When is it Darkest?

My husband is reading a book right now titled The Worst Hard Time. It’s about the Dustbowl, I believe… except it turns out he hasn’t been able to read much lately. He’s struggling, as many people are. He’s making steps to get help, and it’s not ideal, but being released from the hospital with Covid really wasn’t part of the discharge plan, which required being home with no support for a week, so now we are regrouping. Oh, and of course I caught my husband’s Covid.

I cannot tell you how mortally afraid I was to get Covid again, which brought up that very very scary time in all our lives, spring 2020. I got Covid in mid-March that year (always an early adopter of the latest tech) and then it developed into Long Covid, and I thought I was going to die. I can’t explain what it was like to furiously crowd-source individual case studies on a Slack page, on texts and emails and Tweets, as those with this horrible twisting first round tried to figure out what was going on with our bodies. As we named it “long covid" and for years afterward, we were told: “It’s anxiety. It’s PTSD.” Oh my medically-minded friend, but it wasn’t. This time around, I also just got done with my first-ever course of Paxlovid! Delivered via a tele-health appointment with no problem! which… bless that drug. Bless those people who invented it. Bless my fellow travelers.

I woke up after a not-great night of sleep with the phrase “It’s always darkest before the dawn” in my head. I then started to argue with it: isn’t it darkest halfway between dawn and dusk? So the saying doesn’t make sense because there’s still a LOT of darkness after the point of midnight and the dawn. Like half of it!

And when does it feel darkest, which might be different than the actual measure of least light? I used to work overnight shifts at a group home, and I can attest that it always feels darkest at around 2:34 or 2:47 a.m. That’s when I was always convinced that time had stopped, that there was no other soul awake. It’s dark in my life right now, but it’s not 2:34.

A few mornings ago when it was foggy and I was taking the dog for a walk around 5 a.m., I started taking these pictures:

I love that tree with its parted hairdo, and the weirdness of the streetlight and an oncoming car making the tree look like a kind of lighthouse. Taking photos reminded me that it’s okay, even in hard times, to find things beautiful. Maybe it’s very very important, especially in those times, to keep our tether to the world of beauty and surprise, to seek it whenever it is offered, even if it is exactly those times when seeking beauty feels like a betrayal of the seriousness of the situation. Serious situations call for serious help and oxygen wherever you can find it.

My Worst Hard Time wasn’t 2020. My Worst Hard Time was a period of years in which I lived with a partner who had active addiction. I’ve been thinking about that long stretch a lot this fall, holding up these days to those days like two photos to compare the lighting and the faces, which helps me understand the depths of where I am, how I’m doing, and how hard it is, and what is not broken.

The hardest thing about that situation with active addition, for me, was the daily barrage of denial, of refusal or inability to have a shared reality, of active attacks against a shared reality, of having no reference point for my own feelings and reactions and observations. You have someone you love, standing in front of you, and they are looking at you with such loathing, but it’s not because of something you did. It’s because of a look that crossed your face, they say, or the way you are as a person. And the weird thing, often, is that they will not even remember the moments that scar you, because they are in their own mortal struggle, which places them at a very different place on this battlefield, and your struggle is very different from theirs, but no less real. No less real. Then the next day there is a momentary clearing and the person you love emerges, and then that version disappears, and then another version returns to lie to you because they are in a specific agony that you will never understand. But you know you can’t ask about the lies, or ask about anything, really, because of the verbal attacks and misery you will unleash, which will then also compound their own suffering. You learn to live very quietly.

You have two choices. One: you can shut down and become cruel or numb yourself, but then you have to deal with this mask of cruelty or numbness you’ve developed, with those behaviors of cruelty or numbness you have come to rely on so keenly that they become your first thought. Or the second: you stay aware of what is happening, and you try to preserve your love and compassion, and you crowdsource your suffering with friends who are going through the same thing, and you try to keep oxygen and blood and necessary nutrients coursing through your soul. But it’s so painful, like a foot that’s constantly losing circulation and falling asleep and then constantly reintroducing blood flow.

I crowdsourced for a long, long time with friends and family of those who struggle with addiction, and I still crowdsource that way, because I am forever changed, forever in danger of falling asleep or reaching for the masks of numbness or cruelty. So even now, in this hard time, I find my itchy fingers reaching for those masks, but I usually stop it at the itch. Sometimes not.

It’s been a hard week, and I’ve been teaching my classes online and now grading. And somehow the holiday we celebrate is looming on the horizon and I have a pile of presents in various bags in my closet but no idea how this all is going to happen, how we are going to get various people to various places amidst our hard time, as the world is on fire, as there is so much suffering, and a ceasefire and end to violence is desperately needed.

Many people in the 12-Step world refer to the holidays as the Bermuda Triangle, and here we are, amid that cluster of islands. It’s a time of celebration but also a time of comparing, of watching my favorite-ever Christmas move “It’s a Wonderful Life” and forgetting that a key piece of that heartwarming story is the breakdown and the hopelessness: the bitter George Bailey in the bar, the five-o’clock shadow and snapping at the kids and losing all the money and the drafty old house. We feel like we’re “not doing it right” if anything is awry, which is why I think the holidays end up being such wreckage for so many people: too much pressure.

I hope you have a nice holiday, however you celebrate. Or, if you need to, it’s totally cool to be currently having a ridiculously sad Hanukkah and to roll into a wretched Solstice and a fucked-up Christmas, a confused and dispirited Kwanzaa with a hopeless New Year. However you celebrate, do it up for George Bailey. And then watch the final scene, when crowdsourcing turns things around, which never doesn’t make me cry.

Al-Anon is one such fellowship for family and friends of addicts and alcoholics. It’s worldwide and there are meetings everywhere, even online and on the phone. So many people know about AA and NA and other fellowships for addicts, but it often takes a direct recommendation from a therapist to find Al-Anon. If you feel like you need support, you can find it with one internet search. You’re not alone.