I gutted my closet the other night.

Now there are many bags full of clothes, shoes, purses and jewelry stacked by my door and a few lone work shirts hanging in my much more bare closet.

I just couldn’t stand it anymore.  I couldn’t stand looking at hangers packed with clothes that didn’t fit, or were too old to be descent, or I never liked in the first place but bought anyway.  I couldn’t handle the “guilt” anymore of putting on the same five outfits for work and then looking at all the clothes I never wore, feeling as if they were neglected in some way.  But mostly I just couldn’t stand that there was no space anymore.  What was the point of having all this stuff?

Sobriety takes, in the words of Mad-Eye Moody, “CONSTANT VIGILANCE!” (Yes, I will quote Harry Potter whenever possible.  And it’s always possible.)  You always always have to be honest, be on the lookout for the moments when you lie to yourself or to others, where you hedge, bobbing and weaving around simple things so that you don’t have to take responsibility for them.

My closet became this physical manifestation of what I wasn’t being honest with myself about:

There is a lot of crap in my life that is getting in the way.  And it’s time for it to go.

A lot of crap like worrying about my students instead of working to better educate them.  Crap like saying I don’t have time to have a real life and then spending hours clicking through the internet.  Crap like the 5 off-brand Twinkies I ate yesterday.  Crap like creepy “though-provoking” foreign movies that don’t really have any conclusion, just end.  Crap like being more comfortable being vaguely unhappy rather than make the effort to do what will make me happy.

Moods like this, of being discontent and hemmed in, usually lead me to some rash decisions.  Like moving without having a job.  Or cutting my hair off so that my face looks even fatter.  Or seeing if I can break my record of two magnums of wine in one night.  So I guess I should look on it as progress that all I’ve done so far is remove a ton of unused clothes from my closet.  And I haven’t even bothered to take them to the donation bin yet, so I must say, I’m getting quiet lazy when it comes to my mental breakdowns.

Or maybe, just maybe, I’m growing up a little bit, and getting to a place where I realize that these feelings will pass.  That I can take a look at what might be causing those feelings, and deal with that in a slow and systematic way, instead of turing my life upside-down because I just hate everything.  It doesn’t mean that I simply let the physical and metaphorical crap stay where it is, cluttering up my existence.  My closet is a much better place now.  I can move around in it.  It doesn’t look like a cave of cotton and hangers.  I can see what I’m doing when I get dressed in the morning.  And after I drop off these bags of clothes in the donation bin I probably won’t think about any of the things I’m getting rid of.

I wonder what can go next?

(1 Year, 3 Months, 29 Days Sober)