Hello, friends 🙂 It’s been a while since I’ve done a blog post on this blog, so here we are. To tell you the truth, I feel like I’ve spent the past several years in a whirlwind, and have finally come out on the other side. And that has been an adjustment in itself.

It’s not easy to make changes in your life, even for the good. It’s not really easy to do anything in life. Life is hard, but we persevere through the bad times in hope of the good. That’s to all of our credit. Human beings are amazing creatures. Resilient and undaunted – audacious, even. That’s to our credit too, when our audacity drives us to boldly pursue the path of truth.

The fact that we all exist on this earth is nothing short of a miracle. Every breath we take is a blessing. Every step we take is an act of faith.

A little humility and gratitude go a long way. So I want to humbly thank all of you who are reading this, all of you who’ve enjoyed my stories and supported my creative efforts over the years, or months – or for however long you’ve been visiting this blog. And if you are new here, welcome and thank you very much for stopping in 🙂 A heartfelt thank-you to all of you.

As much as I’m the author of the content on this site, I want to thank those of you as well who’ve shared your own thoughts and stories here, your great senses of humor and your open-mindedness to adventure – because if we knew all the twists and turns that were coming down the road, the trip wouldn’t be as much fun, now would it? 🙂

Life’s an adventure, that’s the truth. We can look forward to it, or we can dread it. That’s a personal choice, and I’ll wager we’ve all been in one camp or the other at some point in our lives. Despite how dark my stories often are, I’m an eternal optimist at heart. I thank God for that. With how cynical and negative I can be at times, I honestly don’t know how things might’ve panned out otherwise.

This is an ugly thing to admit, but I thrive artistically in a brooding state. This is an even uglier thing to admit, but in the past I’ve used alcohol to induce that brooding state. I’m a pretty neurotic, anxious person (or at least, I used to be), and the benefits of alcohol were two-fold: it both quieted my clamoring mind to focus on the work at hand and at the same time fueled the creative angst. When I’m boozing, the cap’s off my inhibitions, for good and for bad, and all my emotions are right there at the surface, for good and for bad. I don’t have to ‘tap in’ when I’m drunk. It’s a flood I’m bailing myself out of in buckets.

I’m not going to lie, I’ve penned some damn good pieces while writing under the influence. I’ve been prolific under the influence. That was a large part of the temptation not only to keep drinking while writing, but to up the ante, slowly but surely. An insidious dependence that kept growing over the years, spreading and burrowing its tendrils wider and deeper into my life and mind.

But let’s back up for a minute to consider the full picture. Because while writing has been a key part of my life for almost as long as I can remember – and alcohol was increasingly becoming the emotional crutch to my creative endeavors – there were spillovers elsewhere, as well.

I never drank in high school – I was one of those kids staunchly opposed to alcohol. Superior about it, even, which is embarrassing to recall. I’d give my friends shit about partying and drinking, with this high-and-mighty, holier-than-thou attitude. But hey, I was just a dumb kid. What the hell did I know? (Even less than I do now, which is scary.) Anyway, you live and you learn. And the silver lining to my self-righteousness in high school was that it kept me from drinking at a young and formative age, which was a very good thing.

I didn’t drink much in college, either. That was the first time I got drunk, though – on a bottle of Riesling of all things (puke – literally). It wasn’t a pleasant first drinking experience. I went from sober to sick-drunk like falling off a cliff. No buzz to speak of. Pure punishment. I thought alcohol was not for me – an experience and takeaway that kept on repeating the few and far-between times I chose to partake. Looking back on it now, that was a good thing, too.

I began to drink more recreationally in graduate school, although still not very often. It was very much limited to social drinking – I never drank at home, only when I was hanging out with friends. I began to enjoy more of a buzz from drinking, but I rarely had a ‘good night’ where I didn’t end up back at home puking my guts out. There’s a concept called ‘pacing out your drinking’ which took me a long time to figure out. I had this idea in my head that the only way to drink was to pound shots or chug down cocktails like they were going out of style.

Coincidentally or not, this uptick in drinking coincided with the first time in my life when the rubber really began to hit the road for me existentially. I was not happy in graduate school. I was not happy in my family life (my parents had separated just before my senior year of high school, and without siblings, I was the one left alone stranded in the middle, worn down by long years of bitterness and strain). I was growing increasingly discontent in my relationship with a great guy who was just not great for me. The long and short of it was, at the age of twenty-one, I was finally starting to grow up. I’d been a sheltered kid, and as a maturing adult, I was now starting to appreciate the drawbacks of it – I hadn’t been steering the course of my own life, and I was beginning to resent it.

I was not happy with the trajectory I was on, in any sense. But I’m a stubborn person. I didn’t want to quit. So I grit my teeth and did my best to carry on. I endured for years, toiling away under the growing burden of disillusionment and depression, hoping that either I would change or that things would get better. But of course they didn’t – they only got worse. The only good things in my life were my friends and my writing. It was during this time – always while sober, mind you – that I began to write Stasis, which I still consider among my finest work to date.

After four years of weathering this existential crisis, I finally reached a breaking point, and it was total. I pulled the ripcord on everything, all at once. I dashed my mother’s ambitions for me (which were her own). I ended my years-long relationship just short of an engagement. I dropped out of the doctoral program, disappointing my colleagues and mentors and ending my scientific aspirations full-stop. In a matter of weeks, I’d irrevocably altered the course of my life, and as scary and brutal as it was, it was like an invisible boulder had finally rolled off my back.

I took a job – my first real job ever – halfway across the country in a field I knew nothing about: software. A series of trials and tribulations ensued for me on all fronts, unlike anything I’d ever experienced or ever believed I would. I learned a lot about life, a lot about love, and a lot about myself. Years later, in my late twenties, I emerged from it all far from unscathed, but as a fully-matured adult. I knew now, for the first time, what I was truly capable of – for better and for worse. Under the surface, I remained estranged from my family, my friends, and even from myself. But from all outward appearances I was a success.

My writing fell by the wayside during this time. I didn’t think, during these trying years, that I would ever write stories again.

This was the time when I began to drink more regularly, to deal with the stress of work and keeping up appearances. Not every night, but often enough, I would come home from my commute and have a drink or two to take off the edge. It was the relatively harmless, modest beginnings of what would become a pernicious habit, the next time that things in my life got really tough – as things are bound to get.

I can’t remember how it happened now, but eventually I shared some of my writing with my then-boyfriend, now-husband – the seemingly-perpetual WIP that was Stasis. Though he didn’t know anything about Inuyasha or fanfiction, he was so impressed by it that he not only encouraged me to finish Stasis but gave me the idea to start this blog and keep writing stories. So I created this blog. I finished Stasis. Then I finished Transgressions. And the rest, as they say, is history.

But catastrophe was waiting in the wings. It struck in the form of a well-intentioned lie on my part that grew and metastasized into something truly monstrous. Alcohol fueled the monstrousness, which threatened to destroy us more times than once, in more ways than one.

We fled from it, or attempted to flee from it, quite literally. A fresh start in a fresh place. That was what we so desperately wanted and needed after years of rock-bottom heartache–

And then the pandemic struck. Turns out there was another bottom under the rock, after all.

The mass panic, the isolation, the atmosphere of unrelenting anxiety and dread. We lived under the shadow of the Covid pandemic for the better part of two years – all of us. You and I and everyone else. All of us shared in that nightmare. All of us lived under that shadow of death, whether it touched us or not. Two years of chaos, grief and confusion. Two years of life on hold. Two years of time lost to us that we can never get back – those of us who are fortunate enough to have survived the disease itself.

We’ll never know the full extent of the tragedy. So many lives lost. So much suffering inflicted that can never be quantified, let alone rectified. And the lies we were told – the lies worst of all – still plague us to this day. Like the Covid virus itself, they have become endemic, seemingly impossible to stamp out.

Lies breed division by their very nature, and they thrive upon it. Lies beget more lies. Lies are a cancer, and we have an epidemic of that as it is.

The only cure for a lie – and it is a real cure – is the honest truth. But the truth is a hard pill to swallow. Trust me, I know.

I’m a skeptical person, but I’ll admit that I was somewhat naïve going into the pandemic. Only in hindsight did I start to appreciate how naïve I really was. It was a cruel awakening. A real red-pill moment. This newfound awareness to the ways of the world was a good thing to learn, but a difficult thing to accept.

Now that my eyes were open, I felt that I was drowning in lies – both myself and my now-husband did. As analytical, scientifically-minded people, the blatant misuse of statistics to inspire fear and compulsion was beyond reprehensible to us. It was infuriating and demoralizing all at once. It deepened our already profound sense of isolation. It made us both deeply depressed. It was borderline maddening.

Worse still, while we were being smothered by the lies all around us, my old half-dead lie came back to haunt us with a vengeance. The booze came back too, worse than ever. I used it cope, to self-medicate. But it was a slow-working poison that did me no favors. I am convinced now that it only made a bad situation that much worse.

We have all endured a traumatic, unprecedented crisis of our times. Not even our parents and grandparents have a frame of reference for a pandemic of this magnitude and scale. I’ll say it again: we are the survivors of a global, historical crisis. We all need to take the time, if we haven’t already, to grieve not only for our friends and loved ones whom we may have lost to the virus, but for ourselves and the trauma we’ve endured. I’m not a psychologist, but I’m certain that none of us were fully prepared on the psychological front for the bomb-drop of the Covid pandemic and its seismic after-shocks.

What I’m saying may sound controversial, or maybe not. I don’t know. All I know is that it’s heartfelt, and that I sincerely wish the best for us all, going forward. I wish more than anything that we could find a way to put our differences aside and come together with the full collective strength of the human spirit. The past can be a prison if we let it. Only if we can learn from the past, and heal from it will we be able to solve the great problems that stand before us, and those unimaginable ones yet to come. I hope that we will. I believe that we will. I’m an eternal optimist, like I said.

Extremely long digression aside, I started drinking hard liquor pretty much daily by the end of the pandemic. As soon as I was off the clock, and on the days when I wasn’t on the clock, I’d start drinking earlier and earlier. It’s safe to say I was putting away on average four shots of liquor per day. I will also note – because this is extremely important – that I was not drinking nearly enough water, eating right, getting enough exercise, or sleeping through the night. When I didn’t drink, the anxiety was intense. So I’d drink to quell the anxiety. But as it turns out, alcohol induces anxiety. And so the vicious cycle progressed.

I had the sense that my drinking was spiraling out of control. I had the sense that my life was spiraling out of control. I didn’t like it. I felt guilty about it. I felt bad about it, disappointed in myself. I’d hear things from time to time about the dangers of over-drinking – on podcasts and even from people I knew – but I willfully dismissed them. I even read about one of my all-time favorite authors Cormac McCarthy becoming a teetotaler because he realized his drinking was holding him back, and I thought, Yeah, fuck that. I had a visceral, defensive response to the idea of abstaining from alcohol. I thought, Well, that’s them, and this is me. But that wasn’t me – that was the alcohol talking. The alcohol had possessed me. It was the one in the driver’s seat.

As fucked-up as it is, the only thing that could level me out was the very thing that was upending me. I could work just fine sober, for whatever reason. I guess that sort of work uses a different part of my brain. But when I didn’t drink, I couldn’t write. I couldn’t work on my stories. I had too much anxiety. I’d literally pace around the room or the house, with my blood pressure ratcheting up by the second until I did a shot to take the edge off. Rinse and repeat. It began to feel like a Faustian bargain to me, like I was feeding my soul to the devil in exchange for the ability to write.

I was having a lot of other issues besides this, which I’m sure will come as no surprise. I had a hair-trigger temper. Anything that cropped up unexpectedly would set me off into a near panic-attack. My stomach was all fucked-up. I had distressing hot-spots of tenderness and internal pain. It started to dawn on me that I was literally poisoning myself. I was killing myself, slowly but surely, but it still took a good long while for me to gather the wherewithal to put a stop to it.

I’m still not really sure how I did. I can only thank God for it. Day in and day out, I would pray for temperance, but the prayers weren’t really sincere. But I think when they became sincere, that was when I was able to finally kick the habit for good, and it didn’t even take all that long. My heavy drinking tapered off over the course of about a week, and then it was gone.

I think the bottom line is, you can’t really change unless you really want to change. And you have to be prepared to deal with the consequences. Because when you kick a years’ long habit, even a really bad one like alcohol dependency, there are going to be consequences, and they’re not all good.

I struggled to write sober. It was literally like pulling teeth. Many days I just couldn’t do it – couldn’t even attempt it. The aversion was too strong. It’s nothing short of a miracle I was able to eke out enough words here and there to keep my stories going, even at a tortoise crawl.

When you fall into a bad habit, you have to dig yourself out. And over the years, the pit had been dug deep. Alcohol – the crutch I’d used to prop myself up – was also the shovel I’d used to bury myself. I’d allowed myself to believe that I could only write buzzed. The words would only flow when the booze was flowing, that was what I thought. And when you think something strongly enough, it tends to become the truth.

Long story short, it was time to pay the piper, and he had to be paid in full. I had to buy back my artistic soul from the demon I’d pawned it off to, and the price was steep.

I had to learn how to write all over again.

But the first major benefit of weaning myself off alcohol was that I began to sleep better. I began to make healthier choices, because I finally had the energy to make them. I became more even-tempered. Instead of sliding back down into the quagmire of substance abuse, I started to make strides toward a sustainable way of living. I started to gain some real traction, some positive momentum. My anxiety became much more manageable. I found myself forming a new addiction, but a good one – an addiction to clear-headedness and clean, honest living. No, it doesn’t give me the dopamine rush of booze, but it doesn’t leave me with a pounding hangover, either. Or regrets.

I’m happy to say that my writing abilities have returned, and I now firmly believe that they’re better off for it. As I’m typing this out now in a single sitting (3k+ words already, geez!), I’m feeling more optimistic about the future than ever.

So take care of yourselves, y’all, and take care of each other. Life is a gift, so please don’t waste it. Spend time with your friends and family. Drink plenty of water. Eat wholesome food. Get a good night’s sleep and go for walks outside when you can. Live long and well. Enjoy your life, but like Grandma says, “Everything in moderation.”

Seek the truth, and speak the truth. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Understand that the First Amendment is the first for a reason. And truly the best things in life are free. If there’s a price tag attached to something, then it’s at least part of the motive.

And always be on the lookout for hidden fees.

<3