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    • This is My Thing

      
An excerpt from We Are the Luckiest by Laura McKowen

      Before Laura McKowen got sober, she had a long, successful career in public relations in the Mad Men-esque drinking culture of the advertising industry, where “liquid lunches were frequent and drinking at your desk in the late afternoon was perfectly normal.” In the five years since she stopped drinking, she has become one of the foremost voices in the modern recovery movement.

      In her new memoir We Are the Luckiest: The Surprising Magic of a Sober Life (New World Library, January 7, 2020), McKowen flips the script on how we talk about addiction and encourages readers not to ask, “Is this bad enough that I have to change?” but rather, “Is this good enough for me to stay the same?”

      We hope you’ll enjoy this excerpt from the book.

      I knew drinking was going to be my thing long before the night of our mom’s sixtieth birthday party, even if I refused to let that knowing arrive fully into my consciousness. I knew it in college when one of my guy friends, while retelling a story from a crazy party we’d been at the night before, joked that I probably wouldn’t remember — because I was always too drunk to remember — and I felt like crawling into a hole and dying.

      I knew it in my twenties, living in Boston, when my girlfriends continually joked about whose turn it was to take care of me, before we went out to the bars.

      I knew it by the urgency I felt chugging champagne before my wedding, and I knew it later, after my husband and I learned I was pregnant. I drank the occasional glass here and there throughout my pregnancy — sometimes pushing the limit from one to one and a half glasses — but aside from the wine not feeling good physically, I realized how much I relied on it to soften my experience.

      It was so incomplete to me, so unsatisfying, to have only one glass. To have a limit.

      Often in those pregnant months, I’d be going about my day and suddenly be struck by an overwhelming urge to reach for wine. Something to take the edge off. And not being able to drink sent a surprising jolt of panic through me. Before my pregnancy, my drinking could at least be contextualized. I was having fun, going out after work, hanging out with the girls, Sunday Funday, “relaxing.” But now that I couldn’t have a drink anytime I wanted one, it was alarming how often I wanted one.

      It was the first time it had scratched at my consciousness that perhaps drinking had morphed elusively into something I not only liked but also needed. If not physically, then certainly emotionally.

      I’m not sure if you’ve ever needed something like this.

      Maybe you top off your drink when nobody’s looking, like I used to do. Maybe you’re like my friend Brent and you eat McDonald’s Big Macs and whole Domino’s cheese pizzas in your car on the way home from work, before dinner. Maybe you can’t leave a man who regularly beats the hell out of you, even though when he knocked you unconscious last week, you swore it was the last time. Maybe you’re the one who’s been slicing into your body with razor blades since you were sixteen, because the pain needs a place to go.

      Maybe — maybe your thing is less severe or more socially acceptable, like staying at the office past your kids’ bedtime most nights because work is the only place you feel in control, or maybe you wrestle with crippling perfectionism. Maybe it’s the red-hot hatred you feel toward every woman pushing a stroller since you discovered you couldn’t get pregnant last spring, or maybe you keep trying to untangle the knot of rage in your chest that just never leaves.

      I don’t know what your thing is, but alcohol was mine.

      And here is the thing we must know about our things if we are ever going to survive them: We believe we can bury them, when the truth is, they’re burying us. They will always bury us, eventually.

      If you know your thing, that’s good news, although I know it doesn’t feel that way. It doesn’t mean it’s fair. It doesn’t mean letting go and moving through will be easy. It doesn’t mean you have any idea what the f@#k to do next — I certainly didn’t. It just means you’re no longer willing or able to fight to keep it in your life.

      Laura McKowen is the author of We Are the Luckiest. She is a former public relations executive who has become recognized as a fresh voice in the recovery movement. Beloved for her soulful and irreverent writing, she leads sold-out yoga-based retreats and other courses that teach people how to say yes to a bigger life. Visit her online at www.lauramckowen.com.

      Excerpted from the book We Are the Luckiest. Copyright ©2020 by Laura McKowen. Printed with permission from New World Library.

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    • Double Vision: Does Everything have a Spirit?
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      Is there really such a thing as an inanimate object? Since God’s spirit lives in everything, wouldn’t that make things like a desk or a car or a favorite quilt alive on some level? If so, then is everything in the Universe equally divine? Namaste!

      Kinya

      Dreamchaser:

      Everything that you are asking in this question is based on individual belief systems. Some people believe that God lives inside their hearts, but that a chair is just a chair. Some people believe that every single thing has God-ness in it.

      It all depends on what you personally believe, and because of that, I can’t speak for what is correct or incorrect here – I can only offer my own views.

      It is my personal opinion that every living thing has life-force energy, and that energy will travel to and from other living things. So if you are talking about a metal desk, I don’t believe that desk is a living thing. However, if you are talking about a wooden desk made of real wood and not pressboard or something, well that wood was at one time a tree. (I personally feel more affinity towards natural products than towards man-made articles.)

      In fact, I can feel life in most wooden or natural products that I touch. If you take me into a museum, it will be very hard for me to follow those DO NOT TOUCH rules. I want to touch everything to feel its life force energy. I think that comes from a primal need to stay in contact with other living things.

      You mentioned a car. I think a car is a completely different thing. Some of us name our cars; some of us baby our cars; some of us talk to our cars like they can hear us and will respond when we rub the dash and say something like, Please start. Come on baby, please start.

      Though I don’t believe that our cars are alive on any level, it’s natural for us to personify some inanimate objects, especially if we interact with them all the time. Just this past weekend, I was driving through the cemetery by my house and one of the gates blew in the wind, slammed into the side of my vehicle, and tore up the door pretty good. I was just sick about this for about three hours until I realized there was nothing to get so upset about, since my car is not a living thing.

      Some people give money a whole lot of power, and money is not only inanimate – it’s merely symbolic! Despite this, it’s given as much power as anything else in the Universe.

      Everything has the propensity to be divine, so everything has the potential to be equal to anything else in the universe. That is my personal opinion. The Pope is no greater than the big pecan tree I have out in the back yard. The bottom line is the importance we put on something. Catholics obviously think the pope is more divine than my pecan tree.

      It all depends on one’s perspective, doesn’t it? I think the best answer here is a question: what do YOU believe?

      I wish you an even more inquisitive mind!

      *****

      Astrea:

      While all objects can carry the energy of the person who made them, not all possess a Divine spirit. Everything God-made begins with the God-force. God-made Objects are created by the Divine, and are animate in that they have living cells.

      Things made by man are inanimate – the cells don’t grow or reproduce. As long as something is LIVING or ALIVE, it possesses its Divine spirit.

      Once it’s been mined, cut down, created or eaten by man, the spirit moves into the person who consumed or used the inanimate object, whether it’s a plate of sliced tomatoes or a pair of leather shoes. The people who create man-made objects also infuse them with their energy, but that doesn’t mean they have a spirit.

      Does the Sun combine with water and chlorophyll to create a tomato? Yes, and the tomato has Divine energy. Sliced and eaten, the chain continues to the person who eats it. Does the desk where we sit possess Divine spirit? No, because people created the desk.

      The spirit of the tree or the tomato lives within the consumer, and thus is kept divine in that way. People use energy to create objects, and their ENERGY is Divine. While their energy may live on in a painting or a dance, it is just energy – not spirit.

      Are the coins thrown in the I Ching Divine? Are the sticks? They certainly represent a Divine spirit, but the objects aren’t divine in and of themselves.

      Is the cross Jesus was murdered on Divine? It was when it was a tree. Does it POSSESS part of Him in it? There are churches all over the world in death battles for splinters of the True Cross, and in the 12th to 14th century, Europe was ruined by a war over the cup Jesus drank from at The Last Supper.

      Surely those things are Divine, right? Well, the cup can conduct heat and carry water, but it only becomes animated in the hands of someone else. On its own, the cup is just metal (and jewels, to hear some tell!) that a person made into something useful. They are like the statues of Baal in Egypt and other statues and representations of the God Force.

      While these things can be used in worship, whether they have Divine energy or not is largely determined by cultural beliefs. Objects can be infused with divine energy and meaning by religious worshipers, but then they are conductors of Divine energy as opposed to a source of Divine energy.

      I feel it’s up to each person to decide what is Divine for them, and what carries a Divine spirit. Whether they carry Divine spirit or not, I would love to see a table Jesus made or sit in a chair He built. I am sure they are really something!

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