I did not know that when I walked in. I just knew I needed to sit down somewhere that wasn’t a gate chair or a bar stool.

Writing to you from the Minneapolis airport, road warrior style, after one of the hardest work weeks I can remember in a long time. And so happy to be sharing this.

Oh oasis. Oh, surprise paradise.

I used to know the airport lounge on every layover. I knew the layouts, the food and alcohol offers, and which wines were free vs. premium, which meant a few bucks. I knew how to make a two-hour delay disappear into vats and vats of red wine, glass after glass (the free kind), the endless refill, the nod across the bar that meant yes, another, or better yet, the ones where I could fill my own glass, to the very top of the rim, whispering to myself that it counted as only one glass. Every trip. Every “I deserve this.” Vats. Vats.

I find myself at that Minneapolis airport lounge today, which I remember well. Sober since November 2024 and damn happy about it. But sitting there watching isn’t fun anymore. It’s just boring. The whole performance looks exactly like what it always was, and I just never had the distance to see it. The people sandwiched in around me filling and refilling their glasses as they numb out, working on their laptops, watching inane TV shows, or mindlessly scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. So I finished my free cheese and crackers accompanied by a Pellegrino with a lime, tucked a banana and a Rice Krispies treat in my bag for the plane, and threw myself out the door to find people, places, and stories. Much more interesting.

And I found this.

The Chiroport Massage Lounge at MSP Concourse F, tucked in amidst Wendy’s and Jimmy John’s and all assaults on one’s nostrils that I beg the gods to not transport onto my tin can plane home. Indulge here please, dear airport village. Consume, enjoy and drop in the trash. A fairy haven. An oasis I did not expect.

Malu welcomed me immediately for a twenty minute chair massage. I am no stranger to such indulgences and have often needed therapy for life stress and a lot of working out. Did I mention aging.

After the usual questions I looked deep into her eyes. Like I do with all therapists I have met over the years. You get good at spotting the unicorns. The ones who are both receivers and transmitters and know how to tune in to your body. Your ligaments. Your energies. And your blocks, knots, and deeply stored challenges, worries, and anxiety hibernating in there. I looked deep and hoped and prayed she would be one of those. And I said to her: “Please make it better.”

And she did.

She asked if she could unzip my jumpsuit to really get into my back. Of course I said yes. She then reached into my armpits and released old work stress that had been sitting there, tired and uncollected, maybe for years. Thirty years of massages, and no one had ever thought to look there. She looked. She found everything.

I don’t fully understand all the vagus nerve content that floods my social media algorithms nowadays, but honey, when she sputtered mine back to life like a rusty old lawnmower that’s been sitting rusting in the garage, the life force I felt flowing had no words. Just trust me.

And it got better.

Long leans on my back, slow and easing everything back to how it was meant to be. And as things relaxed, the ever-sought pop pop pop of back areas I have no names for, releasing, signaling that something is finally letting go.

And yes. This was twenty minutes.

When I stood up I was several inches taller. My face arranged in what my husband would recognize as “anchovy drunk,” which is what our cat looks like after the good fish pate. I needed a moment. Then remembered to zip before hugging her.

She took this photo of me in the chair, Jimmy John’s glowing behind me. A perfect portrait of contrast.

Those twenty minutes revved up everything the week had ground down. For that I owed Malu’s talented hands words, heart and joy.

I’ll be back. Hell, I didn’t want to leave.

I looked up her name afterward. It comes from a few cultures, though she told me she is Ethiopian. It means peace, calm, shelter, protection.

Of course it does.

The airport lounge will always be there. So will this. I know which one I’m choosing.

If you are new here, welcome. This is where I write honestly about the things that come into focus when you stop numbing them out. Pull up a chair, follow or subscribe. It’s free and it’s worth the trip.

I looked to my left and to my right. My tribe was there. All of us careening forward together.

I have been that warrior. I have also been the chariot mid-air.

The two days before I boarded this flight were not mine. My head muse, the one who lives somewhere behind my left eye and occasionally intervenes on my behalf, decided it was time. She stepped in and dumped gallons and gallons of paint on me. Color everywhere. Pages and pages of writing. Thoughts, ideas, new storylines tumbling out faster than I could catch them. In between, I was on endless calls with Verizon tech support in India, China, and who knows where else, trying to untangle a problem that had no business being as complicated as it was. And somehow in the middle of all of that, I was still producing. Almost to a manic. Tethers in both hands.

So I suppose I shouldn’t wonder why today she’s a little tired.

I’m on a plane to Minneapolis. Choral conference. The work has been piling up and I knew, sitting down in my seat, that I had this window. Time to write. Time to reflect. Time to deep dive into the pile. My muse had other plans, which is to say she had no plans at all. She clocked out. Left a note on the door: “Gone fishing. Figure it out.”

And the strangest thing happened. I didn’t panic. I observed.

The man in the seat next to me is named Matthew. He’s on his way to Missoula. He laughed gloriously at every one of my jokes, every quip, and in his laughter I felt something I can only describe as a love glimmer. A small warm light. The kind you didn’t know you needed until it was right there.

Earlier, when they asked me to hold back so the first class stewards could finish delivering coffee to their passengers, I didn’t sigh. I didn’t check my phone in pointed irritation. I exchanged pleasantries with the flight attendant who delivered the command. Made a joke (because it wouldn’t be me if I wasn’t making a joke). You owe me a cup of coffee, I told him.

He remembered.

A little while into the flight he tracked me down in coach. Extra cup with a fancy biscotti on the side. A treat. Debt paid.

And can I just say how good that cup of coffee tasted, sitting back in the cattle class.

The horses are still there. They’re always there. The tethers are still in my hands. But somewhere between the chaos and the quiet, between the paint-soaked pages and the hum of this engine at altitude, I remembered something the chariot warrior already knows.

You don’t have to be running at full thunder to be moving forward.

Sometimes you let the muse rest. You talk to Matthew. You accept the cup of coffee. You feel the glimmer.

And you stay in the now, just long enough to know you’re still holding the reins.

Marco Polo ate my training plan.

(Marco Polo is a voice and video messaging app, and I am part of a community that runs on it. Think: walkie-talkie meets therapy meets your most honest friends.)

Not in a bad way. In a this is exactly what I needed way. The connection, the reflection, the therapy of it, showing up and being shown up for... it pulled me away from my Garmin and my splits and my long run schedule and I just let it. Because that was the season I was in.

But I can feel the shift. The next season is knocking.

Fall marathon is on the horizon and my legs know it before my brain does. There’s a restlessness that only has one cure. So I’m picking up the Runna plan this week. Getting the structure back under me. Listening to the inner voices that know what I need and when I need it.

This is something I’ve had to learn over and over: different seasons call for different things. There’s a season for going inward and a season for logging miles. A season for Marco Polo and a season for 5am alarms and long runs in the park. Neither one is wrong. The only mistake is forcing the wrong one on yourself because you think you SHOULD be doing the other.

The Stoics said it. So does every tradition worth anything. Honor the season you’re in. And when it changes, change with it.

I’m changing with it.

Who else is in a transition right now? What season are you stepping into?

Rest. Recharge. Reflection. Revved up. Or?

(I am grateful that I don’t need to include Regret in that list anymore.)

P.S. Permission. Compassion.

For every intentional step out to the park that resulted in music instead of miles. For the podcasts. The voice messages. The tears and the laughter and the zero sweat. The no-training days that didn’t look like anything from the outside.

They were everything. That season grew me here.

And HERE is a pretty extraordinary place to be standing. (And that’s on a Monday, which I usually affix a curse word to.)

November, 2025. NYC Marathon. One year of sober-minded living. My birthday. All of it at once, all of it crossing that finish line together. I have thought about that morning more times than I can count since. The proof that showing up, even imperfectly, even slowly, even with a voice message in your ear instead of a training plan, still gets you across.

Now: intention. Attention. A new training plan. Eyes on 11/26 (this year’s NYC Marathon) and becoming me, forward.

New season. I am anticipating it with glee.

Nineteen years ago, someone gifted me an hour with a psychic named America.

I laughed. Of course I did; I was a freewheeling artist with a brand new company and a heart so wide open you could have driven a semi through it. I took the phone call with her the way I read fortune cookies, not too seriously, one eyebrow raised and a joke ready to be armed. America, the psychic, was surprisingly warm, entertaining and a little unnerving. She left me with a handful of seeds I didn’t know were being planted for my future.

The one that found me this morning on a hard and sweaty run in Central Park, nineteen years later, was this: Be careful. You are building your company from your heart, and you will need to protect it.

I pushed back then. I still push back a little now, because I honestly believe it: that you cannot build something truly extraordinary without putting your whole heart into it, all of it. Without restraint. Everything you’ve got. That is not advice I am willing to surrender because it is the source of creation in my experience, as a musician, in business, and in everything I have done that I care about. But I did miss something, and it took nearly two decades to understand. Protecting your heart is not the same as closing it, and guarding the entrance is not the same as locking the door.

I left entrances unguarded and that is where my demons snuck in. Assholes.

There is an old rule about vampires: they cannot enter unless you invite them. My invitation… (I didn’t know I was extending one). She didn’t arrive in the dark. She arrived in the light, at the table, after the standing ovation, after the sold-out house, after another impossible thing we had somehow pulled off at the company.

She arrived as celebration. As camaraderie. As the thing you do when you have earned it. One drink, then another, then another, and I thought I was honoring the work. I thought that was just what success felt like. That I deserved it and should just let go and enjoy.

She let me think that for a long time.

And then she stopped waiting for the invitation. She moved in. She stomped her feet like a bratty and insolent teenager and demanded her space, loudly and without room to reply or object. She stopped being a guest and became a landlord, an abusive one. And she trashed the place.

What you protect determines what gets in and what gets in determines who shows up.

I know something about dark.

When I first got sober, I wrote about feeling schizophrenic. That is the word I kept reaching for because I was two people, and they couldn’t seem to find each other. “Morning Iris” was focused, clear and full of intention, goals lined up like hockey pucks, ready to blam across the ice with a satisfying thwack. She knew exactly who she was and what she was building. Then evening arrived. And with it, the wine. And with the wine, the other one. Numb. Dark. She could be an asshole to her husband. She had swirling thoughts that felt completely, terrifyingly real, and she had no interest in questioning them. She just let them move through the house, free of boundaries, no rules, no consequences for bad behavior. Caustic. Vandalizing.

I did not know yet that I had any say in which one showed up.

That’s the thing no one tells you about, or maybe they tell you and you just aren’t ready to hear it: you do have control over your personalities. Not just your thoughts, but the whole internal cast of characters. The one who spirals. The one who numbs. The one who opens doors to things that do not belong inside. You do not have to let her run the place.

This morning I met my inner guru.

I have read about her. I have written about her. I have even told other people she exists. But this morning, in meditation, when my thoughts went rampant and wild and started pulling at me, she showed up with actual authority. I armed her. I told her to lock it down. And she did. She pointed me back to breath. Back to reading. Back to that sacred, fragile time between sleep and fully awake that I have spent years learning to protect and still sometimes hand over to the phone before I have even opened my eyes.

That threshold is tender. It deserves better than my to-do list.

It deserves what I found this morning, burrowing down into a layer that was warm and welcoming and completely still. Like the Red Sea when I was a child, enjoying a night swim with my family in the dark. No waves. No ripples. The water clear as glass and warm all the way through. Inviting, not threatening. Safe, not because nothing existed beyond it, but because I was held inside it.

That is what I am learning to guard.

Not the company. Not the calendar. Not the version of me that other people need.

The water. The stillness. The part of the morning that is still mine.

Camera Dark Notes goes out every other Sunday. It’s where I write about the internal architecture of a sober-minded life, what we guard, what we let in, what becomes possible when we finally know the difference. If you found this essay and you’re not yet a subscriber, the link is below. Just the next one, every other Sunday. This is where it began: https://substack.com/@irisdnyc/note/c-263871395?r=863oh5&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action

— Iris

irisdnyc.substack.com

The title is a room.

A camera obscura: one small opening in a sealed space, and on the wall opposite, the world outside reappears, inverted, slightly soft, but clear. Renaissance painters used them. Vermeer almost certainly did. The premise is that darkness is the condition for seeing, not the obstacle to it.

I started keeping notes a few years ago. They became something else around the time I stopped drinking.

I wasn’t sure what they were going to be. They weren’t a recovery memoir — “quit lit,” the genre is called — even though that’s what people wanted to put them in. I read a lot of it. They weren’t a runner’s diary, even though half of them happened on long Saturday miles or in the middle of thousands of runners in NYRR races. They weren’t a producer’s notebook, even though the other half was about Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, conductors, repertoire decisions, and the actual work of the company I co-founded.

What they had in common was that they all came from the same room, the one I’d accidentally darkened.

Take alcohol out and a lot of things you didn’t know were soft come into focus. Not just the obvious ones. Not just sleep, energy, weight, the cleaner mornings. Those come back fast and they’re real. But underneath those is a slower realization: most of the way I’d been living wasn’t bad, exactly, it was just blurry. Decisions I’d thought were considered turned out to have been mostly defensive. Relationships I’d thought were close turned out to have been mostly proximate. A career I’d been narrating as passion turned out, in places, to be habit. Subtract the thing that had been softening the edges, and the edges came back.

The image on the wall didn’t change. Just the room.

That’s where the title came from. I knew early I didn’t want a recovery title — The Year I Quit, Sober Diaries, This Naked Mind. Those are books I’ve read, but they aren’t the book I’m writing. I’m not writing about the absence of alcohol. I’m writing about what the dark room reveals. That’s a different book.

There’s a second meaning too, less obvious. In Italian, camera is also chamber, chamber music. I’ve spent my professional life producing concerts at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, large and public and made for thousands. But the music I’ve loved most has always been the music made for ten people in a small room. The book is about that too.

So: Camera Dark. The room. The aperture. The image you didn’t know was there.

This Substack — Camera Dark Notes — is field notes from the work in progress. The book itself is still taking shape. What I’ll be posting here, every other Sunday, is the longer version of what I can’t fit in a caption: essays about the three threads the book is built on — I call them Acts, with an Overture and an Encore, a nod to the world I work in. Sober-minded living, not the performance of it. The real business of showing up — for an ensemble, a board, a 5am long run, a manuscript. And running as a metaphor for almost everything else, because once you’ve spent seven days in a desert ultramarathon, you can’t stop seeing it everywhere.

Some of what you’ll find in the archive is backdated. Those essays were published earlier at iris-derke.com; they belonged in this room more than they belonged on a website, so I’ve moved them here. The earliest are from when I didn’t yet know what this was going to be. They’re how I got here. If you’re new, that’s not a bad place to start.

If that’s a room you want to spend time in, the subscribe button is below. No pitch. The work is the pitch.

Glad you found it. See you in the next one.

— Iris

A note: this is the third foundational piece I’m sharing here. Earlier pieces are The Carousel (where the riding and falling off began) and Camera Dark (where the publication gets its name). This one is where the everyday begins.

I have come to believe in glimmer as a working concept.

I borrowed the word from a therapist who studies how our bodies recognize moments of safety. But the feeling arrived long before the name did. A glimmer is the small warm brightness that arrives unexpectedly and reminds you why you are alive. A rainbow over the Atacama Desert at 14,000 feet. A pigeon outside a yoga studio window. The way light catches a corner of a room you have walked through ten thousand times.

The work, I think, is learning to notice them.

Here is one from a Tuesday.

The irony doesn’t escape me. I’m in my usual spot in this hot yoga studio, under the window rather than in front of a mirror, looking up at the sky. To keep myself grounded, and truth be told, to feel a gentle coolness sneaking into the hundred-plus-degree room. That puff of cool air keeps a balance of yin and yang that I can feel on my skin. I watch as wisps of clouds drift past steam boiling off distant buildings. And there, reflecting my word of this year, SOAR, are pigeons. Flying to and fro, landing on balconies and window ledges across the high-rise canyon of Broadway.

It also doesn’t escape me that what soars most in New York City are pigeons. The rats of the sky. Survivors. Scrappy and relentless, thriving in exhaust fumes and filth, making their nests in the broken and discarded. They’re not the birds we photograph for social media. No powerful hawks or inspirational eagles. They’re the birds nobody wants to be, and yet they’re everywhere in the city, adapting, persisting, claiming this concrete jungle as their own.

Maybe that’s the most New York thing about them. They don’t need anyone’s permission to soar. They just do it anyway, in a city that’s too busy and too dirty to notice. Showing us there can be beauty in darkness and challenge and the things we might overlook. That soaring doesn’t always look Instagram-perfect, but it is relentless and consistent as you look to the cityscape.

I’ve learned so much in this room. From the fact that ankles can sweat, to the puddle forming beneath me as I transition from warrior to child’s pose. Sweat drips off my nose, my elbows, pools behind my knees, in the small of my back. My hands and feet slip slightly on the mat, leaving wet prints of where I’ve been, evidence of the work, the intensity and focus.

And then the sudden unease as I really look down at my mat. It was quickly grabbed and thrown in my carry bag, the one proudly displaying advertising of the Strand Bookstore, because true New Yorkers love to display advertising of the true culture of this city. One side of my mat advertises a past New York Road Runners Women’s Half Marathon I accomplished. The other side? An ad for Bloomingdale’s. Swag from a race where the opportunity to practice yoga in an iconic department store seemed interesting and unique at the time.

The mat holds both versions of me. The runner. The consumer. The woman who finds empowerment in miles logged and PRs achieved, and also the one who, let’s be honest, appreciates a wander through racks of beautiful clothing for sale. As I hold downward dog, sweat dripping onto both messages equally, I sit with this question. How did an icon of empowerment, yoga, running, race achievements, end up wrapped in the very things we’re not supposed to value anymore? Shopping. Vanity. All the trappings of a department store, the endless consumption of items filling voids we didn’t know we had.

I’m reminded of my assigned yoga spot at Bloomingdale’s once, amidst hundreds of women doing downward dog next to the handbags, the fake glow of fluorescent bulbs lighting endless rows of limbs lifting, stretching, as we were asked to breathe in deeply the intoxicating smells of new leather from the bags piled about us.

But maybe, like the pigeons, there’s something real in this contradiction. Something honest about being a whole person who contains multitudes, even the unfashionable ones. My sweat doesn’t discriminate between the side that says athlete and the side that says woman. It falls on both, honest and unapologetic, like a pigeon claiming its perch.

Soaring doesn’t always look Instagrammable. The mat holds both versions of me. And perhaps that is exactly the point.

This is what I mean by glimmer. Not the rainbow on the mountain, although I have had those too. The pigeon outside the window on a Tuesday. The mat with two contradictions printed on it. The sweat that lands the same way on both sides. The realization that arrives mid-pose and rearranges something small in you.

Glimmer is the noticing. The small warm brightness that says you are here. You are paying attention. There is more in this Tuesday than you thought.

That is the practice. Not finding extraordinary moments. Finding the extraordinary in this one.

Sit With This

What is the Tuesday glimmer you almost missed this week? The pigeon, the mat, the puff of cool air, the small thing that caught your eye and you set aside because you had somewhere to be?

Go back to it. Notice it on purpose this time.

A few things to know

On the format. This is an example of what you’ll see most often from me here. An essay built around a small noticed moment, set in a specific place, written from inside the practice rather than after. Some essays will be longer (memoir-shaped, like The Carousel). Some will be shorter (single moments held up to the light, like Camera Dark). Most will be like this. A Tuesday, a glimmer, a thought that didn’t fit anywhere else.

On SOAR. SOAR is my word for 2026. The previous year it was PEACE. I will write more about both, and about the practice of choosing one word for a year, in pieces to come.

On the book. Camera Dark, the memoir I’m finishing, collects pieces like this one alongside longer chapters. Glimmer is one of the recurring words throughout. If you want to know when the book is ready, you’ll hear about it here first.

On staying in touch. If something here resonated, reply to the email. I read everything.

— Iris

A note: this is one of the foundational pieces from Camera Dark Notes — the moment that gave this publication its name. It’s short. It’s meant to be.

The lifelines did not announce themselves.

I want to tell you about the day I almost didn’t join the Zoom call.

November 1, 2024. I woke up to a hangover I had earned the night before. Halloween. My fifty-fourth birthday. A pity-party for one because my husband was away. The pre-packaged cosmo cocktails in a can, the bottles of wine, the and-and-and-and... The morning after, empty bottles of reminders by the recycling. The light coming in too bright and too sharp through the window.

I made coffee. I sat with my laptop. I hit register on Sober Sis.

The first email arrived within minutes. A welcome. A daily lesson. A short reading. A question to sit with. Tomorrow there would be another. Twenty-one days of them. I did not know it yet, but I had just stepped onto something that was not going to end on Day 22.

The first Zoom was that very week.

I remember my very first Zoom on my 21-day reset.

Camera dark and shadowy. My name anonymous. Terrified that someone would find out I was in such a forum about drinking. Hiding my shame of being there, which was also hiding my shame of being exactly who I was: someone who needed to be there, for a long time already, who was only now, at 54 years old, admitting it.

Gina, the Sober Sis counselor running the Zoom session, reached out a very long spoon through my computer screen, with a smile and eyes wide, seeing me.

I can still visualize it: a beautifully carved spoon emerging from the laptop, consoling the tears that surprisingly erupted as I simply tried to introduce myself, startled at my own exploding and embarrassing emotion. “You are not alone, Iris,” she said. And I tasted from her spoon and a huge weight lifted.

On that day I found myself falling beautifully forward over a major threshold in my life.

The camera was dark. My name was anonymous. I was hiding. And someone reached through the screen anyway and found me.

That is where the telling begins, not in the telling, but in being found when you thought you were lost.

Sit With This

Where in your own life have you almost not joined? Almost not opened the door. Almost not picked up the phone. Almost not registered for the thing.

What was on the other side of the almost?

You can answer it in your head, in a journal, out loud to a friend over lunch. Or you can ignore it entirely. The work is yours.

A few things to know

On the title: This essay is where this publication gets its name. The image of the dark camera, the anonymous nameplate, the moment of being seen anyway — that is the through-line of everything I’m writing toward. Camera Dark is also the title of the memoir I’m finishing. The book is not a recovery memoir. It is the book I wish someone had handed me — about sober-minded living, the real business of showing up, and running as metaphor for everything.

On Sober Sis: The Sober Sis program , and Jenn Kautsch and Gina specifically, gave me the long spoon I needed when I needed it. I write about them with their permission and with deep gratitude. If you, or someone in your life, is sober-curious or sober-considering, you can find them at sobersis.com.

On the brevity: Some essays I publish here will be long. Some, like this one, will be a single moment held up to the light. The point of Camera Dark Notes is not the volume of words. It’s the noticing.

On staying in touch: If something here resonated, reply to the email. I read everything.

— Iris

A note: this is one of the earlier essays from Camera Dark Notes — a foundational piece I’m sharing first because it sets the stage for almost everything else I write here. If you’re new, welcome. If you’ve been reading, this is the carousel I keep coming back to.

I loved the up.

There were places that knew me and my reputation as a classical concert producer and professional musician in New York City. Concert venues we returned to year after year, where the maître d’ greeted me at the door like a returning dignitary and the staff had become something closer to friends over the long arc of our celebrations together. They knew what I drank. They knew what my husband Rob drank. Before I had even settled in, my martini glasses were already pre-chilling, a top shelf bottle standing at attention. Rob’s favorite scotch at the ready, smoky and expensive with a story and a birth year proudly worn on its label. That particular feeling of being anticipated, of mattering enough that someone had thought of you before you walked through the door, I lived for it. And it was not unearned. I had taken the time with every one of them over the years, learned their names, asked about their families, treated them the way I treated everyone involved with what we did at the company, no matter what their role or part: as people, with real stories, authentic connections. That has always been my way. Those connections were fuel and the payoff for the manic work and the long days, the reciprocity of it, the warmth of being seen by people who chose to see you back.

What I did not understand, what none of us understood, was what we were actually doing to each other. They would bring me drink after drink before I even knew I had finished one. Keeping me taken care of, the way they had been taught “taking care of” looks like. Honoring the alcohol demon without either of us knowing its name. And why would we have known better? We had all been raised on the same curriculum, the Mad Men boardroom, the Carrie Bradshaw cosmo, the magazine spreads and the television commercials and the incessant advertising that had been threading this expectation through us since before we were old enough to drink. The glamour of it. The reward of it. The sense that this, the cold glass and the amber pour and the room full of people celebrating something real, was exactly what success was supposed to look like. We didn’t invent that story. We inherited it. And we lived inside it without ever thinking to read the fine print, to question it.

Post-concert receptions are their own kind of theater, the hall still humming from what just happened, musicians coming off stage with that particular electricity in their faces that only exists in the first twenty minutes after something extraordinary, and me at the center of it, one of the incendiary sparks that started the flame and blew on it throughout months and years to reach that exact point of exhilaration on stage for performers and audience. The open bar was part of the production. I ordered rounds the way I conducted everything else: with authority, with generosity, with the deep pleasure of being the person who made people happy. A cold martini glass arriving on a tray. The performers leaning in, laughing, the warmth of the room rising. I had built this. I had earned this. I was the one who held out her glass and said another round and meant it as love, as celebration, as proof that we had all arrived somewhere worth arriving.

I relished all of it.

The cold of the glass. The way a good martini has almost no color, just clarity and ice and the faint ghost of vermouth, an ongoing joke I loved to tell of just waving the bottle above the glass and not allowing a drop to actually touch the glass, tainting the vodka. And then the red wine, oh, the red wine. I will say honestly that I miss it. The hearty fruity redness swirling in the glass, the taste rolling around in my mouth, the particular comfort of something that felt civilized and romantic and adult and earned. Ordering another bottle for the table. Watching it pour. The feeling of being in a film I had always wanted to be in, the one where the woman at the center of the room is magnetic and capable and in command of her evening.

And then there was Istanbul.

I want to tell you what happened before the shots and after the performance, because the shots are not the real story. The real story is what came before they started pounding, one after another.

Concert complete, my performance still singing in my head, I stood up in front of a room, yet another post-concert reception this time full of Turkish diplomats. And I, as someone who finally felt that they had a complex and interesting story, performer, concert producer, world traveler, felt like someone you want to talk to. I was there not as just a backdrop to performances, tending to “details” as I often do, but as a soloist on the stage while maintaining all of those other personas. The thing I had trained for my entire life, that I had chosen at an age when you do not yet understand what choosing means, that I had spent decades feeding and practicing and occasionally setting aside in the relentless machinery of producing everyone else’s music. That night I did not set it aside. That night I stood in a room where I was the only woman, blonde curly hair, blue eyes, a New Yorker in a city that had not expected me, and I felt like I was shining, all of my roles visible and recognized. The concert hall had gone still when something real is happening. And when I played that night and again in that room of celebration, I felt it, the particular landing of an accomplishment so long worked toward that your body almost doesn’t know how to receive it. I had not just made sure that all the minutiae were taken care of that night. I had performed. I had done both. I was both.

That was real. That was mine. Every bit of it earned.

And then the Raki came out.

Raki, clear, anise-sharp, deceptively powerful, the national drink of Turkey poured as both welcome and dare. And with it came the tradition: a heartfelt toast shared loudly and from the heart, then the shot, then the point across the table to the next person in the room, passing the baton like a relay race as another shot is poured, each person picking up where the last one left off, working their way around until everyone had a turn adding layers of good wishes, thanks, and dreams of the future. The toasts lengthening in time and robust exaggeration with every shot landing, evidence of loosening lips and hearts. Picture the table, long, filled to the brim with Turkish diplomats in their business suits, rowdy and happy and more than willing to keep New Yorker Blondie going as they kept pointing back to me, devilish smile on their faces. I can still hear their deep guttural laughs, the gorgeous gobbledygook of Turkish being bantered back and forth, me oblivious to the actual meaning of their words but reading the singsong rhythms of that beautiful language and deciphering glimmering joy in every syllable. Round for round, I kept up, and the room laughed and opened and I became not the outsider but the guest of honor. I could have never imagined such a scene.

But here is what I did not see, what I could not see yet: I had just achieved something I had worked toward my whole life, and I was handing the credit for it to a glass. My actual power, what I had walked into that room carrying, what I had demonstrated before a single shot was poured, got eclipsed the moment I made the alcohol the instrument of my triumph. I was placing my own power into the very hands of the thing that was quietly taking it from me.

With each glass, my will was being lessened, my being becoming less. My ness was shrinking. I just didn’t know it yet.

I thought this was what you did. You achieve something extraordinary and you drink to it. You feel the high and you chase it, glass by glass, because the alternative, sitting quietly inside your own accomplishment, feeling it fully, letting it be enough, that was not a skill I had. And so the glimmer of what I had actually done that night, the real thing, the flute and the stillness in the room and the particular moment of landing, got blurred and finally erased in the carousel of the evening. The horse went up and I couldn’t let it come down naturally, so I kept riding until I couldn’t remember getting off.

The horse went up. And then it came down.

The other version of the story was quieter and happened more often, perhaps in pursuit of such incredible highs as experienced in Istanbul. A long day of go go go and then the door of the apartment closing behind me and the sudden stillness of being alone. What does relaxing mean? I had been trained by years of muscle memory: it meant a drink. Martini first, cold vodka from the freezer, the ritual of the glass and the pour and the first sip that told the rest of my body the workday was over. And then the red wine, because the evening had to sustain itself, and of course I kept a few backup bottles because that was just being organized and prepared. Then the math: the bottle getting close to empty, the quick calculation, the opening of the next one so that technically I had only had one glass from this bottle; and let’s just hide that empty bottle quickly so noone sees. My demon, the wine witch, was exceptionally good at managing technicalities and keeping our relationship well hidden.

But then there was the rarest of days. A weekday that had somehow opened itself up, genuinely free, family gone to their days, the apartment quiet, permission to simply exist. Quiet. I settled into the armchair with one of my shows and a glass of red wine. It was mid-morning. I did not examine that detail too closely.

I heard the lock turn.

My daughter had forgotten something. The door opened and there I was, and the glass was in my hand and then it wasn’t, tucked quickly to the side of the chair where it could not be seen, where it was not evidence of anything. She found what she needed and left. We did not speak about it. The moment sealed itself over like water closing above something dropped.

She saw. She knew. I knew she knew.

That weight is still with me.

I became the badass without noticing the moment it happened, high tolerance, martini to bottle of red and still standing, still articulate, still managing the room, at least in my own mind anyway. It felt like an achievement. What it actually had become was an escalation so gradual that no single day looked like a crisis. Just Tuesday. Just the way things were.

The lies I told myself were so well-rehearsed by that point that they no longer felt like lies. They felt like logic. The carousel kept turning. The horse kept going up and down. I kept riding.

What I did not understand yet was that the ride had been running so long I had forgotten there was a platform. That you were allowed to get off.

Sit With This

You will see this section throughout my writing here. It is not a summary. It is not homework. It is an invitation to turn the lens around.

I am a firm believer that the best discoveries happen when someone else’s story becomes your mirror. So at certain points I am going to stop, step aside, and ask you a question worth sitting with.

For this one:

Where in your own life did you hand the credit for something you’d earned to something else — a glass, a person, a role, a moment of recognition? What did the actual achievement look like, before you made it about the thing that came next?

You can answer it in your head, in a journal, out loud to a friend over lunch. You can ignore it entirely. The work is yours.

A few things to know

On the sequence: This is the second piece I’ve published here. The first, Why Camera Dark Notes, sets up what this publication is. This essay is where the real material starts.

On the book: Camera Dark is a memoir I’m finishing. The Carousel is its overture, in a slightly fuller form. The book is not a recovery memoir. It is the book I wish someone had handed me — about sober-minded living, the real business of showing up, and running as metaphor for everything.

On staying in touch: If something here resonated, reply to the email. I read everything.

— Iris