I just got back from seeing the last Twilight movie with some friends.

I think I enjoyed it way more than I should have.

Let me explain.

I had a really long and frustrating week.  I was impatient with my students.  I came home every night and just crawled into bed, refusing to accept that the rest of the world existed.  When I knew I was being irrational I could step back and remove myself from the situation, but I couldn’t get ahead of the irrational.  I looked at my pile of grading growing bigger and bigger but felt no will to tackle it.

But more than anything I felt very lonely.  Lonely in the sense that I didn’t want to have to reach out and tell someone that I was low, I wanted there to already be someone there who would notice that I needed some cheering up and would make that his job to do.  It’s always a little awkward to call someone and say “hey I just feel off and kind of need someone to talk to.”  I am much better about doing that than I was a year and 3 months ago.  (Then I couldn’t do that at all)  But I would like to have someone in my life who would call me to find out how my day was without my prompting.  My natural reaction is to make fun of myself for thinking something as cliched as “I wish I had a boyfriend,” but I don’t wish I had a boyfriend.  I wish I loved someone enough to do for him what I want him to do for me.

By the time yesterday morning rolled around I wasn’t looking forward to coming home after work to more of the same that had been going on all week.  So when Alissa called and invited me to an art show and to go shopping at Target afterwards I jumped on it, even though I was worried I wouldn’t be very good company.  The show was amazing and I bought a really beautiful piece that will look fantastic above my desk when I finally save up the money to frame it.  I picked up a shit ton of pencils at Target because my students keep wandering off with the class pencils.  And like always I had a blast hanging out with Alissa, talking about politics and listening to adorable stories of her children’s exploits.

I did something out of the ordinary last night.  Something way out of my comfort zone. I asked a friend of mine, who was also at the art show, if she had any single male friends she thought would be a good fit for me.  My friend is always in matchmaking mode (she is hilarious) and immediately she started telling me all about a friend of hers. I have only ever once before asked any of my friends to set me up with someone and I never followed up with her about it.  At any point before yesterday I would have been so embarrassed to even bring it up.  Any romantic hopes I’ve had have either been very very private conversations with people I trust implicitly, or vague third person theory debates.  By simply talking to me friend, asking if she knew anyone, I took a step towards making myself more present in my own life.  To connecting my current actions to my future hopes.

And maybe that is why I didn’t feel particularly distracted today.  I didn’t have random snippets of discontent floating around the back of my mind all day.  When I met some girlfriends for the movie I wasn’t half absorbed with my ongoing work problems or my lack of motivation for exercising.  I was engaged with my friends and willing to admit that I was enjoying an awesomely crappy movie with them.

I came home happy with my life.

It’s easy for me to get caught up in what I don’t have (perfect hair, much money, easy social graces) and to forget that over the last year I have developed a bit of self-reliance in asking for the help that I need.  When I have those opportunities to see just how fun and giving and lovely my friends are I wonder how I am able to forget all the help that is out there for me.  I don’t think that it’s that I forget the help is there.  I forget that I have to ask for it.  And I forget that asking will sometimes be hard.

(1 Year, 2 Months, 11 Days Sober

The cold war between me and Bitch-Mom is going nuclear on Monday, and I am the opposite of excited.

I often feel like I’m stuck in lose-lose situations, that there isn’t a right choice that I can make.  In recovery they talk about “the next right thing” which isn’t a concept that comes naturally to me.  I get caught up in the possibilities of how something will play out, in trying to take into account every single consequence that may or may not result from anything I do.  This in itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  I don’t see a world where people live in personal bubbles with no impact on one another.  I accept cause and effect as a fact and view reality accordingly.  When it turns from pragmatism into crazy-making is when I pretend that I can actually KNOW how something is going to turn out, when I start to believe that my prediction of future events is a predestined course that will unfold just as I have seen in my mind.

Yes, my life gets shitty when I pretend that I am God.  And not even the Catholic understanding of God.  Apparently when I am God in my mind I am God as John Calvin understood God.  No wonder things turn to shit.

But the very simple truth of my life is that I don’t know at all how things are going to turn out.  I once knew without a shadow of a doubt that I had met the man I was going to marry.  He married someone else.  I once planned my whole future on the sure knowledge that I was going to become a literature professor at a mid-sized East coast university.  I dropped out of grad school.  I once believed that I could stop drinking anytime I wanted, that I was in control and I didn’t have a problem.  I couldn’t and I did.  In all the futures I envisioned for myself, that I had bone-deep certainty in, not a single one involved becoming a friend of Bill.

I think doing the next right thing is about leaving space in my life for God to do what he thinks is best.  That if I’m less concerned about filling my imaginary future with my self-serving plans, then I am more open to what God wills for me.  The next right thing today is to make some coffee, read a book, and get some sleep for tomorrow.  After that the next right thing is to catch up on my grading.  The next right thing after that is to prepare as best I can to state me case to Bitch-Mom without being accusatory or defensive.  Past these three, I will just have to see how things stand on Sunday.  As familiar as I might find it to crawl into a dark place in my mind concocting all the unjust yelling Bitch-Mom is going to do at on Monday, I have no proof that that is what is going to happen.  It is very well what may happen, but since I cannot look into the future with a perspective outside of time, for all I’m capable of knowing she might cancel our meeting, or she might bring an issue to my attention that I haven’t given enough thought to, or she might yell and then listen to me.

I don’t know.  But I’m slowly knowing that I don’t know.

Socrates would be proud.

(1 Year 2 Months and 9 Days Sober)

I’m thankful that I got over the flu very quickly.

There’s been a bug going around the school for the last couple weeks and yesterday my whole body decided to reject all things good and lovely, so I whined until my admin sent me home and crawled into bed.

But I wasn’t alone.

See, I am a total TV junkie.  There are shows that I will watch 6 and 7 times, even when I know all the lines and how/where/when every plot point either elates or frustrates me.  There are fictional characters that to me are real living breathing people.  (Now in all fairness to my crazy, I am the same way with books and movies as well.)  But a funny thing happened when I started getting sober.  I couldn’t watch TV.  The shows that I truly loved and had followed for years were too overwhelming, too serious, and in many cases, were part of a very serious pattern of wine consumption.  (I mean for reals, did anyone make it through Season 6 of Supernatural not completely hammered?)  So, when the booze became a part of my life only in the past tense, I kind of thought I would just gorge on all my small screen favorites while clinging to “I WILL NOT DRINK TODAY!” but instead I could occasionally watch a few episodes of some entirely new show that for the most part didn’t turn out to be very good.

But starting about a month ago I really missed my old shows.  Not the I miss-my-old-life type thing, but more a are-there-things-I-can-take-from-old-life-into-new-one type thing.  I caught up on Fringe and How I Met Your Mother.  I’m working on back episodes of White Collar and investigating which venue I will use to mainline some Dexter.  My friend KP has been gently reminding me that I’m almost two whole season behind on Sons of Anarchy, an amazing show that KP and I both love to a sort of unhinged level.  On Monday night she posted the cover shot for an article about SoA on my Facebook page, and when my stomach rebelled against me it occurred to me that the universe might be telling me that the time had come for me to return to Charming.

And just like I remember, SoA is complicated, terrifying, and heartbreaking.  And while I cried my eyes out, hid under my pillow, bit my nails, and laughed every so often, and obnoxiously texted KP, all while trying not to throw up (that’s the flu not the show) I was able to appreciate a bit that the old and the new aren’t incompatible, that I may even be able to bring them into harmony.  (I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.)  This is one of the fundamental tensions SoA explores, and in a much less dire way (you know, because I’m not a member of a gun-running biker gang) I saw many reflections of my own struggles played out on Jax and Opie’s faces, in Tara’s silences and screams, in Gemma’s desperate need to control.  But a reflection is not the thing itself, and I am a free creature rather than a fictional one, born a actual person with free will, not a character dependent on her creator for words.

My freedom has felt oppressive lately.  As I work to rid myself of slavery to sin, to invite grace into my life, the allure of easy comfort and quick gratification is even shinier, and therefor my anger at myself those times I give in is greater, because I know just how actively I am working against my own well being.  The extra time and energy I have being single and without children looks lonely and taxing, because I convince myself that I cannot say no to any question put to me, since after all, it’s not like I’m accountable to a husband who needs my love and support.  In my mind, now unrestrained by a need to drink as much as I can as often as I can, I fall into a trap of thinking that no choice is good enough, no action high enough, that I have been given a singular and un-repayable gift which I am not making the most of and maybe never will.

What if I am just as mediocre sober as I was drunk?

You see, freedom is not the same as simplicity.  But also, doubt is not despair.  I’m allowed to doubt in myself.  That is natural, and I have quite a talent for it.  But despair leads straight back to the bottle.  So, in the words of St. Francis, “where there is doubt let me sow faith.”  I cannot lack faith when I realize that I was given a chance to turn my life around.  I cannot lack faith when I think that tomorrow friends are opening their home to me, inviting me to spend Thanksgiving with them in exchange for making the mashed potatoes.  (Um, yeah, say a little extra prayer for that one!)  I cannot lack faith when I know that my mother goes to sleep unburdened by undue worry over me, her prayers for my safety answered after many years.  I cannot lack faith when I look now at the ability to doubt without despairing.  I didn’t have that for years.  Maybe I’ve never had that before.

And so I am thankful.  Thankful to be on the recovering side of alcoholism.  Thankful for faith.  Thankful for doubt.  And thankful that after tomorrow I can watch the greatest Christmas movie of all time and I won’t be “starting the season too early.”

Yes, that movie is Die Hard.

(1 Year, 2 Months, and 1 Day Sober)

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m kind of in hate with the world right now.

Uggg.  Just ugggggggggggg.

For most of this week I’ve been under-slept and over-stressed.  Not because the world really is falling apart, just because I FEEL like it is.  And today, last period while my class was in gym, it all finally felt like too much and I started having a panic attack.  By all that is holy I managed to calm myself down and didn’t completely lose my shite all over the place.  But it was still a scary moment.  Not scary because I was confused about what was happening; why my face was suddenly on fire and I couldn’t breathe and my skin seemed like it was shredding off of my bones.  No, that has all happened before, many many times.  It just hasn’t happened in a while.

I seem to be incapable at the moment of getting any distance between me and the world.  Everything coming in from the outside seems abrasive, defeating and specifically designed to cause me the most pain.  All of my reactions feel explosive, out of proportion and uncontrolled.  During the week I would get upset about something I knew wasn’t worth being upset about, but I couldn’t listen to myself that it wasn’t worth it.  I’ve found the most imaginative ways to see myself as the victim, but knowing I was going out of my way to find excuses to be hurt wasn’t enough to get me to stop myself.

I know that a huge reason I am completely raw is that I haven’t been to a meeting in a long long time.  Sobriety is a habit, it takes work, and I have been nothing but lazy about it for far too long now.  And that’s what I do.  I aspire to “good enough” and then coast downhill from there.  When things are dire I’m all focus and determination, but when things are fair to middling I’m dismissive and easily distracted.

I think the only thing that kept me from drinking on election night was the thought that “well, voters can keep doing the same thing over again thinking it will be different this time, but I know that just ends in misery.”  I think it goes without saying that I wasn’t pleased with the results, but I would be even less pleased if Obama’s victory had trashed my sobriety.

There is no solution to the way I am right now other than the completely obvious one.  I need to go to a meeting.  I need to remind myself that I am not alone in my condition, that I am not hopeless for my future well-being.  I need to listen, to share, to get out of my “me, me, me, it’s all about ME!” mentality.

(1 Year and 50 Days Sober)

Years ago I had a very strict Saturday morning routine.

I got up by 7am, ate breakfast, made a HUGE pot of coffee, put on whatever disc had arrived from Netflix, and cleaned my apartment from top to bottom.  (Except vacuuming, I hate vacuuming and never do it.)  I was usually done between 10 and 11, and then I would shower and get on with whatever else my day entailed.

I loved my Saturday ritual.  It kept my living space neat, it was time to myself where I felt both relaxed and productive, and I never felt like my weekend had been “wasted” because even if I didn’t accomplish anything else, I got that done.  Sometimes, if I’d been out late the night before, I wouldn’t get up until 8am, or I’d need a couple Advil before getting started.  But this tradition was part of the way I lived my life before I was an alcoholic.

Once that shift was made (when I no longer had a drink because I enjoyed it, but because I NEEDED it), my Saturday mornings changed.  It was something I noticed but didn’t think about too closely.  Because I was passed out instead of sleeping, I got up later and later.  Soon, noon seemed like a perfectly appropriate time to start my Saturday.  A few Advil and a bagel no longer shook off the vestiges of beers gone down.  Soon a new Saturday routine developed and it wasn’t pretty.  I would drag myself from the bed to the couch, turn on whatever I left in the DVD player, lie there until the room wasn’t spinning too too much, make the hangover french fries I kept in the freezer, and drink Diet Coke until it was time to shower so I could go out again.  My apartment would get cleaned whenever it was impossible to get into the kitchen because of the piles of beer and wine bottles, or when the black bookshelf looked grey from dust and cigarette ash.  My insides and my outsides were literally a mess.  If anyone asked my how my weekend was I would say “oh ya know, hung out at home” and change the subject.

It wasn’t just that alcoholism made it physically difficult to do what I had done before, it was also that I didn’t want that time to myself.  Cleaning, for me, is a huge part of how I put my mind back in order.  I can’t think in cluttered or messy spaces, and putting things where I think they belong, and making sure they’re neat, gives me the internal space to put myself where I think I belong.  Everyone who meets me thinks I some anal retentive nut job clean freak, but it’s really just that I am incredibly claustrophobic, both internally and externally.

Things are different now.  Being sober doesn’t mean that everything goes back to exactly the way it was before you became and alcoholic.  If it did, then you would just start drinking again, because things exactly as they were had some fundamental flaw that propelled you to drink.  So my Saturdays are different now.  Most Saturdays I have errands and appointments that can’t wait until the afternoon, so I’m out of the house by 10 am, not to return until the late afternoon.  I also live with a roommate, so it isn’t just my stuff in the apartment, and she feels judged when I clean up her things, so I wait until I can’t live with it anymore.  I try to keep my own space pretty neat on a daily basis, so there usually isn’t a great deal that needs to be done all at once.  (I do need to take out my garbage, I’ll do that today.)

For the most part my breakfast, coffee, and recollecting has shifted from Saturday to Sunday.  I get up without an alarm, get the caffeine flowing, and (usually) catch up on the news/blogs/stupid internet stuff that I’ve missed during the week, or return emails I haven’t gotten to, or talk to my mom.  Now it is a lot more about putting information in order than physical objects.  Sometimes I catch up on an episode of TV I’ve missed.  It’s all very slow and relaxed.  Eventually I put on real clothes, go to yoga, get my grading and planning done for the week and finish out the day with Mass.  Besides the coffee, there really isn’t much commonality between the old routine and the new one.  Except that once again, I can spend time with myself.  Even if I’m not super enthused about who I am on a particular Sunday, or the week that I had leading up to it, I look forward to having some time in my week to take stock, do what makes me relaxed, and preparing for what will come next.  When I was drinking that kind of time was the last thing that I wanted.

Time for another cup of coffee.

(1 Year and 45 Days Sober)

Last Sunday, before the hurricane hit, I was in Georgetown getting a new tattoo.

I knew that I wanted to get a tattoo in honor of my first year of sobriety, but as the year mark approached I couldn’t decide what I wanted or where I wanted it to be.  A friend and I had been talking on and off about him getting a tattoo.  He had never gotten one before and he wanted one, but he wasn’t totally sure.  We were hanging out one night, just after my year anniversary, and I told him that if her wanted a buddy to go with him, I would be on board for that.  Of course then he asked me what I was getting and I told him I didn’t know.

That night I went home and started really thinking about it.  What did I want?  I knew that I didn’t want my sobriety date (9/20/11 if you’re interested), which is commonly what you’ll see people in the program have tattooed somewhere.  I knew inside that that wasn’t what I wanted.  My sobriety date is a huge day in my life, one I will probably never forget.  But my first year of sobriety was so much more that just a date.  It wasn’t right.  I started thinking about endings and beginnings.  About how the last year of my life has been the most painful I’ve had to live through, and at the same time the most open and happy, a year full of more love than I could have imagined.  And after hours of looking at pictures of trees, birds, suns and all the crazy shit people tattoo onto themselves (seriously, it is so addicting looking at tattoos because people do ridiculous things, in both the cool and the foolish way), I decided that I wanted words.  But all the quotes that I felt applied to what I wanted to express were really long.  That’s what I get for being in love with Early Modern English poets.   By scrolling through Pinterest I had come across a few Harry Potter tattoos, and all of a sudden I knew exactly what I wanted.

My new tattoo says “I open at the close” with a 2 inch circle surrounding it.  It is above the inside of my left ankle.  And I am so in love with it.

(Here’s a picture!)

Funny enough, plenty of people I know recognize the quote immediately.  It is what is inscribed on the Golden Snitch Dumbledore give to Harry in his will, in which Dumbledore had hidden the Resurrection Stone.  (I suppose I should say Spoiler Alert, but serious, if at this point you haven’t read the book or seen the movie, I can’t think that you care.)  And plenty of people have laughed good naturedly with a “Andrea you are such a dork” follow-up.  I am a dork, and I am completely okay with that.  I first read Harry Potter in 1998 when I was 14.  And I have loved each word ever since, without any apology.  But I picked this particular quote for more than fan-ish sentiment.

In a very real way, it is literally true.  I closed the bottle and my life opened up.  When I decided to end a long phase of my life, to stop drinking, I was small, cold and lost.  I could not see that I had anything left, and couldn’t imagine what would be there in the future.  And despite my worst fears, I became bigger, warmer, and found.  Day by day, even when it sucked, I could see how much better my life was without drinking.  I reconnected with old friends.  My relationships within my family became smoother.  I started to enjoy things again.  I opened up and let my life happen, in all its messiness.  When I ended what I had known for so long, I was given an opportunity to have something new, real, and ever growing.

But there is also the metaphorical sense in which I mean my tattoo.  I had to be willing to die.  By that I mean, I had to be willing to sacrifice, every single day, in ways that I couldn’t have imagine.  In order to stay sober I have to wake up and chose to correct my selfishness, to give myself to others, to do what is right even if it isn’t what I want.  To stay sober I cannot hold onto self-pity.  I cannot pretend that I am the most important person in the universe.  I have to life with a constant willingness to let go.  But to let go with purpose.  I have to see myself and my life as an instrument of God’s plan.  I might not need to battle a lunatic bent on genocide, but I have to face forever that darkness of my alcoholism, and do everything I can to combat it.

So my new tattoo is a reminder both of what I’ve achieved as well as what is yet to be accomplished.

And have I mentioned how much I love it?

(1 Year and 44 Days Sober)

I’m really good at making a lot of plans and not doing jack shit about them.

It’s a special talent.  I know you’re jealous.

No seriously, my whole week was this strange undecided space.  I would make a plan about what I was going to get done during the day and then it just wouldn’t happen.  It wasn’t really that I would do something else instead.  It was just that I would putz around on the internet or take a nap or whatever.  I went to work, to adoration, to a party for out-of-town friends, and saw two movies.  Really, I have been busy.  

But I’ve also had hours where I haven’t done anything and I’ve looked at various to-do lists, or tasks that a painfully apparent (read: CLEAN THE FRAKKING BATHROOM) and I’ve just not.  I want to be a person who can stay calmly and consistently on top of the things in her life, but it’s like I have no incentive to do anything until it is a total crisis.

I would be really much calmer professionally if I did my grading every day, but no, I save the whole week’s grading for the weekend, then I see the huge pile and start crying.  If I did laundry when there was one load I wouldn’t have to spend a whole day shlepping 7 loads up and down to the laundry room in the basement of my apartment building.  If I responded to emails at the end of the day that they actually came in then I wouldn’t be constantly consumed with low-level guilt that so-and-so thinks I’m ignoring them.  There are so many daily things that I could do that would make my life easier, would stave off the panic before it begins and I feel like my life is spinning out of control.

But I don’t do these things.

Or if I do, it’s not really on a regular basis enough to count.  I wonder if it is simply that I cannot convince myself that these daily things are really worth doing.  That I manage to trick myself into not remembering when everything is falling apart how happy I am when things are under control.  On the other hand I might just be so habituated to being a hot mess of a human being that I don’t take care of small things as they come up because that is too much like what a functional person would do.  It could be that I am just lazy as all fuck.  That would be the Occam’s Razor answer.

Whatever the reason behind why I wasted so many perfectly useful hours of this week, I need to get my ass in gear, because I am not a fan of what I’m (not) doing right now.  Uncool me, time to fix this shit.

I try not to see alcoholism everywhere I look, but sometimes it’s a struggle.

Let me explain.

You’ve all met the obnoxious evangelizer.  The person who stopped doing something that was harmful for them, and then suddenly that particular thing or behavior (say it’s drinking, or smoking, or eating sugar, or interneting) becomes the greatest evil there ever was and it is destroying everything around it and anyone still doing it needs to stop right this damn minute!!!

We all want to punch that person in the face.

Some things are fundamentally harmful and no one should do them in the first place.  But most things are pretty morally neutral, and in moderation are simple pleasures.  I try to be very clear when I talk to friends about my sobriety: as much as I’m an alcoholic, alcohol wasn’t/isn’t the problem, I was/am the problem.  I don’t want my friends to abstain from alcohol when we’re together out of some deference to my particular struggle, because to me that makes alcohol the flawed substance, instead of me the flawed human being.  (Now, if they don’t feel like drinking that night I am certainly not going to force them!)  If for some reason I can’t handle being around alcohol on a given night, I don’t go out.  That’s my choice, and I don’t think that my choices should dictate anyone else’s choices, when it comes to the boozey booze.

But every so often, when I’m scrolling Pinterest instead of grading (or instead of showering, or instead of making dinner, or instead of sleeping) I come across a picture that makes me depressed.  A fairly generic early-20-year-old girl in a Jack Daniels or beer logo T-shirt, leggings for pants, a shed load of make-up and Texan sized hair is smiling coyly at the mirror of her bedroom, phone in hand to take the picture.  Everyone has seen a version of this picture.  Every time I see this picture I can’t help pain and pity welling up inside me and all I can think to myself is “you poor stupid girl, this ends so badly.”

I shouldn’t do this.  My story isn’t every story.  And my story is much more misery-chick than party-girl, so I was never the underdressed girl looking for a good time.  There is no reason to think that just because I am in a program that every girl who posts an unfortunate picture glamorizing her drinking escapades on the internet is going to need a program someday too.  But it’s hard, when you’ve come out on the other side, not to want to protect anyone else from ever having to go through what you went through.  It takes a while to remove the “worst possible outcome” filter from your vision.

And so sometimes I am that person, who in the privacy of her own brain, screams at everyone to stop drinking right this damn minute!

I’m waiting for God to give me an answer and I super suck at that.

I don’t really operate on God’s time.  I have this idea that prayers should be answered instantaneously, like a genie.

I have a parent who is deeply upset with me.  She misunderstood my bumbling attempt to help her daughter and is now demanding some sort of reckoning.  This happens with people.  We think what we are saying is totally clear and not contentious but those same words are received as vague and threatening.  It is so easy to take things in the wrong way.  And here, when I tried to say “how can I give your daughter the best education possible” the parent heard “your daughter is a bad child and doesn’t belong in my class.”  I’m so overwhelmed by this mess that I feel utterly directionless.  I’m so afraid of making it worse that I can’t see how any option is even remotely good.

So I’m trying to pray about it.  I’m asking God to show me what to do, to give me the right words to make my intention clear and have the best outcome for my student.  I have been praying on and off about it all day.  And I don’t have an answer yet.  I just have the overwhelmed and the rising panic that maybe there is no answer.  Maybe I’ve ruined things beyond repair.

(Yes, in case you’re wondering, I do tend to overreact to things.  How did you know?)

I have to relax.  I have to let God work with me on his schedule.  And I do have to not jump to “well I just have to say SOMETHING, even if it’s not the right thing” because that won’t help anyone.  If I am patient and trusting the correct outcome is possible.  (And now I will repeat this to myself about a million times.)

This leaves me sitting in the overwhelmed, having to face the waiting.  For years I didn’t do this.  I drank.  At the slightest instance of personal discomfort, or answerless-ness I ran to the bottle.  At the end of a bottle of wine I could convince myself it was all someone else’s fault and they were just being an asshole.  At the end of two bottles of wine I could pitch myself over the self-pity cliff, bemoaning how the world had treated me so unfairly and I shouldn’t be so persecuted.  By the end of the third bottle of wine I would pass out and well, can’t think much at that point, can ya?

But tonight, as much as I remember how much comfort I thought I was getting from drinking away the day, I don’t want to drink.  I don’t WANT to feel like I do right now, frightened and powerless, but I don’t want to be angry, maudlin and self destructive.  I don’t want to pretend that I bear no responsibility in my own life.  When I look at the alternatives to the overwhelmed, I think I can hack the overwhelmed.

At least I can with the aid of the emergency chocolate bar I have stashed in my kitchen.  And an episode or two of Revenge.  God will answer me, when He’s ready.  I just have to be sober to hear him.

(1 Year and 24 Days Sober)