freeze and thaw
how to come back to life
freeze
It’s fine. Basically. It’s fine in all the ways you’re trained to look for. There’s healthy food—obsessively healthy, obsessively often. There’s always a new spice to hunt down from some strip mall in Loma Linda. There’s always a new dubiously adaptogenic thing to hunt down from Erewhon on occasional guilty/obsessed visits. There’s always a new recipe. Everything you cook is kind of familiar and boring. But it’s fine. Maybe a little too much reliance on credit cards. You pick up the phone and see a text, can’t figure out how to respond to it, put it down, and forget about it until 4am, when it would be totally insane to send a response. Tomorrow. But tomorrow you forget again, until 4am. It is a relief—an evil, depressing relief—when people stop texting.
And the thing that nobody might understand—which you, in fact, also do not understand—is that the world is not without beauty. It is not without speech. It sings to you all day, every day. Visual songs like dust motes and the constant red tracking lights of a plane flying into Ontario and out of Ontario every 15 seconds. The lights of the valley like a jeweled tablecloth. Handmade wooden lamps that cast amber light. Literal songs, also. “La Bamba.” Fat bluejays with black heads. Hawks. “Track 10.” “Just Like Heaven.” Solomon Burke. This beauty is arresting. It is real and it is true, and you trust it. But it is also, somehow chilly. It spins peacefully, quietly, like an ice cube in a glass. There are facets, and you feel like if you could just see all of them, understand all of them, resolve all of them, then something … something.
You’ve been working on a book. The main character is frozen. Beauty sings to her, but she can’t resolve the facets. Your friends in the writing group say, very democratically, that it’s hard to understand what’s happening beneath the surface of this character. That her affect is somehow both blank and cosmic. (Sometimes in a writing group someone will address your personality with a razorlike clarity that would never, ever, ever be allowed in therapy.) They want to know her better. This is, ultimately, what everyone says about the book. What’s going on under there? Jesus fucking Christ, you wish you knew. All you can do is point at the beauty, and hope that someone will be able to trace backward to the person doing the pointing. Like reverse echolocation. Because it’s all you can seem to do. All the character in the book can do, I mean.
And you have stopped believing in the old rituals that seemed to keep you safe. The church basements and bad coffee and stories of various forms of spiritual decay. Slowly, so slowly it seemed like it wasn’t happening, this part of you which seemed central to your identity slips away. The part that believed it. This is complicated because, as you used to say, the old rituals and church basements thawed the layer of ice between you and the world that seemed to build up overnight, every night. But in order to thaw the ice, you have to tell a very particular story about yourself, and one day, while you’re saying it, you realize that it isn’t true for you anymore, if it ever was. What will replace them? Something is right about what’s happening, but something is also wrong. You’ve stopped telling one story about yourself, but there is no new story. And so it’s almost like there’s no you. You can’t explain it except to say: You are frozen. You can’t move. And the world is still beautiful.
thaw
You move into town, but you’re still under glass. Nobody wants to buy the book about the frozen main character. In the book, she thaws out after an intense series of events, which makes sense to you, but not to anyone else. You understand why. You know that something about the story’s DNA is missing. Somewhere underneath it, you’re missing something so large and obvious it is paradoxically invisible. Like standing too close to the mirror, when you can only see your eyes.
Your boyfriend worries about you. You feel deeply ashamed—you never want anyone to worry about you. It feels like a problem whenever anyone notices an emotion in you, although you have no idea why. You reassure him. You love your life. And this is true—it is really true. That’s what’s so strange about everything. You walk in your neighborhood and say hello to the turtles in a neighbor’s pond. You are thrilled by sky, sunset, cacti, live oaks that remind you of the ways that Texas will always be home. You love a lot of people. You love the songs he plays on the tenor guitar with three mysterious holes in the body. There are many moments of peace and satisfaction in your life. And there is also this stillness.
Hours slip. You lose hours playing solitaire, which is deeply shameful, and also possibly hilariously on-the-nose in a metaphorical sense. You work hard on writing. Somehow, that is one of the only parts of the world that doesn’t slip. You declare that you will write a novel in 30 days because work means something—it means that you have something, you are something, you earned something, you can still do something. You write the novel. And as soon as you’re done, you realized you haven’t exactly proven anything.
It’s hard to say where the thaw begins. Maybe it doesn’t begin in a place but in a time—a changing season. You go back to breathing exercises. You are frequently shocked at how slow and shallow your breath is. On one hand, it’s a little bit like you’re always meditating. On another hand, it’s like you’re a frog in winter mud. It feels intrusive to breathe loudly, and you realize that it’s just another way that you’ve tried to be quiet and accommodating. So you let yourself breathe more, breathe louder. It feels weird. Like someone might come along and arrest you.
You grieve a beloved cat. And maybe this thaws you, too. Does the body make distinctions between one grief story and another? Maybe not. Maybe they’re all happening at once. You cry so much that it feels like you pulled a ghost out of your body.
Very, very slowly, like ships appearing on the horizon, old friends find you. People who knew you before the church basements and bad coffee, people who knew you as more than an adherent to a religious ideology. Slowly, you say a little bit more of what you mean when you mean it. You start telling the new story. Some people love this, some people don’t. The ones that love it feel closer. You’re still behind glass, but you want more and more to reach through it instead of sinking back.
You start writing another book. It is about a woman who leaves a cult, but stays frozen. She needs to thaw out, although she thinks all she really needs is to understand a scientific problem. Jesus fucking Christ. You would love to someday write books that aren’t these emanations of your shadow self, which seem to require an entire psychological excavation in order to complete. Or maybe that’s just what storytelling is in your life: a desire to evolve.
And then, one day, you can look backward and see, ha ha, that you were depressed. You were grieving. You were stuck. You were letting things fall away without any clue what was going to stay or materialize. It was bigger than you knew at the time, so big you couldn’t actually see it. You didn’t recognize it because you were looking for darkness, but it never got terribly dark. You had your hand on the edge of the swimming pool the whole time. The world was always, always, always beautiful. Mulberries, kitten bellies, random signs tied to the fence of the high school.
Thawing is messy. It is necessary. It feels good, and also yikes. Look out. Nice to meet me. Gone surfin’. And suddenly everything that you were trying to will yourself to do and hating yourself for failing is easier because you want to do it.
Hi! There are a lot of new subscribers in the last month—thank you, it’s an honor! Hope you stay awhile. I typically put posts into the archive for paid subscribers after about a week, but for now I’m going to leave my AA series public. If you liked it or shared it, thank you! And if you think I’m a dry drunk, right back atcha. ; )