Will you be my emergency contact?

On being single at "a certain age."

Aug 17, 2021

🔮August writing workshop is THIS SUNDAY! Join us on August 22, from 10am - 12pm PST. This month’s theme is “PAST LIVES.” Register here.

💙 “The Deeper Blue: Finding FLOW in Long-Term Sobriety” I’m giving a talk at Sober Voices this fall! It’s a rad as hell event. Register here:

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

Man, sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself.
Miles Davis

On Saturday night I had a couple of my dearest most beloved friends over for dinner (let me be clear: takeout) and we drank N/A wine and Topo Chico with quince shrubs and a guava LaCroix (we only had one can so we did a “tasting”), and we hung out well past sober midnight (almost to 11pm, whoa), and we talked and laughed and caught up and our conversation spiraled around a gamut of topics and emotions in the way you might expect of three women like us.

I have so been loving inviting my people into my home. Up here on the third floor, looking out across the rooftops, I imagine these three rooms as a clubhouse for those of us who are unpartnered and childfree, and also, alcohol free (or a mix of any of these things)—those of us navigating a reality of having made certain decisions and/or operating under specific circumstances that place us in a different category than most of our (straight) peers. I imagine my apartment is the place where people know they can just show up, where they can stop by for a coffee or soda water or whatever I have in my fridge and know that however and whoever they are is welcome.

One of the raddest things about figuring out how to be a person in the world who doesn’t drink is that it’s trained me to embrace a sense of outsider-ness. Most people do not associate sobriety with liberation, and I love being a lantern bearer for the revolution (even though it’s often hella weird and awkward). I do not traffic in deprivation. Recovery is the way that I wake up every day with an orientation toward freedom, and this is the commitment that keeps me going on the days that I’m sick of the damn lemon water and I don’t want to sit and meditate and I’m annoyed by everyone (a regular occurrence, let it be known). Recovery is bigger than me, than my day-to-day nitty gritty. And I would never have been able to quit drinking if I hadn’t gone to work on my thoughts and gotten curious about the stereotypes I’d been socialized to believe about what it meant to exist as a non-drinker in this world.

I changed the name of this newsletter back in June from “slow motion sober” to Self Made because I wanted to expand my exploration. As with literally everything, I’m taking the lessons from recovery and applying them to this next phase of identity.

Being self made, like being in recovery, is an active practice. Integrating the light and dark, becoming more whole and more fully who I am, does not happen without effort. Left to my own shitty thoughts, I still swim in the sea of lack. I obsess and fixate about all that I am missing. I feel terrifically self-absorbed. I get hooked in the thought loop of there’s something wrong with me.

I want to move beyond stereotypes. I want to be uncategorizable; a wild, unapologetic beast. This requires more than simply interrogating my beliefs—a practice which, though absolutely vital, is insufficient on its own. What is also required is a behavioral shift, a going against what feels like instinct but is actually bummer programming. And this—this questioning of habituated ways of thinking, this practicing different behavior—is the sweet spot where the rubber meets the road.

This all sounds heady and abstract. Here is what I mean by different behavior:

Asking for help. This includes professional help, for sure. It’s the therapy, it’s the bloodwork, it’s the massage and reiki and all the things I can do to shore up my support team as much as my resources allow. And, it’s also: asking people to drive me to the airport. Reaching out when I’m blue at the exact moment everything in me is telling me to get in bed and stay there. Enlisting a trusted someone to give an extra set of house keys, to be my emergency contact, to be the person I call when I’m sick or hurt or in a bind.
Despite what the phrase might imply, being “self-made” takes a village. Asking for help is vulnerable because it takes risk. I do it because on the other side are friendships that are medicinal, with a depth akin to family.
Sharing here. If I want to shift the paradigm and find my people, I can’t do so in a vacuum. I need all the narratives and examples of what it looks like to live a full, vibrant life from a place of wholeness rather than lack, and it’s so much more fun to do so with other people in similar waters. Is this you? Holler, let’s be friends, the clubhouse awaits. Speaking of:
Joy, pleasure and fun. I actively commit to cultivating these things in my every day to balance out my tendency toward melancholy, and to counter the whole lot of time I spend with myself.
Admittedly I suck at this so I’m grateful for this post where I crowdsourced and you all did not disappoint.
Coping in ways that cause increasingly less harm. My aim is not to be perfect. There will always be squirrels in brain that unleash themselves and cause me to act in, well, squirrely ways. It’s a major win when I turn to something that causes less harm than before. Less harm, less harm, over time we cause less and less harm. This takes as long as it takes, which leads me to:
Self-forgiveness over self-flagellation. This is another way to say: how do I actively practice loving myself (I know what you’re thinking, and YES, that is part of it)? What are the thoughts I might practice to counter the aforementioned squirrels who would insist that I am fundamentally fucked up? Who might I surround myself with who will extend the hand of compassion to me while I learn to extend it to myself, who will remind me that all the mistakes I’ve made (will make) were the not the result of being a bad person, but a human who did her best with the tools she had at the time? What would it look like to own my mistakes and move through with grace and tenderness, no longer caught in the mire of rumination?
Actively building self-esteem: In the abstract, to me this is a practice of saying fuck you to magical thinking. In reality, what this looks like is making incredibly small, incredibly *realistic* goals that I can actually attain (instead of magically thinking things will occur just because I fantasize about them). This is the way that I gather evidence to prove to myself that I can trust myself; that I am a person who behaves in a way that isn’t confusing; that I can change.
Pursuing purpose: Another way I think about this: what legacy do I want to leave behind? What kind of ancestor do I want to be? What can I nurture that has nothing to do with what does or doesn’t come from my womb? It took me a very, very long time to create a life that feels meaningful. Indeed, I am just getting started. I kept showing up, and I now know that this is everything.
Continuing to show up is the greatest action of all, and if I know anything, I promise it will lead you to your purpose. I can’t say how long it will take. I wish transformation was as easy as following the instructions of a neat little bulleted list. What I can say, what I know, if I know anything at all, is that if you keep showing up, if you keep knocking at the door, eventually it will open. And there you’ll be, wild, unencumbered, purposeful, alive, and so, so gorgeously human.

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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