Liberty

I’ve have been kicking around changing my name. To finally take on both my husband’s name (which I’ve always liked and rather disliked my odd sounding one) and also my first name. This idea popped into my head out of the blue a couple weeks ago and I realized right away what I would change my first name to: Liberty.

The name hit me just right and I thought “yes absolutely, that’s the one”. I told my husband and he gave me “the face” and said how much he always liked my real name and that changing it would be all this paperwork and hardship, cost.

Which is true and I’d thought of that. But to me, just the idea that yeah, I could just fricking do that if I wanted to, was very interesting and meaningful.

To me, it feels like my secret name, my real name. Like the name I have that I don’t say out loud, not because I’m ashamed, but because it’s not an audible thing, it’s my feeling name or my spirit name. It has nothing to do with the Social Security office.

A few years ago, one of my favorite humans Holly Whitaker said “It’s not over until you’re free”. I wrote this in my phone, as it really touched me, as does so much of what she says. While there are so many things that I will never be free of, at the very same time, I am free of them.

I have realized I can create my own reality

I have realized I can create my own values and beliefs, my own worldview

This morning I saw on IG the quote: ” Maybe the journey isn’t so much about becoming anything. Maybe it’s about unbecoming everything that isn’t really you, so you can be who you were meant to be in the first place.”

Then, while listening to Lee Davy’s podcast with Ted Izydor, they were talking about authenticity and recovery and Ted said how addiction is “rigid in all capacities….very rigid, very routine…the opposite of rigidity is flexibility”. How quitting something and not relapsing ever, or going back and forth between the behavior and not the behavior, is very very uncommon and to do so would be perfectionism in a sense. And that they are getting along the bridge each time, making it further across the way. Their using life is farther behind then and their new sober life is closer and more present. Also, they touched on how people can relapse in thoughts, not just in action.

Meaning, to be one day thinking “oh maybe I could drink again” is a relapse too.

Interestingly, I was just talking about this exact issue 2 nights ago with my husband. He asked me what my definition of moderation was. I said how I really didn’t think moderation made sense as a word. Because if you’re deciding to “moderate” then you’re thinking about it and it may not really be “moderation” it may just be more of “controlling the problem”. That I thought that having 2 five ounce glasses of wine, pushing the cork firmly into the bottle immediately after, taking the bottle into the kitchen, putting it inside the cabinet and patting yourself on the back for doing all this is called “drinking” to me. Not at all “moderating”. Because you’re putting all this thought and effort into doing/not doing something. And doing it for a reason. Why not just have none? Why not have the whole bottle?

That doing the above and believing that you’ve solved any problem is disillusion.

Instead of the word moderation, I would put it like, “people who don’t have a mental alcohol issue” and those people are very few. Those people would look like my mother for instance. She never drank, not ever. Because she knew people who drank and it looked like they lost control and she didn’t want to lose control. Also, the mere smell turned her stomach. Then like 15 years ago someone made her a madras, she drank some and said she liked the taste. 6 years after that I took her to a pub and got her one, she drank some, left most of it and said it tasted good. Then had a cocoa and a cookie. That was the last time I’m aware of that she has had alcohol so far.

Everyone else who drinks is biding time, controlling it by using a good amount of energy, thinking about it, doesn’t give a shit and doesn’t think about it, but suffers in some way from it and will most likely, eventually have to look into it.

I see nothing “sober” about a person who is always trying not to drink. Who bemoans the fact that “they can’t” or “shouldn’t”. Who drinks O’Douls every night. That is not sobriety, either actionable or mental. That sounds like rigidity, not like freedom or open. That sounds closed and gray and tight.

Putting it all together, it was quite wonderful to see clearly how not drinking anymore is the simplest way to go – it is the way of the freedom. My husband recently was upset thinking that no having a beer after work meant there was one more thing he had to think about or couldn’t have. He didn’t want to think about it and wanted the freedom to have it or not have it. This was in response to my plea of can we just not have alcohol in the house right now? I was struggling with the “what’s the points” recently, for 2 weeks. Did not drink, but almost did, in a mental sense and would have in a real sense, had like 2 mm more of that kind of thinking matched up, it felt like. What stopped me was, I am not sure exactly. It was him telling me it was definitely not worth it, that I would feel shitty, the knowledge that this was true, that even if there was no point, I’d thought there was one enough previously to start this journey again, I’d regretted it in 2016 when I started again – after just exactly this same thought process, that I needed to give myself a chance to fell better still, that if there was no point, then that didn’t mean I should drink, there just was no point.  Having no point did not equal drinking, it meant doing more of the things I liked and hanging in there, hanging tough and maybe there would be something brighter on the other side, even though it was so so so incredibly dark, for a while again. And you know what? There WAS. There literally WAS SOMETHING BETTER, BRIGHTER THERE on the other side of that period of like 2 months.

People always say, myself included, “oh I want to be free to decide” which you are. The only way to keep your freedom though, is to make the best decision. The one that keeps you, me free. That is where the liberty truly is. It is nuanced but it is real palpable too. It is not just my spirit name, it is my spirit. If I put my spirit into a word. It has become known to me, expressible.

Have your true freedom, be liberty.