Close to the edge

 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 'it's LIFE. life is so painful and dangerous' and I realise again just how anxious he is, just like me, just how near the surface everything feels, and I worry that he will need to find things to soften his experience too, to calm his little mind and heart. And I am reminded again that it's not my fault, not my fault, I did nothing to ask for this bloody brain and neither did Remy, and everything we do to cope with it has been about survival. And yet it is my responsibility to live well with it, if I want to live well. Perhaps we are the luckiest. Perhaps in the end we get to be more alive than most, to live always in that liminal space close to the edge, for the edge of the abyss may also be the edge of heaven.

I have been 'tolerating' not having alcohol in previous sober attempts. Now I need to run towards the freedom of it, the space in my life that alcohol takes up and will be created once it's gone. But what if it is too much, too big, too scary, too raw and intense like life has always been, I wonder if taking anti-anxiety might help at this stage but that is also a way of numbing my experience, of taking the edge off, but how do I live as authentically me in this brain, without alcohol or medication, just accepting everything as it feels, but then I think I will need much better skills in self care, much better strategies to calm down, when reaching for the bottle has been so easy, so quick and simple. But maybe now finally, now the kids are that bit older, and I have a tiny bit of space opening up - even to sit and write this on a Saturday afternoon - i can actually invest in these practices that will help me - baths, walks, breathing, yoga, meditation, writing, eating, just stopping to find my peace. I went for a run this morning in the storm (Storm Bertie) and as I sploshed through the puddles and ran through all the fallen autumn leaves in big soggy yellow piles, with the dog pit-patting next to me like such a good girl and the wind whipping around me blowing the branches of the trees so it felt a bit dangerous, I felt so alive and fit and delighted not to be hungover on a saturday. Thank God. Thank you. Thank me.