#69 Fixing ourselves before we begin

and beginning before we fix ourselves

I kind of slammed on scene last week with a new essay and left out all the details of where I’ve been, why I haven’t been writing here, and why I’m back now, and mostly because I’m exhausted by discussing my inconsistency.

One of the biggest boons of my recovery was becoming a reliable person—someone you could take at her word, who would never miss a deadline, who would show up to your dinner party even if she felt like staying under the covers. I prided myself on the fact that I was finally Responsibility Person, and I did this because I’d been a screw up for so long. Being accountable was a kind of new high, and one I conflated quite a bit with my actual worth, or the reason you might waste your time on me at all. You could take me at my word.

Then I lost the things that gave me structure (a job for instance, or my identity), and I kind of just diffused into the ether. If the first ten years of recovery were about molding myself into the person I always thought I should have been, t…