❤️🩹Next Sober From Bullshit Recovery Club is Monday, February 21st. Register here.
✍🏽Writing Workshops are now the third Sunday of the month! February workshop is live - register in advance here (Sunday, February 20, 10am - 12pm PST).
Questions? Ask. I’m here and I’d love to hear from you.
Growing up in the suburbs of Orange County, I spent my whole childhood longing for adulthood. I always wanted to be older. In my imaginative, emotional girl-brain fantasies, I led a life of sophistication, travel, and grand romance, writing my way through it all. I wanted a big life, like the ones I read about in the dozens upon dozens of novels I’d blaze through any given year. These lofty longings were accompanied by a vague assumption that along the way I’d check off certain boxes just like everyone around me had. You know the ones. Career. Marriage. Kids. Homeownership.
In 2017, I was well on my way toward that life. I’d been out of the burbs for years, living in a cosmopolitan city. I was in grad school for writing. I was seven years into a committed relationship with a great man, whose access to family money had us talking about homeownership. I knew he was talking to my cousin, a jeweler, about a ring. Everyone around us was getting pregnant, some already onto their second kids. The boxes seemed inevitable.
Instead, that was the year I quit drinking and set about quietly exploding every single realm of my life. Quiet, because it was slow, and nothing happened overnight. Explosive, because I look around now and nothing, not one thing, is what it was four-and-a-half years ago.
In five weeks I’ll turn thirty-eight. There’s something about this number—the official tipping from mid-to-late thirties—that has me thinking about time, and aging, and desire. I am thinking about focus, and where to place it. I am suspicious of vagueness, relentless in my commitment to eradicating all the vestiges of magic thinking that kept me detached from reality for most of my life. I can say that I have both feet on the ground. Give me spontaneity and flow, serendipity and coincidence, all those mystical lanterns on the path, yes please. But also, give me clear sight, a concrete direction, for I’m no longer willing to leave anything to chance, to assumption. I am here to create my life.
*
Two weekends ago, I was swept inside an old familiar malaise. The melancholy was bad enough, and then I made it worse by judging myself for falling back into a loop I thought I’d finally disrupted for good. That night, I had dinner with friends, which, as always, re-aligned everything, and I woke up the next morning bright eyed and energized, with the clear, visceral, felt-sense that I’d returned to myself.
I moved through my Sunday inside an inquiry: what the fuck, brain? Why do you take me so low, then right back to a friendlier baseline in less than twenty-four hours? Sure, pulling my head out of my own you-know-what and spending time with friends is a tried-and-true, go-to perspective shifter. And also, it would be so nice to not have to be drop-kicked by my thoughts so profoundly.
The day was clear blue skies, no wind. I taught a writing workshop. I took Tater to the beach, watched him prance about the lowest tide I’ve ever seen. I snoozed on the couch, I read, I ate enough, not too much. A deep contentment permeated everything.
Another question emerged: What if nothing was actually wrong? I began to wonder—am I…happy? Is everything good, and my brain is like, yeah bitch, that’s what you think, let me pokity poke poke poke at that thing, THE thing, that will knock out your knees, happy is boring, we need some drama up in here.
So, I’ve been sitting with this ever since, newly present to the ways I’ve been programmed to believe that something is wrong because my life looks different than my straight woman peers (and yes, I emphasize my hetero-ness here because my queer friends, all queer people, have been out here creating non-traditional, unconventional lives and families and ways of being for way longer than I’ve even had to consider any of this, and I’m so grateful to have their magic modeled to me). I am wondering what it might be like to simply allow myself to bask in this period of goodness. To relish in my own place, so much space and time to myself. To be present and available to the joy and richness of friendship. To deepen into my career (this, the one element that for the FIRST time I can say is truly alive for me). To read, and write, and walk, to spend my time exactly as I please, to ask permission of exactly no one (except for my Tater; luckily, he is hella chill).
I am lucky to have many close friends who are in this odd-shaped boat with me: unpartnered, child-free, renting cute-ass apartments decorated exactly as we please (one of my FAVORITE things is walking into a friend’s apartment for the first time, and it’s the purest extension of their personality and artistry, everything I love about them made explicit, tactile, physical), all of us around the same age, intentional about our work in the world, in conversation with our futures. When we extract ourselves from the worry of, “what if x, y, z doesn’t happen?” when we orient our vision toward the future instead of ruminating on the past, well, it’s like one of those “choose your own adventure” books I read as a kid. Anything could happen.
*
I took last Friday off and spent the whole weekend writing with two friends from grad school, grinding away at an essay I started all the way back in 2019. We snacked and wrote and pulled tarot and chatted and read aloud. We sat on Kerry’s Point Richmond back porch, gazing at the bay, a copse of redwoods partially blocking the exquisite view, our ages a range—26, 37, 51—and inside that range, so much wisdom, and even though the essay still feels sticky, and I have a long way to go, I was present to so much delight, and gratitude, and near disbelief that this was my life.
If you’re reading this, and you recognize yourself here, in this unique, full of possibility place that is not without its discomfort and at times—let’s be honest—sheer terror, hello, hi, welcome, you are my people. Let’s move forward together. Let’s remind each other of all that is available, let’s shake up each others’ snow globes, let’s rearrange everything. Print out the old stories, cut them up, let’s paste together a ransom, set fire to it all, release our futures from captivity like lovebirds making a run for it out a slightly too-open kitchen window.
From the archives ~ this time last year:
SELF MADE is a newsletter for fellow 🌺late bloomers🌺 with a focus on recovery, creativity and community. It's written by me, Dani, a writer, coach, and recovery advocate in San Francisco, CA.
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finally had a moment to read this one and it’s so spot on. i would like to say that i also think “it would be so nice to not have to be drop-kicked by my thoughts so profoundly”.
when i look at my life and the experiences i’ve had and also the ones i am having - i’m happy. like, even if it’s not in every moment (and i know that i won’t be), that’s okay - bc overall it’s downright damn good.
Everything you write resonates with me sweet Dani, this maybe even more than most ❤️ I had checked all the boxes (except kids, which was by choice) and then it all got blown up when I got sober and divorced. Four years later and my life looks nothing like most of my friends, and there’s no spouse/partner/boyfriend/girlfriend on the horizon. Some days I’m lonely and a bit sad about it, but many days lately I realize that I’m actually… really happy. I love deciding exactly how I want to spend my time, dreaming and thinking about the future without having to consult someone else. Here’s to moving forward and building our own lives together 💜🦋