I’m grateful for all of the usual Saturday stuff. I’m grateful the Gristedes across the street has Crunchberries again. I’m grateful for all of the chances to learn. I’m grateful for the times it didn’t work. I’m grateful to be sober today.
I am excited about something that’s coming up tomorrow:
This is a live reading event here in NYC and yours truly will be headed there tomorrow evening (or as absurdly early as I can) to read something I wrote. I’ve mentioned this before and frankly am kind of surprised: (a) that I’m actually going to do this; and (b) I’m only the good kind of nervous, the Christmas Eve kind of nervous. I plan on reading “Equine Therapy,”1 which I’ve posted here before. I was practicing yesterday and if you’d like to listen to it, here it is:
I was thinking about the thing Your Sponsor always says about sobriety being fundamentally a journey of self-discovery and then I thought about how often I say that and then the phrase “beat a dead horse” popped into my head and that seemed really odd since the title of the story is “Equine Therapy.” The point is this: I dreamed of being a writer living in New York since I was a kid. I decorated my rooms in college with New Yorker covers, I had prints of posters from Alice Tully Hall, but I was never able to muster the courage or the resolve to write things that meant something to me and then share them. This made it very difficult to become a writer.
All of this suddenly seems a little surreal, almost unimaginable. I arrived in New York two years ago with the tailspin definitely tightening. Here I am this morning, sitting at my desk, approaching three years of sobriety and writing every day about things that mean something to me and then sharing them.2 I’m not sure I’ll get my chance to read tomorrow night, but if I do, I’m definitely introducing myself this way:
Hi, my name is Randall and I’m an alcoholic.
I know it’s not a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous but I think it’s important to dance with who brung you.
Thanks for Letting Me Share
I posted a reading in Episode 12 of Breakfast with an Alcoholic, but I think this version is much better.
Also, there is a meet-up for Substackers here in New York on the 14th and I will 100% be there.
This post is one serendipitous-but-not penny. Congrats in advance because you’re gonna kill it!
Looking forward to hearing how it goes!