The Beginning… Again

I have always loved writing. As a little girl, I used to have diaries upon diaries and, surprisingly, I would write in all of them. This continued through high school and mostly through college but it trailed off once I got a full-time job. I would write sometimes for a different job later on but nothing like I wanted to.

Writing had been a way to get my feelings and thoughts out on “paper”, or a Word document, as it were. I decided it was time to get back to that. Whether anyone but me ever reads this, that remains to be seen. But it’s time to write, again.

I’m coming up on five years of sobriety. Life has taken many twists and turns in these last five years. I left working for the Catholic Church, which I thought I would never do. I came out to my family and friends, something else I never thought I would do. I was in a very tumultuous and abusive relationship; something I never thought I would allow to happen to me. Through all that and many other things, however, the most surprising of all is that I haven’t taken a drink in five years. Well, four years, eleven months and two days, as of this writing.

I have found a whole new way of living, one that I never thought was possible. I am very grateful; for sobriety and serenity that comes from a life lived differently. Is life perfect? Far from it. But there is an undercurrent of peace that was never in my life previously, even as a child.

I titled this “The Quiet Reckoning”. In getting sober and facing the fact that I was an alcoholic, I had to have an honest account of my life and how I got to where I was. I had to come face-to-face with the fact that I was, and am, gay and how I was going to live with that fact when I had tried so desperately to change it, to change how I was created. I had to come to terms with the God of my understanding, because my life and the longevity of it depended on how I was to relate to that Being.

This didn’t just happen once; it happens every single day. Not in big, grandiose ways, but in the still, the quiet, the mundane. Actually living my life and not just getting through it has been no small task and continues not to be so. But this is my one life that I get to live and I intend to live it as fully and as joyfully as I can. Whether that’s in the quiet or the loud, I will be who my God created me to be.

And so I begin, again.