I don’t quite know where I am tonight. I thought about my last writing and felt it was a pretty honest assessment of my current state of mind, for lack of a better word. What has lately been important to me is my relationship with my kids. It comes to the front of my mind every day. I described my life as a bit of an experiment in tonight’s meeting. I am experimenting with how I shall live my life today into my future. I need to move on from mistakes and what used to be routine. It has taken me five years to make that decision, so hopefully I don’t stop and move backward again. It’s easy to get wrapped up in glorifying the past. I don’t mean that in positive terms, not at all. I’m trying to find a direction with my writing, it seems it will fall into my own discovery of self as days go by. As usual the thing that pops in my mind is my sobriety from alcohol. When I think about where it could have taken me, I am clearly grateful to have put it behind me. Pot I’m not so sure about, though I haven’t had any for well over a year. Trying to find inspiration for my writing brought me back to pot but it didn’t pan out as well as I’d hoped. So I’m at a crossroad and rather than continuing to test the waters, I’ve put it aside for now.

I’ve been writing a lot of poetry lately. Actually it’s something I have done a lot with the past 10 or 15 years, and have just amped it up again the last half a year. If anyone familiar with wordpress can help me increase my readership, I’d appreciate it. I have a large following but feedback is rare. For instance, I posted something a couple of days ago that had only one look. I’m not talking about likes, just indications of a visit, and they are rare. For those of you, Phil and unknown, that do comment, I am always grateful. Ok, enough self serving I’ll try to get back on topic.

So I’m back here again, in the place that for a time was a frightening place to be. In the past five years I have had a lot of dark moments, and more recently, they don’t have nearly the impact they once did. In my writing, my poetry, I would get very dark, and to the unbeknownst reader it would come across as dangerously suicidal. That has never been the case though. I’ve certainly had ideations, but I spent my teaching career convincing kids to figure out how to stay alive rather than anything impulsive, so me taking action on hurting myself would simply be a cop out. I’ve struggled through a lot – most of my own doing – and am coming out on the other side in a better place than I was. It just takes time, and I have to be patient. 

Why am I sharing all of this with you? Because I am exploring my writing, I hope that helps me fall in to an outline somewhere.

Good night.