week 22: lush

was this a loaded prompt or what?

oh, wait i guess loaded is kind of a play on words, it was an accident, i swear.

next month i will have had eighteen months since i last had a drink, in some ways it seem like forever ago, and in others no time at all.

for roughly thirteen years, and nearly every night, i tried to get myself from zero to oblivion as fast as i possibly could. yeah, it wasn't nearly all bad, i had many adventures, and had a lot of fun, but those bad times, well they more than made up for them.

one of the things that i was worried about when i stopped, was that my life would become defined by my sobriety, and that i would talk about little else, looking back over the years, though most of the posts here involved alcohol in some way or another, and i have been trying to keep that in perspective, this blog, when i started it, was two fold, the first was that i needed to follow through with something i started and that i needed to have some sort of productive output in a life that was gradually growing smaller and smaller. the other reason i started this was so that i could literally go back in time and see if i had made any growth or progress in my life and as a person, and aside from the few times that i went on sabbatical (read: was too busy or depressed to bother) i believe that i have been moderately successful in this.

one of the changes in my life is that i don't have to be apart from the world, that i can be a part, and that is huge, for me at least. also, i'm learning that i really determine my level of participation in life and that, for whatever reason, was not something that i ever really "got"in the past. mostly i was rejectecting the world before it had a chance to reject me and that really isn't any way to life.

in some ways i no longer fear the possibility or hell because i had made one here, in my life, that was far worse than anything i've ever read or heard on the concept. for me, and i know that i historically have shied away for this topic, that whatever it is that is out there, god, higher power, etc - it/he/she/it/they, are a connection to something more, more than just me running around bouncing of off random shit. that connection, for me, could be called love, pure love, and that hell is not having a connection to that, the absence of god or love or whatever - and that it wasn't ever a case of, like i used to say, that "whatever it is" not believing in me or that yelling at god was like yelling at a shadow, but that i was afraid to let go and trust after a lifetime of chaos and fear and, and well you get the idea.

the last image in this post was a drawing i did for a t-shirt, i had thought that i was being clever... i really was just being stupid and perhaps a little prophetic.