announcement and celebration!

slow motion sober is officially a toddler

👉🏽Next Sober from Bullshit 💘 Recovery Club is Wednesday, April 7, at 7pm PST (IN TWO DAYS). Wednesday night club meetings highlight a community member’s story, a most moving experience - register here if you haven’t already.

👉🏽April writing workshop is live, and the theme—inspired by last week’s essay—is “Desert Rambles.” Register here (Sunday, 4/25, 10am - 12pm PST).

post vaccine stroll through Chinatown

This week, I got vaccinated and slow motion sober turned one year old. The timing is not lost on me.

Fifty-two weeks ago, San Francisco was two and a half weeks into our first shelter-in-place order. I had just celebrated my 36th birthday with a dinner party at my house, which would end up being the last social event I or any of those friends attended. The few adults in the room assured us we could “flatten the curve,” in two weeks if we stayed home and hunkered down. I, and so many of us, expected we’d be back to “normal” by summer.

HA HA. HAHAHAHA.

In my very first post, I am, as ever, earnest and hyperbolic, and there’s an urgency to my words that reflects the nature of what I was experiencing. A lot of it is soaked in cheese, but some of it maybe isn’t too bad. Like this:

I know what it’s like to get to the other side of a mess. I know how to let the mess undo me completely, and then re-wire me from the ground up. I know what it’s like to sit, for many many months, mostly alone, figuring out who I am and what I’m really made of and what I really want for myself and the world when everything I had been standing on had suddenly washed away…

We are going to get through this. There will be another side. But before we can get through, we have to be in it. We have to stay, and sit in the shit. For a while. For longer than we’re comfortable. For as long as it takes.

And the sooner we acknowledge that we can’t control the mess, the sooner we can begin to build a home inside ourselves. A home that is grand enough to hold the fullness of who we are. A home where all parts of ourselves are welcome, even the parts that are secretly annoyed as hell at our kids or in full rage toward the rampant injustice of an actively vindictive government or that selfishly wishes our hair stylist would make a social distancing exception because we’re somehow special and worth the risk.

I keep wondering what it will be like to look back on this. What story will we want to tell, about who and how we were, about how we persevered, how we adapted? I know none of us want to return to where we were, and how things were, before. But if we want to transform, we can’t manage or control or figure out like we always have. Otherwise, we’ll miss the metamorphosis.

Sigh. You see? Earnest.

Over the past year, I dropped essay in your inbox every single week. In July, I added a Friday Open Thread where I shared poetry, curated link lists, playlists and, um, did my best to get you to chat me up in the comments. I started the Sober from Bullshit Recovery Club (next meeting is tomorrow night) after our original group was canceled by the organizers—and, I added an additional monthly meeting. I started teaching monthly writing workshops that holy moly are selling out. I featured different guest posters where we got to learn some of your stories. I took three months off all social media so I could figure out how to operate online without losing my center.

Yes, I got some stuff done in Pandemia. But what I am most proud of is how I kept showing up.

A year ago, I knew I wanted another writing project. I was a year out of grad school, and wanted to challenge myself to be consistent with my output. I thought I’d write about sobriety, and the creative process, and San Francisco.

I had no idea.

(If you want to busy yourself with a project, start a newsletter at the onset of a global pandemic and watch it be (mis)managed by an almost dictator!)

Do you know how many blogs I’ve started and stopped over the past decade+? Let’s just say: several. The fact that the cool graphic associated with today’s post reads, “52” is astounding to me. Because it means that I am a person who shows up and is consistent, which is something that I would have never thought would be possible for someone like me. I was a mess, you see. I couldn’t be counted on for much of anything. I had excuses lined up around the block. General existence felt Sisyphean more often than not.

I don’t live there anymore, and this here newsletter is a testament to that.

Do you know what else is? All of you. Thank you for reading my words. It is one of my greatest gifts.

I wanted to have some bigger announcement planned, and a bunch of promises about the direction this newsletter is heading, but y’all, I’ve been busy and I need more time. Like, do I change the name? Even though I will always write about sobriety and recovery, the more time I spend in the deeper waters of this practice, the less demanding it becomes. Like, it’s just another fact about me, like my green eyes and brown hair. Also, I want to write about whatever I want, which includes the things I mentioned at the top of this post, in addition to what life looks like as we slowly but surely move along from Pandemia, not to mention love, longing, singledom, generalized angst, art, pleasure, and basic wildness.

Basically, I promise to keep showing up. I hope you will, too.

In honor of this anniversary, I’ll be offering 20% off the yearly subscription price all week. So if you want to support my efforts here and swim into this new season of wildness with me, today is your day to subscribe!

Either way, thank you for being here and supporting this work! I am humbled beyond measure.

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Slow Motion Sober is a newsletter and community for creative types who are sober or curious about sobriety, and all the life-y intersections along the way. It's written by me, Dani, a writer and sobriety advocate in San Francisco, CA. 

SMS is reader-funded. The small percentage of readers who pay make the entire publication possible. 

You can also support me for free by pressing the little heart button on these posts, sharing this newsletter with others and letting me know how this newsletter helps you. Thank you.