29 years ago today I checked myself into an alcohol and drug detox unit. I was a voluntary patient, but there was nothing voluntary about my addiction, it was as necessary to me as breathing. It got me through the day, its most important job, to stop me feeling. All feeling, all of the time, until I was in a place it didn’t work anymore. The tidal wave of true emotions it kept barricaded broke through, and I was on my knees, broken and terrified of where to go next. Detox saved my life, and rehab after that. Some of the hardest, most exhilarating work I’ve ever done, and the loneliest and most frightening. There in an old dark, Victorian hospital, under the Dartford Bridge in Kent I began feeling. What a revelation it was to start to thaw out from all those chemicals, to feel so alive, in so many ways. I had to name them in group therapy, emotions unfamiliar to me, so dearly needed, so much a part of me. Those emotions overwhelmed me, surprised me and excited me. I had energy to burn. I was coming alive.
As I went on in my recovery my feelings told their tale, revealing truths buried for years. My dreams would often lead the way, before consciousness took over to show me where I had come from and why I had needed my addiction like I did. It had been my comfort blanket, the cure I had taken to the trauma from my childhood. Take addiction to trauma and maybe we can not know, forever. Not knowing. That was the goal. When I did start to feel, I wanted to understand my emotions, my dreams, so that meant not knowing was no longer needed. Feelings led me to the truth, and in turn that truth led me to more feelings. It was an unraveling, an undoing of a carefully crafted dissociation that saved me when I was small. In the beginning feeling was lonely, I didn’t know I could share these big parts of me. I didn’t know it was ok to show them, to reveal who I was. As soon as I started to do this with others, to find I was not alone, that vulnerability gave me hope I could do this again and again. I made connections because of feelings. Addiction was the loneliest fortress I made, keeping everything inside, sealed with a cocktail of drugs.
Today I have reached a place I can hold all of my feelings, no matter what they are. There is no denial left in me, my subconscious saw to that, with my soul driving the train. That’s the thing about thawing out and feeling, once you allow it, it never stops moving on. Feelings have taken me to places I have soared with the birds and brought me down so low I have wanted to end my life. Feelings have changed me, allowing them to be has brought me back. A return to my childhood to reclaim the little girl who was always full of love. I discovered through the vision of emotions, it was not about what they did to me, it was about a small child who did not let go of herself, whilst they did what they did. Back, go back and find her. Feelings took me back, feelings saved me, feelings were not killed by addiction, only temporarily suspended in another place, waiting for the day they could be found and released. It has been the work of love to unearth those feelings and give them voice. It has taken commitment, because feeling often means you want to give up, but you don’t, you just wait until it passes, because through experience you know it will.
In the place that is my centre I belong to the earth, the wind blowing my hair as I move across the fields. I can be whatever I imagine, I have already survived it all, so now I can build dreams. Being this small is a gift. Waking emotions gave me the gift to be small again, and again and again. So many of us, all children, we are secrets no more. We are here and we feel. Every day we feel. It doesn’t matter if they don’t understand, we understand because you allowed us to finally feel it all through our telling in your body. Thank you for all these years of feeling. It has brought us together, made us close, made us whole. Together we are untouchable, we survived the very worst, felt our way through it and out the other side to integrate as one. The 7th of February that’s when it started. Thank you.