Oil Change

September 27th, 2023

“I may have been sober, but I didn’t start to get well until I could accept who I had been, who I was becoming and accept any distance there was between the two.”

– Nadia Bolz-Weber

I got my oil changed yesterday morning. They put a little sticker in the upper-left corner of my windshield with the date I have to come back, and that date always feels like forever away.

It’s the end of September now, and it’ll be almost April when I need my oil changed again. In that time, we’ll have gone through three seasons and most of the school year; celebrated Halloween and Thanksgiving and Christmas and a new year; I’ll have released new work and written new words and drawn new pictures and a whole lot will exist that doesn’t exist now.

The distance between now and there is only six months.

Honestly, I’m at a stage in my sobriety where having a drink is among the least of my concerns. That probably sounds weird to some (the threat is real!), but others get it: I’m at a point in my life where my biggest struggles are accepting who I’ve been, what I’ve done, and trying to be able to wake up and be okay with the person I am today.

Just like sobriety itself, this is a lifelong dance I have to relearn the steps to daily.

One of the best and worst parts of the internet is its ability to remind you. It can set an alarm for birthdays and anniversaries, carry photo albums of the good times you’ve had with family and friends, and show you all the times you said something weird or mean or gross in the name of being broken and angry and refusing to do any better.

I have to reconcile the fact that I have been awful and selfish with the truth that I want to be friendly and kind.

I have never been one thing, and never will be. Not black or white but a palette of colors, mixed haphazardly. My struggle finds sense in balance, and I don’t have whiskers like normal cats do.

But recognizing this helps me cover the distance, from then to now, a short time that holds a lot of life.

Like how in six months nothing will be the same, how things will exist that have never existed before, how I exist now like I didn’t exist then. But present me doesn’t need to keep that distance between past me; I need to wrap him up and thank him for just hanging on, when I know it wasn’t easy for him.

Because he hung on, I got to be me. The one who struggles because he had to be him, but still gets to be me.

Me now, me in six months, and me for as long as life will have me.