I have plenty of time

For my fellow late bloomers

❤️‍🩹Next Sober From Bullshit Recovery Club:: Storytelling Edition is Wednesday, July 7. I’m on deck for storytelling! Register here.

🔥July writing workshop is on the calendar. Join me on July 25th, from 12pm - 2pm PST. This month’s theme is “HEAT.” Register here.

Questions? Just ask. I’m here and I’d love to hear from you.

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Photo by li hao on Unsplash

godspeak: kingdom come

you, with your point-blank fury
what if I told you
this is all there ever was:
this earth, this garden, this woman
this one precious, perishable kingdom.

Lucille Clifton

I was nearing thirty when everyone but me suddenly seemed to have their lives together.

I’d lived in San Francisco for over a decade, and as I was flitting from gig-to-gig, chasing random certifications, pursuing (and then abandoning) interest after interest, the people around me were building things: careers. Relationships. Houses. Families. Portfolios. Albums, books, trades, techniques, talent. I felt embarrassed, hanging out with my friends. I didn’t know why I was here, and they were all over there. I thought everyone was like me: barely eking by, having fun in the moment, subsisting off burritos and bagels and beers. It hadn’t occurred to me that while I was treading water, the people around me had been learning how to swim.

Now, that was all I saw. This new awareness also revealed to me another pattern: the direct correlation between the coping strategy that had served me so well in my adulthood, and my apparent inability to take even one stroke in a forward direction.

Here’s the loop: in the daily morning pages journal grind, in the full blown anxiety attacks at 3am, I was freaking the fuck out. I knew I had to change; I was terrified to change. I knew I had to address the relationship with my partner that was fine enough but not great. I knew I had to figure out how to take care of myself, how to not always always be on the verge of brokeness. I was desperate to believe that life could feel different, that I wouldn’t always be low-grade miserable, moving through the world with an ever-present current of anxiety rippling right there, just under my skin.

The pattern: fall into the loop, and then by week’s end, when my inner knowing clamored most loudly, choose whatever beer on the board had the highest ABV%, suck a couple down, and forget.

This loop, this pattern, this time treading kept me stuck for so long. My imagination was so limited—though I lamented in page after page in my journal about my drinking, knowing that something wasn’t right—the thought of quitting remained a pipe dream. I didn’t know there was another option until it was the only option. It didn’t help that my drinking looked “normal” to everyone around me. If my drinking was “normal,” then it made sense that I was the one with the problem.

*

In response, I sped up. I signed my boyfriend and me up for couple’s therapy and bought books about sex and rekindling connection and took courses about women’s sexuality; I got a job at a university that promised tuition remission after a year of work; I joined a motherfucking CrossFit gym and started heaving my body around on the regular I lost my grandfather and started writing again I saw my doctor for insomnia and took medication for a time I started tracking my macros I constructed elaborate rituals in my head to manage myself at bars I got into grad school.

But it wasn’t until I quit drinking at 33 that I began to swim.

*

The thing with late bloomers like me is that even though my brain knows that ruminating about the past—connecting all the “if only’s,” all those retrospective dots that if they had *somehow* occurred might have delivered me to some other current now—is a waste of time, I can’t help it. I’m a human, damnit. I might be learning to swim, to breathe, to trust the way my body takes care of me, and, I can’t help but try to understand, figure out, create meaning.

If time is life, than it’s true that the more time I spend in my head wishing for a different past is more time I spend treading. And that is the scariest thing of all.

I have learned (I am learning) that I have a say in my life. I am not only at life’s mercy; I can create, and design my life; I can experience life rather than merely tolerate it. To have a say in my life means I have a say in time. And I don’t mean this so much in how I spend my time (though I’m increasingly living a life of my own design, I still have plenty of obligations, I still have to pay my damn bills, I still sit in traffic and wait in line at USPS like everyone else), but more in how I experience time. And I have a secret for you:

Did you know it’s possible to slow. time. down?

I’m going to tell you how to do it. OK? Are you ready? Are you sitting down? Did you just break out into a sweat? Me too. Eep! Ready? Here goes:

The next time you feel the familiar urgency telling you you’ve wasted time or you haven’t accomplished enough or you should be somewhere other than where you are, somewhere farther along like Brenda or Brittany or whatever the fuck your besties names are; the next time you’re just eating dinner and you get a wave of that old familiar freak-out upon realizing you forgot to do that thing your boss asked you to do, and suddenly your brain has hijacked you and you’re formulating apologetic emails instead of enjoying your homemade bison meatballs; the next time you fail to hit a milestone that our culture demands of us by a certain time while you sit over here, glad to be wearing matching socks and clean underwear; the next time your heart breaks when you remember how you hated yourself for so long because you’d adopted someone else’s shitty narrative about who you are and the quality of your heart and the yearning of your soul, and all the ways you punished yourself as if that was the way forward, when really, the way forward was love; the next time you spin out because real love is the thing you want most in the world, and yet you keep falling for people who can hardly deign to text you back; the next time any of these things happen, all you have to do is stop, take a big breath in, and say: I have plenty of time.

I have plenty of time.

I have plenty of time.

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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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