Two thousand days free
Desire is life’s own yearning for more of itself
Good morning!
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Along with the below in-person event in late April, stay tuned for two more announcements also coming next week: Invitations to register for another late-April virtual event, along with <drumroll> a European (!) retreat (!) happening early October 2023.
How’s everyone doing out there? Bizarro California mashup this morning—yet another storm coupled with a long, rumbling earthquake for good measure. A new normal! I’m doing my best to ride the wave.
Hope y’all are well, and holding your people close 🖤
💥 APRIL IN-PERSON EVENT - SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA 💥
LOCAL EVENT: Join us Sunday, April 23rd from 1-4pm PST in San Francisco’s Dolores Park for our second annual SELF MADE Spring Social. Bring your people, bring your creatures, bring your kids, and bring a snack or n/a beverage to share. This event is free - come hang! I’ll do my best to rustle up some games and eats and maybe even a mini-amp to pump pump the jams.
❓Questions? Ask. I’m here and I’d love to hear from you.
Earlier this month I turned 2,000 days alcohol-free.
I’ve been happily non-drinking for long enough that I feel ridiculous and self-absorbed calling attention to these ultimately random milestones as if they were still tinged by the same urgency and intensity of the early days, the first 30 days, 90 days, the whole first year, really, where every time I hit a specific day or month count I wanted to shout my excitement from every available rooftop. At first, I mostly kept it to myself. Quitting drinking, and the subsequent slow dawning that I might actually be done with this thing that had kept me low-grade miserable for almost two decades, was a long-locked door finally creaking open. If I sneezed, or turned my attention elsewhere for even a second, or if the breeze blew just so, that door would slam shut, and I’d lose the chance to enter that new room, I’d be stuck forever at the threshold, only ever dipping my toe in, catching glimpses here and there. So I was nothing if not vigilant. And not because I was afraid I might drink, but because this new room opening up had me see that my life might actually be holy, and I needed to be protective, and awake, and also because when you quit drinking you learn really fucking fast who deserves to hear your story, and who is just fishing for some facedown-in-the-gutter soap opera storyline.
People expect rock-bottoms because we’ve been sold the idea that no one would ever quit shy of a life-altering crisis. Because I didn’t have what was obviously a point-to-able problem, because I had never fucked a friend’s spouse or gotten a DUI or <insert any other problem drinking cliche here>, my sense that something wasn’t right meant that there was something wrong with me and not the poison I was regularly ingesting. I got stuck in that story, that room, for over half my life. When I finally quit, when that key turned over inside me and I was able to walk through that door, I felt like Andy Dufresne after he escaped from Shawshank. So you’ll forgive me my maximalism when it comes to celebrating all the soberversaries (and all the overwrought metaphors, as it were).
Sober social media would have us believe that sobriety is bright, clean, linear. That if we drink our lemon water and meditate and get into therapy and find community and strengthen our spines and learn to say no that we will finally be free of pain, which is of course a (admittedly healthier) flipside of the same longing that had us start using whatever we were using to begin with. Getting sober won’t make your life easy nor will it free you from pain; if anything, the pain ramps up, and life gets even messier. At first I tried to manage the mess. I wanted to be pure. Organized. Graceful. Calm, measured, less emotional. Inevitably, I’d fall short. So, I’d double down: Make lists, track calories, count minutes in meditation, push harder at the gym. One morning about eighteen months in I had one of those quiet moments in the shower where lightning strikes and I realized that the same inner voice that berated and shamed me for not being able to drink “normally” was still very much alive, was still very much on high alert, ever at the ready to remind me of what a horrible piece of shit I was anytime I mowed down a whole pizza to myself or procrastinated on my writing or scrolled through Instagram instead of meditating or overshared on a first date or made an honest mistake at work or any number of things that made me human and not, you know, an android.
This quest for perfection was just another escape. Just another way I would forego the here and now to future-trip on some idealized vision that aligned with what I’d been programmed to believe I was supposed to want for myself. This was another exquisite distraction and a great way to never figure out what I actually wanted for my life. As long as I busied myself with endlessly unattainable standards, as long as I applied the same obsessive fervor to managing the messiness of recovery as I did to managing the messiness of my drinking, as long as I tried to squeeze the vast mystery of a human life down into some small and malleable and manageable shape, well, it was not unlike waking up to the ways I’d been bamboozled into believing that booze was delivering me unto a life that was edgy and wild when really it just kept me from making my art and whittled me down to size until one day I looked around and my life had become a small, hard thing.
Quitting drinking and doing the work of recovery has nothing to do with becoming perfect. It is a daily practice of relinquishing control, of leaning into the mess of being human, which includes cozying up to our flaws and loving—instead of hating—ourselves for them. These flaws are often gateways to rooms with views so beautiful as to be as yet unimaginable. If I’ve learned anything in two thousand days, it’s that the more I can accept who I am, exactly as I am, the more freedom I experience, and, as a surprising side effect, the kinder my inner monologue becomes. Just like everyone else, I want to be loved, and acknowledged, and I want to look good in front of others, and I don’t want to be clumsy and fumbling, and I sure hate sticking my foot in my mouth. And, I spent so much of my life borderline anesthetized that when I quit drinking life felt urgent—it was unbearable to miss a moment more. My desire for myself, for my own yearning and dreaming and imagination, was finally greater than my desire to be accepted by others. And it was stepping past that threshold that my life—my real life, and not my life’s proxy—finally began.
Sobriety is not a prison sentence; it is prison’s opposite, it is a remover of doors, a breaking down of walls, it is exposure and vulnerability and it is creating a safe home within ourselves where we can trust our own desire. If desire is life’s own yearning for more of itself, then learning to trust our desire is to learn to trust life, not as a force that would break us down, but that urges us forward, to become, to show up, to do the work that we are here to do. That only we can do.
Growing up, one of my best friends had two Rhodesian Ridgeback dogs. Their names were Hank and Hannah, and though they were well-behaved, they were huge and we were little and my friend’s mom had a trick for getting the dogs to calm down and stay put. She bought some PVC pipe and connected four pieces to form a square, and when the dogs were inside the boundaries of pipe they knew not to step out. At the time I remember being astonished that these giant beasts would just sit there, wouldn’t even test sticking a paw or a nose out. I’m two thousand days in, and I keep thinking about those dogs. Sometimes it’s helpful to imagine myself inside my own PVC square that no one else can enter, my gentle yet uncrossable force-field of protection. But mostly, I’m curious about all the ways I’m continuing to live inside limitations of my own making. I’m noticing how so much of what change looks like now is unobservable to anyone but me: though I’ve developed good habits and know how to be a functioning adult in the world, the inner spelunking—the inner dismantling—continues, offering up a wild and unfamiliar terrain that I get to keep exploring, a boundlessness and freedom I can relax into and trust, even when things are really hard, even when trees are falling and earthquakes are rolling and the headlines are gruesome and we collectively continue to choose death over the preciousness, the miraculousness of life.
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” -Marcel Proust
The truth is not much out there has changed. I’m still traipsing around the same streets. I’m still kicking it with the same people, still plugging along inside the same humble (read: boring) routines. But there are fewer blinders clouding my line of sight. There is so much more information available than I could have imagined. Space, too: puzzle pieces rearranging themselves, creating openings where love, care, and compassion can emerge as guiding forces. Imagination, too.
You are not alone if you find yourself beholden to the binary of perfectionism. Awareness is the vital first step. And then you might try softening your gaze. Let things blur, fall apart. Stay in the discomfort of obscurity until new shapes reveal themselves. Maybe it’s a door, a window; a skylight, an escape hatch. You don’t even have to step through. You can wait until you’re ready. But maybe you crack it open a few inches. Let the breeze blow through. Let it wash over you, the soft call of a whole new life.
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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Thank you.
Oh boy you can really write. So inspiring and rewarding to read. I can feel my own story so clearly described in your journey. Congratulations Dani.
A timely welcome reminder that counting days can actually work. Thank you. 🙏