What I Learned At 111 Days Sober (111 days!)

I feel like this post in particular is like a total throw back to blogs when blogs were a brand new thing. Like you just hopped onto the internet and said shit as though it were in your journal only it’s online ‘for the world to see.’ Which is hilariously dramatic I mean the whole world is not looking at your blog, you see what I’m saying. In reality very few people are looking at your blog specifically and even those who are are reading your stuff and then taking the bits they prefer and walking right on out the door into the rest of their lives where they will read and watch and share and think about and talk about literally billions of other things.

But I digress. All this just to say that this post, like mostly all of my others, I write stream of consciousness and then hit publish because I’ve got a bunch of time constraints but also because I just need to say shit sometimes. A lot of times, it seems. And this is my favorite place to do that. And if I think too hard or censor myself too much I’ll never say a goddamn thing.

By 111 days sober I can tell you these three things, even though I fucking hate list posts, even though I also love them tbh. But remember way back when blogs were newly forming things that no one really understood and they were not meant to ‘help’ or give advice or any of that bullshit which grates on my nerves even as I take it in with one eye open and the other firmly scrunched in what I believe to be finely tuned, well earned, perfectly executed skepticism? When you just wanted someone to listen. Anyone. Maybe even or especially a stranger. Or you just wanted you to listen. As if you were a stranger to yourself. And for some reason the only place you could really truly find yourself was in the words you typed onto the white glow of the empty screen. That milky white portal into the depths of your own soul. What on this earth could be more romantic than that?

But I digress again. I was wanting to share with you that at 111 days sober I censor myself a lot less, I am highly aware of and in sync with my very wide range of feelings, vibes, emotions, ideas, creations, desires, skills, interests, and – dare I say it – prowess. I’m getting all the way up tight and close with what I would call the shape of my inner landscape. I am learning the terrain and learning that you cannot ‘learn it’ so fuck that. You can only explore it. Feel around inside and be over taken by beautiful wretched storms. Be soothed by the oceans in your being which rage but only once in a while. Which, honestly for a good lot of the time, swell and curl and glisten in the impossible tranquility of being just what they are. Collections of the tiny droplets of the infinity of all the prismatic facets of who you are.

Was that three things, though? I’m not sure. It’s probably a lot more than that if you think about it. I mean if you connect what I know with what you know we could count things all day long and they would add up to a hell of a lot more than just three things, but you’ll never really capture all of them so what does it matter? Perhaps we are not ‘whats’ you know what I mean. Like how they say search for what you are, do you know what you are. ‘What do you want to be when you grow up’ and all that business of cutting off your creativity before it can even begin to bud like the spring trees I’m gazing out across now. What am I? I’m a forty-three year old former addict now one hundred and eleven days clean and sober. But really that’s not even the half of it.

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Photo: self-portrait April 2022