Higher Powers
"Thank you for the tragedy. I needed it for my art." Kurt Cobain
She eyes me like a Pisces when I am weak
I've been locked inside your heart-shaped box for weeks
I've been drawn into your magnet tar pit trap
I wish I could eat your cancer when you turn blackHeart-Shaped Box, Nirvana
As outlined in one of the central doctrines of Alcoholics Anonymous, achieving a spiritual awakening, and thereby initiating the life-altering transformation brought on by the Twelve Steps, requires the acceptance of a power greater than oneself. This "higher power" is often referred to as God, though it is purposefully left open to interpretation, allowing room for individual understanding, whether that be Him, Her, It, the Universe, the Collective Consciousness, or something else entirely.
The essential core idea is surrendering to a force that transcends the limited human ego and intellect, allowing that force to guide and heal the spiritual affliction that underlies addiction.
“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” -Karl Marx, 1844
It’s important to note, however, that the Twelve Steps, like the Ten Commandments before them, were composed by men: flawed, mortal, and deeply human men. In fact, it's widely acknowledged that Bill Wilson, one of AA’s founders, experienced what might be understood today as a form of religious psychosis or hallucinatory episode during the inception of the program.
Had a woman experienced the same visions, heard voices or proclaimed divine insight, she might have been institutionalized, pathologized, or silenced. Instead, the writings of men become canon; their spiritual episodes codified into doctrine, their visions turned into scripture. We rarely stop to ask what voices we silence when we decide who gets to be prophet and who gets to be patient.
Initially, I met the Twelve Steps with cynicism, even contempt. The language felt outdated, patriarchal, and vaguely cultish. But as my journey in and out of rehab unfolded, through relapses, near-death experiences and revelations, I began to accept that, yes, something beyond the human mind is operating behind the veil of this world. Something vast and incomprehensible is spinning the Earth like a diorama on an unseen axis. What this force is, I don’t pretend to know. I have my doubts and questions. But I no longer doubt that it exists, nor do I fear it.
One of the more profound experiences of my travels happened at a dusty roadside gift shop off Route 66 in New Mexico. There, I learned about the Hopi people and one of their sacred traditions: climbing to the summit of a mountain to meditate in unison, hoping to summon what they call the katsina… beings from the stars, perhaps ancestors, (most likely extraterrestrials) who come from a place beyond bearing wisdom and messages. This ritual wasn’t superstition to them. It was communion.
To me, that’s what “Higher Power” can mean: any force beyond the narrow, biological limits of human perception… whether cosmic, ancestral, natural, or abstract. It doesn’t have to sit on a throne like a dictator and decide what is right and wrong for me. It could be the quiet intelligence in the patterns of leaves, the pull of the ocean tides, the synchronicities we can’t explain, or the still voice that urges us to keep going when every part of us wants to quit.
Ultimately, spiritual surrender is not about obedience. It’s about recognition. Recognition that we are not the center of the universe. This form of healing requires extreme humility. And that something, whatever name we give it, is out there, reaching back, if only we learn how to listen.
I truly believe the closest you can get to understanding God in this realm would be to unpack the mind of a twelve-year-old girl. At this age, I began contemplating the higher meaning of life with an intensity and sincerity I’ve rarely seen matched in adulthood.
I was utterly, completely, and entirely infatuated with Kurt Cobain. Honestly, to this day, I don’t think I could ever love a living human being more than I loved this man.
At twelve, I would light candles to call upon his spirit and pray to him nightly, like he was some sort of angel, a secret one, an angel they don’t tell you about in scriptures you read at Sunday school, but a powerful angel at that.
This is because Kurt wasn’t just a rock star to me, he was a symbol of something beyond language, a portal to the sacred.
That is, until my grandmother told me this was Satanic behavior and that I needed to stop. (Sometimes I wonder why I never had an inheritance, but I also understand that maybe family isn’t always flesh and blood. I don’t think the Van Winkles really want me at their family reunion, either, or they would have asked me to come…)
But by this point in my life, the seed had already been planted: the notion that divinity might not look like a white-bearded man in the sky, but it might look like a disheveled grunge icon, speaking in riddles, screaming into the void. (There is recorded evidence of Kurt Cobain, but was Jesus ever on MTV Unplugged? I didn’t think so.)
As we remember the innocent child inside the drug addicted Cobain, in this piece of his hanged fetus on the tree provides an exaggerated symbol of a man who, due to drugs, died before his time; a symbol to conjure with at Nirvana séances.
Whilst the many symbols in the paintings take us into a dark wood of tangled and conflicting meanings the fetus on the tree offers a stark image of premature death which I would struggle to interpret in another way. For me, these troubling artifacts have helped shed a new light on the innocence in Cobain, and revealed a more gentle side of the troubled genius who was the very embodiment of fallen angels, one of those creatures whose trajectory was as brief as it was brilliant.
The divine might bleed, overdose, vanish. It might be fragile. But this is also what it means to be human, beautiful in brokenness.
And then came the darker thoughts, the ones you don’t say out loud in church or to your therapist unless you're ready to risk that long, uneasy silence and some notes jotted down on a pad.
What if God was real and he wanted to have sex with you?
This would be an insane theory, sure, but not an unconsidered one, historically speaking. Mystics like Saint Teresa of Ávila described their visions of God in language so erotically charged it bordered on the orgasmic, divine ecstasy blurring with physical desire, the sacred and the sensual entwined.
Even Carl Jung wrote extensively about the way the unconscious mind projects divine or archetypal energy onto human figures, how God, love, fear, and sex often emerge tangled in dreams and symbols. To Jung, the divine wasn’t always benevolent or pure, but it could be terrifying, seductive, even violent. He believed that encountering the “God-image” in the psyche could be as destabilizing as it was transformative. So no, maybe the idea isn’t so insane after all. Maybe it’s ancient. Maybe it’s human.
Especially when you’re a young girl coming of age in a world that just wasn’t meant for you, aching to be seen in a sea of conformity, to be touched by something bigger than yourself, even if that something feels dangerous or inappropriate or wrong.
When all you've ever known of power is how it takes, consumes, or confuses love for ownership or control, it is difficult to conceive of a concept where it is benign.
But what if the divine wasn’t benevolent, or clean, or safe? What if it wanted you in a way that left you trembling, in awe, in fear, in obsession? And what if your earliest brush with God was not inside of a concrete building that promised salvation, but through a rock star whose pain felt identical to your own, whose destruction somehow sanctified yours?
He is one of those rare instances of artists who live and die by their craft. It’s not only admirable… but holy, in a sense.
I wasn’t praying Kurt Cobain because I thought he could save me. I was praying to him because he made my pain feel less like a curse and more like a subliminal map to greatness. Because if someone that raw, that lost, that luminous could speak for me, and be successful doing so, then maybe I wasn’t insane.
Maybe I was simply awake in a world that teaches girls to sleep through their own revelations. Because what no one tells you is that sometimes, to touch the divine, you have to burn a little.
Sometimes God doesn’t come in robes, but in ripped jeans and heroin-laced sweat, in the buried, delicate bones of a flawed man who never learned how to properly be a human being.
Despite popular conceptions, I think God is not the one who saves you, but the one who mirrors your ruin so perfectly it feels like salvation, until you become whole and one within it.
Maybe that’s what it means to worship: not to kneel, but to ache. To want something so badly it splits you open. To offer yourself up, not in obedience, but in longing. This is kind of longing that vibrates in your fingertips and your thighs. The kind that rewires your brain and turns unspeakable pain into poetry.
Maybe prayer is just another name for this craving. Not for answers, but for contact. For confirmation, to reencounter the fire within that reminds you you’re alive. And maybe surrender isn’t about passivity at all… maybe it’s about giving yourself over completely, body and soul, to something that terrifies you with its immensity.
Because what if God didn’t just want to love you?
What if God wanted to enter you?
To hollow you out and fill you with himself; visions, madness, heat, truth. What if the ecstatic mystics weren’t mad at all, but simply brave enough to let themselves be taken, to ride the fever dream of divine possession all the way to the edge?
And what if young girls know this, innately programmed from birth, before anyone else did? Before the shame, cultural conditioning, and the complex trauma of compulsory public education. Before the world tells them that salvation must be distant, male, and sterile.
What if young girls are the most dangerous mystics of all… still wild enough to feel God pulsing in music and magazines, in daydreams and bedrooms, in the thin electric place between pain and desire…
In Fight Club, Tyler Durden says, “Our fathers were our models for God. If our fathers bailed, what does that tell you about God?”
I think about that a lot, especially when I try to make sense of the strange shapes my longing took as a girl. Because if God is a projection of our father, then for many of us, God is absent. Or drunk. Or angry. Or unreachable. Or impossibly disappointed. So what does salvation look like when the highest power you've ever known was inconsistent, cruel, or simply not there to begin with?
Which brings me to The Story of O, a book I familiarized myself with as a child actor. My task was to read a portion of it. I think the joke was that here is this middle school girl going to greath lengths to read a book she isn’t supposed to be reading…
At twelve years old, I had no idea what I was going along with. I thought I was just reading a script. But deep down, on a soul level, I felt it in my bones, and those words lived there for a long time until I was old enough to read the book on my own and fully digest what was being said.
Maybe that’s why The Story of O always haunted me… not because it was pornographic, but because it gave shape to a different kind of God. It outlined and detailed the darkest rite of passage a woman had to take to come to the liberation of true freedom.
One who doesn’t promise safety. One who doesn't come with commandments or forgiveness. In Pauline Réage’s novel, O’s salvation doesn’t come from liberation, but from complete and total surrender.
She is stripped, renamed, broken open by desire and obedience. Her journey isn’t toward a mystical throne in the clouds, it’s toward the annihilation of her former self. A fire. A trial. A transformation.
And that’s what made it feel familiar. Because isn’t that what addiction does? What obsession does? What trauma does? It remakes you. It burns you down. And sometimes, it feels like the only god who ever truly shows up is the one who brings you to your knees, not to pray, but to suffer, to beg, to feel.
When your image of God has been built in the absence of real protection, maybe you start looking for divinity in danger. Maybe surrender starts to feel like the only way out of the endless performance of strength. The Story of O offered a mirror to that: not a fantasy of freedom, but a fantasy of being seen so completely you no longer need to pretend you're whole.
But where O submits to male dominion, marked, possessed, consumed; I craved something beyond the limitations of my own gender. I wasn’t looking for someone to tell me what to do or how to live my life. I was looking for dissolution. Not to be owned, but to be undone.
I wanted to hand myself over to something immense and impersonal, something that didn’t care if I was pretty or good, but wanted all of me… untamed and wounded. The next closest thing to this is finding solace with a man whose screams feel like scripture.
I didn’t pray to Kurt Cobain because he was famous. I prayed to him because he felt like someone who had already been destroyed, and rebuilt himself in art, which, in my opinion is the closest thing to divinity. His entire life was a shrine to the sacredness of falling apart.
Broken hymen of Your Highness, I'm left black
Throw down your umbilical noose so I can climb right backHey
Wait
I got a new complaint
Forever in debt to your priceless advice
And if our fathers were our models for God, then maybe we… the daughters they left behind, instead took the place of that and had the creative freedom to decide what God actually is, not an entity, but a feeling, one that feels like not love, not wrath, but the hollow space in between.
The ache that never fully leaves. This hunger that makes you holy, a hunger that can lead to addiction, a hunger that can only be filled with divinity, after it has completely and utterly destroyed you.
xoxo
[Verse 1]
She gives me everything
And tenderly
The kiss my lover brings
She brings to me
And I love her
[Verse 2]
Bright are the stars that shine
Dark is the sky
I know this love of mine
Will never die
And I love her
[Bridge]
A love like ours
Will never die
As long as I
Hold you near me
[Verse 3]
Bright are the stars that shine
Dark is the sky
I know this love of mine
Will never die
And I love her