Rock Bottom’s Secret Trap Door
After I left my boyfriend of twelve years, my friend Moss took me to the park and got me stoned.
On a number of counts, this wasn’t the wisest idea. The house I’d just moved into turned out to be infested with fleas and, determining that my sanity and health were more important than guaranteed shelter, I was now in the process of turning around and moving right back out. I had packing to do and next steps to plan. The partner I’d just left had been a source of emotional and material stability and, less than 2 weeks after flying in the face of all that “safety” poppycock, it was starting to sink in just how much I was actually giving up. Shock and adrenaline were slowly and inevitably giving way grief and uncertainty. Though it had doubtless been the right move, at this moment I was the most ungrounded, the most lacking, and the most afraid I’ve ever been.
I’d gone to visit Moss for a hug and a chat, after which we were both going to head to aikido, a martial art we’d been practicing together for a couple of years. Instead, when my young friend invited the detour, I was quick to accept. I was at rock bottom, I figured, so why not spend one last evening settling in there?
I hadn’t smoked weed in years, largely because whenever I did I’d become cripplingly paranoid. On this particular day I was either too naïve, too hopeful or too numb to care what might happen this time.
After two puffs on a joint that it took 30 minutes to procure and another 20 to light, I found myself sitting on the grass in the middle of a giant nature reserve at the marina at dusk, shivering in the wind blowing off the bay, watching the sky darken as the people around us turned, in my mind, from late-day park-goers to potential muggers. I suddenly and inconveniently realized that all I had left in the world was on my person, and if it got taken away … the thought was too scary to think all the way through.
Suddenly rock bottom wasn’t looking so cozy.
I requested that we get up and walk, briskly, back to the car. We got in and, once my icy blood began to thaw, I realized there was no way I could drive in this state (I also started to wonder what exactly we’d smoked). Even if Moss was in better shape to drive there was no way I was going to risk it. So there we sat, for … ten minutes? Thirty? Forty? Ninety? Tracking time was an impossibility — as was doing anything other than staring at the blinking red light on a buoy out in the harbor, listening to Moss talk about building a computer with his dad, and fretting.
Oh, did I fret. Among the myriad fears raining down on my head like so many locusts were the perceived consequences of having skipped aikido. The community I practiced with comprised my remaining friends in the world (untrue; but a stoned and grieving mind will come up with some weird shit). My over-suspicious synapses lined themselves up like military ranks spanning the cause of skipping practice (not at all unusual) and the perceived effect of my friends taking it personally and abandoning me.
After an hour (two hours? 15 minutes?) I began to feel in touch with my extremities enough to pilot the hatchback the three miles back to Moss’s house and the remaining two it would take to get to mine. Suspiciously slowly, we rolled through the back streets of north Berkeley until I’d deposited Moss and was back in my little yellow room on the second floor amid the half-packed plastic crates and garbage bags and hopping fleas.
Relative functionality restored, and minus the distractions of Moss and the pressing need to stay conscious, I was left with little to do but contemplate what lay ahead for me in the coming days and weeks. I had no idea. I knew that around me was chaos. I was being attacked by vermin, my legs bitten and scratched to shreds (my nervous system in a not dissimilar state), and in two days’ time would be homeless by my own choosing. More than anything I needed friends and still harbored the paranoid fear that my choice to play hooky and do drugs would sever that the remaining tenuous connections in my life. Two weeks out of my relationship I was deep in the throes of second-guessing my choice to leave: the most gut- and heart-based choice I’d ever made.
In this moment, it was all wrong. I’d led myself down a dead-end path in the woods and it was getting dark.
I couldn’t think of a damn thing to do but follow the fear. Feel it; let it do its worst. Turns out that rock bottom had a trap door and I fell through it, into the shapeless jaws of true horror. I had nothing to fight it with. No hope — even false hope — to buoy me. I’d given up almost everything and was on the verge of losing the rest of it. I let myself, for whatever reason, feel the prospect of being all alone in the world. I allowed myself to be dragged into the basement of my being, cobwebby and pitch black, crevices weakly doored by rotting planks, a demon behind every one. Like in the Blair Witch Project, when the sniffly girl says she’s too scared to close her eyes and too scared to keep them open. This is what I felt. Endangered, abandoned, trapped, threatened, chilled to the core. Like something worse than death awaited me.
Down and down I kept sinking, sobs threatening to choke me. The fear sat next to me, curled up in my lap, wrapped its ghoulish arms around my neck, and sunk onto me with its full weight. I heard myself whimpering, asking for help, begging whomever it was to stop torturing me, for someone to come save me. I was locked in a moldy cellar somewhere in my psyche, long abandoned with creepy discarded toys strewn about. Every morsel of fear I’d been amassing since birth, since before birth, joined me in that underground place, parading before and around and through me, making sure I saw them, that I felt them.
I was sitting doubled over on my low bed, clutching my gut and rocking back and forth, the remaining shred of my lucidity grateful for no witnesses because this was certainly one of those “call the nice people in white coats” moments, or at least a “drag her into the bathtub and turn on the cold water” situations. I’d let myself go mad. Partly on purpose but mostly not, I had opened the door for the demons and in they came, knocking me to the ground and trashing the house of my being. I had surrendered.
As quickly as it came on, it was over. Like a summer thunderstorm in the little New England town of my childhood, after the the black clouds had sicked their needley sheets of rain and hail down onto the planet, there’d be a beat of silence and then the birds would start trilling again. The roads would begin to steam with evaporating precipitation and, almost disappointingly soon, we were safe to crawl out of whatever shelter we’d waited defiantly until the last moment to seek and resume our summer. That’s what it felt like. My breathing became even, the horrible basement room blurred and vaporized, and I felt … clear. Not in the sense of knowing what the next days would bring — I still had no idea — but the imminent danger was gone, I knew, for good.
Would this episode have even occurred without the “help” of the herbs? Who knows. But this particular set of circumstances set into motion a perfect storm that led me to do what I needed, which was, to the casual observer, go bat-shit crazy. My outer and inner reserves completely depleted, there was nothing to do but let this terrifying whirligig of dread find its way into and then out of me. To my shock and — if not delight, at least relief — it did not tear me apart. I stayed intact, and after the tempest I could see further out into the horizon than I could before — clear space, many roads, way more possibility than I could perceive when I was busy fighting being afraid.
Why am I telling this story? God knows it’s not a “do what I did and everything will be okay” tale. Hopefully we all know by now that there isn’t such a thing. I’d become furiously fed up with the frantic stampede for inspiration that’s out there — Huffington Post lists and Ted talks and Facebook memes instructing us on happiness and positivity and gratitude and peace — the only mention of darkness being its defeat. Sick of it all, yes, but unsure of an alternative. And that’s when this scenario came to mind. It wasn’t the greatest, most illuminating moment of my life but it was one of the most real and I do believe it did led to some movement. When I couldn’t keep a brave face on any longer, or do the right thing, or hold it together, or keep myself from feeling lonely, or touch anything that felt like It Would Be Okay Eventually, I had to get pulled back in the other direction by icy hands and spend some time there. Surprisingly little time.
I did move out of the wrong place a couple of days later and couch surfed for awhile. Just kidding. That would have been the brave thing to do and I don’t wish for anyone reading this to be under the misapprehension that courage took me through any of these uncertain moments. No. I went crawling back to my ex’s house where I was storing my garbage bags and prevailed upon the generosity that was now understandably wearing threadbare. I stayed in the guestroom for a blurry, excruciating week before finding the place that WOULD be my refuge for the next eighteen months. I cried incessantly for weeks. I learned to live alone, be alone, be lonely. There were other moments of sliding down the wall to the floor, crushed by tears of heartbreak, and then rising like vapor off hot pavement to make some toast or brush my teeth. Everything kept showing me that I did the right thing. I may have even uttered a delusional “everything’s just fine” once or twice. I wrote about blackness and regret, wafted dizzily through days until, more and more, I could feel the ground coming up to meet my feet and circumstances seemingly conspiring to keep me not only afloat, but upright.
So I don’t know, could it be that moments like the one in the yellow flea room — the ones that are so terrifying that we can’t bear to think about, never mind live them — are the ones we need to lean into? Let the feelings rend us apart and have their way with us until they’re done? Maybe that’s the only way to not loop back in on ourselves; making ourselves actually insane with cycles of hope and disappointment; safety and danger; steadiness and instability; sickness and health; [insert your own maddening polarity]. At the risk of tacking a moral on to this tale I don’t know why I’m telling (because I don’t know how else to close it out), perhaps it’s when we’re wiling to LET GO and sit in the blackness for a bit — let it crumple us like a restaurant receipt or spin us like a dervish or send us sprinting down the middle of the road at midnight — are the times that we’re actually bushwacking out of the forests of our bewilderment.
I suppose there is a risk inherent in letting ourselves go: we can’t know that we’ll be let back out of the basement, brought back from the brink, resume what we previously understood to be sanity and okayness. I know that, in that moment of gut-wrenching horror, my preference to be there or not was moot because something much bigger was happening: I was opening up a new compartment in my soul that was necessary to make me a truly different person … one I couldn’t fight being anymore.
So maybe saying “fuck it” and getting stoned with Moss WAS the wisest idea. Strangely, perhaps masochistically, but by no means uncertainly, I thank my intuition for prying my fingers off the banister and so I could feel what it was like to be a crumpled heap at the bottom of the stairs. I didn’t stay broken forever.
Note from the future (2021): I found this 2014 essay whole and complete and buried in the archives, and am birthing it belatedly into the world. The ol’ ViewMaster of retrospect shows that I was—and remain — another white lady floating between pristine white and slightly grayer clouds of privilege. Some of the ways I describe feeling unhinged smack of ableism. We learn and we learn, we regret and we grow. And pain is pain, so I offer this humbly to whomever it might help.
