Are you gonna wait for a sign, your miracle?
Stand up and fight!This is it…Make no mistake where you are
Kenny Loggins, “This Is It”
This is it…Your back’s to the corner
This is it…Don’t be a fool anymore
This is it…The waiting is over
I’m one of those people who really hears lyrics when I listen to music. I think it goes with the territory of being a Highly Sensitive Person. And like most aspects of the HSP experience in a TMI world, this “gift” often seems like a curse/weakness/sick joke.
Once you find deep personal meaning in a piece of art — whether you were looking for it or not — it has a way of hitting you hard in the feels whenever you encounter it. That gets dangerous when the art is readily accessible on any random day of the week via satellite radio. I mean, you’re rarely prepared to weather a visceral attack of emotion on your way to work or school, and ill-equipped to explain to your spouse why you’re performing household chores with tears streaming down your face.
So it went this past weekend, when I decided to get in the spirit of Father’s Day by tuning in to Amazon’s “Yacht Rock” station. This is akin to raiding my dad’s old tape drawer and spinning the soundtrack of my childhood, the strains of “Sailing,” “Africa,” “Steal Away,” “What a Fool Believes,” “Love Will Conquer All,” and basically the entire Kenny Loggins discography tapping into my tenderest places, where I typically dare not go because I can’t afford to break down.
I imagine my mind being kind of like the girl’s in “Inside Out,” with several little “personality islands” that go dark when you cut off certain “core memories.”
Anyway, sure enough, listening to just a little bit of Yacht Rock on Father’s Day, I was quickly overcome by bittersweet nostalgia. I found myself using the towels I was folding to dry my eyes, then telling my husband I was too emotional to go to brunch with his family. 😭😭😭😭
When “This Is It” came on, it was the first time I really zeroed in on the words. I decided, in the moment: This song isn’t a tale of lovers reaching critical mass in their relationship! It’s about an addict hitting bottom and confronting a critical choice: Keep digging, or start climbing. Give up on life, or surrender the lie.
After all, art is subjective and can mean whatever you want it to, right?
Today is the fourth anniversary of my “come to Jesus” moment — or, my “this is it” realization — when I stood on the deck at my parents’ house in suburban Chicago and finally acknowledged my out-of-control drinking problem out loud. (I didn’t actually stop drinking until more than a week later; my official sobriety date is July 7.) It’s still mind-boggling to reflect on that miracle, to think that I was given a chance, after all those years of running and hiding and faking and lying, to make a change and turn everything around.
“The lie” was that I needed alcohol — to calm down, to enjoy life, to fit in, to feel normal. Like all people who get hooked on booze, dope, sex, whatever, I clung desperately to the belief that I’d found the magic pill. The cure for pain. The antidote to emptiness. A release valve I could always unscrew when being human got too heavy. A best friend who would always be there to love and accept me unconditionally.
And despite mounting evidence to the contrary, I told myself that I could keep drinking and be OK, hold on to what I had, and somehow keep moving toward…well, probably not paradise, but at least a tolerable, reliable status quo. 🤷🏼♀️
I stood on the deck that late-June morning, drunk on tequila at 10AM — what self-respecting alcoholic wouldn’t pre-game a 1-year-old’s birthday party? — and arguing with my mother for the 10,678th time about…well, everything. I can’t really explain what happened next; I wasn’t exactly “with it,” per se. But it was like something flew out of the sky and smacked me in the face.
The truth.
A life revolving around alcohol/drugs is just circling the drain, swirling around and around in the same old shit until the suction pulls you under. And if I kept on doing what I was doing, my life would never get better. The very best I could ever hope for was the status quo, and I could no longer deny that my current situation was very sad and terribly dysfunctional.
For once in your life, here’s your miracle
Stand up and fight!This is it…Make no mistake where you are
Kenny Loggins, “This Is It”
This is it…You’re goin’ no further
This is it…Until it’s over and done
This is it…One way or another
Surrender is a hard, hard pill to swallow, and while “putting the plug in the jug” was/is a huge step, it’s only the beginning of a rough ride. Living sober feels like walking naked, with the thinnest of skin, into a world full of sharp points and jagged edges, nothing to keep you from being mortally wounded. It can feel like opening up the door at the dawn of each day and being like…
I don’t want to act like my experience is any harder than any other recovering addict. I just know that for me, being an HSP in a TMI world — in other words, a hyper-perceptive empath who feels everything deeply, and thus, is easily overwhelmed by external stimuli — comes with a built-in self-protective tendency that lends itself to comfort-seeking behaviors. That does not go away when you sober up; in fact, your sensitivity seems to skyrocket, and you find yourself reaching for other things to soothe, shield, distract….
As I’ve shared previously in this space, I was so emotionally sensitive in early sobriety that I could not bring myself to listen to music for more than a year after I quit drinking. Every now and then, even (almost) four years later, I’m reminded why.
Amazon recommended “Love From the Other Side” because I had added other Fall Out Boy songs to my running playlist, and the first time I listened, the lyrics went straight to my soul. Like all “breakup songs” written about shattered romance, it’s easily applicable to anyone who has ever grieved the death of a dream.
People in recovery understand that giving up your substance feels like severing a sacred bond with the thing you thought would save you.
When I hear this song, as I did again this morning while laboring around the high school track in soupy humidity, I hear a message from a recovering addict to the idealized version of themselves they believed they were, when their MO was running from reality.
Model house life meltdown
Fall Out Boy, “Love from the Other Side”
Still a modern dream let down
It kills me, you know I’m dying out here
What would you trade the pain for?
I’m not sure
We were a hammer to the statue of David
We were a painting you could never frame and
You were the sunshine of my lifetime
What would you trade the pain for?
…
I saw you in a bright clear field
Hurricane heat in my head
The kind of pain you feel to get good in the end
Good in the end
Inscribed like stone and faded by the rain
“Give up what you love”
“Give up what you love, before it does you in”
…
Sending my love from the other side of the apocalypse
And I just about snapped
Don’t look back
Every lover’s got a little dagger in their hand
It is a timeless truth that anyone caught in the cycle of addiction must confront if they want a better life: Running from pain is a path to destruction, not freedom. Four years ago, for whatever reason, I arrived at a moment of clarity when I was finally able to see that “inscription on the stone,” plain as day. I was forced to admit that I’d lost myself in a toxic love affair with alcohol, and although ending that relationship absolutely felt like an apocalyptic scenario, I knew it was the only way I could ever hope to “get good in the end.”
I will celebrate my official sober anniversary in two weeks, but, of course, that day won’t be any kind of “end.” And even though my skin continues to thicken, I might never feel completely “good” as a naked person in a sharp world. It can be difficult for any of us to find sources of sunshine in a sometimes dark and stormy lifetime, and we encounter new tests of our strength and challenges to our resolve every day.
Personally, if I look back on the recovery journey that started in late June of 2019, when I stood on my parents’ deck and decided, “This is it,” and I trace it to June 2023, which finds me “on the other side” of addiction, in a position to help others make that same life-changing decision, and I think about how the death of a false dream (a delusion?) paved the way for me to live a real one…I have to ask myself:
What would I trade the pain for?
The answer comes immediately: I wouldn’t.
Jen Wielgus Journalism 
Amen, Jen. I feel this! I, too, am approaching an anniversary, and one of the songs for me is “Solsbury Hill”, Peter Gabriel.
“Eagle flew out of the night………”
“Hey, he said, grab your things, I’ve come to take you home!”
I was rescued from a life of darkness and hospitals. They brought me home.
One of many songs, but that one still makes me watery eyed.
As always, thanks for the post!
Peace.
p.s. The old sponsor used to say, “Alkys would do much better with thicker skins and thinner heads!”
🤣🤣🤣🤣
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