December 9th, 2025
I know exactly how that raccoon feels. The shame and guilt and all that existential crisis garbage.
But it’s been a minute.
I’m eight years sober today.
I know I’ve been missing lately from your social media diet. (The FDA no longer recommends me.) Like I mentioned in a previous post, the last two months have been among the most eventful and stressful of my life. If I ever find a moment and an ounce of grace, I will try to catch you all up sometime; otherwise, if you see me in real life, I continue to be an open book and I will fill you in.
These posts tend to get a lot of attention so I want to talk about something really important to me; this idea is not just the catalyst to me getting clean, but the thing that keeps me sober every day.
Over the years, I’ve written a lot about concepts like cognitive dissonance and self-selection to try to reach people who I feel have lost themselves. As you can see from the world we’re living in, there’s still a lot of work to do; ignorance and bigotry and hatred are still burning bright in their dumpsters. I want to help put those fires out with intelligence and kindness and love. So I’m constantly wondering if I could find better ways to say it and I think I can.
Whenever I write or say or do something, I ask myself a simple question:
Does it match?
Does what I say match who I say I am? Do my actions match who I think I am? Does what I type match the type of person I want to be?
Because, for a long time, they didn’t.
When I was actively drinking, I did not match. I have said and done things that I do not consider to be who I am in the deepest, truest sense of me. And I’m not saying I didn’t do those things; I did, and I have felt the hopelessness of that raccoon, desperate on the cold bathroom floor of a liquor store down the street.
If you think that these are just the ramblings of a former drunk, then you clearly have not been on the internet lately.
How many Christians match today? How many followers of Jesus? How many people who wear crosses around their necks or t-shirts that say shit like “Kindness Matters”?
How many Americans match today? How many people who claim to love freedom and family and our extraordinary constitutional rights? Those who insist on protecting and caring for all children and honoring just laws?
Who among us matches?
And who is wearing just one sock?
And if you were about to congratulate me but now you’re offended for some reason, I am terribly sorry to be holding up the same mirror to you that I’ve had to unflinchingly hold up to myself for the past eight years.
I didn’t have to learn how flawed and biased I was; I had to accept it and then work hard to reverse it and promise, promise, promise myself that I would try to be a tiny bit better every single day.
But when you get better, the world doesn’t agree to with you, and that might be the hardest part.
I have so much gratitude for the people in my life who have stuck around and loved me long enough for me to catch up and love myself; I am so sick at the world but I also pay attention to the universe and know how much good and wonderful and awesome exists in it simultaneously. In fact, I will argue until I return to dust that there is more light than dark on average.
I love you. Remember that. When you see all that hate out there, just remember that I love you and that is all that matters.
And I really love that raccoon. He’s just like me. If anyone has his number, send him my way. I’d love to sit down and talk trash with him.
The Den 