Your wildest dreams (yeah: you)
This is me, inviting you into a new story.
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
🗣I’m so excited to announce that I’m opening my books new coaching clients for January 2022. Click here for more information and to apply for a spot.. I like working with folks who are newer to sobriety, or those of you who are stable in your recovery, and looking to evolve into what’s next. Let’s connect if you’re ready ❣️ *3 spots left*
❄️ WINTER SOLSTICE writing workshop is THIS Sunday, December 19th. This is the last writing workshop of the year! Please sign up here (Sunday, 12/19, 10am - 12pm PST).
❤️🩹Next Sober From Bullshit Recovery Club (final one of the year!) is Monday, December 20. Register here.
Questions? Ask. I’m here and I’d love to hear from you.
I am so damn excited to remind y’all that I have *three* 1:1 coaching spots remaining for January. If you’re curious, if you’re feeling that little tug in your gut that has you wondering what it would be like to work together, I invite you to check out the application here.
Before I share all the ways I stand behind this work, I want to say something that might sound weird, considering I’m, ahem, trying to sell you on working with me.
Here it is:
You can quit drinking on your own.
You can absolutely quit drinking without outside intervention. People do it all the time, every day. It’s absolutely possible and 100% within your capacity. You don’t need therapy, you don’t need a recovery community, you don’t even need to tell anyone, and you certainly don’t need a coach.
Even though it’s absolutely possible to quit drinking, or to renegotiate your relationship to alcohol, on your own, what I want to say is that without at least a couple of those aforementioned things, it’s just a lot harder than it has to be.
It’s hard, don’t get me wrong. It would be weird if changing one’s life was easy. And. It’s making it through hard things—a courageous journey where you accumulate evidence that you are indeed a person who can have a say in their life—that so much becomes possible. As you gather this evidence, you develop self-esteem, confidence, self-worth and—dare I say it—self-compassion. You become more available to the world around you. You expand your capacity for joy, and pleasure. You begin to trust yourself, becoming a person who shows up, who keeps their word, who behaves in ways that are in alignment with what you determine are your highest values.
What a coach can do is help lighten the load. Life will still be life-y, even if you no longer drink. A coach walks alongside you, offering tools, suggestions, care, resources, listening, and accountability. A coach can be a mirror, reflecting back to you your goodness, worthiness, pointing out things you might not have noticed on our own. A coach is a peer, someone who gets it, a reminder that you are not alone. Never, ever alone.
You step on this path, and slowly, slowly, over time, as long as it takes, by way of small, sustainable adjustments, one day, you’ll look around, and your life will be utterly unrecognizable to who you were when you started.
Working together, you might even have some fun along the way.
*
I spent so much of my life struggling. I had become so accustomed to feeling low-grade shitty all the time, that sometimes it’s still surprising to me when I catch myself in moments of ease or contentment.
Within the first eighteen months of getting sober from alcohol, I had changed a lot of external factors in my life. My outer world was transforming, in so many necessary ways. But my inner experience was mostly the same: I still tended more often than not toward melancholy. I was still achingly hard on myself, still at the mercy of persistent trains-of-thought that insisted that sure, I may be sober, but I was still a piece of shit most of the time, that there was still something inherently wrong with me, and, one wrong move, and I was sure to be kicked out of “the club” for real, never to belong anywhere.
Inside, my soul was still dying (if you’re like me, which I’m guessing that most of you reading this are, at least to a degree, you too probably have a tendency toward metaphor and hyperbole—hello, I love you).
Then came the lightbulb moment I’ve written about so many times: there I was, washing my hair in the shower, when it hit me: what was the point of being sober if I still hated myself?
It is this part of you that I am speaking to today. The part of you that knows there is more to life than what you’ve experienced up to now. The part of you that wakes you up in the middle of the night, clamoring for your care and attention. The part of you that is reaching, that yearns for joy, and self-expression, and a sense of freedom, even inside the challenges of being a human alive at this time in history.
So many of us were trained to handle everything on our own. To never burden anyone with our struggle. To hide our reality.
I’m saying it doesn’t have to be this way. I’m saying you can lay this belief down. We can come into care for each other. We can flip the bird to this outdated, holdover programming from the patriarchy.
I talk about the early days of becoming a non-drinker a lot because even from where I sit, over four years free, it’s still scratch-my-head-damn-near-impossible-to-understand how this one choice had such a ripple effect into every other arena of my life. Working together won’t make your dreams come true overnight (if it did, I’d be retired by now). But I can say that it will help you move in the direction of what that precious, tender, reaching, most gorgeous soul-part of you desires most.
I don’t want to “sell” you on coaching, at least not in the traditional sense of me sitting here using certain tactics to convince or persuade you. Rather, this is an invitation to listen to yourself. If there is something in you that is curious, you can always email me with questions. Or go ahead and check out the application.
*
I now leave you with some coaching inspo from Thoreau, (and yeah, I took some liberties with pronouns):
“Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler.
I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of their dreams, and endeavors to live the life which they have imagined, they will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. They will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within them; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in their favor in a more liberal sense, and they will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as they simplify their life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”
Quitting drinking is indeed the end of a story. It’s also the beginning of a new one.
From the archives ~ this time last year:
⭐️Stuck in the Swirl…and You Snapped Me Out
⭐️The Holidays and Feeling Stabby
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.
SELF MADE is reader-funded. The small percentage of readers who pay make the entire publication possible.
You can also support me for free by pressing the little heart button on these posts, sharing this newsletter with others and letting me know how this newsletter helps you. Thank you.
If you have a question for the advice portion of this newsletter (whether you’re a paid subscriber or not!), reply to this email, or send your own to urbansagesf@gmail.com.