Tangled Up in True (isms)
Dispatch No. 4: On the weight of the ancient lines and the young grunge gods
A man on this platform asked a question recently. It was one of those intellectual prompts dropped into notes, designed to drive engagement rather than find truth. He wanted to know if there were any truly original ideas left in the world.
I replied. I told him no. I pointed him toward the Bible and the cosmic cycles of the Yugas.
His response was immediate, wrapped in the cool, detached language of academia. He dismissed them as “truisms,” arguing that time and context make our modern experiences entirely new. He spoke with the casual arrogance of someone who treats life as a debate topic, using big words to build a clean barricade between himself and the terrifying, ancient rhythms of human suffering.
It is easy to belittle the old truths because the old truths demand something from us. They demand surrender. They demand that we drop our buckets and admit we cannot save ourselves.
My story is not new. It is as old as the dirt. I do not want to write another predictable, boring addiction memoir where a girl falls into the mud, finds a recovery program, finds God, and suddenly her life is wrapped in a neat, commercially viable bow. The world’s idea of a happy ending is so small: you write a book, you get wildly successful, your bills are paid, and you spend your old age traveling and painting.
But grace is not a tame lion. Meeting God is like meeting Aslan—it is terrifying, dangerous, and completely out of our control.
Last night, I was thinking about prevenient grace. It is the grace that knocks at your door before you even know you are trapped. And it breaks my heart, because I look at the rockstars I worshiped at twenty-two—Andrew Wood, Shannon Hoon, Layne Staley, Chris Cornell. They articulated such beautiful, agonizing pieces of human emotion through song. They sang with a weight that I don’t think they fully understood until it crushed them.
My ex-husband had that same tragic poetry. He was beautiful in ways that were dangerous. He could manipulate people so flawlessly it felt like art; he could bend the world to his will for short sequences of time. Even when he hit me—when he broke my teeth, broke my nose, and blacked my eyes—I stayed. It took me a long, bloody time to realize that I was going to die if I kept waiting for the “good” he could have used instead of seeing the monster that was actually there.
And I made my kids go through that.
My twenty-seven-year-old daughter—his daughter—is out in those same dark woods right now, a living ghost I love fiercely but must grieve from behind a locked front door. My older daughter carries the physical and emotional scars of what she witnessed. We are close today, but no matter how fervently I try to walk a path of living amends with her, I know I can never fix what I allowed to happen. She has her own book to write, I suppose.
When I look back at how I walked straight into that fire at twenty-two, I have to look at my father. He is the giant in the early chapters of my life. It sounds cliché to talk about falling in love with your father, but that is the pattern I carved into the earth. He wasn’t a drunk, and he wasn’t an addict, but he had his own version of the exact same trap. It is that same ancient truism proving itself true over and over. That is the real demon I am trying to exorcise here. I want to stop it. I want the cycle to be completely over.
A small, venomous voice whispers to me while I type this. It tells me that this is a waste of time. It tells me I am saying too much, and that “normal” people will look away in disgust.
Maybe they will. But I don’t care anymore. I am not writing this to stay comfortable or to pitch a clean philosophy to academics. I feel a literal command from above to say these terrifying things out loud.
Draft Excerpt: The Descent
At twenty-two, she worshiped the tragic, beautiful grunge gods who sang from the altars of self-destruction. She didn’t know she was blindly walking down the exact same path. She loved a violent, beautiful, breaking man, and twice the dark waters of an overdose closed completely over her head. Twice, someone pulled her out. But her husband’s thread snapped on a concrete hospital floor, and her fourteen-year-old daughter chased his phantom pony straight into a psych ward down the hall.
After the machines in the ICU went silent, she spent two years trying to outrun the echo of that room. She let them repo her car. She boarded a flight to New York with nothing but twelve dollars in her pocket. When the city chewed her up, she retreated to her father’s porch, watching him scream into the fracturing mind of a wife whose memory was turning to ash. There was no safety there, so she fled to Austin, finding a rock star with a loud guitar and a house full of white powder. She lived in a blur of late-night noise where the alcohol never ran out. She had completely forgotten what a morning felt like without a glass in her hand.
And then, the whisper came. It wasn’t a burning bush; it was just a strange, unwelcome thought on a morning she hadn’t asked for: Go to a meeting. She hated the idea. She thought AA was a cult for the broken. But that night at 8 PM, she sat in a metal chair. At 10 PM, she sat in it again.
Note: The track above is an original musical piece I curated and produced to score the shifting landscapes of this week’s article. It is built to sound like a restless, late-night party in Austin—driven by fast acoustic strumming and a piercing harmonica wail that nods to Bob Dylan (a deep nod to my ex-husband’s favorite musical landscape). Eventually, these companion pieces will be available on Bandcamp, but for now, I hope this raw sketch helps you feel the highway rhythm and the ancient lines running beneath the text.
That was nine years ago. Today, the door to the active chaos of drinking is firmly closed. But the real work of recovery is facing the doors that remain: the racing mind, the persistent whisper that I am not enough, and the deep sadness that tempts me to withdraw.
For a long time, I carried an immense survivor’s guilt. Why did my thread keep winding forward into sobriety while the rock stars of my youth—and my own late husband—saw theirs snap in the briars? I used to think God was completely absent during those dark years. Jaded by the rigid, legalistic Southern Baptist traditions of my youth, I explicitly denied His existence. I thought my shame and the horrific things I had seen had permanently locked Him out.
But sitting in those cold metal chairs, a terrifying and beautiful truth began to break through: God had been there the whole time. I just had my eyes closed.
He was the silent shield when the dark waters of an overdose closed over my head twice. He is the reason my daughters are alive today. I still carry a deep sadness, and I grieve fiercely for the pain my girls inherited. But I am learning that gratitude and trauma can coexist. My sadness does not mean I am ungrateful; it means I am human, processing real wreckage.
J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis often wrote about the concept of the writer as a sub-creator. They believed that because we are made in the image of the Divine, we have a God-given responsibility to take the raw, fragmented material of our reality and shape it into something true. We do not create from nothing. We work with what we are given.
I realize now that this is my command from above. I am not writing to complain or to wallow in a dark memoir. I am acting as a sub-creator, taking the jagged, pitch-black threads of violence, addiction, and grief, and handing them to the Master Weaver. My job is not to understand the whole plan. The Creator of the Universe is under no obligation to explain His blueprint to me. My job is simply to listen, to trust, and to keep my eyes wide open.
This is the ultimate operation of prevenient grace—the grace that wooed me, protected me, and knocked at my door long before I even knew I was trapped. The happy ending isn't a life completely free of sorrow. It is the breathtaking realization that no matter how deep the darkness went, it never had the power to swallow the Light.
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The Bird and the Baby was a place of roaring fires, heavy pipes, and friends who weren’t afraid to look into the dark to find a deeper magic. This Substack is my attempt to build a similar room. Writing these truths out loud is a massive, exhausting labor, and I cannot carry the weight of this story alone.
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