Straight Talk and Hold The Sugar Please..

Ya'll know that I love me some Dolly Parton and any chance I can get to somehow include Dolly in my life, I take...hence the title...Straight Talk...from her acclaimed (by me) movie wherein she plays a woman mistaken for a radio psychologist and wows Chicago with her no nonsense well...straight talking.

Coya and I had some real heart to heart straight talking just yesterday. It was a rough conversation, a tough conversation, and one of the best conversations I've had with her ever. I've been going through some things lately, and I have fallen into some old patterns of not wanting to let folks in. Somehow in my head, I decided that the best way to protect my friends and keep them happy is to keep them out of my head and away from my craziness. In essence, I've made decisions for them about how and when they can help me and how much they can give of themselves to me. I've cut them out of the opportunity to grow and change with me, and I lost the opportunity...at least I had lost the opportunity...to learn and grow with them. It took a whole lot of tears and some angry emails and conversations from folks for me to get that.

Coya and I are alike in so many ways, which is also probably why when we fight...we fight. Luckily, we didn't fight yesterday. We came to some really good understandings, and she gave me the opportunity to start making amends for putting her through some things last week. Last week, my depression kicked into high gear. I let myself get to a mental health breaking point, and I could no longer see the forest or the goddamn trees. All I could see was that I had no idea how I was going to pay my rent, that I had no food, no bus fare, and the light of the end of the tunnel seemed to have been switched off. I found myself turning back to my friends for financial support and really finally letting myself feel the failure (and ignoring the successes and life lessons learned) from my last two jobs...at YouthAction--where I had to close down the organization, fire one staff person, and lay off another that was a good friend turned embezzler...and the campaign...where I poured heart and soul into somethat that was so right...only to find out that the world often doesn't do what's right even when the opportunity is right there in front of it. So, last week, I relapsed...not on meth...but a relapse still. I disappeared for two days, and I showed up just before my friends put out a missing persons report. I put Coya through holy fucking hell...particularly in the light of what she has gone through in the last year and a half...and when I turned up...all I could think about was my own shame and disappointment, and I didn't do the work of dealing with and comforting my friends that I had put through it.

It's funny...Coya and I had two conversations and neither time did she pull any punches. I knew exactly how she felt, and I knew exactly what I had put her through. But I never at any time felt shamed by her. As a matter of fact, I was humbled by her honest and her love for me. She went out of her way to let me know what she was feeling while also being supportive of me and letting me know that as an addict this shit is going to go down and that there is a better way for me to deal and to respond to it when it does. And while it was not comfortable to have to sit and own the ugly and the uglier, I did it with as much grace as I could. And I was astounded at how not defensive I was...because lord knows I can get angry and defensive in a heart beat.

After talking with Coya I came to understand exactly why I could sit there and hear what she had to say, accept it, and feel it. It's because Coya lives and models in many ways what almost no one else in my life does. She owns her shit. She doesn't pretend that she is anyone's savior. She doesn't pretend that she doesn't fuck up or that she doesn't have her own stuff to work through. She reaches out for help when she needs it and acknowledges her weakness as well as her strengths. When she steps to me to have conversations about our friendship, I know that she is doing it out of love and out of a desire to strengthen our friendship and not out of some missplaced martyr complex. She asks me to call her out and recognizes when she takes actions that are hurtful to those around her. I can hear her because I trust her. And I realized through this process that there are those in my life where I do not share that same level of trust, and with those individuals there are conversations that I now need to have.

Coya and I shared the same sentiment yesterday. She and I have gone through multiple lifetimes of lifetime experiences in our 30 odd years of life. Lesson after lesson after lesson comes up, and sometimes we learn the lessons the hard way and sometimes there is only the hard lessons to learn. But against all odds, against all statistics we are both here, we are alive, and we will continue to fight. I will continue to fight. There is so much good in the world and in my life, and I'll be damned if I let anything or anyone dim my light.