Loyalty

Fear of the mundane’s got me down.

 I was looking through some writings from before: before I got sober, before I started my years of intensive counselling, before I started taking medication for my ADHD, before I began putting myself first instead of just giving myself care, or maybe just attention, with whatever energy I had left after everyone else got what I told them was theirs. There’s some good stuff, some good writing that I really like, and I find myself wishing I could write like that.

 What I mean by that is that the energy is different, it’s more wild, and is freighted with a sense of urgency that can only come from actual urgency. I find myself intrigued by the guy that wrote that stuff. He’s got some significant issues, and by the feel of it, he’s having a really tough time.

 I know that writing is cathartic for him, and I think that he should do a lot more of it than he does. I checked the dates on his work, and he only writes 4 or 5 pieces every year. That’s better than nothing, but it’s not really enough, not for what he’s trying to do.

 And what is that, exactly? What is he trying to do? I get the sense that he doesn’t really know, and so he’s just trying to get by, to survive. He doesn’t really talk about the challenges of sobriety, that’s not really his focus; he’s concerned about how he got to the point where he felt he needed to drink so much, or do so many drugs. He wants to know why he felt like that was necessary, he wants to know how. He wants to hear himself explain his reasons, but he knows they are all just excuses, and it makes him sick, and it makes him hurt. So he’s sick and he’s hurt, and I’ve got to hand it to him, he doesn’t turn away. He just doesn’t know where to go.

 I love that guy, that 40-something boy who’s learning that you can’t thrive if you can’t heal, and you don’t get to go anywhere if you can’t decide where to go. I feel like he was a better writer than me, but I also remember him saying that writing was really good for him, that it was his path out of the morass that his life has mostly been, but he only writes 4 or 5 pieces a year, and I wrote more than that last week, and the week before that.

 I appreciate him for not giving up. I remember him telling me that the kind of life that creates that kind of writing is not the kind of life that you want to live, not if it’s non-fiction, and that’s a good lesson. The goal was always to write himself out of the life that he didn’t want so that he could write his way into the life that he did, but he had no vision for that life aside from the absence of pain, the same as every addict. It’s a dangerous path to tread, so I stepped off of it.

 Now I worry that my writing sucks because I do it everyday. I know it doesn’t, though I am a little self conscious about my run-on sentences, but that’s how I write, and it’s only a problem if they’re unreadable, which they’re not; I can read them just fine.

 I think the issue is that I was so conditioned to crisis management that I’m not familiar with what happens in it’s absence. That is such a good problem to have!

 My writing doesn’t suck. I’m still going to write 4 or 5 bangers every year. I’m also going to write hundreds of other pieces every year, and a bunch of them are going to be even better, and I owe it all to the guy who quit running from pain, and quit sitting with pain, and instead picked it up, and carries it with him like his wounded brother, onward.