Beyond the Burn (The Drinking Years)

It’s a threat trying to regain your grace as a woman who has fallen so many times. I started to fall as a girl and kept going down until I brought my head back up to breathe at the age of twenty-four. I didn’t learn until I started to live again what grace meant. How it was integral to the type of womanhood I’d always loved but never felt I possessed. I was without bearings, without any focus beyond the nightly rage. Beyond the bodies pressed. Beyond the burn and the grind and the spit. Fueled by lust, not only of the body, my thoughts rarely turned inward during the medicated bliss. Bliss, its something I always associated with being wasted. A sort of thoughtless joy, of pure detachment, free of all introspection. My mind, it pushes itself inward far too often. I am given to bouts of obsessiveness that are hard to tangle with. They are tangles themselves.

It’s shocking to me when I hear that people have noticed a change in me. They seem to have noticed it more than I have. Maybe its because I haven’t changed as much as they think, I’m just showing the insides more and they are more appealing to others than I thought they could ever be. All the hidden faces, faces I thought were all darkness and sadness, are not dark and sad at all. But quiet, reserved, scared perhaps, but vulnerability like grace have their places in womanhood. One never has their bearings if they don’t understand their vulnerability. No one is invulnerable, for someone to be such I would think them a monster. Happiness comes from understanding your vulnerabilities and seeing them as strengths.