Page 59 of All the Way to the River

W ithin a few months of my coming into the rooms of recovery, some really weird things started happening in my life.

For one thing, I stopped drinking.

Now that took me by surprise.

That had never been my intention—to put down alcohol when I came into the rooms—and nobody had asked me to do it.

You aren’t required to get sober off substances just because you’re a sex and love addict.

Technically, they are two different problems. And I didn’t come into recovery because I was a drunk, anyhow; I came into recovery because I was a crazy, needy, clingy, desperate, out-of-control, love-starved maniac who drank a lot.

But one night I was out to dinner with some friends, and the wine bottle was being passed around, as usual.

When the bottle got to me, I heard a voice in my head that I immediately recognized as God.

The voice said: This isn’t helping you, honey .

So I let the wine pass me by—and I have not had a drink since.

To this day, I still find this part of my story totally wild—that from one moment to the next, I went from being a person who drank quite a bit of booze to being someone who’s never even desired it again.

And in that mo ment, the entire raucous, complicated, devastating, and sometimes deadly centuries-long history of my family’s engagement with alcohol just ended within me—cut itself off, got cauterized, and was gone.

Left behind was a slightly clearer mind.

People in the rooms often talk about “the gifts of recovery”—strange, un-asked-for miracles of transformation that show up seemingly out of nowhere, once a person starts working the steps in their primary addiction.

Losing my desire to drink was my first tangible gift of recovery.

God gave me that one for free, like: If you put down your sex and love addiction, kiddo, I’ll take away that deep, historic urge for alcohol .

I quit using drugs, too, within a few months of coming into recovery.

Now, this was not as easy for me as putting down drinking, and I did have to go through quite a long and uncomfortable period of withdrawal from those substances.

I had come to drugs late in life, but when I finally discovered them in my mid-forties, I had fallen passionately in love with the stuff.

I wasn’t after the hard stuff that Rayya had always used; cocaine and opiates never interested me.

Mushrooms and ayahuasca and MDMA were more my thing, because I loved tripping.

I loved being able to leave my body behind while I got to roam freely about the universe, far beyond the reaches of space and time.

I loved changing form—turning into animals, trees, air—and watching reality melt.

Those drugs had felt like nothing less than a direct and immediate shortcut to God, and I couldn’t get enough of that feeling.

But I put all that down about four months into recovery.

Again, it wasn’t because anybody told me that I had to stop using drugs; I just came to understand that these substances were not helping me.

Now, listen, I fully understand that psychedelics and “plant medicine” can be miraculous agents of psychological healing, and that they are currently being widely and successfully used as treatment for depression, anxiety, PTSD, and, ironically, drug addiction.

I think it’s great that people are finding healing with these substances.

And I also understand that psychedelics are not considered to be chemically addictive.

But here’s the problem: You don’t know me.

The truth about me is that I can get addicted to anything that feels good.

And those drugs felt incredibly good to my system—far, far better than my nonaltered reality feels.

In fact, whenever I came down from psychedelics, I would immediately start to ache and sometimes even weep, because I never wanted to come back here —back to this dumb planet, where our souls are trapped within these meat bodies, and where we must follow the laws of Newtonian physics, and where pain is a reality and death is forever.

I just wanted to stay there —bodiless and safe, far away from my humanness and from all responsibility, adrift in a soft cosmos of unfettered imagination and infinite possibility.

(I’ve never once had a “bad trip” on psychedelics; to me, the real world has always felt like the bad trip.)

But I put all those drugs down after a few months in recovery because I came to understand that anything that stimulates such extreme craving in me—and such a deep need to check out of reality—was going to have to go now.

Again, it was the God of my understanding who made the suggestion: Stop taking shortcuts to try to find me, my love—it will only slow us down.

You don’t need those substances to talk to me—it’s all just a means of escape.

I’m always with you and I’m always within you.

We’re talking to each other right now; you can’t get any closer than that.

So leave it all behind and stay with me.

We’re doing something different now. We’re doing reality now, and nothing is wilder than that.

Can you trust me enough to go on this journey with me?

Can you stay present? Can you allow my voice to be all the magic you need?

To my ever-widening surprise, my answer seemed to be yes .

Other big life changes happened around that time, too.

I will never stop being grateful, for instance, to my first sponsor, who said to me one day, “I won’t be able to work with you anymore, Liz, if you don’t get financially sober.

I can see that you’re still using money as a means of trying to medicate your anxiety, control people, and make them love you.

If you don’t stop that behavior, all the hard work we’re doing with your sex and love addiction won’t amount to anything. ”

And so I set out to get “money sober,” working with a financial therapist (there is such a thing!) to create a “best practices spending plan” for me—a plan that, among other things, forbids me from giving money away without checking it out first with at least two sober fellows.

And I have learned to donate money to trusted charities rather than giving money directly to people whom I know, in order to not foster codependent personal relationships.

Of course, I don’t get the same high by donating to charities that I used to get from being a “savior” to my friends, but it seems to work out better for everyone if I stay out of their money business.

I also have enormous gratitude to that same sponsor for suggesting that, for at least a year, I should go on a “rescue detox”—meaning that I should stop trying to save anyone’s life but my own.

“You constantly try to rescue other people as a way of avoiding your own pain,” she pointed out.

“No, I don’t,” I said.

“Really?” she replied, with one eyebrow raised. She then asked me what percentage of my social life involved “checking in” on people, just to see if they were okay.

“That would be one hundred percent of my social life,” I replied.

“What if you just trusted that they are okay?” she asked. “What if you trusted that other people have their own resources and their own higher powers? What if you took care of yourself and trusted that other people can find their way without your help?”

“But they aren’t okay!” I protested.

“When was the last time you called a friend who isn’t going through an emotional crisis, just to get together and have a cup of coffee with them or go for a nice walk?”

“I don’t know anybody who isn’t going through an emotional crisis!”

“And why is that?”

“I don’t know! What would an emotionally healthy person even look like? If they were healthy, why would they hang out with me ? And what would we even talk about?”

“I want you to call somebody today who isn’t in trouble, and make a date to have lunch with them.”

What a revelation!

Stepping out of other people’s drama cycles was scary, weird, and difficult for me at first. I felt guilty for keeping the focus on myself, and I wondered how anyone could possibly survive without my overinvolvement in their lives.

(Spoiler alert: They all survived. And I gradually started hanging out with healthier people.)

None of this is what I expected would happen, when I first came to the rooms—but sober living casts a wide net and changes your life in more ways than you could possibly imagine.

Here’s the thing, though: When you quit drinking, doing drugs, having sex, and trying to manage, rescue, and control other people, suddenly you find yourself with a lot of free time on your hands.

What on earth would I do with myself now?

At first I had no idea what to do, and I noticed myself wandering around a lot in vague, lost circles.

I discovered that the evenings, especially, tended to get very long.

So I filled those empty hours by making art while listening to recordings of great spiritual masters.

I would sit at my kitchen table for hours at a time, all alone, cutting out pictures from magazines and making amateurish collages in my journal while I listened to the voices of teachers like Ram Dass and Pema Chodron and Thich Nhat Hanh and Byron Katie.

I drew pictures, too—even though I don’t consider myself much of an artist and I hadn’t drawn pictures since I was a kid.

I started out by making little drawings of stars and flowers and animals, which I remembered drawing a lot when I was a kid.

I traced images from coloring books or art books, or drew with my nondominant hand in order to get out of my analytical mind.

My drawings weren’t sophisticated, and I still had the same wobbly hand I’ve always had, but it didn’t matter—the mere act of pulling a brightly colored pen across the pages of my journal was relaxing to my nervous system.

Sitting there in sober solitude at the kitchen table, night after night, I remembered how drawing and coloring had been one of my primary tools of self-soothing as a child—long before I discovered the thrilling and numbing effects of alcohol and boys.

Then one evening in the deep silence, I started laughing—realizing that I was literally withdrawing with drawing.

And it was working—just as it had worked when I was a kid.

When craving or restlessness threatened to overwhelm my nervous system, I also read poetry, and that helped, too.

Then I started writing poetry—sometimes in my own voice, sometimes in the wise, older, and loving inner voice that I call God.

I began to relax more deeply into that voice.

I became more curious and affectionate and playful with it.

As God’s voice became clearer in my head, Rayya’s presence began to diminish.

This frightened and upset me at first—I did not want to lose whatever I had left of my beloved—but both God and Rayya reassured me that it was all right.

Keep going , said Rayya. You’re on the right track. Don’t quit before the miracle.

Steady now , said God, taking my heart from Rayya’s hands. I’m right here. I’ve got you now. Let’s keep going. Stay with me.

I cannot exactly say that I discovered God in the rooms of recovery—for I had known God a long, long time before I got sober.

Even at the most insane height of my addiction, I had always believed in God.

Even as a child, I had always been amazed by God.

I had always loved God. Sometimes I had even prayed to God.

But I had never trusted God—not for a minute.

Now God was asking me to trust.

What have you got to lose? God asked me.

I gave you almost fifty years to do things your way, sweetheart—and how’d that work out for you?

I let you sample everything out there to try to feel better.

I wanted you to really make sure that the solution could not be found outside of yourself, before you finally turned to me.

Are you done now, though? Have you seen enough?

Have you suffered enough? Have you tried enough?

Have you had enough? Are you ready to give yourself to me and let me show you what I can do for your life?

I’d seen enough, I’d suffered enough, I’d tried enough, I’d had enough.

I gave my life to God then, the way I used to give it to strangers.

Two hundred days sober now.

I could sleep through the night at last.

And one morning, when I was looking in the mirror after my shower, the frightened inner voice within me saw my reflection in the glass and realized with delight: Oh my goodness, there is a person here, after all! And she is real! And she’s always been here!

Three hundred days sober.

Compulsions were fading; a sense of ease was growing.

I took on a sponsee, then another one.

I couldn’t believe it, but I was actually helping someone else stay sober.

Now I was 365 days clean.

My fellows—my recovery sisters—held a little party for me, and I felt like the brightest and most beloved little kid in the whole nursery school.

Not long after that, the pandemic hit.

Instead of collapsing into fear and panic, I accepted Covid as “life on life’s terms” and took the opportunity of a shuttered planet to go even deeper into my recovery program, which, conveniently, had moved online.

I moved deeper into my solitude, my artwork, my prayers, and nature.

I got off social media—at first for days at a time and then for months at a time.

I started working on a new novel—a mystical novel, thick with magic.

I went for long walks all alone in the woods, marveling at hawks and coyotes and deer and turtles.

I practiced yoga in the quiet predawn darkness and never stopped talking to God.

I brought literally hundreds of new plants into my house.

I collected more pens, more paints, more notebooks.

I made art every day. I learned how to cook some Indian dishes I’ve always loved.

I meditated for hours at a time and wrote more and more poetry.

And then one miraculous afternoon when the world was completely shut down and I was more alone with myself than I have ever been, I looked up and realized that I had somehow slid into the most peaceful, creative, happy, and spiritually rich season of my life—and I’d never even seen it coming.