Expand Quote
Expand Quote
I think im done skating for good. Like drugs it just feels like something I need to move forward from. I skated from kindergarten till 32 non stop, all I have to show for is im kinda good at skating. Maybe because drugs and skating were so intertwined for me, I never piled out and stopped skating, I would do drugs and skate, my favorite combo. I kinda feel at this point I can only skate if im high. Thats all I cared about was drugs and skating.
Really Im just ready to move forward with my life and focus on the things I never focused on like getting a career and a relationship. Disability denied my claim and I dont feel like appealing it, Im just ready to start moving forward and skating just isnt important to me anymore.
I dunno, maybe Ill just take a break and revisit it in the future, I think it would maybe be fun relearning stuff in the future.
Im just at that point that im over it, I dont feel bad about it either it is what is.
Maybe you’ll eventually come back to it in a different way. Cruise or skate bowls or whatever you haven’t done, but I totally get where you are coming from.
I really think that is what separates people is the willingness to take on new ways of being in the world.
Not everyone is willing to do that.
Respect.
This really spoke to me this afternoon. I think this willingness is foundational to living an actively sober life - it's also the hardest part and something I have to come to grips with myself daily.
Here, here!
I'll tack my little thought onto the line here: I'm 34 years old going on 35. Alcohol was always my drug of choice. I went sober for ~year long stretches at two different points in my 20s, both of them basically to appease the two women with whom I've been in long term relationships. The latter of these women is now my wife, and the period of sobriety which I undertook for her sake ended a few years ago when we both agreed that it was unhealthy, for my own psychology and for the health of our relationship, for me to go sober for her sake instead of my own. I needed to be actively, not passively, sober, or what was the point? A few months ago, after a couple of years of heavy but relatively orderly drinking (I'd picked up
some maturity and restraint along the way!), I had a bad night where I drank way too much, for no discernible reason, and my wife found me blacked out in the bathroom. When she woke me up, I stood up and basically fainted (it felt like passing out from heat exhaustion) and almost hit my head on the edge of the tub. I didn't quit drinking for a couple of weeks after that, but I knew without reservation that I was soon going to, and now that I've stopped, I have to say that it feels different from the other times I've quit (knock on wood).
Circling back around to the "finding different ways of being in the world" point, I think the thing that strikes me now that didn't really strike me in my late teens and 20s, no matter how fucked up I got, and no matter how many times I actually did put my life on the line while I was "being in the world" under the influence, is that my time in the world is really limited. Given an average lifespan, I'm likely halfway through my life; in my prime in some ways, but the cracks are beginning to show (as they will) and I'm having to come to terms with the fact that I will only live to do and be so much, and that the decisions that I make will have some binding effect on the way the rest of my life plays out. This isn't a new thought to me - in fact, some of my most primal fears have always been bound up with the notion that choices are binding, that I can't just be anything or anyone I want, that on some level I have to "become who I am." For so long I think I was just letting the booze choose for me, and I think I could see how that was playing out and I just finally had enough. I have to remind myself that the choices that come up are a privilege and that I've got to show up to make them before they are made for me. Or maybe what I'm saying is that I finally don't have to remind myself...that it has become clear to me in a way that I can't unsee or ignore.