Empathizes

My friend and I have some of the exact same dysfunctions. Difference is that he is sober all of the time and I am not.

I allow myself the Sunday wake and bake. The evening Chardonnay. The afternoon cerveza on a Friday. The Xanax to go to sleep to at night.

I allow those things and my actual reality is kept consistently a little at bay. Just enough removed. Not so much that responsibility ever shakes off completely, I bear the yoke each morning. I'm a soldier.

But I pack myself in cotton. Emotional bubble wrap.

He does not. He likens going through the feelings we have in sobriety to sitting with a red hot anvil in your lap. Unavoidable. Searing. A goddamn inconvenience, and a shitty way to feel.

But he wouldn't go back, either. It's a highway, he says. We have to travel it and getting drunk or stoned is like pulling over for a minute. Or an hour. Or a day. Or six weeks.

And sitting there you forget that the whole point is the highway. And if you get on it, and hit a stormy bit that's filled with curves and treacherous things, you may start to feel the worst you could feel about anything ever.

But if you keep driving at least you know that you won't have to hit that particular crazymaking patch of highway again.

Or, that if you do, you will be better equipped.

I'm getting used to the idea of not sitting by the side of the road waiting for the weather to pass. But I'm not fully committed.