Before Ben’s Sunday essay, a quick reminder that . . .

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Here is a quick one from A.J.: “I fly to Florida on Saturday to pick up my mother from my aunt’s and take her back to her new apartment in West Palm Beach—a place she signed a lease for last June but hasn’t lived in yet. Before she had a chance to fully unpack all her boxes, she fell into a deep depression, alarming enough that my aunt and her part-time caretakers decided she’d be better off staying in Jersey near the rest of her family until the newly prescribed SSRIs kicked in.

I’m not looking forward to this visit. I know I have to go because there are papers to sign, boxes to unpack, and difficult conversations to have, but I mainly feel dread. We’ve had a few FaceTime conversations throughout the summer, and I’ve struggled to distinguish between healthy ACA-approved detachment for my own needs and outright neglect of hers. I shared about it at a meeting on Tuesday. I admitted that I’d rather amputate my own foot than take this trip. Most of the men smiled, but I was flabbergasted by my own cruelty.

After the meeting ended, my sponsor encouraged me to go home and list 10 things I love about my mother. I texted him a few hours later with an update. ‘I’m stuck on five. And one of those five is about her soup.’”

Now onto Ben’s essay!

Appreciate you all here at The Small Bow. If you’re looking for more from me, my blog is here.

I have a bin in the garage full of unused paper journals. Some are American-sized, 3.5 x 5.5 and up, some are Euro A5, A6 and B6s, all different thicknesses, types of paper, types of binding, grid, dot-grid, blank, lined, never committing to a brand. I’ve worn the same brand of pants and the same brand of shirt to work for over a decade, but paper stock, that’s a daily choice to make. After 33 years of obsessing over the perfect friction from the perfect pen on the perfect paper, it turns out having something to say is important, too. I suppose that’s why wisdom has been on my mind this week.

I didn’t start drinking heavily until I was 29, and I’ve  been looking backwards lately, digging into my character defects. In the early days of sobriety—age 45—I struggled to accept that my worst actions had more to do with me than with alcohol, because my worst self had been laid bare during my divorce, and I wasn’t ready to admit some poisonous root. Seven years of recovery, medication, therapy, etc., later, that’s still hard.