THERE IS A little bit of irony to the fact that I write so much about so many of my most personal issues on a website read by millions, which sometimes leaves me with no time to deal with those issues in real life. Sure, I go to SLAA meetings. I go to AA meetings. I go to Al-Anon meetings. But it takes years sometimes to break out of patterns of self-hatred and self-abuse.
That initial pink cloud from my early days of sobriety is long gone. Now I am just stuck with myself, and the magic is starting to feel dull.
I am not drinking or drugging or betraying my sexual bottom line, but to be quite honest, all that heady elation from my early days of sobriety is so long gone that “recovery” sometimes feels like a chore. Still, I keep doing it. I know that as long as I am sober, that is in itself a victory. But it never looks like the third-act everything-is-suddenly-perfect reinvention that is portrayed in the movies. Sometimes the process is the most unglamorous, irritating process imaginable. Sometimes getting healthy is a drag. But it’s still the right thing for me to do, and I have to remind myself of that daily.
My absolute favorite part about xoJane is the platform it provides for women to shatter stigmas and fight back against the subconscious shaming of women’s lived experiences. That’s what I hope some of my favorite pieces for the site achieve.
I write one called “I Don’t Think I Can Have Casual Sex Anymore Because the Power Balance Shifts So Dramatically,” where I chronicle what is to be my last one-night stand ever. I reveal that at the last minute I took a young man I met on Tinder with me to a media party I was invited to, which was held at a strip club and riddled with porn stars. This was after I’d gotten blown off by a proper OKCupid date. After the young man and I fooled around for a while, I asked him if he’d want to do it again in the future, thinking maybe he could be my new “healthy” friend with benefits. I didn’t want a relationship. Not at all.
“Well, you have my Tinder chat,” he responded, getting up to leave.
“Yeah,” I said. “I get it.”
He left, and I went to my phone and pressed my finger on the app until it quivered. “Are you sure you want to delete Tinder and all its contents?” Yes.
I realize that casual sex feels like I am trying to invert, like a spiky umbrella, that loss of power I felt when I was young by angrily protesting through my actions: “You want to see whore? I’ll show you fucking whore. You will never have any ownership of my soul. Guess what, what you got was a character. There is no intimacy there, and yet, I saw you inside and out.”
But I’m only contributing to a pattern of debasement.
Maybe, I start to realize, my hero’s journey is in transforming and healing myself sexually. My sword can be wielded to cut my attachments to the men whom I’ve let into my precious energy space without regard for how it affects me and the aftermath of what I’ve let inside. My resurrection is in revealing my heart, and only revealing it when someone has proven themselves worthy of being in my ordinary world.
AS MUCH AS I may occasionally pop up on TV (oh hey, there I am on Dr. Drew, check it out, I’m on Inside Amy Schumer) or take photos with celebrities here and there for my job (I’m booked on a panel with Issa Rae, oh hey, it’s a party with the cast of Orange Is the New Black), the reality of my life is as unglamorous as it gets.
The only real companions I have are my dogs, Sam and Trip. Sam is a pit bull I took home in 2012 from the shelter after a Facebook friend posted his picture, telling me he’d be put down the next morning—and I was his only hope. I am gun-shy about pit bulls in general from coverage of so many incidents on every newspaper job I’ve had, from Florida to New York, but I figure I can at the very least help buy the dog a little more time. Trip is a Cavalier King Charles spaniel I got from a breeder after my vet suggested a companion might help Sam.
But from the first night I took Sam home, his unpredictable aggression scared me. Out on a walk that first night, he bit a stranger. It wasn’t long before he bit me, too.
And so begins the journey of a very complicated and abusive love story.
If you were to look at the relationship in the perspective of a domestic violence situation, you would never say of a man hurting a woman, “It’s your fault.” But with my pit bull, that is exactly what happens.
“You need to make sure you don’t do anything that might upset him . . . like seeming tense or worried,” a stranger tells me as I sob in the middle of the Washington Square dog park after Sam bites my calf, leaving a dark purple welt. “You need to do better and be more careful how you look at him, because it might alarm him.”
Sam is
