I do in fact have a story for you this year, too, but I'll tell you at the outset, it's probably gonna land on a note more of contemplative reflection than full-throated affirmation, I'll do what I can

 

I've talked before about early spring '86 in Portland, a time which I mark as the end of one arc. somewhere in the year or two before that I'd lost my way almost completely. friends saw it and couldn't help;

 

people who wanted to become friends I kept at arm's length; people who did get close enough got burned, there was no way around it

 

I did not know whether I wanted to be a good person at all. much of the time my thinking was: to hell with it all, anyway. "unicorn tolerance" is about this important moment in my life: a turning point

 

everybody who did me kindnesses I didn't deserve in Portland helped. grateful forever.

 

sometime in the next couple of years I began to relocate the version of me I hadn't succeeded in killing off, and began trying to nurse him back to health. it was a slow process but I found, anyway, the path. still on the path

 

but for years when I went to Portland, my muscles would tense up, my mood would shift rapidly, my vision narrow like a prey animal making sure he's ready at all times to break from the clearing

 

year in and year out, when I went to Portland. I'd walk around specifically to let this mood overtake me, to get inside of it, to shake hands with the damaged boy who'd lived there and tell him I could still see him from where I ended up

 

and I'd sob a lot and sleep badly and when I left I'd feel like somebody'd wrung me out like a wet towel & thrown me into a corner of the laundry room

 

I was in Portland just last month. I did my walks I always do -- down to the corner that was the 2nd-to-last place I ever bought heroin, past other spots with both easier and harder memories than that one –

 

but this year I noticed: the dread's gone. the fear is absent. less shame, more clarity. what do you know about that.

I can still access those feelings if I want to, or if I need them for anything -- they'll always be accessible to me, but I have moved on from them.

 

when you have such touchpoints of shame and dread and fear and sadness and regret, you can get addicted to them. they're part of you; you build things in your life in response to them, and then the touchpoints themselves began to feel like lodestars, like cornerstones

 

they're not cornerstones at all

 

they're points of departure.

 

and when you reach a point of departure, when you know your map is finally showing you where the better waters are, well: you take a good look at that jumping-off point, and then you leave it behind

 

there are multiple applications for this lesson, as I would hope is clear

 

maybe as one year turns into another you might think, I carry around a lot of rage, a lot of hurt, a lot of pain

 

be ready for when the moment comes to say to yourself: I don't have to feel that any more unless I want to

 

there's no promise as to when that moment comes

 

and universal applicable-to-everybody platitudes are a fool's game I don't play: but generally speaking?

 

the moment comes.

 

it could come in a few years, or after a few more, or it may already have arrived and is waiting for midnight, or tomorrow morning, or the middle of next week: whenever you might find the opportunity to say -- it's time.

 

If it's time, give yourself that gift. the gift of seeing where you are now. of seeing how far it might be from where you used to be, from the place you'd gotten so used to being in.

 

there probably won't be one of these threads here next year, the writing's on the wall. that's ok, too. I'm around. so are you. that's the point of all this and I hope you can hear it:

 

So are you. /thread