i want to be like her … she wasn’t try-ing to get away with less

This message was sent to subscribers by email september 30th.

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from me:

drank coffee in bed thanks to husband. checked my email, looked at paintings, and then started to scroll through my personal facebook feed.
lindsey lohan. brett kavanaugh. what do they have in common? alcohol.
it’s time to remove the alcohol, y’all. booze makes us do ridiculous, dumb, dangerous, illegal things we would never do sober. booze makes us forget our involvement, minimize the consequences, and offer to take a homeless family’s children to a hotel for the night.
(also — anyone listening to the new season of Serial? the first episode? alcohol all through it, and yet not mentioned directly as the source of the problems.)
and maybe if you are not sober, you don’t see the underlying alcohol in these stories the way that a sober person does. but me, a sober girl, sees booze as a contributing element to all kinds of things, large and small: marriage issues, the drunken behaviour at the pool party, kissing your neighbour’s wife, ‘forgetting’ to get groceries, throwing up in a garbage can in your office, arguing with your sister in law, getting yourself into dangerous situations of ALL KINDS … physically dangerous and emotionally fraught.
so for me, i’m going to bask — yes, that’s the right word — in the knowledge that i don’t drink any more. i know that whatever stupid thing I do is not being caused by alcohol (and if i really do something stupid, i can apologize, own it, and try to do better.) as a sober girl, I can sleep 9 hrs, drink coffee, go for a 1-hour run without my phone, no audios, no kilometre tracking, and just head off to the italian street market, buy two tiny cauliflowers (he assured me they were better than large ones, who knows), and potatoes, and then i found an lebanese stand and got hummus and tabbouleh (parsley salad) and pita bread. this woman, the lebanese stand woman, reminded me that kindness is all around us. how much for the little tub of salad? 5€. Expensive. but then she filled it, and filled it, and squished down the parsley to fill the corners, then she drained out the extra liquid, then she added in more, then the cover wouldn’t fit, then she said to me directly “it’ll fit!” and she got the cover on and it was bulging.
i will bask in the message she gave me today:
   she wasn’t trying to get away with less. 

from the blog:

Veeee: “Another work event.  Another hotel.  Still super tired from all the changes at home and work this week. Making it through. Thank goodness I”m sober and hanging out in the hotel pool instead of with alcohol … still discombobulated, but things have mellowed as the week has gone on. That raise came through with today’s paycheck. YAY!  I feel a lot of change in the air … thinking about dreams and what I want and where I want to go.”
[then she emailed again 10 minutes later]
“Walking up from the pool I hear a couple arguing. She says she not walking out, she is getting a glass of wine. Then she complains that he dumped out $5 worth of wine. He says he doesn’t care, he buys it anyway. She sounds drunk but not wasted. I don’t remember a fight exactly like that before but ya know it ain’t gonna happen if you remove alcohol from the equation. It’s better here.”

~

Fridgkit: “My *rational* self will always lose when talking to my addict self. I need to see my addict as a raving serial killer with an axe that can’t be persuaded that using the axe to just chop wood is a healthy alternative to mass murder. That self doesn’t think that way. All you can do to prevent murder is to take the axe — or the bottle — completely away. Not a very elegant metaphor, but it works!”

~

ShelT (day 100): “I feel like I’m going to blow a gasket as the old saying goes. My 15-year old is being more difficult than I would ever have thought was in him, and I want to scream and have another parent make him behave. Ha. (I’ve been divorced for 10 years.) But I noticed a good thing in the midst of my misery. I walked into the kitchen, feeling frustrated and angry. I saw my sparkling water, cranberry juice, and muddling supplies on the counter. It’s day 100 and you said I should plan a treat and I trust you 😉 so I got raspberries and mint for my drink. Anyway, I saw the supplies from my drink-making earlier and realized that at no time in my frustration did it ever occur to me that a drink would be nice. In fact, when I first thought of it, it was when I made my way to bed with a pint of coconut ice cream and thought, ‘well at least I’m not making it worse by checking out with alcohol’.”

if alcohol is an elevator that only goes down, then you get to step off. in fact, the sooner you exit, the better. and when you find a way out, you stay out. www.tiredofthinkingaboutdrinking.com/original-art/

this is a close-up of the lettering on painting #237 here.