My 44th birthday is in a few days. I was meditating the other day--I hate to meditate, but I still do it, just like I hate to empty the dishwasher but I do that too--and suddenly thought, "I don't know how to have a sober birthday." It's not that my birthdays were exactly maniacal blowouts, or not…
Day 295: Fixing things you had no idea were broken
I said the above to a friend at lunch today. He's not someone I know super well, but our paths have crossed here and there over the years and I've always found him to be an unusually (for the alpha-male tech company I work for) thoughtful and kind person. His wife died quite suddenly in…
Continue reading ➞ Day 295: Fixing things you had no idea were broken
Day 240: I’m Still Here
Whew! It's been a while since I posted and I'd like to get back to doing so more frequently. Being sober is more and more just my default setting and I don't always feel like I have something new and revelatory to say about it--or when I do, I don't always have the quiet time…
Day 197: “At Least I’m Sober.”
"At least I'm sober." I find myself thinking that so often lately--and in a natural way, not a forced-gratitude one. For instance, I've got the flu right now (don't be like me and forget, people--go get your flu shots!) and feel pretty wiped out. But in the midst of a self-pity moment today I thought…
Day 189: I Won’t Drink Sparkling Cider and You Can’t Make Me
I just cannot bring myself to drink it. That is all. I have some kind of utterly irrational yet bone-deep hostility toward the notion of sparkling cider as a substitute for champagne/sparkling wine. (I actually find it odd overall that fizzy drinks are regarded as 'festive,' as if modern humans experienced the miracle of carbonation…
Continue reading ➞ Day 189: I Won’t Drink Sparkling Cider and You Can’t Make Me
Day 187: Sobriety Accumulates
My husband has a surfing buddy who has been sober for 20-plus years, and he said something great the other day about how the effects of sobriety are cumulative, even if the practice of it can be very one-day-at-a-time. (Surfers are surprisingly philosophical people--it turns out Point Break is exactly like real life, except for the…
Happy 6 months to me!
It's 6 months today since I last had a drink. (And here I am below, poking my head out of the shadows to wave hi to you. Hi!) It was a day, a good day in spite of The Current Fraughtness Recently Discussed. I slept late, walked the dog, went to the new Coen Brothers…
Day 179: Farmvilleing my way through
I look back at recent posts and in some ways it feels like I'm in stasis. I'm still in my Northwest-winter funk. Work is still feeling kind of Sisyphean and meaningless. My mom's health continues to fail--her symptoms ebb and flow, but her heart is operating at about 20% of its optimal capacity. We knew…
Day 163: Well, at least there’s always a mocktail…
I'm not going to lie, life feels like kind of a slog right now and sobriety uninspiring. It's dark (like, 3:30 p.m. sunset dark) and cold in my city, I'm still feeling burnt-out at work in a way that isn't going to just resolve itself over a weekend, and I'm not having those lovely little…
Continue reading ➞ Day 163: Well, at least there’s always a mocktail…
Day 154-ish: Urges to Make Mad Changes
Though I'm not in AA, I find some of the concepts useful, and one I've been thinking about is the idea of not making any major life changes in the first year of sobriety. Honestly, this was easy in my very first weeks, when being sober was the life change and all I had the mental…
