The Quiet Part

I am an introvert. That is one of the three things I used drinking to manage. The other two are harder to put on a webpage.

For the first two months at Sunrise Semester I did not unmute. I don't think anyone pressured me to. I don't remember anyone even noticing. What I remember is the feeling of being in a room — a rectangular grid of a room, thirty-five little squares of faces — and not being the one expected to carry it.

That is not a small thing. I had spent two decades being the one expected to carry it.

What it was like before

I drank because parties were unbearable and the wine made them bearable. That is the short version. The long version involves a lot of rehearsed small talk, a lot of arriving late so nobody would notice when I started, and one stretch in my early thirties where I genuinely believed my personality was the alcohol. If you took it away, what remained would not be worth meeting.

I am going to ask you to read that last sentence again, because it took me a long time to say it out loud, and it took me longer to hear myself say it.

What Sunrise Semester gave me

Permission to be quiet. That is the honest answer.

There's a thing people say in recovery about "getting out of your own head." For a lot of us that means learning to talk to other humans. For me it meant the opposite: learning that I could sit with other humans without performing for them, and they would still be there the next morning, and I would too.

I started sharing at three months. I cried the first time. Nobody fixed it. Someone said "thanks Miriam" and the next person went. That was it. That was the intervention. Somebody had heard me and then they had kept going — had given me the enormous gift of not making me the center of anything.

What I would say to you

If you're the person I was — the one who has been told their whole life to speak up, and has found a chemical that makes speaking up tolerable, and is now discovering that the chemical is also killing them — I want you to know something.

There is a meeting where you don't have to talk.

There is a meeting where you can listen for a month.

There is a meeting where the expectation is not that you entertain the room but that you stay alive until tomorrow morning, and the room will be here tomorrow morning too.

I'll see you there. I won't make you say anything.