The Saint and the Drunk – A Guide to Making the Big Decisions In Your Life: Excerpt

This excerpt is from  Stephanie Peirolo’s upcoming book The Saint and the Drunk – A Guide to Making the Big Decisions In Your Life about how to use the ancient spiritual tools of St Ignatius of Loyola through the lens of the Higher Power concept from Alcoholic Anonymous for a modern, spiritual-but-not-religious approach to make major life decisions with intention and clarity.

Children’s Stories 

I’ve always wanted to be a writer. I studied English and Creative Writing in college. Soon after graduation I was talking with my mother about my future. I was working as a waitress, but the plan was to use the time outside of work to finish the novel I had begun my senior year in college. 

“I always thought you’d write lovely children’s books,” my mother said. She said it warmly, it was clearly one of those stories she told herself and her friends. I had just graduated from Stanford, working my ass off to learn about literature and how to write. I finished my degree even though my father died the summer before my junior year. And it was the writing that drove me, this hunger to read, write, use my voice. 

Children’s books can be lovely and transformative, and I enjoy them. But I never wanted to write them. Women write children’s books. That was my mother’s narrative. Having a daughter who wrote small books for small children was a story my mother could get behind. 

I don’t remember what I said to my mother when she made that comment. But I mentally rejected her story with anger that still echoes across the intervening decades. And yet. I can still feel her story, like broken glass on a bedroom floor; hard to avoid barefoot in the dark. I write things and then don’t submit them. One rejection letter paralyses me, and I stop submitting anything. It’s as if my psyche has made an accommodation with the narrative box my mother put me in that day; you can write, but you can’t publish, you can’t be recognized as a writer of anything other than children’s stories. Which I don’t write. 

We humans are meaning making machines. We make meaning by telling stories. We see stories the way we see faces; our eyes are primed to see patterns as facial features like the man in the moon, and our minds and spirits are primed for narrative. Stories can support us or limit us. A story can be useful at one point in our lives and then lose utility later. The stories we are told as children by our families, our culture, our religions, can echo through the rest of our lives. Stories are not the problem. The problem is believing that a story is real when it’s not, accepting a false narrative as immutable fact rather than the fiction it is. 

Inordinate attachment 

“Spiritual exercises which have as their purpose the conquest of self and the regulation of one’s life in such a way that no decision is made under the influence of any inordinate attachment.” (SE # 21) Ignatius wrote that. There’s plenty packed into that sentence, but what intrigues me is the inordinate attachment I have to certain narratives. Learning how to make decisions without the influence of our inordinate attachment to limiting or damaging narratives is the point of this section. 

Alcoholism and drug addiction are easy to understand as inordinate attachments. My attachment to alcohol was inordinate, extraordinary. A friend once asked me about my sobriety, saying, “don’t you miss the taste of good wine?” 

I laughed. Taste, conviviality, ease, all those things that are associated with an appreciation of wine or spirits were lost to me for most of the last years of my drinking. I would have consumed whatever was put in front of me to achieve the impact of alcohol; the snick of release when the hypervigilant part of my brain shut off. No matter that release was often accompanied by blackouts where I lost hours. 

At the height of my drinking I was in a bar and went to the ladies’ room and saw my face in the mirror and I didn’t know who I was. Literally, not figuratively, I was so drunk I didn’t recognize my own face. I knew it had to be me because there wasn’t anyone else in the bathroom. Did Hemingway write about this, I thought to myself, looking at the young woman with long dark hair and brown eyes like my grandmother’s? 

I thought I was losing my mind. The narrative in my head was that I had to hide this from anyone around me or they’d take me to a sinister mental hospital. When, a few years later, I realized I was an alcoholic, I was completely relieved. I wasn’t crazy, I was a drunk! Oddly, that was a story I celebrated. For many, it’s a shameful admission, for me it was the key to get out of the narrative that I was insane. 

I’ve had friends who responded to a diagnosis of ADHD in much the same way; the relief of having an explanation for patterns of behavior that didn’t make sense without that narrative. These stories can be supportive, bringing order out of chaos. 

In the past few years, I’ve come to understand that we can be inordinately attached to ideas and narratives. We don’t always question the stories we are told, and their validity over time. A key piece of our discernment process is making the stories we were told visible as stories, constructs rather than actual reality. Then we can decide if they are still real and valid for us, or if they are outmoded or even harmful. And we can see if we are inordinately attached to any of our narratives in a way that causes us to become enmeshed in a world view that no longer serves us. 

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Stephanie Peirolo is a board-certified executive coach and writer. Her storytelling on The Moth has been featured on NPR and in the best-selling book All These Wonders. She is an Associate of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace, a community of Catholic Sisters who work for peace through justice. She has a BA from Stanford University in Creative Writing and an MA in Transformational Leadership from Seattle University’s School of Theology and Ministry. 

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The Saint and the Drunk – A Guide to Making the Big Decisions In Your Life

What if you had an internal compass that could provide direction at every turning point in your life? The Saint and the Drunk – A Guide to Making the Big Decisions in Your Life shows people how to build a practice of intentional decision making. Everyone has access to an understanding of what we are called to do or be in the world. But for many that access has been obscured by cultural or familial narratives, trauma or grief. This is a practical book that considers the very real responsibilities most people have. The exercises and writing prompts help to reach that deep knowing within people so that they can build a life that is congruent with their values while moving closer to their dreams.

The author shares her deeply moving, and at times, tragic personal journey that successfully affirms that the discernment process outlined in this book can help anyone, no matter their circumstance, to make even the most difficult decisions in their lives. The Saint and the Drunk – A Guide to Making the Big Decisions In Your Life shows how to use ancient spiritual tools with a modern, spiritual-but-not-religious approach to make major life decisions with intention and clarity. 

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Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing