I Am Still Here
I am not writing this because I am proud of it.
I am writing it because I know some of you are in that room right now. The quiet one. The one where it is late and the bottle is open and you are the only person in the world who knows you are there.
I was capable of drinking a bottle of vodka alone on nights when nobody gave a fuck if I was alive.
I want you to sit with that sentence for a moment. Not because it is dramatic. Because it is the most honest thing I have written and I spent a long time pretending it was not true.
Here is what that room actually looks like.
It does not look like the rock bottom you see in films. There is no dramatic scene. No intervention. No concerned faces gathering around you. There is just you, and the silence, and the specific particular loneliness of being a person who has always been too capable for anyone to think to check on.
I was good at my job. I showed up. I performed. I was the kind of person people called when they needed something sorted. Strong. Reliable. Fine.
Nobody asks if fine people are actually fine. That is the whole trap.
Behind the fine I was depressed in a way I did not have words for yet. I was grieving things I had not named. I was lonelier than I had ever been in a life that looked, from the outside, completely normal. And at night when all the performing was done I sat alone and drank and the drinking was the only thing that made the silence feel less like something was wrong with me.
I want to be careful here because I know who reads this.
If you are in that room tonight I am not going to tell you it gets better in a way that feels like a poster on a wall. I am going to tell you something more specific.
The version of me sitting in that room could not have imagined the version of me writing this. Not because everything got fixed. Not because life became easy or the loneliness disappeared overnight. But because something shifted. Slowly. Almost without my permission.
Thailand happened. Dancing happened. Two cats arrived and decided my lap was theirs. I started writing things down and then started showing them to strangers and the strangers said me too and that changed something in my chest that I cannot fully explain.
The room is not forever. Even when it feels like it is.
I stopped drinking on June 13. Not because I decided to. Because somewhere between the sea and the silence in Thailand my body just said no. Quietly and completely. The want was gone and I did not chase it back.
I do not tell this story as a sobriety success narrative. I tell it as a survival one. Because the real story is not June 13. The real story is every night before it when I chose to still be here even when being here felt like the harder option.
You are still here.
That is not nothing. That is not ordinary. That is the whole thing.
If you are in that room tonight I need you to know one thing.
The room lies. It tells you nobody would notice. It tells you this is just who you are. It tells you that the fine performance is the real version and the person sitting alone at midnight with a bottle is the truth.
It has it backwards.
The person sitting alone at midnight is the one who survived everything the world threw at her and kept going anyway. The fine performance was the costume. This, right here, raw and honest and still breathing, is the real one.
Stay. Please stay.
rise · believe · fly 🪶
From the Ashes She is for the woman in the middle of it. Not after. If this found you tonight, you are exactly where you are supposed to be. You are not alone.
fromtheashesshe.com