❤️🩹Next Sober From Bullshit Recovery Club: Storytelling Edition is Wednesday, September 3 (TOMORROW). Register here.
🔮September writing workshop is live! Join us on September 26, from 10am - 12pm PST. September’s theme is “DOG DAYS.” Register here.
💙 “The Deeper Blue: Finding FLOW in Long-Term Sobriety” I’m giving a talk at Sober Voices this fall! Register here.
Questions? Just ask. I’m here and I’d love to hear from you.
It’s Self Made’s 69th post 😎 🙌🏾
Ok now onto the goods. And thanks for humoring my dorkdom.
Six months after I quit drinking, I revisited eight years worth of daily journal entries. A longtime morning pages practitioner, I had stacks of notebooks tucked away in my closet, and I was curious to see what it would be like to go back and track the various ebbs and flows of my drinking. I wanted to see if I could trace a throughline, observe a pattern, make some sense of how I’d gotten from there to here.
I wasn’t prepared for just how much space my issues with alcohol had taken up in those pages, and how it would effect me to see my struggle spelled out page after page, year over year. There it was in great detail, all the angst and shame I’d been swimming in for as long as I could remember.
If there was a pattern, it was the ongoing, constant confusion of holding two opposing thoughts at once. On one hand, I knew something was deeply wrong. On the other, I did not believe it would ever be possible for me to stop. This confusion kept me stuck in a destructive loop for nearly two decades, until one autumn after a particularly harrowing hangover, I finally stepped off the rollercoaster.
I believed everything I’d been socialized to believe about quitting drinking, namely, that to abstain would mean a lifetime of deprivation. So it was an absolute shock to realize—a few weeks into what I thought would be yet another “break”—that this time, my experience of not drinking wasn’t deprivation, but total relief.
Lightbulb.
Up to that point, I had entertained vague fantasies of being a sober person, but I did not believe that reality could actually be possible for me. You see, I believed the stories I’d been told: that there was something deeply wrong with me. That I was irredeemable. But that unexpected flutter of relief got me curious. I began to question the narrative I’d been offered.
What other stories might not be true?
I got quiet, and listened. I spent a whole lot of time by myself. Time passed, and I felt something rearranging itself inside me, and that something was an orientation toward freedom, which is to say, the exact thing I thought I was finding at the bottom of a frosted glass. This orientation is not without its challenges, of course. Figuring out how to be a person who doesn’t drink in this world is the hardest work of my life. It’s also the most beautiful. For I am no longer beholden to that which only ever kept me small, my imagination stifled, my vision clouded by someone else’s story. I am free to create, and to be the author of my own life, even though it’s still messy as hell much of the time.
Recovery is a practice of liberation. This is the empowering belief that keeps me going on the days that I’m sick of the damn lemon water and I don’t want to sit and meditate and I’m annoyed by everyone. Recovery is bigger than me, than the day-to-day nitty gritty. It is possibility and potential, purpose and power.
Today, I invite you into this practice. What would it be like to get curious about your beliefs? What stories you might free yourself from?
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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