“We are humbled by our imperfection – but let there be no mistake, humility is the ideal state

for us to be in” The 12 & 12 of Narcotics Anonymous: It Works: How and Why

I come from wild stock, I come from broken things. The less you have to work with in your
environment, always, always, rougher the terrain, the skin of your feet adapting to stones in the
road, the hot asphalt, the unforgiving-ness of all things. I grew up around drugs, poverty,
violence, shouting. I grew up scared, ill-equipped, side-lined, outcast, angry. I grew up in smoke
filled rooms where recovering addicts and alcoholics met every day in order to survive, to
become better people. I grew up surrounded by adults who, as it turned out, still needed a lot
of help learning how to live, how to love.

I never really wondered, then, what my father had had to do in order to survive, to get his fix. It
wasn’t until my life took a similar wrong turn that I would come to know what happens in the
dark with no light to lead us, the raging fire we become.

My time line is filled with people who were broken and who broke others. Everyone I knew had
either done jail time, been in a straight jacket, been shot and stabbed, lost everything, their
house, their family, had slept in cars for years and years. And who also, impossibly, had found
ways to come back to life.

One of my very best friends, a gentle and troubled soul, went over an edge none of us who
knew him had seen coming. He hit his girlfriend in the head with a hammer, then stabbed her.
She jumped out of a window in order to survive. She survived. Thank God she survived.

But the last memory I have of my friend is the one I choose to carry with me. It is just as much a
part of who he is as is his tragic mental breakdown and horrible crime. We took a trip to
Mammoth Cave State Park in Kentucky. We were mostly silent all day, wandering around,
sipping at the gentle hush of nature. I remember we walked out to a small islet in the middle of
the rushing water. I picked up a stick and drew a heart in the sand at the edge of the water. My
friend took the stick from my hands and he drew a circle around it. We looked at each other
and we smiled. We stood, still and quiet, at the foot of a circled heart. Both of us broken, each
in our own unique, but familiar way.

I choose this memory. Not because it erases the horrible thing he would, in time, do. But
because without this other part, who my friend is becomes but a sound bite, an example to be
made. He is doing his time. A long time. He is becoming a better person. He leads a men’s group
in his prison that works on confronting their domestic violence and owning up to the path that
led each of them there. He plays guitar in the prison’s church service. He is grappling with a bad
thing he did that will haunt him and his loved ones for the rest of their lives. As it will his
girlfriend, who will never forget and probably always carry that trauma with her. It cuts so
deep, in every direction. But my friend was a kid once. It’s not often said, but it should be. Every
dark and troubled soul was something else before they became dark and troubled.
Lucretius once wrote “We are each of us angels with only one wing, and we can only fly
embracing one another.” And some of us only have half of half a wing. Four broken beings
helping one another take flight. Pieces of a wing patched together with twisted wire and duct
tape.

I have lived many lives. Mental institutions, jails, rehabs, half way houses, recovery, activism,
and now, the literary world. In that order, it should be said. Who I am is informed by that order
of events. The good and the bad. It could have gone so many ways for me. I could have ended
up hard and mean, but I chose, instead, to become softer and kind. And I fought to become that
way. I fought hard.

My ethics is informed by my own imperfection. Too many decry in others what they also have
in them. They take the argument that calling them out as a bully in calling out other bullies is a
straw man’s trope. In psychotherapy there is a measure for action; it is timing, dosage and tact
that guides the healer. Because you see, the wounded and broken will dissociate anything that
becomes too much for them to bear in the moment. It is how they survive. This is true also of
those who call out what needs calling out, but who often do it in a self-defeating way. In a way
that traps somebody into the identity that is being denounced. This doesn’t make the world a
better place. Quite the opposite. It makes us all retreat into our inner, walled off hearts.

One must call out abuse, speak to hurt when hurt has been caused. But if the only way we’ve
found to do so is from a tower that looms above, we will find that voices do not carry down
from such a height without also being distorted on their way to the source of harm.

If I am to be told who I can and cannot be friends with, that I am not to have compassion for
those who have caused harm, then I must disown my own life, and every one I have ever
known. My parents, my family. Both blood and muddy water. But this seems to me to be the
poorest measure of friendship. Those who find it hard to live, live a little harder, as Carson
McCullers put it.

We are, none of us, without fault, stain or scar. We have been doer and we have been done to.
I find it odd that some would present themselves as almost haloed and perfect creatures. I am
leery of using the term hypermoralism because it is most often used by the Republican right in
order to look away from their own impropriety. But perhaps this is equally so for those on the
left. A kind of moralism that looks away from one’s own share of caused harm.

I’ve learned how to live, honestly and feet to the ground, through the 12 step fellowship of N.A.
One of the most beautiful passages for me has been the following;

“We are humbled by our imperfection – but let there be no mistake; humility is the ideal state
for us to be in. Humility brings us back down to earth and plants our feet firmly on the spiritual
path we are walking. We smile at our delusions of perfection and keep on walking… We gain
more tolerance for the defects of those around us. When we see someone acting out on a
defect that we have acted on ourselves, we feel compassionate rather than judgmental, for we
know exactly how much pain such behavior causes. Rather than condemning the behavior of
another, we look at ourselves, we can extend compassion and tolerance to others.”

We open our spirits to healing through and beyond the harm that we have caused. We make
amends with no expectation of forgiveness. Forgiveness, here, is an inside job. We stagger into
the light. Ill equipped, more often than not, for the journey that lies ahead.

After having spent 2 years in a mental institution I found myself back in a public high school
with sea legs floundering on terrifying land. I had this teacher in special ed math, Mrs.
Tompkins. She had worked in one of the out patient hospitals I previously attended. I
remember staying after class with her as she taught me math by counting out dried beans on
the desk, a visual aid that helped me to make sense of the confusing mesh of abstract numbers.
She knew what I been through. We would talk about that urge to disappear and rock back and
forth forever in a corner in the depths of our despair. She shared with me, how, in her deepest
depression, she would sit on the floor in the corner of her darkened room, knees to chest,
rocking, just rocking in unshakable sorrow. “I could have stayed like that forever” she said. But
my husband would come into the room and he would say gently; “you’ve gotta get up now
dear, you’ve gotta try and fight this.” And there’s a moment when we must choose, she told
me, when we must choose to either spend the rest of our lives rocking in that corner or to get
up off of the floor and live again.

“Lord, let me live again,” was my mother’s favorite line in “It’s A Wonderful Life” as George
Bailey stood over the snowy bridge from which he jumped after wishing he had never been
born. My mother has always sought a magical way to become a brand new person again. She is
waiting on God to lift all of her bad from her, but her defects have always gotten the best of
her. I love this woman dearly, this woman who birthed and broke me. Abused and held me. The
cruelest household is not without its love. And we are, none of us, without our ability to harm
the one’s we love.

There was a boy in that same math class, Teddy, easily profiled as a simpleton, a redneck. He
would chew tobacco and spit it into the rug rubbing it in with his cowboy boots. One day Mrs.
Tompkins caught him, she lost it, called Teddy every name you could think of, stupid,
disgusting, no good, son of a bitch, bastard. To this day I cannot get the look on his face out of
my mind. He looked like an abused and defeated dog. He winced with every expected blow,
always expected, he saw it coming. He was used to be being called these things. It was like
these words were merely his other names.

My heart broke. Why did Mrs. Tompkins have to be so cruel to him? I admired her deeply but
here she was being as cruel as a person, who is supposed to care for kids and their intellectual
development, could be. Yes, what Teddy did was wrong, but he didn’t deserve the verbal
beating he got that day. He walked from the room with his head hung so low to the floor I
thought he might topple over. I never really knew Teddy to say more than a few words. And
while I did not know the specifics of what his life was like then, I assumed that, like most of us
in that special ed class, it was a chaotic and impoverished home life. Mrs. Tompkins was
capable of good and of bad. Isn’t this the state we all find ourselves in?

Four years into my sobriety, my friend and I drive out to have dinner with a couple from our
N.A. home group, Donna and Daryl. They live in a small sweltering trailer but it feels like a castle
to them compared to years in a maximum security prison and a life spent on the run. They told
us their story, how the FBI had been hunting them both down as they fled from motel to motel.
Daryl would shoot up the forest with a double barrel shotgun some nights, high on meth,
thinking he heard footsteps nearing, an invisible raid.

Suddenly I noticed a picture of their son sitting atop their small black and white television. It
was Teddy. Donna and Daryl were his parents. Teddy was in prison now and Donna was heart
broken and blamed herself. She hadn’t been there like a mother should be for her son.
Suddenly I knew what Teddy’s life had been like, and that moment in that classroom came
flooding back in and breaking my heart all over again. His parents had been living a harsh life
back then and Teddy, that kid never stood a chance at normal. Teddy was a kid once. And these
were his parents, repentant, and softer. If they could have had Teddy now they would have
been really good parents, I think.

Donna works at MacDonalds, and shares every night how grateful she is to draw an honest
paycheck, come to meetings after work to be with people who have been in her shoes before,
who understand her pain, and to be able to go home and get on her knees at night and pray for
the strength, courage and hope to stay on the right path. She is a soft, gentle woman now. But I
know this was not always so. Donna, in her day, was as fierce and scary as they come. And
Daryl, he’s still got a gruff and rough aura about him, but even this has been watered down.
There is a kindness and generosity to Daryl that you would not have recognized in his prior life.

So much trauma passed on by complicated people. We are, none of us, one thing alone. Nor are
we the things we’ve done.

One night I was shopping at Walmart, far from my apartment, after work at a shitty factory that
was wearing my soul and body thin. I was waiting on a cab I could barely afford to get home.
Mrs. Tompkins and her husband came walking out. They gave me a ride home in their truck. I
had dropped out of high school and Mrs. Tompkins was the only person who gave a damn
about my decision and pleaded with me to stay. “Alright, if you’re gonna drop out then you
have to promise me something,” she said. “You have to go and study for your GED and take it
now, because if you don’t do it now, you never will. I’ve seen it too many times before. And
you’re too smart not to.” I followed her advice and got my GED the same year I dropped out. I
will always be grateful that she pushed me to follow through on that.

As we drove home in her truck we talked about all sorts of things. I told her about my shitty
factory job and she looked concerned, she had this look on her face that said “goddammit kid,
you’re capable of so much more.” Only this time, she didn’t say it, she didn’t have to. Mrs.
Tompkins hadn’t been able to be there for Teddy as she had for me. But things could have been
so much worse for me if she hadn’t have been there for at least one of us. That’s not nothing,
that’s everything. The success and the failure. Human frailty. As I got out of her truck, I thought
of Teddy once again, and felt a pain in my heart.

Mrs. Tompkins had helped me to survive when I really did not think I would make it through. I
was grappling with the pain and trauma of being gang raped in the mental ward, I was trapped
in the back seat of my own body and had little to no hope in my broken heart back then. In my
future. But this woman cared about my fate. She pushed me to give a damn about myself. And
she also tore poor Teddy apart when what he had needed most was exactly the same thing that
she gave to me. Sadly, Teddy would not get what he needed from anyone.

When Donna and Daryl talked about their son they did so with a foggy and tearful look in their
eyes. At one point, Donna grabbed Daryl’s hand and squeezed it tight as she said what he was
in prison for. She wiped a tear from her cheek.

It’s funny how life brings things full circle, how our hard traveled roads criss-cross into one
another. Donna, Daryl, Teddy, Mrs. Tompkins, me. All of us broken and staggering towards the
light. I could tell you twenty more stories just like this one. I could fill a whole book with them.
Would it change anything in the literary community, to sit with and know how complicated and
mixed we all are inside? Each of us capable of the best and the worst.

We are the best of people and the worst of people.

These, these were friends of mine, as Jim Carroll put it. Another fellow recovering addict who
devoted his life to service and carrying the message of hope to the still suffering addict. An
imperfect and broken poet. A dark and beautiful spirit. He surely caused his share of harm and
he also helped those with no hope step back into the light again.

Francis Bacon once wrote that “without friends the world is but a wilderness.” And every friend
is fucked up and full of shit, as was said to me once by a counselor when I was in rehab. Every
friend is imperfect and bound to fail at unspoiled goodness. And, also, much, much, more than
this. Every friend is an angel with only one wing and every angel is terrifying.

Some would seek to penalize me for who I choose to love. I love my parents, who have caused
so much pain and damage, and not just to me. I love Donna and Daryl, I love Teddy and Mrs.
Tompkins, and, hardest of all, I am learning, little by little, to love myself. That makes me
human. Makes us all human. And broken. We were, each of us, kids once. Kids who asked for
none of what happened to us. Kids who were broken by the places and people we came from.
Lord, let us live again. Let us live again.

And love. I will love, always, the ones who stagger in and out of the light. Those who have
found it hard to live and therefore have had to live a little harder.

I’m still learning. We all are. Painting by numbers in the dark. Aiming, impossibly, for light.