A letter to my 21-year-old self
Healing is a practice. Pain is a portal. Awe can be found in the darkest seasons if you are willing to look for it. Stay willing.
March 4, was my 23rd sobriety anniversary. To honor this moment I wrote a letter to myself in my first year of recovery. I was 21.
Dear Ashley,
You are not a fuck up. You are not broken. Everything is not your fault despite how it feels. You cannot always trust your feelings. Sometimes they are accurate. Other times they are echoes from the past. Some of them belong to others. Learn to differentiate between all of this, it will become essential to your life’s work.
Rehab will scare the shit out of you and give you a safe place to land. Nobody will find you there. Not the people you owe money to, or the dealer who held a gun to your head, or your nosy roommates who have the best of intentions. They care about you even though you can’t receive it yet. Your body needs safety. You must be away from the city to heal. In nature. Crying. Screaming. Writing. Twenty years from now you will build a house in the country and your body will experience a deeper level of safety.
Those people huddled by the church down the street smoking at 7:45pm on a Friday night will become your community for years. You will walk through those church doors trembling and terrified. There you will meet other suffering people who are a little further along in their recovery. You will feel the most comfortable in queer meetings. Pay attention to this, it means something.
When you go back to school and make art about abortion, know you are brave. When the students in your classes are uncomfortable, it has nothing to do with you. Keep processing your pain and grief through art, no matter who can hold it.
All those nights alone in the printmaking studio covered in ink are medicine for your early recovery. Throw yourself into your art practice like your life depends on it, because it does. Keep drawing. Keep printing. Keep writing. Keep trying to remember. Keep reaching for yourself.
You can’t rush your healing. As much as you want to get there already, to the place where joy is sustained and fear and pain are absent, it doesn’t exist. There will be fantastic highs, frightening lows, and relentless numbness in-between. Over the years you will learn that healing is a practice, that pain is a portal, and that awe can be found in the darkest seasons if you are willing to look for it. Stay willing.
Though it feels like you have missed out on so much and need to make up for lost time, you don’t. You are one of the lucky ones, reaching through the void, choosing a sober life at 21, despite the uncertainty of it all.
When your boyfriend dumps you before you leave to start grad school across the country, don’t take the Prozac. It does more than take the edges off. It leaves you empty. It increases your anxiety. It makes sleeping through the night impossible. Everyone is terrified you will start using again. You might. And you might not. You have no idea how strong you are. You can feel through your life unmedicated.
Outgrowing people is uncomfortable. You will outgrow many relationships this year and in the future. Keep your head down and keep showing up. When a relationship ends, it makes room for new connections. Learn to sit in the grief, to tend to yourself in seasons of sorrow, and know that when you are angry, grief is often hanging out just below the surface.
When your dad comes over to your first apartment and cuts the vines off the windows it isn’t because you are doing something wrong. It is because he loves you. It will take you years to understand that helping is his love language.
One night you will meet a guy with a mullet and green eyes at a party. He will give you a cup of wine after you tell him you are sober. You will toss the wine and go out with him anyway. You will find a letter from another woman next to his bed one night. He will lie about it. Having sex with people does not make them care about you. It never works. You are worth caring about.
Your art matters. Your writing matters. Doubt will creep in at every turn. Critics will try to silence you. They will tell you that nobody likes your work. They will yell at you to give up. Learn how to listen to your inner voice. Learn how to trust the part of you that knows the truth. Keep creating. Keep taking photos. Keep writing in your notebooks. Your first book will be published when you are 39. That is so far from now. You have much more time than you realize.
Being present is hard. It will be for a long time. You will feel what you have been running from and it will bring you to your knees over and over. The pain never goes away. You won’t get over anything. Learn to care for the parts of you that are hurt. Practice honoring the sadness. Share your pain with others, you don’t have to hurt alone anymore. Take time to celebrate yourself for making it this far. For staying alive when you wanted to veer off the road that night.
Practice gratitude. As difficult as it is to access right now, try to come up with one thing you are grateful for every day. Not to bypass what is hard, but to add to it. To remember that each moment is complex, that there is often something else to be uncovered in experiences that feel unbearable. A decade from now a therapist will ask you if you can locate any place in your body that doesn’t feel pain. You sit for a long time searching. And then you find it. Your pinky toe on your left foot. No pain there. It’s the smallest of openings. It counts. Be grateful for your left pinky toe. It changes the course of your life.
Many years from now you will find your way to a loving home full of children in a town you’ve never heard of. You will walk through the wise oaks with your family.
You will find pockets of joy in the moments when you are not striving. When the parts that try to get ahead and push through, settle. When the parts that ache to feel like they are enough and belong, feel connected.
You will find pockets of joy laughing with your sons in the river, carrying your daughter through the forest, and crying with your partner in the car with the kids asleep in the back seats.
You will find pockets of joy brushing the dog, feeding the donkeys, mulching the garden, cooking breakfast, folding the laundry, and looking up at the night sky from your bed, waiting on a shooting star.
It will come.
They always do.
I love you so,
Ashley
Thank you so much for this writing! I always appreciate the depth and authenticity that you write from. I also wanted to say bravo for taking a pause from the podcast, and listening to what your body needs. I have been in awe and wonder of how you have done all you do, with three little ones!!! I only have one and am exhausted all the time. Take good care Ashley. :)
As someone who is 24, just a touch over 7 months sober after 4 months in rehab I love reading pieces that I can relate to deeply. Sometimes I get lost in my own feelings and through recovery I am reminded that I’m never alone.