Dryuary Day 29: Half-Way Down The Page

“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.“

Ernest Hemingway

I knew I wanted to make this post about imperfection, but I didn’t know how to start it. I didn’t want to say, yet again, that we are all human and by nature of that, imperfect. That’s been said too many times it has less traction than a bald tire. I also didn’t want to say, as Ernie said so eloquently above, that our imperfections make us stronger. Or, more interesting. Or more beautiful. Yeah, yeah yeah. We all know that, don’t we? Platitudes don’t help when we’re out there day after day walking through life lugging our imperfections around wishing there was one single perfect thing about us to give us comfort. There isn’t.  Simone Biles doesn’t get all 10’s, Patrick Mahomes doesn’t throw a touchdown pass every time, and even your secret recipe for “never fail” Hollandaise sauce will betray you sometimes.

I am an imperfect drinker.
I drank imperfectly (way too much) for way too many years.
I abstained imperfectly for a good amount of time. (97.7 percent abstinent for almost 8 years give or take a sip here and there.)
I’ve moderated imperfectly just short of a handful of years.

That’s my story. Not much to go on when you’re trying to write an inspirational post.

Still stuck on how to start this post, I decided to make a list of my imperfections. This was easy. My fingers flew across the keyboard rattling off imperfection after imperfection. I am impatient. My hair is too fine. I don’t spend enough time on make-up or sweeping or dusting, my writing is as clunky as the 2004 Ford Explorer I drive and just about as drippy (It has developed a new leak in the roof)…

I was to the middle of the page when I found myself typing, I-drink-too-much-at-times.

Shazam! Inspiration struck!

It seems like such a small thing. What’s so inspiring about that line halfway down the page?

Let me tell you.

For many-many years the words, I-DRINK-TOO-MUCH lived at the top of my list of imperfections. It was there in such big bold letters it deserved a whole page to itself. Oh, I had plenty of other imperfections all glommed onto my drinking problem in my mind. I felt like a cartoon snowball that began with a hardpacked core of I-DRINK-TOO-MUCH rolling down a hill picking up all my other imperfections, getting bigger and bigger until all that was that I could see of me is my arms and legs sticking out. I rolled along like that for years because I couldn’t figure out how to stop or even slow the roll.

Then I joined MM. I learned to take breaks from drinking. At that time, it was easier for me to stop the roll than control the roll. Then, I took an almost 8-year break from drinking which completely melted that I-DRINK-TOO-MUCH  core and all my other imperfections separated from that snowball and fell around me. I could see them as individual problems for the first time in a long time. Some of them, I decided, were not imperfections at all, they’re just quirky parts of me that I’m glad to call mine. Some imperfections were the ones that Ernie refer to as having made me stronger in the broken places— the I-drink-too-much imperfection is one of those. Others I still have to work on but I can do that one or two at a time.

Four years ago, I decided to try moderation again but this time I did it with tools that keep me from letting it roll out of control and, if it starts to roll out of control, I have the tools to stop it.

Now that my imperfection of I-drink-too-much has moved from the top of the list and has transformed into I-drink-too-much-at-times along the way, it’s no longer so big and overwhelming that I think about it every day all day long. It doesn’t amass all my other imperfections until they are all one big snowball that is rolling and growing out of control. I will always have imperfections. I may always have that “I-drink-too-much” imperfection but I now know how to keep moving it further down the page and I have tools to transform it from I-drink-too-much-at-times to I-drink-too-much-on-seldom-occasions and then to I-drink-too-much-rarely and maybe someday it will move completely off the page.

In the next few months, if you feel your I-drink-too-much imperfection moving back toward the top of the page, you now know that you can step back and take a break until your ready to get back to work moving it further down the page.

by Mary Reid
Moderation Management member and former Executive Director, author of Neighbor Kary May’s Handbook to Happily Drinking Less or Not Drinking At All with the Support on Online Communities, editor/writer of Moderate Drinking Success Stories and Lessons Learned: Tales from the MM Community and Beyond and creator/writer of MM’s Kickstart Moderation Program.