If like me you spend a bit of time wandering around amongst Twitter’s #RecoveryPosse community, you will find vastly differing approaches to anonymity or the lack thereof. When I first joined Twitter and the Posse, my account was strictly anonymous. @SobrietyMatt’s avatar was a mat, literally, and my handle was some random one assigned to […]
Category: Writing
Tea, anyone?
There is a strange and rather unhelpful pattern to my sobriety journey. The better I’m doing and the more confident I become as a soberista, the more likely I am to stop doing all the things that I need to do to avoid drinking. It inevitably starts with thoughts like: “I’ll miss Thursday’s meeting because […]
10 Minutes
I have ten minutes. Ten minutes to articulate what I have struggled all my life to understand. Eight minutes now, it must have taken longer than I thought to open this word document and select the font that makes me most comfortable. Seven. I do not know what it is that I am meant to […]
Another day, another lesson.
Something has happened this week to make me feel sad, reflective and fearful. There is nothing that I can do to change it, whatever it might be – events and their outcomes are totally out of my control and they will inevitably bring big changes to my life. Faced with this my initial reaction was […]
What’s Left: A poem of redundancy.
Unable to sleep I got up and scribbled this, my thoughts as my school faces the threat of closure.
Hello fear, where have you been?
It’s Tuesday and this is the one day of the week when I am at home alone*. There are endless jobs to be done, so there is very little reason to be idle, but idle is my default mode; energy-saving is my specialty. So when I am home alone it is easy for me to […]
Letter to my 16 year-old self.
For Christmas I received a wonderful book titled Letter To My Younger Self, a compilation of interviews with various celebrities, where they consider what they would tell their 16 year old selves about what life holds for them. A Twitter pal and I wondered together what we would write to our 16-year-old counterparts if we […]
“Remember, we drank champagne and watched the snow falling on the garden?”
That simple sentence sent a shiver down my spine this evening . A sudden jolt and I am reminded of that feeling as I gulped down my first glass of champagne of the night. Oh, I was a decadent drunk; every good night started with champagne and a Friday wasn’t a Friday without it, but […]
Misery contest it is not
The last 24 hours have been life-changing for me. I made a decision yesterday to quit alcohol after decades of being powerless to control my drinking and relying on it to close the door on my overactive mind. I found support from those closest to me and from people I had, and still haven’t, met […]
Misery Contest 