I’m grateful for a day of rain. I’m grateful for a day of the swanky umbrella. I’m grateful for a gorgeous, sunny morning. I’m grateful for taking the days as they come. I’m grateful to be sober today.
Update: One of the newest features here on Substack. You can listen to a snippet of today’s post plus, I like to think of it as being subtitled:
An increasing percentage of the photos that you see posted here or over on Twitter (@ThanksFLMS) are from my perch at the end of the pirate balcony. This may reflect laziness on my part; or it could be that I have a really sweet set-up there, including a very low profile camp chair that keeps me out of the wind, but still maintains the view. It’s a perch from where I can observe the world and not really be observed.1
I’m not sure why that is so appealing to me, but it is. As a kid, I built a very rickety, and probably pretty unsafe, treehouse in the backyard. I was probably nine or ten when I began construction. I will tell you it was my first and only treehouse and some of the construction methods were definitely questionable. It was wedged between the trunk and two branches that forked out enough for to support a piece of plywood. It also had a swanky plywood top, there were no sides, which was a definite safety issue. It could maybe accommodate two people, but that felt kind of dicey. You definitely didn’t want to move around too much when you were up there.
I loved it up there. It was about 12 feet off the ground, so the view wasn’t the same as living 22 stories up, but it was still pretty great. When I climbed up there, got situated and then took in the broad expanse of the backyard, all the way to the lilac bushes behind the garden, I always felt this very pleasant feeling as I realized I was alone.2
I was a solitary kid and grew into kind of a solitary adult. I loved going to the library alone. I loved taking long walks by myself. I loved delivering newspapers in the dark mornings by myself. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t like other people, I very much did, it was just that I felt like I was always under observation. I was kind of awkward, still am, and have always had the sense that I didn’t quite understand other people.
Being alone was my answer to that. I was free to look up all the crazy things I wanted to in the card catalogue, I was free to pursue the things I thought were interesting. There were no raised eyebrows, no expressions of “that’s weird.” Somehow, I came to believe that was the only time I was really free to be myself: When I was alone.
When I think back to some of my favorite perches, my favorite places to be alone, and they cycle past my minds-eye, viewmaster-style, there are a fair number of images of me sitting in bars. When I started drinking as a teenager, it was more about fitting in, drowning the curious, way too wordy inner nerd, keeping him quiet. While I started drinking for assistance in social settings, I soon realized its real power lay in how it made me feel when I was alone.
I kind of wondered why I ended up alone, was it my choice or theirs? Somehow, the thing that metastasized in my brain was that I was alone because I was defective. There was a flaw others could detect and it kept them away, but I was incapable of either seeing or fixing it.
Alcohol rendered that question irrelevant. All of the other questions that would bounce around my head, all of the insecurities and fears that spun around in there, things I would never show anyone else, a few drinks and it all vanished. Drinking was like applying a thick coat of whiteout to my thoughts and feelings. There was definitely something under there, but it was impossible to distinguish now.
Being sober and my time on the pirate balcony (and some other things) have shown me the path back to myself. I love sitting up there, coffee in hand, sporting a sweatshirt these days, and watching the sun come up. During the summer, it would rise over the smokestacks, as we get closer to the autumnal equinox it’s moved about 20 degrees on the horizon, to where it came up this morning.3 I find a great deal of comfort, peace even, at the idea that the world spins around me, not the other way. I find a great deal of comfort, peace even, when I watch the world spin around me and know that I’m in the exactly the place I was meant to occupy.
That was not a reference to the end of the pirate balcony or suggesting that it is my permanent roost. It probably isn’t. What’s permanent is who is sitting out there and why. The phrase on AA chips is “To Thine Own Self Be True.” That’s what AA, the Big Book and working the Steps showed me: How to be true to myself. How to see myself in the world. What I have come to understand, is that when I occupy that spot, the one meant for me, and when I am true to myself, that’s when I feel whole.
I guess that’s one of the things I had to figure out; that being alone was not evidence of a defect or a design flaw. It was just when I was most able to be myself. Now, it’s when I’m most able to see myself and my place in the world. That’s the view that’s pretty fantastic, the one I can hang on to, no matter where I happen to be sitting.
That sounds a little like a creepy St. Francis.
This was our wiffle-ball “Green Monster,” or like the ivy at Wrigley Field.
As depicted in today’s photo.
My story , i don't smoke and drink, but I'm also lonely, but in my case I just was ashamed of my life so much that I so deliberately broke off contacts and now it's a bit too late. I also wrote sth here on substack about how I didn't choose such lonlines)) my best wishes
Have you considered you might be “high functioning” autistic? I realized I was an “Aspie”/Asperger’s/High Functioning before I realized I was an alcoholic. I firmly believe a lot of us alcoholics are autistic. I hear it in the stories... it starts as social lubricant and progresses to self- medication. If I ever wrote about it I think I’d call it “Autism... now without the booze”.1