My daughter saw a version of me that predated her. She just needed the light for it.

My friend Missy and I met in November 2024, in the first weeks of my sober-minded living, and lately she has been talking about how revisiting a time from high school has changed her. She watched the movie MICHAEL, more than once now, and as a result has been cueing up Michael Jackson tunes. When she does, she talks about how something happens in her body, in her head, in how she feels. She felt it once and, like a whoosh of time travel, there she is, in some other yesteryear, some other version of her. How she feels, present tense, changes the moment the music starts. That feeling is the doorway. The body remembers where the image of past Missy is stored, and the song walks her right back into it.

I think about this more than I admit, because it is the whole mechanism of the book I am writing, Camera Dark. We are each carrying more images of self than we will ever have the time, or the nerve, to bring up. Some developed when we were young and have been hanging in a back room ever since. Others are still latent, exposed long ago, waiting in the dark for their turn. They do not come up by thinking. They come up the way Missy’s do, through the body, through a song, through a place, through a feeling.

For me it was a place.

Some years ago, after one of our European performance tours, I took my daughter Ella to Israel. Just the two of us, mother and daughter, to see family and to revisit the summer home of my growing up. Tel Aviv and Eilat were where I spent just about every summer from birth through the start of college, because my parents, both working, did not know what else to do with me. What sounds like an inconvenience was actually a handoff into freedom. Mornings by the sea, swimming and reading endless beach reads before the heat had made up its mind. Enormous midday meals that ended in siestas, whole apartments breathing slowly behind drawn shades. And then the nights, which belonged to us, me and my cousins and friends.

Night clubs, music, dancing until the dancing was the only language anyone was speaking, all the way to sunrise, and that particular freedom of youth that you do not recognize as freedom while you are inside it. You just call it summer.

Ella was eleven on that visit. Old enough to watch her mother carefully, which kids that age do with a precision nobody warns you about. She was used to seeing me in New York City, on concert stages, moving large teams of people through enormous musical nights. Somewhere in those Israel days, on a beach or on a street or across a table, she looked at me and said, “I’ve never seen you like this, Mom.”

I asked her what she meant. I swear the words she used were free and light. And different, which is just a nod to parenthood for those who know.

She was right. That is exactly what I was. Not becoming, not performing, not trying. I had stepped back into an image of me that developed decades before she existed, a teenage girl on those same beaches, in those same streets, free and light and full of joy. The image had been hanging in the back room the entire time. The place brought me to it the way the music brings Missy to hers, through the body first. I did not decide to be that woman again. I walked into the room where she was still hanging, and Ella, watching, saw the print.

Here is where I have to be careful, because this is the part of the story where alcohol enters the room.

For a long time I would have told you that alcohol darkened everything, and it is tempting to write it that way. It is not accurate, and the darkroom will not let me get away with it. Darkness is not the enemy in a darkroom. Darkness is the condition. It is where the image develops, and my room was already dark in exactly the way it needed to be.

What alcohol did was different. It was not more darkness. It was fog on the film. It was the light leak that ruins the exposure you did not know you were making. It stopped the developing, quietly, for years, while everything on the surface still looked like a life. And it did one thing more, the thing I find hardest to write. It put a hand over my mouth and wrote its own captions under images that were mine. False truths, in my own handwriting.

I should be honest about how the fog got there, because alcohol did not break in, I let it in. It was a coping mechanism, and for a while it even worked, the way they do right up until they don’t. What pushed it over the edge was not the wine or the martinis but the thing in me I have come to call my gluttony troll, the voice that has never once wanted just one of anything. The troll did not particularly care that it was alcohol. Alcohol was simply the substance most willing to be overused and the tool closest to the door.

Which is why I distrust the word cured. When the drinking stopped, there was new vision, and not all of it was beach light. I could finally see what remained, what was actually me, and what still needed work, and those are three different piles.

The girl in Eilat was on the film. So were frames I would rather not print, and those are mine too. Because here is the trap the troll sets last, and it’s a good one. The troll does not leave when the bottle does. It shops. It eats. Overeating, smoking, shopping, scrolling, all of it, the same negative in different prints. It will happily throw a party for sobriety itself, gluttonously, so that I could stand in all that new light announcing I am cured while the troll passed around the cake, and the ice cream, and the candy, and, and, and…. Removing the alcohol did not finish anything. It did show me the film. The work is on why the fog was needed in the first place, and that work, as far as I can tell, has no finish line. I have made a certain peace with finish lines being beside the point. The running pages of my life are the proof.

The images themselves were never touched. That was what I didn’t understand until the room went quiet. The girl on the beach in Eilat was still on the film. Free and Light were still on the film. Nothing needed to be created, repaired, or replaced. It needed developing, and developing requires a dark, quiet, undisturbed room. I had spent years making sure the room was anything but.

I keep returning to one more thing about that trip, and it is the reason I am telling this at all.

On September 11, 2001, I was carrying Ella, newly pregnant, though I did not yet know it. She was with me in Grand Central, on the silent train, on the desperate push toward home, unseen, already true, already on film. I write about that morning in Camera Dark. What I had not put together until recently is what it means alongside the beach in Israel. The child I carried, unable to see her, grew into the person who could see me. Eleven years old, squinting at her mother in the Mediterranean light, watching an image come up that predated her own existence, and naming it before I could.

“I’ve never seen you like this, Mom.”

She had. She just had not been born yet.

The images are all still in there. Mine, and yours, and Missy’s. All they need is a dark, quiet room. And maybe a song.

Missy, this one is for you.

Michael Jackson, “Rock with You”

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This essay first appeared on my Substack, Camera Dark Notes, where I write about sober-minded living and what comes into focus when the noise clears. Subscribe there to get new essays every other Sunday, and join the conversation in the comments.