One Year Ago
I've been thinking, for some reason, that I started my journey on May 26. My archives tell me different, though. It was one year ago today that I left on my journey, pedaling away from the Yorktown Victory Monument in Virginia...away from Pea, our house, and the East coast, where I had lived for almost my entire life.
I'm a little dysthymic at the moment...a lot of up and down with this medication, although, to be fair, I've got a lot of up down without it, so it's somewhat difficult to determine the cause of my mood at any given moment. "One day at a time" really doesn't work for me, as my moods are measured in hours.
I've lost a lot over the past year. Some of it I needed to lose. Weight. Alcohol. The absurd belief that I could continue doing the same things I had been doing and somehow effect positive change in my life at the same time.
Other losses...well, "regret" doesn't quite cover it. There's Pea, of course. This is a woman who, during the four months I was on the road, gave up what should have been her "clean break" period at the end of our relationship to be on the phone with me nearly every day. She knew what I didn't: I was in no shape, mentally or physically, to be attempting what I was attempting. I was alone, hanging by a thread, and had no one. So she was there for me. Every. Day. She was my lifeline. I miss her. Not because of what she did for me, but because she's the kind of person who can do that sort of thing, if that makes any sense.
I want to be able to say, unequivocally, that I'm in a better place now than I was a year ago. Objectively, that's true enough. I've pulled off a whole set of major life changes. Subjectively...subjectively, these are difficult times for me. I might not be drinking, but I'm still well within that period of sobriety when everything that's been suppressed by that anesthetic is hopping about in my skull with frenetic abandon and generally having its way with me.
Had I not been on the road, there is a better than even chance that, if I had just moved back to the city, gotten an apartment, gotten a job...I would have killed myself. Not on purpose. It would have been some stupid accident. Too much alcohol, maybe with Xanax, just another routine attempt to numb myself out that happened to end in vomit and asphyxiation. Instead, via a stubborn, senseless sort of grace, I put myself in a situation which made that impossible.
So, I'm glad I'm alive. I'm glad I'm near the ocean, even though I haven't gone to see it in months. I'm glad I'm finally self-aware enough to recognize where I am in my life, do the work that I need to do, and avoid repeating the mistakes of my past.
Or, at least, avoid repeating them in exactly the same way.
Or...perhaps, if I do repeat them in the same way, making sure that they don't produce the same goddamn results.
