Mary Karr

Day 28 of no men. I'm sitting here at a local Laundromat reading Mary Karr's The Liar's Club, recommended to me by a former writing professor of mine who's blog I'm following to see whether or not he's going to survive this bout of cancer. (We all know he will, again...but I'm on pins and needles, damnit.) His blog inspired me to start one. I'd all ready been instructed by the guy who wrote a popular sex and love addiction recovery book to make an "inventory" describing every relationship I've ever been in so I could see how the hell I made such a mess of my life. Now that I'm reading about a guy going through what sounds like living hell in a fight just to stay alive, the "hell" I thought I'd been living in doesn't seem so bad. Not that I'd want to go back there -- actually, the whole point of writing, for me, is so that I don't keep fucking men I don't even know and figure out why the hell I've been doing that for the past two years in the first place.

Of course, it was suggested I write about all my relationships: friends, family, co-workers, etc. It's a monumental task, so I'm just doing pieces at a time and letting myself write freely whatever comes to mind (and then edit like a maniac when it goes from my paper notebook to this notebook).

In Mary's "Introduction" she describes the power of narrative as cathartic and healing -- but even more than that, for me, it changes my very life in the present, every day. I'm not sucking some guy's dick in a church parking lot right now. (I couldn't have said that two months ago.) This weekend I read to my four year-old son the dinosaur book I bought him for his birthday in August, for the first time. (It's mid-November.) I haven't written much about my mom yet -- that post is drafted and will probably get published after maybe a good 'nother eight hours of editing -- but I when I was pushing my son on the swings this weekend, and my arms were getting tired, I realized that I actually have no memories of my mom ever taking me to a park. So I kept pushing him. Later, I called her, just to tell her that I love her.

I freak out every time I post because somehow I expect to tell the whole story, right then and there. I have to get over that. I guess I just want these secrets to stop making me so sick. I want to throw 'em up and run like hell.

"Run like hell!" That was my best friend Shawna's motto when I was 12. She was 15. She and I did all kinds of crazy things. Once we broke into a vacant apartment and peed on the kitchen floor, just for the hell of it. I thought of her while reading The Liar's Club's page XIV about a fan of Mary's who, as a girl, "got adept (as [Mary] had) at worming her way into other people's houses." I don't think that's what she meant, but still.

This is how you recover in a 12-step program: you go to meetings where people tell you what they were like, what happened, and what they're like now. If you want what they have (sobriety, happiness, freedom) and are willing to go to any length to get it -- then you buckle up for the ride of your life, hold on tight, and don't let go.

Step 5 is, "We admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs." Then we let it all go, and carry our message of experience, strength and hope with others so that they may recover also.

The real reason I needed to sit and read and write right here and now at the Laundromat is because there's still a part of me that wants to go to that church where that guy will be tonight (#21: The Black Jack Dealer). But there's a better part of me that wants that part of me to die.

St. Francis of Assisi said it best: "It is by dying that one awakens to eternal life."

Amen.

"Talk about it, the old wisdom says, and you get better. From narratives about childhood, [we manufacture] a self, neither cut off from [our] past nor mired in it" (Karr, XIV).

So -- let's face the music, and dance.