Every year, our family participates in the UC Berkeley alumni family camp, Lair of the Bear. My mom is a UC Berkeley alumni, and we attended when I was a child. It’s serendipitous to now bring my own kids, reprising memories from almost forty years ago.
There’s something magical about camping sober. Before I quit drinking, camping and alcohol went together like toasted marshmallows, Hersheys and graham crackers. Even now, it’s hard to see so many adults break out the beer or start mixing campout cocktails and not feel left out — until I remember the hell that was camping with a hangover, of course.
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This year, as I sat in a camp chair reading, a group of folks plopped down nearby and started talking gregariously. I thought to myself “Here we go again,” until I saw one guy pluck down a six pack of Athletic Brewing Non Alcoholic IPA (my personal fave). And I remembered… alcohol isn’t required to have a good time. And the stories we are telling ourselves (ie. Everyone is drinking but me) are often not true.
Our brains trick us like this all the time, immediately associating people who are buoyant with joy or energy to drinking, or connecting activities to how we used to feel doing them under the influence. Similarly, when I participated in an eating disorder IOP six months ago, I realized how often I connected foods and behavior to being good and bad. I caught myself labeling certain foods as safe or unsafe, based on preconceived notions of what I thought I knew about diet and weight management.
As we lined up to get breakfast at camp one morning, I saw a woman clearly returning from a run. Her shirt glistened with the sparkle of sweat spots. Another woman greeted her happily with “You went running? Such a good girl.”
Such a good girl.
My stomach ties in knots just writing those words down. Even as she said it, I absorbed those words internally like a sponge. A good girl goes running before breakfast. A good girl earns her meal.
I spent my life believing good girls were pleasant to look at, easy to talk to, and go with the flow. They weren’t too loud, with no strong opinions, and relentless people pleasers. Good girls stayed small. Good girls ate like birds, and didn’t poop, burp or fart (or at least never left evidence of such). Good girls went running.
Alcohol fed my desire to be a good girl because I felt more attractive and likable under the influence. And numbing out distracted me from asking the bigger questions, like who wants to be a good girl anyway?
In my pursuit of “goodness” I lost what mattered most: me. When people ask about the hardest part of sobriety, I often say it’s the first 90 days but the long game was introducing myself to that person who lived in my shadow for years. Waiting for permission to shift from an amorphous black and white to 3D color.
When I was little, my friends and I used to play with our shadows. Running from the top to bottom of the hill, we would transform them from short and stout to long and skinny and laugh at the results. Secretly, I longed to be that long and skinny version someday. I believed it was everything that mattered.
Now I can look back and see that I was the marionette all along. Lifting, tugging and pulling to constrict or construct the person I was becoming. Short and stout, or long and skinny; my shadow morphed into whatever I wanted her to be. Even as I got older, I still played with my shadow, contorting her to fit the mold I thought she needed to be, never trusting her to shape herself.
Even now, in my forties it’s still so hard to let go of the strings. I’m afraid that trust will create complacency. I tell myself “Stay firm. Stay rigid.” But what I’m really saying is “Stay scared.”
What will it take to stop puppeteering myself and let myself operate with its internal user manual? How will we teach our daughters being good is subjective but being real stays embedded into the fibers of everything we do and why we do it? It’s where our shadows connect back with ourselves and create the full self.
Worth doesn’t come from a shape or a shadow or even the puppeteer holding the strings, but the holistic integration of all three. And until we can bear witness to it all within someone, we are all just shadows running up and down hills, wanting to be something we are not, hoping someone sees it as good.
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