The Blog

What you’ll find—what I’ve found—is that the truth is ultimately life-affirming. Even when it’s ugly and inconvenient and has the potential to dismantle our life.

To know the pain of too much tenderness. To be wounded by your own understanding of love. This is where've I have lived. This is where I am.‍

When I went to write this post, I thought about all the things that have changed since September 2014. I thought I could write about all that stuff, but there’s almost too much. Everything is different, especially on the inside. So I decided to pick five things - lessons, ideas, shifts - that feel the biggest to me today.

You asked me if you’re an alcoholic, and I’m telling you it's the wrong question. It's the question we've been socialized to ask, the question I asked myself for a long time, and the question that shows up in my inbox all the time, but it's the wrong damn question. If believing you're an alcoholic feels true, if it elevates your life by furthering you on the path to betterment and healing, believe it. If it doesn't, throw it away.

It takes an ocean not to break. What does that actually mean, though? That the force of an ocean holds us together? That the ocean never actually breaks fully, even as the tide breaks over and over? Like all the best poetry and music, I’ve never really examined the meaning too closely.

I’m not going to tell you that you only need to love yourself, or that romantic love isn’t worth all the hype, or to love the whole world, or that love is all there is (although yes).

What was the tipping point? What was it that made the difference when you finally got sober for real, for good, once and for all? The Question was the reason I read and re-read all those damn memoirs, went to meetings, and even clicked through 90’s-era substance abuse forums late at night and early in the morning when I couldn’t sleep. I wanted to locate the magic sticky glue. The key. The secret combination lock that would finally, once and for all, make sobriety stick. This is my best shot at answering.

Those things are true about me, they always have been, and they always will be. Even though I may not show up that way in my life anymore, it’s all still part of me. We are all a little bit of everything—light and dark—and even though we don’t always present certain aspects of our nature, we still contain them.