I’m sitting on a backporch in Garland, Texas. I’m visiting Dallas for a wedding tomorrow. It is the first time I have been back since in six years.

When I left Dallas I was running. Running from events I was afraid I could never deal with. Running from a truth it would take me 3 more years to face.

I was nervous about his trip. Nervous to miss work, nervous to spend money I should be saving. Nervous that I wouldn’t feel welcome. As my plane descended I must of had a look of longing on my face, because the woman next to me asked me if I was from Texas. I told her no, but that I had lived here for a lot of good years.

It would be so easy to be nostalgic. There was nothing for me to be nervous about. I have had only joy so far in reconnecting with old friends, meeting their many children, and getting sunburnt in the shade. I even got a few semi-offers if new employment at a party tonight. I sense the stillness of a life I loved very much surrounding me. Enveloped in the comfort of people who didn’t give up on me, I can see myself romaticising a place and forgetting the person.

The time between my leaving Dallas and my entering AA is what we lovingly call the “lost years.” It is not a term that does the reality justice, but it is the best we can do now. One day maybe I will be able to have a phrase that captures what I was really like. I know now I was already an alcoholic when I was still living in Dallas, but I was for the most part a functional one. For the 3 years that followed I wasn’t even that. There was a terror inside of me that I could not escape; an absence that I could not express. I assumed it was circumstance. Everyone I knew had gotten married and started families, a future I was determined to be denied. The literature that had brought me such solace was a burden of truth I could no longer carry. My crosses felt like curses, divine retribution for once voicing a desire to be loved.

It wasn’t about a guy, but it was easy to say it was. It wasn’t about grad school, but I couldn’t finish, so I didn’t correct people when they talked about “burn out.” It was about God. Isn’t it always?

God was never going to be able to repay me for all the shit he put me through. I never thought of it as anger. After all, what was the point of being angry with the omnipotent creator of the universe? What a waste of time? No, it was anger. It was simple balance. How could he make up for years of death, for a heart so often broken, for a lifetime of giving to others by taking from me? He couldn’t. His love for me was a love of brutal demand and forced sacrifice. And I wanted no part of it. I could not stay, could not live amoung those whose path was set and set with kindness and generocity, know without doubt that I would forever be their foil.

3 years of sobriety eases many hurts, and sheads light upon many misconceptions. The great misconception would be to tell myself it would have been different if I’d stayed, to trick myself into believing that there would have been no “lost years” if I hadn’t picked up stakes in the middle of the night and fled like a bat out of hell. For many years I had a happy life here, but that life turned sour when my heart turned from others and toward myself.

Selfishness is a funny thing. We tell ourselves that we are so giving, so concerned with others, a fountain of love taken for granted by the very people who should cherish us. We tell a lie that lives in our souls; a winding vine choking our freedom, from which we can only escape with the grace of God. The grace to see that we are not owed. The grace to be as helpless as we truely are in the face of our own redemption. The grace to admit we fear God does not really love us.

I landed here without a heart of fear. Not because my life in DC is perfect and I have no regrets about my choices amoung the endless track housing beneath the wide sky. I will always be sorry. I will always be sorry that given the opportunity to be loved by God I chose to be unloving. I will always be sorry that when given my freedom I chose to be shackled. I will always be sorry that I took from so many when I thought I was giving. I will always be sorry for the “lost years.”

But that sorrow no longer cripples me. I can feel it as a part of myself, but not all that I am. It is simply a piece of a heart that has held so much. One element of a woman who is deeply loved.

(3 Years and 6 Days Sober)

When did I become such a rule-following pain in the ass?

This is the question I have been asking myself since June when Margaret and I were having breakfast in a 100 year old saloon in Montana.

Margaret was chuckling with glee as she surveyed the interior of the restaurant; dark wood, brass lamps, the catch of the day (many days ago) mounted on the walls.  I asked her what was so funny.

“I love it.  This place looks like it doesn’t have all those stupid safety posters up.”

“You are very strange Margaret.”

“Oh come on!  I would think you of all people would be annoyed by stupid rules.”

Luckily, our coffee arrived, and the germ of my current existential crisis remained just that, a germ, for the remainder of our trip.  But over the months, the questions have grown more insistent in my brain.  When did I become an obsessive goody-two-shoes?  And more importantly, why?

I’m fairly certain I’ll never pin down the when.  It was more recently in my adult life, that’s for sure.  I was raised with a tendency towards skipping directions, bypassing what was thought to be dumb, and ignoring that which could turn out to be pointless.  This is a slightly problematic way to live, especially when young, because you must rely on your own judgement.

Your judgment can easily be flawed.  Sometimes, near fatally so.

I used to love stealing bricks from construction sites.  Not many bricks, just one, every couple years or so.  It made me so happy, deliriously happy, to sneak my arm under the fencing and dash away with a brick.  I knew I shouldn’t steal, but I didn’t do it often, and really, it didn’t harm anyone. I almost didn’t graduate high school because I determined that there was little of value there for me, so I only went to the classes I like (photography, latin, and biology) and spent the rest of the day hanging out at Starbucks, reading or talking with my best friend.  I never gave a second thought to the fact that I shouldn’t break the law by simply leaving school for the day without permission.  When I was caught (and I was, often) the only thing I cared about was how I would avoid getting caught in the future.

Rules were fine and all, but if there wasn’t any danger, there wasn’t any need for them, or so I justified to myself.

And anyway, isn’t this all what confession is for?

So used to listening to myself, I eventually couldn’t listen to anyone else.  I couldn’t recognize the look in my family’s eyes when I opened the third bottle of wine as concern.  All I saw was them being boring.  I couldn’t accept that my professors adamance about due dates, because it shouldn’t matter that it took me a few extra days (weeks, months) to get my thoughts together.  My thoughts were worth it, they should just be patient.  “Don’t move without a job” wasn’t well-intentioned caution to be thoughtful about my future; rather, it was selfish demands by people who wanted me to remain miserable.

Reality was distorted, and I drank to escape.  The more I drank, the more distorted reality became, and the more I need to drink.  I almost drank myself to death.

Part of the agony of sobriety has been recognizing those parts of myself that are willful, childish, and wrong.  And somehow, at some point in the last almost three years (yayayaya!) I became fixated on following the rules.  Sometimes I can hear myself and know that I am being absurd, but it was like I couldn’t make myself stop.  And it’s really started to bug the hell out of me.

Sitting in Mass today it started to come together.  Often the readings in Mass are about how the old laws are encompassed in Christ’s law of love.  Today was such a day.  I started to see how I’d gone backwards. 

Sobriety has been a very vulnerable time for me.  Talking to others, both know to me and unknown, about my struggles and my triumphs has exposed me in a way I am still not comfortable with.  I get emotional-hangovers when I have conversations with people that reveal myself.  I have a sense of being on display, an object of amusement or pity for others.  The truth of this is irrelevant, because it is my perception of it that correlates to my recent need to never ever deviate from what I am “supposed” to do.  Fearing myself to be an emotional spectacle, I have restrained my behavior to be as unnoticeable as possible.  If I’m never in anyone’s way, maybe they won’t notice me, and maybe I’ll be safe.

When Mary picked me up from the airport after my months away in Portland one of her first questions was:

“So, where is your new tattoo?”

“What?  I don’t have a new tattoo!”

“Ok.  So where is your new piercing?”

“I don’t have a new piercing.   Why do you assume that?”

She laughed, but didn’t respond.  I thought she was just giving me shit.  Now, I think Mary has been on to something that I am just starting to see; I don’t make a lot of sense, because my parts still don’t fit together quite right.  What I love and what I say don’t always match up with what I do or how I seem.

Anyone know of any construction sites with lax security?

(2 Years, 11 Months, and 17 Days Sober)

On Saturday I went to my friend Tim’s funeral.

In a moment of deep self-centeredness I had a minor breakdown over the fact that most people I know were at a wedding while I was at a funeral and isn’t that just the most telling statement about my life to date.  As soon as the words escaped my mouth I felt like a total ass.  To make me feel like even more of an ass, I hadn’t been invited to said wedding, so I wouldn’t have been there anyway, funeral or not.  You would think after a whole lifetime I wouldn’t be surprised by how ridiculous I can be, but every so often I find new and amazing ways to be a self-involved asshat.

All of this is to say that I will miss my friend.  Tim was a wonderful man.  He was funny, smart, kind, and selfless.  We both got to school early, so we would talk before everyone else arrived.  Politics, religion, football, all those subjects you’re not supposed to talk about, that was what Tim was interested in.  Tim helped me navigate my first few years of teaching, I was able to encourage him by understanding his Beyond the Fringe references.  I have no idea what my day will be like on Wednesday, our first day of school, when I arrive at the building and Tim isn’t there.  Will it feel like school is actually happening?  How can we have school if Tim isn’t there?

I can’t answer those questions.  I can’t plan for what will happen to our school without Tim.  I couldn’t plan to have lunch after the funeral with my AHM and his family and have a conversation with his 13 year old daughter about where she will be getting tattoos when she’s old enough.  I can’t plan for how long I will cry.

So I put together a bookshelf.  A bookshelf I bought a year ago, that has been sitting every since in my closet in its flat-pack box.  Small accomplishment in the scheme of things, I know, but I’m glad I did it.  It was a waste to have bought it and never set it up.  And I needed something to do, other than sit around feeling sorry for myself and fearful of the future.

I guess you could say summer is officially over.

(2 Years, 11 Months and 10 Days Sober)