Squirrel!

I was just diagnosed with ADHD. I always suspected I fell into that flavour of neurodivergence, so it’s helpful to get the empirical confirmation. I have a strong bias toward the AD part, although in my early years I scored top marks in both attention deficit and hyperactivity. Over course of my life, the most […]

Me, then and now.

So this was me, then: I dive into a new interest, be it an activity, hobby, or a person. I mean, I actually dive into. I go in head first, then my torso follows, and not long after my legs and when my feet disappear, I’m gone. Why is it ‘head over heels’? Shouldn’t it […]

Give and take

The source of my social anxiety fatigue as an introvert is probably not uncommon: I’m an emotional intuitive (an empath). I don’t always act upon my empathy—that requires consciously and intentionally processing what I pick-up and interacting in return with loving kindness. I act on it more now than I did before I entered recovery. […]

no-no noetica

My disease wants me identify with thought, write with proper diction, connect thoughts with logic, compare and contrast, bring hierarchy into order. My soul wants me to live from the heart. At one point about ten years ago, my heart was battered and bruised and short of breath. I shut it down. Locked it up […]

A secular approach to power/lessness

When the Twelve Steps were first formulated in the 1930s, its founders didn’t have the understanding of many aspects of alcoholism and the human condition that we have today. Nevertheless, they did have a very accurate and intimately personal understanding of the experience of alcoholism, its destructive progression, and a nascent grasp on a very […]

Conscious life

“When you feel in yourself the addictive attraction of alcohol, remember these words: You stand between the two worlds of your lesser self and your full self. Your lesser self is tempting and powerful because it is not as responsible, not as loving, and not as disciplined, so it calls you. The other part of […]

trust the process

I recently came to the realization that, for a good portion of the last few years, I’ve been steadfast in the activity of ‘not-dying’ as opposed to truly ‘living’. In the fall of 2022, I made a decision to not end my life and instead reached out for help. At the time, I had been […]