“I’ll Buy The Flowers,” Said Mrs. Dalloway

I say with confidence and gusto that I am an expert on love.

                Not experientially. …Maybe a tad experimentally… but I definitely know love epistemically.  I know romantic love: epic, tragic, unrequited, and (hardly ever) attained.  I know infatuation and limerence.  Liaisons and dalliances.  Exigent lust and Platonism.  I know courtly love and chivalric love and all of the ways they’ve both been misinterpreted.  I know all about Eros and Aphrodite and that bowstring-plucking little bastard, Cupid.  Le coup de foudre and la douleur exquise.  The endurance of Odysseus and Penelope.  The futility of Jake and Lady Brett.  The superfluousness of Troilus and Criseyde (if Pandarus only had a hobby…) And that amorous kerfuffle we associate with Oedipus.       

                On paper, I am a student seeking a Master’s of Fine Arts with a concentration in Literature.  In practice, it means that I study love.  All day.  Every day.  Any story worth reading is a story with love at the forefront.  It feels, at this point, that I’ve read every story ever written.  Obviously, I haven’t read everything—that would be impossible—but if I haven’t cracked open the specific book, I can foretell that the narrative within it will transpire around love.  It always does.

                Now I’ve gone and brought up the topic of love… and it is Valentine’s Day… and I bet you think you know where I’m going with this, but I bet you are wrong.  My vocation has not jaded me.  I’m not embittered by my personal life.  I won’t write a diatribe because I don’t operate on loneliness.  Or disappointment.  I could… but once you’ve clambered up the ladder to self-assurance, you don’t want to take the oily slide back down to self-pity.  You fought too hard for that ascension to just let go and let the terrible, easy habits suck you right back down into the pit of compulsion.

                Addicts are always looking for an excuse to drink.  An excuse to use.  Right?  That generalization isn’t incorrect.  Depending on where some people are in their sobriety, why they are trying to get sober and how hard they are trying to do it—yeah, they’ll use any excuse or any corporate holiday to justify using.  I’m not talking to/about addicts in that place right now.  I’m looking at the people who are trying.  For the right reasons.

                Valentine’s Day is abrasive.  To people who are single, to people who are in relationships that no longer include effort or romance, to the widowed, to the divorced, to the hopeful (bound to be disappointed), to those unsure of their sexuality or feel forced to suppress it—Valentine’s Day aches and irritates like a mouth ulcer. 

                I don’t want to brag or anything… but addicts take emotional slights extremely hard.  You don’t become an addict because you cope well with life.  We were motivated by anxiety and emotion before addiction, addiction made us feel amazing whilst we descended into chaos, post-addiction we are still heavily influenced by anxiety and emotion—we just can’t do anything to ease it.  We can only experience it and attempt to survive it.  A bad day hits most people like a stiff breeze.  A recovering addict feels a bad day like a Florida idiot who bungee-cords themselves to a tree to ride-out a Category 5. 

                Let me be clear (because there is always that one troglodyte…), recovering addicts are not all subject to relapse because of a bad day.  Not even a really, really bad day. We are, however, inclined to let our resolves deteriorate when we feel more insufficient than usual.  I employ “more than usual” because we feel inadequate all of the time.  No matter how many days, months, years, apologies, amends, reparations, lifestyle adjustments, or miles we put between ourselves and past addiction, we know that we are still an addict.  Even worse, other people know that we are still an addict.  We could be lapping everyone else, and they will always look at us like we are barely keeping up.  Surround us for 12 hours with arrangements of red roses, cards, and teddy bears—all intended for other people—and we instinctively start to list the reasons why we are unlovable. 

                We knew what we were signing up for when we decided to be in recovery.  We read the fine print.  Did the due diligence.  Signed the parchment with a quill and agreed to give up our voices to gain our legs.  The cost of sobriety is the permanent stigma of addiction—especially when you constantly post on social media about sobriety and addiction (whoops.)  Stigma is hard to shake, but nothing about addiction recovery makes us unlovable or incapable of loving in return.

                I say again, with confidence and gusto, that I am an expert on love.

                I know true love: Agape, philia, storge, and how wonderful it is when they are found.  I know all about the March sisters.  Cathy and Heathcliff.  Horatio and Hamlet.  Don Quixote and Sancho.  I know about the unlikely friendship of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (and the even more unlikely friendship they have with Jim.)  I know that even as Elinor and Marianne Dashwood fantasize about romantic love, their souls are fed by each other.  I know that Paul Baumer hated every single second that he spent in the trenches and couldn’t wrap his young brain around having to shoot strangers and burn down a world he’d barely gotten a chance to see.  I also know that of all the atrocities the German army forced him to commit, leaving his mother was the most difficult.

                Unlike the great romances of classic literature, I know, firsthand, all about true love.  The love between sisters, the love of a wonderful mother, and the love of genuine friends.  They stood by me when I signed away my voice. 

                Let Valentine’s Day do what Valentine’s Day does: pinch you in the tender places.  It’s just a sting, it will dull shortly.  And it’s ok to have the impulse to mow over roses and take a knitting needle to a heart-shaped, mylar balloon.  But remember, great love needs neither dog nor pony to show off.  It needs bad days to bolster its endurance.  Ah, and I almost forgot—the one love you aren’t supposed to forget—philautia.  Self-love.  Its hard sometimes, I know.  Believe me, I know. But if you are an addict in recovery, you chose to be better for all of your other great loves.  Love yourself a little for that. Buy yourself some flowers. Set them on your desk. Admire them while you read about great love.