Doubt

When I started writing this blog in November of 2009, I had a couple of goals. One was just to start writing again. I had this notion that I couldn't write unless I was high, so for the first two years of sobriety I barely even tried to write. Every once in a while I would post something on my old blog, but in two years I think I put up five posts. Then Friendster, where my old blog was hosted (god that sounds ridiculous now – I had a blog on Friendster), changed its server or something and my entire blog got erased because I hadn't paid the $2.95 a month to keep it active. Just about everything was gone.


That wouldn't have been such a big deal, except that half of the stuff that was posted there was saved on a computer that was sitting broken in my apartment and the other half had been written on a laptop that just completely died and took everything on that hard drive with it. So, not only was the blog gone, all the evidence that I had ever written anything was too.

I became convinced that I wasn't funny at all sober. It's mean to say, but the reason I was so terrified that was true was because of Augusten Burroughs. He's the author of Running with Scissors and Dry, two terrific books about his crazy childhood and his alcoholic young adulthood. Both books were very entertaining, but then starting with his third book – Magical Thinking – his writing got less and less compelling. It was like he had two good stories to tell and that was it. I kept reading his books (I think there were two more after Magical Thinking) and getting more despondent about my chances of being interesting sober. It took more than two years to just gather the courage to even try.

The other reason I started this blog was to put everything that happened during those crazy meth years down in black and white. I figured it would help me make sense of what had been real and what I had imagined. After all that drug-induced psychosis, I really had no idea which was which. Plus, I figured a bunch of other people made money writing books about their addictions and I wanted to see if there was enough story here to do it myself.

Four years later I have a fairly good grasp on what was real and what wasn't. Not completely though. I still sometimes wonder if some of the crazy bullshit that I remember happening (when there was no one else around to verify or refute) actually happened. The good news is that I am pretty clear that know that isn't nearly as important as knowing that it almost certainly won't happen again as long as I stay sober. I also have (I'm estimating here) about 75 stories that are directly or indirectly connected in a way that could form a book. It might be time to start trying to stitch it all together and see what happens. 


There are also two reasons this has been on my mind today. One is that I was at an interview for an internship (or a job – that was never really clear) and the interviewer basically asked me if my real goal in life was just to promote my own blog or if I really wanted to work for someone else. Good question. Let me get back to you on that. The other reason is that I'm having trouble connecting with that time in my life this month. Usually when I start writing every day, the memories of what happened back then come flooding back. That hasn't happened so far this week. It's been a struggle to come up with something to write about. And now it has me worried that what I thought about Augusten Burroughs might be true about me. What if I'm out of stories?

I'm at least smart enough to know that I ALWAYS think I'll never have anything interesting to write about again and thus far that hasn't been true. But this week has made that fear real again. I don't have a clever ending or something to wrap this post up in a bow. I just have me, at 12:03 am (so technically I missed the day), wondering what will happen here tomorrow.