Awakening to possibility + potential
Reclaim pleasure and joy and celebrate the work—and the gifts—of recovery in Italy with SELF MADE this October.
Hey friends! Lots of stuff below! And I want to feature a workshop that’s happening next week on summer solstice. All are welcome and I’d love to see you!
VIRTUAL EVENT: Solstice Celebration + Virtual Bonfire - June 21st, 5:30-7p PST
☀️ “It’s a good time to remember that we, like the sun, contain the power to nurture and sustain, and that we have a responsibility to burn as brightly as we can.” ☀️
This 90-minute workshop will begin with a virtual bonfire and burning ritual. After taking stock of the year up to now and clearing out anything you want to leave behind, you’ll be lead through an intention-setting process to set a course for yourself for the second half of 2023. Finally, the workshop will culminate with celebrations and wins, and delights. For more information and to register, click here.
💥 Events 💥
VIRTUAL EVENT: July Writing Workshop is live! Join us Sunday, 7/30, from 10am-12pm PST. Workshops feature two writing prompts, and a (zero-obligation) option to read aloud and receive non-critical feedback. This workshop is appropriate for all levels. For more information and to register, click here.
HALF FULL ~ INTERNATIONAL EVENT: SELF MADE presents With Pleasure! —a seven-day alcohol-free retreat in Tuscany happening this October 7-14. I’ve partnered with Carol Sicbaldi, founder of Carol’s Moveable Feast, with the intention that you reclaim joy and pleasure, relish in your five senses, and soak in the richness of your surroundings. To learn more and make a deposit, click here.
❓Questions? Ask. I’m here and I’d love to hear from you.
In November 2018, daydreaming of ways to celebrate my upcoming 35th birthday, I Googled flights to Spain and found a round trip ticket in-and-out of Barcelona for $354. At the time, I was a year out of my MFA, selling and cleaning jewelry at a shop in the Mission, recently single after ending an eight-year relationship, and eighteen months into figuring out how to be a person in the world who no longer drank alcohol. Though my rent wasn’t cheap, I was living with friends, so it was cheap-”ish,”—by San Francisco standards—and I share the above details to show that I could have made the case plenty of times over for why the timing wasn’t right to spend a month in Spain. But suddenly there I was, heart pounding, armpits sweating, credit card clutched in a clammy palm, having a near out-of-body experience as I typed in my information, incredulous that I was actually going somewhere, my first trip longer than a week since I’d come home from Thailand in 2009.
I had lived in Granada for a year in my early twenties, from 2005-2006, and hadn’t been back to Spain since. In between my arrival and departure into Barcelona, the plan was to sandwich a return trip to Granada, and then head up north to Basque country, a region I’d barely I’d barely visited during the year I’d lived there. I made plans to meet up with a friend in Barcelona, and other friends invited me to stay with them at their home in Pamplona, but otherwise, I’d be roaming solo, writing, walking, and of course, celebrating another turn around the sun.
Something to know about me is that since I’ve quit drinking, I’ve become a bit of a coffee snob. I grind my own beans, I have an elaborate pour-over ritual, I buy the $20 bag of decaf because I am not a tea drinker but I am an insomniac and sometimes I want a cup of bitter richness at 6pm. I elicit not-so-subtle side-eye from my family members as I go through my coffee-making-motions, so much effort for a single cup as their hulking 12-cup coffee makers glare at me in offense. I bring an emotional support coffee with me on any drive longer than 20 minutes. I am able to get up at 5am every morning not for strength of will, but for the strength of the single-origin whatever the fuck I happened to have picked up that week.
All of this to say: upon arrival in Spain, I was shocked to discover that coffee in Spain is, well, terrible. And I’m not the only one who thinks so! It’s for a real a thing:
I'm currently based in Spain, and the coffee here is not good. It's popular. It's drunk everywhere all the time. But it's not very good. Nowhere near as good as Italy (ahem, cough)*, which is not too far away at all…Everything needs sugar. A café con leche, the milkiest coffee you can order, is still too bitter to drink on its own.
That's a problem, and it's a problem partly because of "torrefacto", a Spanish method of roasting coffee beans that, coincidentally, involves the addition of sugar – a lot of sugar – to the beans in the final stage of roasting. This sugar coats the beans, and is supposed to help preserve them, but it also burns and adds a distinctive and unpleasantly bitter taste.
Torrefacto is widely and bafflingly used in Spain, as it is in France and Portugal, which goes some way to explaining the really average cups you get in those countries. Again, guys: Italy (hi)* has mastered this skill. Just copy them. No more torrefacto.
*Dear reader, forgive me: Those parentheticals were most definitely added by me.
I’m embarrassed to share how much this terrible coffee situation stressed me out (and yeah, maybe I’ve traded one dependency for another, but at this moment in my life I am unwilling to remove a daily ritual that gives me joy with every single sip). So, I went on a quest: Barcelona is a cosmopolitan city, and I made a map of all the coffeeshops that touted themselves for their more modern approach to coffee (though I know we Americans get tremendous flack for all the awful customs and products we export to other countries, and rightfully so—when it comes to this, I think we’ve done Spain a solid). The plan was to organize my wanderings to include visiting a different spot each day.
Turns out, sniffing out the bougie coffeeshops was the key to unlocking what ended up being my favorite part of the trip.
Coffeeshops were a delightful place to hang out for many reasons apart from the obvious. Por primero, seeking them out got me walking to various neighborhoods and districts that wouldn’t have otherwise been on my radar. They were great for people watching. I visited a few spots multiple times and got to know a few baristas, who were always quick to offer recommendations of where to go, what to see, what to eat. They were places I could hang out and write and snack and sip for as long as I wanted, and best of all, they smelled like my favorite substance on the planet, a far and delicious cry from the familiar funk of all those you-know-where type spots I previously frequented.
Here’s the thing: I was nervous to go back to Spain as a nondrinker. In the months leading up to my departure, scenes of my younger self’s belligerence came back to haunt me. Granada is a college town: tubos of beer were €1.50 and came with a free tapa, young people regularly gathered in parking lots of big box stores on the outskirts of the city for botellón, and nothing really got going until midnight—and it was always after midnight when things would go sideways. My time in Spain was one of the best years I ever spent, and it was also the year that my drinking solidified in its strangeness. I came home to San Francisco with a relationship to alcohol that had shifted, and that I could no longer attribute to being just another college kid partying on campus in dorms.
As I readied myself for the trip, I wasn’t overtly worried I would drink. Despite the lowlight reel of various past transgressions running behind my eyelids, I reminded myself that I was gaining traction with not drinking. I felt strong, but I wasn’t quite at the place where I was trusting that strength. As my departure drew near, I was haunted by all the messaging I’d internalized about navigating recovery:
Surely I’m going to be triggered.
This is definitely the situation that’s going to have me question everything, jeopardize my hard-won progress.
It doesn’t matter that even the smell of booze makes me dry-heave; what if I get there and the temptation overpowers my resolve?
What if what “they” say is true, that this whole time I’ve been fooling myself, and that I can’t actually trust myself to make good decisions?
In addition to my concerns over the potential behavior that was just WAITING to be unleashed, I was also anxious about how I would be received. It was so ingrained in me that “you can’t go to Europe without drinking wine.” I worried that I’d be met with suspicion or pity, that I’d spend this one precious trip feeling self-conscious and awkward, or that this was the experience that would finally have me feel I was missing out.
Here’s how it went instead.
On my birthday, I took a train from Barcelona to Montserrat and hiked to the summit instead of taking the tram. It was a decently rigorous hike, 5km straight up to a monastery built into the rocks. The perfect weather for a hike, I didn’t pass one other person on the trail, and I spent a couple of hours wandering around at the top, taking in the view, people watching, and of course, reflecting on my life and mortality and asking myself if I was living the way I wanted to be living (ever since I got hit by a car in 2017 the day before my 33rd birthday, birthdays are existential and I always mark them by doing something special with myself).
Next up: A fixed-price dinner at a fancy-ish restaurant per the recommendation of a friend. The menu was amazing, and, across the top in bold letters, something that wasn’t reflected on the website: “Each meal includes a bottle of wine!”
The waitress took our order. “And what type of wine would you like?” she asked.
“No bebo alcohol,” I responded, catching her eye, mine glinting sheepishly.
Without missing a beat, she responded, “No problem! You get extra dessert.”
Me: 😎😎😎
Once again, I was reminded that no one is paying as close attention to me as I think they are.
Next up: A sweet Cuban diaspora moment. I got to meet Suyin—stay with me here—the daughter of my great aunt’s (by marriage) sister, who left Cuba for Spain instead of coming to the states. Suyin and her husband, another Danny, took me out to one of their favorite restaurants in Barcelona. We sat down, as you can see, amidst hella bottles of wine. They asked me what I wanted to drink and when I said “no bebo alcohol,” they responded, “We don’t either!” We proceeded to drink the World’s Best Bubbly Water, el tremendo Vichy Catalán, out of fancy glasses and it was deeply meaningful to make this connection so far from home.
These moments? They’re but a glimpse. There was so much more. So many surprises, so many ups and downs: there was loneliness, there was elation, there was boredom. Looking through photos from that trip, there are so many micro-stories I could tell, tiny threads that wove together to shape something so different from anything I’d experienced ever before.
Europe was Europe.
I was different.
One of the things that happens in early sobriety are all the firsts that aren’t really firsts, but returns—first time attending a wedding; first holiday season; first time on a plane, in an airport; first sober sex; first time losing a loved one; first time hosting a dinner party. These returns can spike our anxiety—what if I’m awkward? What if I have FOMO? What if people think I’m a weirdo? They can also be corrective experiences, because they are moments where “the rubber meets the road:” We get to witness the results of our painstaking hard work play out in real time.
The ghosts of our former selves shiver and whisper. A new future beckons.
There were two Dani’s on that trip to Spain. The first was the version of me who was present for the daily experience of walking, interacting with other humans, navigating transit, sightseeing, being back inside a language that had gone a bit rusty, and all the delight associated with the inherent novelty one experiences when traveling. The second was the “wise-mind” Dani—the part of me bearing witness to my experience on the ground, while at the same time observing myself inside my own becoming. This was the part of me with her jaw on the floor, watching as I moved through the trip experiencing myself anew, as a person doing something—and thriving in that something—that only slightly earlier I would have viewed as unfathomable, impossible, utterly out of reach for someone like me.
I’m sharing these anecdotes with you today to express how recovery is so much bigger to me than what we do, or don’t do. It’s bigger than routine, and boundaries, and thought-work, and ritual, bigger than the ways we abstain. It’s all those things, of course. But choosing to figure out how to be a person in the world who no longer drinks—and not only has walked away from drinking, but is joyful, self-expressed, supported, alive, and thriving—is the deeper why.
The narrative we’re sold about recovery is that it’s marked by deprivation. In my experience—and in the experiences I see with my clients every day—this is such a limited point of view. Seeing recovery through the lens of lack brings the ceiling all the way down. It cuts us off from the potential for all the forever opportunities to discover what we’re capable of and to experience ourselves as so much more expansive than we’ve ever known.
The flipside of deprivation is liberation. Inside this new narrative, we no longer see ourselves as missing out; instead, we begin to see that we are actually free from the thing we thought we could never live without. Inside this paradigm shift, the universe reorganizes itself. A new world opens up. We begin to ask ourselves: what else am I capable of? We become free to explore our own evolution and becoming, to experience ourselves more alive than ever: awakened to the senses; creative and self-expressed in the way only we can be; fortified and steady from the inside out; present and activated in our daily lives; and—now that we no longer need a substance to get us there—tapped into the endless potential for joy and pleasure that surrounds us no matter the circumstances.
This is worth celebrating, acknowledging, relishing. And it’s with a spirit of celebration and community that I extend an invitation for you to join me for With Pleasure, my upcoming retreat in Tuscany in October 2023.
I designed this retreat—in collaboration with my co-host, Carol Sicbaldi, who has been running retreats and tours in Tuscany for over twenty years—as a way to celebrate the work—and the gifts—of recovery, and with the intention to reconnect to pleasure and joy, and so we can be together and relax, explore, adventure, and <eep> have fun.
For so many of us, joy and pleasure can feel like the final frontier. In recovery, we’ve found (we’re finding) an increased stability, a steadier ground, a calmer center. We get to a place where we look around, and wonder, is this it? Seeking joy and pleasure can ruffle our feathers. We think we don’t deserve it, we think it’s selfish—what the hell right do I have to seek pleasure when the world is burning?—or maybe even the word activates parts of ourselves long buried, and we’re not sure if we’re ready to uncover or reconnect to those tender parts of ourselves so full of longing, desire, devotion, ambition.
I’m inviting you to be surprised, to experience your own moments of serendipity and discovery, to connect deeply to your five senses, and to do all of this with a rad group of other humans who you just may fall in love with.
I’m also inviting you to stay in a stone farmhouse with a pool, and a spa, located at the center of a 370-acre herbal-aroma plants farm where we can meander and dream; to meet and interact with local artists and artisans; to go mushroom foraging and pizza making; to bike and hike and relax and laugh and move and practice and slow all the way down.
Most importantly: I promise, the coffee will not disappoint.
To learn more and to put down a deposit, click the button 👇🏽
If you’re curious and you have questions, let’s hop on a call! I sincerely want this to be a full-body yes to anyone who joins, and if asking questions will help, I’m happy to chat. No pressure, no hard sell ;) We can check in and you get to discern if joining us feels good.
SELF MADE is a rebellious recovery community that empowers you to liberate yourself from societal programming and boldly step into a life of your design. Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, founder, writer, Integral coach, and recovery guide based in San Francisco, CA.
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