milestone

So today is my NA birthday. I have been clean 19 years. Happily for me, where I live that isn't such a very long time. In fact, I feel like I can almost play with the big kids, like I am almost old enough where I don't have to eat at the card table with the youngsters, you know? I had a really great day at work. Went to the Indian buffet with a bunch of coworkers to celebrate my birthday and U's, who is my "sister in recovery" with a nineteen years and three days today. Got an array of gifts: lucky bamboo and a gold cat from Japan that waves (I'm not sure if it's waving out the bad luck or waving in the good). I am sure I have placed these things in the wrong corners and completely messed up my chi and fucked up the feng shui, but hey. Admittedly my office is beginning to look like a set for some sort of wannabe cool indy film or something. Last week two of my coworkers brought me a plastic severed foot that expands in water and the next day JS gave me an early birthday gift: farm animal pencil toppers with nose erasers that "sniff out mistakes." Sort of a David Lynch meets Spensers Gifts kind of combination that made me think hmm... And there were an array of other nice things today. K got me a leather belt from the skate shop that has my name on the back. I feel like I am stinting it to wear it without a back tattoo that says something like "delicious" with some sort of goth border or something.

After work I met J at the little step meeting, which grew right out of its room tonight. It was a recovery battle of the bulge. J gave me a cake and we went out to follow your heart with P and J. I bought my favorite vitamins (MegaFoods Unstress) and my favorite yogurt (Brown Cow full fat, thank you very much, with the cream layer on top). J gave me a pink cat clock that will go on my table at work next to the magic 8 ball and the punk duck. Let it never be said I take myself too seriously.

Really the thing was though not the stuff or the cake but just the feeling of being so loved and at home. I got so many calls and emails and cards. Sitting at Follow Your Heart eating potato soup and talking with P and J and J I just felt so content. I remember when I was using I felt so incapable of enacting any change in my life. I didn't feel like an agent at all, and I was so desperately unhappy but I just felt like a victim of circumstance...like an object in misery will remain in misery until acted on by an outside force...the physics of addiction. I remember there was a Kate Bush song that was popular that had a lyric like "I just know that something good is going to happen but I don't know what," and I used to hear that and think something good will happen. I used to go out to clubs and get totally obliterated and wait for something to happen, but I didn't know how to make anything good happen in my life. And tonight I just thought about how much I love my life. Exactly as it is.

And it's a funny thing. Even though I know that I understand how to affect change in my life now. I have a life I love in part because I have worked to get one. But at the same time, I think about how unlikely it is for someone like me to be happy. I wouldn't have bet on that horse. I hear people say in meetings all the time "I deserve this," or "I deserve to be happy," or whatnot. And I don't know; I don't feel like I "deserve" a life as good as the one I have. I am grateful for it and I cherish it, but I think I am more lucky than deserving. So many people don't make it. I always think about Meredith on my birthday, my friend who killed herself when I had five months clean. She was 21, and she jumped out of a ninth-story dormitory window. She and I used to live in the dorm and we would sit in my room, on the ninth floor, and talk about what it would be like to jump. I still miss her and I think about how it could have been me. What am I trying to say here? Just I guess that it's all a blessing. And I guess I think living a life that makes me happy is a privilege not a right for me.

On a related but different note, I got the bound copies of my dissertation in the mail today. I paraded them around like pictures of grandchildren to show everyone in the office. They are baby blue. Then of course, I had to look myself up in the UW library catalog. I now have two entries next to my name. I confess: I've done a vanity search for myself in Google before. I am a validation slut. There, I've admitted it.

I have been collecting websites to post, but they are all at work. Too many of them are political. I think that's part of why I have been so bad about posting here. With the election looming, sometimes I feel like politics is the only thing worth talking about and yet politics depresses me so much sometimes I have to turn off democracy now on the radio lest I swerve into oncoming traffic. More on that note later. In the meantime, here are two sites that made me laugh so much I almost hurt myself: famous films reenacted in thirty seconds by animated bunnies and Strindberg and Helium.

P.S. So I just ran spell check, and it suggested I replace "fucked" with "bucked" or "bucket," "Spensers" with "Spenserian," and "P.S." with "POOH," which I guess is the shit you forgot to say in the main body of the message. Anyway, I thought it was pretty funny. Spenserian gifts...that's like when you write your girlfriend an inscrutable and overly long poem because you don't want to spring for a piece of jewelry, right?