Kissed by Ash: How Being Burnt Was Bottom Enough & Finding Sobriety
Guest post by Jo Christian
Content/trigger warning: Suicidality, substance abuse
Before baking in a brick oven, one doesn’t consider the chief chore, having to clean the oven. Ash and soot build up after days of burning wood, amassing small mounds in the back of the oven.
One of the first things I learned in training as a baker in my current kitchen is that I must rake and brush out all the old ashes each time I bake. Otherwise, ash will touch and even smudge the bread — making it, at worst, inedible, and unpleasant to say the least.
Cleaning this brick oven involves a lengthy process of removing the fire box, clearing a pan to rake the ashes into, running a broom back and forth from back to front, wetting the broom, and doing it again.
All in all, it’s a task that can take up to 30 minutes, if you are obsessing. Thirty minutes by a 500 degree oven, in all seasons, summer included.
The first few times I did this task, it took me much longer than it should. I sweated and sweated and still, somehow, managed to get ash on the bread.
Thankfully, the ash only kissed the bread, leaving it slightly smudged gray. Sometimes sliding a loaf from my peel would bring the ashes with it. Leaving it all a floury, ashy mess, which I’d have to dust off later.
Thankfully, the ash was never so bad that we had to throw out the bread, but it was close. We can call it a warning of sorts.
An indication that I should clean more, be careful when placing each loaf in the oven, or be more precise when taking loaves out of the oven.
Either way, being kissed by ash was a kind of gentleness, a reminder that I was close to a point of no return…close to having to shrink loaves of my bread…close to hitting a baker’s bottom.
Since working in this kitchen, with this oven, for over a year, I have finally found a sweet spot, barely brushing each loaf against one another and still keeping them clean from ash.
Each time I manage this, I call it a clean bake.
Thankfully, it has gotten smoother and cleaner the more I do it. But not without scaring me, not without teaching me a lesson.
Sometimes, it reminds me of my journey into the rooms and 12-step fellowships. My Higher Power’s version of being “kissed by ash.”
The place I bake is also a brewery, which means there is always beer on tap.
Given my false confidence with substances and compulsions — mainly thinking that since I hadn’t exhibited much compulsion around alcohol, I wasn’t an alcoholic and could handle it — I could justify drinking.
So, when I got a job baking for a brewery, the beer was a bonus.
Free drinks at work, free drinks I could take home from work, and free drinks anytime I wanted to come out.
It helped that this was my favorite brewery.
So even though I didn’t think I had a problem, I knew where I was going to get my buzz, regardless of the week.
It was mandatory after all. I had to show up to bake. So I could drink.
I hemmed and hawed about this perk. I could have free beer anytime I wanted. I told everyone who would listen, including my brother, who was known for loving a good brew.
In fact, I had my first beer with him, at 21, on break from school, visiting him and his military friends.
For months, we talked about going to this brewery together. We’d have a few drinks. He’d get to try my bread and my pizza, and we would drive off into the country backroads of Southern Illinois, feeling mighty proud of the people we had become.
Sadly, this vision never came to pass.
For, it was around this same time, close to a year ago, that my brother overdosed on his SRI’s in a suicide attempt.
That night, I happened to roll over and open my social media to find a story he had made within seconds of posting. In the story was a stack of letters, and using text over the image, he said: Read these.
Without thinking, I called my younger brother. I called my mom. Not even an hour away from him.
We then called the police.
They were able to get to him before he had even passed out from his medication.
On his way to the hospital, my brother found out he had had almost 20 beers in the hour leading up to the attempt.
We didn’t talk for days, not until he was headed to check himself into a rehab center, the very same rehab center my uncle, father, and mother all went to.
Long story short, he survived.
My brother’s time in rehab was an awakening for him. He learned the program and began working the steps right away.
Afterwards, he went to outpatient, altogether totalling over 90 days of recovery before being totally immersed back in the real world.
It was seeing his bottom, seeing him “kissed by ash,” burnt even, that led me to get honest and take stock of addiction in myself.
Up to this point, I was still drinking. I was shopping compulsively, debting even, and I couldn’t control it. On top of that, I had reached my highest weight.
Somehow, it still took months for me to realize that addiction was in me, just as much as it was in my brother. I was just kidding myself. Not ready to admit the obvious: when you are in close proximity to a bomb, the bomb can still hurt you.
Addiction was a bomb that had exploded in my life time and time again. Of course I had been impacted.
I had been “kissed by ash.”
My bottom came shortly after, when trying to stop my recent shopping binge led to being in the same place I had been many times, promising myself, my god, and my partner that I wouldn’t buy unnecessarily again, and being met with an invoice for an expensive pair of boots I had put on credit.
It wasn’t going to end, not of my own willpower.
Thankfully, I knew enough to know there was likely a 12-step fellowship around shopping, similar to alcohol. So I went online, bought literature on credit, and began attending meetings. This was January 10th.
I immediately found a sponsor, committed to a 90 in 90, and began working the steps. (1)
It didn’t take long at all before step work revealed the other compulsions in my life: food and drink.
Shortly after, I had an experience where I was eating two entrées from a restaurant in one sitting, and it felt like a voice was screaming in my head for me to stop, but I couldn’t. I joined Overeaters Anonymous.
Still, I drank. I kept drinking in controlled amounts. I kept fearing it would come back to bite me. But the fear wasn’t enough to stop.
And when I could no longer say no to more than one drink, and when I knew my addiction would just move from shopping/eating to drinking, I knew I had to quit.
The ash was a warning, a sign of what was to come.
I was about to be burnt up, inedible, and ready to go in the trash.
The ash of my brother’s overdose and my soft bottoms of powerlessness showed me the more I drank, the more I was likely to relapse in my other programs, and the more likely I was to reach my brother’s bottom…maybe to never return.
But our Higher Power is good and true, and if we are listening, gives us these gentle kisses, these brushes with fire.
I am thankful for mine. Thankful that so many times in my life, HP has given me kisses of ash, warnings of where not to go, what to steer clear of, how to be more careful, and ultimately, how to trust.
I hope you begin to see your kisses of ash for what they are, gentle nudges from a Higher Power that loves you, showing you there is a better way. We don’t have to wander into the fire. We don’t have to lose our lives, bottoming out.
We can turn around any time. We can get up. Dust the ashes off. Thank our HP, and we can keep moving.
Today, you get to choose. Start again. Just start again. It is that simple.
What are you waiting for?
Kisses of Ash
Just a peck, a gray smudge, a brush, a smothering of soot —
a burning — I open the bricked oven to see it, the plush mounds
round as lips, lush as the Southern Illinois hills, and coals’
red teeth widening, dancing like a tight smile turned to terror —
a warning of proximity, a nudge to not near, to hear the fear,
to answer without words, not a single flick of the tongue,
but a turning round.
Now you.
We’d love for you to share in the comments:
- Have you encountered messages, warnings, or “kisses of ash” on your recovery journey?
- Have they ultimately supported you in moving in a healing direction?
And if you found this article helpful, please leave a clap or 50. It lets others know there’s something useful here and will help us grow this community.
Jo Christian (they/them) is a non-binary baker, writer/poet, and recovering addict in Southern Illinois. They are the author of Love Doesn’t Hurry, a Substack newsletter, and Post-Eclipse: A Queer Home (2024), a chapbook of poems published and available at Bottlecap Press.
Want to be published on Sober.com? If you’re a sober writer, we invite you to contribute! Reach out to hello@danaleighlyons.com for details.
Notes
- A “90 in 90” refers to 90 meetings in 90 days, a typical recommendation for someone getting out of treatment or just starting on their recovery path in 12-step fellowships.
