Escape: Art, Armor, and the Edges of Self (Offering 5.3)
The entwining of creativity and self-protection
This offering includes three chapters that step into the blurry spaces between love and addiction, healing and hiding.
(This is offering 5.3 of Eclosion: An Artist’s Path to Power and Peace. If you’re new here, start at the beginning. Or visit my Memoir Hub for a full table of contents with links.)
Borderlines
After ten days intertwining our bodies, our hearts, and our souls, that unexpected Alaskan adventure came to an end. Shon flew back to his life in Olympia. I left the wilds of Alaska—and my hard-won independence—for the safety net of home.
At twenty-six, after six years on my own, needing to go home felt like defeat. I didn’t want to need help. But I did. And as always, my family showed up. Not asking too many questions, never showing judgment, they gave what they could: a soft landing, a job, transportation. Tangled in my own shame and pride, I wasn’t often gracious in receiving their support—especially with my mom. Even so, they were there. And it mattered more than I could say.
Back in Bismarck, I lived with my mom, worked construction for my dad, and served drinks at a local country bar, for the three months my driver’s license was suspended. I was broke, trying to save enough money to move back to Olympia as soon as my license was reinstated.
The work for my dad was hard and so cold. We shingled a lot of roofs as fall turned to winter, the shingles frozen stiff. I did not want to get out of bed before dawn, but I loved being on a rooftop watching the spectacle of colors as the sun rose and set each day while we worked. The sky has always been one of my favorite aspects of North Dakota and those panoramic vistas were an awe-filled balm.
Serving drinks at the country bar was its own kind of torture. I mostly worked weekends, which were busy and had me running constantly. I’d have a cigarette burning at the service bar, taking drags while I stopped to drop off and pick up orders. The bar usually had a country or classic rock cover band on those nights. Every single band played “Sweet Home Alabama”, and everyone would stand up and drunkenly sing along. Let me repeat that. Every. Single. Band. Played. That. Song. God I hated it.
I’ve never been a fan of pop country music—I developed an almost physical aversion to anything country during middle school. That boy that harassed me every single day was a wolf in cowboy clothes, complete with western shirts, cowboy boots, and a ten-gallon hat. I had no idea if he even knew how to ride a horse, but he played the part of cowboy, and I unconsciously formed a bias against all things country.
So, there I was, in a country bar, not two miles from the house I lived in during middle school. Two older white men were always sitting at the end of the bar. As regulars, they acted like they owned the place, including the women servers. They thought it was perfectly acceptable to grab any server who walked by—some of whom laughed and played along as they were pulled onto a lap.
I’d had a lot of practice between ages twelve and twenty-six in responding to sexual harassment—men shouting slurs as I walked down the street or trying to touch my body when it wasn’t wanted—and I’d long since traded my silence for righteous rage. It is such a ludicrously common story. It seems no matter where you go as a woman, there will always be men who think it’s ok to shout sexual slurs out of their car window or touch your ass as you walk by. Like they fucking own you.
When the old men at the bar tried touching me, my inner rage, barely suppressed under the surface, rose up in a way it couldn’t at twelve years old. I shut them down hard and fast, telling them to keep their fucking hands off. They responded with mockery. The owner of the bar watched in silence. The other servers acting as if I was stuck-up for not letting some greasy old man touch my body. But they left me alone. And I felt powerful.
Whether I went out with friends after my shift at the bar, or sat on my mom’s porch by myself, I drank and smoked every night that I was in North Dakota. My mom was worried—she may have been the only one who could see that there was a problem. I didn’t try to hide my drinking from her. I was in North Dakota after all—the land I learned to drink in—and drink I did.
Throughout that time, Shon courted me with hand-written letters and phone calls that lasted late into the night, packages of homemade cookies and tales from his life and travels to faraway places. Travelling was a dream of mine, and something I had little experience with. No one I knew from North Dakota travelled out of the country ‘just because.’ Together, Shon and I planned a two-month trip to Mexico, an adventure unlike anything I’d ever done.
In Mexico, I changed my stripes once again, only drinking as much as Shon. One night as we wandered through the streets of Oaxaca, Shon shared some things about himself that he was worried might scare me away. I wasn’t scared. I did stay silent, though, keeping my addiction—which I couldn’t even admit to myself, hidden at the back of my brain, with the switch slammed tightly in the off position.
We spent an entire month living in San Cristobal, a gorgeous city in the southern Mexico state of Chiapas. While there, I built a makeshift travel easel and painted on the streets—colorful buildings, narrow alleys, and open plazas alive with movement and sound. Locals would pause to watch me paint—sometimes for just a moment, sometimes for longer. Sometimes women with babies strapped on their backs, sometimes young men with rifles. All with a quiet presence and curiosity that fed something in me. I was letting my art be seen—and I was being received.
After Mexico and back in Olympia once again, Shon and I had an opportunity to date like normal people for the first time. I was insistent that we take a step back and slow things down. I was not going to go from one long-term relationship right into another. So, we dated. We had fun. And I slid back into my addiction, just out of Shon’s line of sight.
The Audacity of Art
It was in my last year of college, several years before my time in Alaska, that I took my first and only oil painting class. I remember so clearly the teacher, a young woman, walking in and introducing herself. She said, “My name is Sarah, and I am an Artist.” Are you kidding me? I could not believe she had the audacity to introduce herself in that way! To call herself an Artist?! She was so full of herself it made me want to puke.
Even though I was sitting there in an art class, I still couldn’t believe that being an Artist with a capital ‘A’ was a real thing—couldn’t even reconcile that my Art Teacher was an Artist! This underscores how far out of my realm of experience I was, and just how powerfully toxic and limiting my art blocks were. What the heck was I even doing in an art class? I hardly knew. But, somehow, there I was. And of course, I fell in love with oil painting, setting up studios in each rental I lived in and continuing to paint after I graduated from college.
When I returned from Alaska, I resumed my position as a Naturalist for Northwest Trek Wildlife Park. My duties had shifted though. Before I left, a large portion of my job was giving tours through the 335-acre free-roaming area, where I drove a three-car tram, filled with up to 90 passengers, while talking about the large, native mammals and ecology of the place. With my license suspended, I could no longer drive the tram. My supervisor took pity on me—I only had one drink! —and shifted my duties to include the design of new science activities, utilizing my growing artistic skills. That winter, I worked on livening up the park’s education center, where I painted my first public murals. I downplayed painting the murals, which featured native plants and animals—it felt more like technical painting than making art.
It was Shon who helped me to see myself as an artist. When he called me an artist, he made it sound so logical. “What do you mean you’re not an artist?” he’d say. “You make art all the time! You have an art studio!”
After returning from Mexico, I moved into a shared house with several other young people, once again turning the garage into a makeshift art studio. I was working with youth doing environmental education and co-organizing the inaugural Olympia Family Barter Faire. I made pottery and sometimes painted. Slowly, I began to believe that, yes, I was an artist—though maybe not with a capital ‘A’—and making art was what I wanted to do.
A Chameleon’s Confession
While living in that shared house, one of my housemates became my best friend, sister, another aspect of self. A mirror. She saw me—the beautiful and the grotesque. She saw how I drank, and she asked me why I did this to myself.
I didn’t know.
I had no idea why I drank the way I did. Her gentle questions, never judging me, were the catalyst that helped me admit to myself that I had a problem—that I absolutely had to stop drinking the way I was. The only way I could do that was if I told other people what was going on. I had to tell Shon.
I was so afraid that Shon would reject me, but I needed to tell him. We went for a walk out on the land he lived on and sat on the hillside in the sun. I told Shon that I had something terrible to tell him and I was afraid I would lose him because of it. Somehow, I made myself say out loud to him that I thought I had a drinking problem. I couldn’t believe it when he was relieved! He said he thought it was going to be something ‘serious’ like that I was a heroin addict or something.
Couldn’t he see? Couldn’t he see that alcohol was destroying me?
Even though I was baffled and relieved by his response, it made sense that he couldn’t see. I had concealed the extent of my drinking from him throughout our entire relationship, playing a dangerous game of pretend that allowed me to fool even myself.
After I came clean, or as clean as I could at the time, I did curb my drinking. I tried to heal myself. I saw a therapist but was never fully honest about how I drank. I began attending the Olympia Zen Center and learned Zen Buddhist meditation. My studio moved from the garage of our shared house to an extra bedroom. I turned it into my yoga, mediation, and art room.
The first, and maybe only, thing I painted in that space covered one entire wall. I painted myself as a tree, a tree of life, elegant and curved. But the roots and branches had black, dripping, ugly wounds on them. It was how I felt.
Wounded.
My housemates, and even Shon, couldn’t believe I’d done this. Not only because it was a rental, but because it was so disturbing. In some ways, it was probably a cry for help. I was trying to say through paint what I couldn’t express in words. When I gave up that room, it took many coats to cover the wounds.
In the same way that I buried my shame from being sexually harassed, and painted over my tree, I concealed my alcoholism. Shoving it deep, deep inside, beyond the reach of any kind of light. In that darkness, my shame festered and grew, like the cankers on my tree.
The me that showed herself to Shon then was vile. I became a nightmare to be around. I was cutting and unkind. Shon grew tired of this, but I had the audacity to tell him he couldn’t leave me—he couldn’t because if he did leave, I wouldn’t be able take to take it. And for some reason I still don’t understand, he stayed.
So began seven years of me as a chameleon. Pretending that I was OK. Pretending that I could drink like a normal person. I couldn’t. I was constantly obsessing about when I would drink, who I would drink with, and how I could drink as much as I wanted to without anybody being any the wiser. During those seven years, I somehow managed to keep things together on the surface, stringing together seasonal outdoor and environmental education jobs and making art when I could.
But my emotional landscape? Always like a roller coaster—my inner life was punctuated with ever higher highs and exceedingly low lows.
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