Ana Marie Cox Instagram – God sometimes speaks to me through shuffle. Woke up this morning on the wrong side of my mind and the driving to my meeting first I heard two songs I listened to on my darkest days of using. Elliott Smith’s “Needle in the Hay” — it’s about heroin specifically but why we use generally:
I can’t be myself
I can’t be myself and I don’t wanna talk
I’m taking the cure
So I can be quiet whenever I want
So leave me alone
Then, Jesus, “The Believer” by @rhettmiller, which is about Smith:
All of your good friends
All of the people I’d meet
Keep a list of the things
In this world that we trust
…
When you said happiness is all you wanted
You said this is all you wanted
How I miss
You almost made it
Happiness
And while I miss Smith as much as anyone (the night he was on The Oscars was either the day punk died or the day people heard what it could produce), that song hit me because it reminded me of what I’d lose if I completely gave up.
Now, eventually, I did give up. But the universe wouldn’t let me off that easy.
One thing that kept me going when I had to start over again was the same thing “The Believer” said to me: “You’re so close, you’re loved even if you don’t feel it.”
And then this was the reading in the meeting. AA literature isn’t often as beautiful as what Elliott Smith or Rhett can produce, but this one comes close.
And I have seen the stars in sobriety. Let me testify that to you. Whatever you’re going through today, my witness to you is that the stars will be called in to shine for you as they always eventually do for me. | Posted on 02/May/2024 20:37:33
