I awake, warm in my lover’s childhood bed, inclined towards an aching and familiar frustration. This is a common occurrence, I’m noticing, regardless of place and setting. I remember years ago when I used to binge drink most nights of the week, I’d often meet each morning heavy with hangover followed by surges of panic that coursed through my entire body. I’d barely wipe the sleep from my eyes before my mind went to work puzzling together where I was and what bits were missing from the night before; who did I need to apologize to, how had I embarrassed myself? It was never my intention to have “too many”, but somehow one drink usually turned into blackness. I’ve been free from alcohol for well over a year now, and have been exploring sobriety for the last 5 years, but I’m only just now coming to realize this pattern of worry and frustration first thing in the morning is a remembered mechanism my body re-enacts, although the defining culprit (alcohol) has long since been removed.
My lover wants sleep. I cannot rest. I’m a guest in his parents home, so I gently tip toe into the living room to quietly write my thoughts—a trusted way of processing my uncomfortable feelings. No sooner that I start punching on the keyboard about awaking with frustration, I hear the dog whimpering to go outside. Taking him out is a noisy, chaotic ordeal, and there is family sleeping in the basement where I would have to pass through. I keep typing but his whimpers only add to my helpless feeling, instead of helping the caged animal pee, I go back into my lover’s room to write at his desk. He’s still fast asleep and I don’t want to disturb him or write in darkness, so I sigh, take my clothes off and hop back into bed. I’m trapped for now. Despite all my rage I am still just an animal who “feels” caged.
I stare at the ceiling for a time. Then, from my back, I breathe in for four counts, hold for two, then out for four, hold for two. This bores me after exactly three rounds and the overwhelming warmth of tears forms behind my eyes, all consuming. My failure to be able to act on my frustration as well as my inability to self-soothe sends my mind into every envy and every shortcoming, warping itself into a definitive life story—poor me.
They aren’t being dramatic when they say the body keeps the score.
Before long my partner awakes to my frustration and offers himself as help. I share with him my dilemma, he presents some solutions… go write upstairs, take the car to grab coffee, he’s awake now we can get up. None of these appeal to the helpless state which I have now claimed as “my entire life”. He asks if I just need to feel helpless. I think about it and confess that I do. With this permission, I peel back from the immediacy of my narrative—that I am held hostage by this strange morning—and decide to stop panicking and trying to fix anything. Clearly I don’t want solutions, I want to feel unhinged. Or maybe it’s not that I want to, but my wise and habitual animal body is just doing this thing it knows how to do so well; see: have a crisis first thing in the morning.
He points to the window, my cue to the open the blinds. The sun spills over our bodies. I’m immediately soothed. My partner reminds me I’m okay and that I can do what I need to do, leave or stay, or anything else. I think I just needed sun. The pity I’ve been clinging to starts to slip away from my mindbody into the mattress and hopefully even further into the earth. I imagine a burial for my self-pity. I give myself grace. I decide there’s still time to connect to and live from my deepest desires. The day has only just begun. This morning is not the morning I stop holding the shape of who I long to be, which is somehow, simultaneously, who I currently am, whiny ass bitch and all.
Sometimes, being that I am a human, I root from the most familiar framing I can recount, which for me is the helpless and self-pitying one. My body still remembers a life I’m no longer living as if it’s present. I think this is because of childhood dynamics and also because I lived for close to two decades in a self-induced, fearful and panicked stress state thanks to my addictions. But the past is only so present as I reenact and refer to it. I have to remember that my body is still very early in learning how to live without substances. I finally quit smoking for good. I don’t smoke weed but on occasion. And even psychedelics have become more of a biannual event than a regularity. At this point I’m not just sober from alcohol, for 93% of the year I am sober from everything. This is a radical shift from being someone who was closer to 93% intoxicated, and it only took a handful of years to achieve.
I often fail to understand how truly miraculous this is. But right now it’s not lost on me: my life was on fire and I chose to put it out (as well as had the support and means and resources to). I transformed from one way of being into a complete other. I trusted there was another future for Samantha Morgan Hancock, one where I was really living. I chose to stop decimating myself. I had to begin to crane my body is such a way that allowed for the shape of what was to come, even without being fully clear on what that looked like. This was extremely uncomfortable at first. But somewhere inside I sensed it wasn’t just about survival anymore, about a habitual pattern I started when I was 13. It was about listening to the anxious hell inside of me and taking it seriously. I took my life by the hand and began trusting it.
The shape I hold now is of all things resilience and poetry with a little bit of clown, but sometimes I forget. Forgetting is natural and not a problem, all I do when I forget is remember. But when I forget, old mechanisms find their way to the surface, sometimes without my noticing. I’m more curious about them these days. They’re like old friends who stop by without calling. I ask what brings them around, how they’ve been. Upon further probing of these old pals, I’m finding a common denominator behind all of my self-pitying narratives is the question why? Specifically, Why me? Back when I was drinking questions like: Why did I get that drunk? Why did I have to go to that last bar? Why am I such a fuck up? would play on repeat in my mind. Nowadays the why’s show up differently, a tad more existential, but I think they still point to the same insecurity. Why isn’t my writing more popular? Why is my instagram following so small? Why haven’t I made more of an artist of myself?—They seem to beg that who I am in this moment is not who I really want to be. They seem to be desperately asking, why me?
But maybe there’s something deeper to be gleaned from these neurosis, which is all that they are—which I’m learning all neurosis are really just defense mechanisms/self-protections we offer ourselves to not have to sit with the pain of [insert life inconvenience here]. While these incessant self-pitying why’s are easy to misjudge and fall victim to, they might actually be nudging me to see if there is a future (other dimension of) me more cut out for this moment than what I’m currently offering myself. Instead of recounting every failure or loss from the past, I could begin to collect what shapes towards this future me would look like instead. And I rather like this way of relating to my self-pity over the one where I crumble in defeat.
An important message came to me recently and it’s this:
THE FUTURE COMMUNICATES THROUGH THE PRESENT, NOT THE PAST.
It’s all here now, the past, the future, the present. The future constantly hints at us as to what shapes we are invited to hold to bring about the world we desire—the options are endless. But this is not communicated by sinking into the past, it is only ever communicated precisely here—now.
If we see repeating patterns happening in our life, this is likely the past reenacting itself, I imagine because we have not yet taken the time to imagine something else for ourselves. The body will do what it knows to do, we operate more from feedback loops than anything else, it seems. That’s why we want to create feedback loops we feel passionate about, or at the very least enjoy. It’s also a human habit, I think, when recognizing our life’s patterns to look backwards instead of imagine forwards. I think both are necessary, but at least speaking for myself, I get stuck in the rearview of my life all too often.
Looking to the past for surefire answers regarding present situations is like looking on the ocean floor for shipwrecks. There is information there, absolutely. But it’s distorted and worn and eaten away at it. It’s changed. It’s too watery; it’s more of a story than a pristine ship we can sail from. So, I’m learning present situations are more easily dealt with in the present, with the present, when one becomes present (the past is always in the present anyway).
If there’s anything I learned in all my 35 years of life on earth is that we seldom get to know why. Even scientific study is more of a testament to how than why. And it’s no wonder I’m in school studying philosophy, a whole academic field that begs the question why? because deep down I feel I ought to have the right to know. Deep down I have an aching why, and I long for it like I long for a lover who I keep losing through lifetimes. Because, from my simple, ego logic, if I knew why (I am the way I am/things are the way they are) then I’d finally understand how to move forward in life in the best way possible. But it turns out how and why, while connected, are not dependent. I’ve been how-ing my way through life without knowing exactly why for decades. There are many questions left unanswered and yet here I still am, functioning, and in moments I’m even thriving. Why is a privilege to have and to know. If someone ever gave me their why, then they are an angel. And the same is true if I gave others a why: for leaving, for staying, for moving, for quitting. Then I too am an angel.
The shape I’m being invited to hold is becoming less of a why, and more of a how. It’s less of a longing for what was. Less of a remembered mechanism, a neurosis, a learned function, and more of a how. How will I hold a new way of being, a new way of trusting? How will I ask better questions to live from? How will I honor my existential grappling without buckling under its embrace? It’s learning to hold the shape from the present instead of the past. It’s becoming not a single shape, but a shapeshifter. I can change shapes as necessary and that this is both motivated from myself as well as from the surrounding environment (as if they are even so different). My obsession for answers (to know why) is half the problem, too. It’s also half the fun. But really, it’s about living the questions, as I’ve heard Sophie Strand name it. It’s about embodying the mystery as it unfolds, taking note as I go, pivoting when necessary.
The past is information, the body seldom forgets it. The future is unknown and already exists, the body senses this, too. The present greets all of it with an open and loving embrace, or a cold, coy demeanor depending how we relate to it. The past isn’t going to tell me what’s coming anymore than the future will, only the present reveals what is possible. And then we must live it and see. The future beckons me with unknown delights (and horrors too) I can sense and feel only here and now. To lean towards a future that my deepest desires are conjuring, I must embody them now. I must let the past be the past, not a predictor. The future is not bound to the past, it only comes from it/out of it, or… maybe this isn’t true. I don’t know or understand the physics, it’s just this sense. Nonetheless, I’m finally learning that who I want to be doesn’t exist out there, but already within me right now, and that if I get silent and patient and sweet with my mindbody, the future whispers new shapes for me to hold.
ON MY MIND:
^This piece may have contradicted itself many times, so be it.
To stay up to date with useful information regarding the genocide (yes it is a genocide and we should be calling it that) from a powerful voice, I recommend this substack by Fariha Roísín. She’s also one of the three hosts, alongside Lordcowboy and Marlee Grace, of an upcoming writing class I’m taking and I cannot wait! (Click on Marlee Grace if you want more info about the class).
It’s taken me over a month to begin to realize how truly awful what’s happening in Gaza is. How truly distorted the ruling powers frame reality. This is a moment asking of us to get present and to get real. To slow down and to breathe. To honestly consider what our life’s current happiness and ease costs, not with shame, but with reverance. This is not a time to cast blame and create enemies where there are none. This is not a time to shame ourselves for our privileges or others for not having them. This is a time to learn to want for others as we want for ourselves, and to be receptive if they don’t want what we want or aren’t ready to want what we want. Solidarity across difference is the only way to include both individuality and our interconnectedness. This is a time to not be authoritarians over ourselves and others. This is a time asking us to look with our hearts.
The future whispered a shape, and it “said” LIBERATED. What shape does the word liberated look like? In all honesty, I think the workings of the Living Universe are compelled to its own liberation. I don’t think we have a choice or a say—liberation is coming. Just look around, it’s here and it’s happening and it won’t stop. It’s coming whether we want it or are ready for it or not. I’ll be writing more on this soon!