8 Years Alcohol-Free

"I want to find peace in my heart; I want to raise the white flag in my heart."

Good morning, happy Wednesday. I’m in your inbox a day later than my typical Tuesday post because today is a celebration 💃🏻

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This week’s inspiration:

Antilamentation

Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read
to the end just to find out who killed the cook.
Not the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,
in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication.
Not the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,
the one you beat to the punchline, the door, or the one
who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones
that crimped your toes, don't regret those.
Not the nights you called god names and cursed
your mother, sunk like a dog in the living room couch,
chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.
You were meant to inhale those smoky nights
over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings
across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed
coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.
You've walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You've traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs
window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied
of expectation. Relax. Don't bother remembering
any of it. Let's stop here, under the lit sign
on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.

Dorianne Laux

---

COVID time so this was probably 3 years-ish sober?

Late summer 2017: after a very very dark night, I quit drinking after ten years of knowing something wasn’t quite right with my relationship to alcohol but feeling utterly unable to stop. A daily journal keeper, I was about six months sober when I decided to revisit the notebooks that were piled up on a high shelf in my closet. I wanted to retrace my steps; I wanted to put together a map of my past, to understand and make sense of how I’d gotten from there to here. I was curious how I’d gotten so stuck for so long.

I’d been struggling in the dance of moderation with two left feet in shoes that didn’t fit for years (PSA: it’s a shitty, shitty dance), and I knew that by paging through ten years worth of journals, I’d be revisiting this struggle. What I didn’t expect was the degree to which alcohol featured in those pages. When you journal every day, much of it is mundane, boring, day-to-day life stuff. To see how much I agonized over my drinking, and how desperately I wanted to quit, and how many times I failed spelled out on page after page, year after year, was too much for those starry-eyed, full of wonder days of early sobriety. I re-shelved the journals and there they shall remain (until I burn them for some future birthday letting go ritual).

20 September 2017 (3 days alcohol-free)

Why would I drink like that, if not for extreme self loathing? People who love and respect themselves don’t drink like that. I want to be a sober person. I want to be comfortable in social situations without drinking. And sure I don’t binge drink the way I once did, and, obviously, it’s still possible. I feel I’m standing on shaky ground. I have so little trust in myself. My personality. Even my thoughts and opinions. When I’m around people I’m great but in my quiet moments alone I’m a big mess. And I feel such a greater anxiety about the world….

24 September 2017 (7 days alcohol-free)

My internal state feels so precarious and fragile right now, lately. I can no longer handle the bullshit. I need a significant break. I’ve been listening with renewed enthusiasm to Tara Brach’s podcast, and it's been an absolute lifeline for me these past two difficult weeks. Her three most recent dharma talks seem like they were written only for me. Knowing that they weren’t— that she talks about what she does because of their universal nature—reminds me that I’m not alone. And I’ve been feeling quite alone. Isolated. I don’t yet feel out of the woods, but I do see a path forward, a light in the distance. There’s a newfound tenderness for myself. Still not the default- far from it- but perhaps a glimmer of how it could be. How I might get to a place where I can be gentle with myself. Not hate, loathe, and be so constantly ashamed. Because what’s exhausting, and even more concerning, is how thoughts create reality, and that is NOT the reality I want. I want freedom, kindness, grace, creativity, simplicity, self-expression, honesty, forgiveness. I listened to one of her meditations last night before bed and I’m afraid. And I knew I was afraid, am afraid, but last night it hit me why, and I knew the why was true because the moment it hit me so did the tears: I am so afraid I will never find success. That my life will always be like this, feel like this: a constant push of a boulder up a hill. And I have plenty of evidence of failure, there are quite literally dozens of failed pursuits in my wake. And if the same happens here? I might die. So I’ve come to some threshold. If I don’t change, I will have the same results. And I want to change more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life, more than I want to be a successful writer: I want to find peace in my heart.

25 September 2017 (8 days alcohol-free)

As much as I feel a growing tenderness sprung up inside me ever since last week’s rock bottom hangover, right there alongside the tenderness is so much grief. Perhaps the two go hand in hand. Perhaps to feel truly tender is to feel the weightiness of what’s real. The more tender I feel toward myself, the more my heart erupts in sadness. Something is happening. I can taste it in my mouth, the acridness of anxiety at the back of my tongue, in my teeth; my skin shivers something rotten is invading my nose. And my eyes! My ears! Take me to a place where I can rest my eyes, relax my ears. Every day an assault. And for what? This is the question I’m asking. How might I live in a way that aligns with my values? What *are* my values? Am I willing to be honest? Am I willing to take a bold step into my life as an artist? ...this past week, for the first time in what feels like a millennia, I actually believe it might be possible that I change. That I *can* retrain my thought patterns. And I might even have a bit of hope. Cautious hope. I have no idea how to do it but I’m starting to trust that this process might have more to do with allowing than doing. I’m not even sure how to write about it...I want to love and care for myself as I would my dearest friend. Befriend myself. And start to make choices based on how I want to BE rather that what I want to DO. I don’t know. Spelled out that way, it still feels a bit simplistic. But there’s something there...there’s something there, and I’m curious. Curiosity is a much sweeter feeling than jadedness. Certainly better than despair, that island I’ve spent years wallowing on. I’m still there much of the time. But I’ve begun work on a boat. I’m getting off that island. And I’m going to create my inner and outer worlds in a way that aligns with the future I want so badly to believe is possible. And I’m not sure what that looks like. But I’m curious. And cautiously hopeful. And - oh! - Forgot to mention! I’m going to experiment with a prolonged sobriety. See what arises...wish me luck.

27 September 2017 (20 days alcohol-free)

I want to make choices about my life based on feeling, not thinking. Thinking is what’s gotten me into all the trouble. Thinking, and drinking. So now I’m entering a world of feeling and abstaining. And I pray the messages will come clearer.

11 October 2017 (25 days alcohol-free)

What happened to me, to the girl who would travel with only a tiny daypack between countries by herself to renew a Visa in Vientiane? Who could stay in falling apart shacks for $4/night in Bali? Who shoe-stringed all summer across Europe? That girl seems so distant. I pray she hasn’t disappeared for good. I want to conjure her back. And then I want to go beyond. Because even back in those wild days, I was still tamped down. I don't think I’ve been or felt fully expressed since very early childhood, preconscious memory. I’ve always been hyper-aware of my body, the space I inhabit. I’ve always been debilitatingly self conscious. It wasn’t until I discovered substances that I was able to fake otherwise. I wonder how my life would have been different if I’d learned to deal with anxiety at a younger age. But now I’m having to actually deal with it and it’s fucking terrifying. Undoing, relearning decades and decades worth of habitual thought patterns...Even if the greatest action I can take is to learn to sit comfortably in silence with myself. The self, myself, the scariest frontier. But I’m done looking externally for answers to my issues. I need to befriend myself, to raise the white flag in my heart…

14 October 2017 (27 days alcohol-free)

I want to learn who I am, really, because lately I am so full of confusion. How much of my personality is actually mine, and how much is me acting? Am I really so gregarious as I behave around people? What would happen if I didn’t automatically jump to make sure the other person was as comfortable as possible? What would happen if I focused on my own comfort and let the other person be responsible for theirs? Sounds relaxing, haha. So how do I do that? Can I do this?

I think that when people hear statements like “I was utterly unable to stop” they imagine that I was a person who hid my drinking or drank all day every day or whatever other images we associate with being a “functioning alcoholic.” It wasn’t like that for me. By the time I quit, I was barely drinking. What made me utterly unable to stop until I finally did was that I could not imagine a life for myself without alcohol. I couldn’t imagine socializing without it, unwinding without it, celebrating without it, grieving without it. I still associated drinking with being pleasurable and I couldn’t imagine giving up something that brought me pleasure, no matter that when I really got honest, the pleasure only actually lasted about an hour at best, until the warm punch of the initial buzz wore off and I either continued to chase it with more drinks or went home feeling low-key bummed out, either way waking up the next morning feeling ambivalent and anxious and tired or worse, which is ultimately what I struggled with and is what got me to finally quit—I knew there had to be more to life than just tolerating it.

In the story of my own transformation, like other tremendous changes that occur slowly, slowly, then all at once, quitting drinking wasn’t an option until it was the only option. I could not imagine a life without alcohol, because the stories I’d been told about what it would look like to be booze-free were so limited. Until I discovered a new vision for what was possible, the specter of sobriety loomed like a prison sentence. That story was incomplete, limited by a lack of imagination. After a lifetime spent beholden to a certain story about alcohol, suddenly, by stepping away, my imagination stepped forward.

I drank because it made me “edgy;” I drank to take my edges off. Both sides of the edge became stories I was no longer interested in participating in.

There is a freedom inside the act of transforming something that was once impossible into something possible. A confidence emerges, hones, and strengthens when that impossible thing integrates, and becomes second nature. Faith in ourselves develops as we begin to trust that nature. Then one day, something happens—we are triggered, or a challenge arises, or our backs are up against a wall—and we find ourselves responding in ways that keep us well rather than destroy us. We look around and our lives are unrecognizable. We have been made anew. But we have to be willing to question our stories. We have to be willing to examine and move beyond our own limitations, to actually walk the edge rather than throw ourselves off it or shy away from it completely.

I share the details of my individual story because it’s in my nature to constantly toggle my attention back and forth between the micro and the macro; the individual and the collective; how I might make sense of the grander scheme or current events by filtering them through my personal experience. Collectively, we are living through an opportunity to make the impossible possible. We are questioning our collective stories. We are bringing history long covered up out into the light. We are suspended inside the messiness of death and birth. This is a time of great trouble and unrest but also great imagination—every single one of us is living into what’s possible.

A big part of recovery is taking back agency over our stories, and giving ourselves permission to change the narrative we tell about ourselves—and the world. So many of the conversations I’m hearing in my social circles and among clients is a conversation around sustainability: how do we endure? Recovery is like activism in that we have to find ways to sustain ourselves inside a complicated practice for the rest of our lives. Once we are past the initial tumble in the whitewater of early sobriety, how do we then swim into deeper water? How do we stay?

Recovery and activism go hand in hand for me now, because both call me to do the work of making love visible out in the world. Of breaking down any barriers inside me that keep me from loving myself, and therefore, my neighbor. Of being peace, not just talking about it. Of having difficult conversations. Of reconciliation and forgiveness and accountability and reparations. Of holding a vision for a new world, even in the midst of so much trouble and pain and grief.

Last night I was out to dinner with my favorite person who is also booze-free and in discussing how I wanted to celebrate my soberversary (meditation group! Who even am I), I had a moment of visceral memory of the beginning. I felt the feelings of those first most earliest days, the feelings of those first most earliest years come over me. The glory of that dawn of awakening: I never had to drink again. The sense of wonder-eyed, curious innocence that arose as shame washed off me like cheap hair dye down a drain. The exuberance of so what else is possible as a near permanent effervescence in my chest. The relief at finding a group of people like me, of finding belonging for the first time in my life, of the spontaneous healings that occurred as the result, and continue to, blessedly, these years later.

I am a different person than I was mid-September 2017. This is true in the literal sense, in that a human body’s cells are constantly regenerating. But my soul feels different, too. The wonder has tempered. The magical thinking that lingered some years longer has been replaced with two feet more planted in reality and a more, well, sober view of reality. The excitement is more distant: a day is coming where these yearly updates will be retired. And after making sobriety not only my whole personality, but my whole career for a while, and spending the first handful of years of sobriety being very OUT AND PROUD, unashamed, unabashed, very public with my musings and activism and voice, I am more tempered now. Private. Less obsessed with visibility. More interested in depth and development, which are slower, softer, quieter processes that aren’t served by the urgency of the algorithm.

As we used to say: quitting drinking is what thrust me into creating a life I didn’t want to escape from. It was the prerequisite for everything. And, let me be clear: while certain things are easier—most importantly, the inner dialogue is kinder, and quicker to offer comfort over judgement—life is still what life is. The biggest difference is that I’m available for all of it. I can show up. Every year that passes my capacity to be with what is expands.

The lessons of sobriety have waned; what persists, no matter how much time passes, is gratitude. I feel it now, sitting here in the dark, lit candle calling all muses blinking gently on my altar, little dog softly snoring on the couch, sound of the garbage collectors doing their pre-dawn service just outside—that familiar buzz in my heart, a dampening at the corner of my eyes.

This year’s antilamentation is a declaration of freedom: of regretting nothing, of knowing that everything, everything in my life had to happen exactly the way it happened for to become who I am, who I needed to be; every single experience served up precisely and exquisitely for me, my own cosmic curriculum.

I started this newsletter five months shy of my 3 year soberversary. Here are prior essays:

One Thousand Days Free
Foot off the pedal, burners on low
Four years free
Five years free
Six years free
Seven years free

Self Made updates:

• This fall I have space for five four new coaching engagements. Coaching is a finite engagement working toward developmental outcomes, but it's also a space to explore what it means to be human, and how to become more human at every moment. These are six-month commitments where we meet twice monthly with a co-created, collaborative integral coaching plan for you to follow, live into, and embody. I don’t do hard sells; we start with a conversation, and if it feels mutually good we go from there.

• I have turned paid subscriptions back on! In addition to essays and first access to events, workshops, retreats, and all the other things I conjure up, I’m excited to share a new monthly offering for paid subscribers: one Friday/month, I’m hosting a Coaching Circle, where you can come with something you’re working with and engage in some spotlight coaching. First circle is THIS Friday, 9/19.
  
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SELF MADE is a call to deeply connect with the self—self-knowledge, self-trust, self-development—and then to make, small step by step, a life that you savor. Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, writer, Certified Integral Coach, and Holistic Recovery Guide, based in San Francisco, CA.

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