Alcohol hid me out of fear of what might happen if a woman began to believe that loving herself was not differentiated from her faith but an integral part of it. Alcohol kept the beauty of myself safely hidden out of fear of what might happen if a woman began to believe she had the right to love herself the way God loves her. In sobriety, Jesus has seen the part of myself I find most vulnerable, the part of myself I have to work to show, which is of course the heart of myself that is the most true. My drinking meant I was shaped to start each day inside a dark night of the soul, even as the rays of sun suggested I could begin again. I adapted to believing this is how days begin I came to believe that every day I rested in God, I also had to rest in soreness, ache, heartbrokenness, and shame. They set the tone for the day: the muscles governing my movement would be sore, the head housing my mind would ache, the seat of my heart would feel broken, and the voices of my soul would speak only shame. The weird thing about hangovers is that I adapted to them. There is no fear in death because it is destroyed each day when I wake. In the way God resurrected me in sobriety, I am resurrected each day again and again. Sobriety redeemed my mornings from hangovers and transformed them into possibility. My mornings, even at their worst, feel like perfect wakings after years and years of hangovers. My mornings are a mixture of coffee, wishing I could go back to bed, and being grateful I have a morning at all: a chance to breathe and a body that no longer awakens to a hangover but to a different type of life. If you can believe it, this is how I feel now that I love mornings. Before I leave my bed, I will send a good morning tweet of a raccoon meme, even though I know the only way I will meditate is if I meditate before I open Twitter. To this day, I am not a morning person, even as I wake without an alarm by 7 a.m., my body emerging from the grogginess of a trazodone haze and into another day.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |