Thanking Anne Lamott

In February 2007 I got arrested after a misunderstanding with the law.  Apparently they frown, heavily, on calling in your own prescriptions.  I saw it as eliminating the middle man; they saw it as a felony.  They won.  It was a horrible experience, but it was the beginning of the end of a twenty year battle with opiates.  Getting arrested probably saved my life and definitely saved my sanity.  Two years of visits with my probation officer and random drug testing left me little choice about using.  I guess if I had been willing to go back to jail I might have continued to use, but the three days I spent locked up was enough for me.  Horizontal stripes and community shoes?  No thank you.  I began to believe that living above the influence instead of under it might actually make things easier, but I hadn't a clue how to go about that or why my attempts to stop using in the past had never been successful.  I went to NA meetings because the court mandated it.  I listened to people who were having varying degrees of success at living a drug-free life because I had enough sense to do so.  And I read.  A lot.  Anything and everything I could find about overcoming addiction.  That's how I found her.

Browsing the shelves at Barnes & Noble one day I found a book of essays and interviews of well known people's stories of their experiences with addiction.  The list of contributors included Richard Pryor, Chuck Negron, Alice Cooper, Richard Lewis, Steve Earle, Malcolm McDowell, Grace Slick and several others with whom I wasn not familiar.  It was a great list (seriously they had me at Richard Pryor and Alice Cooper) and I had no doubt that it would be an interesting read.  I picked through and read the chapters of the people with whom I was familiar and then went back and read the rest.  All of them were heartbreaking and inspiring and hopeful and it felt like each of these people, in their words and their willingness to bare their souls, had given me a gift.  I finished reading Dock Ellis' story.  It was late and I was tired.  I turned the page to put in a bookmark and there was Anne Lamott.  Soft eyes with lines of knowledge and wisdom and experience around them and the most fabulous blond dreds.  I put down the bookmark.  One more chapter.  One more story.  The story that would touch my soul and change everything.

As she described herself as a child she also described me.  Never feeling like she fit in or belonged.  Always feeling like she was "too much" or "not enough".   And how that first mind altering substance changed all that.  Made everything right until it made everything wrong.  She wrote about not using drugs but what she also wrote about, in this essay and in her own books of essays, was how she was this wonderful, crazy, neurotic, silly, irrational, perfectly imperfect person even without any mind altering chemicals in her system!  That's when I had my epiphany.  I had been willing and even able to give up the high, but what I'd never been able to let go of was the built in excuse for being a fuck up.  It was so easy to tell everyone, myself included, that my words, actions and decisions weren't really my fault because I was wasted.  If I quit using drugs on a regular basis I would have to take responsibility; but what I realized thanks to Anne was that I didn't have to be perfect just because I wasn't wasted.  And that was the key to my freedom. 

I've read just about everything she's written and while I love her fiction, I devour her essays.  She has a strong faith in God and talks about this part of her life often.  I am an atheist but respect and admire how she can use her belief system to inspire others without ever making you feel like she's trying to convert you.  In the essays where she talks about her church she refers to it by name.  It is located north of San Francisco and just happens to be mid way between Lake Tahoe where my daughter Sam and I volunteered at a Tough Mudder last month and my daughter's home.  When I realized that, on the weekend we were spending in Tahoe, we would be driving back to Sam's home on Sunday it occurred to me that I knew where Anne Lamott would probably be that morning at 11 o'clock.  Now it crossed my mind that as an atheist, my going to church to try to meet Anne Lamott was a bit like a vegetarian going to a butcher shop to try to run into Lady Gaga while she was trying on dresses and I struggled with the idea that maybe it would be wrong, but I talked to a few friends about whether my plan bordered on stalking and after much thought I decided.  I was going to church.

It took a while to convince my son-in-law that my pagan daughter and I were not punking him when we told him he needed to get up at seven in the morning and drive three hours so that we could go to church but we finally did and he got up and drove us there.  Bless his heart.  We found the church and parked.  I had a card that I had written a little something about how she had changed my life, her book Bird By Bird that I planned to ask her to autograph and my phone so that I could get a picture of myself with this woman whom I idolized.  I was having a bit of a panic attack while trying to decide if I was really going to go through with this craziness when a car pulled up next to us and she got out.  Her dreds make her so distinctive that there was no "Is that really her?" moment.  There was no doubt.  She walked into the church and I just sat there.  My daughter gave me a "shit or get off the pot' look and we got out and went inside.  It was a small church with a small congregation and it felt very welcoming.  Anne was sitting across the sanctuary.  Even though I could see her it didn't seem real.  The sermon was given by a visiting pastor and was a story about a gift that she had sent to her brother and how much it meant to him to know that someone was thinking of him.  She knew that he appreciated what she had done because he called her and thanked her, telling her how much it had meant to him.  Do you know what he didn't do?  He didn't ask her for anything more.  That would never have occurred to him or to anyone with half a brain and one eyeball who was expressing what he was trying to express.  Gratitude.  Appreciation.  Humility.  And so, after the service, when I had the honor of meeting Anne Lamott, I told her how her willingness to share her experience and her talent for putting words together had made it possible for me to change, to be a better mother and friend and to truly enjoy the life I was living.  I gave her the card and then I left.  I didn't take out my book or my phone, because I was there to honor her and an autograph and picture weren't about or for her.  They were about me.  Asking for more when I had had more than enough was not okay.  Making this about me instead of her was not okay.  Being selfish instead of grateful was not okay.  How do I know these things?  Anne Lamott taught me.