Dust

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"I will show you fear in a handful of dust"
– T.S. Eliot

I keep sitting down to write, and stopping myself halfway through.

I pour out paragraphs of what I think wants out, of what I think you might want to read, and I keep stalling before I get to where I thought I was going. I have no less than a dozen bottled up drafts sitting unpublished on this blog, collecting digital dust on the shelf.

I haven't been listening to myself.

I haven't been taking my own advice.

I haven't been writing as though no one would ever read what I was spewing through my fingers and onto the screen, which is the little trick I try and use to outsmart myself, so that I stay honest, vulnerable, and able to write from my heart instead of my head. 

That stupid, damned head.

It's the same stupid, damned head that got me into trouble in the first place, from too much thinking which always led to too much drinking.

Way too much drinking.

My thoughts always turn into this daisy chain of little red wagons full of suffering, some full of the future, and others, the past, and I willingly towed them around everywhere I went for far too long.

They only grew heavier and harder to pull.

Thinking is exhausting, especially when you're dragging your swollen, heavyweight ego behind you all the time.

And he always hops on for the ride.

I've been in a bit of a (read: very) crusty mood the last few days, brought on by a sobering cocktail of bad sleep, bad diet, bad finances and a bad self-image strong enough to stir up a scarily familiar, intense desire to drink.

I won't.

I can't.

I know better. 

This is a rare situation where thinking actually serves me.

I've arrived at a glorious point in my sobriety where just one quick glance at my track record is enough to turn me off and set me right again, like one of those inflatable clowns that tip over but always pop back up.

Ready for another beating.

It's taken years to inflate myself enough so that I don't just stay there, knocked over and deflated, waiting for something or someone to blow me back up again.

Yet still, the romance is there like a dog-eared storybook filled with the magical lies of a children's fairytale – and I'm the damsel in distress and a drink is my Knight in Shining Armour. 

It's easy to cast yourself as the victim who needs to be rescued, forgetting that you're the one who locked yourself in the tower to begin with. It's easy to wallow alone inside yourself, in some empty room that still somehow feels overcrowded and stuffed with all the things you think you're missing and everything you feel you've lost.

Suffering.

Suffering, because you're clinging to the past and grasping at the future, trying to freeze the ephemeral and capture the fleeting.

Suffering, because you're trying to control the uncontrollable.

Suffering, because you've fallen for the fairytale.

Suffering, because you're trying.

Trying so hard to force things.

I catch myself trying to make water flow upstream and forcing square pegs into round holes – and every time I'm left exhausted and frustrated in a heap in the corner, no good to others or myself. That's how I ended up in the messy predicament I did, after all: addicted and knee deep in dust. It left me choking on mouthfuls of all my past regrets and pleasures, and tripping over all my insecurities around the future, all of them swarming at my feet like ten thousand dusty red-eyed mice.

Dust is just tiny little pieces of things that once were, because everything always leaves something behind.

All that dust builds and collects, and overtime, only ruins whatever is beneath where it settled.

That is, unless you keep sweeping. Unless you keep moving.

Unless you keep what you value shiny, polished and clean; sobriety included. It takes being engaged and not allowing the past to cover everything like dusty sheets draped over furniture in some locked-away room, crammed full of all that you're hoarding and want to keep but have no use for anymore.

All that you're struggling to hold on to.

All that you can't let go.

Struggling and suffering are verbs.

They require action, and for so very long I always assumed they were things that happened to me, when in fact, they were circumstances I brought on myself. I always knew they were, but I struggled to admit it.

I refused to own it.

Just like my addiction, I excused the cause of everything wrong with my life as far away from myself as possible, always ready to justify my next bottle of wine with any number of things from my ten mile long list of Reasons I Deserve a Drink.

I refused to admit that my world was covered in dust because I failed to keep dusting. I chalked it up to the delusion that the world was simply an overly desolate and dusty place.

And, sometimes, it is.

I refused to admit that life felt hard because I was making it hard, and I was making it hard by wanting and by forcing. I kept imagining different than what was, and kept coming up disappointed.

I was making it hard by wishing everything and everyone else had the capacity to stand as still and stuck in time as I was.

Covered in dust.

I'm pretty sure that I've been in a bad mood the last few days because my imagination isn't lining up with my reality, again. That I'm resisting just feeling what I'm feeling. That it's okay to have bad days. That it's okay to let my cravings come and go, and to call them out for the little liars that they are.

That I'm allowed to rest.