Denial: Still Not A River in Egypt

Ethlie 1994, meet Ethlie 2023...

As I mentioned the last time we spoke, I’ve been cleaning out old file cabinets. It takes me a while, because I can get lost in nostalgia when I open a box of memories. This is why I hired an assistant for the job; she has no emotional attachment to any of my crap. Highly recommend, if you’re planning on doing any Swedish Death Cleaning yourself.

Did you know I was actually a productive and hard-working journalist, back when they paid you money for that sort of thing? Go figure. I wasn’t bad at it, either, it appears; I have totally forgotten writing 3/4 of these articles, and have frequently surprised and delighted myself reading them.

I was more surprised and less delighted when I unearthed a piece I wrote for Australian ELLE Magazine back in 1994 about love addiction and codependency. 1994 was about five years before I crawled into my first meeting of SLAA, and at the time I guess I thought that all this talk of “sex and romance are just like drugs and alcohol” was at best overstated, at worst a grift. A string of hopeless crushes that leave you in fetal position on the floor, that’s just the human condition, right?

So, hey, sometimes I am wrong. Rarely 😉, but it happens. Still, the article is good. Note: I think the last paragraph is missing. But we both know where it was going. I was about to say something along the lines of “Recovery. It might not help. But it couldn’t hurt.” That, I still believe. To paraphrase author John Bradshaw, whom I interviewed for the piece (I remember doing that - he was great), maybe people were yelling “House afire!” when it was just a match in the wastepaper basket. But still… hot, yes?