Page 22 of All the Way to the River

And I must also remember the heartbreaking rules of Earth School.

The reality is that, at any given time in a human life, we cannot see beyond what we understand to be true right then .

We are only ever working with the level of wisdom that we have acquired up till that moment.

We cannot access tomorrow’s wisdom today, much less yesterday.

And when wisdom finally does arrive, it often enters our minds through the pain of lived experience.

If you haven’t lived the experience yet, then you don’t get the wisdom.

That’s how Earth School works, and you can’t skip any grades in Earth School.

So let me be humble and merciful here, when I say that today—nearly ten years later—I know so much more about addiction than I did back then.

I certainly don’t know everything , but I’ve learned a lot.

And I gained that wisdom through my painful lived experience of Rayya’s relapse, as well as through my own continuing recovery from sex and love addiction.

Perhaps most educational and devastating of all, I have access now to Rayya’s journals, which she left for me after she died, and which she encouraged me to use as research for the book that she wanted me to someday write about her.

In those journals, Rayya reveals the true story of what was happening during those years.

She was both drinking and suffering to an extent that I didn’t see at the time—because she didn’t let me see it.

She didn’t let anyone see it. Not even me, her “all the way to the river” friend.

And she certainly didn’t let anyone in her recovery community know the true extent of her pain.

“I most certainly am an addict,” she writes in 2008. “Am I drinking? Is it drinking to have the bitters? Is it? I’m not sure I would consider it as a relapse. Am I abusing it? Am I ruining my sobriety? No. I have no intention of fucking up a good and slow and long and beautiful sobriety.”

Those words were written several years before the bottles of bitters started appearing in public—and long, long before Rayya started pretending that she didn’t know they contained alcohol.

But apparently she had already recognized the situation as a potential problem for her.

A problem she had decided to keep to herself.

“Could my mind be playing tricks on me?” Rayya asks herself again about her drinking, in a journal entry a few months later. “Could I be in denial about my own disease?”

She promises herself in that same journal entry that she will go to a meeting later in the day and share about it, but I don’t know whether she did or not.

What she did do that year—a lot, apparently—was hole up in the church for days at a time and numb out her feelings with food, alcohol, and television: “Watch TV, eat, and sleep. Is that laziness or is it depression? I’m not an expert, but one thing I know is that I’ve lost my zest for life. ”

By 2010, she is more emphatic about her problem.

“STOP DRINKING!!!” she writes as her final and most commanding New Year’s resolution that year.

But she doesn’t stop drinking, and she still doesn’t tell anyone about it.

Later that year, in defeat: “I’m a fuck-up and I’m crazy.”

“Wine, wine, wine,” she writes in 2011. “Is it so bad? Is it like heroin? I don’t think so, but I’m consumed with it lately for some reason.”

Consumed with wine? This was a full two years before she sat me down to say that her loved ones in Detroit had just staged a “reverse intervention” for her, inviting her to sample one tiny little glass of the stuff.

By 2012—around the time that I am deifying Rayya as the person who has the answer to my every problem, and whose presence magically erases all my pain and fear—she is writing: “Why is it that I suffer? I’m afraid of myself, of my thoughts.

When I wake up, I’m afraid of the day. I’m afraid to feel, because I associate that with pain.

Fear that I can’t take care of myself. Fear of not being loved.

That I don’t know things, anything. So I’ll put my armor on.

I don’t let anyone in, and I go out there in the asphalt jungle and I become everything I’m afraid of. I become MIGHTY.”

I need to address something painful here, before we go on—just to get it off my conscience.

There have been times in the years since Rayya died when I have blamed myself for what happened to her—for her gradual slide, and then eventual collapse, back into active addiction.

After all, look what I did!

I lured her out of New York City, taking her away from the recovery community that had been her spiritual family for years.

Then I set her up in an old church in the middle of nowhere, leaving her alone with nothing but her own thoughts to keep her company—always a dangerous scenario for an addict.

I gave her an assignment of writing a book that she wasn’t sure she could write, thereby kicking up all her deepest insecurities and fears.

I threw her into a lifestyle where alcohol was at the center of every glamorous gathering.

I reinforced her ego’s most grandiose stories about itself, basically treating her like she was the highest power in the universe and completely buying into her “mighty” self-mythologizing.

And worst of all, I went years without expressing my honest feelings for her—which probably created a dust cloud of confusion and mixed signals and bewilderment within her mind about what, indeed, was true about our relationship.

No wonder she drank , I sometimes tell myself.

But I must be careful of that line of thinking, too—because guilt is one of my ego’s favorite methods of taking me down, and if I fall deeply enough into shame, I will end up relapsing myself, just to relieve the pain of it.

The terrorist who lives within my mind constantly tells me that I am to blame for any pain that anyone associated with me has ever experienced—and that’s bananas thinking, but it’s where my mind always goes.

My codependency gives me outlandish ideas about how responsible I am for others, and my anxiety distorts my perception of reality—convincing me that I can control people and keep them safe, if only I try hard enough.

But I cannot control anyone.

Nor can I keep people safe from their own choices.

Adults get to do whatever they decide to do—even to the point of their own self-destruction or death. And as my sponsor always reminds me when I am about to overstep into someone else’s territory: “God didn’t bring anyone into your life for you to control them.”

Because I can’t control them.

I have enough trouble controlling myself .

And because I cannot control myself, I have made mistakes.

Big mistakes. I have used people and attempted to manipulate them in ways that are far from ethical.

And I certainly used and manipulated Rayya, trying to extract from her a sense of safety and courage that I could not muster in myself.

But I also must remind myself daily—sometimes several times a day—that I am not responsible for anyone else’s addictions, because I don’t possess that kind of authority.

I can neither make someone use nor (as life has taught me again and again) stop them from using.

And never in history was anybody able to stop Rayya Elias from doing something she was bound and determined to do. Her will was a runaway train packed to the rafters with TNT.

And that goes for me, too.

That goes for all addicts.

We are all runaway trains—and nobody can stop us from acting upon our worst and wildest ideas, once we get started.

Nothing can stop us but a miracle.