It’s OK already

what a weird boost. this last week has been the strangest ‘gift’ i’ve had in a long time.

got a big catering job, busy doing that. listening a lot to podcasts. had the idea to expand MY sober podcasts, to change how they are distributed (move from a paid subscription to perhaps iTunes) and to add sponsors.

Got lots of emails, thankfully you’ve been pretty kind to say “yes i’d like that” or “no i wouldn’t like that but i’d follow you anyway.”

E. asked me if i was really ready to give up Job #1 to focus on the sober stuff more.

my response: “I do like job #1 but only because I’ve had it for a long time (1988) and I’m good at it and so it’s easy, and it’s safe place to hide. whenever I need to feel like I know what I’m doing, I can go there. the sober world isn’t quite like that! So being a text and graphic designer is an ‘easy’ place to go, periodically.

then i realized that in my imagining to ‘go big’ with the sober podcasts, what i was really wanting was for someone to convince me to do it. If you’ve been following me for awhile, you’ve seen me do this a few times. I walk right up to “let’s go big” and then i slink off again. I’m a reluctant protagonist.

I realize now that one of the gifts of sobriety has been my slow learning about how let things unfold as they will. No pushing. No plans to do anything. Stuff just happens. Opportunities come and you take them, but I’m not out there hustling up anything. I’m just going-with-the-flowing.

sigh.

So i thought, OK, i’ll contact Mailchimp to be my sponsor for the podcasts and just see what happens. I didn’t email a bunch of sponsors, i dipped my toe into one sponsor. i figured it’d be a litmus test. and … they didn’t answer.

and so today i wake up and realize that there’s nothing the matter with where I am now. while i periodically have fantasies of ‘changing everything’, in reality, when we do that in life it hardly ever works. let’s leave our husband and go live on a goat farm and write a book. Yeah, i’d last less than a week. Decisions made impulsively, or on some kind of high of “let’s DO this” have a dreamy quality to them. they’re not fully thought out. they don’t include the “yeah but…” (yeah but if you post podcasts on itunes then your anonymity will be at risk, and you’ll be subjected to the trolling comments of 1 star, she’s full of shit, which is fine, but you can’t ban the trolls on iTunes…)

That impulsive thing that comes over me every so often, the feeling that “where I am now much change” happens less and less now that i’m sober. and I can see it coming, I can reach out, get ideas, start the wheels turning, and then the tide flows back out. And then I feel OK with where I am again.

I think what i’ve learned is that good shit happens. It’s not my job to MAKE shit happen. It’s my job to be sober, clear, present, and well-slept enough to take advantage of the opportunities when they come.

Not sure what to do next?

I sent this message to Lifeasirockit, but as usual, I was really writing it to me:

“you’re on day 73 today 🙂 Not sure what to do next? Things start to shift in the rest of your life later. still too early 🙂 no plan yet 🙂 once you’re 90+ days things will begin to happen for you on their own. you don’t push anything. things just happen. you’ll wake up and say today’s the day I’m going to work on some changes for about an hour… you have lots of time, so you can clean house … literally. make a clean ready space for your new life to come flowing in!”

PS/ as an aside, about how things happen when you don’t push, I mentioned that I’m going to be in London at the end of the month; in the last day since i posted that, a whopping 12 people are coming so far. And TWO people are flying in from other places. People are getting on airplanes to have coffee with us in a bakery. holy shit batman. Lordy. That’s what happens when you just have a big sleep and show up.

Things Just Happen.

or, as my husband would say … “It’s OK already.”