Day 1,825

I have awakened every single day for the last 1,825 days with the same thought: I can’t drink today. Every. Single. Solitary. Day.

Today, however, in a curious twist of events, I awoke thinking about mopping my kitchen floor, doing a couple of loads of laundry, and, possibly, even giving the bathroom a good once over. I suppose that’s a good thing. It’s a weird thing, though, especially considering that today marks the day that five years ago I had what I like to believe was my last drink.

I have a vague recollection of hearing in some meeting or other about how important the five-year mark is for addicts — some scientific or spiritual mumbo-jumbo about how your brain (and, I suspect, your soul) needs that much time to recover from the damage inflicted upon it. I remember thinking, upon processing this, that it was horseshit.

Imagine then, if you will, my surprise when I awoke this morning thinking about housework rather than my usual alliterative companions — doubt, discomfort, and disease. It was mildly unnerving, but not altogether unpleasant.

Sometimes, as it turns out, it can feel good to be wrong.

I jumped out of bed at the crack of dawn, not because I had an overwhelming desire to get crack-a-lackin’ on the housework, but because I didn’t want to break the spell. I also felt an immediate need to write about it. Truthfully, before this morning, I had made the conscious decision NOT to write anything about hitting the five-year mark.

When I started writing again, I did so to fill my time with something more productive than drinking. Much of that stuff, mostly hand-written, has, hopefully, been turned into something more worthwhile — like an Ikea bookshelf or something equally useful. I came to blogging — virtual paper is much easier and far more environmentally-friendly — a few years into sobriety. I was determined that this would not be a recovery blog. And, if you’d asked me yesterday, I’d have told you that it hasn’t been.

Now, I’m not so sure.

Outside of the fact that I need to make the hovel a bit more presentable, that we are experiencing a clean towel shortage, and that I won’t be drinking anything stronger than a Diet Coke, nothing feels certain today. Maybe that’s the point. Perhaps that’s been the point all along.

I think that the very real possibility exists that this is, indeed, a recovery blog. It just so happens that it’s MY recovery blog. It’s been my way of sorting through the mental detritus so that, in the end, I could wind up here — thinking about cleaning and about writing, instead of about drinking or, more to the point, about not drinking.

Milestones exist in many ways to demonstrate how far we’ve come and how much farther we need to travel in order to reach our destinations. I don’t know how much farther I need to go or whether or not I’ll ever get there. That’s for the universe to decide. I do know how far I’ve come, though.

And that, my friends, is something worth celebrating. Maybe I’ll go nuts, throw caution to the wind, and put a shine on the faucets. They, too, deserve to smile today.

Merry Christmas Eve, everyone!

photo credit: bing