Ayanna Freedom
Finding F*ing Freedom
Trauma is a four-letter word that kept Ayanna stuck, drunk, and in pain. Today, she's sober and focuses on each breath.
By Ayanna Freedom
I was on the way to the bank, going to deposit a small amount of money from various jobs that month. Making deposits to myself from teaching yoga, working at the Department of Youth Services, being a therapist, and running my nonprofit, B FREE Wellness, Inc. I was caught up in the stress of how these deposits would cover my expenses until something else caught my eye: The teller’s eyelashes.
She was beautiful and so young. Seemed a little shy but curious as to why I was staring at her. I kept thinking to myself, her eyelashes are so beautiful, I wonder where she got them, or better yet were they naturally hers? I got lost in her eyes as the taps and clicks of computers and people rushing around me started to fade away. I finally said, “Are those your own eyelashes or do you get them done somewhere?” She turned purple–cheeks dark red. “Oh my gosh, I am so sorry, I didn’t mean to embarrass you they are just stunning,” I said to soothe her nerves.
“They are mine,” she replied. “Wow, they are like butterfly wings, they fit so perfectly with your beauty.” I said matter of factly. She turned and looked at me in shock like that was something a stranger shouldn’t say out loud at a bank.
We looked at each other in silence for a minute, then both cracked up smiling and laughing. “Thank you,” she whispered through tears. “No one has said anything that tender to me before.” Her whole body softened as she relaxed her shoulders and her jaw and took in a breath. My body softened, too, as I let go of the stress of money in an instant of that one exchange. That’s what it’s like to be seen, even in the presence of strangers.
My story starts on a train. A train stop where I waited for my mother by myself from 8 to 12 years old. I was never seen by her or anyone during that time—or so if felt. Every moment she didn’t show up at that stop, the deeper I felt unloved, unseen, and unworthy of anything. She was an addict of all kinds and came from a horrific story of violence, rape, abuse, and other things I can’t repeat but knew well at age 6. She was my whole world. Our love was real, even between the twisted trauma bond we had.
I wanted nothing more but to be near her coffee-colored skin and her big-ass afro that gave the middle finger to every white person that passed her by, even without trying. She was a social justice goddess in my mind. She was also the person who caused me the most harm in my life and shaped every fiber of who I am now. What’s wild is I will take the pain in exchange for just being next to her hips. She had so much swagger in those hips. She was so unapologetically herself. She just didn’t care what other people thought about her. Not one. She would tell people about themselves, too. Like, right to their face. You would know in 5 minutes if she didn’t like you and walk home with a detailed list of why. She was the embodiment of courage.
She died in 2009. I watched her die and watched my addiction birth itself at the same moment. My body didn’t know how to live in the world without her. I couldn’t find my feet on the earth without my mother Valerie Gail Lake. I convinced myself that alcohol could cradle my pain, ground my feet in the soil, and heal my pain. My addict brain convinced itself for the next 20 years that I needed booze to survive. And so I drank. I drank so much I almost killed myself. I am here to tell this story about how I saved myself.
I have probably been an addict since I graduated college. What’s funny is I didn’t drink at all in high school and very little in college. I remember the moment it clicked with me, though. Like the snap of fitting a cap on a bottle so perfectly, you knew it would never pop off. The satisfaction was so real. I was in college in Boston and out with friends at a club, and I had drank more than usual that night. By the third or fourth drink, I found myself lost on the dance floor, feeling free; all anxiety and worry had left my body. I could move without restriction of my own thoughts or anyone else’s. I had finally tasted freedom.
My addiction ebbed and flowed for years, but shit really hit the fan when Valerie died. I lost myself and alcohol found me. It was painful, and I was wrapped up all together in one big mess.
Fast forward to 2014, my husband and I became foster parents and were desperately hoping to adopt a beautiful African American girl named Blessing. She was the most beautiful being I have ever laid eyes on. Not only is she strikingly gorgeous but she has the most loving spirit and energy in anyone that I have ever met. She oozed the best parts of Valerie out of her dark brown chocolate skin, including her loud, raspy cackle of a laugh.
The adoption process was brutal. It was full of unknowns and maybes and we-don’t-knows. Every time her beautiful little 3-year-old hand grabbed mine, I longed for Valerie. The pain would shoot from my hand straight to my heart as I tried for dear life to hang on. I wanted to let go of alcohol so badly but at this point, my body needed it to survive, so I reached for child’s pose and downward dog hoping to feel something else, anything else. I found yoga that year, and besides alcohol it was the only thing keeping me from harming myself to try to relieve the pain. I would lay on my yoga mat trying to reconcile how to heal myself and love Blessing while not knowing if we would be able to ever adopt her. Everything was brutal and beautiful at the same time. Both can be true, but we can slip deep into one or the other if we are not careful.
I was on my way to pick up Blessing from preschool, drunk. I had the typical wine with lunch with friends but kept drinking by myself. My hand was on the door with keys in hand, eyes blurry, breath full of the aroma of the poison I continued to put in my body. Something caught me. I stopped myself. I called my husband at the time and told him to come pick me up and take me to rehab immediately or I would never go. Saying the word rehab out loud hit my stomach like a big rock had dropped in my gut. My belly hurt so bad as I doubled over in the pain, crying, hanging onto the phone so I wouldn’t drink anymore until my husband got home. That was the day my sober journey began.
I continued to try the sober path after detox and rehab the first time. In some ways, this felt harder than watching my mother die. I remember getting out of rehab feeling like a skeleton walking around the earth with my skin dripping off me, exposed. My bones were in eternal pain. The world felt foreign and I was so lost. I couldn’t shake the look of disappointment in my husband’s eyes and heart despite him trying to hide that from me. It wasn’t the attempted sobriety that the look was from; it was the countless times I was drunk prior to this moment when I couldn’t get my shit together or when I would embarrass him publicly. I finally could see the look, sober. Ouch.
After that, I leaned hard into yoga. I had been a fitness instructor and social worker my whole life but always hated yoga. I could do most of it, but when it came to savasana, the final resting pose, and we had to be quiet in our own heads, I would walk out of the studio. I would always think to myself, “Why would anyone want to be alone in their own thoughts for so long?” Every time I was alone in my thoughts, every moment I had done something wrong in addiction would come up, or every moment my mother promised to show up at the train station for years but never did, came up. I tried my best to work it out and heal it, but the images flooding through my body became too much, and I found my unconditional love partner Chardonnay again.
I relapsed on the 6 month anniversary of my first attempt at real sobriety. I was halfway through yoga teacher training. As much as I had a hard time with savasana, my whole body knew I needed it, and my mat was the one place that felt like love that wasn’t alcohol.
I found myself drinking but then driving myself to an AA meeting one night. I attempted to drive myself home after the meeting but God intervened, and my tire blew, and I had to pull over into a parking lot. I called my husband laughing as if it was funny and not the scariest thing in the world. He did the right thing and promptly picked me up and dropped my ass off at Cape Cod Hospital where I belonged. That was a long night for the staff and everyone who I called begging to get me out of there because my husband was an asshole. The only asshole in that moment was me.
I landed back in detox in 2017. How I felt surprised me. I had never been more relieved in my life. I didn’t die, and I was so grateful. I remember jumping around, dancing, and doing yoga in detox with people whose physical bodies were full of so much piercing pain as the drugs and booze left their bodies. I made them do yoga with me as we cried through the pain over and over again as if our survival depended on it. Because it did. I still get letters from police officers, veterans, priests, dads, moms, and heroin addicts about how doing yoga in detox that year with me saved their lives. That was the moment I was given the name “spiritual gangster.”
Some of those folks came with me to the same rehab and we continued to move and find joy together. I was in rehab that year during Christmas and New Year’s. I was away from Blessing and my husband. I missed them deeply, but I was happy for the first time in my life. There was a huge relief in being around other addicts and not being judged, just being witnessed. The human connection is so powerful when it’s raw, real, and honest; it has the power to move mountains. I was loved there just for being an addict, and I didn’t need to prove I was anything other than that. I looked up at the stars at midnight of that new year, surrounded by a circle of other alcoholics and drug addicts, and it was by far the best New Year’s Eve of my life. I was safe for the first time.
I consider myself a social justice warrior. It’s in my bones. It’s one of the greatest gifts my dad and mom have ever given me. I was about 7 years old when I could tell you the gritty details of the lives of Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Maya Angelou, Rosa Parks, and Harriet Tubman. They were more than my ancestors; they were my angels. They helped me see life in a new way where we were all human and deserving of love. I knew what belonging and becoming felt like when I thought about them. They became the quilt and stitches of who I had become in sobriety.
What surprised me was that I could feel just as safe with my angels of social justice as I could with the other addicts in rehab who had committed horrible crimes. Some of them were police officers who harmed other people of color and were sickened by it; some of them were priests who had harmed young boys; and all of us carried trauma in our pockets like rocks that would never fall out. Our addiction connected us in a way nothing else could. These men would pull me out of a fire if they needed to, yet by political standards and identifying across party lines, they were racist. They loved me more than it felt like my own father did at times, yet they voted for Trump. That is the human bond of belonging that can never break us, just makes us stronger as one. America, in particular, isn’t ready to radically accept that concept, so we continue to make big changes in small ways by loving strangers in banks and witnessing the pain of others, Democrat and Republican.
Jason, my now ex-husband, and I separated 2 years ago but are able to be more ourselves separately and have more space to love our sweet child Blessing. Since leaving rehab 7 years ago, I have become a yoga teacher, have written 2 books and have started my own nonprofit. I remain sober for one moment and breath at a time. Sometimes focusing on a full day is too much so I fill it with beautiful moments of seeing others, like the bank teller with butterfly wings that embraced her face. May this story give you hope to find yourself in the gorgeous tiny moments of life that build on one another and create a revolution of hope that forever allows all of us to belong to one another.
Ayanna is the owner and founder of B FREE Wellness, Inc. She is a clinical consultant at the Department of Youth Services and teaches yoga and workshops across Cape Cod and Boston. She is the Author of the books “Becoming Free” and “Unf*ck Your Stuck.” She currently lives on Cape Cod with her daughter Blessing and dog Sawyer. AyannaFreedom.com.
