In a beautiful reflection on her nonfiction piece “Distillation,” Athena Dixon reckons with family addiction, intimacy, and selfishness in memoir writing.
There is a level of narcissism that comes with writing personal essays or memoir. It takes at least a kernel of selfishness to look at a blank page and decide to fill it with your own story. Whether this decision is spurned by a need to heal, examine, or expose, the reflection is yours and yours alone. Until I wrote “Distillation,” I never felt a pause when telling those stories. I never shied away from taking the contents of my heart and allowing them to be examined by the world at large. I had no true fear in exposing what I’d always kept so hidden because I knew my intentions were good. I could easily explain that I was only trying to dissect my own life and figure out how far I’d come or if I were standing still. Others, my family and friends and those now gone, were a part of the path but never the vehicle. “Distillation” starts to bring at least one of them to the front seat.
The story is still about me, however. It’s about how I navigate alcohol when it is both an integral part of American life and yet still very much tied to fears of how addiction can take hold in a life. These kinds of worries are whispers in some branches of my family. They are reminders that home is many things, with the good and bad in equal measure. Alcohol is nothing new nor is how it manifests in ways small and large. The family knows the way liquor appears in our eyes and mannerisms. We have clearly seen how addiction can destroy a body while still allowing that same body to function, work, and love. It’s normal for this knowledge to be swallowed until something lurches back up and we taste the bitterness of it. Lost jobs. Fights. Tears. Embarrassment. But there is also the sadness. There is the hiding.
“Distillation” is rooted in the hiding. It is a shame I’ve carried since I first moved away for college at eighteen, and it has only grown with each year I am away from my hometown. It is the ache to reconnect but knowing that I’m wishing to link with something, or someone, that has fundamentally changed. Or maybe the real fear is that what is in front of me has always been, but there was always a good memory to overlap it. The further away I am, the memories get more and more distant, so it’s hard to see into the past. There is only the here and now.
Writing this piece scared me. It is a slim work, taking place within the confines of a vehicle on a single drive, but the space is voluminous to me. At first, I stayed distant on the page just as I do in real life. I read article after article about the consumption of alcohol in my home state of Ohio. I tried thinking of ways to make the narrative more about the numbers than the emotions. I kept circling the driving idea of the piece—a bottle of cheap vodka and the silence of that drive. I wrote and cut and wrote again until I stopped circling as much as I could. I know I could have done more digging, but I don’t think I’m ready or willing to damage myself in the process.
Using the image of someone who I love dearly feels all at once freeing and shameful; it was hard to get a grasp on. It felt good to voice just how alcoholism paralyzes me even if the addiction is not mine. How it stops me from seeing her because I am not prepared for the impact of what alcohol does. If I were brave, I’d ask her directly about how she feels and what she needs, but this state of being has always been. I’m not sure how to change it. The shame did not let me forget this is family, however. There was a person behind the image, and I wanted to take care in not exploiting, embarrassing, or using her. Shame made me doubt I could tell my own story without encroaching upon hers. It made me remember that no matter how carefully I choose my words, once they are in the world, they are no longer mine. They are open for interpretation and those who do not know her can never get the whole picture because she doesn’t belong to them entirely—this is only a sliver of a lifetime.
From the very first paragraph I decided I would not share this piece with my non-writing circle as I do with everything else. I made a decision to hide it from my family. I’ve decided to hold the words closely even as I am sending them out into the world. I am struck still by appearing to be disrespectful or judgmental in any way. I can admit I am not sure my good intentions will matter to those who know the both of us. That they can see it as anything other than the airing out of dirty laundry. This woman, who I have loved my entire life, is so much more than that car ride. But that ride is a part of who she is, and it was a perfect manifestation of what sits heavy in my heart when I visit. Something so small, a routine purchase, is large enough to keep me at bay.
I can only hope I have properly given her the grace and the respect she is due. And if she ever reads it, I hope she is able to see that there is love between the lines. I am still the little girl she tells stories about the day I arrived home from the hospital. I pray she can see that just as much as I am trying to distance myself from this addiction, I’m really drawing myself closer. I need to do this so that I can see the root of it. This fear is too important to study from afar. I’ve seen it for too long through screens, pictures, and phone calls that allow me the ability to disconnect from it. There is no reckoning for me this way. What I need is for it to be tangible, even if distilled down to its essence, so I can get used to the taste of it. So that I may compare it to my own addictions and enchantments until I understand they are not better—they are only different. If I look closely at her, at my hometown, perhaps I can see just why I’ve drifted away. Maybe I will find that the root of it all is greater than my need for “more.” Just maybe I will find that the distance I am cultivating is simply a long sip before I swallow what is waiting for me.