Overcast Day

 

(The view outside my window, 12.18.21)

Yesterday, I observed a year and three months of sobriety. 

I posted the milestone on social networking (Facebook) and am humbled and overwhelmed by the positive and supportive responses. In a continued isolating and uncertain time, it is a comfort to have both an in-person and an online community of love and support. Sometimes it is a challenge to remember that, so I reach for newly recent learned lifelines of (re)connection, gratitude, sobriety, and support, clinging on to gray strands like life depends on it, because in my journey and so many others, it does. I swing on constancy, the pendulum of life: one day, one hour, one minute, sometimes one second at a time, one deep breath with the image of the tranquil blue and gray going in and the image of flames emerging out of the mouth of a dragon. If I don't fall off the pendulum, it's a good day. (In recovery, we attempt to avoid falling off of things as much as possible.) 

A good day can be a meaningful day; a good day can be a hard day; a good day can be a sad day. In reflection, sobriety, and therapy, good continues to be redefined in my mind with fewer extreme contrasts of blackness and whiteness and more layers of gray. Gray is good; gray is perspective; gray can even be beautiful. I learned that some of the most striking photographs are taken on overcast afternoons. 

Growth and recovery continue to hurt, like wounds that burn and itch in the process of healing.  Eventually, I have been advised that scars will someday remain as reflections and observances and won't sting anymore. I am looking forward to the time, most likely on an overcast day, that the scars are completely healed over.

 For now, I am willing to put in the work to achieve the calm, the purpose, the concept that we refer to as serenity, so I can completely, finally affix my own oxygen mask so I can help others breathe.