I’m grateful for a really lovely wedding. I’m grateful to see two people choose so carefully how they wanted their life together to start. I’m grateful for my own path. I’m grateful to be where I am. I’m grateful for the life I’ve been able to live and I’m grateful to be sober today.
Greetings again from the Windy City. I have a lot of experience with weddings, probably too much if we were going to be completely honest about stuff. Weddings do provide an excellent opportunity to take other people’s inventories and while that can be mildly entertaining, I have mostly resisted that impulse. I will say that weddings are amazing opportunities to see, as the Big Book puts it, “self-will run riot.” What I loved about this wedding is that it completely reflected the couple getting married. They did what they wanted and how they wanted it.1 They eschewed a lot of stuff that gets done at weddings, largely because it gets done at other weddings and set their own course very intentionally.
Obviously, that concept resonates pretty strongly with me. Getting sober has been a process of understanding what really should be at my core and then putting in the work to remove what was there and install the new wiring. It required me to understand and accept my self and develop an honest and authentic way of living. When I see two people who kind of already get that, without having to take the long, horrible trip that I did, that makes me very happy.
Weddings are beginnings and this time of year has always been about beginnings for me. My dad was a graduate student and then a professor when I was growing up and Fall was always more of a beginning for me than New Years. Fall often meant starting at new schools, trying to start building new friendships, adapting to new circumstances. Fall was when things started and Labor Day Weekend became, over many years, a time when I would consider where things stood and launch the next year’s campaign.
I was feeling off for most of this week and couldn’t really put my finger on it. Tired, a little listless, not as much enthusiasm. I’ve struggled with fairly serious depression for most of my life and I pay pretty close attention to the indicators that signal the onset of a cycle, but this wasn’t that. I’m pretty obtuse sometimes.2 I finally realized what was generating those feelings—I moved to New York on the Sunday of Labor Day Weekend in 2020.
It was not exactly a triumphal entry. Metaphorically, maybe I was riding a donkey, but no one was spreading cloaks or palm fronds as I wheeled my overloaded luggage cart through La Guardia Airport that Sunday evening. I joke that my arrival in NY was kind of like this:
It was a little more grim than that. I can come up with a lot of over-dramatic ways to characterize it—but it was the first time in my life that I literally had no clue what was coming next. I did know that, in Big Book terms, I had reached the “jumping off” point. I was clinging to about 10 months of sobriety and knew I didn’t have another comeback in me. Things had just been too hard, too destructive and after ten years of fighting to get sober, my tank was empty.
I can’t say that things turned out differently than I expected, because I had no idea what to expect. For better or worse, I was living from one moment to the next, because there wasn’t much of a future to consider. I realized my mood this week has probably been a reflection of how that last week of August really was in 2020. I’m not someone who typically gets emotional at weddings, but I did yesterday. I saw two people starting down a path, their path. We all know about the twists and turns that come later, but there is so much power watching two people commit to each other and to a path that they know is theirs. You could see it last night, you could feel it.
For my nephew and his wife, Fall will always be a time for their beginning.3 Me too. There wasn't cake and dancing for me two years ago at LGA, but I know now that I took the first few steps on my own path that night. The path that led me out. It's two years later and there isn't too much certainty in my life right now, but that's ok. I have a lot of confidence I'm still on the right path. Know why?
Dinner was winding down last night and a guy sitting at my table came back from making a phone call. He had been talking about his daughter’s upcoming wedding and the expense associated with it earlier in the evening and now he wanted to show me what he had had found on the street during his phone call. He held out his hand with a bright, shiny penny in it: “It's come to this, I’m going to need all of these that I can find,” he exclaimed. Me too.4
Thanks for Letting Me Share
They actually insisted on no gifts.
Maybe a lot of the time, you do have to be kind of obtuse to keep drinking as long as I did.
They met during the Fall of their freshmen year.
I have not missed the growing sense of “showmanship” that has been accompanying recent penny discoveries—someone must think that’s funny.