Spirits

SpiritsPicture by me.  

365 days ago I was hung over for the last time since then. (I hope so, can't say ever because I'm not a clairvoyant wizard.) It wasn't a remarkable hangover. That one happened on a scary day earlier in the week, the day I decided that this was the end, one way or the other, and as pointless as it felt at the time, I decided to give the better, less sad option a crack.

Today I woke up and read some stuff and went to see some people about some things, and I felt pretty good about it. I didn't feel good about much most Sunday mornings for a long time. Or Saturday mornings. Or your random Wednesday mornings. That's different today. That's good. 

Yesterday I went back to the place I was on the last day I ever drank, in some kind of pilgrimage to a self I remember, very carefully and intentionally without dwelling on her, because it's important not to forget how wrecked this life was should I ever get any brilliant revisionist ideas about that. The whole past month and some change (because things really started to get bad from May on, after a years-long slide downward into terrible) has been a constant, evolving flashback, varying between fuzzy old-time newsreel and the kind of shift to relentless, vivid colors like Dorothy saw in Munchkinland post-Kansas. The dates, the holidays, the birthdays, the landscape melting from spring into summer has been really hard. Even as I'm focused on how much better things are today, there's a natural grieving process in my practiced, naturally negative (and also sentimental) mind for the simplest of things, like, say, lunch being over, so big life changes get them big time. This is getting better, but it's slow.

I'm amazed that I've been able to be productive at all, considering the time I've spent involuntarily remembering things I've forgotten about where I was last year, how I felt (that's the worst, yuck, feelings), how I spent every day in a place of self-loathing and terror, no longer able to physically tolerate the consumption of a substance that I thought I needed to live. 

I am grateful for those feelings now, for that terrifying physical experience, because it was so bad that the memory of it and the knowledge of how quickly I'd crash back into it if I brought alcohol back into my life again as anything other than a respected adversary and a cautionary tale is the solitary thing that has kept a drink out of my hands for a day shy of a year. (I am not celebrating until it's actually the 14th. A year is a year.) 

It's the fundamental conundrum of the addict. That which kills you also seems to sustain you, has in fact done that in some way for so long that the thought of living without it (even while you're dying, while it's kicking your ass into oblivion, yes, even the wine on the top shelf and the better IPAs) is unthinkable. If I hadn't been numbed out somehow for all of those years how would I have survived these feelings, right? How? I'm really not sure. This is the part that seems the hardest, in my experience, for normal people to understand. I've read some unfortunate internet comment sections and heard some sketchy comments in real life about the deaths of Cory Monteith and Philip Seymour Hoffman that show me just how much people don't get it, either can't or won't, depending. Drugs aren't part of my story, but I relate to those guys anyway. They got lucky for periods of time, too. They found some grace along the way, and then it went away, and that was that. I want longer. I want my full allotment. I'm only almost a year old. 

So yesterday I went back to Annapolis and I went to the same teeny park on a corner that I sat in front of last year. I felt like a fool, but I did it anyway, and it turned out okay. I sat in a corner spot at the restaurant where I ate with a friend on Saturday last year, and I had a club soda (three, actually.) and a dozen oysters and some crab dip. And when I had satisfied whatever I needed to by being in that place on this particular day, I left. I walked by a wine store and I looked up and I realized that it was actually the last place I'd ever bought wine, ever, and I marveled that even as a woman came out of the shop saying "Guys! It's a free tasting!" that I felt only the oddest ancient twinge, that my feet had zero urge to follow her, because they know, as connected as they are to my brain and my heart at this point in the service of taking me to the places where I need to be to get me where I need to go, that there is nothing but destruction in there for me behind some beautifully-designed labels.  

I went instead to see some friends who help to keep me on the path I'm on and then I went home and went to sleep. It was a really good day. 

 (I wrote this post on July 13, 2013 and just found it in my drafts. I guess it wasn't time to hit publish yet.) 

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Invincible summer, and what I'm doing here.

 Last summer was heavy. I wrote in the midde of winter, rather clumsily, about how I had gone and gotten sober last July, and how it had managed to last until the end of the year. 

It still lasts today, for today. That's how I mark the time now, not because I'm told to, but because that is how it works for me now. Some things just move in and become the right things, the way things go. 

Everything is different, even the things that are the same. I always liked an Albert Camus quote from a book called Return to Tipasa that I've never read, "In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer." I see it mostly on Pinterest now (quotes, that's where I see quotes) in references to love of the season or a need for tenacity in struggle, and I guess it fits both ways for me. I'm a summertime girl. Loathe cold. Bitch all through the winter months that they are here--driving in snow is horrible, being cold is horrible, winter is horrible, on and on and on until March--and love everything about spring from the day it drops in. 

It popped into my head when I sat down to write about some goals I've got this summer, an opportunity that came along at a perfect point where I actually feel ready to make some goals again, with some, any, optimism that I'm in a place to follow through. And although it's too grandiose for me to own, because I am very vincible, I am so vincible--I just like the idea. I like the idea of it always being summer. There is just always so much more possibility there. I'm in a better mood about it. 

Early sobriety is no joke. I don't even really feel like writing about it, but it's everywhere around everything so it's stupid not to. I honestly don't think I could explain it accurately if I tried, but I frame it for myself as Oz after the brown of Kansas. A stumble and a fall and a weird, chaotic trip. All the colors after there weren't any. Some freaky people. Witches in my own brain, mostly. Friends I wouldn't have chosen but that is why I shouldn't be in charge of anything. And those colors, they never turn off, after years of everything be sort of dulled. The lights and sound, can't shut anything up.

After it happened last summer, I spent the rest of the season blinking into space as my brain woke up and reformed into some kind of new shape (I know that how it is isn't permanent even now, it just keeps going, changing around, putty or something.) I took a lot of pictures of flowers, which seemed to be the thing that made sense that I liked that I could tag with parts of my before and after. It was just important at the time to feel some kind of continuity at all, because it wasn't anywhere I looked.

This winter, I worked, mostly, inside and out. I sat with myself a lot as I was more able to do that, sometimes with people I could trust to get the fragments that started to fall back into place and into a more recognizable, hopefully better whole person here. 

Spring. I started to think beyond the initial 20 minutes or the next hour I could swing without freaking out, and I found a focus that I barely recognized, because it hadn't been there for a long time, maybe not ever. It's been interesting, more than anything--a daily first date with myself, as someone who has been through the same thing described it. A daily first date in a fun house, really, wacko mirrors and shifting metal floors and weird dreams and clowns. God I hate clowns.

The biggest difference is my filter. I can't handle bullshit anymore, basically, especially the kind I create. I can't do it. I have to walk away, or stop listening, or change something, almost immediately. It is the most important thing I do every day, and sometimes the most difficult. But that's what happens now. 

(Oh, because google is my friend I learned that kd lang also had an album called Invincible Summer, and "Summerfling" is so...not kd to me, but kd all the same. Super pop don't-steal-my-summer kd. Holy moley.)

Drunk or sober, my heart is mostly a dive bar, even now when I don't go to those places in real life. It's a relaxed space. There is a decent jukebox and a lot of good people who mean well. It means well. And it's got some grace in the shabby places. 

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