making a chain

dispatch 43

May 17, 2023

Hello friends!

This is the last dispatch that will come your way before my annual summer break lasting through June. We’ll pick back up the first week of July. The funny thing about this break is that while I know I need it, I have been resisting it hard. I thought about re-sending past essays all month, about maybe doing an easier post format…anything to avoid an actual full break because I worry that if I don’t do something 100% perfectly and consistently that I am not doing it at all.

We all need rest, we all deserve rest. We deserve time away from even the things we love when we just need a pause from the need to endlessly say something or produce. In late May of 2021, I was unexpectedly laid off from my job, and alongside the stress of not having an income, the break from a 9-5 made me realize just how much I needed rest. This newsletter came out of that time, as did a whole lot of joyful moments that are not quantifiable but exist in my memory as one of the scariest and best times of my life. So, I’m taking the space for more good things to come.

If you’d like to support my work and receive an additional monthly dispatch you can at the button below. If you’d like to receive the additional dispatch but signing up isn’t financially feasible, reply to this email and I’ll get them your way.

A photo of the flowers at Pike Place market. You can see customers and merchants milling about among the colorful blooms. — "The flower market at Pike Place today in Seattle" by dionhinchcliffe is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

making a chain

When I was in Seattle there was a man who would sit with a five-gallon bucket full of flowers, diligently tucking tender blossoms one-by-one into the cracks in the pavement until they created a colorful border around each square of cement. Sometimes I would see him in the act of creating, other times I’d simply see the evidence. I didn’t get to ask him why he did it or why he was always smiling, but maybe that was reason enough in itself. Each flower was so small and he placed them with such care. There is a magic in that kind of devotion to joy, to that drive to share it. The act of turning something unseen into something beautiful is a gift.

The flower market at Pike Place is famous and I imagine that these small blooms were the discards, not quite perfect enough for sale. Flowers can be like that, too tiny to stand alone, but the perfect size to be a part of something. How lovely then, to place them where everyone can see them, to make them into art. I wonder how he got started, and how he keeps going. I wondered as I saw him sit in the cold wind of a 40-degree day on the water if he does this in winter too. But mostly, I am just grateful for him.

Early sobriety was a whirlwind of so much wonder and fear and so many emotions that had stayed in the dark for so long that I no longer knew their names. I had become estranged from joy, from compassion, from anything beyond survival and just getting through the day. There has been so much written about being kind to yourself in those early days but kindness is easier to read about than to practice. I thought that personal changes happened through control and punishment. Taking care of myself was something new, and I very much needed something new.

So everyday I wrote cheesy one-line affirmations that I did not believe on colorful Post-it notes and put them in my planner and on the inside of my bathroom cabinet. I brought teabags with me everywhere, started to journal, and ate a truly startling amount of banana walnut bread. I tried to meditation and remembering to breathe, made time to learn and read about recovery. And if I am honest, I found every second of all of it tedious and annoying, but it was helping and so I kept doing it, adding links to the chain. Each action, small in itself, built on the others to make me something new.

Like everything else, recovery shifts and changes shape as your life changes. Over time, the colorful Post-its, the physical toolkit full of teas, and even the banana bread fell away as I found new ways to cope. My recovery has shifted countless times in the last five and a half years. I look back on those early days and and miss that earnest willingness to try anything. And I feel like I am in a moment of wanting to claw some of the magic back. To find tiny moments of kindness and joy and tuck them into a line until they become something beautiful, transforming something otherwise mundane.

I want to put my attention on things that are good, not because there aren’t so many bad things to focus on, and not to ignore what requires action, but because I don’t want the narrative of my life to be marked by what I am angry about. I want to practice being kind to myself again and writing stupid gratitude lists and seeing if that helps this swirling dark place in my center. I am craving small things that add up to big things, a way to see the beauty of the pavement within a border of flowers. I am craving devotional joy.

I find myself thinking about the man with the flowers as we move into Spring here and I am surrounded by flowers. Lately, I’ve been writing down one good thing that happens every single day. I don’t worry about writing it so that someone else will read it, I just write one small or big good thing. I catch the meanness that bubbles up when the words that come out of the pen are trite or cliche, because I turn the pages of the notebook and see the long line of them stretching back, forming a chain every bit as beautiful as that man’s flowers. I see that each moment is so small and fleeting and that if I am not careful to honor and keep it, it will be gone. Instead, I add another bloom so that I might see how there is so much good here, so much beauty and so much joy. So that I might notice what I love in my life more than I notice what I don’t.

It makes sobriety feel new again to do these things. To seek out the good for myself so that I may have the space to hone more good for others, to wrap the pavement in a wreath of flowers.

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