Struggles

I catch myself again; Looking for you in the doorway. Expecting you to walk out onto the porch, wrap an arm around my shoulder, and hold me close as you did when all the others died. Not this time. No, not this time, you are not here. Still, I won’t believe it; my aching heart skips another beat, my stomach somersaults, recognizing this helpless hope for the impossible possibility – that you are alive. We have all your evidence: an instruction set for painters, heavy typewriters for writing weighty words, for poetry, for Gertrude Stein and Whitman, Bukowski, and Kerouac; in English and approximate French; poetry written down on misaligned keys, characters askew; words for you, words for us, words because we exist; paintings on plywood canvas; lonely sea fences, space bugs, spoons, and barbed wire; Your voice making sense, or making nonsense in our world; Workspace Wednesday. All that you touched, and all you created, everywhere you've been, and everyone you’ve loved, bear witness to your beautiful life. You were extraordinary, Frank. And we, we were blessed. No, I don’t believe you are gone. When your soul’s fragile shell failed, death released your spirit to dance among the atoms of the Universe. You are in the water flowing down the Gunpowder, in the leaves of the grass along Stonesifer Road; riding on cool, sweet air breezes and blue skies, breaking August heat in September; steeping with the Tea in Gainesville; mixing with the soils of the Earth; in our breath and in our blood. For every atom belonging to you belongs to us. When we were young, I would hold you tightly, burry my nose in your hair, and inhale your scent, knowing you were mine and I was yours. Brothers. Caught in this memory, I barely notice the air become still, stagnant July heat on my skin, rain falls, releasing an ephemeral rain-soil scent. Inhaling deeply, I begin again, becoming whole.

As a person who’s life could be described as one traumatic event after another, I’m really good at catastrophic thinking.  I can plan for the worst with the best of them.  I mean, I used to think about the fact that terrorists could hijack a plane and use it as a missile ever time I got on an flight long before 9/11.   ...

I feel that I’ve lost my voice in my writing. Since I started this blog, my posts have been largely confessional in nature. Early on, a lot of my posts were about my struggles with various aspects of the 12 Step world as I understood it at the time. Some, but not all, of those misgivings arose from my own misunderstandings of things. ...

I feel like I lost time this summer. The entire month of July feels like it was lost. Most of August as well. It was hot, and humid, as it always is in Maryland over the summer. I stayed mostly indoors.  ...

Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all. I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of self forgiveness lately. I think that self forgiveness presents a challenge for many people, in and out of recovery. As humans, we often judge our own actions through an unrealistic lens and are particularly hard on ourselves. ...

And acceptance is the answer to all my problems today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing, or situation—some fact of my life—unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing, or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment. … Until I could accept my alcoholism, I could not stay sober; unless I accept life completely on life’s terms, I cannot be happy. ...

I’ve struggled to come up with three things to post today. It’s one of those days when the weight of the world feels heavy on my shoulders. I am grateful to know that I don’t have to shoulder that weight alone. ...

We came here knowing that this trip would be different but it was more challenging than we expected. Prior to heading to NY for a week in the Catskills, all three of us had gotten COVID tests in order to conform with the current NY state guidelines. These guidelines stipulated that we could come to the state provided that we’d had a negative COVID test within three days of arrival and we would agreed to quarantine for three days upon arrival. We would be released from quarantine after getting another COVID test with negative results on the fourth day. In theory this sounded feasible. In practice we faced many hurdles. ...

Things are really hard right now. Every day, I feel overwhelmed. Like so many others, I’m navigating uncharted waters without so much as a compass. The uncertainty of the moment weighs heavily on my mind and the challenges we face as a family feel insurmountable. It’s a game of wack-a-mole. ...

Something that isn’t talked about enough in the rooms of the recovery community — courage. It takes courage to admit that we have a problem. It takes courage to ask for help. It takes courage to leave behind old habits and old coping mechanisms. It takes courage to get honest with ourselves and others. It takes courage to get sober or get clean. ...

Of all the muscles in the body, the heart is probably the most essential. In conjunction with the diaphragm, the heart works to delivering oxygen and nutrients to every other system in the body by pumping blood 24 hours a day. ...

Are you Struggling? Yesterday, one of my Twitter friends sent a tweet saying that she would be deleting her account because she was drinking wine again. A few weeks ago, another friend on Twitter posted that he’d relapsed and he would be deleting his account because he’d promised himself that he wouldn’t keep half-assing sobriety. Perhaps you have seen these messages. Perhaps you’ve sent a similar message. Perhaps you feel an incredible desire to pickup a drink or a drug. Perhaps, you are struggling. ...

Before I begin, I want to say, categorically, that I’m not going to pick up a drink. When I think about the escape that alcohol provides, I can’t help but remember the emotional prison where it held me hostage for so long. ...

The mysterious universe seems to be built upon cycles. Stars are born out of gas clouds and cosmic dust. As the dust spins and collides, heat begins to build, and a proto-star is born. These proto-stars grow in size to become stars. Over the lifetime of a star it expands as it burns off fuel. Stars burn for eons until the fuel is consumed, at which point, they collapse upon themselves forming either white dwarves or black holes. ...

Our world has felt heavy to me for a long time. If I’m honest, it has felt heavy ever since 9/11/2001. That was the day that everything changed. Collectively, we lost our innocence in the United States on that day. ...