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As I lay there, listening to its groans, a sense of peace washes over me, even as my guts churn and tangle, knotting themselves into a gnarl. My hollow cavern of abdomen feels good, even if it doesn’t feel right. It feels good to overcome the emptiness, knowing I can’t fill it.

My father taught me how to drink. I was eight or nine. By then, I’d learned to detach from the physical me and send my soul hovering against the ceiling above us, a wispy cobweb of consciousness. It looked on, no matter how desperately I urged my curious soul to avert its gaze. The soul watched; the soul knew.

I ran across a quote from James Baldwin recently that caught my eye. Here it is: “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” I’ve been thinking a lot about this concept, considering my own history, the things I have looked at head-on, and, as a result, what has (or hasn’t!) changed.

While our son is on vacation, my husband and I are watching his dog, Sassy. She’s been through a lot in her eight years on this earth: multiple litters of puppies in a puppy mill, a couple of surgeries, many teeth pulled…and who knows what else? As a result, she’s a little slow to trust, just like our Penny was when she first came to us.