I’m having a tough time (as I’ve written and written and written and written). I’m terrified that something awful will happen to my daughter on her week in Greece, and right now I can’t imagine coping while she’s gone. She lives, I have to point out, more than five hundred miles away from me here in the US so I can’t exactly respond to an emergency when she’s “home.” She is, I will also add, 29 years old, and so far a much better put together human being than I ever was. She is (a daughter is) what at one time I wanted more out of life than anything else. She is more amazing and remarkable than any daughter I could have dreamed up, if I could have described my ideal.
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And so. I’ve planned activities for myself after work when she’s gone. I’ve planned to buy a new computer then (and new Sims!!!) a new toy to distract me. I plan to make lots of meetings. I’m kind of intrigued by the idea of trying to go to all of the meetings in my area’s meeting list, which won’t ever happen because it covers a very wide geographical distance but I think it will be interesting to try. Well, there’s the distance and the fact of that pesky day job.
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I love my job and I am aware that it is an incredible blessing to love your job, a blessing which most people probably never experience. I need to rededicate myself to it because these should be some of my prime working years, and because my work partner will retire probably ten years before I do. I’m also incredibly blessed by being able to work in social services and have a wonderful life because I don’t have to support myself.
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I’m nearing (God willing-Carole hates that, of course God wills it!) thirty-one years sober on May 1st. Should I present at meetings as the basket case I currently am, or is that a bad reflection of long-term sobriety? I don’t know, but I think I should present that way. My problems are luxury problems for sure, luxuries made possible by AA because I was dying without it and certainly could not have brought forth and nurtured new life to the point where it could take itself to Greece unaccompanied … I am a mess, but I’m not self-destructing and actually I am looking for ways, in the midst of this, to CONstruct a better and less anxious me. From someone who was killing myself with alcohol I have evolved into someone who knows with restored sanity that drinking would bring tragedy on all my situations.
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This is what (almost) 31 looks like and I don’t think it’s a bad thing.