6/6/24

Hey babies,

I woke up this morning, and even though it was rainy and grey outside, I hopped out of bed with a sense of purpose and substance. The same anxiety I fell asleep with remained, but I’ve learned to rationalize that I’ll probably always live with the anxiety because the alternative is taking more pharmaceuticals than I already do, and I’ll become a zombie in the pursuit of wanting to quiet the only constant I‘ve had my entire life. 

Every day is a gamble on if I’m going to function at a reasonable amount of executive function, and today turned out to be a good amount. I’ve highlighted off several tasks I’ve been needing to do for weeks, and I buckled down and powered through a good chunk of my work load. And I’ve managed to write the bulk of this lol. 

Today is my 6th “Soberversary.” It’s a quiet year, not a milestone year, when people typically write something to honor their time in recovery. I don’t remember what I wrote on my Facebook over the years, and God knows I probably wish I hadn’t, but lucky for me Facebook Memories will remind me first thing tomorrow fucking morning. 

I really have to laugh at the hilarity over how desperately I wanted to write things I knew others wanted to read. Now that I’m only writing to the two of you, the things I want to write are completely different. I want you to know things that matter to you, and the way you’ll navigate through this world. If all my bad choices can be redeemed in giving you guys the knowledge I needed so badly, then those choices are all blessings in disguise. 

Here’s 6 things I’ve learned in the 6 years of being sober:

I’m a firm believer that the God I love, the one I want desperately to be real, wouldn’t put us through shit “just to make us stronger.” Fuck that. No God could actually want the pain we suffer to happen, and I have to instead believe that the hell we’ll experience is the life we’ll live here, and we’ll have to find pockets of hope through ways we feel closer to God and heaven.  

In my desperate attempt to run from God, and from anyone who suggested I seek Him out. I didn’t attend more than one AA meeting the first 5 months after I quit drinking, and I was fucking struggle bussing. They call it “white knuckling” life, meaning you’re fighting for your life and your recovery, but every day is as big a struggle as the last, and you’re not really living because you’re using all your available ( and unavailable) time just trying to survive and not drink/use. 

I wasn’t mad at God, but I was furious at humans peddling him because they were all so convinced their answer was the only right one. The most amazing thing happened in those first few months, where my vision of God started to come together, and I didn’t know it then, but I was in a highly traumatic transformation, and I was spending all my time begging Him to help me. 

Many year later, it dawned on me that God was my salvation, and I did need Him, but what he was to me was so fucking unique, that I knew no other human could possibly have the same God. We’re all our own little universes, and who God is, or isn’t, is entirely unique to each of us. I was able to shed my shame and guilt on never seeing other Gods, and never fitting into any one group. I suddenly lost the urge for church, and chose solitude and books, and friends who accepted my unique love for something we all experience, jist differently.

The sad truth is of course that I’ve lost friends, because my firm beliefs invalidate theirs, and not at all intentional. That’s maybe the hardest friendship to lose, is when you did everything with the best intentions, and it didn’t matter. That doesn’t mean your relationship with God, or the lack thereof, is at all wrong, unless you’re hurting someone. It means that some people believe that people who don’t fit their molds aren’t going to find space in their lives. Love them anyway, because they’re just doing their best at navigating the world, just like you. 

Emotional growth and evolution have been the main themes of my life since I quit drinking. I often tell people that I felt like I was fetal Voldemort in heavenly King Cross Station in the Harry Potter scene, just a little bundle of horror and vulnerability. I felt like I’d just broken up with my best friend, the bitch that stayed by my side throughout my entire life, even before I began drinking. All my parent’s actions were dictated by alcohol, and they impacted me, so alcohol has been the only constant my entire life. Breaking up with alcohol was like telling the love of my life that they were the worst thing for me, despite all they got me through. It was hard to breath, and I thought some DT’s would be normal, but it wasn’t DT’s, it was heartbreak. My identity was tied into my alcoholism, and without alcohol, I didn’t know who I was supposed to be. After I got through the shock period, I realized that I was going to have to find community, because doing it on my own was killing my soul. I found my community, and then I began to really begin to heal.

After about a year, I began to realize I was going through a transformation I hadn’t prepared for, and didn’t know where to go. I began to notice my parenting was changing, my marriage, friendships, and professional relationships were all changing. While some of those relationships thrived, others suffered, especially professionally. The transformation occurring was this onslaught of clarity about my behaviors and the behaviors of others. I softened away from the over-zealous advocate I’d been, and I stopped yelling in my house. I began to prioritize intentional time with my friends and family, while I struggled (still do!) to prioritize more important people. I built a dream system in my life, addressing and validating real feelings in real time, and not allowing anyone or anything to fuck it up for me, and I haven’t touched a drink still, even through some of the hardest moments of my life. 

When you drink, use drugs, have disordered eating, use sex as a coping mechanism, and you’re doing it over and over, especially to numb a pain, your brain and your body go into survival mode as a child. When your brain should be creating new pathways meant to help you become an adult, it has to halt construction, and go elsewhere to keep you alive, so your normal development stops. When I quit drinking at 29, I firmly believe I had the emotional intelligence of a 12 year old, because that’s when I think I stopped developing. In the past 6 years, I’ve matured more than 20 years worth of emotional growth, and I’m thinking it looks like I’ll be continuing to catch up to my peers for the rest of my life. I leave every interaction I have with anyone but you guys and Daddy, convinced that I was stupid and said stupid things, and THAT is my biggest insecurity, and I don’t see hope in the future because apparently I’m just always going to be a little bit feral and a lot fucked up lol. I’m ok with that, I know I do my best with every interaction I have, and that’s all I can really hope for. 

I was born feral, and feral I will be until I die. What I used to believe was part of being feral was actually self-destructive. Now I’m feral in the things that matter, like politics and how to act around politicians (it’s not pretty.) When I began drinking, I was like a possum that had been kept in a rusty cage, finally free and no one to care about me that had any power or influence over me. The drinking and the drugs became the most normal thing in the world. Everyone who drank around me showed me in real time that it worked to numb the pain they were feeling. My father showed me that my entire life, and my mother was showing it to me following my father’s death. Once my freedom was granted, I took my lessons to heart, and I consumed drugs like they were the only thing keeping me tied to myself. Now that I’ve had years of sobriety to compare against my life, I know that I can be feral, and not destroy my life. I choose anarchy with a dose of love, and check my feral ways to make sure I’m not hurting anyone else, including myself. Of all the relationships I destroyed in my years of drinking and doing drugs, the relationship with myself was the one I mutilated the most. Always make sure you’re wildness is done in love, not harm. 

Being actively in addiction often, not always, comes with repeated occurrences where you’re high or drunk, and do or say really stupid shit, and when you get sober, whether or not you’re working steps, you have to make intentional effort to accept the humility of asking the people you love and cherish to forgive you for the dumb shit you’ve done.

Whether or not anything is ever said out loud, there’s an understanding that some people saw you (repeatedly) make an ass of yourself, and they’re choosing to forgive you and move forward. But the shame and the humility that remains after many silently agree to keep you in their lives can feel suffocating. You’re working at your laptop on Thursday at 3pm, and suddenly you remember that time you lifted your whole ass skirt in a bar to show the color of your underwear, or all the times you puked in the most inappropriate places and always at the worst times. You’re haunted by the memories of all the times you made unsafe choices just to try to capture the feeling you experienced when you first started drinking or doing drugs. Receiving that forgiveness is a gift, and honoring it is incredibly important. Never needing it to begin with is my hope for you guys. If you pick up any substance, and it makes you do regrettable things, it’s not worth the humility you’ll live with forever. 

Sharing my “Soberversary” with my mother’s birthday was initially a blow to my ego, and I even considered moving it day forward or backward. This year, I’m eternally grateful that even though she’s gone, this is a day where I can feel close to her, in ways I never could when she was alive. My mother was one of the main contributors to my sobriety, not because she in any way helped, but because I recognized that after years of exhaustive inner turmoil of not becoming her, I was in fact headed down the same path, and that scared the shit out of me enough for me to get up off the couch and pour everything down the drain.

There have been a million times between this very day 6 years ago and now, that I’ve almost convinced myself I could drink again, and not be like her. Every time that urge or thought has occurred, I’ve been able to rationalize that picking up a drink would surely lead me to the future I never wanted, which would be lying alone in filth, and dying a horrible death. And also losing a lifetime with you guys, because if I were to drink, I’d lose you forever.

My Soberversary being on my mother’s birthday is now a gift, and one that I’ll celebrate happily for the rest of my life. It’s the one day of the year that she and I are going to be the most intertwined. I can’t celebrate the relationship we had when she was alive, but we can certainly honor the relationship we have now that she’s gone, at peace, and not suffering from the hell that made her need to drink to begin with. I’ll take it, and cherish it, and I hope someday you’ll understand why. 

Music is a coping mechanism. I know I’ve filled the house with music your entire life, and maybe you’re sick of hearing the same shit, but there’s a reason. Music transcends time and space, and it can take you back in time at any moment. That’s why we listen to it. Someday, you’ll identify songs as being connected to painful memories, and I beg you: don’t delete a single fucking song. Put them in another playlist and neglect them for a decade, but never delete it. There’s music that takes me back to my addictions all the time, and I listen anyway, because so fuckign much life happened while I was drunk or high, and music may be the only thing holding onto some memories. My brain has suffered so much trauma, and memories are hard to capture, but when a song comes on I can still smell my Daddy, or see him standing in front of me, and as soon as the song ends, so does my vision, and I have to wait to hear it again to be able to be so near someone who’s been longer each day. You’re going to get your hearts broken, and music will be a bitter reminder for a while, but eventually the pain fades to a dull occasional reminder. I have music that holds me close to a ton of humans I’ll never see or speak to for the rest of my life, and the memories are the only proof any of it happened. 

I can hear people mocking me now, but I listened to Eddie Vedder for months after I quit drinking, and I sometimes think he saved my life. I obsessively repeated his albums each day, and neglected reality to sink into the sounds and feel cradled when I was on the verge of death. Now they come on and sometimes I smile and let them play, and other times I catch my breath in my chest, and I have to press “next” faster than I can manage. I never know which reaction I’ll experience, but I forget until the first few chords start playing. I’ll never remove Eddie’s songs, because I’m willing to take the chance that they will bring me joy, and seeking joy is my singular mission since the moment I quit. 

The thing that matters to most to tell you, is that I wake up and fight the urges I know will numb the pain I ran from most of my life. I fight because I want to live, and be in the moment when I do, and that urge is stronger than the one to drink. You are my life, and you are my number one blessing in this life. I am not a dumb human, and I know in my bones that both of you will give things a try, because we all do (mostly). There’s no way of knowing if you’ll become addicted just because of your bloodline. You may very well be one of the lucky ones, and you’ll have power over moderation and control. And I will be happy for you if you do, because alcohol can be wonderful, if it’s not being used to kill something inside of you. I’m proof that smoking weed is not the devil, and I’m not some horrible monster just because I smoke every day. There is absolutely no knowing, but I pray you’ll be scared enough to be careful, and go in with a sense of understanding of the potential consequences. NEVER get in a car with someone you suspect or know has had a drink or done any drugs, because they may think they drive great, but I’m not willing to lose you so that you don’t hurt someones feelings. Call me, every fucking time. Never worry that I’ll be mad, I might be, but you won’t know it, because I cannot risk losing you. Advocate for your friends too, warn them, make sure they stay as safe as possible. I’ve worked so fucking hard to live for you, I’m begging you to work as hard to live for me.

I love you so much, and I hope someday when you’re reading this, you’ll have more context and understanding for what all this really means. And I hope I’m still here to hear about how corny it is.