Answer Addiction

Tag: feminism

  • Harpies, Bitches, Witches and Whores: Women Write About Anger in New Anthology

    Harpies, Bitches, Witches and Whores: Women Write About Anger in New Anthology

    “People can see an angry man [who is] fighting for a cause and see him as strong. It’s not the same for women—especially not for women of color and trans women.”

    Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger is a fiery collection of 22 essays. Editor Lilly Dancyger (Catapult, Narratively, Barrel House Books), an accomplished essayist (Longreads, The Rumpus) and journalist (Rolling Stone, Washington Post), brought together a diverse group of writers. Currently Dancyger is working on a memoir about her artist father and his heroin addiction.

    With empathy in short supply these days, Burn It Down is an invigorating read. The collection is filled with compelling creative nonfiction in the form of first-person narratives from women of different races, ethnic groups, and religions. No matter how you identify—cis female, cis male, trans, or nonbinary—there is a lot to learn here. Dark humor and gorgeous prose take you through the lessons learned in other people’s lives.

    The first sentence in Dancyger’s introduction demanded my attention: “Throughout history, angry women have been called harpies, bitches, witches and whores.” With a shorter-than-ever attention span, I was surprised to devour this book in one sitting. Dancyger guided the writers to go deep and spill raw feelings. 

    Dancyger told The Fix about her troubled teen years. She said, “I had good reason to be angry.” Not only was she raised by two people with drug addictions, but her father died at age 43 when she was a preteen. Her beloved cousin Sabina was only 20 when she was randomly murdered.

    “Anger overwhelmed me,” Dancyger said. “It came out in excessive drinking and doing a lot of drugs.” Her life was thrown out of whack, which sent her on a rocky journey where she learned that you need to “make space for anger in your life or it pushes you into self-destruction.”

    “Those were wild, reckless years. Then I dropped out of ninth grade,” she said. She made it to college, still drinking heavily. “There’s a big difference between drinking with your friends and being determined to get drunk every day. Finally, I ran out of steam and decided I was just done.”

    Writing has been healing, Dancyger told me.

    Burn It Down is meant for readers to give themselves permission to access their own anger. “To feel it, recognize it and accept it. There are so many things to be angry about,” Dancyger said. “It can be fortifying to enforce boundaries, pursue passions, and let anger out.” The book acknowledges that men are angry too, but this is a book about women. “People can see an angry man [who is] fighting for a cause and see him as strong. It’s not the same for women—especially not for women of color and trans women.”

    The first piece, “Lungs Full of Burning,” is by Leslie Jamison, who never thought of herself as ill-tempered. She spent years telling people, “I don’t get angry. I get sad.” Jamison writes about her long-held belief that sadness was more refined than rage. Out of a fear of burdening others, she squelched her feelings in order to spare people the “blunt force trauma” of her wrath. She writes, “I started to suspect I was a lot angrier than I thought.” Her essay talks about women in literature and film, pointing to the Jean Rhys novel, Good Morning, Midnight, in which the heroine resolves to drink herself to death, and describing Miss Havisham as “Dickens’s ranting spinster—spurned and embittered in her crumbling wedding dress.”

    I Started to Suspect I Was Angrier Than I Thought

    Jamison writes, “I’d missed the rage that fueled Plath’s poetry like a ferocious gasoline.” She talks about I, Tonya and how it handled what became known as the “whack heard around the world,” where one woman’s anger leaves another woman traumatized. Harding was portrayed as a “raging bitch,” said Jamison. Kerrigan was a pitiable victim. Yet, things are usually not as black and white in real life. Jamison points out how little coverage there was of Harding’s abusive mother and husband.

    “Women’s anger is a necessary conversation to be having,” said Dancyger. On Hillary Clinton, she explained, “Here was a woman who bent over backwards to avoid coming off as shrill. Look at the words used to describe angry women—hysterical, crazy, hormonal, irrational. And women of color experience an extra dimension of misogyny.”

    Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is “under tremendous pressure. We hear the racism in words like ‘fiery Latina.’ Kamala Harris is an ‘angry black woman.’”

    Erin Khar, editor-essayist-columnist and author of the much-anticipated memoir, Strung Out: One Last Hit and Other Lies That Nearly Killed Me (Park Row Books, Feb. 25, 2020) writes in her essay “Guilty” about panic attacks and anxiety she felt as a child, who then began keeping secrets. She grew into a troubled 13-year-old who turned to heroin. Later she was a chronic relapser: “As a junkie I was a walking apology.” Finally, thanks to a wise therapist, she learned that it wasn’t the guilt that was killing her; it was unexpressed anger. It’s a powerful story that illustrates the madness of addiction.

    There are tough scenes of self-loathing in Khar’s piece: digging fingernails into her arms till she bled, using a box cutter to carve into her leg. Recovering memories of being raped at age four. But the ending is satisfying, with a description of what her life is like today and the steps she took and tools she used to get there.

    Khar was generous with her time and very open in our interview. We covered a wide range of topics and segued into how many women experienced PTSD from watching the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. 

    “Lilly [Dancyger] was editing the essays during the Kavanaugh hearings and I was writing my essay for the book at that same time,” Khar said. We talked about Kavanaugh’s weeping, and blubbering about beer during his job interview for SCOTUS. We teared up as we shared our similar experience of shaking while listening to Christine Blasey Ford. 

    An Angry Black Woman, No Matter the Reason, Is Thought to Have an Attitude

    Burn It Down isn’t about what makes you angry, it’s about anger itself. In the essay, “The One Emotion Black Women Are Free to Explore,” Monet Patrice Thomas writes, “[A]nger spread through me like red wine across a marble floor, but I did not show it.” She describes her conditioning: “An angry Black woman, no matter the reason, is thought to have an attitude.” Her rage was inside her “like a shaken can of soda.”

    In “Rebel Girl,” Melissa Febos writes, “I knew that I was queer and that it wasn’t safe to admit that at school.” She burned with self-hatred that was “slowly blackening my insides.” Then she met Nadia, who was “six feet tall in combat boots … with a shaved head and arms emblazoned with tattoos. She stomped rather than walked.” 

    Lisa Marie Basile describes living with chronic pain and all of the stupid, condescending advice that dismissed her very real symptoms in “My Body Is a Sickness Called Anger.” One doc tells her she probably stuck her finger in her eye too hard. She writes, “I gently remind the doctor…that feeling like absolute shit with two enlarged assholes for eyes just cannot be normal.” Friends say she looks fine, then offer useless unsolicited advice like yoga, green juices, and giving up gluten. Basile’s snarky inner dialogue is hilarious. 

    There is an energizing quality to women’s rage and it builds a united front. Dancyger has succeeded with her goal to “create a place where anger could live” and her vision to display rage on pages that “sizzle and smoke.” As the last sentence of her intro reads, “Our collective silence-breaking will make us larger, expansive, like fire, ready to burn it all down.” 

    Burn It Down is now available on Amazon and elsewhere.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Lara B. Sharp's Transformation

    Lara B. Sharp's Transformation

    “AA is like parenting for adults. I got to have it as a child. My mom abandoning me in AA was the best thing she ever did for me.”

    Close your eyes for a sec and pretend you’re watching a movie. It’s Christmas Eve, 1975. Lara, a five-year-old girl with white-gold hair, big green eyes, and olive skin, is scurrying to keep up with her mother, a five-foot-eight beauty.

    Noni’s hair is black, her eyes blacker. Her stiletto heels click at a manic pace on the Manhattan pavement. With her large pupils and long-legged strides, she seems to be on speed but could also be soused. Her upper body teeters down Delancey Street. By rote she steps over drunks and around junkies without slowing, oblivious to her daughter racing behind. Lara mimics Noni’s dodges and weaves, also unfazed by the bodies littering the sidewalk. 

    Everybody Has a Screwed-Up Childhood, Right?

    The Lower East Side neighborhood was “kind of peaceful then. Heroin addicts are docile,” Sharp tells The Fix. “They don’t make trouble.” Yet, as she and her Mom laughed at the late shoppers, a speeding bullet whizzed by Sharp’s head.

    “It was so close it blew out my left ear. We never saw doctors so nobody knew I lost my hearing on that side.” Noni frequently exploded at Sharp for “ignoring” her, but the child couldn’t hear much of what was said. Noni mistook the lack of response as proof that Sharp was dimwitted, or willfully not paying attention.

    “Everybody has a screwed-­­­up childhood, right?” Sharp smiles and shrugs. “The only kids I knew were like me—living with a single mom, with no idea who their father was. We were like goldfish in water. You can’t see the water because it’s all you know.”

    When her friend Marisol bragged about getting a letter from her father, Sharp didn’t believe her at first.

    “I was so jealous. Not only did Marisol have a father, she knew his name and where he was. She could go visit him. They had conversations.” In Sharp’s five-year-old brain, it didn’t matter that Marisol’s father lived in prison.

    Today Sharp is a graduate of Smith College and has written for Teen Vogue, Longreads, and is a top writer on Quora. Two years ago, her “Mansplaining Pool Post” went viral.

    Poolside Johnny

    Sharp explained what prompted the post: “Women all know a Poolside Johnny. We’ve met him in a hundred different places in a hundred different ways.” She was engrossed, reading Rebecca Solnit’s book Men Explain Things to Me, when a man walked up and offered to be her mentor. 

    “It was so funny. I started thumb-typing everything he said.” When she told him her name was Gloria Steinem, he responded “it’s too Jewish.”   

    “So I said, ‘How about Betty Friedan?’ He just wasn’t getting it. He didn’t know who they were or that they both went to Smith College. While he’s still talking, I popped the conversation on the internet.”

    When she realized he was not going to stop talking, she left. 

    “I took a long shower,” she said. “When I get out, my phone is blowing up! Facebook alerts. My first thought was a terrorist attack. Then I see it’s my post. It kept going and going.”

    The famous post has now been written about in 6 languages and 20 publications including Glamour, Elle, The Daily Mail, Huffington Post and Refinery29. Sharp was surprised by the attention, especially from literary agents who wanted to rep her memoir, Do the Hustle, about growing up in foster care.

    Love Is…

    “My mom taught me what I needed to know. Like how to falsify documents—birth certificates, marriage licenses. We ran them through tea and let them dry on the window sill to make them look aged.” She also gave Sharp notebooks “to write everything down,” and great advice, like “Sometimes abortions are better than husbands.”

    Beautiful Noni attracted men and married some. Sharp has no idea exactly how many.

    Sharp self-published her first book at age five. She folded pieces of paper into a book and punched holes in it with scissors, tying it together with a ribbon. The book was a gift for Noni’s most terrifying husband, who verbally and physically abused both of them. 

    Sharp’s book was titled Love Is. Each page contained an answer: A hug. A kiss. Asking someone how they are. She thought if he had that information, he would be nice.

    “It didn’t go as planned,” said Sharp. “He accused me of plagiarizing. A five-year-old. So yeah, that was my first book, Love Is for a sociopath.”

    Noni’s struggles with alcohol and drugs started before Sharp was born. “She was that way my whole life, which I think is good because if you had a great parent and then they go downhill, I’m sure it’s a lot harder.”

    Sharp didn’t know any other life: “I met a girl outside of our circle who invited me over. It was strange when we walked in and her mother wasn’t lying face down in a puddle of her own body fluid. I was so surprised when the girl’s mother served sandwiches at a table with matching chairs.”

    Sharp recalls Noni’s feelings were so overwhelming, she couldn’t control her behavior: “When my mother had a feeling, she expressed it by throwing a chair. When I voiced a feeling, even if it was just, I’m hungry, I’m hot, I’m tired, my mother’s immediate response was, ‘No you’re not.’”

    AA and Foster Care

    When Noni found AA, Sharp learned there were people in the world who lived and behaved differently. 

    “Sitting in those rooms, I listened to people express themselves. They did it so clearly, appropriately. Well, despite the cursing,” she laughs. “What I mean is, they’d use words to say what had happened and how it made them feel and talk about what they were going to do. They’d say things like, ‘I’m going to sit with the feeling.’ That’s when, at seven, I realized, ‘Wow, you don’t have to react to a feeling.’”

    By age eight, Sharp understood that Noni wasn’t bad, she was sick. “AA is like parenting for adults. I got to have it as a child. My mom abandoning me in AA was the best thing she ever did for me.” After getting her court slip signed, Noni would leave Sharp in the meeting while she went to the bar across the street. In those rooms, Sharp learned that addiction was hereditary and decided she didn’t want to test her luck. She considers herself an “alcoholic waiting to happen” and has always been cautious about drinking.

    At nine, Sharp went into foster care. At every new place she was shuffled to, she asked if they knew how to reach her mother.” Responses ranged from “No, she couldn’t take care of you” to “She left you and isn’t coming back.”

    “Noni never came to visit me. No one did.” She tried every number in her notebook. None worked. Finally, she reached one of Noni’s friends who said Noni had moved to Florida.

    “Birthdays passed—no calls, no cards. By 12, I started to believe she’d abandoned me,” Sharp said, “I figured nobody wants me because I’m unlovable. I talk too much, get in the way. I’m a burden.”

    Sharp told me, “I think those social workers were trying to help but, as fucked up as my mother was, before foster care, I knew she loved me. Foster care took that away.”

    The places she lived all had one thing in common: Jesus. Most of Sharp’s foster parents were fundamentalist Christians.

    “I didn’t do Jesus. I wasn’t down with that. I knew this hippie guy from Egypt didn’t look like Kurt Cobain. That nonsense never sat well with me. And I’m glad my mother passed on her rabid femininity. She never yelled ‘Oh my God.’ For her it was, ‘Oh my Goddess.’”

    On the Grift

    Some of the families had money, but many just liked collecting a check. They’d take in as many kids as they could but they’d spend the money and not feed the foster kids.

    “We were always so hungry,” said Sharp. “Whenever they gave us anything to eat it was rice.”

    As she got older, her options narrowed.

    “Once you hit double digits, the number of homes that will take you in plummets.”

    The majority of older kids live in group homes, residential facilities. Or, if there’s no place to put them, foster kids are sent to detention homes. Sharp says at group homes, there was a lot of Christianity, too.

    Sharp credits those East Village AA meetings with teaching her that if a situation is uncomfortable remove yourself from the situation. At 14, she ran away. Homeless, she wound up sleeping in Washington Square Park where she met “Gay Cher,” a transgender drug addict and sex worker.

    “We were on the grift together,” said Sharp. “Gay Cher became my BFF. She gave me a makeover so I could pass for 18, get a job, and earn enough to rent an apartment.”

    The plan worked. Sharp found jobs in the nightclub business: waitress, hostess, party promoter and bartender. She tried dancing and recalls: “I was a decent go-go dancer but never great at pole dancing. But I made a lot of money from then on.”

    Doing the Next Right Thing

    On 9/11 Sharp lost friends when the towers fell. Aching to do something but feeling helpless, she credits AA for guiding her to “do the next right thing.” At 31, she examined her life and realized she wanted to quit bartending. For years, she’d been serving alcohol to customers who had drinking problems. But, without any formal education, her opportunities were limited. As an avid reader since the days Noni left her alone in libraries, she decided to take the GED. On the day of the test, she ended up in the wrong room and was given a college exam instead of the high school equivalency placement. She aced it, and enrolled in a two-year associate’s degree program for free. After that she won a scholarship to Smith College. With hard work and luck, she found her way to a career as a writer. 

    “I’m not angry at my mom anymore. I’m grateful that she abandoned me in libraries and AA. Now I have a loving and kind husband. We live in a beautiful home in a safe and friendly neighborhood. I learned everything I needed to know to take care of myself. And I’ve done a damn good job.”

    Lara B. Sharp reads an excerpt from her memoir in progress:

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Post-Kavanaugh, Women’s Self-Care Needs to Lose the Alcohol

    Post-Kavanaugh, Women’s Self-Care Needs to Lose the Alcohol

    Alcohol, when construed as the first or best line of self-care, actually renders us less effective in resisting an exploitive system that makes legal space for our bodies to be legislated, controlled, and raped.

    “Should we get some wine?” I asked him, pushing a bit of sweet potato around on my plate. I felt my cheeks flush and a weird half smile launch across my lips, the way it always does when I feel embarrassed or awkward or sad or anything really. Whenever I’m feeling anything too much. My partner looked startled.

    “What? Why?” he set his own fork and knife down, leaned back in his chair. “I mean, an IPA sounds really good right now. But I guess, just, what’s the motivation behind it?”

    It had been 62 days since either of us had had anything to drink, thanks to a self-imposed sobriety challenge after I’d watched my already heavy alcohol consumption creep up and up and eventually become overwhelming in the years since Trump’s election, post-Access Hollywood tape, post-everything. Two months was a long time, I reasoned now. A quality effort. And in all likelihood, an accused sexual predator would sit on the Supreme Court when we woke up the next morning. If there was ever a good reason to nurse a nice bottle of beer to ease some of the anxiety, fear, anger and hopelessness I was feeling, both as a woman and a victim of past sexual abuse, now was it.

    Wasn’t it?

    “I mean, would this be about escaping things?” he continued, gently, pushing, asking the question I had begged him, at the start of our not-drinking, to raise when I inevitably said I wanted back off the wagon. Because the answer was, is, will always be: Of course.

    Of course. I have made a lifestyle out of escaping things, of turning away from what’s hard and ugly and painful. Either that or confronting darkness only when I was a couple of drinks in or after I’d settled beneath the protective blanket of Klonopin or during the rush of false energy following a purge, all the food I’d consumed vomited up and flushed quietly away. In a very real way, I can trace my life as a ping-pong game of silences and rages, each assisted along by some substance or behavior I’ve begun to describe as “not me,” in that they’ve all been designed to take me out myself and, as a result, out of proper caring—for this world, its injustices, its humanness, its pain.

    There’s a lot of rhetoric around the usefulness of women’s rage right now, but what keeps getting left out is how, so often, we (middle-class, white women) use anger to stand in for or erase action. How, so often, anger becomes the justification for harm. And for me—and the rising number of American women turning to alcohol to deal with stress, trauma, and its aftereffects—that often takes the shape of self-sabotage in a bottle to numb out, ease anxiety, filter boredom, help us slip into apathy dressed up as protection and self-care. Let me be clear, and I speak from experience: Drowning your sorrows is the opposite of self-care.

    Wine will not heal your wounds, will not even tend to them, no matter what the patriarchal messaging around alcohol promises you. And I say patriarchal because it’s true: Our American culture of binge-drinking and heavy alcohol consumption is directly and implicitly tied to the capitalist, racist, structural misogyny upon which our country is founded—and through which marginalized groups are subjugated, oppressed, and continually, insistently Othered. We only have to look to history to see the ways in which alcohol was used to keep said groups under the heel of white men in power: White Europeans, for example, notorious for their “extreme drinking” on the frontier, encouraged both alcohol trade and excessive consumption among Native populations, later weaponizing the stereotype of the “drunk Indian” against them. Years later, slave masters on Southern plantations developed strategies to carefully control slaves’ access to alcohol during the week, only to encourage them to drink heavily on Saturday evenings and special holidays. Frederick Douglass later castigated the so-called controlled promotion of drunkenness as a means of keeping black men and women in “a state of perpetual stupidity” that reduced the risks of rebellion. More recently, increased experiences of racism have been explicitly, causally linked to riskier drinking among black women on college campuses. Meanwhile, growing wealth, educational, employment, housing and health disparities between minorities and white Americans have led to a much greater increase in alcohol consumption among those communities between 2002 and 2013, a study published in JAMA Psychiatry suggests (although it’s not much of a stretch to say that increase is significantly greater in our Post-Trump world of racist nationalism, its cruel policies, and resulting demoralization among the people affected the most).

    Alcohol, too, has become the primary coping mechanism for women in America, regardless of race or ethnicity: Overall, female alcohol use disorder in the United States has increased by 83.7 percent, according to that same study. High risk drinking among women, defined as more than seven drinks in a week or three drinks in a day, has increased by 58 percent. We only have to look at mommy or work wine culture to see the ways in which alcohol is used to keep women quiet, dulled, apathetic and convinced they need booze to survive motherhood or employment or both. So perhaps it is no surprise the contemporary rhetoric of white feminism is rife with messages that draw a supposedly intuitive connection from anger to self-care, which is inevitably linked to drinking. We get tired? We pop open a bottle. We get scared? We fill a glass. We get angry? We rage over shots or cocktails or champagne. None of this helps us. In fact, all of this renders us less effective in resisting an exploitive system that makes legal space for our bodies to be legislated, controlled, and raped.

    “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” Audre Lorde famously said in her 1984 call to and critique of the internalized patriarchy of white Western women. Alcohol, when construed as the first or best line of self-care, I’d argue, is one of the master’s tools. We indulge in the drinks that American culture (and American feminism) says we deserve, and we get raped while the men who were drinking alongside us get off and then get nominated to the Supreme Court. It’s a double bind—one that bears calling attention to, however hard it is to look at. We should be able to say that it’s absolutely, undeniably immoral for a man to abuse a woman’s body while she is drunk (or sober or somewhere in between). That rape or abuse is never a woman’s fault because of what she was drinking (or wearing or saying or where she walking or what time of night it was, etc., etc., forever, etc.). And we should also be able to challenge the messages that encourage a woman to relax or to rage or to start a revolution only after she has a glass of wine in her hand. 

    Alcohol is a depressant. It anesthetizes our pain and our power, our minds and our bodies, and we will need all of ourselves to fight what will come in the next weeks, months and years as those same bodies become the battleground upon which men’s petty force and overwhelming self-hatred wage war. Look, I’m barely nine weeks sober. I never hit the rock bottom people describe in AA or alcohol recovery programs. I don’t know if I plan on a lifetime of sobriety or if I’ll have a celebratory beer after I finish grading all of my students’ papers over fall break. What I do know? I spent years using alcohol to avoid the work I knew I should be doing. The healing I knew should be seeking. I know many women who don’t drink, who don’t turn to alcohol to deal with exhaustion and fear and heartbreak. I know many, many more who do. I’m not advocating for prohibition or teetotalism. But I am asking women—white women in particular—to take a hard look at what they mean when they say self-care, and what they’re hoping to accomplish by drinking their way through.

    We certainly don’t need #BeersforBrett, the hashtag that surfaced among white, wealthy men celebrating Kavanaugh’s confirmation Saturday. But we definitely don’t need feminist cocktails, either, as I saw recently championed on a Facebook group for women scholars and rhetoricians. Jessa Crispin has warned white women against misconstruing the philosophy of self-care that Audre Lorde conceived of as way for activist women of color to ease some of the burden of dismantling racism and misogyny while living at the very intersection of such oppression. “Now it’s applied to, I don’t know, getting a blowout,” Crispin writes. “And pedicures. Even if your pedicurist is basically a slave.” Especially if you’ve got a glass of champagne to assist you along in ignoring that reality. So, no. We don’t need rage if we’re going to use it as an excuse to drink, to sink into dispassion.

    We need real action. We need true healing. I didn’t need wine on Friday night, and the community of women I want to support through this troubling time didn’t need me buzzed or drunk or hollowly chill. We need the opposite of that. In our activism and in our downtime, we need a clear-eyed, hangover-free commitment to dismantling absolutely everything that violates us—whether through false comfort or force, apathy or abuse.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • She Recovers Brings High End Feminist Recovery to Los Angeles

    She Recovers Brings High End Feminist Recovery to Los Angeles

    I could say a hundred things about every incredible woman I encountered over the weekend and it would not hold a candle to the inspiration I felt. The only catch? The price of admission.

    One year ago, Harvey Weinstein and men like him were purged from their high positions in industry jobs due to allegations of sexual assault, misconduct and worse. Across the nation, dominoes fell while survivors locked arms and commiserated. Crooked Rehabs and their rapey cult leaders were dethroned or taken to prison along with Bill Cosby—their paternal halos were tossed back into the stream that raged forward without them. Me Too and Time’s Up have gained momentum as women insist on equity and diversity in every corner of our lives whether it’s work, rehab or the Olympics.

    On Friday, September 14th, hundreds of women redefined recovery for themselves with a fresh, feminist lens at She Recovers, a conference held at The Beverly Hills Hilton. She Recovers was founded in 2011 by Dr. Dawn Nickels, a warm, honey-haired overly credentialed sober badass from Victoria, Canada who has accumulated decades of 12-step recovery and one prescription drug relapse after she lost her mother to Leukemia. With years in AA, Dr. Nickels saw a missing piece of the Big Book that excluded women. She wanted to offer an alternative for women who long for that missing piece.

    She Recovers is branded around the idea that we are all struggling to recover from something—not only drugs and alcohol. This expanded view of recovery has the potential to reach women who have survived sexual assault, abuse, cancer, heartache, self-harm, homelessness, eating disorders and all kinds of suffering. The weekend was dedicated to healing. The only catch? The price of admission.

    I received a few emails from Dr. Nickels confirming the schedule of events and I was really excited to attend. Not only did the line-up include comedians and authors I’ve long loved like Cheryl Strayed, Janet Mock, Amy Dresner, Sarah Blondin, Tara Mohr, Mackenzie Phillips, Laurie Dhue and others, but there were several workshop panels offered with helpful, vital topics like “Changing our Relationship with Food” (Shelly-Anne McKay), and “Money as Power” (Allison Kylstad), “Standing our Ground” (Darlene Lancer), and even “Finding Forgiveness” (Ester Nicholson). The mind, body, spirit approach to recovery was factored into the weekend to include fitness classes like Yoga by Taryn Strong, Pilates, meditation, and an early morning run.

    I drove to the Beverly Hills Hilton and arrived after registration opened at around 3:30 p.m. After getting off the elevator, I stepped into a conference room that was turned into a temporary mini-marketplace. Tables and fashion racks displayed oceans of lotions, soaps and mood lifting supplements, dark chocolate and yoga pants. Postcards and stickers offered the promise of energy shifts and emotional well-being. I figured if I was going to focus on recovery all weekend, I wanted a mental lubricant in the form of a dopamine supplement. I was being marketed to like a mofo and the rhetorical trope was tailored to fit. The buy message on tap was this:

    You are perimenopausal and you are raging. Your sleep is shit and your relationships are strained. You are horny. You are prickly. Take the gummies and no one gets hurt.

    I snatched the vegan, non-GMO dopamine-enhanced gummy bears and pocketed the chocolate for later.

    Around the corner, a half-dozen aggressively kind, smiling women sat behind long plastic registration tables handing out laminated passes. They directed me to where the opening reception was held.

    The Beverly Hills Hilton is a fancy place. And She Recovers attracts fancy women.

    According to their website and other sources, the bulk of paying attendees are the wealthy, white feminist elite ages 30-69 with a household income of 80K and over. Registration costs $500, not including the rooms or the parking.

    I asked Dr. Nickels how she planned to engage younger women, women of color, other-abled and the LGBTQ community. She replied, “The thing that we are most proud of related to LA is that we awarded 40 scholarships. We have been attracting WOC and members of the LGBTQ to our community – especially LGB – but we recognize much more needs to be done. We also need to work harder to include other-abled women to join us. We were very fortunate to have already made close connections with some amazing WOC and thus our program exhibited much more diversity than we had been able to do in NYC. Janet Mock is a powerhouse – and we loved having her – but despite efforts to do so, we didn’t have any success making direct contact with influencers in the trans community in LA to ensure that the trans community knew about our event.”

    Given the steep cost of the weekend and the fact that registration for the conference was sold out, I wondered if presenters were paid or not, so I asked around. Those who answered requested anonymity.

    Some presenters were not offered payment, but their registration fees were waived. The speakers and presenters who were not paid were happy to be asked but some were disappointed they were not offered the opportunity to have a book signing. Two of the speakers were paid high fees (between 16 and 20K) to speak. Those who were not paid used the weekend to promote their materials and businesses; they also wanted to share their experiences and connect to other women in recovery. So, who gets a seat at the table? Follow the money and you can see that She Recovers prioritizes celebrity.

    This is where AA (and other 12-step programs) and She Recovers part company: AA has no red carpet; AA doesn’t cost money to attend and speakers are not paid at meetings. AA is an anonymous program that does not acknowledge celebrity or participate in the cult of personality—at least not as outlined in the traditions. While it has its own shortcomings, AA welcomes everyone.

    Outside on the grass, several women stood in small clusters by a table of pastel colored macaroons. One of them was Shelly-Anne McKay, a delightful woman from Sasquatch Canada who led the panel on our relationship with food. Another woman told us she had just arrived from France. Others chimed in from the Bay Area, Washington and Oregon. When I asked the group what they were recovering from, the ones that replied stared up at the cerulean late afternoon sky and said, “Everything.”

    I asked Shelly-Anne McKay what brought her here. She replied: “I love the She Recovers philosophy that every woman’s path to recovery may be unique. Not everyone finds solace in AA.”

    I should tell you now I’m 23 years sober in AA and have studied the Big Book (the basic text of Alcoholics Anonymous). It was written by and about men. The language is old-timey and urges men to check their overinflated egos, to give up “golf fever” and to dive into service instead. The narrative of the shattered, broken self is a theme that is relieved by the belief in a higher power. The one chapter to women, “To Wives,” is heteronormative and sexist, designed to pacify neglected women and encourage them not to make waves.

    She Recovers was designed for wave-makers.

    Back in the ballroom, the first keynote speaker was wave-maker Cheryl Strayed. Interestingly, Strayed is not in AA and does not consider herself an addict (to my knowledge). But before she spoke, Paula Williams took the stage.

    I was concerned for Williams the same way I am for any person with no public speaking experience who collapses under the pressure of adrenaline and stage fright. She seemed mortified to be center stage and she spoke to that. In that moment of terror, I fell in love with her rawness. Williams constructed an art installation — definitely my favorite thing in the mini-marketplace room — called “Shame Booth” (also the name of her podcast) where a person could sit alone inside a vintage phone booth and confess their secrets into a silent ear piece and then leave. Segments of their voices are recorded here: Shamebooth Audio. The only piece of that secret they took home was a new pair of strangely oversized white briefs with the big red words “No Shame” on the butt. And yes, I got my granny panties.

    Cheryl Strayed brought the house down with her seasoned message that illuminated the question: how do we do the thing we cannot do? Her personal stories contained humility, resilience and heart. I’m very familiar with her content because I teach her memoir and essay collection “Dear Sugar” to my nonfiction students at UCLA extension. The crowd was enthralled as Strayed discussed the suffering she endured due to her mother’s illness, the aftermath of her grief, and the hopefulness she offered as a reprieve to that grief. She answered questions that were not really questions for a long time. At some point while listening to her, I realized that — whether we were addicts or not — the room vibrated with undeniable hopefulness and willingness to carry that which we thought we could not carry; but in the end we find that we can, we have — and we will.

    I could say a hundred things about every incredible woman I encountered over the weekend from Friday evening until Sunday afternoon and it would not hold a candle to the inspiration I felt. I only wished there had been some scheduled time for us to all connect and mingle in one place away from the speaker/workshop/formal dinner format. The schedule was jam-packed and felt a bit rushed. The highlight for me was Saturday night: The Gala Dinner.

    I never know what to wear to formal events, so I brought a couple of options. I decided that nothing says Formal Gala like clear stripper heels with red rhinestone hearts in the middle and shiny black Bad Sandy (from Grease) pants. A petite brunette with tattoos on her arms was looking around. She looked as lost and overwhelmed and alone as I felt so I asked her if she wanted to find a place to sit with me.

    The dinner honored celebrated change-makers and wave-makers who dared to break the silence of addiction and alcoholism like Betty Ford and the woman who started a movement to disrupt sexual violence, Me Too activist Tarana Burke, but the speaker who got a standing ovation (which seemed to befuddle her) was My Fair Junkie author and comic Amy Dresner.

    The opulent ballroom fell silent as Dresner walked up to the podium wearing a vintage Indian jumpsuit with billowing legs. She did a funny dance and squatted.

    “I was attempting 70’s super model but I’m way more Genie, don’t you think?”

    After explaining how neuroscience proves we can burn new pathways of stability in our minds by taking consistent, disciplined action, she said, “If you’re waiting to take the action, you’ll be waiting forever.”

    Dresner’s journey of addiction to recovery was a beacon of inspiration and the best part of the weekend. Her talk embodied all that She Recovers hoped to convey because her story contained universal, gritty humor and you can’t package that. Her message was the very thing I craved the whole weekend. She told us the worst thing that ever happened to her was definitely the best thing that ever happened to her, but she could only see that after experiencing jail and street sweeping. The room erupted in laughter.

    Dresner ended by telling us that after getting three years sober for like the 14th time, she asked her dad, “Are you ashamed of me? When you talk to your friends do you feel ashamed?”

    “My friends wish their kid was as unbreakable as you,” he said.

    Then, looking out at the 500 wet faces, she told us: “Remember, that’s what all of you are: unbreakable.”

    And dropped the mic.

    View the original article at thefix.com