Editor's Remarks

Derek Σωκράτη CC


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           "Wherever there's a lighthouse, there's a light that saves
             It goes without saying, but say it anyway" - Mary Chapin Carpenter


       It feels good to be back in this place. Shared, common ground. Sometimes you gotta take a temporary detour to return home to yourself. That's my story. Maybe it's yours, too.  This is what I know, we can be awfully cruel to ourselves, and it can feel sickly safe to wield that weapon turned inward. As write this, I celebrate six months in recovery. My heart is a wailer. Heavy. Pumping blood. Live, it says, just a little bit harder if you have to. Because you have to. Hope may be elusive, and ever on the move, but I'm staying on its trail. 

All my life all I wanted was to be whole. Not broken, not ill-fitting in this body I carry around like a bag of ancestral trauma-stones, not shell shocked from a childhood war I was drafted into straight outta the womb, not... me. But I am me. And there is no whole. I sorta feel the way Jon Dee Graham feels about it: "not beautifully broken, just broken, that's all." But that's not all. There's beauty in the break, but it don't sit pretty in us. It can be hard to locate some days. But there are days. Hours. Minutes. I reckon one reason we create is to try and put our feelers on it. That fracture of light pouring in through the crack in us. It's daunting: to not be whole but to work with the pieces we've been given. And to make those pieces shine.

I remember this moment in rehab, a life time ago, when I first made contact with the inner child in me. It took the form of a crumpled teddy bear on the floor. We had been asked to pick stuffed animals out of a closet to represent our inner child. For weeks I refused to indulge what I determined was hippy nonsense. So every day, when I got to group, I would just sorta toss my floppy eared bear to the ground beside my chair. I don't know what it was, how it happened, but one day I looked down and saw that bear laid out on the floor by the wall and I saw... little-me, a kid convinced they might actually die at the hands of their own parents. And not an entirely unfounded fear at that.

​I thought, goddamn, they look so scared and all alone in the world. When I say I wept, I wept. No, I wailed. "Why don't you pick them up," one of the counselors asked. My hands were shaking, my chest heaving. I didn't quite have the language for it yet, but I was being asked in that moment to be a parent to myself. I'm telling you this because that's the pain we try to remove in ways that only add more pain. That's what addiction is. The why and how of it. Life asks us to pick the thing up. Look it in the eye. Take better care than was taken with us. 

"Fight when you need to fight, but don't turn the weapon on yourself," someone once told me. I am so good at self harm, but self love, it's a muscle I must fight to work every single day. Most of us didn't get exactly what we needed. And there's some truth to "not beautifully broken, just broken." It's painful to have lived through what we've lived through. What was done to us. It was so unfair. We didn't stand a fighting chance. But maybe we do now. That's the rub. We were given bad information about ourselves, and the world. There's a lot to learn and unlearn. Terrible things happen, but grace-points do silver through like ineffable moments of unnameable beauty. I can name a moment. Once I saw a parent on a train console their angry child by asking them "what are you feeling right now, kiddo? It's ok, whatever it is, just let's talk about it." Just let's talk about it. Damn. Ok. That's it. What most of us needed was to just be able to talk about it. Our insides. The burning. 

And that's what we're doing here. Giving the shame we've for so long carried a proper measure compared to the deserving of self, and other-love that we are each worthy of. Pain doesn't go away, it just takes a more realistic seat at the table. There are others. Joy. Laughter. Innocence. Anger. Beauty. Fear. Hope. Comfort. Prayer. Doubt. Frustration. Agony. Bliss. 

"When I was a little boy," writes Michael Eigen, "I remember seeing a tree. Half of it was withered and dead and the other half was blooming. Then I realized that one could be dead and very much alive, concurrently. We are not monolithic, and can experience vitality and life on certain levels and on others total deadness." 

"Sometimes we hide ourselves to survive." he continues. "To make pain go away we simply make ourselves go away." And to make life return we must find a way back home to ourselves. The long way home. Partnering with the pain, we try our hand at a different story. It's something, ain't it, that we can die and come back more alive.

Addiction, self-escape, is an attempt to freeze time and pain, but time is pain and pain is the deal. What can we do with it that helps lessen the blows of life? This is it right here, a tiny part of what we can do. Art consoles, at least to me it does, the voiceless, alone, terrified parts of ourselves. It's a window we open onto the world, and the world is what we have. And each other. Heart speaking to heart. Take up my hand. This is rough country. Rough road. Even so.

There might be snow heavy on the tundra of our lives, but there's also a fierce heat in our hearts. Love is a muscle, pain the road we travel to break out into a thousand points of light. If it were easier it wouldn't come out singing. And shining. 

Until we meet again, friends. Tend to the fire in you that lives on, even if only as a smoldering ember that the slightest breath can reignite. Fight. Just not yourself. I am learning it is worth it. I am. You are. 

In love, service, and solidarity,
James Diaz, EIC
Anti-Heroin Chic


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