Growth

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.

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.

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.

I started to realize I could either keep joining and stay on the treadmill for a few hours of relief and “fun,” or I could push through the discomfort and keep my sobriety intact for another day. It's not that I stopped wanting the things I associated with drinking, I just wanted other things more.

I shook, but I was steady. I knew how to do this. My body knew from the moment I got on the plane in Boston—it knew how to be with my grandma who was dying and how to hold her lineage and her spirit and her life as it was transitioning.

Something I know to be true only 100% of the time is this: once you know a truth, you will never not know it. You’re going to end up at that truth no matter how long or complicated a detour you take.

The truth is I’m in the middle place. I’ve pushed off the shore on writing this book, but mostly all I see is a mess of pages and words; I've got no feel for the shape yet, no sight of the shore.