On Beginning

Being human is a complicated business. It is not impossibly complicated; we have, after all, been managing for millennia. That said, we’ve been arguing over what “being” human means for almost as long. It is in no way a monolith. The types of experiences we have vary so greatly, and our minds are so bad at processing magnitude, that we can’t fathom what most of those experiences could even be, much less what they are. Of course we share a great deal in common: our hearts which beat, our children that wail or laugh, complaints about the local economy, too much month at the end of the money or too much money to know what to do at the end of the day. The list goes on and on, ad nauseam. It's hard to process even a few of commonalities or differences between the former and present versions of ourselves on a day to day basis, let alone pause our existence to ponder the vast and varied days or versions of self that others may experience. Balancing things like grocery runs and work deadlines with existential crisis is a large ask for anybody, even the most philosophically inclined.  On some days, it's enough to just put your feet on the floor and push up out of the bed.

Like I said, being human is a complicated business.

What if we could ponder it, though? What if we could stop and think about how each action causes a reaction, like a pebble skipping over the surface of still water; to think that everything changes everything; to weigh in the balances of our egoistic morality and our animalistic Id every decision we make; what then would we do? What happens when we take into consideration that some of our most near and dear values, belief systems, and cultural ideologies and zeitgeists, and generalized judgement factors could be terribly wrong? What if we opened ourselves up to the critique of someone whose life is so vastly different, whose perspective is so dissimilar to our own, that we balk at their very existence having even the smallest grain of actuality? What if they told us that we see our shared world through midnight tinted glasses? Take it a step further, suppose what life would be if you could see yourself, every nook and cranny of your corporeal and spiritual being, for what it is without the bias of your flawed memory and neurologically induced misremembering? Suppose the place you must start your search for answers is the place that makes you so uncomfortable that  your every instinct is to grind your inquiry to a halt, for fear of your inability to bear the weight of it;  what would you do then?

I don’t know the answers to any of these questions, but I do know this:  if you want to have time carved out for any level of questioning, in categories spanning the easy breezy to that of an existential crisis, all you have to do is go to rehab.

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Rehab is a word that has a lot of connotations shoved between the syllables. People assume a lot of things as soon as the word rolls out of one’s mouth. “Recovery” is less clear, but strikes the question, “from what?” So, I have no idea what you might be thinking when I say I am in rehab, or recovery. When I say, “for having a week-long panic attack and thinking I might die,” the waters only get murkier. Now, I know that the better answer is, “my life had become unmanageable,” which is a phrase I’ve learned from the twelve step programs I attend, despite addiction not being what brought me here, at least at first. Eventually, I will get into the truth of what my addictions are but, you may find yourself triggered by the conversation so I won’t digress down that long and winding road just yet. In sum, when I checked myself in, long gone were the days that a quick to-do list or a paper planner could save me from myself. I’ve never been in a plane that is in a tailspin, or on a boat with a hole in the bottom, but I can state almost positively that I have a thorough understanding of the physical sensations those examples bring. My mind, both waking and sleeping, was running an iron man race, chosen for me by the metaphoric rabid bear that was chasing me, without the slightest bit of training. Every decision felt like ligaments tearing from the muscles or tendons ripping off my bones: what I wanted to eat, what I wanted to drink, to wear, to do, in what order to do it, where did I place that, this, and the other, every question that most people run on autopilot felt life or death to me. It felt as if my own skin had betrayed me, sloughing off into the deep woods of the unknown, while the insides of me clung to a cellophane thin membrane, the lieutenant and executioner in my mind screaming, “HOOOOOLLDDD THE LINNNNEE!” and nothing would.

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My legs won’t stop bouncing as I write this. Not from nerves, but from the energy overflow and the need for movement through this passage of my life. This is the point where the words will only come if I’m willing to bleed on the page. Stop this frantic clacking and tapping of my keyboard and face myself in the mirror of open space. This is the precipice where discomfort and training meet, where the parachute must deploy or I will crash into…into what? Not rock bottom; I know because I’ve been there and this is not the feeling leading up to it. More like birth; contractions so painful that something inside me will, mercifully, forget it before I must do it again. 

Just write a few lines. That’s one already. Fuck’s sake, bearing it all is ridiculous. They don’t need this nakedness you’re offering them. This part is the hard part: the naked and afraid part, the “they will see you and won’t be afraid” part, the write for days part, the “you’ll think you know me know, but the whole truth is miles away,” part. But someone will see, and they won’t see me at all, only themselves. Do I write for them? I can’t; for others, this is a clanging of symbols and a painting of the wind. What if the ones I write for never find me. Impossible. That is as if to say a bird won’t find a branch, a sparrow, to make her nest. Pigeons make terrible nests, still they try. God knows, they must try.

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I never understood why we celebrated New Year the way we do. It's at the coldest time of the year, with the longest nights. My Seasonal Affective Disorder is in full swing and everything feels like it takes extra work: getting out of bed, getting out the door, staying focused at work/in class, doing anything “productive” when I get home, preparing to start it all over again. I know, in this, I am not alone. It just doesn’t seem like the time to make resolutions. I mean, that is such a resolute word. Like, there is no wiggle room at all in a resolution. Which means if you even gently bounce the ball, you’ve completely missed the point. God forbid you drop the ball, and then spend the rest of the  year reminding yourself that you started the year off on a bad foot.  Even in the throes of my commitment to an extremist capitalist nightmare I can count on one hand the number of times that I actually made resolutions. I don’t need any fingers to count the number of times my resolutions  made it a full 12 months. Honestly, I just never  understood it, even without knowing why I didn’t understand it. Something inside me never wanted to understand because it’s always oriented itself in the “this doesn’t feel right” corner of my mind.

I will say that I like the idea of seasonal commitment. Nature doesn’t spring into action in January, but that doesn’t mean waiting to bloom is a passive thing. Far from it, the work that’s happening is slow and below. The roots of things, the soil, the dark places in the universe are in full swing of sluggish persistence. Not dying is most definitely an activity. What if, instead of making resolutions for the whole year, we just decided not to die for a few months? After all, what does not dying look like? Well, living of course. Living quietly, down in the soil. Burning up all the energy that you frantically gathered in the fall, surviving on the stored fat of yesteryear while pondering and preparing to open up in spring. Lets do the quiet things like reading, breathing into just one new stretch, discovering what a new root vegetable tastes like when you cook it with harissa or turmeric or brown sugar. Perhaps you dare to take a few weeks of that online course you keep thinking about. Perhaps saving a dollar in quarters, since they are going out of fashion and all things vintage are desirable. Can you pause and think how greatly one must dare to simply move slowly in a very fast world?

My new year started November 3rd, 2026, when I checked myself into a wellness center after having a week-long panic attack. The leaves in the north were crunching beneath my feet and the cold seeping into my bones, but when I landed it was as if time rewound itself; the world was warm as a day in May, the sun shining over the horizon like a happy toddler. Those first days were like roughing it in the woods; I could barely sleep, ate whatever edible things I could put in my hands, and trudged through the forest inside my skull looking for a way out into open spaces, into clarity. I was in ignorant denial, unable to fathom that there were truths I did not know which countered my convictions. I was engaged; I was alone. Now, my winter nights are breezy and chilled, and my days humid and unnaturally warm, and it feels to me like the Ides of March. I am no longer engaged; I am no longer alone. I have found myself in a clearing, only it is not as I expected. Small things move quickly between blades of grass, and the wildlife moves unseen between the foliage. The mountain is still far off, but the incline is noticeable. I have not arrived at basecamp but on a new plain, unexplored and beckoning. I did not die, but things in me have shifted violently. I have broken forth from the cocoon I spun myself into, and spring has brought only the start of work, not its end.

I am living in the middle, at the end wrapped in a beginning. Where are you living, my friend?

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So I ask you now, what might spring up in us if we cross this great wide open field together? Are you willing to go with me? I long for good company; there is much to do, so much to see and hear, taste and smell, touch with tenderness and optimistic hope, of which I would not say I’ve been a true proponent of until now. The fog lifts but settles again, with each dawn and twilight hour, even as the sun and moon trade places in the sky. We’ve no reason to fear these signs, these metaphors of our becoming. We winter and we spring, soon we summer and we fall. We do it all again, a thousand times over, in both big and little ways, ways so small they hide behind their repercussions. Daily we suffer the consequences of our choices, both for good and ill. Daily, we perform well adjusted and maladjusted rituals and rites, but do we look at them with any great thoughtfulness? Does this make us less worthy of the journey into the great unknown? Time and space will take us with or without our consent, but what great fun it might be to go willingly through these cycles, with eyes wide open instead of wide shut. We can live, if we gather now for ourselves the bread for this leg of the trip. Perhaps, these words will give some sustenance, perhaps a community of journeyman friends?

Then again, who can know. One thing rehab has taught me is, none of us can. We can only live and see.

Cheers to not dying my friends,

Love, Alie