The Last Birthday I Lost To Cocaine

Content Warning: This reflection includes difficult themes: death, addiction, suicide, and trauma.

It is also a message of hope, healing, and human connection.

​Please trust yourself and your own limits as you decide whether and when to read.

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10 years ago today, I wrote a reflection piece about the last birthday I lost to cocaine.  

I was six months from entering rehab for the last time. 

Six months from learning in rehab that I was pregnant. 

Six months from turning the page on what would be the next 20 years of my life, the past 20 years of my life. 

Ten years ago, I paused to write about the last birthday that I lost because a decade seemed like a tremendous, milestone-amount of time to be living my new life, and yet, I still felt frozen somewhere between the “surviving-to-thriving spectrum” I kept hearing about. 

Was I thriving? 
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My marriage had mostly just begun, but was already ending.

In some ways, I was in a healthier body than even today, but the weight of chronic illness was staring me down constantly. 

I had two master's degrees that I didn’t know would come with a sidecar of imposter syndrome. 

Was I thriving? 

This birthday, with another 10 years under my belt, I actually feel less intrigued by that question today, and more aware of how much pressure it puts on a person to be somewhere they're not. 

If I add the last 10 years into the count, I can say that in two drug-free decades there were days of surviving, and days of blissful, bursting-at-the-seams thriving, and a lot of the mundane in-between. 

I feel certain now that on my deathbed, what I'll crave and cherish the most are those mundane in-between moments, by the way. The irony. ​

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Less intrigued now by the question of whether or not I'm thriving, more and more I'm able to ask the question of how I can serve, and how my gifts, my life force, want to live through me to help others feel even the slightest bit better being in this broken, beautiful world. 

I find my way into answering this question each week meeting with clients, in the neighborhood building connections and community, in my home caring for my partner and our children. 

And I find it doing my daily psychospiritual wellness practice of reflection and discovery, constantly releasing and rebuilding my constructs around what it means to be a human, what it means to be here.

Time spent reflecting on 20 years free from hard drugs, alongside the 10 years of using them before that, was my practice of psychospiritual wellness this very morning: journaling, breathing, crying, sharing with my partner, gazing across a beautiful, green landscape before the world was awake. 

And the insight I've taken away from this morning’s practice, added to my collection of answers about how I can be of service, is this:

It’s time to talk freely, with compassion and empathy, about the moments that a great many of us will encounter in our lifetimes of *not wanting to be here*.

The confusing, painful, I-don't-know-what-to-do-with-you feelings of “I don't really want to be here anymore.” 

Not like this…not in this body…not in this house, this family, this town…not in this pain, this thought looping, this addiction, this PTSD…not in this mundane day-to-day that I don't know how to cherish the gift of…so if there is an escape hatch, I want to pull it now.
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Dear readers, dear listeners, if it frightens you, or triggers you, or hurts your heart to think of such a thing, please take a break and read the rest some other time, or maybe not at all. 

I'm with you, and your limits. 

If, however, you resonate with that complicated, confusing feeling of “I don't want to actively end my life right this moment, but I just don't think I have it in me to be a good steward of my life force anymore”.... then let's stay to think about this just a little bit longer, together. ​
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circa 2006

​Because my conversations with clients and loved ones and my own complicated heart tells me that it's more common than we talk about to encounter moments over our long lifespans where we're just not sure what this is all for, or how to be with it when it's so raw and messy and painful and awful at times, and it’s good to talk about things that are more common than we realize because they’ve been living in the shadows instead of the light. 

That feeling started for me when I was 12, the same age that my beautiful son is this year; the boy who I can see so clearly is still just a child. Through him I can look back and recognize that 30 years ago, I was just a baby. But nevertheless a baby drawing up the blueprints of her first suicide plan.

The impulse that lives in the shadows of our collective consciousness had reached me, and I no longer wanted to be here. 

Everything was too painful, and the tools were not at my disposal to transmute the ache.

I wanted to leave. 

Yet rather than carry out this messy and decisive plan, I got high for the first time.

At age 12.

And more and more high throughout the next year at age 13.

And more and more high the next year at age 14, until I had experimented with most hard drugs and experienced a slew of unfortunate arrests and hospitalizations and teen pregnancy and a failed year of high school by the time I was 15. 

And on and on it went like this through the last birthday that I lost to cocaine at age 22, marking the timeline of my life with a decade of not really wanting to be here, but not truly being ready to leave, suspended in the liminal space between, without a clear way to reconcile the confusing and painful place we find ourselves in when we don't fully know how to be good stewards of our "one wild and precious life," nor are we actually sure that we want to. 

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I'm imagining some of you reading or listening who are not able to fully relate to these depths of despair that live in the collective, and I'm celebrating you.

I'm imagining that you have contact with capacities that create a societal scaffolding around the rest of us who need time to catch up to where you somehow started, or at the very least a fighting chance of trying to stay in the race you’re leading.

I’m celebrating that you don’t know this impulse and I genuinely wish it never finds you. 

For the rest of us who truly can relate, who feel the contact with those inner parts that sometimes wish we could make it all go away, I just want you to know I'm writing this reflection piece today to say I'm with you. I see you. 

This is my personal practice and my service. 

From the very farthest extremes of wanting and choosing to leave, to the more subtle micro-moments of drinking too much, or eating too much, or sleeping too much, isolating, or staring at the screen instead of flowering your gifts, checking out in any myriad number of ways that feel so deeply soothing to the parts of you that just don't want to wrestle anymore with how hard it is to be here… I see all of you. 

I don't have a course to sell you, or client session hours to bill you about it. 

I'm just writing to you because my psychospiritual wellness practice for today was to make contact with the part of me who spent 10 years wanting to leave, and in that practice I realized how important it is to fully witness and welcome that version of me that exists in so many of us. ​

circa 2006

​But also to share with you that what followed was a subsequent set of 20 years slowly reclaiming my love for this life. 

Even when life often looked like survival mode, peppered with pockets of time where I was thriving, and, more than anything, amounted to a whole lot of the boring-yet-cherishable mundane. 

From the contact made during this morning’s practice, I’m reminded that I can now tell you without a shadow of a doubt that I want to be here. 

I marvel at the chance for a second chapter after years of losing so many loved ones to suicides and overdoses, family and best friends and boyfriends. I bear witness to the painful reality that not everyone who wants to leave gets enough time to make contact with the parts of them that want to stay.

It will forever be one of the greatest mysteries of my life how I fell into one camp and not the other. 

But here I am now, a complex constellation of parts that want to be here, and the still occasionally emerging parts that don't. And if you recognize yourself in that description, please know that the more I've talked about this over the years, the more clear I am that the collective is filled with those of us who learn to balance and integrate those conflicting parts, sometimes over the course of many years.

If we can just make it through today and into the mystery of tomorrow, perhaps we find ourselves looking back on 20 years worth of tomorrows. And realizing that somewhere along the way, the parts that wanted to be here developed more skills and more scaffolding and learned to see more creative possibility than the parts that wanted to leave. 

20 years later, I'm celebrating my birthday today with so much tenderness and forgiveness for the decade I spent actively trying to take myself out of this reality, arms open wide to a form of healing afforded to me now as this level of self-forgiveness and empathy truly sinks in.

More of me is welcome in the room today, even the parts full of pain and difficult memories and missed opportunities, trusted to be here, out of the shadows, and with the rest of me. 

Even if some days they wish they could sleep this strange reality off like a bad dream, they still get to be here, fully witnessed in the light, all nestled up next to the other complex parts of me: the ones figuring things out, the ones still building new architecture for joy, the ones paying grown-up bills, the ones journaling in the early morning while the world sleeps. 

Out of the shadows, hopefully all of us can spend many more years together, looking around wide-eyed and musing:

“Wow… sometimes it really feels like grinding through existence is purely survival...

and other days I catch myself in awe at some newfound manifestation of my own self-defined thriving...

but most of the time, it’s just another simple, boring, mundane day, and God do I fucking love it here!

I hope I get to stay a while longer. 

I hope you do, too."
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** ​You can read the original reflection piece marking the first decade of this story here.

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