April 16, 2008
Commitment to My Progress
K, there’s more than a few things that I have drafted to write about in here, but I gotta prioritize and go with my gut. My gut says talk about the following…
I saw a blog post recently where this very awesome person mentioned her visual way of tracking her progress. Insert photo of her last month’s calendar, where each day had a large “clean & sober” sticker on it. Wow, I didn’t know they had those. Seeing the photo made me realize how quiet I have been about it. That’s always been my way when I stop drinking for a while. Mum’s the word, outta sight and outta mind. In the past I can see that this was a way to avoid keeping sobriety permanent. I never made a note of the day that I stopped/started either. If I didn’t tell anybody that I was trying to stay clean, nobody could call me on it when they found a drink in my hand! And that’s exactly how the yo-yo has gone since I started drinking in earnest in 1995. It has actually worked well for me this time around because it’s forced me to live into the idea that I must be in control of my thoughts. When I start to think about booze, I immediately tell myself “sorry but that’s 100% not part of my reality right now” and the thought generally disappears. Tight ship, baby. Nothing has leaked in yet. But having Sean to be my accountability partner has been very helpful. I feel that being more honest about it will also be helpful in the long run. I hate to look bad and go back on my word. It’s not the most holistic method of improving one’s life, but the possible embarrassment and shame of showing everyone my failure is a strong motivator… I’m almost 4 months without a drop of alcohol!
Another hard line I’ve taken with myself is probably only 2 weeks solid thus far. Again, I never write down dates because I don’t want to face the failure if I fuck up. Anyway, I’m off celebrity culture. OFF, OMG OFF FOREVER. I never cared for it, but when I got bored I would allow myself to go to a couple sites and just let my eyes glaze over as I mindlessly scrolled through the gossip. Damn, that was hard to admit. I couldn’t understand why I would do that, when consciously I believe that the celebrity culture is poison and don’t even watch or own a TV. In retrospect, just 2 little weeks away from it, I think I can see the lure. It was that mindlessness and the continual updates. No other sites that I visit are updated that quickly. Green news and craftivism and art just aren’t the commodities that the entertainment industry produces. (Or rather, they aren’t valued as such just yet. I see the shift, though. What was once labeled stupid hippie shit is now available in slickly designed packages at your local Target.) And absorbing the antics of someone else’s unfathomably wealthy and unconscious lifestyle does not take any effort. After a hard day’s coding, I could just stare and scroll and shake my head until I was even more bored and had to close the browser tab. See, words are powerful! Even though I’ve been thinking about this lately, seeing the words really rams the point home. I was just making the same bad choice over and over, and there’s no excuse for it and nothing good came from that. So that chapter is done in my life. I look forward to the day when I go to Muxtape and don’t tell Sean “I only heard of this band because some guy in it was dating a ’supermodel’ and then he got caught doing a fuckload of drugs over and over”. Besides, I still hear snippets about entertainers who are using their fame to promote awesome change. Natalie and Alicia could fill a book with their efforts.
So this is my calendar, filled with invisible stickers that proclaim my victory over habits that brought me down. I make the choice again every day to keep drinking and gossip where they belong: as chapters in my life that are over for good. BAM.