I am the cake
Welcome to the identity shift
Friends! Come hang ::
👉🏽 Writing workshops are back! Join me on June 27th, from 12pm - 2pm PST. This month’s theme is “Beginner’s Mind.” A real sweet community is emerging out of these monthly workshops, and I’d love for you to join us. Register here (Sunday, 6/27, 12pm - 2pm PST).
👉🏽 Next Sober from Bullshit Recovery Club :: Storytelling Edition is TOMORROW. Register here.
This is a humble ceremony.
I moved into my Very Own Apartment ten days ago. Sunday night, eating homemade tacos at my kitchen table, I caught my reflection in the window. I had one of those short, sputtering, thirty-second cries, releasing something I didn’t know I was holding. I did this, I thought. I did the thing I never thought I could do.
That very moment—a quiet evening alone in my own kitchen with a plate of home made food and exactly the music I want on the outdated bluetooth speaker—is a moment I fantasized about for so long. I dreamed of having a whole fridge to myself. I dreamed of waking up as early as I liked and not having to worry that my elaborate coffee ritual might wake anyone up. I dreamed of having spontaneous “just stop by!” moments with friends. And I can’t tell you how often I imagined myself in the act of signing my Very Own Lease, the ink from my autograph an outward symbol of this next great chapter I’d be embarking on.
I want to tell you that I danced out of my old apartment and into this new one thrilled and excited and joyful the whole way through. The truth is, it was so much more difficult than I expected. Of course it was. Moving homes is one of life’s great stressors, and just because I knew it was the thing that was next for me didn’t make it a breeze. The physical move was challenging, but what exhausted me most was the holding of every last detail in my brain. And then there was the added bummer of having fantasized about something for so long, getting it, and having the lived experience of it feel so different from what I’d imagined.
It is thrilling, absolutely. It’s also testing every single coping strategy I’ve painstakingly developed over the past 3.5 years; it’s the frustrating sense that I’m falling short, that I’m somehow backsliding; it’s forcing me to move past my stubborn wallowing and do the exact opposite of what everything in me would have me do (i.e. reach out to a friend at that exact moment I want to crawl into bed and Instagram scroll my entire holiday weekend away).
I’ve taken on living on my own, and it’s so much more than paying rent and finding cute window treatments on a Memorial Day sale. It’s being solely responsible for my whole life. Yes, I’m doing the research, and crowdsourcing friends, and working with a coach and an energy healer. This *is* what I want. And, even as I’m overjoyed by the expanded freedom and agency, I’m grieving.
I’m in the messy soup of unknowing—the uncomfortable, liminal space between spaces, the void between past and future, the itchy, skin-shedding phase where the old identity is gone, but I haven’t quite slithered into the new one. Luckily I have some practice here.
*
Early sobriety is like being in the whitewater of the ocean. You’re tossed about, doing whatever you can to get your legs underneath you, to move through, and though occasionally you catch glimpses of the horizon or the shoreline, you’re at the mercy of the wave. There’s no prescribed amount of time in the whitewater: it takes as long as it takes. Giving over to it helps, though it will feel like dying.
At some point, you do move through. You move into the deeper blue. You know how to move your arms and legs in a way that propels you forward, keeps you from sinking. You know how to flip over onto your back and take in the sky, catch your breath when you need rest. You may not yet know your destination but you have learned how to swim. The deeper blue is not without its challenges but it is so much calmer, quieter.
You begin to have a say. You begin to shore up your periphery, to reestablish yourself as a person with likes and desires and preferences and full body hell yes’s and clear eyed, unapologetic hell no’s. You begin to look past the urgency of just getting through the present moment and toward a future of your own design.
Self Made is the deeper blue for me. I am not yet sure of the destination, or if there is a destination. I know that I will always write about recovery and what it means to be joyfully sober because it’s the choice that made the deeper blue a possibility for me. And, there’s more for me to explore, examine, experiment with, expand into, and I’m listening.
*
I was sharing my sadness about how the move was so much more of a bummer than I’d imagined with my wise friend Faith (everyone, stop what you’re doing and get yourselves a Faith) and she reminded me that the fantasy exists because if humans knew in advance how hard something would be, we’d never do anything.
Self Made is me throwing myself back into the whitewater. I don’t know how to do this, because this is something I’ve never done before. Of course it’s weird and hard. And I keep swimming because discomfort is part of it; it’s not an indication that anything is wrong. I keep swimming because even though it’s much more acceptable to be a woman on her own, I often get the sense that there is still this background assumption that I might be living this way now, but eventually I’ll partner up or settle down in some traditional way.
Enter the cake.
Self Made is me declaring that I’m the cake, that any frosting that comes along is a sweet addition to what is already whole. It’s me casting a wider net. It’s me speaking and living from the deeper blue. And I’d like to take you all along for the ride.
Sober from Bullshit Recovery Club continues apace, as do the monthly writing workshops. In the fall, I’ll be offering a program for a small group of people who are curious about their own deeper blue; their own ways of making of themselves a cake.
I’m grateful for you and I’m curious to hear what you think <3 sending all my love, and more, from my little apartment with the dirty windows but gorgeous view.
SELF MADE is a newsletter and community for creative types who are curious about evolving their lives by design. It's written by me, Dani, a writer, facilitator, and recovery advocate in San Francisco, CA.
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Beautiful post! I shared it with a fellow writer 🎂
Love your words, you ARE the cake!