Famesick: A Memoir by Lena Dunham - 18

Triggering

As the therapy session with Jenni approached, I sat in my bed and practiced what I wanted to say over and over again. In the weeks leading up to the big day, my imagined entreaty changed—in tone and in substance. Sometimes, I was a power bitch who was mad as hell and wasn’t going to take it anymore. (“Listen, I wouldn’t even talk to my DOG like you talk to me.”) Other times I was soft-spoken, fragile, weeping into a tissue. (“I just want to find a way that you can love me like you did before.”) And in still another version, I was calm and focused, the kind of woman who wears corduroys and sits spread-eagle in front of a group and takes turns looking everyone in the eye as she teaches “vaso-vagal relaxation techniques.” I could imagine being all of these women and none of them, but I would have to be someone sitting in therapy with Jenni, ready to tackle the issue that was actually a million issues.

When I had told her I wasn’t willing to speak unless a therapist was present, it had seemed—to me, at least, in my sixty-something days sober brain that was still coming slowly back online—like a choice born of maturity, of the desire to have a constructive dialogue, to avoid painful misfires.

But the more I considered what I’d say during the session, the less sure I was the session was even a good idea. I hadn’t asked to meet in therapy because I was brave and adult. No, what I wanted was the same thing I had always wanted: to be assured, to be coddled, to be promised that I wouldn’t, couldn’t push her away. But I’d already done it. Adults shouldn’t need these pathetic guarantees of safety. Why could some people let their sharp-tongued friend’s barbs roll off their backs, laugh it up, keep it easy? Why did I always take it all so fucking seriously? In any case, there would be no assurances now, and if I knew Jenni, they wouldn’t come for a long time, if ever. She was practical, and she didn’t want to throw out a dynamic that (more or less) worked. But we weren’t going to kumbaya our way back to it. It was either going to keep making us cash or not.

And now, after years of this—being so sensitive that a text from Jenni without punctuation could throw me into spasms of self-doubt—we had officially moved past the point where fifty minutes with a therapist, however skilled he was, could set us right. Our options were either to submit to the discomfort of therapy for as long as it took to “heal,” or to head home in opposite directions, kicking rocks the whole way.

I forced anyone who would listen to work the impending therapy session through with me. The people who would listen were mostly the exhausted former junkies who congregated at Canter’s after a Saturday morning meeting, people who had been to places much darker than where I was and were comforted by walking me through my basic predicament. I was conscious of not bringing it to anyone we knew mutually—the few I’d tried responded with a simple, “You know how Jenni is—she’ll come back around, just distract yourself.”

But what had I been doing if not distracting myself? I’d tried everything from fucking a forty-year-old skater who lived with his mother to writing prose poems to joining meditation circles to nursing a dog named Bowie with an incurably limp leg. I’d bought track suits and fat gold earrings, gone to a Brazilian steakhouse, had forced reunions with every friend I hadn’t seen in five years or more. I’d made lists entitled FORMATIVE TRAUMAS and THINGS THAT ARE STUPID BUT STRESS ME OUT ANYWAY. I had avoided, in every way I could, the inevitability of the conversation that was coming.

And I had come to realize—after endless circular discussions with the people I paid to have them with me, agents and lawyers and publicists and therapists—that Jenni and I couldn’t continue our shared business. For starters, I was tapped out. Second, I had never been able to create unless I felt safe, cozy even. And if my situation weren’t enough, she didn’t seem all that delighted, either. But perhaps, I hoped, the removal of the pressure to make life and art together might mean Jenni and I could find our way back together in a new formation, in what is sometimes called “a friendship.”

A few days before we were due at therapy, Jenni texted me a link to an article about a starlet wearing a halter top made of Beanie Babies, the kind of message we’d exchanged thousands of times over the years. She still knew the way to my heart.

But for once, my reply was not instantaneous and bursting with affection, but instead, slow and a bit stilted.

“It’s been strange not to share these things over the past few weeks,” I wrote.

“Pretty fucking weird,” she responded. I could feel her, present again. And I knew this move—waiting until someone cracked from lack of affection, then offering it up again, as tempting as cheesecake on a cheat day. I was careful not to slip back, despite feeling how easy, how lovely, it would be to just forget the last six months and hold on for dear life.

In the office waiting room, we greeted each other like loose acquaintances surprised to learn that we shared a gynecologist: “Oh, hello.”

Before we could go any further, the therapist appeared—tall and angular and anonymous in his gray spectacles, his gray slacks, ushering us into his gray office.

I stood in my sundress, swaying a bit with nerves, as I watched her sit down on the opposite end of the sofa. She was wearing a ruffled white prairie blouse and jeans, like a French teenager on vacation.

“So, can you tell me a little bit about why you’re here?” the therapist began.

We each tried to speak. We each interrupted ourselves with our tears, tears I felt too embarrassed and estranged to shed. I did consider crawling into her lap—how could I not? How many times had I done it before?

“She wanted the session, so…” Jenni motioned to me.

Before my second try at getting a full sentence out, I was crying again. I have never known whether my own propensity to tears is a weakness or a form of manipulation, but it’s one of the qualities I trust least in myself. It seems especially damning that I can also vomit on command.

“You have been my best friend for eight and a half years,” I blubbered. “My family. My, uh…everything. I probably put too much on you; I know that. And I must have made you very anxious at times; I know that, too.” I looked at Jenni, who had never appeared more naïve or innocent than she did right then in her Laura Ingalls Wilder shirt, mouth crumpled. “And I don’t think we are making each other very happy,” I said. “In fact, we’re making each other sad.”

She nodded, her arms crossed, palms tucked into armpits. “Yeah, I think…yeah.” She let her head drop forward, exhausted.

“So the question,” the therapist said—nonplussed by the speed with which we’d done his job for him—“is whether, from this long-standing business dynamic, there is a friendship to be salvaged here?”

I looked up brightly. Yes, I thought. There it is.

But before I could speak, Jenni looked at him, then back at me, and shrugged. In her look, I saw every moment we had ever misunderstood each other, from the day eight years ago she had told me to just fucking eat right until now. I felt every moment I’d swallowed my own words, hoped that they wouldn’t come back up at the wrong time. But before I could respond, she turned to me. “I just have one request.”

“Anything,” I said. “Really anything.”

“Please don’t write about this immediately. I know how you work, and that you will. But please, just not right away.”

She knew me. She knew my process, better than anyone. She had seen me write my way through experiences, write my way past them, and sometimes write them into existence, as if I was holding Harold’s purple crayon. I felt myself saying goodbye to all of this knowing and being known, and tried to summon a perfect response—something that expressed that I knew: all the ways this had been hard, all the ways I had been hard. Hard to corral, hard to understand, hard to love. All the ways she had been my best and always. All the ways she had confounded me, terrified me, made me my best and worst.

But then she began to gather her things—purse, phone, a CVS bag—and stood. “Thank you for your help,” she said to the therapist. I stared at him plaintively, as if he might stop her, tell her that we had forty-seven more minutes to use as we needed to. But he just shrugged, too.

It took me seven years to write this, mostly because she told me not to, and I wanted her to know—in my last act as her person, the person to whom she’d once given a golden ring that read “Best & Always” in cursive—that I knew how to keep a promise.

It took me many drafts to even type Jenni’s name in this manuscript—the book was full of stories that made little sense without her presence, were missing some essential seed or spark because I felt I could not include her. Ultimately, it became clear I was going to have to choose—between telling an honest story and avoiding any mention of her. I knew she hadn’t said “ever,” but rather, “immediately”—but it’s telling that, even seven and a half years after last laying eyes on her, it all still feels immediate.

The truth is that there is no explaining those years without explaining Jenni—not just the power I imbued her with, the fear she could incite in me with a crooked look, but also the magic. I’m allowed this, to remember our nights working on scripts in Palm Springs, sitting in the hot tub and talking about a shared future that made the fact that my boyfriend barely checked in since he’d gotten on the tour bus feel a little more okay. It made being far from my family feel safe, as if that’s what we do—we grow up and make new families, crawl into vacant nests and set up shop. I can remember the way we were always hungry for the same foods—rich things, like burgers and pâté and pasta vongole, and how I could smell her—soap and conditioner and a little sweat—a moment before she came into a room and long after she left it. I haven’t written about what her children meant to me, or how much I loved watching her get dressed for a night out, putting a casual bend in her hair with the straightening iron, patting blurry red lipstick on with her pointer finger, asking me to zip the back of a long floral dress. In those moments, she was everything: the sister I no longer had, the mother I could no longer be sure was thrilled to see my name on her caller ID, the public that might adore me or might just shoot me a savage glare, depending on the day. I’m sure that was too big a job to give anyone. But I also know I was too young to understand what I could and couldn’t expect, and I know that she was older.

To this day, I think about an evening—a few years into our run—when I lay in her king-size bed after my first surgery as she brought me coconut water and a heating pad. I was in pain—we didn’t yet know this would be the first of many surgeries, and so it seemed perhaps like a fun little snow day of sorts—and she stayed up with me as the medicine kicked in, laughing until my stitches almost burst at an episode of a sitcom that neither of us even liked. She fell asleep first, bunched up purple sweatpants in a sea of fancy linen sheets, her hands curled under her head like a kid dreaming. I watched her, wondering what I had ever done to earn all this love and luck. It was impossible, just then, to understand that you can earn a whole bunch and then spend it just as quickly.

Outside the therapist’s office, in the July sun on the east side, we walked down the stairs out of the nondescript building together. Outside on the pavement, I faced her—she was already facing partially away, sending a text. I thought about asking where she was headed next, but it seemed invasive. I thought about trying to continue the conversation, but I still knew her well enough to know that there was almost nothing she wanted less. For a moment, I wondered if we’d hug, but her arms stayed tight at her sides and, after a beat so considered it felt scripted, we walked in opposite directions, her little leather fisherman sandals clicking against the sidewalk as she passed Urth Caffé and her form started to soften like a mirage. It’s rare that you get to watch someone walk away and understand that they are really, really going. She didn’t turn around, so I wonder if she feels like I left, too.

A year and a half earlier, Jack and I had taken a vacation. It was a last-ditch effort on my part to seem fun and spontaneous, two adjectives that nobody would use about me at my best, let alone when I was fifty pounds down on the diarrhea diet and spending 80 percent of my time lying on a heating pad like a beached whale. I hadn’t done much research into how long it took to get to the Maldives, but I knew a lot of celebrities went there, so how far could it be? Very far, I realized, when I checked our tickets that morning and noticed a layover in Dubai.

The trip was an unmitigated disaster, front to back, starting with the moment I was cautioned for foul language in the Dubai airport McDonald’s. When we arrived at the hotel, we turned out to be two of only six guests occupying an entire island. We were given the sexiest room, an irony that was not lost on two people who barely touched each other anymore, and he fell asleep at eight p.m. while I stayed up late watching Manchester by the Sea and bawling at Casey Affleck’s dramatic restraint. “You can’t just die, honey,” Michelle Williams begs him, and I bawled harder, looking at Jack tangled in the 1500 thread count sheets.

I loved him when he was sleeping, but during the day we did everything we could to avoid looking each other in the eyes. I took hourlong showers, read essays by depressed women, and hurled a bike onto the ground when he insisted I could enjoy our surroundings if I would just change my attitude. “It’s not that hard to decide you’re going to be happy,” he insisted. And maybe he was right.

By day four, there was a pain in my belly so sharp that we got a doctor from another island to boat over with codeine and a stethoscope. From that point, it only worsened, leading to a nail-biting twenty-seven-hour journey home, and a trip straight to the ER, where an intern ordered an X-ray that revealed “shocking constipation.” The enema didn’t work immediately, and so we missed our yearly New Year’s Eve gathering because I was attempting to expel what the intern described as “hardened rocks of fecal matter.”

“But I’ve been pooping,” I protested limply.

No, they explained, I’d been doing something they described as “superficial pooping.”

“You can do it,” Jack had said, as I tried to hold the soapy water in for twenty minutes. “Just get this done and let’s get home, please.”

“I can’t,” I cried. “I can’t.” (You try holding a jug of sea water in your asshole for a third of an hour. It’s hard.)

As I watched my feet, in their yellow hospital socks, contort against the Lysoled Formica floor, I remembered the one beautiful moment we’d shared on our vacation: Jack and I had woken ourselves up in the night to watch the sea turtle babies hatch. Our alarms went off at three-thirty a.m. , and we pulled our pajama pants, sweaters, and flip-flops on and ran to the beach. “How do they know exactly when they’ll do it?” he asked skeptically. “Like, won’t it just happen when it happens?” Still, we shone our iPhone flashlights at the sand.

And there they were. Hundreds of them, coming up from inside the sand, shiny green hatchlings the size of quarters, so determined that they looked almost angry. They scrambled for the water, flinging themselves into the foamy tide with a lack of fear that took my breath away.

I watched Jack watch them, narrating the story of their first minutes in silly voices, and thought, There’s nothing that can’t be fixed. We’ll start fresh, begin again. If I try so hard, am so brave and determined like these little guys, we can grow together. Just like someday these turtles will be the size of kiddie pools and astonish scuba divers, I will fix myself and us.

Back in our room, I wrote Jenni a long florid email about the turtles. I had so much to prove—not just to Jack, who had wanted a vacation and gotten another medical crisis, but to everyone who loved me. The paragraph about the baby turtles was really, I’m sure, meant to prove that I, too, was joyful, present, and alive. “We saw hundreds of little turtles go flying toward the surf,” I wrote. “As if there wasn’t any such thing as a predator. They’re going to grow so big, but for now they are so brave!”

How big would they grow? Further research taught me that only about 1 in 1,000 sea turtle hatchlings make it to adulthood. Most are eaten within minutes or taken down by the various threats of the open sea.

I’d run to Los Angeles after treatment seeking something like normalcy. After Jenni’s and my breakup, I returned to New York, looking to remake my life yet again. New York and Los Angeles were the only cities I could even think of, and it seemed I was destined to run back and forth between them, on the lam again and again forever.

I rented a prewar apartment in the West Village sight unseen, with a cramped galley kitchen where, like Carrie Bradshaw, I filled the oven with shoes. I allowed a nice girl with a chic website to select all my furnishings and organize all of my things in new and surprising iterations. She did a great job, in that she made the place look like it belonged to someone who was currently busy, successful, phone ringing off the hook—a retreat for a Girlboss who needed a place to unwind.

Never mind that there was nothing to unwind from. That year, the phone rang very infrequently. The offers—big ones, small ones, casual ones, jobs and parties and interviews and essays—also slowed to a trickle, and when anyone asked anything of me, I accepted breathlessly within seconds, so thrilled to be considered that I didn’t even ask myself whether I wanted what was being offered. Whether it was the breakup with Jenni, the Big Bad, or perhaps the fact that I was sick and newly sober (word travels fast, and I’ve never been great at keeping my own secrets), I went from the kind of demands that left me guilty with all I could not fulfill to feeling like I had flirted with radioactivity one too many times and now the label had stuck.

It wasn’t just jobs that quieted down. I could feel that friends—even ones who cared about me, who wanted me to be well—didn’t know how to talk to me or about what I’d done, what I’d said, what I’d been through. They didn’t want to acknowledge the changes in my life, to spare me humiliation. But when they ignored it, it made me feel delusional, paranoid. And I didn’t bring it up because I had learned, during my near decade in Hollywood, that there were few things less appealing than someone listing the ways in which they’d failed.

As I waited for the apartment to be ready, I rented a room at the Greenwich Hotel, which I shared with Bowie, the limp geriatric dog I was determined to keep alive at all costs. Just as I’d been an emergency room frequent flier, Bowie was a regular at the twenty-four-hour veterinarian, where they treated everything from a tumescent growth on her chest to scraped skin on the heel of the leg she dragged. Every time I spent money on extending her life, a kindly vet would offer the idea that perhaps she was heading toward her expiration date.

“Oh, no,” I explained. “She still gets so happy when she smells chicken. She loves to sleep in the crook of my arm. She’s really having fun. She’ll let me know when it’s time.”

And let me know she did—I awoke one morning to find the bathroom spattered with blood, Bowie sitting patiently in the corner, waiting for me to notice. I had refused to accept the vet’s assertion that her chronic bowel disease would never improve, just as so many people had refused to accept my pain as a fact. “Okay, girl,” I whispered to her. “Okay, I see you.”

The vet agreed to come to the hotel, where Bowie’s previous owner—my first real sober friend—and I gathered. The vet heard us speaking in some sober slogans—we referred to Bowie as a “sober woman of dignity and grace”—and admitted that she had actually seen us, Bowie and me, at a meeting on the Bowery late on a Friday night, when I had been so desperate to hear someone share intimacies that I left the hotel with the dog zipped into the front of my hoodie at eleven-thirty p.m. And so here we were, three sober women and a dog who had made her desires apparent. As she gave the injection, and Bowie closed her eyes for the final time, I couldn’t believe we’d only had less than three months together—but those months were the duration of my sober life, in which I’d begun to change but mastered none of it.

At night—sleepless, afraid, unsure of how much more reality I could take—I had talked to her. “Stay with me just until I know what comes next,” I wanted to beg, but she had made herself clear, and who was I to argue with a tired girl whose time had come.

When my new apartment was ready—the one in the new neighborhood that would make me a new person—I moved in and proceeded to never leave the bed. Instead, I established myself on an infrared heating pad and experimented with different variations of the Bachelor franchise. My only scheduled event to speak of was my father showing up every morning at 7:45 a.m. with a latte, as if he were waking me up for a very important meeting. Often, he just sat in my room and watched me sleep. My mother came over at the end of her workday, wordlessly clearing the galley kitchen of takeout boxes.

I was still living in the narrative that going to rehab had been the period at the end of a final sentence, the completion of a story. As a child, I’d had a compulsion to read last lines first, then spend the entire book wondering what it would take to arrive at that conclusion, thrilled every time I spotted a clue. Here I was, certain that if I just stayed put, water coloring in a nightgown until five a.m. every morning, it would become clear that I’d reached my destination.

I was, during that time, under the illusion that healing began and ended with a decision to shift a single behavior—in this case, my Klonopin use. I had started my journey toward rehab, if you’ll remember, ostensibly because I was nauseous. I was now sticking with it for the purported spiritual gains, but in that case, shouldn’t I find my vitality increasing by the day? But now, many months sober, new symptoms presented themselves—not just new health crises, which came rapidly, like massive waves without enough space between them to catch your breath. But surprising fresh ones, like a phobia of social gatherings where I might see someone who had a big life update, who would point at their stomach and smile. Meanwhile, my picker was even more broken than it had been pre-sobriety, and I batted my lashes becomingly at the least safe, healthy, or reformed men within miles.

The one I wasn’t prepared for was writer’s block: In what cruel reality would someone who had written her way through every foible, failure, and humiliation fall to such a low only to find the blinking cursor her greatest enemy? Had I stopped writing because no one had asked? Or had nobody asked because they knew, because it was clear, that I was all tapped out?

I started to get migraines so bad that I’d pull a parka on over my nightdress and take the walk over to the St. Vincent’s ER, where they’d give me some IV Benadryl and a barf bucket, and the blood rushing in my ears sounded like the beach as I watched the morning light come in through the frosted glass windows behind my little gurney. Often, I made it home in time to crawl into my bed and appear, to my latte-delivering father, as if I’d been sleeping peacefully all night.

When I moved back to the city, Nick began messaging me, often dozens of texts at an hour that seemed suspicious, desperate. Then, he started appearing where I was on the rare occasions I went out—sober gatherings, hotel lobbies, street corners. These weren’t places I was flashing on Instagram live (“Hey, y’all, I’ll be at the Narcotics Anonymous meeting on Houston today; roll through so I can sign some ninety-day coins!”), so I wasn’t sure how he did it. One day, he jogged up the steps behind me at my seven a.m. AA meeting.

“Sup?” I said, my body buzzing as I gave him a nervous hug. We hadn’t spoken since he’d turned up on my father’s doormat, and I couldn’t say I wanted to. It didn’t help that the day’s topic for sharing—which was round-robin style, and I was the first to the right of the speaker—was about how we acted out through sex during our addiction. I could feel his eyes boring a hole through me as I stuttered out something about how “sex, in general, should never replace, uh…other stuff?” But that afternoon, he had sent me dozens of GIFs, images of female praying mantises biting their partners’ heads off.

“You can stop now,” I wrote back. But I didn’t fight his analysis. I was still so sure that almost any man I had slept with had a clearer sense of who I was than I did. Of course, Nick had the ability to look at me and see what I was working so hard to hide: I was, and would always be, bad.

Sometime in early January, I got a call from Kathleen McCaffrey, an HBO executive who had helped bring Girls to life (“Lena’s case worker,” my father called her). She had a great new script for a low-budget British show about young people working (and fucking) in the London stock market. She wanted to know if I could think of any young directors who were ready to take on a pilot. I asked her to send it to me and then read it in one hungry sitting. The show, Industry, was smart and sleek, perverse and timely. While I didn’t understand any of the money jargon, to me the show was about a subject with which I had enjoyed a torrid, if toxic, romance: ambition.

I called Kathleen back. “Why not me?” I said. “I could be in London next week.”

I don’t know what the instinct was that told me I needed to get the fuck out of America. All I knew was that this version of life I’d been living was not a 2.0. It was barely a .01. And, while AA might call escaping the site of your formative traumas “pulling a geographic,” I wasn’t convinced that was unwise. It didn’t matter to me that this sexy London show was, in fact, going to be shot in Cardiff, Wales. I would have taken the next plane basically anywhere had I thought it might spark my love for what I did once again.

My parents questioned the logic of leaving my doctors behind, just as I was starting to find some solutions. Solutions was their word—I hadn’t gotten anything out of my time in bed over the last year, except for more time in bed. Thus far, I was learning more from the many people online living with EDS and narrating their post-hysterectomy experience than I was from anyone whose office waiting rooms I sat in. The friends who remained close pointed out my fragility—that a walk around the block was often too much, and how was I going to handle a long stretch away in a place where I had no real support? I was past trusting my instincts. Instead, I was trusting something else: that the world was placing an opportunity in my path, and any opportunity was better than spending long afternoons assessing the barrette shelf in Manhattan’s most overpriced pharmacy, C.O. Bigelow Apothecaries.

When I arrived in London, I was shocked by how different it was to begin a project as a solo entity. While I had often written and directed alone, Jenni had been there to manage the parts of the process that involved adulting. Whether it was taking notes from the network, talking through deal memos with casting directors, or wrangling crew, Jenni’s expertise allowed me to do my work. But here, with two excellent but inexperienced writers, I was the Jenni—it would be up to me to make sure that the set ran smoothly, that the costume designer didn’t cry when faced with a last-minute pencil skirt emergency, that the older male crew members took me seriously.

The primary cast of Industry were all just out of drama school—it was their first job, perhaps second if they’d day-played on another show. The enthusiasm every day was palpable, and contagious—a reminder of how we’d felt shooting the Girls pilot nearly ten years ago, when we couldn’t get over the dreamy feeling of showing up every day to do the job you’d always dreamed of.

It wasn’t as if the pleasure of being back in the director’s seat had eliminated my pain. During my time in Wales, I went to the emergency room with not one but two ovarian cysts; developed an immaculately conceived urinary tract infection; learned just how hard the rain could be on an arthritic body, and how deep into my bed the wet and cold could take me. A few days I directed from a wheelchair, and I was amazed at how quickly actors adjusted, squatting down to meet me at my level. I could still do this thing I loved, even when I awoke to an uncooperative and angry body. I was delighted that the only pain doctor I could find in London was named Kris Jenner, and when I made a Kardashians reference (“You’re doing amazing, sweetie!”) he looked utterly perplexed.

While most of the cast and crew rented in Cardiff, I decided that I was going to take whatever the Welsh countryside had to offer—and so I rented “The Old Stone Rectory,” a vast gray brick house with half a dozen bedrooms, ancient beams, and a million dusty fireplaces. The garden bloomed wildly with flowers I couldn’t name, purple and blue and pink. I sat out there in my underwear and painted, letting the sun shine on my aching back. And at night, in the bedroom with the lumpy mattress, I started writing again. Pages that would someday become pieces of this book. Pages of my long-gestating adaptation of my favorite young adult book, Catherine, Called Birdy, a project that had always managed to take a back seat to the relentless demands of the show. Pages I owed, pages I didn’t, pages people read, and pages that I would never share.

This is where I got my spark back: in the smallest bedroom of the biggest house in the village of Cowbridge, in the town of Ystradowen, in the Vale of Glamorgan, in the country of Wales.

Against all odds, I learned to make and keep a fire going. My driver, Steve, a sexy bald former ecstasy dealer turned committed father (the best kind!), taught me. Otherwise, I would have caught my death of cold, succumbing to the Brontë fate that always beckoned.

Throughout the summer, visitors cycled in and out of the house—my mother, my father, and my brother all came at different times, and I felt proud and resourceful leading them up to their sweet bedrooms looking out on the rain-whipped fields. I noticed, now that I was meeting them on neutral territory, just how much change our relationships were beginning to show, how differently I responded to them, and how differently they responded to me. It had been a year and a half since rehab, and it was finally happening.

Back when I walked through the doors of rehab, I’d believed it was the page turn to Part II, after the Part I of my life came to a screeching halt. In fact, it had proved to be something more like a P.S. on an angry letter.

I no longer believed in sections now—just a slow bleed from one highly pigmented color to another.