Growing Through the Years: Life on Life’s Terms

“You need willingness to walk through all the doors that open.”

August 11, 1988. The tile floor and dirt-smeared windows reflect back light in all directions. I sit in one of the ubiquitous metal chairs, felt banners with gold letters facing me from the front wall. It’s not my first meeting, just the one that took. 

I haven’t had a drink in 15 months. My life continues to careen toward bottom. My partner kicked me out on move-in day. So now I live in a group home as a counselor. One of the residents shits his pants every time I leave the room.

Around me, men lift their hands. Noon on a weekday, lunch time, some of the workers with dirt creased into their skin, some with paint-spattered pants.

“Just don’t drink, go to meetings, and ask for help,” says one man or another.

I’m twenty-eight years old. I will try anything.

Someone points me toward a lesbian at least 20 years my senior, says I need a sponsor. She tells me to get my butt to a step meeting.

Okay.

And so, instead of simply not drinking—which I was accomplishing with relentless and obsessive control that was going to fail sooner or later—I end up Monday morning in a group of people old enough to be my grandparents. The person I like best is a guy whose wife is an incest survivor. She was abused by her parents, like me. 

“Do the steps,” he tells me. “It won’t be enough. It’s hard. On her. On me. Find a way to a Higher Power.”

Okay.

I let the seniors at my meeting introduce me to a sober incest survivor, who hears my first fourth step.

As for the men at the noon meeting? When the memories come fast and furious, they tell me if I get angry I’ll drink again.

But I have been adopted. I have been pointed to another path, and I take it. Humbly, I let the adoptive AA grandparents love me.

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For some people with post-traumatic stress, at nine months of sobriety you get a surge that lasts, oh, maybe a week or two. You feel crazy, volatile, you don’t know what’s happening. If you’re like me, the surge will return at somewhere between 12 and 18 months sober, and this time it won’t go back down unless you drink again, pick up another addiction, or do the work.

No one tells you this ahead of time. The invitation into your own darkness arrives unannounced, much like a push off a cliff.

I always did want to learn how to fly.

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I sit at the kitchen table in the apartment I share with the trans-masc person who will be my partner for the next 35 years. The retro Formica table has steel legs that rest on the barn red floor. My partner and two best friends, all recovering alcoholics, sit down to eat. We’re figuring out a schedule of who will stay overnight with me when my partner does graveyard shifts at the group home where they work. I have nightmares about the abuse; often I can’t sleep.

I’m the person who traveled solo in Europe and Asia, put myself through college. I didn’t pick up a new addiction or drink when the darkness knocked, so sobriety has stripped away all my swag and left me struggling to make it even one day at a time. It’s a hero’s journey—except the hero goes it alone. I have help, so I get to be loved and held in my darkness. I get to have sisters, companions, as I heal and simultaneously come out of the closet with the gentle boi-girl who never pushes me to do more than I can. 

I always wanted to learn how to love. I didn’t know it would hurt so much, make me so vulnerable, but I have a Higher Power who leads me to lean into the dark so I can fill it with light, friendship, loyalty, and commitment. With love.

I do the steps from Incest Survivors Anonymous.

My adoptive grandfather from the senior AA meeting was right. It’s hard on me, on my partner, on my friends. I find a therapist who teaches me how to listen to my gut, how to trust myself, how to find my own light. Not the compulsion of addiction, not the reactivity of trauma. Listen, she tells me, there is a voice in you that knows the way. There is a plumb line past the dark to wholeness no one can take way.

I will try anything.

In AA meetings, I tell the truth of my alcoholic father’s abuse in spite of the men who don’t like hearing it. Women and queer people line up afterward to ask me how I’m making it through. Can I help them? Can I tell them it will get better?

I can. It does.

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Nearly 10 years in. I have written a book of poetry and a novel, started a community of writers who work from consent culture—something I understand from being a #metoo survivor and being queer and oppressed. I teach people to find their voices and to create safety.

In meetings—not just AA, but any other kind of meeting I need, I do another round of the steps and then another. I lead AWOL groups (A Way Of Life through the 12-step closed groups). I give back.

My partner and I are getting married. It’s 1997—most of our friends and family have never been to a queer wedding. In the planning, my partner and I come out at Macy’s when we register. We come out to florists, to jewelers, to the rental space administrator. We’re working class—so our friends, gay and straight, most in recovery, arrange the bouquets, make the food, play the music.

As for me, I meet a woman through recovery who is a stand-up comic and slam poet. I go to see her perform and that voice, that plumb line to wholeness, sings out in me: I can do this. I am SUPPOSED to do this.

I compete at my first poetry slam and to my surprise I keep having to stop because the 200 people listening can’t stop laughing. Why? I’m only writing about how I lift a spoon of granola and yogurt in the air, space out thinking about my novel without putting it in my mouth until my partner says, “I don’t think I can marry someone who eats like that.”

Apparently that’s funny. 

Who knew?

Seven years later my partner and I get married a second time. This time, it’s legal. We read a quote about not being second-class citizens.

I feel liftoff. I take flight.

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Thirty-four years in. My partner walks into my bedroom. I’m sobbing, lying on light blue sheets, summer sun warming the room to an early heat.

“Why am I crying?” I ask them.

“Because you’re leaving me,” they say.

It’s 2022. Throughout the pandemic I went to meetings online—international meetings, all kinds of meetings. I started a 20-years-plus all-program group with a friend. I led an online step group.

I also interviewed over 50 people to create a web series about body and identity, focusing on queer body image, race, gender, ability. And so, I came out as non-binary and found both my people and myself.

I also learned my partner’s sexual problems were not my fault.

I leave because the plumb line yanks me forward. I’m 62. In some ways, I’m still the person I’ve always been—the risk taker, the world traveler, the artist, the one who yearns for growth, who can’t leave the darkness unexplored. The one who is willing to lose my second family, the love of my life, to come home to my body.

I grow and grow again.

Just don’t drink, go to meetings, ask for help? I believe that when the first doors opened, at 9 months and then at 12, when I had to choose to feel the pain or drink again, only my adoptive AA grandparents, my loving friends, the Higher Power I’d been taught to find, the other survivors who led the way, saved me from the drink again option.

Don’t drink, go to meetings, and ask for help may be enough to stop the drinking. But to get a life, you need willingness to walk through all the doors that open.

If your life pushes you off a cliff, learn to fly.
You have to feel every emotion, not just the ones you like.
You have to wake up, whenever waking up calls
Recovery is a life process, not an end game.
How grateful I am that doors open. How lucky to be able to grow. 
Liftoff. After the darkness, the laundry, the step work.
Life on life’s terms.
Flight.

Your turn.

We’d love for you to share in the comments:

• When and how have you “walked through the doors that open” in recovery and sobriety?

• Where have you found support along the way?

And if you found this article helpful, please tap the little heart. It lets others know there’s something useful here and will help us grow this community.

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Skylar Lyralen Kaye, fae/they, is a recovering human and a queer social justice award-winning writer. Fae believes that under the strata of experience we are all made of a vital core of light. You can read more of faer work at Queerly Enlightened: Releasing the Barriers to Joy.

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