What Will I Find in the Center of my Onion?

Excavating feelings I hadn’t been aware I was feeling

Aug 12, 2025

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Don’t leave before the miracle, that’s what the 12-step folks say. When I stopped drinking, I figured that was my miracle. If you knew me prior to 1990, you’d know, it was pretty damned miraculous.

They say sobriety and recovery are like peeling an onion, you work through layer after layer, tears and all. Thirty-five years since my last drink, I thought I could sit back and enjoy a massive plate of fried onion rings. I thought I knew everything, a character defect that stubbornly refuses to leave entirely. But, seriously folks, I thought I at least knew everything there was to know about me.

Then, I discovered some new things.

I’ve told my story on stage, in essays, and in church basements at least a hundred times in the last 35 years; mostly what we call the war stories—the drinking stories, the wild and crazy years I still wore armor in the form of braggadocio, denial and Revlon Cherries in the Snow lacquered acrylic tips.

I told you I regretted nothing, was ashamed of nothing I’d done. Lots of terrible things happened and I did many shitty-less-than-legal-and-laudable things I wouldn’t do again if life had do-overs, but I’m good with who I became after going through the rinse cycle a few dozen times.

You’d hear how the only thing I’m really afraid of is intimacy, but that as an only child, I grew up amusing myself, keeping my own company. Only children don’t get lonely.

I’m still protecting myself from myself, from whatever is at the center of the onion I’m peeling.

They said identify with the feelings rather than compare facts when listening to someone else’s story. The problem was, I had no memory of any feelings I may have had in the past. Events, yes. Feelings, not so much.

Until recently.

Like emotional constipation, my shit was there, but it was stuck, it wouldn’t come out.

Researching my own life trying to fill in blank spaces, creating a mosaic from shreds of memories, legal and medical records, newspaper clippings, photos, and other ephemera, I realized most of what I’d done was a search for love. Misshapen. Misguided, but still, it was love I was looking for.

I was desirable, I had evidence of that fact. It was part of the armor that hid my insides from you and me, where I was not only unloved (1), but unlovable (also 1).

I had to be 68 years old to understand what should have been basic elementary school level maths, 1 + 1 = Lonely.

Looking at the Lost Years (in the subculture of strip clubs, sex and crime) through a different lens I wondered for maybe the first time, why I did the things, went to the places, with the people? And why did I stay even when things turned out wrong?

Squirrels forget the location of 26% of their hiddey holes. I’m a squirrel, a cognitively impaired squirrel. I’ve buried feelings and truth and pain; I’m digging everywhere, looking for old nuts I don’t remember burying.

I unearthed twins I didn’t remember having: loneliness & shame. Fear ran close alongside us. Trying to connect actions and feelings to a mysterious culprit—a source at the center, my brain resembles a police board.

When is it safe to experience these feelings? Can I move on? Can’t I continue to sidestep them, feed my inner squirrel new things? Can’t I leave those old nuts buried? If I let the feelings come, will my onion finally be gone? When the fuck do I get to stop onioning?

In recovery, some of us worried once our wild behavior was removed, our character defects faced, what would be left? Who am I if I am not wild / crazy / drunk? After peeling all the layers of the onion, will I be left with only the hole in the middle of the doughnut? Will I be left with nothing but a mixed metaphor?

I’m grateful for friends who love me the way I am, in the way I’m capable of being loved—broken and at an arms distance.

What happens if I drain the moat that’s been protecting me? As these new insights change me—and they will because change is the nature of discovery & revelations—when I’m struck well, when I’m able to receive, will I have to find new friends?

To receive: the act of becoming the recipient of something offered, sent, or bestowed.

I can give.
I can support.
I can hug.
And I can take. Taking is transactional.

I struggle with receiving kindness, tenderness & love. With being the huggee and not the hugger. Receiving requires a leap of faith, a level of trust and intimacy.

Pretty sure I’ve mentioned my fear of intimacy.

Please do not confuse intimacy with sex. Sex was easy for me, it was a transactional language, a way to communicate. Sex was physical and external.

Intimacy is unzipping yourself head to toe, letting the light in and allowing someone a peek at what you’ve stashed away in there. Like Let’s Make a Deal of the soul, if you have a comb in your purse or a heartbreak stuck in your muscles of your neck and shoulders, you get what’s behind Door Number 3.

I’ve been intimate with one person. The sex wasn’t earth-shattering but, I don’t care about sex. The touching, skin on skin, holding, exchanging the same breath, holding each other’s pain, joy, and secrets was healing. That’s vulnerability. Vulnerable with another person and not feeling “now I have to kill you” afterwards. I didn’t want to run. Didn’t feel less or flawed because someone saw Me. He saw Me. Our intimacy persisted, long after the sexual relationship had dwindled, lasting over periods of no contact, other people, illness, and death.

If I access these old bricked up feelings, what will change? Will I be a little less noodley? Will I finally recognize myself in photos and mirrors—all the time? Because, on the regular, someone walks through the door, or across the street and I think, Oh, that’s me, and were it not for a passing acquaintance with physics, I might could go with that thought for more than a second. How often have I looked into the bathroom mirror and only know that’s me because if this then that. I recognize the clothes that person is wearing, grok that the wall I see in the mirror is the wall of my bathroom so, if this then that, that must be me in the mirror.

Barely present most of the time, when a revelation surfaces—like the twins loneliness and shame—I don’t know what preceded it, can’t place the trigger. How did I get there? The scientific method would have me retrace my steps, recreate the experiment. How far do I try to trace back? Does it qualify as an epiphany if I can repeat the process? Or merely a discovery? Am I just quibbling over words now?

Words are all I have.

Will I have to rewrite everything I’ve written about myself or only how I think of myself going forward?

Carl Jung, a darling of the OG 12-step recovery gang, said “All addictions are a low-level search for God."

Let’s call God, god—all lower case.
Or call god, higher power—less weighted and stereotyped.

My first experience with god was on a footbridge, walking over the noisy, dirty Brooklyn Queens Expressway. Manhattan’s silhouette across the water, the sun low in the sky battling a haze of exhaust from the BQE and whatever the giant freighters were belching out at the docks a block away. I had a crush on someone. I could feel it, but couldn’t put my finger on whom. My heart plumped up like a ballpark frank, yellowy pink mini-Christmas lights twinkled somewhere in my brain.

Either I was having a stroke, or I was in love.
Who was in my life that I may have fallen in love with and then forgotten?

In a breath, I knew the target and source of the love, and just like that, the feeling was gone.

It had been god/God/HP.
Target and source.

For a moment or a minute or a breath, my heart had been unprotected and open and light flowed in and filled me up.

Love. Universe. god. God. HP. Freedom. Faith. I was okay, in that moment. In that moment, I was the hole in the donut and everything else in the universe.

And then it was gone.
That moment was enough to keep me moving in that direction.

These new unveilings feel a little like that. Love was in one secret pocket, one locked room. Loneliness, Fear and Shame hidden away in another. Like Nancy Drew, accidentally finding a secret door when she wasn’t looking, I’d be brave enough to reach out for the doorknob. The revelations come like a force of nature, but the secret room is still and quiet, not unlike the way I’ve heard the center of a tornado described.

My onion’s layers are bright and pungent, some are dark, the flesh beginning to rot already. My onion has layers of pain and freedom. Peel away the outermost layer, the crunchy protective tunic of anger and there’s the fear. Cut away at the fear and find possibility.

Between the tunic and the flesh of an onion is a thin transparent skin called an epidermal peel. It protects the onion from fungus or drying out.

That’s the miracle, the tenderness. Peeling more layers from the onion, you find more of those protective transparent miracles. Delicate. Easily torn. Easily overlooked.

When I’ve peeled all my layers, what will be left?

A small woody flower stalk is at the onion’s center, the remains of a flower that grew from the original bud. The stalk is bare on one side, the other side has small, cone-shaped bud structures. Peel further, there are tiny, conical buds…new future plants.1

What will be left? A chance at a new beginning, it seems.

Thirty-five years without a drink and I’m just now beginning to see the fear, loneliness and shame that motivated almost all of my behaviors while I was an active addict and alcoholic. Those feelings are still here—more than a residue, they’re breathing & breeding and I can’t breathe as I type that, my heart feels heavy, it could lose its grip on my ribs and slip out of me, or become too heavy to pump blood. Because yes, it’s still there, taking up space inside me, the fear of vulnerability, of intimacy, afraid you’ll see me and reject me. Laugh at me. That I am still not good enough.

Funny is self protection
Promiscuity was self protection
Isolation. Drinking. Drugging. Self-harm. Work. Overwork. Obsession. Brash. Loud. Silence. Eating. Not eating. Sleeping. Not sleeping. Sarcasm.

What part of me is me? Who am I without my moat, my armor, my castle walls?

How will I survive if I drop my armor, lower my drawbridge, drain my moat? If I let down my guard, unzip myself, let you see me? How will I live, standing there with no skin like the some version of me has escaped the Bodies Exhibition, completely exposed? It’s a leap of faith, trust in something I can’t see, have no experience with, and I guess that’s the point of faith. Believing without solid evidence. It’s tossing out everything I’ve learned for the chance of becoming…what?

Maybe one day, I’ll be that person who’ll let you photograph me without my wanting to vomit, without self-hate roiling up to choke me.

Maybe one day, I’ll be that other person on the bench, getting old with you as we stuff our faces with deep fried onion rings.

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