my evening routine allows me to reset and recharge for the next day. By building in certain goals (like fifteen minutes of restorative yoga before bed) into my routines, I’m even more able to progress towards what I want to accomplish while maintaining that sense of structure and fulfillment.

Ever since starting this process, I’ve completed the yoga teacher training program I started four years ago, started volunteering as a crisis counselor for Crisis Text Line, completed treatment, and made a lot of progress on a scarf I started knitting ten years ago, all while continuing to work on the magazine and spending more time with friends and family. The outpatient treatment program didn’t teach me this – I had to discover it for myself. It taught me some helpful tools, but it didn’t teach me how to actually live. I had to rediscover how to live, and how I wanted to live, and while healing is where living begins, actually living is what matters in life.