I’m grateful for October and for some other Octobers before this one. I’m grateful for a really rainy morning and a fire in the fireplace. I’m grateful for being able to piece things together. I’m grateful to see what is taking shape, if I let it. I’m grateful to be sober today.
Boy, I’m just very confused these days. I really bounce around from feeling-to -feeling and things just seem kind of strange at times, none of it good or bad, just a little strange. And, at least here in New York, Fall fell or whatever. It is a cold, dreary, rainy morning.1 Remember the other day when I said I wanted to spend the month of October writing about the month of October? Well, it turns out a shit-ton of stuff happened in October. Way more than I had realized. As I started jotting down notes, things would pop into my head and the voice in my head would then say something like “oh shit, that was October, too.”2
If I expand the parameters of “October” slightly so as to include a few weeks of September, well, the story starts to write itself. So that’s how I’m going to spend my time this month and I will tell you that the prospect of that excavation doesn’t necessarily provoke a lot of eagerness in me. The more I think about those things, the more I remember and the more I feel—there were some reasons I drank and being able to forget those reasons was pretty important to me then.
In the same way that writing the words ‘I’m grateful” at the top of the page can reset the course of my day, setting an intention around this project seems to help. I realize this is the work that is at the heart of Steps Four through Step Nine—fully understanding what happened to everyone and being able to honestly assess the history. I’ve come to understand this is a highly-iterative process and the journals from the time of my first stab at those Steps (ten years ago now) are like a foreign language to me. Reading them feels like watching the beginning of a movie and wondering, “Have I seen this before?” Little things seem familiar, but so much is barely recognizable.
I’m also coming to understand another reason for doing this: Like it or not, it’s happening anyway. All of those unresolved things, events, relationships, people bounce around in my head until I can sort them properly.3 I think there is something akin to an emotional bitcoin mining operation running in the background; it warps me and my perceptions in ways I’m not aware of. I realized that taking the bat in my hands is a better way to do this.4 I know there is real value in this and that comes from coming to a deeper understanding of myself and my role in what happened and what is happening. If “total conciousness” is the ultimate goal, and I think it is:
The work of ahead of me is to honestly write the story of all of those Octobers and there’s a lot pain there. But the truly great news is that I get to write about what happened towards the end of October and hopefully I have that right this time.
Thanks for Letting Me Share
Even someone who usually romanticizes “Lab Weather” is not going out this morning.
The voice in my head is also capable of facial expressions. Weird, I know.
There probably needs to be a Dewey Decimal System type of thing.
I’m going to say this: When you really, really want to prove you CAN hit a curveball, every pitch becomes a curveball when it leaves the pitcher’s hand and somewhere in the next sixty feet turns into an inside-ish fastball and that can hurt like a real m-fer.
Write on 🤘