*Originally posted on the Sober Knights Chronicles Substack
When thinking about tipping points what first comes to mind is Malcolm Gladwell’s book by the same name, published in 2000, when I was 24 and in the midst of working on how to gather all the knowledge about all the areas of study that I’d determined I needed to gain in order to make the vision I’d had on a vision quest at the age of 19 a reality.
I read the book at some other point later in my life and it doesn’t *really* correlate with our topic of reflection in this stack, but I’m thinking of it nevertheless because while it was addressing how just the littlest thing, the tipping point, can cause rather momentous shifts in a variety of scenarios (and this does dovetail accordingly with taking up a sober life), society is still quite a ways away from alcohol NOT being everywhere….
….all this is to say that the other Tipping Point I’m being directed to is the British game show that I’ve yet to see and if I never see it, I’ll be just fine.
Where am I going with all this?
There was definitely a point where I knew it was time to end my drinking hobby, a few really, and because of this I wouldn’t say that the last day after sharing 3 or 4 bottles of wine/bubbly with 2 other friends was so much a tipping point as the road I’d been on just….ending.
And a whole world of I don’t know what laid out in front of me to make my way in: sober, clear, and suffused with a force of love for myself that I’d been drowning with the drink for no good reason at all – it was just everywhere I looked and my brain responded how a brain that has a predisposition to addiction does when given an addictive substance….tipsily.
Somewhere a long time ago, I learned that love is not a static noun that’s sold on greeting cards or stamped on candies (or on a bottle of booze), but an active verb that could look a LOT of different ways, even ways that were more reflective of fear more so than love. This is where the first tip about the point of how to love myself in ways that weren’t actually loving were absorbed into my developing brain.
When fear is what’s on the other side of love and it’s not clear to a young person how to manage fear, the easiest way to attempt that is to escape it, in whatever way possible. When I couldn’t escape in my mind any longer because my mind had turned on itself and forced me out into the world I sought (and still seek) comfort in friends because there was no family to go to.
And as I aged there were so few friends of mine that didn’t drink that I turned on myself and loving myself (again) by fully embracing drinking alcohol much the same as I did with coffee (I didn’t enjoy the taste of either when I first tried them), which in many ways is just as damaging a substance as alcohol.
The point is, this idea of living a sober/recovered life is not one that spread like wildfire in my mind, not when I decided to quit for good on November 17, of 2023, nor when I proceeded to drink very intentionally on three different occasions between that date and December 31, 2023. No, I’ve tiptoed around an alcohol free life a number of times as an adult, and who knows, I may do some more in the future too, for I can’t really know what will happen.
What I can and do know is that that force of love, for not only my self, but for my children and everyone else I love fiercely that I felt on the morning of November 17th was like no other love I’d felt previously; because it had fear in it as well, and I knew that something had finally opened (and who knows, maybe it WAS the alcohol from the night before) some space in my heartmind that fear isn’t separate from love or on the other side of it, it’s a part of it.
I no longer fear loving myself, because I did before – between the modeling and wider environmental influences throughout my youth presenting me with such a twisted and unspoken definition of what constituted love – and I did not believe I was lovable as I was.
I am love, worthy of my own love, and others love as well. Just as I am.
Tip me over, pour me out. I’ve got enough love for myself and all of you. And that’s my point.
Now then, as a dear friend has been fond of saying (who oddly enough, was sober for 20 years before resuming what appears to be a successfully moderated with alcohol in their life approach): Let’s get the road on the show!
TimeSpaceOne 