“Rock bottom is where you stop digging.”
I wish people were encouraged to hit rock bottom. Rock bottom doesn’t kill you. Refusing to hit it does.
I found the most beautiful hue of gratitude at rock bottom. The truest shade of gratitude that did not need anything in return. It gave and it gave and it gives.
Gratitude is now. It supersedes circumstance. It waits not for a commonly-deemed-positive opportunity or what we perceive we lack to be granted us. It admits what is now and positions the self and the heart to receive the wholeness of now. This is true even when the wholeness of now is an opportunity to integrate an old emotion and feels as though life shows no grace. Gratitude does not wait for “positive” emotion. It needs not the sky to be blue. It is as the flowers bend towards the sun. Conscious, effortless.
I’m 3 weeks into a journey of no caffeine (tapered off) after drinking it nearly every morning since adolescence. For me, caffeine is a way to force a societally-appropriate mode of being and I was sorely dependent on it to be conversational, able to think fast, energized, [fickly] motivated. Little was my awareness of how it also perpetuated a great hurriedness within me, attention deficit, a clinging to narrative, hormonal imbalances, sleep troubles and more I have yet to discover. I’ve also quit drinking alcohol, which really had no benefit to me anymore beyond the pleasurable headiness of the first sip of wine of an evening. Every time I drank I felt further away from myself. Most of the time that was the point. Someone recently asked me how long I plan on abstaining from both. Truth is, I wouldn’t judge my own relapse, but I don’t see a return. Why?
In the momentarily-tireder, clearer radio signal of near-sobriety I am remembering that I am not separate from the experience I want to have. I am not separate from the human I dream of being. From love. Love is the very breath of my body.
My personal rock bottom wasn’t my angriest time, nor my loneliest. It wasn’t my brokest, my least-sober, my most creatively void, my most promiscuous or transactional. While I have ritualistically revisited all of these hells like a fiberglass horse on a carousel, rock bottom was when I stopped needing to. It was a pigheaded summertime depression within which one morning I woke up and decided… this sickness is over.
I need not conjure from darkness the sun. I need not conjure from darkness the sun within me. I needn’t manipulate time or dissect myself into shreds, or build myself up larger than life. All there is to do is allow what is to be: allow love to be. And believe it. Be mystified, be in awe of what wealth of truth flows from letting go.
If everyone were encouraged to hit rock bottom, they would probably also be encouraged to ask “who am I?” and truly listen for the answer. If everyone were to see who they are, they’d fall in love. They’d live in love the way they long to find with another person, in their career, in the world. And life is big enough to support that being the case for every single one of us.