every.single.fucking.day

Twenty years ago today I “celebrated” my 42^nd trip around the sun. Why the scare quotes? There are two reasons, really. The first is simple history. My birthdays have never been all that – ever. Where I once had expectations for actual celebration, I no longer do and, ironically enough, I prefer it that way. I have come to see these things as more pomp than circumstance, more superficial than real. The same can be said of most socially created days of recognition, but this day 20 years ago was particularly bad. This day twenty years ago warrants the ”scare” in the scare quotes.

 

I don’t remember it in any specifics, but I do remember that part of my life – and there really weren’t any good days. Beyond being alive and not incarcerated, life pretty much sucked. I was at the end of a five-year downward spiral that began 25-30 years earlier. The end of the end had already come and gone; I was at the beginning of the beginning – again. I went from a near-death, self-inflicted wreck in 2000, to incarceration in 2002, to a six-month in-patient addiction recovery program in March of 2003 to getting my shit together and going back to school in the fall of 2003 to relapsing at the end of 2003 to violating probation and picking up a new charge in April of 2004 to two more incarcerations in the fall of 2004, finally getting released some time in late September or early October with about 60 days sober (or clean, if that matters to you). That’s a really long sentence and it reflects how long that last year and a half felt – the world’s slowest roller coaster. 

 

By this time in 2004, with about four months sober, it was worse than it was the first time. I was, this time, on my own. I did not have the structure or the community of a “recovery home.” I did not have the faith or trust of my family. I did not have a job, and I felt as though I flushed what was a shitload of promise in going back to school right down the toilette. I was miserable, but I knew that if I gave probation one dirty test, I could multiply that misery exponentially – the next step was not jail again, it was state prison. And here it was, my fucking birthday. Yet another shitty one.

 

I almost said “Fuck this!” on Thanksgiving (another socially constructed superficial celebration) just a couple of weeks prior. I would again on New Years eve. But I managed to stay sober and stay out of prison, and, with the help of a school counselor, I found a path back into school. In January 2005 I went back with a plan to transfer to California State University, Sacramento in the fall. Things started to get better. I started to succeed. I was getting good grades again. I was enjoying the fruits of my labor, and those fruits were not monetary. One day, I realized that it had been some time, several days at least, that I was not angry. It hit me like a bolt of lightning. I spent most of every day for I could not remember how long being pissed off about everything. Being angry all the time is fucking exhausting. 

 

What I was experiencing was a taste of freedom. It was not a permanent state, but it did grow. The days, weeks and months went by. Birthdays came and went. Some were better than others, one (my 48^th), in particular, was actually kind of cool, but mostly they were just another day. Today, my 62^nd, is that – just another day. It has been 20 years since I literally started my life over again, since I literally rose from the ashes. I didn’t do it alone, I had a lot of help along the way from friends, family and two different 12-step fellowships, but the simple truth – for all of us phoenix’s – is that without the effort we put into our own lives, our own resurrections, it will not happen. 

At 42 years-old, there was no light; I moved forward anyway – on faith, because there was nothing for me in the rearview but more bad. I could not, in a million years, have predicted where my life would take me. While I do, sincerely, appreciate the well-wishes that inevitably come to me on this day every year, I don’t need a bunch of minions celebrating the day of my birth – I celebrate life every.single.fucking.day.