Today I celebrated 1,000 days of sobriety. And yet it seems just like another day, which means I am getting used to living this way. My sobriety has taught me a few things over the last 1,000 days. Here are a few:
What we practice, we become.
I ran track in high school. I remember we had t-shirts for the track team that read "Track: where there is a place for everyone." And there was. I wasn't the best, but I got to compete, to try. I learned about how you could both be an individual and part of a team, that it is important to try new things and fail before having competency (let's just say triple jump is hard), and that sometimes your role is to cheer on the sidelines.
New Year's Resolutions Are Like Diets
New year’s resolutions are like diets – many of us have tried them all: writing a list of our goals, picking a word for the year, imagining how you want the year to feel, the year of “yes” or the year of “no”. And most of them leave us feeling unfulfilled, shameful and, most of all, like we need to be fixed.
12 Things I Have Come To Know
Today is my birthday and for the last 8 months I have been thinking I would be turning 49. Thing is, I am only turning 48. Time has become an amorphous thing during this pandemic - or maybe I am at the age where you lose track. However, I feel older. During the last year my body has begun decomposing. Or at least that is how I am thinking about my diagnosis with osteoarthritis that has shown up in my left hip and my neck, and the onset of chronic pain in the last few months.
For me, someone who has relied on my body to do so much – hike mountains and backpack in the wilderness, run half marathons, practice and teach yoga, biked hundreds of miles and more - this feels like a betrayal and a tenderness. Perhaps most accurately what I feel is grief. I have loved my body but also taken it for granted. I have pushed myself to my limits. My body is literally screaming out for a new way of being. I am learning, resisting and slowly accepting. Moving from always doing more to accepting that what I can do is enough. That I am enough.