You’re Gonna Make It After All

 I have been having an exhilarating time writing these stories for you guys, and I appreciate your readership (you know who you are!). A year ago I couldn’t imagine I would be blogging. I started my writing again in February of this year, with a yellow Mead notebook I bought at the thrift store for 25 cents (kind of like Bryan Adams and his guitar). By May it was full. I called it No Rules: Journal of Recovery and Discovery. That’s where I fleshed out my early blog posts. John let me use his iPad to make posts to my brand new blog, and then in late May I got my own iPad, and I started a journal on it, which took me away from my paper journal, which I felt bad about (I’m a millennial but I’m still a little old school). These days I use both the iPad and a journal, and that’s fun. It’s a “journal of aliveness,” a phrase I got from Mark Nepo. 

This version of myself is so different from the hot mess (not to be cliche…okay I’ll be cliche) I used to be. The hot mess girl was not the girl in college majoring in English. But the hot mess girl could work two jobs and party on the weekends (party on the weekends was just me in my apartment drinking. That’s it). Hot mess girl forgot how to read and write. She forgot she liked Annie Dillard and Anne Lamott, and that she should write her mom a letter every now and then. She forgot she could punctuate and that she loved parentheses (you know I do!). She forgot she had family that cared about her and a sister who might want to do lunch some time (I never made that lunch. I am sorry for all the things we will never do but happy for the things we did do). She forgot, she forgot…and then she remembered. Now days I keep my iPad charged and a hot cup of coffee in the wings.

When I got sober and got out of the hospital my dad texted me: “you’re like Laverne and Shirley. You’re gonna make it after all!!!” Yeah. 

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