by Angela Perez

Here I go with this story. I am putting the truth about me out there. Burning certain bridges in the hopes that I never need to cross them again. How could admitting these things be so frightening. I’ll explain that to you.

The fringe of life. I have always been drawn to that fringe. Since my 20s: Going to shows, snorting cocaine, taking any pills that were being handed out, and drinking gin drinks and tequila – sometimes until I blacked out – either out on the town, during a show, or coming home from the venue, sitting up all night alone, chain-smoking, listening to music – waiting for some spiritual, healing breakthrough that never came. I stopped the major indulgence in drugs many years back and with the alcohol a few months back.

I actually had stopped drinking for four years just before the pandemic, mainly because I hooked up with someone I shouldn’t have after a Slayer show and a LOT of tequila and gin. I was so guilt-ridden that I quit drinking that very day and never looked back until the pandemic hit. Me and my dog, Tater Perez, were stuck in the house with not much to do. And I went back to my carousing at maximum level, even though the hangovers were excruciating.

But I ignored creating from the fringe and being honest about living on the fringe for fear of being exposed to the “normal” world, where I needed to work and conform. I denied my selfhood to make significant money to survive on my own terms (which weren’t really terms—I was living in an infinite Catch-22). I am drawn to people who live on their own terms, which, alas, all too often involves self-abuse. I like people who have suffered, scrapped and fought for what they have. I am endeared by shared struggles and pain. But you don’t often find these people in a cubicle in a gray, fluorescent-lit office building (where I have spent way too many years of my adult life).

But I am finished with all that pretending and hiding who I am and who I have been. I suppose that’s easy to do now that I am not drinking and the drugs are long gone. I know that I have pain and anguish and that my alcohol and drug abuse were to cope, to numb that pain – or as I heard Josh Homme say in a recent interview with the comedic king of pain, Neal Brennan, about his own substance abuse, “to put a callous on that pain.”

My natural voice and creative spirit are born from that long-held pain and the consequential draw of the fringe life. Of a dangerous life. I always admired my little brother for it, even though that life killed him at the age of 33. Still, I romanticize the life of a man who lived larger than life, who had more charisma than any human should be gifted with, who was brutal, and violent, and angry but hilarious and generous, and who was never going to live past 40 unless he went to prison.

I have never whitewashed his life when I talk about it. But for decades, even while I indulged, I whitewashed my own self-abuse for the larger world. The real me lives under that stiff facade I created to be palatable to corporate America. I have led a double life for decades. My closest friends know about it, and we’ve often marveled at how adept I was at living both lives. I was putting that innate passion to create to work, just in places where I didn’t really belong. Some people I worked with in corporate life knew about me and brought me in any way. To those people, I love you and thank you. You embraced the broken, fragile parts of me that make me who I am because you recognized something more in me.

After all these years, I realize that I must create, write, and use my ability to deeply engage with others to help them heal as I work on my own healing. I want to help those like me who are trying to live comfortably and with self-love. To divest themselves of the eternal simmering anger in healthy ways. Of figuring out my love for my brother, Tony, one of the most real loves I have in my life – but that love is for a dead person. He is dead, but the love is more real now than when he was living. I have a another living love for that ole’ hound dog, Tater Perez, who passed away in my arms over a year ago. A love that has been heightened and made more present and profound by both their deaths. Recognizing those two loves as more real (and being baffled by the mystery of that) has been one of the catalysts for the significant changes I have been making lately.

Even as I seek now to decide how I will heal myself and others, my depression and darkness are in me. I suppose they always will be. I used to drink or do coke or take pills when I felt myself being suffocated by my depression and sadness. And guilty of not being strong enough to manage it in healthier ways. I am an over-induling sensualist. Cain’t help it.

And, so, I am beginning a year-long Shaman training program focused on the Andean healing arts. My work begins next week.

I used to think such spiritual expeditions were, well, flaky. For weak people who couldn’t heal themselves (with drugs and alcohol). But I don’t feel that way anymore. I have reached a transition point since the pandemic, which coincides with me accepting entering my 50s – accepting middle age. So much death and pain around me catapulted me into an introspection I was ready for but unable to kick start on my own. The direct trauma related to the pandemic and the other traumas that occurred during the pandemic but weren’t associated with COVID, well, all that pain aligned in a syzygy to draw my need to transition into sharp focus.

So, here I go, folks; I shall keep you apprised of my successes, failures, pain, and pleasure. For I revel in all of these, and I always will. That wild, destructive streak ain’t ever gonna go away. I’m just going to become more adept at harnessing it.