Laura McKowen

I fell so far out of integrity with myself, I didn’t trust I’d ever return.

Something big was amiss. This was bigger than alcohol, or addiction.

There was hiding and denying, everywhere.

Why did we try so hard not to see this? Why were we so afraid to tell the truth?

Maybe your thing is chasing love, or sex, or being perfect, or keeping your body very small. Maybe you don’t have a thing, but you still feel a deadness inside and there’s a voice that haunts you — it finds you every morning just after you wake, before you remember yourself — whispering, Listen to me. Say yes to me.

wandering around my town drinking nips of cheap cherry vodka and warm white wine from my purse all afternoon, then laughably trying to hide the fact that I was blasted when we met back at my place. As if he wasn’t my brother, as if he wouldn’t know just by looking at me.

And here is the thing we must know about our things if we are ever going to survive them: We believe we can bury

them, when the truth is, they’re burying us. They will always bury us, eventually.

I was still hoping for a third door: another option besides door number one (drinking) and door number two (sobriety). I simply could not fathom that there wasn’t a fucking third door.

have one foot in the new, strange land of sobriety and the other firmly, desperately, in my old life. This is what it feels like for all of us, I think, when we have only half-decided to own our thing.