Ten Years

 

On Wednesday, Dec 7, 2022 I turned ten years sober. I have been looking forward to that ten year mark since late summer. Waiting for it to arrive, looking back at what was happening for me in fall 2012. Y’all, this unexpected combination of love and tenderness for myself showed up while I was waiting- I could see how much I was suffering then, and I have enough distance from that time to look at it from the outside, even though it’s part of me.

Back then, I watched episode after episode of Intervention, checking to see how I compared to the people on that show. “Am I that bad?” I would think. “I don’t think I’m that bad.” In a weird way it would make me feel better about my drinking, because things could be so much worse. I wasn’t in jail, or losing my job, or in and out of rehab, wrecking my car or abusing my children in alcohol fueled rages. I was just sitting on the back porch determinedly drinking myself to a slow death. I was dying on the inside, not the outside.

It’s been ten years. Ten years since I drank at things that went wrong- like my marriage ending or two different cancer scares. Ten years of not drinking in celebration for birthdays, weddings, and vacations. Ten years since I picked up a drink and felt the rushing relief of the alcohol as it entered my bloodstream, ten years since I bought extra alcohol as insurance, that 12 pack of beer just in case. I can still feel the way it felt to get back home from an unnecessary trip to the grocery store: the kids safely in front of the TV, cigarettes in my pocket, giant glass of sauvignon blanc in my hand, the whoosh of the glass porch door, down the deck steps and I was safe. The relief of that moment is so real, it was like I could finally be my whole self. In that moment the walls came down, and I was exposed. And then I went about the work of getting drunk, filling in the dirt, covering over myself again.

For me, the most surprising thing about long term sobriety has been how the behaviors still show up after the alcohol is gone. It was enough for the first few years to simply not be drinking. Not drinking was a buoyant triumph. I stopped thinking about booze all the time. It stopped feeling like an old dysfunctional lover, calling to me when I wanted to escape struggle. It got quiet, and stayed quiet. The thing that I didn’t know how to do was what came after that.

It’s the what’s next? that I struggled with for several years- riding the line of my success at staying sober, staying right there at the surface, my quitting a touchstone that proved I was a good and healing person. Wasn’t it enough? I was in therapy, I dedicated myself to self help, I had quit drinking. I was sober. Nothing more to do I guess. I didn’t go to AA meetings or anything like that because I was building my new identity, and didn’t want to be reminded of the old one.

That kept me stuck for a long time, my success at quitting drinking a thin badge of honor that helped me pat myself on the back and avoid the rest of myself- until I heard Elizabeth Gilbert use the term “emotional sobriety” in an Onbeing podcast with Pico Iyer. “Oh”, I remember thinking. “Ohhhhhhhhh wow.” The thing I was having a hard time understanding was that sobriety wasn’t just quitting drinking, and then not drinking, the end. It was quitting drinking, not drinking, and then not drinking becoming something more and more alive, and always evolving. I had been living a half life.

Sobriety is much more than not drinking. It’s a set of behaviors and accountabilities that keep me in recovery- in a truthful relationship with myself and the rest of the world. It cushions me. Cares for me, guides me. For a long time I felt like I had to defend and protect my sobriety, but also avoid it, and also like it was armor protecting me from the world. It’s wild to see it as much more free than that- as a mentor, a best friend. Long term sobriety gives me the leeway to play around with that.

The past ten years have been simple and complex. Simple because my one basic rule is: drinking is never an option. The complexity comes in when I try to understand myself and my behaviors- how I can still behave like the me that drinks, but without the drinking. It was really tough for me to reconcile- that I was making choices and acting how I acted when I drank, but I was sober. Some choices that seemed wise, and real, heartfelt and genuine, some close relationships that seemed healthy and good slowly began to reveal themselves as an old way of choosing and connecting that were dependent on me being the old me- holding me back from growing and changing.

Until I could see myself differently, I couldn’t do things differently. Long term sobriety for me is about telling the truth, when I want to run from it, and looking at my excuses. One of the hardest things was seeing how I chose situations and relationships that kept me in places that made me feel generous, loving and helpful, but weren’t generous, loving and helpful for me. Seeing, believing, and behaving in ways that show I matter has been some of the hardest work I’ve done. Holding myself up as a person who is deserving of respect, recognition, and care still feels unnatural sometimes. I have standards y’all! This makes me giggle with delight every time I say it. Who knew I would grow up and have standards?!?

Another huge lesson is something that just came to me in a therapy session on my ten year sober anniversary. I mentioned above that I didn’t get sober with AA (or rehab). I put together my own sobriety by blogging, writing to a pen pal, and a deep desire to stay in good, close relationships with my children (then 4 and 7) forever. I had community online for the first few years, and I had a sober friend for a minute, and I was part of a women’s sobriety group for a minute, but I haven’t had close sober friends or felt a substantial presence in a recovery community in many years.

At the beginning, I didn’t want to go to AA because I adamantly stood with my idea that I didn’t need to stand in a room and declare myself an alcoholic. That wasn’t who I was anymore! I was trying to grow and solidify my identity as a sober person, not steep myself in the stories of the past. I think it also helped me not feel like I’d failed, like if I didn’t have to go to meetings I was already well enough. Like I was safe or not as attached to alcohol as people at meetings. Ugh.

It was a huge moment for me to recognize (at ten years in!) that going to meetings is not an accusation, or a way to shove my nose in shame. I realized that going to meetings could be about building community, helping others, and keeping my past with me- not as something bad, but as something real and true. It helped me to see how I have been open about my sobriety but also hidden it away in many ways. I have been working so hard to invite these two parts of me to integrate, to come together- and I have also been the one working so hard at keeping them apart. Recognizing what I did about going to meetings means I can suddenly see those parts of me together. That they can intra-act.

That makes me think that what I have truly gained over these past ten years is maturity. That I have, at 51, grown up. There is still work to do, always. Thank goodness. It used to feel so daunting- that to heal from the past, cope with the present, and contemplate the future took so much work- but now, the biggest relief for me is understanding that as long as I live I can keep trying. Life is many things, but it is not a thing to be avoided. My sobriety gives me recovery, and my recovery gives me my whole life.

 

Ghost Walk

Long term sobriety is full of complexity and layers.

Oct 06, 2022

Photo by Stefano Pollio on Unsplash

When I say I work hard to reconcile the past, what I mean is: I spend a large portion of my time learning to feel so I can experience all of life. I am a lifelong expert in the art of self anesthesia. Since I quit drinking I can feel well-seasoned, capable, and wise.. and then also like a brand new beginner- all at the same time- in an insistent conflicting way that makes life confusing and hard to understand more than I’d like to this far along in my recovery.

I imagine myself, as 2022 me, going back and introducing myself to all the hers I was back then, and then..and then. Me meeting myself.

When I think of doing a ghost walk through my own life I wonder…what would I do when faced with the reality of my own self?

What would it be like to see 13 year old me up in the neighborhood treehouse? Getting fingered and vigorously dry humped by the older teenage boy who wore Levis, his hard adolescent penis grinding into my hairless pubis in a way that bruised and hurt, but also made me feel found. What about me at 10 having my bobbed brown hair pulled out in chunks by the husky squinty eyed younger boy who lived across the street? He pulled my hair hard I couldn’t breathe. Would middle aged today me push that mean kid down, pull then me aside, whisper to her that I understand now, I think know what that kid who pulled hair was so angry about..maybe it had to do with his creepy bald step father who routinely wore loose athletic shorts with no underwear, legs spread wide, his wrinkly flaccid penis innocently as an afterthought on a deck chair.

What would it be like for us when I look 15 year old me in the eye and say we could have told that boy from French class no and gotten away with it. We could have gotten away.

Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

What would she think about me? Would me at 23 be like wow you’re 51!?! We actually lived? Would she be shy? Ashamed of me now like I was ashamed of me then? Or would her shoulders sag with relief?

What about 31 year old me.. the one who woke up in cold puddles of pee, mattress soaked, so drunk the night before that I wet the bed, again- what would she think? Would her mouth fall open when she met me, my starting to grey hair, would she recognize me, yet see a stranger?

What would this 51 year old today me do or say if I went back in time to meet myself there and then? Would I be horrified? Detached? Loving? Still in denial?

I like to think I would rush in to save myself, save her, save all of me. That I would trample all the time traveling rules and tell her all the things I know now and together we would stop all the damn suffering. We’d build a reputable solid lively life that I would be proud of much

sooner than right now.

Alas. Impossible,

no matter how hard I wish I could make it true.

This makes me sadder than almost anything else, that I can’t rewrite the bottomless suffering I did while I waited to wake up from the things my life did to me, the things I did to me.

It can be hard to tell who’s the ghost. Is it me, or is it all the me’s that I have been? Is the ghost current me, haunting my life, still living on the outside of it all- even though I quit drinking almost ten years ago. You just can’t hold up the string of “I quit drinking” as the shiny prize anymore. It’s..rudimentary? to celebrate not drinking at your cousin’s wedding when you quit seven years ago. You’ve gotten way past that part. The drinking was definitely a practically impassable coping mechanism, and quitting is definitely a glorious hallelujah miracle, and then there’s all the things that are still here

even though you don’t drink anymore you still have the things.

Those are the ghosts?

I’ve been in weekly therapy for almost 8 years and we are just now getting to the place where I am ready to surrender more and meet myself- I’m just starting learning to cry without automatically stopping in the next breath. “Where did your tears go?” my therapist will ask, and now I finally know what she means. I can remember crying past the first surge of tears, crying so hard, is crying a ghost that can be resurrected? I can remember the uncomfortable lump, that big painful lump of uncried tears in my throat- head down walking into school, or shoulders slumped small at the dinner table- anything anything to stop them from spilling over. Gulping hiccups from crying so hard when I was by myself- at 5, at 15, and then somehow somewhere along the way I learned to shut down and stop crying.

I think I remember that getting drunk was a way I got numb but also gave myself permission to feel- I might have cried a lot when I was hammered. I don’t remember. I can remember feeling dramatically bereft, my body remembers shaky inhales after long cries, but I can’t remember the reasons why. Everything?

If I’m here now, and also like a ghost in my head when I remember things like that, what does that mean? Am I only a ghost then? I actually feel like the ghost now, that this today me is the apparition and I am haunting my life.

Current life can feel like a lovely surprise, the old me coming back to life in a way that is necessary and yet painfully real, my face crumpling, tears filling my eyes. Falling. Stopping.

Starting again.

The ghost really is this woman, this me, almost ten years sober, learning to continue the cry. I am the one who flies through walls, rattles the chains. I am the one who believes the illusion, flickers the lights, becoming a reality we can all agree on.

Until next time,

Photo by Thalia Ruiz on Unsplash

Grown Up

 

Turning 10 years old was a very big deal to me. My age had TWO numbers and I was officially on the way to being a grown up- the magical thing I wanted more than anything else in the world. My little girl heart desperately longed for the grown up-ness of life to begin. I thought if I was a grown up I would securely fit in, fit most somewheres, that several if not all someones would understand me. That what made me hard to understand was the child part of me, which at 10 years old was most of me. That I would be credible, lovable, and believable if I was a grown up. 

When I quit drinking I wanted to be a person who was a grown up sober person. I didn't want to be a beginner-a sobriety child- I wanted the convincing distance that age of doing a thing for a long time gives you. It was a sense of security, of being able to be believed. Just like wanting to be a grown up as a child, I imagined long term sobriety/recovery would give me the credibility I longed for. That people wouldn't be smiling with goodwill upon hearing I quit drinking and also hiding behind their back the fan of skepticism cultivated from seeing too many people say one thing and do another. 

The interesting thing about quitting the thing that stunts your growth and keeps you from your dream is that it forces you to grow in a whole other ways besides up. My freedom from alcohol now, living my 10th year, seems like such a small step that was also the biggest thing I've ever done for myself. It was a first step, a footfall. A choice. I thought the biggest thing was the quitting, but really it's all the daily things that happen after that that are the big things. 

When I think about the morning I quit, I still cry. It feels so close, the kids innocently small, me a sick sack pinned to the bed so hungover I couldn't speak or move. The slats on the closet door. The love I found for myself that morning, that I dug down and found my worth, my heart. I didn't know that I did that until now. Then I just thought I was miserable, on my last ditch, and if I didn't quit I would lose my children's love and respect, that as soon as they grew up they would get as far away from me as they could. I had to quit or lose them- that was the choice I made then. I could slowly kill myself but I just could not kill their childhoods. 

The boys were 7 and 4 when I quit. They're 17 and 13 now. They are bigger and beautiful, we have solid close loving relationships and both of them thanked me for being there for them in the birthday cards they each made for me. I have wept a bit every day since with gratitude for who we are together. The scariest thing I imagine is how different their lives would be had I drank for the last 10 years. What their lives would be like today if I was still a blackout drinker. How big my mountain of shame would be. Would I still be alive? Would I be alive but dead to them?

I thought drinking made me a grown up. I thought getting drunk was a sign of sophistication. I learned getting drunk made me forget my pain. I didn't know. I didn't know. 

But my children know. I have been open and age appropriately honest with them and we talk about my drinking and why I did it and what they remember about it and what they think about them drinking or using drugs themselves. I am incredibly proud of how quitting drinking makes me the mom I always wanted to be. Present. Loving. Honest. Patient. Supportive. My children love me. We love each other. 

I am also incredibly proud of how quitting drinking makes me the grown up I have always wanted to be. Present. Loving. Honest. Patient. Supportive. I love myself. 

Now I think being a grown up means you learn that there's a lot more to things than you thought. Yes, I did quit for them. What I've learned is that I also quit for myself. As I've reflected on these past 10 sober birthdays and the years that go along with them I am pleased to realize that along the way I found the love I have for my children for myself. There is both. 

That by being their grown up, I also became my own. 

Caring

 

This morning I woke up and finished watching Broadchurch. I canceled my Saturday clients because my voice is still gone. 

A dear friend suggested fresh ginger tea. I gather the things together- the little knife I got at the thrift store, the pretty stars and animals saucer, part of an espresso set from when I worked at a restaurant called Upstream when I first moved to Charleston when I was 30 years old, which is now 20 years ago. I got that espresso set because the cup was chipped and cracked and it was going to get thrown out. Where's the cup? I’m not sure, it was around for a long time but things like that get lost in moves or suddenly seem like garbage since they're chipped and I maybe threw it away. I can’t remember. 

It made me think about how hungover I was then, at 30, a lot of the time. A lot of my life. Being hungover, feeling bad- it’s just not part of my life anymore, it's been gone for so long. That I did that to myself, dragged myself through my days like that, had babies like that…oh, oh. How it makes my heart ache. 

When I look at this scene: my own little house, the pretty things I have, behind the lovely cup my mom gave me last Christmas because it’s deep blue and has nature and owls on it and she knew I'd like it, the good loose leaf tea in the beautiful blue jars that belonged to my great grandmother. Was I always this loved? 

It’s strange to realize how much I suffered at my own hand. Is this a stage of recovery/sobriety? What would I call it? Realization? I’m winding my way to 10 years this year. TEN. YEARS. WITHOUT. DRINKING. Me. 

How did I do it? Go to work, live? Feeling so shitty? And how did I decide to do it over and over again, not caring about the me on the other side of getting drunk, drunk, blackout drunk? It makes me proud of my determination in a strange way- that I was so driven to show up even when inside I was suffering so so much- physically from the effects of so much alcohol, mentally from so much else. 

^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*

This morning I woke up, made coffee. I did my little morning routine- while my moka pot heats up the coffee I unload the dishwasher and make my bed. I empty the litter box. I check my email and social media while I drink my first coffee and poop. I sit at my round dining room table, the one where I sat with my beloved grandmother as a little long haired girl, drinking sweet milky coffee. I read my book.  

I didn't used to be able to drink coffee when I drank alcohol. The anxiety and edginess it produced was so overwhelming- when I think of it now I know it just made the voice of something is really wrong here unbearably LOUD. I would get so shaky and nervous and uncomfortable that I just became a person who could not drink coffee instead of a person who could not drink alcohol. 

Now, my morning coffee gives me a sense of accomplishment- I can drink some coffee and be okay in the world. I don't know why it's these little things- these every day little things that make me feel the most like I found my way. These little things like coffee, making my bed every day. Washing my face and brushing my teeth at night. My patience and not taking things personally with my children, who are now both lovely teenagers. I don't just care about myself, I care for myself. 

Being sick this past week has been a bit of a chore and a light bulb in my head. It has taken me a lot of reality checks and presence to remember that being sick people aren't bad people. I made myself sick drinking for so many years and then had to deal with those consequences like nothing was happening. Like I was fine. Years of pretending you feel fine when you actually feel like you're dragged out dying makes it weird to be actually sick, or hurting- like I'm faking this cold, or I went and did this to myself on purpose. Like it's my fault. Like there's blame to be tossed around and I will throw it and catch it and hold it tight because that's what you do when you drink a lot to cope. 

I am really proud of myself. It seems like such a small thing: take sweet tender care of yourself when you're sick. For me, my work continues to be showing up in the world with the truth in my outstretched hands. 

How to be Sick

 

Does it seem like I'm always at the doctor? Here's another selfie, this one from urgent care on Monday when I had what felt like strep throat. My hair looks lovely but I feel like total shit. 

I felt pretty worn out on Sunday, I took an at home Covid test and it was negative so I kept the walking date I had that morning. By Sunday afternoon I felt exhausted, heavy. Rest I thought. I just need a good night's sleep. 

I woke up Monday morning and it was clear I was sick. I had several things to do on Monday- clients, a meeting for a class I'm taking, and not just clients, one of the appointments a brand new client who was considering working with me. OH NO I thought. How can I make all these things happen? How can I just get through it?

Then, the sweet moment of realization that I did not have to make anything happen. I was sick. It is normal to be sick. It is normal to cancel everything when you are sick. Relief, then dread, thick dread. It felt wrong, and weird to think that way. What would my clients think? What about the brand new person? What a terrible impression to have to reschedule our first meeting. What about my classmates? They'll think I don't care. 

I had the out of body experience I have when I understand that my training is at work and I am living in my habit instead of being in the moment. I become two people: the old me, the one who thinks people judge you for canceling and it destroys your credibility and I am not really that sick, I am just lazy and dumb and careless. Ouch. Then the this me, the 50 year old who has been in recovery for almost 10 years and therapy for 7 years and working so hard to know what's real me gently comes in. She knows not to rush, or be loud. She mothers me, tenderly. This me knows what's real. 

I have to break it down into the most basic of basics in actual conversation with myself because I am still young in my practice of this kind of knowing about things. Wait Amy, 50 year old me says, without force or agenda. You are sick. You can feel it. You know what you're talking about. What would you tell someone else or your clients? Tell yourself that too. Now, what would you say? 

I answer myself, shyly. I would say if you're sick you take care of yourself. That being sick is not a character failing, but something that happens to everyone. That people are understanding. That if they aren't understanding those aren't your people. That to be in my integrity I cancel everything. I go to the doctor to make sure I don't have strep. And then I go to bed until I'm well. Old me and 50 year old me look each other in the eye. Together we open my email, we text clients to reschedule. No one is mad, or disappointed- they know who I am. We make the doctor appointment. Together. 

Often I am so angry at the part of me that kept me drinking and numb for so long. The part that made me work when I was actually sick, that never let me see how bad things were. TWENTY SEVEN YEARS!!! I want to scream at that part, over and over. I want to be so angry at it, to burn it down, to shame it and hurt it and reject it and ask it how on earth could you be so fucking foolish while I'm standing there close in so it can see the anguish of what it's done. 

It knows. She knows. I know. 

I am to the point where I am starting to feel my feelings and recognize my true feeling. I don't know how to say it better than plain like that. When you master numbing out for the majority of your life there are fathoms and trenches to tirelessly swim through before you feel the tiny jolt of aliveness that matches what you're truly actually really feeling. Oh, I will think. I FEEL MAD. Oh. 

It seems like such a simple thing: to be sick. And then to take the normal steps that you take when you are sick, that are new steps to me. What a glorious moment! To recognize myself and to openly care for myself in front of people. It feels monumental. 

Replacement (Part 1)

I've been a runner since spring of 2005. In my memory I started running to offset the boredom of walking with the baby in the jogging stroller. But, it was probably more to combat the extra weight I was carrying from having been pregnant. (baby weight on top of the extra weight I was already carrying from a lot of late night binge drinking) 

Another fighting my body. 

I have always wanted to be effortlessly beautiful. 

When I was in my early 20's, I moved home a year or two after dropping out of college. I got a DUI the night before my mom was driving three and a half hours up the mountain to Boone, NC to pick me up and bring me home. I called her as soon as I got out of jail just before dawn that morning, lying, saying I had to work just one more day, could she please come get me tomorrow? 

Back at home, I got a job waiting tables at Chili's and I'd go hike up Crowder's Mountain whenever I had free time. I lost weight- down to a size 2, which to me felt like a weird miracle, and yet I still often felt excruciatingly big and uncomfortable in my own skin. I was probably a size 8 or a 10 to start. None of that feels important now, and yet it does- these decades old numbers and the images that go along with them tattooed on my brain. Anything past about size 6 started to mean you were an out of control body failure. I have spent years of my life resenting the body I have- wishing someone else would find me substantially beautiful enough enough times so I could start to believe it myself. 

You know how you get so tired of something, exhausted from carrying the idea you were taught that wasn't even yours to begin with? And yet, resigned you sigh, heave it up, ratty and worn, heavy old burden that's super glue fused to your thoughts, the boomerang that can't be tossed far away enough to not come back? God, damn my fixation about my body. I'm so sick of it. 

I start to feel uncomfortable. I start to try to control it, but then following my pattern, I alternately want to starve myself or stuff myself. I stress. My body is the first place I turn against when I'm stressed. I immediately start finding things wrong- my stomach isn't flat, my legs are dimply. The solution seems to become "look different and all problems resolve themselves". I feel ugly. I start to change clothes 7 times when I get dressed, my anxiety making it harder and harder. But also looking too pretty is a problem, so I have to find the right balance of I look great and I didn't try at all. 

If I only could look right then everything will be okay. 

What does "look right" even mean? 

It's interesting to be 50 years old and still feel like this. To tangibly want to give up giving a shit about this, and to be so attached to it as a coping mechanism that losing it feels like losing myself, in a way. What do I have if I don't have this consistent criticism of my appearance in my thoughts to comfort me? 

The empty space is harder than the familiar. It is hard to quiet the voice and wait. It feels inauthentic to cheer myself on, the other option feels like waiting for what else I have to say but that is so...empty. I resort to comforting myself by trying to say the truth (I look like me, I 'm supposed to look like me) but I can only approve of myself in an echo chamber for so long before my own voice coming back to me feels insulting. 

It seems like it's about control. I think about myself on the beach in a bathing suit and the people who see me are thinking: look at her body, she has no self control. 

Ha! I am overflowing with self control! I have a grand surplus of it! It squeezes out of everywhere, bursting forward, leaking all over everything. 

To let go of control. Or approval? Or both? 

Circling back to the beginning and me being a runner..now I physically can't run much more than a mile. I can walk about 4 or 5 miles, only after some ibuprofen and it isn't great. I have to stop some, and the last mile or two I'm often wishing I were finished already. So I don't go as often, even though running in the woods is my redemption, my saving grace. 

It happened suddenly, not being able to run. Around Christmas I was continuing a long practice of running 6 miles four or five times a week, sometimes further. I was signed up for an 8 mile trail run in February. But I had to email the race director mid January and let them know I wasn't going to be there. I physically could not do it.  

My body reflects this change in my running practice. It feels like a slap in the face. I have been devoted, careful, dedicated to running in a way that felt wise and good. Losing it means I lost my comfort in my own skin. I feel like I'm in a stranger's body. Like I inflated a little and can't exhale. It's not much, no one would notice. Like a rock in my shoe, you probably don't see it, but I feel it. It's painful, and annoying, and also feels petty and vain. 

The picture above is one I took of myself before my consult with the surgeon who is going to replace my hip on June 13th. Finally, after years of pain and lack of mobility I will get a new hip. He will replace the one that's worn out, the one that is bone on bone, with bone spurs that act like locked doors and that for the past couple years has only let me do one kind of movement: run. In turn, running let me feel okay. It gave me control of my body, and my own approval. 

Now, it's gone. 

And it's not okay. 

For now, I'd like to acknowledge that. To not rush myself past what I'm experiencing now, but to feel it, suffering vanity, the lack of approval, the discomfort I have in my own skin. 

Not rush towards the solution, to the but, but, but! 

"But no one can tell!" 

"But it's not forever!" 

"But you know you are (insert positive descriptor here)!" 

I am here now to say: I want the time to feel uncomfortable. 

I want to see what it feels like, to get to know it, so maybe I learn something about myself by not being okay. 

To be patient enough to hear the silence of me not knowing what to say. 

 

Permeability

 

Permeability

Out on a run/walk/wander I remembered what I thought on a recent early morning: I am separate from other people. It really struck me that what I feel, think, decide, am... it's all mine. And that other people's those things are all theirs. Like I am a cloud, and you are a cloud, and we are each our own weather systems that can also create weather together. 

I spend a lot of time thinking about humans- how we behave, our histories, our family histories, our behavioral legacies, our training, choices, conditioning, changing, stagnating- it's all fascinating to me. I think about myself and how I got sober and what it took to get there. 

What it was like to live the life I lived before I quit drinking. 

What it was like to live that life. 

What it's like to live this life. 

The things I have learned and how much I still have to go. I remember being out on a run in the beginning of my recovery and thinking "What if I never finish?" and starting to cry because then I thought with relief and joy "I will never finish!!!" 

I realize periodically that something I do unconsciously pretty often is: I try to not make any mistakes by being me the individual. I really guard myself closely, collecting myself, looking for loose threads or flyaways of self. Oh this? That's nothing! And I scoot that part of me you might have seen under the rug. It's weird for someone who is like me- I am open to talking about your behaviors or your life so I seem like I am open and revealing, but just try asking me about myself and I will probably clam right up like a... clam. I'm so good at it you may not even notice that I change the subject or that I'm very brief and that I rarely talk about myself. 

I am working on this. It can feel like being pushed out onstage naked when I talk about myself. I watch the audience closely. Was that my line? Am I saying it right? I watch for signals. Did I mess that up? Am I in the right place? Did I hit my mark? Your mark? I try to be palatable. Too much of me and I start looking around for you, but you coming from me. Talking about myself makes me feel afraid. I don't like it. I worry you/the world won't like it. 

My afraid is the fear of being ridiculed or looking foolish, of making a mistake. My therapist and I have discussed this for several years now and I am at this place where I really love and trust myself inside. How to put that on the outside? It's like if you had a beautiful treasure but you keep it hidden. I love my beautiful treasure and I'm afraid if I show you you'll make fun of it or tell me it's stupid or that I don't know what I'm talking about. So it's much easier to live inside myself where I'm safe. 

Vulnerability is hard. 

Except.. I want to connect. I know I'm mostly not breakable fragile like that anymore, and I'm working on remembering that I'm a 50 year old woman who made my own recovery (don't we all?) and I've been purposely living and studying human behavior for almost 10 years in my own cool way and I have pretty terrific things to share about that and about me. I have mothered and run my own business and been married and separated and/or ended and/or repaired signifiant relationships- like my marriage, my relationship with my parents, a couple of friendships. 

These boundaries, the separation from other people is not a wall, it's a defense mechanism. A coping skill. I was thinking about how I tend to think people in my life think like me, but it's more like I try to guess what people are thinking and then I make myself like them. Writing that makes me think about how I don't really do that as much anymore but I feel like I do and I need to catch up to where I actually am. 

The idea that I am separate from other people means that we might be in relationship but we aren't the same person. 

What a relief. And what a mind fuck. For a lifetime I have thought that if someone was in my life it meant we matched. A strange sort of branch of codependency. Gaining the understanding that we can be in each others lives and differ vastly feels like maturity. It feels like I'm responsible for me, you're responsible for you- and we are responsible for each other too, but not dependent on similarity to function. 

This gleaning of personal separation feels like a wise expectation. 

As in: 

I expect me to be like me, and you to be like you. 

That seems real, and honest, and much less confusing than thinking the people in my life are mostly like me but I actually have to be mostly like them. It was a blind spot. It feels validating to see myself in the pool of that insight. 

I was reading something somewhere about how lately these days we all think we are unique and separate and individual and that's what's getting valued- that the collective has become the pieces, not the picture. I think it's both. 

It's the permeability. 

The ability to allow things to pass through you. To keep your self while keeping community. A frog's skin is permeable to water- but the frog does not become water, and the water does not become frog...they exist together, and apart. The frog is a frog, the water is a water. And there is the frog in the water, and there is the water surrounding the frog. 

Putting yourself - the youest you- out into the world as yourself is crazy: hard/easy/hard/easy on and on. There are so many ways we are bombarded with different options and opinions...how do you know? And then how do you not short circuit when rejected or laughed at or made fun of- even if it's only in your own mind? Being the "right" frog in the "right" water- it can be exhausting. 

And such an unconscious habit to be absorbed instead of be permeable. 

When I am absorbed I do not have boundaries. Something I have started noticing is that I do have boundaries, but I tend to set them and then erase them. It's wild to watch. I'm learning that if I am permeable I don't lose myself, or my boundaries- and it feels healthy and care full. I know where I am. It's kind of like always telling myself the truth and being willing to stand with that truth, and knowing that truth can change. That it isn't a threat to know more or do things differently. 

Taking it apart- here's me in a situation:

Me deciding what feels wisest for me. 

DOING THAT THING. 

Wanting to erase it (oh no! I didn't mean it! never mind! it's okay!), but not erasing it. 

Feeling totally uncomfortable in the itchy scritchy sweater of not erasing it. 

The sweet nugget of warmth that comes, a bit of confidence, of trust, of love. 

I have to do things in these kinds of instructions because then it makes more sense: I slow down, recite my practices to myself- whatever they may be- First you do this, then you do that. It's not about right or wrong. Please slow down. You don't have to go fast. 

There's a sense of recognition and congruency that arrives. I am me, and I am here, standing next to you, apart and together- permeable. 

Moving Back

(pictured: where I first started writing Soberbia)

 It's funny how I loved writing this blog so much, and then as life got different, I got things like a my own website and I left Blogger to move on. I wrote on my website on Wordpress for a while, but it felt confusing and flat. Now all of those posts are gone, deleted by Wordpress without me seeing their look out warning. I started to blog on my current website but that didn't feel right either. 

Thankfully, these early years are still saved here. I started thinking about jumping on the Substack bandwagon, made a Soberbia page there, and yet...every time I wrote something it remained a draft and now there are 10 or so and it just doesn't feel like me. So I just leave my writing hanging in the draft space in Pages or on Substack and in my mind I keep promising myself to publish something, anything, for gods sake. 

But alas. Months go by, years..and nothing. No publish. 

Then on a call with a potential client the other day they told me they'd read this blog. And my old blog before this blog. I'd forgotten there even was a blog before Soberbia, but there was and it was called Sell the Goat. 

When I started Soberbia my method used to be: get up at 5 am. Sit at the computer desk next to the fireplace and hope no small children wake up early. Start writing, or find a picture that says what I'm trying to say and build on that. Be as honest as possible. Don't overthink it. Just write and publish and write and publish again and again, learning and living my way into some answers. Words are the flashlights for me. Scour the landscape and find the thing that needs light, writing is a lighthouse. 

It feels real and right to sit here, now, in a totally different life, nine years later, to return to write for the deep deep pleasure of writing writing. That it's a way to connect, to be in community, to build real relationships, and to offer what I know and to learn from others. I left Blogger when I decided my writing needed to look important, and be more legitimate, and got on social media and promptly killed my love of writing words with the soggy blanket of comparison and shiny expectation. It's interesting, I did that with my running too- made it complicated with times and miles and achievements and appearance and then let go of all of it and found the deep deep pleasure of running again. 

Maybe it's because I'm 50 now that I value my experience of my life more than I value the experience others have of my life. Maybe it's humility, or freedom, or the heart of dedication to my art- my beloved and temperamental writing- that beats steady and loud in my ears. 

Or maybe it's just that somehow we always manage to find our way home... 

Moving Along...You can come too!!!

After over four years here at Blogger I'm moving over to my very own website!

HERE IT IS!!!!

Come visit me at my new digs. You can still email me about anything, and I'll still be writing blog posts. I'm also offering Life + Recovery Coaching over there too.

Thank you to everyone who reads along with me here, I hope that you'll continue to be part of the Soberbia community. With this community I have grown into the woman I am today. Let's keep going. BIG LOVE.

Love's Not Love

The other day my oldest son, age 12, brought home a lovely bouquet of dandelions and sweet little purple flowers for me. He stuffed all these flowers into his LaCroix lemon seltzer can during outside time at school, carried them around with him half the day and all the way home on the bus- the bus that carries eighth graders who are relentless in their teasing of my under-tall unfashionable glasses wearing boy. He came in the front door grinning. "Mom! I picked these for you!"

I am never surprised by his open heart, the heart that stays open in spite of always being teased for being different and this year, 6th grade, is the first year he's finally had a solid group of real friends. His love for me is so big, and he is so honest about it, that sometimes it feels so vulnerable for me to witness. He is so confident in it- this love we have for each other- that I find myself being envious of the person he loves so much until I realize she is me.

I love him back in this same open way, he and my other son are the only two people on the planet that I can really let my own apprehensive heart reach out to and receive back from. I relax into both of my children like soft pillows, my love for them feels so good and safe. I relish their arms around my body, their faces pressed into my shoulder or my side, giving me love. Even when they yell things like I HATE YOU MOM! and YOU ARE THE WORST MOTHER IN THE WHOLE WORLD! I know they don't really mean it, without any doubt. I let them love me in whatever way they do, unafraid of their anger or resistance, encouraged by their independence, secure in the knowledge that they love me, really real-y forever.

It is easy for me to give love. When I say that what I really mean is it is hard for me to accept love. I cringe at being offered love by anyone other than my children. I am the first to offer a hand, a heart, or a help, but I vanish to last in line with my blind eye turned when those things are offered to me. I am uncomfortable when given things like tenderness, empathy, and care. So uncomfortable that I can feel my shoulders tensing even now, just writing about it.

This makes a marriage hard.

Sometimes in my head I am the loving wife I think my husband might need- I imagine melting into his arms when he reaches for me as I walk past in the kitchen first thing in the morning, I picture looking up at him with kindness and a kiss, but then I react the way I always seem to when offered the soft gift of love: I straighten and panic. I can feel the wall clank into place, annoyance fixed on my face, impatience brushing him away, again and again. How many times can I do this before he stops reaching?

I'm working on it- chipping away at the days and years of self protection with a tiny chisel and a fearful yet courageous heart. Logically I know, I know I'm safe. I know I am capable of watching out for myself, and knowing when I don't have to be protected, but my involuntary nervous system is well trained and stubborn.

And thankfully my husband is patient and good humored.

The longer I'm sober the more I recognize what I need- and god... do I ever need and want love. Funnily I hate even admitting it, that I cannot be some self contained underwater breathing apparatus, a closed system, a solo artist. I long for and cringe at the thought of fading into the amount of trust it takes to allow myself to be loved, it's like I'm dying of thirst holding giant glasses of water. It makes sense to drink it, but what if? So I stand there thirsty, sheepishly smacking my lips, taking smallish sips and seeing if anyone noticed.

Sobriety has given me the courage to even think about all this. It gives me the ability to laugh at my hunched up shoulders and to share these thoughts with you and to keep going further and further into the woman I really am inside all the years of hurt and fear. It allows me to see who I am and to recognize myself clearly in all the messes and rejoice in the finding.

So maybe love's not love. Maybe it's more than that- more than a word, more than a feeling. Maybe it's acceptance, maybe courage, maybe nothing more than a grin and some flowers, held tight then given freely on an early spring day.

New Blog

Hey y'all!

I have a long time pen pal who has started a blog and his subject matter resonates with me. So much of recovery can be faith or religious based. I come from a totally not religious/spiritual background and he comes from a background rich in religion and faith. Yet somehow we are so similar when it comes to the way we speak about what faith and spirituality means to us, what it means in recovery. He is writing about his struggles with and interest in different ways of believing, and I think that is something many people can identify with. Hope you like it!

Shifting Beliefs Blog

Lovely Profile

Hi Y'all!

I wanted to share this profile from drugrehab.org

I think this is the nicest profile I've had done yet. I am always so happy to share my story- who I am and where I am in my recovery. It seems like we all have a recovery story of some kind, and I'm so grateful to have the opportunity to put myself out in the world so I can connect with others and we can have those "ME TOO" moments that help us all feel our belonging.

Profiles in Recovery

Thank you for reading and for commenting and for being part of this community. :)

These Revelations

I sent a complaint letter.

I've never done this before, me, people pleaser extraordinaire, forget the thought of me speaking up when mistreated or handled in a clumsy way, but I did it.

I have revelations all the time- Oh! I can do this! Oh! This seems so normal! - it's disconcerting how I realize and understand so much about myself in these short bursts, like an explosion of light bulbs above my head, it's so blinding and so illuminating all at one big time. Sometimes I have to laugh because I feel so off center and wobbly that if I don't laugh I might just cry and revelate forever. I reassure myself with little victories: I'm learning to walk, how to stand while bearing weight on both legs- to be in my body. I can take deeper fuller breaths than I could a year ago, I'm not always holding my breath. My accomplishments may seem small in the grand scheme of things- I can keep my chin level now instead of a little up ready to defend, I think about sex without wanting to seethe, disappear or hide, I danced with other people in the room, I sent a complaint letter. Revelations. Grand scheme ones.

I've gone from reading about sex to reading about grief. Unexpressed grief is basically like shoving giant wads of gunk into your feelings pipes so they get mucked up, impassable, and you become anxiously paralyzed by the fears you'd meant to cry out but drank down for twenty years instead. I can connect the two so clearly, sex and grief go hand in hand for all of my life. I can see how the grief was the beginning, I can take myself back to me at five sweet years old, strawberry blond hair hanging down my back, past the ties of my favorite pinafore, sucking in my tears because I was too dramatic and so so stupid for crying, my parents teasing me for having feelings. I can feel how much it hurt when I needed tenderness and my parents had no idea what that even meant since their parents had no clue how to do things like feelings either. How that grief led me to using sex for hurting myself and being hurt, how drinking helped me unrealize who I was enough to do it, over and over until the beauty of my body was lost and I spread my legs again, bereft. Revelation.

I can feel how much I try to hide myself, too big to disappear and too unwieldy to blend in.

I sit on the couch across from my therapist and stay a good girl, unable to sob out the tears that are dying to get out because I want her to like me and have me please come back again next week. I have stuffed it all down for so long that I'm afraid to let it out because I could possibly head into a nervous breakdown, never to return- we only have one small hour, and then I have to head to work. Not a lot of time for falling apart and then back together.

I imagine a time when I don't have all this work to do, that these moments of glaring understanding, these revelations, will happen only a few times a year instead of a few a week. These things that come up, these elementary understandings that could have been lessons learned long ago had I only been bravely paying attention instead of fearful and drinking. I feel so stupid sometimes that I'm just now getting the idea that I can ask for what I need and it isn't a crime, it isn't wrong. Why wasn't I this person I am now all along? My years of work boxing up and shoving down all of the feelings and it turns out they never disappeared after all. All that work, down the drain.

The other day I was talking to my mom about being sweet when people are hurting and she said she uses humor to make people feel better. WHAT? I felt so sad and angry thinking of all the times I cried, hurting, and got humored by my own parents. They were using their humor, the very people who were supposed to love and heal me instead making it worse. Making it funny. I'm in total disbelief that she thought that teasing was what made people feel better. I want to stomp my five year old foot and scream stop laughing at me! right in her smiling face. Which would have only made her laugh harder.

No wonder I have no clue about what a normal emotional response is. No wonder I don't know how to take myself seriously, or how to speak without questioning myself, or how to be tender, or where to put all these big feelings. No wonder when I sit on the couch at therapy when the most hurty things come up I laugh. God, no wonder. No wonder my life is full of revelations, these connections that lead me from disappeared to conscious again and again.

I'm all spun up, so much happening, so many feelings that I don't know where to put them all. They're all unruly as puppies, scattered and making messes everywhere. I don't feel like myself anymore, but I don't know who I feel like either- sometimes it feels so much like me and then I hardly recognize who I am. It's like giving birth, but for years.

I feel so fortunate to be coming along in my understanding, and also so right at the beginning, like I've been running for a hundred years and somehow I'm still within sight of the starting line. It's frustrating in this gracefully annoying way, this is where I have to laugh, where it actually is funny, and lovely, sweet and amazing. Me, at forty-five years old, stumbling along, learning to walk. Learning to fly. Being exactly myself at my life. Being born, by revelations.

What I'm Reading: MATING IN CAPTIVITY

                                               

Hey y'all! Something I've been kicking around for a while is a virtual read along. I love to read and I always appreciate it when a blog I read posts about books they're reading...and then I thought it would be cool to post it before I read it, in case you wanted to read it at the same time. I'll start a discussion by writing a post about it, people can join in, and we can have some "me too's" and maybe some "whoa really's?". 

I started with this because sex and intimacy is my biggest thing I am working through. It has taken me years to get to a point where I can actually almost talk about it and almost not feel like I should probably find the nearest rock and crawl under it. In other words that tiny little s-e-x word is HUGE for me- I have a ton of stuff around it: my body, my freedom, my violations- but what I don't have is a clear intelligence about my own self as a sexual being, how sobriety has changed my sex life, and what all that even means. In talking with others I've learned that I am definitely not on my own when it comes to this subject.

So let's read THIS BOOK and then talk about..(moving rock)...sex.

Backbone

Do you ever feel like you are an incredibly capable superhuman amazing person and then things happen to make you remember you are certainly all of those things but mostly you are the human part? ME TOO.

I've been stretching thin, starting big new things, internalizing all the stress from thinking I might die from skin cancer, juggling all the things that are supposed to slow down after the holidays but that really just keep going. My body has been so lovely, healing my stitched back beautifully, having the energy to balance my ever persistent roller coasters of anxiety, putting up with having coffee instead of rest when I'm tired. I've had a little patch of eczema in between and around my eyes since the fall, for four or five months, this tiny spot, controlled by a cream the urgent care doc prescribed for me when as an afterthought I had him check out my rash while we were there for my son's fourth bout of strep throat in as many months.

Those creams you can't use forever- so in addition to removing a piece of my back the dermatologist prescribed a different cream I refuse to use (holy warning on that sucker- please read your paperwork at the pharmacy before you pay $50 for something and then get it home and realize you wouldn't use it, which I didn't do and learned a $50 lesson) and so my eczema has been like a wild animal unleashed- moving around both eyes like a blotchy red lizard-y eye mask. I hate to admit how vain I am, but I am. We've been snowed in and I've spent the snow days peering at myself in the mirror half horrified half amused at what seems like a really bad joke.

I have to laugh kindly at myself when I start bargaining with the universe: Um, hello. I just had that skin cancer scariness so all this eczema all over my EYES so soon seems a little...unfair? 

And then in typical universe fashion the universe sort of shrugs and says ...meh, what're you gonna do?

My body is always obvious, it just takes me a long time to listen. Even though I've been sober for four years that doesn't mean my body isn't still processing almost 25 years of drinking. It's interesting how me being able to say "I'm sober" seems to make me think that my sobriety absolves me of all bodily (mental or physical) debts incurred over my long career as a drinker. Like living while drunk was punishment enough, but now that that part's over, it's just over. It's kind of like when you start working out for like two weeks and then get a little pissed at your good intentions daily because your jeans feel a little tight and you still want to eat all the cookies.

Are you as good at hide and seek stress as I am? I can take on so much and still seem okay, it reminds me of a duck: gliding at the surface, paddling like mad underneath. I push it down and push it down until my body throws up the flag of surrender: I get sick, or I get a big rash all over my eyes, or I have a breakdown and pick fights with everyone in my family until I can finally admit that I'm freaking out some and then I work my way back to being fine, shedding good intentions as I go.

My good intentions can also be my downfall. I get myself into too much and then I have to get myself out of it, I get wrapped up in taking care of everyone else and forget the instruction that I am the first person to get the oxygen mask always. Then my sweet body shows up for me, making me more tired than usual and when I still don't listen my face blooms in a messy rash around my eyes making it impossible for me not to see where I am really.

I spent so many years making the wish to quit drinking, I wished and wished and drank and drank, wishing to be well. It wasn't until I got out my backbone, stopped wishing and made a life out of reality that I got sober and started to heal. This is always the truth: when I get with my backbone instead of my wishing I move myself to more healed. I find my remedies rather than my excuses- it's then that I am back to my backbone, facing reality.

You Love Her

My youngest has the sweetest crush on a girl in his class. She is his seat mate, they talk all the time: "Even more than me and you mom!" One day after school we waited for her mom to show up so we could ask her to come over to our house. I introduced myself and said to my son's friend, "Would you like to come over to our house one day to play?" She said, "No thank you, I'm fine," and my son pulled in his lips and made the please don't let me cry face and I kind of laughed politely and said, "Oh, okay, um see you later. Nice to meet you." We walked the long walk to the car and when we got in he tried to smile but cried instead. I tried to make it better by saying things like be patient and maybe today just wasn't a good day to ask but he kind of got himself together with a ragged sigh and proceeded to act like it didn't matter.

This has been my relationship with myself. I send out these fancy love letters to myself and then when it seems like time to become home friends and not just at school friends I clam up and refuse politely, and I also forget to feel how heartbroken I am and I breathe a lot and pretend like I'm just fine anyway, thanks. Mixed signals all over the place.

Is it embarrassing and a little self indulgent to admit that I love myself? Does that make me one of those people that persistently posts selfies and quotes about how they just keep going no matter what because even in the darkest day there might be a slice of light? When did it become wrong to love yourself? Does school beat it out of you? Your peers? Just life? Can it just be okay and acceptable and not make me arrogant or full of myself if I am okay with saying I'm okay?

I'm reading THIS BOOK and although I get tired of all the rah rah rah I love reading about giving myself permission to be cool with myself. Gratitude to HIP SOBRIETY for publishing her book list, I hadn't seen You are a Badass before and I really am almost to the liking the idea of thinking of myself as a badass cool lovely woman point. What have I got to lose? I mean I hated myself for years, so I'm giving love a chance. It's all part of the MERGE. :)

Word of the Year 2017

The photo above is us, New Year's Eve, 2009. It was the first or second year my oldest stayed up until midnight, he toasted our flutes of champagne with his own of sparkling apple cider and felt so grown up while his little brother slept through it all. I had worked that night and had a bunch to drink before I rushed home to ring in the new year with my dears. I'm guessing that after the ball dropped we shuffled Jack quickly off to bed and we drank more, my husband was probably tired and ready to go to bed and me just getting started- "Just one more!" I would demand and he would acquiesce rather than risk setting me off and end up staying up even later to fight instead of drink.

I'm well on way to drunk when we took that picture. My eyes are always my dead giveaway, but sometimes I'm the only person that can see that I've disappeared, to me my eyes look blurry, crossing a very tiny bit, looking far far away even though things are quite close. And this is exactly the way I wanted to feel when I drank: far far away, signals all crissed and crossed, swallowed up. I'm not here anymore.

When I first got sober I wanted to leave that shitty woman as far from me as I could go, I wanted to shed her skin a thousand million times until I was unrecognizable to myself, until you would never ever guess she had ever ever been me. I wanted to be separate from that version of myself, so cut off that there wasn't even a blurry memory of a single phantom limb or reminder of the amputation.

After a few years of sobriety I began to understand that I was still here, that I wasn't leaving. I was beginning to be at peace with admitting that I was my self, my view had expanded wide enough to see past the drunk woman I hated to find the tender girl I was before the hurt of life got in the way. But I was still two separate versions of myself: the unspoiled breakable girl and the woman who didn't drink anymore. Built with courage but scared, free but jailed, I could hold my own hand but not been ready to merge these two: I think of them both as parts of me that are who I really truly am but they remain friendly strangers- these parts of me that recognize each other but haven't trusted that one will allow the other to exist.

A few months ago on a walk in the woods the idea arrived that I was ready to be one person again. I could be finished protecting myself from myself, after four years I am allowed to be trusted. The two hands that represent what I was and what I am have reached across the middle and kept holding on when they used to drop. Instead of passing on the street with a friendly wave they shook hands and held on, each as each, melded together as one person, one woman who is unspoiled and breakable and sober and trustworthy. I have been protecting what is sweet and tender in me from the damage I've been known to do. I know now that this isn't necessary anymore.

My word this year is MERGE. Combining one into the other. Blending what has been and what will be. Becoming indistinguishable: the parts that are fragile and the ones that fight all singly recognizable as just me. Merging the hope and joy of my five year old self with the wisdom and care capably held by this woman at age forty-five. All the heartbreaking hard lessons I learned along the way? They are here too, part of my merge, here to make certain that this one woman never forgets to honor where I came from, where I've been, and all the places I'm yet to go.

Maps at Halfway

I have twelve stitches running up the middle of my back. They've been knitting themselves together for eight days now, pulling together pieces of skin on my back that have never been neighbors all these 45 years until now.

I have a mole on my upper lip that once concerned a periodontist when I was in my middle thirties. At that time I was still feeling pretty immortal, I'd picked up smoking again while I was training for a marathon and was drinking heavily in fits and starts, trying to parent two people and failing miserably at parenting myself. I had no time to worry about concerning moles, I could barely keep my daily shit together. It was monumental that I was having my gunky gums deep cleaned, that was as healthy as I got that year. For some reason this fall I got around to the idea that I should see a dermatologist.

Something happened to me when I turned 40. One day the big thought occurred to me: MY LIFE IS HALFWAY THERE. My mind dropped to it's knees and my heart sank and I think that was the moment that I realized I was really going to have to quit drinking, I just didn't know when or how I'd be able to put the other foot down to take the full step. It would take me until 41 years and almost 8 months old to bring my feet together in that life salvaging step, and then two more years after I got sober to realize that being sober was not enough anymore, that I needed to use my sobriety as a push off point for the deeper care of myself- my body and my mind.

I finally got around to calling the dermatologist this fall, waiting three months for my appointment. The mole on my upper lip was fine, she said. The odd blurry mole on my thigh came off, and one on the middle of my back got taken off too. I got two band aids and a prescription for the weird rash around my eye and left her office happy that my favorite mole got to stay.

About a week after my appointment the dermatologist called me. She left a message. How nice of her to call, I thought, and promptly forgot to call her back. She called me again the next day and left another message. I had some time so I called her back and was put right through. I should have known that it's not good news when the doctor calls you, but I thought she was being super attentive and still had no clue something could be wrong. She started talking, saying words like "melanoma" and "melanocytes" and "dermal nests" and "severely atypical" and I still didn't understand. I asked her to say all these things in Amy Parrish language instead of doctor language and still didn't get that it could be serious until her nurse called me five minutes later and said the the doctor wanted to get me in as soon as possible to do an excision. Oh. Shit. Shit.

I Googled melanoma. Mine was a stage 0, in situ, survival rates 99-100%. I decided to freak out and also to be okay. Cancer is a big word, I am a big person, life is a big deal. I kept thinking Don't put the cart before the horse and then I'd do things like pull up to the stop sign at the end of our street on my way to pick up my youngest at school and I'd look at the traffic going by and the sun shining and I'd imagine that all of it would go on even if I didn't, that someone else would pick up my smallest boy at school and he would miss me with all of his heart and be so lonely in the world sometimes without me but he would live and go on just like the traffic and the sun.

I talked with people close to me. They had two kinds of stories: the everything was fine story and the dead in 4 months ones. I kept thinking I was going to either be okay or dead before summer.

It's a strange thing to come up against my own mortality, the breathtaking sharpness of thinking about myself dying, of no longer being, my family's empty arms longing for me. Even stranger the deep calm I felt from knowing that I am actually living now. Dying doesn't seem like such a raw part of the deal. I alternated between thinking it was no big deal and desperate that my life was over. I was mostly okay, but fearful sorrow would come on suddenly, I would burrow my face into my husband's chest and gulp out a sob and feel so bereft and he would pull my chin up and look into my eyes and say he was scared too but we were going to be fine. I knew he meant I would be well, but I prayed hard for them to fine no matter what, no matter what.

I went in for the excision on December 23rd at 2:30. I thought she was just going to take out a bigger circle around the spot she'd had tested. No problem. No biggie. There were five people in the room, my doc, her resident, three nurses. I still thought she'd be taking at most penny sized piece of my back and I'd be sewn up and out the door by 3:00.

She started with the lidocaine, about eight shots. Talked me through what she was going to do: cutting more skin around the site, there'd be inner stitches, cauterizing, outer stitches. I'd need to take it easy for 2-3 days. After a while I began to wonder what was taking so long, it couldn't possibly take this long to cut out a penny sized piece of my back. So I asked, "Hey, just out of curiosity, how big of a circle are you doing? Is it like a dime? A penny? You know- size wise." There was a pregnant pause. "More like a dollar bill," said one of the nurses. I pictured the small side of a dollar bill, but as a little rectangle of skin coming off my back. Like the white edge part of the dollar bill. No big deal.

They sewed me up, bandaged me up, let me know the pathology would be back within two weeks, maybe longer because of the holiday. I made follow up appointments, went to work, still thinking I had this slender rectangle of skin taken, wondering why it felt so sore. I left work early and Googled melanoma excisions and dollar bill measurements and figured out what had actually happened: she had taken a 2.5 inch long oval out of the middle of my back.

 We spent the next day traveling to my in laws. That night my husband changed my bandage and counted 12 stitches on the outside. He took a picture with his thumb for scale. It was twice as long at least. She took a lot. She was more concerned than I had ever imagined.

Late Christmas afternoon we took the boys out to the beach while the sun was starting to set, they ditched their shoes and ran shrieking to the water, then down the beach, watching them my heart caught so hard while the cold wind whipped my hair, I reached out for my husband and sobbed out What if this is our last Christmas? What if we were too late? He held me tight, the boys ran up, my oldest asking "Mommy? Why are you crying?" stopping my breakdown, allowing me the white lie of saying something about the sunset-y beach being beautiful before he hugged me quickly and ran off.

Yesterday, the 30th of December, I got an email from my dermatologist's office. AN EMAIL.

Your surgical margins are clear, and no further treatment is necessary. We hope you are healing well and will see you at your next visit. 


My margins are clear. No further treatment is necessary. I did not make it this far for it just to be over. I get to keep going. I get to live this life that I have only now just started to have the courage to live. When I thought it was possible that I might be dying the one thing that was my saving grace was the fact that my life got to be lived, that I got to be sober for these four years, that I wasn't going to head into dying never having known what it was like to live as me.

There's something about thinking I could be dying that makes it simpler to make hard decisions, to take chances, to be kinder when I would have been impatient- to look and see the good in everyone. To stop thinking there's plenty of time left and instead using the time I've got as if it's valuable currency rather than an all you can eat buffet.

I don't know how to not be preachy here, so I will just be it. If you think you should stop drinking you should stop. Today, right now, this minute. If a doctor told you that you might have a disease that could kill you how would you decide things differently? What if you could save yourself?

I realized yesterday afternoon that if I were still drinking that I would never have made the appointment with the dermatologist, that maybe if I hadn't quit drinking I would have died from skin cancer at 50, never having gotten sober, never taking the time to check out my moles, sadly ragged and hungover while going through cancer treatments and trying to make it up to my children and failing miserably. My decision to quit drinking has saved my life twice now. In all the maps that have led me to this place, the middle of my life, the clearest directions have come from my efforts to care for my own self, to save my own life.

Here's to life. Here's to living, to surrender, to finding the courage when there's none to be found, to grace. This time, it will be different. Happy New Year y'all.