Hi friends. It’s a dark and stormy afternoon. As I write this, I’m listening to Skull and Shark by Lazerhawk, which sets a very suspenseful vibe. I apologize for the delay—time just got away from me. But let’s move forward. Bring on the haunted houses!
What do you do if your house is haunted?
In Part 1, we talked about the different types of haunted houses that appear throughout the horror genre. In Part 2, we dove into some popular addiction theories, and in Part 3, we looked at characters from The Haunting of Hill House and The Easter Parade to see how people can get stuck in their own “haunted house” of mental health and addiction issues. Let’s finish this chapter once and for all.
Back in my early days of AA I heard someone say, “Stay out of your head, it’s a bad neighborhood.” This phrase made me think of 1990 New York City from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, where hooligans on skateboards were snatching purses amidst a Foot Clan-fueled crime wave.
Yeah yeah, I knew what they really meant by “bad neighborhood”: spending too much time alone in your head isn’t good for your mental health. It’s important to get outside of yourself because it provides perspective and cuts down on ruminating.
There’s been times that I’ve spent way too much time alone with my obsessive thoughts and went into a k-hole of anxiety. In these cases going out for a walk or talking to a friend makes a massive change in my mood. This is self-care 101 and you probably already knew all this. But what perhaps you didn’t know (because I definitely did not know) is that the way you frame your story makes a big impact.
What kind of story am I telling about myself?
When I was drinking, I viewed myself as someone who was neither properly living or properly dying. I felt like a zombie aimlessly roaming the earth, occasionally stopping to eat pizza. So when it came time to get sober and address the depression, etc., I looked at it as a form of drastic self-improvement: I was a massive fuckup and needed to fix that, stat. To return to the theme of haunted houses, I felt like my house was so infested with horrible things that the only solution was to burn the whole fucker to the ground.
I’ve seen other people in recovery pull this off with varying degrees of success. They drew a line between who they were when they were drinking and who they are now. The cliche we’ve all seen on TV is the guy in a suit who has some horrific backstory about the days when he was using. He razed his “bad neighborhood” and upgraded to a split-level house in the suburbs.
This process wasn’t as straightforward for me. First of all, I’m not a wildly different person from who I was when I drank. Yes, there are some key differences, namely emotional maturity and not throwing up in my friends’ cars. (Although, I was pretty barfy when I was pregnant.) However, in order to recover, I realized I didn’t need to burn my house down.
What would you like the outcome of your haunted house story to be?
I totally get it if you’re like “fuck this house, I want to move.” If you’d like to take this approach, here are a few things I encourage you to keep in mind:
You can walk away, but don’t try and blow up your old house. Not everything in there is ruined and warrants destruction. One day you might feel differently about it. So instead of saying, “I was a piece of shit and I drank and I need to be a totally different person now,” try saying something like, “I used to drink and I don’t want to do that anymore.”
Moving takes a while. It’s not going to happen overnight. You’ve got to pack, clean, sort through stuff…just do as much as you can each day and know that you’re working towards a goal. Every day that you don’t drink is a win.
Where you move is not permanent. If you got out of your much maligned haunted house but had to move in somewhere you don’t like, know that it’s not going to be that way forever. Transitions like quitting drinking are hard. They’re tough emotionally because you have to navigate all this new uncharted territory in your head and they’re tough physically because you may be stuck in a situation that is immensely frustrating. One of the best ways to make it easier is how you spin the narrative. It’s the difference between “This is a punishment, I’m starting over at the bottom,” and “I’m moving forward and doing what is best for my recovery.”
Are you ready for a Shyamalan twist? I don’t think that living in a haunted house is necessarily a bad thing!
I tried moving, but my ghosts kept following me, so I eventually just got to know them. And being heard is really all they wanted, because they stopped trying to scare me after that. I’ll explain this process in more detail in another chapter that’s specifically about talking to ghosts. I mean, obviously that’s going to be a chapter.
I won’t lie—my haunted house issues still piss me off. Things that have bothered me since childhood still bug the shit out of me today, and you’d figure that I’d maybe be used to it by now, but that’s not how haunted houses work. Like, when I go to catch up with a family member, and they’re slurring their words on the phone because they’ve started drinking again, it’s upsetting in the present and past tense. Before, when something like this would happen, I’d tell myself that I should just “get over it” or “get used to it.” But like, is it fair to tell Danny to get used to seeing those creepy twins? It’s jarring! It’s ok to be jarred. The important thing is that I don’t go on my own self-destructive bender to deal with it.
So yes, I live in a haunted house. It’s actually pretty common for a lot of people, especially the creative ones. Most of the time it’s like a normal house, and when the ghosts do show themselves, it’s not the end of the world. Sometimes it’s scary, sometimes it’s sad, sometimes it’s just super fucking annoying. Other times—when I get to turn it into writing or comedy—it’s pretty dang fun.
On a good day, that looks like this:
What story are you telling about yourself?
If you are quitting drinking, working on your mental health, recovering from a crisis, or all of the above, how are you framing this story in your mind? If you’re beginning your story with “I fucked up…” or “I suck and I need to do better…” you’re not telling a very compassionate tale. It’s a given that those of us with addiction have screwed up at one point or another, and have been told, either by ourselves or others, to get our shit together.
So for now, think about the story you’re telling about your recovery.
Because, my friend, needing to get sober and/or treat your mental health issues does not make you a bad person.
You’re just doing a little house cleaning. You don’t have to burn it all down. ❤️
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