730 days ago I woke up sober. I have managed to stay sober since then. That makes today my birthday. There will be cake, preferably chocolate. With cream cheese frosting.
Exactly two years ago -- and for a long time before then -- my life was in absolute tatters. Desperation, depression, panic and quiet denial were all I knew. Hope was at best a distant memory. I generally regarded solitude, comfort and serenity as oblique and beautiful ideas as far removed from reality as really poorly written science fiction. Inner peace, I fathomed, was something you could only achieve in death and maybe not even then.
There are no echoes of that lost-empty outlook now. These days, the world seems a brilliant place to be. Sure, its occasionally shitty for everyone. People are still just people and, people are often assholes. And bad things continue to happen to people who cannot possibly deserve the wrath of man or nature or god or whatever. All that is exactly the same and perhaps it always will be. It's my outlook that has changed. I no longer rail endlessly over the raw injustice of the world, content to sit miserably on my ass as though my self-righteous rage might somehow forgive my own sins. I like to think, instead, about what I can change. I like to think that when I'm lucky enough to wake up in the morning, I may have the opportunity to help someone in some small way. And sometimes that opportunity does come, even if all I can do is smile. Because sometimes, someone will smile back, and while -- in the scale of the universe -- a stranger's smile is tiny and inconsequential, I was there to witness it. And that is good enough for me.
Today has been a good day, and as its now 11:20pm I think its safe to say I'll make it to 731 days sober. Which is only two days away from a prime number. So I got that going for me, which is nice.
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