Slaying the Dragon

D.R. Garrett is a Pushcart nominated writer and award winning filmmaker sharing stories, essays and films about divinity, sex addiction recovery, and punk rock. Visit the writer on Substack.

Once I found a book that I could not put down. It was as if the writer was telling my story. The story I wanted to tell but was unable to say. It was a book about a man who was struggling with heroin and alcohol addiction. But it wasn’t just that it was a book about addicts. It was a book about someone trying to find themselves. Someone who was always chasing something, but everywhere they went tragedy was at their doorstep. The book was called Jesus’ Son. I found it on the street. I found it to be a message, a sign for something, but I didn’t know what.

It was my first year in sobriety. I had left my husband. I was practically broke, and I had no idea who I was anymore. All I had was the memories I had been trying to drink away for the past fifteen years of my life. And here was this book giving me permission to tell my story, to tell it like it is with no metaphors, stripped down and raw just like I felt sitting in a recovery meeting telling the truth for the very first time in my life.

Anais Niin says that “the role of the writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.” Writing about what I know is saying what I am unable to say. It is what I am most afraid of, and what gets in the way of what I really want out of life. For years this had been the difference in being able to tell good stories and great stories. This is because, for a long time I did not know what it was like to change, to overcome my addictions, to live a life not defined by the trauma I had endured. I understood the concept of putting your protagonist in a tree and throwing apples at her. I knew all the Jungian archetypes. I’d read books on craft and taken a handful of writing classes. I’d written in different styles and genres, but something was always missing. I could never figure out how to change my character by the end of the story. Sure, I could change their circumstances for better or worse, but I couldn’t change them. This was because I couldn’t change me. I had never completed my own hero’s journey so how could I complete one in a story?

I saw myself as the labels that I liked the most and not for who I really was. I thought if I married the love of my life, I would be happy. When that didn’t work, I thought if I became a famous film maker that would fix everything. What I found when I got sober was all the labels I put on myself were not me. Even if I got a film into Sundance and people told me I was a “real” artist, I would still be miserable. Because deep down inside, I believed that I was all the shitty things that other people had done and said to me. Inside, I was a million fractured pieces all projecting my insecurities out into the world. Then something amazing happened. I gave up. I stopped trying to be someone I was not and stopped pretending that everything was okay. I accepted that I was powerless over my addictions, and my thoughts, and what other people did and said, and I asked for help.