I’m grateful for a really good meeting last night. I’m grateful for another morning on the pirate balcony. I’m grateful for not letting tomorrow ruin today. I’m grateful to be sober today.
I was nosing around in the stats last evening, as I often do, and realized I had never re-sorted the posts here from “oldest to newest.” So I did that and I very quickly realized that today, September 6, 2023, is the Two Year Anniversary of Thanks for Letting Me Share!
I had been posting the daily gratitude lists on Twitter since January or February, and sending them to a growing list of friends, at some point over that summer, the idea began to form that maybe I should take advantage of this whole pandemic thing and finally do the writing that I had been talking about doing and thinking about doing and fantasizing about doing, for my entire life. The problem is doing the actual writing thing can often fall short when measured against the very active fantasy writing life that sometimes plays out in my head.
I’ll just summarize: The fantasy writer is not only fabulously successful, but really nice and funny. He was so great on Oprah!
Here was the start of me actually writing something:
Then, I published these two essays, which had been kicking around in various formats for a while. But I finally pulled the trigger and put them out there.
There’s a bit of overlap and repetition, but I was someone coming up on two years of sobriety and this was how my story felt to me back then. I kept posting the gratitude lists every day:
I didn’t let the overnight success go to my head. We added the Podcast and the Liner Notes and things started to grow.
was tricked into joining the enterprise and here we are now! I’m often not sure where this newsletter fits into my life, which by itself is a weird thing to say, and certainly not something I would expect to come out of this mouth. Recent events painted things pretty starkly, in a hard-to-ignore way, and are going to force some re-evaluations on course and speed. But I realized that writing is one of the things that brings me back to myself. It’s maybe the most important thing I do to stay sober.I remember the nearly complete sense of disbelief I felt as people I didn’t know actually began subscribing. The first version of the email that got sent to new subscribers started with “Wow. Thank You.” Because that’s really how it felt and to be honest it feels that way today. That is not a schmaltzy request for more subscriptions. It is meant as a very heartfelt thank you.
The sense of not being enough is a thinking pattern that runs through a lot of alcoholic brains (addicts, too!). For this alcoholic, drinking was one of the things that I used to help propel me forward in life, it was what let me present a manufactured image to the world, and it was what let me ignore the loud voices in my head trying to resolve the conflict between the avatar and the original.1 The problem, as we all know, is that the drinking and using thing can be pretty effective for a long time.
I’d been writing in notebooks for decades and had folders full of writing projects in various cloud-based niches.2 But that kept things confined to the fantasy writer world. It was when I started writing here, that things began to change for me. For one, and I’m not really going to show you any of this, but my writing was very portentous (worse than now) and smug, with a shot of worldly disdain tossed in. Reading it now just makes me want to take steps to avoid ever having to talk to that person.
Writing here was different. I wasn’t writing to promote the avatar; I was writing to express my authentic self.
Or at least that’s what I try to do. I go back and read things I wrote and think, “really?” But you all have stuck it out and I’m not completely sure I can explain why that’s so meaningful to me. But I am going to try.
I always thought that when I told my actual true story, everyone would leave.
That’s maybe a little dramatic, but you get the idea. Here’s something you maybe don’t know. Like everyone, there are low points and high points in my life. With a spooky regularity, every time I get down and start questioning why I’m here at the desk all the time writing this, a feeling which coincides with the “low points,” to be clear, the same thing happens. And I mean this happens literally every time: Someone I don’t know writes me and tells me that something I wrote helped them.
Maybe there’s too much vanity in that, but it’s meant humbly. The AA flywheel works to spin the shitty stuff that happened in my life into valuable, non-dross stuff in someone else’s.3 It is activated by someone sharing their story honestly and authentically and with vulnerability (meaning it is not told to provoke any particular response). The listener/reader finds a nugget in there that helps them look at something in a different way, it can be good or bad. They share that and the wheel turns another revolution.
And that is one of the important ways that the Program of Alcoholics Anonymous saves lives: It shows the alcoholic how much value there is, and has been, in their life and in their story. AA works to somehow turn the darkness in my life into a light that shows someone else the path back to themselves.
Thank you for two years of listening and reading. It turns out that being here, writing this, is when I’m most myself. It’s one of the most important things I do to stay sober. And I know that writing this (and some other stuff) is what the Big Guy was talking about on 86th Street the other day:
You held on to you.
Thanks for letting me share. You really have no idea what this means to me.
Of course , the Avatar is going to hold the upper hand, owing to better physical conditioning, superior weapons and re-spawning.
I still run across a rogue folder every now and read what I used to write. Wow, I was kind of a dick.
I’m mixing a lot of “wheel” metaphors, including Rumplestiltskin, but excluding Chuck Woolery and Vanna White.
Happy two-year Substackiversary! I, for one, am incredibly glad you started writing here and that I found you -- I get so much out of your sharing, so thank you.
Thanks for sharing (writing.) one alcoholic helping another, the cornerstone of recovery! I read it every morning, part of my morning routine, and it helps keep me sober. For that, I thank you! 🙏🏻