This Is How I Become More Than I Was

Fall is a tough time of year for me. I feel like a butterfly in reverse, receding into a sticky and slow chrysalis. When you have a seasonal depression problem, it can feel like a regression, a backwards slide. It feels like failure.



This isn't the truth, though. I just have an illness. I can feel like things are backsliding when they are, in fact, moving forward quite tickety boo. I can't feel it, though, at the moment.



It'll come back to me. It always does. Those of you with seasonal depression know what I'm talking about.



This year is harder than other years, though. One year, one month, and ten days ago, I quit drinking.

I spent most of the first year dealing with sweeping lifestyle changes and not getting high. Other emotions? The hard emotions coming out of my real self, the self not numbed by alcohol, were so distant behind the noise of not drinking that I barely felt them. I can see that now.



Upon the first anniversary of my sobriety, a handful of people congratulated me by saying Now you can begin the real work of being sober. I nodded to myself and smiled and hoped that they were wrong.

They were not wrong.

I'm over the hard beginning stages of kicking my old habit of drinking myself into a black hole every other night, but now I'm a raw nerve. I'm all vulnerable and frayed and tired and overwraught and naked and uncomfortable.

It turns out that if you spend over twenty years drinking every time you have a strong emotion, good or bad, there is a lot of stuff to get through at the end of it all. Nothing goes away just because you got drunk enough to forget most of it.



It's still brilliant, though, this having a life I've chosen over one that lead me by the nose, despite the tears and the bad dreams and the urge to smoke every cigarette I see and imagine and remember smoking back to when I was fifteen and learned how to french inhale.

I have to remember that this is how I learn to be free, or at least more free. This is how I become more than I was and more than I am.

Despite these moments of self-doubt and heaviness, I am living a life I love. I get to tell, hear, and help mould stories for a living. This is the seed of fantastic.



I just need to remember that these difficult feelings do not mean that I'm sinking.

This is swimming.

It's just that sometimes swimming is lazily floating around a lake on an inflatable tube with tropical fish printed on it, and sometimes swimming is slogging your way back to hide under an overturned boat in a sudden storm.

In either case, the next day looks pretty good from where you are, as long as you don't drown, and we all know that I suck at drowning.

The Five Best Decisions Of My Life

@Chookooloonks tweeted this question: "5 best decisions of my adult life so far: go to law school, move to London, marry @marzjennings, adopt Alex, quit law. What are your 5 best?"



I was surprised at how quickly and easily I came up with my five: "My 5 best decisions: not choosing suicide, marrying @palinode, getting a pap smear in 2006, blogging, sobriety."


Not choosing suicide.

I experienced my first serious bout with suicidal thoughts when I was about eight years old, and those thoughts have dogged me most of my life. I have managed to remain relatively free of suicidal thinking over the last three years, which is no small feat.

This sounds so sad, and it is to an extent, but it's also a gift. I am aware every day that I have chosen to be alive, that I have chosen to be here and do the hard work of being alive, and that I have chosen it because life is short and the return for choosing to be here and working to do so with an open heart is large.

Marrying the Palinode.

I was terrified to be in love in 2000, but I never felt more at home with myself and with my life than when I was with the Palinode. It was the greatest leap of faith I have ever taken, and it is one I continue to take more than ten years later.

It is because of him that I have had the love and support I've needed to grow into a life I once didn't believe I could create.

Getting a pap smear in 2006.

In 2006, I hadn't had a pap smear in six years, and I listened to a niggling little thought in the back of my head that urged me to go. It turned out that I had cervical cancer, and I ended up having a hysterectomy in 2007. Catching cancer early, undoubtedly, makes all of what my life has been since then possible.

Sometimes, those voices in your head are real. Listen to them.

Blogging.

Next to the Palinode, blogging has had the most sweeping effects on my adult life. I am not being hyperbolic here.

Before I found blogging in 2003, I was a creative person who created nothing. I was insecure and depressed and had no hopes that I could ever realize my creative dreams. Blogging has opened up worlds of connection and creativity that I could never have forecast, and the things I've done and the decisions I've made since August of 2003 have largely happened because of this space right here. I learned to listen to myself, write, take photographs, design both on and off the web, quit work that hurt me and embrace work that built me up, and embrace vulnerability so that I could love more fully and take on sobriety.

Never forget, even in the face of some injustices we face here, that we have built amazing things within this dear old internet.

Sobriety.

I quit drinking in August of 2010, just a year and a month ago, and I credit that decision with saving my life. I can't even wrap my mind around all that it has affected yet.

I feel as though love is being revealed to me, as though layers are slowly being peeled away to show me the nature of the universe. I sound like a crazy person, but that's what's happening. Without the alcohol to, quite literally, dampen my spirits, I am waking up, I am opening up, and it is terrifying and beautiful. I have new eyes. I am learning to be present in my own life.

What are the five best decisions you've made?

This Is The First Anniversary Of My Sobriety

Listening: Patrick Watson's "Big Bird In a Small Cage":




That photo is of the last coin I flipped to decided if I should have another drink. The coin came up no. I said yes anyway and forgot the rest of the night. So it went, then. I forgot half my nights. I slid into an uneasy balance between tipsy and lost until I woke up some time later trying to work out how I got home.

It doesn't go that way anymore, because today is the one year anniversary of my sobriety.



When I start to wax nostalgic about the terrible good old days, I have a handful of photos that I look at to remind me of how isolating it was to sit drunk and hollowed out at a table most evenings with people to whom, for the most part, I felt no spiritual connection. It's amazing what we'll do for ten years to keep a hold of the safe sensation of the clack and thrum of moving along, moving along, moving along. I was my own cow, prodding myself along.



To be honest, it is only approximately the one year anniversary of my sobriety. When I quit drinking, I had to fool myself into it. I didn't tell anyone what I was doing. I barely told myself.

I remember the last thing I remember from the last night that I drank. I got up from the table on the patio I had been sitting at all summer and walked in the wrong direction. I didn't walk in the usual direction. I turned right instead of left. I have found that a good way to make a decision stick in your head is to make your body go over unfamiliar, unhabitual territory. It puts a mark in your brain that will make your needle skip when you hit it. It tells you to go this way and not that. It reminds you of what's important.

I walked away.

Making the turn I never made stuck in my brain, but the rest of the night disappeared down a hole like most before it, and I woke up unable to recall how it was I had made it home. I went through my usual post-drunk night motions for the last time: I checked my wallet to see that I hadn't been robbed, I looked at pictures on my phone to jog my memory, I checked my legs to see if I had more bruises that would tell the Palinode how drunk I'd been again, and then I cried with shame in the shower.

It was the last time. I didn't really believe that it was the last time, but it was the last time.



I didn't know at the time, though, that I would survive. I quit because I knew that I was going to kill myself, that the alcohol was fuelling the second nature suicidal desire I've had with me since first conscious light. I could see that unnecessarily herding myself over the precipice because I couldn't stop putting a particular liquid in a glass and then putting that liquid into my body, that allowing emotions to dictate the downfall of my entire existence like a child wound into a perpetual, unreasonable tantrum, was ridiculous.

I was going to lead myself to suicide over little more than a feigned helplessness about making the choice to turn right instead of left. It was ridiculous to choose that, so I got up from my table and walked the other way.

If you find yourself inside one of those moments where you wake up and feel like you're really breathing, and you are hit with a sudden clarity that pulls you out of the sad weight of subjective desire, grab on and follow it with everything you've got. That is life's invitation to hitch yourself to a new horse. You've been tapped on the shoulder by the universe. This is your time.



I'm sitting at my kitchen table this morning, and I don't know what to say about it all. I am floored that this is where I find myself. I have an entire year of sobriety under my belt now.

This work I'm doing is far from over. This sobriety baby is really only just now getting its legs, but rather than feel defeated by the fact that, a year in, it is still this hard sometimes, I am excited. All of the hours I put into drinking and wallowing and not believing and not doing never fed my heart and mind so much as doing the work to embrace my sobriety.

I've discovered an ability to realize my creativity that I didn't have faith in before. Confidence and self-esteem are like candy after years of self-defeat. Like flock to like, and I'm finding my soul brethren. Food tastes better. My full range of emotions is back, and I've discovered the delicious fierceness of real anger again. I am a kid with myself now that I no longer numb out every high and low with alcohol. I am actually alive and actually breathing after 21 years of carefully maintaining my drinking calendar.

And, for this, I need to thank you. I came here to this place on the internet 365 days ago and laid it out. To love myself, I had to come clean everywhere, and I came here not knowing how you would be with me. I had to be willing to lose you, to lose this place, but you were gentle with me. You were kind. You took me at my word and held me up. You wrote me comments and e-mails to let me know that I was not alone. You told me that putting it out there made you less alone. You bouyed me up when I had to walk away from almost everyone that populated my daily life. When I wasn't sure who I was or why I was doing this, I came here, and because you were here, I stuck to the work of making it work.

People who say that friends on the internet aren't real don't know you.

This is the first anniversary of my sobriety, and, for the first time, I feel like I'm walking into my life. My life. I own this one.

Thank you.