‘LOOK AT WHAT’S RIGHT’
Staying sober means putting away microscope, local author says
It was an uphill battle for L.L. Kirchner to find wellness techniques that helped calm her mind and give her the strength to maintain a sober lifestyle. A series of triggering incidents led Kirchner to try everything from yoga to immersing herself in New York’s polyamory community before realizing what she actually needed to move forward in a healthy manner.
“What I discovered was that owning that narrative was the alchemy I needed to get distance from it, see it and reframe things,” Kirchner, 56, told the Post-Gazette. “You can look at what happens as ‘Today was the worst day ever and I got through that whole terrible day without having to take a drink.’ I don’t put an affirmation on it.”
Anyone interested in learning more about her wellness journey can do so via her latest book, “Blissful Thinking: A Memoir of Overcoming the Wellness Revolution” (Motina Books, $16.99). It is Kirchner’s followup to 2014’s “Hello American Lady Creature,” which chronicled her experiences living and working in Qatar.
Kirchner is now based in St. Petersburg, Florida, but she spent her high school years in Murrysville and honed her writing skills as a Pittsburgh City Paper columnist and occasional PostGazette contributor. She’ll be back in Western Pennsylvania on Oct. 29 for a two-hour “Unstick Your Magic” workshop at Om Lounge Yoga & Wellness in the Strip District.
As Kirchner sees it, Pittsburghers are an authentic bunch who prefer bluntness to “fake friendly” posturing. Her parents operated Holiday Health & Racquet Club in Plum from the late 1970s until shortly after her mother died in 2014. Kirchner’s sister still lives here, and Pittsburgh gets a few shoutouts in “Blissful Thinking.”
The main thing Kirchner took from her time in Murrysville was a desire for a more urban lifestyle post-high school. She moved away from Western Pennsylvania, then returned as a communications specialist for local institutions like the Carnegie Museum of Art and Andy Warhol Museum. Her stint in Qatar included taking on a project for Carnegie Mellon University.
“There was a lot of blight in this region while I was growing up,” she said. “When I came back in my adult life, it was utterly transformed.”
Kirchner has been managing her mental health and substance-abuse issues for decades. Life-alerting events like the drowning death of a boyfriend and her ex-husband ending their marriage over the phone while she was still in Qatar inspired Kirchner to seek out just about every type of available treatment that could keep her from relapsing.
“Blissful Thinking” follows her on a search for wellness that includes her recollections of leaving the Middle East, completing a few intensive yoga retreats in India and immersing herself in the New York City dating scene — all while attempting to avoid drugs and alcohol. Though “fiction is my first love,” Kirchner felt compelled to craft a memoir in which she could plainly describe what long-term sobriety looks like.
“Part of living with the condition of substance-use disorder is you do need to take steps to not be miserable,” she said. “I have a very powerful brain that looks for negative information in the environment. My biggest takeaway for people, I would hope, is that you can put down that microscope and look at what’s right in the environment.”
Kirchner’s other impetus for writing “Blissful Thinking” was to lay out the dangers of getting “stuck in these hamster wheels of self-improvement.” It’s a cycle familiar to many folks in recovery and one that Kirchner desperately clung to before working through the “prolonged grief” that had hung over her since her boyfriend’s death and her divorce.
To be clear, Kirchner is definitely not anti-wellness. She just doesn’t have much patience for anything that allows people to pretend everything is fine when that clearly is not the case.
“It gets into ideas of, because you do yoga and because you meditate, you’re over your troubles,” she explained. “I am against that, for sure. What I’m really against is the proliferation of people who call themselves wellness experts who have zero credentials and zero accountability.”
Though Kirchner admits that she also isn’t a mental-health professional, she can at least attest to how “I couldn’t think my way into feeling better” while grappling with her past trauma and addiction. Forging genuine connections was one of her keys to preserving sobriety, especially with mentors and friends who advised her on how to approach problems rather than telling her what to think.
Despite its heavy subject matter, Kirchner believes that “Blissful Thinking” can provide readers with the combination of “humor, personal growth and hope” we could all use these days.
“There’s so much bad news in the world,” she said. “Let’s get some hope in a fun, funny way!”