she's not from around here

~ trigger warning ~

When the weather warms up, and I start coming back to life, I don’t want fruit salad or an ice cold lemonade.

I want a Marlboro menthol. Or maybe a red. But mostly a menthol.

I write a lot here about medicine, about the divine, about the function and reality of being a mystic in the modern era. Though I reference it from time to time, I shy away from sharing the darker aspects of this path. I’m not sure why. Maybe I don’t think whoever is reading this deserves to know. Maybe I just haven’t been ready to write about it more and again. It usually feels like an apology, even though I have never really gotten one of those in return. Beyond the grace of space and time. So I guess that is a kind of apology, but I have never really gotten the straight-forward kind.

Regardless, it’s been a hot stove lately. I haven’t touched it. I just sit and stare at the burner as it turns orange and… reminisce.

So I am going to share some of my memories with you, reader. For every bright, beautiful anchor point my childhood and adolescence gave me, there is an equal opposite. These are snapshots, not nearly all of the worst of it. But I think you’ll get the gist.

So, like I was saying, when the weather warms up, I want bare feet and a menthol.

I think of catching tadpoles in the creek flowing behind my childhood friend’s house, our six-year-old hands and feet chasing them and splashing through to the other side. When we get back to her house, I see her mom filling up a bucket for us to dump them in, hand on her hip, cigarette dangling out of the corner of her mouth.

I think of the smattering of kids who lived on Arcadia Street, all grubby hands and sweaty foreheads from a day spent romping outside from backyard to backyard. I remember gathering on our front porch to pool our dollars and coins together so we can walk to the Texaco station for Doritos and Cokes, an excursion spearheaded by my older brother. I remember the constant of Route 50, a few hundred feet away at all times.

I remember setting up a snow cone stand on the curb at the edge of our front yard, willing the yuppies stuck in beach traffic to pull over for a dollar refreshment. Most of our clientele were watermen, swinging by the Shore Sportsman two doors down to get live bait and the various accoutrements one needs out on the water. Though I was born and raised on the Shore, I wouldn’t really know. I can count the number of times I’ve been fishing on one hand. My mom is from New York City originally, though the back half of her childhood was spent in the suburbs between DC and Baltimore. My dad is West Virginian, through and through, from Spring Hill in South Charleston. So our summers were spent the Appalachian way. Most of our vacations were camping trips or pilgrimages to various state parks in the Mon. And when we were at my childhood home on Arcadia Street, we were more culturally mountain people than water people.

I never truly fit in either role, though. Too much of the other always bleeds through. Plus the New York of it all, too jagged and cosmopolitan for any and all true land or water people.

I remember being twelve, and walking into town to watch the grimy boys practice skate tricks behind the movie theater while I smudged more eyeliner on my chubby freckled face. A few of those boys are dead now, but most of them are in recovery.

I remember being fourteen, getting dropped off from a party at 7 am, and riding in the back of our chestnut purple Windstar minivan to a ravioli lunch fundraiser at the church my deacon grandpa was shepherding. I almost didn’t go, but I actually felt… incredible? One ravioli in, my hangover hit. I didn’t yet understand that sometimes you get so drunk at night that it sticks with you til the morning. I didn’t understand this yet because I was a literal child. I remember puking in the church basement bathroom.

15 here. Did you know I got a full ride to WVU? In another life…

Then, it’s midday and I am a little older. I am a little bit day baked in the back seat of a car, being driven by my childhood sweetheart, who has done too much acid. Not this particular day, there was no acid. But in general at this point, his brain was already getting sticky and mushy. Anyway, we pick up a pint of blueberries from a farm stand on the side of the road, and he drives us out to an estate on the water, owned by people he knows and “they said we could come by whenever for the boats.” That could’ve been true, but we also could have trespassed. I’m still not sure, and these are the mysteries. Anyway we canoe out to a little island in the middle of the river, which is actually just an inlet of the Bay, like most rivers where I grew up. I bask in the sun and eat blueberries while the boys disappear to do what I assume are the “good” drugs, and I close my eyes and I feel God in the quiet.

Then I am 17, sitting around a campfire in West Virginia with my entire extended family, trying to hide how drunk I am on local blueberry wine. When summer comes around, I mostly think of West Virginia, and I think of my cousin Derek.

He grew up on the mountain-side of Maryland, while I was out on the Shore. We saw each other, along with the rest of our extended family, every holiday and most birthdays, when we’d all meet in the middle. Different cousins took turns staying at our grandparents’ for weeks at a time during the summer, and I bounced around to different aunts and uncles. All the grown ups were very young and very much needing to share some semblance of relief and support. Derek and I frequently wound up in the same place at the same time. I remember the two of us sorting a hundred dollars of quarters and coins our grandmother had been saving under her bed. He must’ve been ten or eleven, so I was eight or nine. He was supposed to use the old towels when we walked to the pool because he’d bleached and blued his hair that summer, and the manic panic dye would streak down his face when he was all chlorine sweaty. We fought and we made up and we had so much fun.

I remember years later, sweating bullets after the sun went down, walking the grounds of Camp Maria together. We were both 1:1 counselors at Muscular Dystrophy Association Camp, and we were off cabin duty for the evening. We took a walk after ghost driving some of the camper’s power chairs up to the activity hall for charging. We had to spread the chairs out over the camp buildings every night, or we’d overwhelm the power grid. When we’d plugged in, and it was just the two of us, he asked me what meds they had put me on, which dosages, and how I felt about it. He asked me if I was eating enough, even though I still got made fun of for being chubby. Eating disorders can be sneaky like that.

He knew how smart I was, he knew how sad I was, he knew I never learned how to eat in a way that wouldn’t stop my heart eventually, and he knew the medicine they gave me made it all worse. But why would doctors and parents trust two mentally-ill, self-medicating teenagers who oscillate somewhere between the smartest pseudo-transplants in rooms full of the real Appalachian and Shore folk, and the token white trash in fancier environments? For that moment in time, it was enough that he’d asked. It meant even more that he listened. No one else did either one of those things without yelling at me, or lecturing me, or telling me I was wrong in how I described my own experience.

He told me I wasn’t bipolar, which is something every single one of my therapists has also confirmed, but other adults in my life weren’t always so sure. It’s a classic case of projection that I really don’t want to get into right now. Anyway, he said he’d tell me if he thought I was, which I trusted, because he was. Diagnosed and medicated and everything. He said I mostly just seemed sad and upset about the world, and too smart for my own good. He told me weed was fine, but don’t smoke cigarettes because they’ll ruin my voice and they’re terrible for you. He smoked them. He made me promise I wouldn’t. I said okay, and we both knew I was lying.

I remember the next day, when the lift at the outdoor pool broke just before the camp-wide party, which meant many of the campers wouldn’t be able to safely get in. I cannot possibly overstate how big of a disappointment this was. Camp is the best week of the year. It’s a chance to feel “normal,” and there is a freedom and relief that bodies with various neuromuscular degenerative diseases can only experience when submerged in water, with a personal 1:1 camp counselor. The doctor and wheelchair engineer on the MAC team couldn’t figure out how to fix the lift, and neither could the handful of firemen who had stuck around after donating camp lunch that day. Derek took one look at the issue. A screw was missing. He looked at it for all of about five seconds before standing up, popping out one of his purple titanium nipple rings, and gliding it into the empty space. It was a perfect fit. Everybody swam. Some real Jesus stuff in that kid, if you ask me.

My body flashes forward a couple of years, and I am getting high with my Uncle. We are smoking out of Derek’s little handheld party bowl after hiking to the top of Bald Knob in Pocahontas, just the two of us. Summer to me is also mostly a day buzz and a pb&j at the top of Bald Knob. That place is one of my favorite churches. I always prefer to hike all the way up, instead of taking the ski lift and ridge-running over. So we do the whole trail, base to peak. We even ditch the switchback for the last quarter of the hike and go straight up the mountain, scaling the steep clay by pulling ourselves up on the sturdy little shrubs that grow defiantly out of it. A series of middle fingers. “Fuck you, gravity! I will GROW HERE!”

We sit on the ancient boulders at the top and he asks me if I am eating. He asks me about my grief. He asks me about my friend from high school who has just been murdered two months earlier, after a group of guys I’ve known my whole life did some drugs that are supposed to be fun, until they really aren’t very fun at all. 52 of us graduated. After freshman year of college, we are 51 of us left. That in and of itself feels like a miracle, since kids and teenagers die all the time where I grew up. Tragic childhood death is very much a fixture of the culture. Cancer and house fires and freak accidents, sure. But mostly drunk driving, suicides, and overdoses.

From the top of Bald Knob. Blueberry wine was in my future.

After we sit up at the peak for a while, my Uncle and I walk back down, and make our way to go get higher. We smoke out of his bowl, but Derek isn’t with us. He died the previous December, first semester of my freshman year. It was either on purpose or a really, cosmically unfair and stupid accident. He was 21, and I had forgotten to text him back a few days before, because the culture of NYU was hitting me like a bus.

We’re not supposed to talk about these things honestly, and so I think I probably have to.

I think of the first time I tried to stop drinking. I was 23. I know that might seem young to get sober, but you have to remember that I had my first sips so young I don’t actually remember them, and I started in on beer, wine, and hard liquor when I was only 14. By 23, I was living in a precarious environment, with questionable people, but everything I’ve ever done has been to keep myself and people I love alive. And so I’m okay with it. I’m okay with the judgement from people who have never been where I have been, or where the people I love have been. Because at the end of the day, it worked. We’re still alive. Well, most of us are.

Anyway, I graduated from NYU with honors by the skin of my teeth, after writing and handing in a string of pilot scripts based in my alternative timeline lives. A group of siblings living in Morgantown making their way, a young musician taking up residence at a Fawlty Towers version of the Purple Fiddle in Thomas. That place is another one of my churches. The academic work was never that hard for me, but the culture stripped me naked. My NYU persona felt dirty. The art school was full of rich kids who either used it to enforce a hierarchy, or pretended to be poor. All of them simultaneously calling me white trash to my face. Funny, given that the more salt of the earth kind of people I grew up with considered me a rich snooty city slicker with my big college loans and scholarships, who, at best, they just “don’t understand.” The number of times I’ve been told, “New York?! Oh, I could never live there,” with a grimace? I wish I had a dollar. The other half of the people I grew up with are as wealthy as the rich folks I met in college, but they feel superior because most of them live on the big land they own, and they pretend to be Christian about it all. The Devil is from the Big City, didn’t you know?

The other normal-ish people I found from working class backgrounds at NYU were either nose-to-the-grindstone determined to be the BEST out of spite, or weren’t from a place where there were so many farms and so much Death. The only other girl from my town who went to NYU while I was there drove into Easton from her family’s estate when we were children to attend the rich day school I can see from the front porch of my parents’ house. Then she went to a very fancy boarding school before mesmerizing Pharrell Williams at NYU and getting a record deal. Maybe you’ve heard of her. We’ve never met. I was never her kind of stock, from what I’ve been told.

I would like to say, right here right now, the fact that I graduated both high school and college with honors, while drunk out of my mind, consistently high, never eating regularly, and flirting with death every other day of the week is something pretty fucking special and impressive. I have been told by mental health professionals it’s a wonder I managed to keep myself straighten and keep myself alive with no grippy sock vacations or real consistent care. And so I would like more people to recognize that. By “more people,” I mean me. I did it, and I did it by myself, often times while people around me were actively working against my recovery, sometimes on purpose. And so excuse me if I am particular about who gets to be a part of the living part of my life now.

And excuse me if some of my memories are mixed up, jumbled, overlapped… the combination of childhood substance abuse and routine gaslighting makes certain things both very vividly clear and fuzzy at the same time. When I write about the experiences of my young life, it’s an effort to sort out what was actually happening. I am still learning to trust my memory.

We’re not supposed to talk about these things honestly, and so I think I probably have to.

Anyway, I decided to dry out a year after I graduated college. I felt like I already made every mistake, and I thought if I didn’t stop drinking, I would probably die soon. From doing something stupid during a blackout, or from getting into different kinds of substances. I was already flirting with them, and that landed me in my precarious, fuck-the-future living situation. I got a job dog walking, 10 am - 7 pm every day. If you’re not familiar with the New York City dog walking industry, it’s very intense, competitive, and serious. So I rode my borrowed, five-pound, fixed gear, custom-made Italian bicycle frame from 10 to 7 every day, with dog walks scheduled back to back in Williamsburg, Greenpoint, and Bushwick. The dogs were wealthy, neurotic, and sometimes a little dangerous. My bosses could see where I was on the company app, and were supposed to call me if I was behind schedule to make sure everything was okay, but mostly to tell me pick it the fuck up. They never called me because I was never behind schedule. I became a muscle and a total monster on the bike. I channeled everything I’d ever felt and everything I’d ever run from into that bike, into finding my woosah-zen, to alpha up my anxiety and noose leash a biter whose owner had only booked fifteen minute daily walks, in and out.

I would get back to the apartment in Bed-Stuy, dripping in sweat. I was vegan and sober and my sweaty clothes started to smell like kombucha. That apartment was haunted, by real ghosts, and by the people I lived with.

I got along pretty well with the working class organizers I met at the PPA, BLM, WFP… my mom’s parents are immigrants and real working-class from Brooklyn and Queens, respectively. But she only lived out on Long Island until she was 7 or 8 before moving so my grandpa could find work.

I was born on the Shore, but to outsiders. Both my parents are transplants. They’ve carved a place for themselves in the community, but when I was a kid, they weren’t the right kind of local working class folk to fit in any real way, and they definitely weren’t rich. It is a strange sensation, not belonging to the place you were born. To this day, I have different accents that jump out at different times. My dad sounds like he’s from West Virginia, because he is. My mom’s parents have thick New York accents, and she definitely has certain syllables where that jumps out. The Eastern Shore has its own dialect that sounds like a mix between an Arkansas southern draw and the Philly accent. A real long “ohw.” Depending on how tired I am, who I’m around, and what I’m talking about, my mouth falls into emphasizing different syllables. I also code switch. Thanking the watermen from down Tilghman, who used to come into the coffee shop I worked at in St. Michaels, for praying over me as a counter tip vs. telling Aidy Bryant I put her credit card back on her desk after running an errand for her? That’s two different Meg mouths.

In the back yard of my first real home, in Royal Oak.

I moved to New York and felt home in a new way, but so much of my wildness and softness were forced to switch places in order to survive. It required a different kind of jagged, and a dulling of some of my favorite parts of being alive. No one really understands the geographic or economic breakdown of the Shore unless you’ve been there. Some of my friends from the city came to visit after I had moved to the house in Royal Oak, and one of them said, “Meg, I didn’t know that this place is mostly farms. Like we just kept driving, and there were just more farms, and some water, then more farms, then more water, and then we got to your house.” And they’re right, it is mostly farms, in between all the inlets and creeks.

These are farms owned by salt of the Earth people who’ve been there forever, or farms owned by richie rich city runoff. Plus the watermen, who run the spectrum from working class to very wealthy legacy families. Then there are the townies, which I think I probably am. Now a billionaire moved in and bought up literally more than half of my hometown, like the evil man in the Goonies, but if the children actually all died tragically on their treasure hunt. Plus, a ton of wealthy folks from New York and DC moved to the Shore during Covid. But before, when I livd in New York, no one knew any of this macro culture stuff, let alone all the ways I didn’t even fit in there. And the only mention of Appalachians or rural folks was derogatory, which didn’t help. Neither did all the free drugs on daddy’s credit card, and the “don’t worry about the remnants strewn across the floor, the nannymaid will get it tomorrow morning.” Bleh. One of these rich kids, an Upper West Side brat who was cosplaying as a starving artist on Avenue C, actually looked me in the eye one time and said, “Meg, the world doesn’t owe you anything.” Yeah, no shit. He proceeded to use a story I told him about my own life in a one act play he wrote. It was stupid and derivative. I think he’s a TV writer now. And we bless him on his path.

I like to say that I often feel like a social experiment, given that my mom is a native New Yorker and my dad is from West Virginia. But I am much, much quicker to feel defensive about rural folks when city people criticize them. It’s a hell of a lot easier for me to let the “New York?! I would never live there,” slide. I don’t know why.

I moved back to the Eastern Shore after I started drinking again, and just as I turned 26. I met one of the great loves of my life, when I was in the middle of a great personal tragedy involving Acid Brain from childhood sweethearterdom, and this new guy asked me, “Why are you even here?” We were sharing a 3 am cigarette on his porch and talking about the stars. He had heard me sing, and he heard me channel, and he had heard stories about my big city life. He wasn’t really from the Shore, either, but he was shiny and very mystical, like me. People like shiny, especially at first. We really did it up big and bright, and we burnt out fast. We fought in public and giggled and cried to each other in private. We told people our business, but we didn’t tell them all of it. We never really touched each other the way people assumed we did. It was both bigger and more tragic than that. We spoke in a secret language and we ran around with and without each other.

You see, without spilling every single bean… we made a deal before we came here, and he tried to erase this deal because he thought I was getting the shittier end of it, even though it would have hurt him, too. He thought he was protecting me. He told me this. It was a life and death sort of thing, in his eyes, and no, I don’t care to explain more. Not here, not like this. Anyway, he wasn’t able to erase it, but he did change it. After he decided to move away, he lied to a few people to protect me, and I changed our pre-life agreement even more that he did, out of spite. I switched to a different timeline, and I switched again. I miss him. I miss cigarettes and I miss being a mess whose medicine wasn’t ready yet. The real kicker? His absence was very much the energetic mechanism that initiated me deeper into the priestess of it all. He made my medicine ready, because it hadn’t been ready for him when he was in front of me. As soon as he was gone, I could see exactly what I needed to do in his wake, and I found certain teachers, and it all fell into place.

Whoever else comes to love me in this lifetime doesn’t need to worry about him. He died before we could apologize to each other. Out with a bang and I don’t really want to talk about it anymore. All this death will drive a girl crazy.

We’re not supposed to talk about these things honestly, and so I think I probably have to.

I stopped drinking after our last fight. It’s now been over six years since I’ve had wine, whiskey, tequila, beer… I don’t smoke cigarettes. I stopped with the weed. I don’t even drink caffeine anymore. It’s not that I don’t trust myself or insist on some kind of purity. It’s just easier this way. I feel better when I keep the signal clear. It allows me to focus my addictive tendencies in more productive ways, like in helping myself and other people. I enjoy being fully present for my pleasures and my pains. I used so many substances and people to drown out my medicine and my power because it scared me. Then when it stopped scaring me, it annoyed me and I resented it. Now I embrace it, and I enjoy embracing it, because what else is there to do?

So much wisdom, most of the medicine the modern era calls for, cannot be found in a book, or in a weekend workshop. It’s not in an oracle deck or in the mouth of a guru. Sure, you might find the labels for the jar in those places, but not the stuff itself. The stuff itself is in how we survive, manage, and navigate great pain. In relationship to other people, and to the wisdom of the Earth. I can write for days about the mystical initiations, trainings, and practical, hands-on experience I have as a priestess, as an energy worker, as a servant, all of which has been happening since I was a child. You can roll the tape back here and dig through the archives. But all of that would be nothing, would mean nothing, without this context. Without the ever-present darkness that I was fighting my way through, battling, accepting, surrendering to, humbling myself through, alchemizing, and integrating.

Life is nothing without Death. And I am scared for more people to find me and my work because some of what I have lived through and survived, some of what I’ve done, I am supposed to be ashamed of. In this culture, in this power structure we live within. In reality, those skeletons are the bedrock of my medicine, of my light.

And so I have a secret fantasy.

Now, it’s important to remember that fantasies are fantasies because you know they’ll never really come true. Because even if you were to follow the fantasy to a capital-T, things never really work out exactly how you think they will. Fantasies are so thrilling because they’re idyllic. They’re not rooted in the reality of things.

Anyway, I have had this fantasy forever, for my whole life, since I was a teeny tiny little thing. I come back to it again and again.

This is my perpetual plan B, and I let myself float away into the energy of it whenever the plan A of the season seems too far away or too far-fetched or too difficult or too unfair.

In this fantasy, I take my dog and we rollin’ stone our way up into the hills of West Virginia. I grow my hair long, and I wear flowy skirts, and I play my music at local haunts. I teach art and yoga and songwriting to veterans and kids in foster care and people in recovery and the incarcerated. I smoke one cigarette a day and might take an edible from time to time.

I fall in and out of love with strapping gentleman, and I can never really be pinned down, and I don’t wear shoes or a bra. I live in a little cabin that I adorn with art and stonework, and I sleep on the roof when it’s nice outside.

And the only people on Earth who know I exist are the people right in front of me every day.