Waking oh so slow

 

 

I am bumbling around finding poetry books and coffee cups and semi–guttered scented candles. My housemate at the age of 68 is going white water rafting on the Orange Riiver,  I  am sick with fear and try not to show it. We do    what    we need  to do.

I woke up wishing I had someone to talk with. I am suddenly very lonely and uncertain right in the midst of my uncertain life. I talk to my beloved sober friends and they say  nothing. I know they care for me. They don’t see the lostness.

One of   my    images   of  P ower   is Maybelline, best reverenced by Chuck Berry. Not a gal to slow anything down. I suppose I am a stranger in an open car.

One of these day I shall be decisive and lucid again. I am right out in the Amazon, the Sahara, the strange hours before my friend Aletta died. Just bearing witness and checking for bed sores, sips of water, presence. How often do I think of Pam at her mother’s bedside.

The light shines more brightly in darkness.

And she will always carry on

 

 My little dogs found a fallen egg at the back of the garden and rolled it under several Polygala bushes, over gravel, along a  rough brick path, up a step and into the kitchen where I retrieved it. Whole, unscathed, and smaller than a hen’s egg, creamy and faintly speckled, stone cold. I have no idea whether it fell out of a nest or was left in a grassy hollow. How astonishing.

Echoes of Samhain are drifting my way from across the oceans. Even as I repot pelargoniums and  go out into the garden with a watering can, the sun hot on the back of my neck, there is a sense of darkening, endings, descent. In night dreams and daydreams, I feel a sense of separation and liminality. Dreams  stay with me like cobwebs tickling the face on waking in the morning, insubstantial but lingering, haunting.

Two years ago while engaging with the Steps very enthusiastically and unskilfully, I wrote to an older woman who was living in a small cottage somewhere in the Forest of Dean, 30 years sober and a great-grandmother, to ask how I should go about searching for helpful images of a Higher Power. That is how I thought and acted in my unguarded moments back then. She wrote and  told me that the Power at work in others like me, call it the Divine, the Source, G-d, a Still Small Voice, that Power would find me, I need not worry too much about it.

In those months it didn’t feel as if anything was likely to find me. I had buried  all my emotions and intuitions deep under several decades of numbing and dulling behaviours and even I couldn’t find much of myself to work with. So I wrote to  the wise woman I shall call Sara and asked her about her own Higher Power. Sara wrote back with a recipe for apple and blackberry crumble and said vaguely that her Higher Power was quite elusive, more like a fragrance than a dogma.   Which reminds me of the old Pretenders song:

And she will always carry on

something is lost

but something is found

they will keep on speaking her name

some things change

some stay the same

 

But some things can’t be rushed in recovery and I’m still out there amidst the rubble with an arbitrary compass and lousy sense of direction. In about a decade or so I might have something to say on the Power that comes into our lives in sobriety and changes everything.

My housemate may be travelling up north to Limpopo in early December for health-care work and I am worried sick about her being at risk from malaria and heat stroke and snakebite. I am also envious because I wish it was me going on a big adventure.

If you are working yourself into a frenzy for Nanowrimo or if you love the writing of Annie Dillard, you might want to read this tribute to a writing course. Yes, it really is that much work.

If you’re doing your job, the reader feels what you felt. You don’t have to tell the reader how to feel. No one likes to be told how to feel about something. And if you doubt that, just go ahead. Try and tell someone how to feel.

 
A much-loved friend called me from the UK yesterday and in the course of a long and enthralling conversation (shoes and ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings) talked to me about  my brother and how limiting it may be that I only understand his situation  through reports given by third parties. She also talked to me about ‘untreated Alanons’ or codependents who keep doing the same thing over and over again and seeking out alcoholics whom they can ‘rescue’, and with whom they can become enmeshed. How the role of being a martyr or saviour allows them to control the story. That labelling her ex-husband as a hopeless alcoholic would allow my sister-in-law, the successful lawyer, to criminalize him and turn everyone against him. I sat and thought about this afterwards: how alcoholism is so stigmatised and misunderstood, and at the same time stereotyped. It hasn’t occurred to me once to wonder if my brother might have another more complex and contradictory narrative of his own to share. I don’t even know if he has tried to get help. In fact I don’t even know if he is alcoholic or if there may be another problem there, a mood disorder or PTSD. All the information I have comes from his ex-wife who has divorced him and has sole custody of the children.  Everyone believes her, nobody believes him. Because we all know what alcoholics are like.

Sometimes I wonder what it takes to learn to think clearly in a society filled with so many self-serving misconceptions. Let me go and chop carrots and celery for a lamb daube.

Eye of the heart

The wind has dropped and there are bees fumbling in the lavender spires, geckos dozing on sun-warmed stones, a heady fragrance of sweet lavender and bruised rosemary where the dogs have pushed under the bushes. I love mornings like this. Everything inside me goes quiet and receptive, the noise stops, the clutter falls away. I am in Presence, something I cannot define or even begin to understand, a Presence both immanent and transcendent, and my world fills with visible and unseen light. I gaze on all that surrounds me with the eye of the heart.

Leap and the net will appear. One of my favourite food writers/bloggers has made the leap to become a published writer. Although it is limiting to call her a food writer, since she makes it clear that to write about food is to write about love, nurture, life. And the journey is what matters.

Now, do you know what I wish I could do? I wish I could go back to that night, slip into that room with the girl sitting in that chair, and wrap her up in a big hug. Trust me, I’d say. Trust me. It won’t always feel this way. And she’d know I was right.

My beloved housemate is feeling much better and I am grateful for that. I have managed to let go, just a little, of the oppressive helplessness I feel about my alcoholic brother, whom I remember best as the small red-headed boy who used to follow me around the house trying to show me how his toy train engine worked. I will always be his Big Sister and that is precisely the role I cannot play right now. Getting sober is such a simple thing. But not all of us are ready. I could never have sobered up for anyone else, and my brother will not sober up for the little daughters he has not seen in two years. He has to see for himself that his one precious life is sliding away out of sight and understand for himself what must be done. I read with gratitude the raw honesty of Syd talking about what happened and just let go an hour at a time.

We can’t help those who don’t want to help themselves. I have no idea why something so simple should escape  my conscious thinking so often. It reminds me of the way I wake up some mornings with a start, wondering how I am going to deal with situations that lie far ahead in the future, six months or seven years away. What will I do if I need another retinal operation next year? What will we do when Afghanistan comes to America? What will I do when peak oil runs out? What will I do if my brother doesn’t get sober by 2012 when the world is due to end according to the Mayan calendar?

Meanwhile the bees are thrumming in the blue lavender spires and the lizards bask on flat stones in the sun, and today is more than enough, the present moment is more than enough …  and all I really have to do is stay sober today and I might have a future tomorrow.

 

Treading water, head up

 

This morning I heard from my cousin in Zimbabwe who has had an email from my actively alcoholic brother in the United States. My  brother has a court appearance pending for breaking several restraining orders and wants to do a quick geographical escape back to Africa. How my heart sinks when I read his aggrieved and bitter emails to my cousin, the  insistence that nothing is his fault, the accusations against his ex-wife and the torrential self-pity. It could be my own voice some years back. And like me, he is filled with nostalgia for a country that no longer exists. There is no home for him to return to, no farm, no parental house, no safe place, no hideaway. And unless he sobers up, no place for him in human society.

The elderly neighbour who was assaulted and burgled last week has had a severe stroke and is in a deep coma. He may not recover. How terrible to have one’s life peter out in rage and fear: in the days and nights before his stroke, the neighbour went about armed at all times, threatening  any black person who walked down the street, sitting up nights with a loaded gun at hand. But the attack came from within the cordoned heart, as is so often the case.

The festive season is at hand, a time of year I dread and associate with family chaos, suicides, drunken car accidents and ugly conflict, greed and recklessness. In the last couple of years, sober and grounded, I plan for a quiet time with friends, lowered expectations, time spent going to meetings,  gardening, reading, writing letters and  sharing meals with  lonely neighbours or those who are struggling in the recession, those trying to get sober. I discourage the giving of gifts and ask friends to donate to battered women’s shelters and homes for Aids orphans. Doing the next right thing helps and I know that the key is to enlarge my life, live more fully, open to loss and sadness along with the hope for times of happy togetherness. The ‘littleness’ of my life as an alcoholic still appalls me, the tunnel vision and closed circle of concerns and lack of vision. I do know all this, and each morning I remind myself that gratitude is not just a passive attitude but also an action, a way of showing my thankfulness for all the sobriety. But still the fear follows my heels at this time of year, breathing chills down my neck.

 

One of those days when the Serenity Prayer is a balm to my spirit.

 

God,

Grant me the serenity

to accept
the things I cannot change,
the courage to change
the things I can, and the
wisdom to know the difference,

Living one day at a time,
enjoying one moment at a time,
accepting hardship as a pathway to peace,
 taking this sinful world as it is,
not as I would have it,
Trusting that you will make all things
right if I surrender to your will,
so that I may be reasonably happy
in this life, and supremely happy
with you forever in the next.

Looking in the mirror

 

Somebody emailed me and asked: what is wrong with counting drinks?

Well, nothing, if you are doing it with calories in mind. I suppose. But I used to work out that I could have five glasses of wine before I had to go out in the evening. I would work out that if I drank for three hours, I would have another two hours to sober up, have  a bath, drink black coffee, dress, fake sobriety. But after three or four glasses of wine a simpler solution would present itself. I would call up the person who had invited me to her birthday party or book club and I would talk in a slow thick  nasally voice,  a voice heavy with feigned regret, explaining that I had flu. I would apologise for not being there and say I felt bad  for letting her down. She would be kind over the phone, disappointed or exasperated but kind. And then I would have a free evening! As many glasses of wine as I wanted. No sums necessary.

 

When I was five months sober I went off on a 4th Step retreat. I had already done my 4th and 5th Steps and felt this would make it an easy time, a walk in the park. I hadn’t yet realised that the Steps were a lifelong process and would work me. Off I went, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

We sat out in the dusty veld in small cottages with more cold water than hot. In the meetings after the meetings, I listened to joky trade unionists and  enraged housewives and wistful men in search of the ultimate woman. We were sent out to sit under eucalyptus trees to sit and read Step 4  as discussed in the 12×12. I never read that book without the smell of eucalyptus and peppery dust filling my memory.

On the third day of the retreat I was sitting out  under my eucalyptus tree swatting flies and wishing I could take over the cooking of the food, when I came across a sentence in that 12×12.

The primary fact that we fail to recognize is our total inability to form a true partnership with another human being.

 

I read that and my world tilted. I began to understand how blunted and numbed and alone I really was. I came to an understanding that has informed my life ever since and which may not be true for everyone but has helped me stay sober.

As an active alcoholic I was incapable of relationship.

If you are involved with an active alcoholic or drug addict, there is no relationship. Period.

While I was making my amends,  I spoke with a former lover. She heard me out and then she said:

“What I liked was when you were not too drunk, and you were warm and sweet and sexy and funny. And I loved how you used to say you needed me the next day when you were so ill and sorry for what you had done. Those times kept me going.”

“I was lying,” I said to her. Her eyes hardened and she began to distance from the hard truth I had spoken.

The primary fact that we fail to recognize is our total inability to form a true partnership with another human being.

Storm breaking

 

 

A dark and rainy Monday with gale-force winds pounding our coastline and warnings  about flash floods here in the mountains. My housemate had another very painful and prolonged angina attack yesterday and is very pale and tired. I feel sick with worry. Health is  a blessing we only appreciate when it isn’t there to be taken for granted.

A number of readers are turning up on my blog  from the Orange Papers, that scourge of the naive in AA. I wonder if they see me as a secret heretic and One of Them, or if they pine for  the cosy fellowship of a grubby church hall where everybody knows your first name? I’m also puzzled but pleased to see all the readers popping across from the Junky Wives Club, another cosy spot  full of ambivalence, codependency and hothouse confessions. And then there are all those who hopefully Google ‘how many drinks before one passes out?‘, another unlikely source of readers. If you are counting your drinks, you just might have a little problem and I am not here to help with the sums.

 

And as rain pelts the window panes and tears rose petals off the Tradescantia, I have been sitting looking at the only known live footage of  the young Anne Frank leaning out of a window in Amsterdam, on a summer’s day in 1941. She leans out to see a newly wed couple walk out of the house next door. Twenty seconds of Anne Frank leaning out of a window, a 12-year-old girl who  is keeping a diary (Dear Kitty) that will carry her into  history. Before the Nazis made her wear a five-pointed yellow star that stigmatised her as Jewish. Before her family went into hiding in the Secret Annexe. Before she was taken to Bergen-Belsen. I feel I am watching a ghost.

As Stefany Anne Golberg muses:

‘It’s funny how ghosts always appear at windows. They’re always trying to get in, peering out, or — seen from outside wandering back and forth — floating in and out of the window’s frame. Think Catherine in Wuthering Heights, Peter Quint in Turn of the Screw, the charming maiden in The Deserted House, Poe’s The Haunted Palace…the list is long. Nothing represents longing and loss like a window, especially a haunted one. It’s no wonder that the word “haunt” has its roots in the word “home.” Ghosts are always trying to find their way home, or find themselves lost in a home where they are unwanted. Even when they are in a home, they never feel “at home.” Ghosts are permanently homeless. They live in the space between inside and outside, between home and not home, like a window. Lurking about a window, the ghost hopes to see and be seen, aching to be free. But ghosts are by definition in limbo, and therefore never free.’

Hauntings. I have had an email from my friend Michael who is six and a half years sober. He writes:

‘The damage caused by drinking is vast, capillary, fascinating, and ultimately subjective. I don’t think there’s anything else quite like drinking, and that’s why analogies to, say, physical and mental illness or moral shortcomings fail.

The slow realization of the damage done I referred to is more like awaking than wallowing in the past. For example, I am at last acknowledging many efforts on others’ part to help that at the time I rejected out of hand. (Attempts to help often come from hated sources.) 

But of course I am also concerned with real mental damage — and perhaps over-compensating now.’

 

How my friends make me think! And I shiver each time I read the word ‘damage’. And look at the slow awakening that in my case has also been a darkening despite the hopefulness and restitution. A time of taking stock and the descent into painful self-knowledge. Drinking takes us into the Underworld, that plutonic darkness and anomie, and how many of us shrink from the sunlight as we emerge!

Later. And then the storm broke and the electricity went off and I sat with books and a spiral-backed notebook drinking green tea and scribbling away. Thoughts on healing and haunting and what the word ‘recovery’ holds, a great treasure.

When nothing changes

 

My life is filling up with friends who are at various stages of getting sober. Which is a wonderful thing and helps me stay sober and grateful. The night before last, somebody living  on the other side of this vast country  rang me up. We had been emailing back and forth and I had thought she was doing fairly well. She called me at 10pm and I could tell right away she was drunk as a skunk.

Unsober Cynthia: Oh Mary I just wanted to talk to you. You have done so much to help me. Oh Mary well I just wanted to you know say hi.

Mary (in a friendly but exasperated tone): You’re drunk, damn it. Get some sleep and call me tomorrow if you want to get sober.

Unsober Cynthia: I slipped! I had a small glass of wine! And then a bottle! How could I do this to you, you’ve done so much and I never meant to hurt you like this, how could I do this, what is wrong with me, why do I always, life is so messy and unpredictable, etc etc

Mary: It’s fine Cynthia, I’m sober and life makes perfect sense to me. Put the phone down and get some sleep.

Of course she wouldn’t put the phone down, so I did. Then I shook my head ruefully and had a hot bath and forgot all about the conversation. Not my problem. And I’ve been there myself, yammering on and on full of phony remorse and exaggerated feelings and far too much gin.  It took me almost 30 years to sober up after realising there was something horribly wrong with my drinking. You’re not ready until you’re ready. And I have learned through long experience not to argue with drunks.

At 7am the next morning Cynthia’s husband called me. I shall call him Cedric because I have always liked that name, all manly and Olde English.

Cedric: Mary, what are we going to do about Cynthia? She looks like hell this morning. I’m not much better, sat up all night  going over things in my head. God, what a mess. Just called her employer to say she’s back on the booze again. He’s at his wit’s end too, was nearly in tears on the phone. He told me that if Cyn was his wife, he’d have killed himself years ago. Doesn’t know how I keep going. She won’t listen to reason, never has. I’m taking the week off work to sort out finances and  make sure she feels supported, but I know it won’t do any good. So devious! You’re our last hope.

Mary (under my breath): Oh Cedric I do wish you were an alcoholic. (Aloud) Have you tried Alanon? You need to detach.  We didn’t cause it, we can’t control it, we certainly can’t cure it.

But when I put the phone down, my own inner Cedric surfaces like Banquo’s ghost.  I grew up trying to save and protect and care for an alcoholic mother. I grew up in a household with a man who had a desperate need or compulsion to have sex with children. If you want a revealing but pessimistic overview of sexual addiction, just ask the daughter of a paedophile.

Years ago, when I was 19 years old and doing well at university, I entered a short story competition. My story was carefully crafted and all my friends admired it. It was about infidelity, a kind of  borrowing from Madame Bovary, set in a dreamlike landscape with a few thoughts on the disappointments of marriage and a surprise ending.  My story didn’t win any prizes.  I didn’t get even a mention and was bitterly disappointed. We could get feedback from the judges and I went along, feeling genuinely puzzled. What was so wrong with my story?

The judge was a retired teacher, a very gifted man who was a published writer himself. I sat down in his office with immense trepidation and some curiosity. What was wrong with my story? The judge looked at me and there was a long silence. Then he told me something that went like this:

‘You see,’ he said slowly and quietly, ‘there is a big problem, a bigger problem than you might realise. Deep down you think writing is some kind of game, a way of pleasing and impressing others, a way of showing off. You wrote this little fiction with the judges in mind, you wanted to please everyone who read you. A remarkable attunement to what you feel would be required of you. I suspect you think that life is a shabby unfair sort of muddle and  needs to be made appealing and delightful  by writing. You think that by producing a palatable version of reality, you can convince others you know something about  relationships and conflicts of which  you have no experience. There isn’t a truthful word in this little piece of nonsense. You are not going to take your own writing seriously until you learn to take life itself seriously.’

I was too stunned to say anything and I walked back through the university town in a state of shock. Attunement. Because I lived with reactive and chaotic parents I had grown up second-guessing them and  pretending my home life wasn’t as frightening and dangerous as it was. I had developed great empathy with others: I knew what teachers wanted from  me, I could placate bullies, I was a born mediator. I could mimick maturity and all those warm fuzzy feelings I didn’t really have. Attunement. I had no voice of my own, I didn’t trust my own intuitions and feelings. I wasn’t sure I had feelings and intuitions because I had just survived by my wits for so long.

I had never understood that there is a relationship between writing and reality. I had thought I could invent and make up stories and that would be enough. I didn’t realise that the writing life is grounded in accountability. That truth matters. That readers do not want to read a bright shining lie.

When I sobered up, this is the angel in the house I had to kill. The part of myself that keeps insisting that everything is fine and I can sort out things all by myself without bothering anyone else. The part of me that wants to reassure others and let them think I am someone to be admired and able to cope. That soothing, calming, comforting part of myself that wants to make things all right for everyone else. The part of me that wants nothing to change because I can just keep faking it, saying lovely misleading things that fool some of the people some of the time. The part of me that persists in believing I can do for others what they will not do for themselves.

The part of me that wants to control the story at the expense of truth. And has to stand back and let Cedric find his own way forward.

Staying silent will not protect you

 

Thinking about the bottom line. Two things happened this week that called for responses and confrontation, not easy at all.

When I was out shopping  in the village the other afternoon, I saw a mother who lives a few streets away walking with her young daughter. I thought the mother looked flushed and excitable, but didn’t pay much attention. We waved to one another. The same night I was about to go to bed at 11pm and looked through the living room window to see the little girl, about five years old, sitting across the road by herself in the dark. She was sitting there because mine was the only house in the road with lighted windows. I called her inside. She said her mother had forgotten to keep a door open for her and had been asleep for a long time. Her mother had put her outside for being naughty.

I feel it is important not to ask a child questions that may incriminate a parent. It isn’t fair to the child and they will usually lie to protect the parent. The truth for a child is that loyalty owed to a parent rather than the  truth owed to a stranger. I saw that the child had bruises on her arm and worked out for myself that the mother had flown into a drunken rage and hit the child, locked her out of the house and had then passed out. I called an aunt in a nearby village and asked her to come and collect the little girl. By the time the aunt arrived, the child was asleep, so I could speak freely to the aunt.

The mother drinks and hits the child. The aunt was happy to take the child but does not want to say anything to the police or social welfare that might  lead to her sister getting into trouble. Family loyalty again. She took the child with her and said she would  make sure her sister was sober before returning the child to her.

So, the next morning I called someone I know in social welfare, talked to her about child battering and said I would be available as a witness if the police became involved. Social welfare will investigate the case. I am willing to talk with the mother, but doubt she will want to speak with me. I hope she gets sober and seeks professional help before her child is taken away from her.

As alcoholics we all know that our behaviour verges on criminal or anti-social at times. Alcoholism takes many of us to places we never imagined, way beyond any norms of decency or safety. And sometimes others do have to step in and protect the innocent from us. There is a documented history relating to cycles of violence and battering that show  the violence escalates over time. It gets worse. I grew up in a household where my father battered my alcoholic mother. Both my father and mother beat us children, punching us, kicking us and beating us with sticks or whips. The escalating family violence only stopped when my mother was taken to hospital with a broken jaw and my father had a call from the police. So I have no compunction about stepping in when a child  is living with violence.

The second  incident was  another kind of challenge . In the local newsletter, a sportsman who is well-known in this area  gave an interview about how his drinking had ruined his life. He said that being a member of AA had helped him. He felt very much at home in AA and found his fellow members of AA to be great friends and very kind people. Then he said: ‘These days I drink much less and don’t have to worry about my drinking because AA has given me such good advice.’

The sportsman himself is no doubt ensconced in denial and happily so. In time, he may come to learn something both about alcoholism and his good friends in AA that will surprise him. But that little newsletter is widely read out here in the countryside and I felt some intervention was called for in terms of responsible reporting. So I rang the journalist and explained why I wanted him to publish a correction from an anonymous source in AA. I explained that the name Alcoholic Anonymous  is about alcoholics staying anonymous. And that AA does not think alcoholics can drink in moderation. The journalist was happy to publish the correction.

Accountability, knowing when to speak up, when to confront and when to keep silent. Something I have learned about in AA and from listening to friends in Alanon.

Insalata Caprese

 

This weekend I am putting together the first Caprese salad of summer, if I can get good-enough ingredients at the farmers’ market tomorrow. You need very ripe and juicy tomatoes, plenty of flavour. Fresh basil leaves, torn. And fresh, dripping buffalo-milk mozzarella. If you can’t get those three, make something else instead. I have made a passable Caprese with rocket (arugula) leaves but I can imagine the foodie  isle of Capri recoiling in shock, rearing out of the waves like an outraged Aphrodite. Basil and tomato go together sublimely for long summer luncheons al fresco.

They do best when grown together too: I grow cherry tomatoes with basil interplanted in a large pot andthey go into some kind of symbiotic overdrive and produce fruit and basil foliage like crazy. If you’re new to gardening remember never to plant rue anywhere near basil. Rue is a very strange witchy herb that can kill a small green bush of basil before you have time to say abracadabra. Most of the basil varieties are quite tough and  will keep going  into the autumn. The quintessential fragrance of summer for me is a handful of just-picked basil from the garden, spicy and with that elusive hint of nutmeg and clove.

2 pounds vine-ripened tomatoes (about 4 large beefeater types, use eight Rosa tomatoes), sliced 1/4 inch thick

1 pound dripping- fresh buffalo-milk mozzarella, sliced1/4 inch thick

1/4 cup packed fresh basil  leaves

3 to 4 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, as green and peppery as you can afford 

fine Maldon sea salt to taste

freshly ground black pepper to taste

On a large attractive round or oval platter arrange circles of  tomato and mozzarella slices and torn basil leaves, alternating and overlapping them. Drizzle with olive oil. Season salad with salt and pepper. This is done right at the end and only takes about five or six minutes. Some people like a small splash of balsamic vinegar but it isn’t necessary.

 

Serves four to six  fairly greedy people. I serve this  as a side dish with grilled lamb or spatchcocked chicken, but it also works well with a deep dish of oven-roast vegetables.

Dear diary, let me confide

 

How did I come to blogging? While making a Thai tomato soup with fresh coriander last night I found myself thinking about how I came to join the recovery blogging community, a key source of inspiration, friendship and support for me in sobriety. But where did it all start?

This is my letter to the world/that never wrote to me

This goes back to prehistory in Internet terms, a time when personal computers walked the earth like dinosaurs. In 1995 I got my first home computer and  began exploring the  world wide web with the search engine of Alta Vista. I had no idea what I was looking for and no idea how big the Internet was even then. But that same evening I found my first web diary, aspirant screenwriter Diane Patterson’s The Paperwork, and then online diaries by Justin Hall and Carolyn Burke. This last is often credited as the first web diarist, the first  person to take a private diary online in January 1995. In 1998 Bruce Ableson started Open Diary and the idea of keeping a web journal took off in a way that baffled many Internet users who thought home computers were for geeks to play Dragons and Dungeons. Within a few years, there were thousands of diarists or escribitionists online, talking about their daily lives and political beliefs and religious convictions, what they had eaten for supper, the dream from which they had woken, the suspicion that their husbands were cheating on them. It was kiss-and-tell time on the web.

Because I had kept diaries in exercise books since the age of 11, I knew right away that this kind of activity was ideal for me. Over the next decade I started and stopped many web journals of my own. I read online diaries with increasing fascination, read articles about online diaries. When Gus lost his job with a dot-com because of libellous diary comments, I was taken aback. The flaming wars  were savage and unexpected. And the web diaries were ephemeral. Diarists would build up a following and then would vanish without warning. Or, like Ophelia Z, would suddenly tell us that she was in fact a Japanese-American male who had been composing spoof entries. Gradually the diaries or web journalers gave way to blogs and the mystery of hyperlinking. Mental health advocates created overnight communities of the marginalized. And I watched the rise of a whole generation of loyal Catholic bloggers in the wake of  those early paedophile scandals.

But I didn’t participate myself except erratically. I was drinking and  didn’t trust myself to post sober or regularly. I didn’t want to create a fictional lie about my life that would echo the kind of lie I was living at work and amongst superficial acquaintances. I was alcoholic and it was hard enough for me to write about that in  pen and ink in a diary intended for my eyes only.

And then it was 2007 and I was sober, active in online sobriety forums and I started a blog for myself. I didn’t want readers, I just wanted an online record of what was happening to me, this miracle of sobriety. Then one morning  I found Mary Christine. Then Dave and Scott.  To my amazement I had stumbled across a readymade community of recovery bloggers. As I wrote more and more regularly, I worked out my own set of ground rules to do with responsible blogging and showing respect towards others in recovery. I began to leave comments to let other bloggers know I appreciated their presence in my life. I had one or two comments myself from time to time and felt very excited (Steve!). I even ventured to comment on Syd‘s Alanon blog, which felt very daring since I know next to nothing about Alanon. Then I went across and commented  on Lou‘s blog, feeling even more daring.  And then there was Mickey trashing my comments and cursing me along with BillW. New bloggers joining even as older bloggers left, too many to name but I tried to get to them at least once a week. (Which reminds me that I must update my blog roll before Christmas.) I learned to post images and change  the odd font. This was another kind of coming home.

Diane Patterson is still blogging by the way and you can read her entries as far back as June 2006. Way back then she wrote a brilliant essay entitled Why Web Journals Suck. It seems to have disappeared from sight but in the essay she gave one piece of elementary advice I have followed in the last decade.  It covers most of the bases.

‘If there is anything  at all that you don’t want others to read, then don’t post it on the Internet.’