Fucking with Sober People on the Internet (day 104)

Watching as the nearly-full April moon sinks lower and lower in the black morning sky, I am still snuggled underneath the blankets as wild springtime bird chatter rises and falls through my open window at 4:35am. It is still pitch dark out but already 71 degrees. My sheets are damp with sweat which smells a little salty and a little sweet. A little like fresh shampoo and a little like the soft nuzzle of warm sleep. The moonscape is like something from a movie or a painting. The perfect yellow-baked glowing disc swathed faintly in thin pewter fingers of cloud, which move slowly away away to reveal the shadowed craters of giant rock surface. It is a moment of pure intimacy between the moon and me and no one else in the entire world. Like peace, handed to me on a silver platter. I take it. I smile and it sinks all the way into me.

It has been a weird fucking week. A day or so ago, someone on Instagram published one of my quotes on her page and she took all the time, care, and effort to erase my name from it before she share it. Right out in the open. Like this was just a thing one does. Just like that. My words were stripped from me, or I from them, and regurgitated by a whole ass stranger. It is hard to describe how that feels. It isn’t the first time it has happened to me but this was the first time my quote and my caption were about my sobriety. Yes, indeed, she stole my caption, too. Without mentioning me at all anywhere. And I thought to myself, how pathetic. How absolutely tragic that this human wanted to say what I had said but instead of searching herself for her own wisdom she just took the lazy way and ripped me off. Plucked my genuine personal thoughts and passed them right along as her own. How brilliant. How classy. How plug-and-play a life she must lead. I asked her why on earth she would do such a thing. She responded by deleting her entire account. Even just typing that makes me laugh aloud.

What a strange fucking thing to waste one’s time with. Her for doing it and me for even bothering to call her out. It’s just the internet. It’s just petty bullshit. But I think what really got under my skin was that I didn’t get to that quote she stole without a lot of fucking hard soul work. And you’d like to think people would respect that about a newly sober human. But the truth is that everything you create can be fucked with and everything you hold sacred can be desecrated in the time it takes to figure out how to erase someone’s name off of their own intellectual property. lol. Like seriously how do you even do that. It’s almost clever if it weren’t so goddamn stupid.

But ridiculous as it may sound, there is a secretly breathtaking truth inside the sting of being violated like that. Slicing someone away from their own sobriety hurts like hell because sobriety is the ultimate intimacy with the self. There is no other feeling or relationship, no other promise or vow or commitment or bloodswear that can be compared to it. When you can say you are sober, you are saying no one and nothing else comes between you and your truest self. Sober is the closing of the gap between what you say you value and what you actually do. What you want and what you make sure against all brutal odds you maintain. Maybe that’s a good mini-thought to share on social media. Sometimes my little bits get shared a fuck lot of times and I guess that’s how I know they are worthy ones. Or if they get stolen. I guess that means a thought was damn fine, too.

I sip my second cup of coffee as the sky lightens from rich navy blue to velvet sapphire. I write my blog post, I design my ‘content’ and I think about the absurdity of all of it. I am grateful to the sprinkled twinkled stars in the heavens above that I get to even talk about any of this beautiful mess at all. It is everything to me. Because they can say what they want and steal what they covet and talk trash on the internet until they get their little tiny rocks off. All I know is that I haven’t had a hangover in one hundred and four days. And only a person who knows what I know and does what I do and has been through the hellfire I have can ever truly say that.