Kinder Living

 Re-listening to the audiobook of 'We are the Luckiest', the best book on sobriety I've read, I am struck by her phrase that she used alcohol to 'soften her experience'. And I have been thinking about the raw jaggedness of my experience of living, the sheer intensity of it, as I feel things so much more than others, that it penetrates so much more deeply, and how just the same disposition is showing up in my son Remy. My father used to call me 'thin skinned' and 'sensitive' as if these were good traits but I don't know if it's been good. I have needed to soften my experience, to blur the edges, to numb myself, and it's one of the reasons I can't sit down or rest because I also use work and productivity to do the same, to take my mind away, which is also why gardening is so restful for me being both occupying and in the outdoors. But I worry about my son Remy - the other night he woke with one of his night terrors and he was murmuring ...

 I called this blog 'Kinder Living' because it's the first thing that came into my head. This is meant to be automatic writing so really I shouldn't be punctuating at all but it is a place to pour out all the thoughts and crap and splurge that are accompanying me on this sober journey. The word kinder is about the fact that I am not kind mostly to myself, I am impoverished, I live in such scarcity, such self-denial, so pinching, and I am determined that this next crack at sobriety should not be about denying myself something, or feeling bad or ashamed and penitential but that I am walking into joy, into a wider place, into beauty, into seeing things properly, into being fully alive, into what I deserve, into being lucky, into what I can give myself not what I deny myself, how will I treat myself, I will I LIVE - I want to eat the delicious food I have so often gone without, saving the calories for booze, I want to wear all the sweet smelling face creams and have long ba...