Editor's Remarks

Donnchadh H CC




      I've been carrying a lot of anger in me these days. The kind of anger that makes you bawl your eyes out. Makes your skin itch, your hearth throb. I'm angry at myself, I know. But it all gets externalized. It's a lot easier to see it when you can throw it out like a net over the world. But it's just me. It's just us. That kind of thing, you know it too, I imagine. Like Goldilocks, nothing inside us feels just right. Some of us really were left to it on our own too early, too long. And now nothing feels enough, or right. I got this huge emptiness in me, this craving for what can't but destroy. And it's  really hard to locate the light when you're busy snake-handling the dark. 

       Telling someone else about it is the only cure I know. Saying it out loud, all pride to the back. Picking up the phone instead of this or that. Trying to live right where my feet are at. It's so damn hard and so damn easy at the same time. I could complicate how to boil water. But beneath all of that anger and discomfort is a lot of grief. I struggle, every day, with not wanting to die. Of all the gifts of recovery I hear talked about in the rooms, the only one I want is the ability to get through a single day not wanting to leave the world too soon. I was talking with another addict recently and they told me "I call suicide my 'Big Relapse'". That so hit home with me. I used in many ways to avoid the final using. Because without the aid of something else, there it all just is. And I am left to deal with what I was never really taught how to deal with. But I have tools. They've been rusting on the shelf. But they are there. So where is my willingness? Sometimes you only come to it on your knees. Utterly defeated. I've entered so few doors without banging my head upon them first. 

         I remember someone saying that creative people have a hard time titrating sensory inputs. We take everything in. And the world gets so loud that it makes sense that we would just want to turn. the. volume. down. sometimes. And so many of us do that self-destructively. How do you take so much in and find softer ways to navigate the gulch? Not all of us have meetings to go to, or friends to turn to, or a therapist we can afford. Sometimes all we have is pen and paper. Putting it down helps. Again and again. What happened then. What happens now. 

        What happens now?

      It's easy to disappear. To convince yourself that you don't matter. That it's all been for nothing. But you do matter, and it is all for something. It's not what we're given, but what we do with what we've been given. Turning pain into a song, or a poem, a photograph. Mapping out the moods that swell inside us like dark crashing waves and being able to look at all that, and then back at ourselves, and say, hmm, maybe I am long for the world. Even with all this hurt and rage, key and cage, I can be a person among people, and I can tender the tide. Just one more human along for the wild ride.

        The world don't stop for none of us. Pain is pain. What happened happened. There is a choice to make. Art tells us as much. Every creative act involves a choice. A beginning, a middle, and an end. What life takes, it gives. If we've ears for it. That kinda song. I know what happens when certain things are taken from us. When our innocence is stolen, our joy crushed underfoot, our wonder and awe taken up by fear and the expectancy of bad stuff always happening in place of good stuff.

          I also don't know anything really. I know I'm human. I know I'm imperfect. I know I have a shot at this thing called life if I keep on doing the work. If I keep on sitting with the grief that rides just beneath the tides of anger and tend to it like a garden. 

         I'm a curious bastard, like Steve Earle Says. I wanna know why I'm still here after all that. I want to make it mean something. My life. This song. And I want to share it with others. I can't change what happened to me. But I can change what happens next. And knowing I'm not alone, (we're not alone) something works through something to reach us in our most unreachable places. I guess they call it grace. I just call it holding on. To the pen and the paper. To the hands of fellow travelers. Walking the road because the road keeps on going and so must we all. Until the very end. Don't make it come too soon. There's room enough for you in the world. It won't be easy. So write that story a little bit harder if you have to. You have to. 

           Until next time, friends. Buckle up, hold on.

James Diaz
Editor-in-chief
Anti-Heroin Chic


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