Off We Goddamn Go, Guys

Holiday Check-In time — and a poem to help you fight the coming gloam.

Are we ready? Are we ready to lumber through this week — and the next 50 days, basically — when all the grief and discomfort and RAGE about our families hits us square in the mouth, hard enough to leave a gaping wound on our upper lip, a wound so severe it becomes impossible to eat mashed potatoes let alone turkeys or pigs or any flesh at a festive event over the next month?

Sigh — too much?

Well, if you’re in any heightened emotional space, please share your thoughts with your fellow weirdos, wasteoids, and whatever-whatevers to help us all survive. It’s time for DECEMBER CHECK-INS.

The perfect length is 150-300 words. Here’s a great one from last year’s batch.

This year I’ll be spending the holidays with my partner and his family. Since I got sober I’ve spent the holidays in all different ways: in the slow fog of the first year I was with my dad and his girlfriend and her kids (no longer in our lives; I hear from my dad irregularly and see him almost never), but after that I either had delightful days to myself, doing turkey trots and volunteering and going to meetings, or I joined friends who became a much more comfortable chosen family. My partner’s family is important to him and I am feeling like a feral animal stuffed into the body of a sweet little pet. I want to bolt, I’m scared of being found out, I’m preemptively exhausted. I find myself wanting to tell my partner his family isn’t better than mine, that they’re fucked up too. And they are — and they are. It’s not hard to be “better” than a collection of people who can’t be in the same room and almost never are. I don’t think I realized how sad I am until I started writing this. The holidays always sneak up on me. I don’t care about them at all so why do I get so sad if I actually stop to think about them?

Off we goddamn go, guys.

EMAIL US HERE: tsbcheckins@thesmallbow.com SUBJECT: DECEMBER CHECK-IN

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As a reminder, here’s our meeting schedule for this week, but I will send out email alerts as a reminder and to let you know if we have any additional ones on Thursday or Friday.

Monday: 5:30 p.m. PT/ 8:30 p.m ET

Tuesday: 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET

Wednesday: 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET

Thursday: 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET (Women and non-binary meeting.)

Friday: 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET

Saturday: Mental Health Focus (Peer support for bipolar/anxiety/depression/grief) 9:30 a.m. PT/12:30 p.m. ET

Sunday: (Mental Health.) 1:00 p.m PT/4 p.m. ET

Meeting ID: 874 2568 6609

Password: nickfoles

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A POEM ON THE WAY OUT:

Late Fragment

by Raymond Carver

*****

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

— From A New Path to the Waterfall