I felt out of sorts. Like a visitor in my own body. Slightly different, less than. Too skinny and awkward. A square peg trying to fit in a round hole. On the outside looking in. I think more people feel this way than don’t, but it took me a long time to realize that… I […]
Getting and staying sober has taught me that I have a perfectly good brain. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe I am extra smart but I’ve come to realize my brain is fine. So why would I want to poison it regularly? In our world today, drinking is portrayed as such a normal part […]
I hate meditating. There, I said it. Meditating is a stupid waste of time. It does nothing for me and my time would be better spent doing anything else. Whew, I feel better now. I am a doer. A doer and a fixer. I identify with all the motivational sayings: Get up and go. The […]
I was trying to get home from a funeral or something. I had a flight change in Minneapolis/St. Paul with a brief layover. Doing what I always did, I ended up in the airport bar. I didn’t end up there because it was fun or because I was feeling gregarious; it’s just what I did […]
All alcoholics quit, eventually. Sounds hopeful, right? Maybe not so much when you realize we only quit one of two ways. Vertically or horizontally. The hard facts for me are, I will either die a sober alcoholic or a drunk one. This will never disappear and if I start believing that it will, I’m in […]
I hope I don’t get caught. I hope I don’t get pulled over. I hope she doesn’t leave me. I hope I don’t get fired. I hope I don’t have cirrhosis. That was pretty much it for ‘hope’ before sobriety. My life was small, my outlook bleak, and fear ruled. I was beholden to alcohol. […]
My Mom died a couple days ago. It was ok, it is ok. She was ready and it had not been good for a while. She regularly said, referring to herself of course, “Some people just live too long.” She had outlived her husband, much of her family and nearly all of her friends. She […]
There is no situation I’ll find myself in that a drink won’t make worse. Conversely, there is no situation I can find myself in that recovery won’t improve! For me being sober makes everything better, now that I know what works. Now that my recovery program has shown me how to live. Where I was […]
I hate confrontation, in basically any form. I hate it. Confrontation always meant I was in trouble when I was a kid. Trouble for not paying attention. Trouble for doing the wrong thing. I recently found out my mom kept a lot of my report cards from elementary school and junior high school. Nearly all […]
About five years ago, I had dinner with a friend I hadn’t seen in a while. We talked about what had been happening in our lives since the last time we had been together. He told me about all the amazing things he had been doing, and I told him how I went to rehab […]