65. Recovery Is For Another Book

It’s funny to think that within days of the black box opening I headed off to the Venice Biennale, that most surreal and picturesque of places which on a normal day is like walking into a dream, but which during the festival is beyond Alice in Wonderland. The missing pieces of the jigsaw had come tumbling out, I had a seen a picture awful but whole, ugly but a thousand times better than the jumbled nonsense I had lived with; memories that made no sense, feelings that had no grounding, behaviour at odds with a childhood apparently so blessed, and the revelation was like taking acid as my world changed shape and settled into its new reality. It was with this that I landed in Italy and pulled my suitcase noisy along the cobbled canals, Venice out of body, an explosion of art for which I had no grip. I spent three days lonely and drinking and out of my mind, putting on a show for the people I knew so that they would not know, spinning with all the shattered pieces of me around this one fantastical, unavoidable truth. Now I knew, and the pictures came together, and I had to live conscious with what had been hidden. Recovery is for another book; it is an ongoing process but I will say this. Within a year of remembering I stopped drinking. I’d been a steady wine-in-the-afternoon-on-my-own sort of person, combined with spliffs it had been for over a decade my way of connecting with the thing that was lost. Abuse splits you off from yourself and I was seeking that person, all addicts are doing the same, at the heart of all addiction lies trauma. But those couple of hours every day manufacturing a feeling of not being alone cut me off from twenty-three other hours of connecting properly, and it was time, so I stopped. I cried for a month. Then the sensation of acid again as if I was tripping. By the third month sober I’d found my feet. It’s saved my life. I have saved my life. When I started this memoir, I didn’t know the sun around which it would orbit, the story I was telling. That only became clear as I wrote, that most magic of knowings, the unconscious, driving the story of a girl running blind, acting out, being lost until she is found. I found her in a gremlin, in a black box, in words on the page and this thirty-thousand-foot view of my life has been a gift; I have seen patterns, a way through, the picture, again, has made sense. I don’t know how to end a memoir. I suppose you do it like this. “In our time, as in every time, the impossible is the least that one can demand.” James Baldwin (1924-1987) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eleanoranstruther.substack.com/subscribe