Today I am One Year Alcohol Free
Here’s how I quit drinking, lost 85 pounds and saved my life
Well Andie Main, I’ve clicked on your little article so now you’ve got my attention, but why the hell should I listen to you anyway, you frizzy haired Rocky Mountain bisexual?
Wow! Well? First of all there’s no need to be so personal, especially when one of the reasons my hair is so frizzy is because there’s no moisture out here in the Mile High City, but secondly the reason you should listen to me is because during the same shitshow of a national timeline we’ve been living in, starting in 2019 along with watching my sister pass away from cancer, enduring a divorce, leaving my hometown, losing my dog in the divorce, getting my heart broken, getting my heart broken again, and then watching my already problematic drinking escalate to nearly fatal levels? One day I just quit, and somehow I stayed that way. And I also lost a fuck ton of weight.
So I figured you’d want to find out how I was able to change my lifestyle so dramatically, especially since I didn’t go to one meeting. All I did was love myself, maybe for the first time ever. I switched my mindset; I looked at the last half of my life as an opportunity to upgrade, and I found myself enjoying the journey, so I thought you might too.
After I dried out from drinking for a few days, I started walking around outside because I realized that it was the exact opposite of how I had been spending my time before, which was being wasted on the couch. And after taking in sunlight and breathing fresh air like how a human being is designed to do, my perceptions shifted and I got gratification from the naturally occurring chemical reactions that happen in your brain after finally getting enough sun, air and cardio for the first time in my life. After living in that space for a while, I realized I was strong enough to change my relationship to food too so I started practicing intermittent fasting
It’s so crazy. Now I walk around smiling, fucking SMILING, and thinking about other things than how badly I used to want to kill myself. This last year has been the best one of my life, which is why I chose today, the one year anniversary of my quitting drinking, to share this with you.
The weirdest part about making a drastic change to your appearance, like a major tattoo or dramatic haircut or weight gain, is how quickly you become accustomed to it. It’s only a temporary shock.
At one point my weight gain meant I couldn’t tie my shoes without having to contort myself. It meant I couldn’t get off the couch without at least one attempt. It exacerbated every ailment I had and created new ones and bottom line, it was the most uncomfortable I’ve ever felt. I remember how upset I was to move up to size 22 jeans, but when I try to remember who I was while it was happening to me, I feel like I’m trying to remember a dream upon waking. My past life feels like that of a ghost, I feel completely disembodied from who I used to be.
That person was sad and angry, and brimming over with tragedy, waiting for someone to recognize it in her and save her from it. She was passively and complacently not moving on from any misfortune. There is a certain comfort in sitting right there in the guts of grief and rooting around and dwelling in it. Grief meant I could comfort myself with anything at all, so at least it was just beer and pizza and not something much worse, like crafting.
I think of who I was while I write this, and wonder if anything I could have said to myself would have gotten through to me. And since I know myself pretty well, and have thought about this for at least five minutes, the truest answer is that I think I just had to come around to figuring my shit out once I was ready to. It doesn’t always have to be a dramatic moment of reckoning, even for me. Sometimes you just arrive when you get there.
I was trapped in a cycle where I felt like shit with and without alcohol so I decided the funnest way to deal with that was with more, always more- never less. I started living the same day over and over again, which was so easy to do in quarantine, but I finally drank myself to the end of my career when the weariness of the pandemic bled into a vaccinated world and I wasn’t moving forward along with it.
I was still drinking at myself, like I was my own tormentor playing the stop-hitting-yourself game but with White Claws. Every morning as I was calculating the damage from the night before, I was fully aware that I had completely forgotten why I was drinking, and yet I was still drinking, so that made me drink more.
That’s where I was, until I snapped (but like in a cool way). And I snapped so profoundly that I ruined that old Andie, and now I’ve put so many miles on the trails of Colorado since then I can’t remember her at all.
And while the icecaps are melting, and the tensions across the globe simmer, and the water is poisoned and the animals are dying I just want you to have as nice a time as possible OK? This whole end of the world thing isn’t your fault- it’s your stupid parent’s. So while we cling to this iceberg that just separated from the arctic shelf, let’s get in as good of shape as we can get, cuz you’re gonna need all of the strength you can to outrun the Confederates, and now they’re riding Polar Bears
So here is a sample of how I upgraded my life from a total shitshow to becoming bearable, if not even enjoyable. Along the way I lost 85 pounds, gave up sugar, gave up processed foods, went probiotic, intermittent fasted, quit drinking, quit cocaine, quit smoking, started walking, started hiking, even started fucking jogging, and even figured out that I’m not a giant piece of shit… but we only have enough time to talk about quitting drinking and losing weight, so let’s get into it.
Here’s the map I’ve written to recovery that doesn’t involve one single meeting or dollar or program, (and if that alone isn’t interesting to you, read it for the blackmail opportunities)
The first thing I did was leave my hometown
One of the biggest problems in my life was Portland, so I fucked the fuck off outta there. I didn’t exactly know why I was doing it, other than that every fiber of my being was telling me that I had to, but if you asked me why, I would have just pointed at my magpie tattoos and you would’ve gotten pretty annoyed so I’m glad we’re talking about it now instead.
That period of time was so painful. It was the most loss I have ever experienced all at once, condensed into a sucker punch hitting you in the guts, making you double over and wretch your guts out. It was almost as painful as watching Rudy Guilliani speak.
I had lost, at that moment, a ton of friends. I was also losing my sister to cancer, which would have been a lot easier if I had any friends to talk to about it. And then I lost my dog in the divorce. The divorce where I kinda sorta lost my husband. So if we’re counting, I had lost what felt like every type of love you could receive- from family, from pets, from friendships, and romantically, all in one moment, the one where I told my husband we needed to break up. (Ok the break up wasn’t the reason my sister Katie died from cancer, I guess if we’re assigning blame, it was her colon’s fault. But I’m gonna say it wasn’t NOT because I was leaving Portland too)
That radical exit had immediate benefits for my mental health. I was in Denver for just a week or two, driving to my new job, and I found myself smiling. Bitch you are driving to work! What are you smiling about?! Your sister just fuckin died and… and YOU’RE SMILING? ON YOUR COMMUTE TO WORK? Whyyyyyeeee?
But then, when the sun went away for the winter, I figured out exactly why I had been in such a good mood for the first 6 months I was in Colorado, despite all of the reasons I had to be sad. I had never known what it was like to be hit in the face with Vitamin D all day, every day, and It turned out that losing the sun was the last thing I could stand to lose before I went through a winter which would escalate my drinking by another degree or two (this was when I started waking up at 2am and sagely decided since I couldn’t sleep I might as well have a beer) and then I started having these incredibly charming attacks of pure sorrow, doubled over, dry heaving my grief, which was so scary that I drank more.
Was I trying to kill my ego or was my ego trying to kill me? Actually it can be both. Wow, what a long way to get to my original point, which was something about how when the sun left, I felt like shit but… but then! Once we got back to spring, when the sun was hitting me all day every day again? And I was just walking around smiling like a simple country idiot again? After 16 months I was finally like “oh, this is a pattern, and that pattern is called seasonal affective disorder, and you never knew you even had it cuz in Portland there’s barely any seasons to be affected by, just gray and grayer. THAT was your problem! You were depressed the whole time, you stupid bitch!” and something else I learned later is that it is not considered positive self talk to refer to yourself in third person as a stupid bitch.
I never could’ve have accomplished anything in Portland compared to how much I’ve achieved since then, and I figured out why: if you want to fix yourself, you’re going to have to make radical and uncomfortable changes, and you’re going to have to get used to throwing the things you once loved away, since they no longer serve you on this new journey. Nothing changes until you make changes, and leaving my hometown was the most radical one I could make at that point.
Your radical departure could be a shitty partner, an entire town, a toxic family member or it could even be your identity. What if you were no longer an addict? What if you were just trying to comfort yourself during the darkest timeline? What if what you sacrificed was the shadow that followed you, enabling your addiction?
Then I switched addictions
I have been addicted to one thing or another my entire life and maybe someday I will be able to live without chemicals or objects to pacify me but right now, at this moment, that is absolutely the fuck not gonna happen. Before weed and cardio it was alcohol and cigarettes and before that it was comedy and painting, and before that it was cocaine and before that it was soda and pizza and ice cream and before that it was comic books and before that it was The Babysitters Club and before that my parents were still married.
Unfortunately, to kick your habits, you will have to journal about them, and I apologize for giving you such obvious advice but the reason it’s obvious is because it works.
The thing is that you need to know exactly why you’re adapting, and you should look back at your physically written out reasons as often as you can to steel yourself for when that Banshee starts to scream in your ear about how badly it needs a drink or a smoke or maybe like a funny third vice: ok let’s go with a dimestore handjob.
I deliberately chose the word adapting, earlier, because you are. You’re moving upwards because your old habits no longer serve you and that’s exactly the mindset you’re gonna rely on to get through the rough parts because the worst thing you could do is look at this experience as a loss. It’s absolutely not. You’re upgrading. You’re fixing yourself. You’re decontaminating your mood. You’re saving your life. Even if you just take a break for a while and go right back to your bullshit, it’s all a part of your journey, and your upgrade is still waiting for you.
I journaled about how I was becoming a scumbag, and I was turning into my dad and I was spending all of my time with alcohol instead of developing as a person. I wrote about how I wanted to be more attractive and I was worried about how I felt underneath the alcohol and what if once I remove that layer I find something even more painful simmering under the surface? I wrote a bunch of thoughts and wishes and fears out while I lit a fancy candle and burnt some incense and took note of what the moon was up to (waxing gibbous) and I took a photo of my written fears and set the paper itself on fire and I pretended that all of this possibly problematic quasi-spiritual white lady nonsense gave me just the tiniest extra bump of strength which could have been the difference between where I am now versus having relapsed.
My detox was mild and sweaty. I had some trouble sleeping, maybe because my body was sweating out all of my abuse onto my sheets at night, and I was waking up in actual puddles. It was kind of cool in an extremely fucked up way. Whoa, my body did that? The puddle around my asscrack looks like a Roshach Test!
I felt new and refreshed, instantly. And I was already posting on social media about it. I was running on the high of simply not feeling like shit every day,
A week later I relapsed because I wasn’t ready for my triggers. Hey, did you know that doing comedy is a trigger? I did! Or at least I thought I did, but actually going through the trigger was too much. I had that banshee screaming at me for over an hour and did a set and thought that if I stayed sober during a show that would be the challenge, but it was actually the drive home where my Banshee shrieked the loudest. My Banshee told me that I should “try moderation” but that turned into a moderately priced 6 pack of IPA which turned into Tinder which turned into a cocaine fueled shitshow which turned into me spending that entire weekend puking my guts out, unable to even hold water.
I look back on it as a blessing now, because as I dried out, every time I wanted a drink all I had to do was remember how badly that last one went. I would feel the craving, and I would consciously project myself back into the absolutely nauseous and queasy memory I felt on that sunday, unable to move except to barely make it to the bathroom. It was a rotten way to quit but that’s how I finally did it. After one more weekend, so I could do High Plains Comedy Festival with a couple of drinks down my neck. Like the very best addicts, I just needed one last score before I retired from the game.
I had to personify my alcoholism to defeat it. I had to recognize it as my shadow, my aforementioned Banshee. it was me and also separate from me and I had to talk to it, I had to bargain with it, and I had to listen to it- not just the urge but the reason under the urge. And doing this was very unnatural for me, talking outloud to myself freaks me out, but it was all a part of the separation between the Banshee and me. I had to treat my psyche like it was fragmenting.
A weird effect of quitting drinking for me was that I didn’t have emotions for the first 100 days. If something good happened I would think to myself “oh, what a good thing that is” and wait for any sort of gratifying chemical to hit and validate the good news but nothing did, and that didn’t bother me much either, because on the other hand, nothing did. Nothing felt good and nothing felt bad for the first 100 days, and I think that’s because my neural pathways were so traumatized by being doused in vodka for half my life that they just didn’t know what to do with all that air so they short circuited while they were rebuilding? Or maybe it was a part of the experience I had while my ego was separating from my consciousness? I’ve gone ahead and decided that’s why, but don’t worry I still believe in science. For the most part. Ok fine I look at Tarot every now and then too but I still think science is great. Hey! You can have both! OK!
One night, a week or so in, I had such an intense urge on the drive home from Comedy, that I had to talk myself off the ledge. I was fragmenting, I had two very different minds happening inside one. I knew i couldn’t drink, but i sure wanted to, and I was grinding my jaw but inside my skull and I told myself I could have anything on the fucking planet as long as it wasn’t booze.
You want to try Kratom tonight? Go for it. Let’s get into Scratch It tickets! Andie, maybe this is the moment you really get into gas station porn mags! (I didn’t actually do any of those things but I had the freedom to, and so do you! Fuck yeah Joe Biden’s America!)
So because I couldn’t drink and the screaming banshee in my skull needed SOMETHING I fixated on getting an ice cream sundae. At 11pm on a Sunday night. I was making such a weird deal with myself, like a dad who only gets visitation twice a month and isn’t really comfortable with that much responsibility. Aw fuck, I was so worried about becoming my mom that I was absolutely blindsided and became my dad!
Well, I couldn’t find a sundae, of course, and as I was realizing that every closed C Store and fast food place was telling me even a pint of Ben and Jerrys (or fuck it! a Choco Taco) were all prospects which had dried up, and once I came to terms with the fact that this fool’s errand was making me angrier, I talked my way through the anger and it subsided and it felt like I had calmed a temper tantrum that was happening in the core of my being and it wiped me out and I just called it a night and went right to sleep. I went to sleep craving alcohol and/or ice cream at a pure fever pitch and I knocked it out with melatonin and masturbation. Just like my dad should’ve done.
I woke up the next day and walked around Mt fuckin Bierstadt. Did I climb it? Absolutely not. And I never fucking will. And I never even would have walked around and marveled at it if I had relapsed the night before. As I drove into the mountains I reminded myself of that fact over and over again, as I wept in relief that I was able to hold on for one more day. That was only Day 21. In the days to follow sometimes the cravings would get more intense, but then so much easier. I was scared but also I was strong, and sometimes I was scared of my strength.
“You can do whatever you want, just not booze” was my mantra early into sobriety and I got weirdly intense cravings for all sorts of random urges beyond a sundae, like “LETS LEARN HOW TO MAKE MUFFINS” “LET’S GET A PUPPY” and “LET’S PLAN A TOUR WITH DAVE HILL”
I literally did all of those things in one weekend and fortunately the muffins were the only disappointment. Also, you can’t put a 12 week old puppy in a 40 year old childless woman’s hands, unless you don’t want that puppy, because she will instantly embed all of her never before used bonding hormones all over that puppy and it will become the driving force of her entire life, and maybe if I raise a puppy responsibly and she turns out lovely it will mean I’m not a giant piece of shit? Anyway, what was my point?
Switching addictions. I turned my obsession with self destruction into an obsession with puppies. Sadie has kept me from drinking a couple of times. I had to remind myself that she has never seen me have a drink, and it worked. Crisis averted, but just barely. Even when I was dealing with the breakup of a friendship, (which, btw, hurts in a different and more emotionally intimate way than a romantic one) while I was sitting in a shite motel in Moab Utah and I was more alone than I had ever been, and freshly exhausted in that invigorating way you get from walking some trails, and there was no one here to be accountable to, especially after I watched someone I loved fuck up so badly I had to leave them, so no one would know if I drank right? All of a sudden those four distinct triggers: a break up, traveling, being alone and perhaps the biggest one of all: the memory of how satisfying a frosty pint glass of IPA pairs with your post-cardio self. I had all of those separate yet equally enticing reasons to drink floating around my head like a cartoon character’s reaction to getting hit on the head with a mallet, and because I had transferred my addiction/obsession to my sweet little puppy, the very thought of my sweet sweetie Sadie watching me get drunk, was enough to talk me off the cliff.
That was a change in my my momentum going forward: I didn’t have to white knuckle through the cravings by remembering that gnarly relapse hangover I had, I didn’t need to live in the past to continue not drinking, instead I had the future of my life with Sadie to think about as my anchor, and after this realization my cravings because much more tame and much less frequent.
I had *so much* time to kill now that I wasn’t drinking it away. I needed to start living my new life in the opposite way I had lived before, and the most obvious way I could get started on that was to go outside.
I felt the air and sun and I pushed myself. I was doing hikes that scared the shit out of me (to be fair, I wasn’t doing anything actually scary, but for me they were terrifying) and all of this: the puppy and the cardio my new Colorado life, those obsessions took over from alcohol.
After hundreds of silent miles on the trails, with the birds and the trees and wildflowers and my dog and my thoughts- thoughts that were too weighed down by hangovers to ever realize before… I began to realize that my addiction wasn’t just alcohol, my addiction, my Banshee, was my subconscious attempt to blot out my existence. I was using getting wasted as a tool to passively erase myself instead of putting everyone I love through a full blown suicide.
I was on a trail at Green Mountain when this realization hit me, and when I say that? What I mean is that it literally hit me. It knocked me sideways and I had to stop and sob and feel the moment and forgive myself or at least try to, and once I started walking again, following my train of thought, it led me to wonder “why are you afraid of your power?” which became a mantra. Now when I see myself fail I ask why am I afraid of myself and I wonder about my fear and then I do insane shit like writing this in hopes of propelling myself ever forward and hopefully deepen my new addiction: because after all of this work I figured out that I am now addicted to having a more meaningful life. Carpe’ing the fuck out of Diem
I redirected that compulsive banshee of mine onto a habit that actually pays off, and I gave up my nights for my mornings. Instead of waking up hungover I woke up to sore muscles and gratitude. Like Allen Carr and Holly Whitaker advised before; I changed my mindset. I adapted. I upgraded.
I was a neglected vine replanted and given the right conditions to thrive, and it was working. Now, just like what Trainspotting told me would happen in middle age, it was time to choose life. I was, for the first time ever, actively trying to be alive instead of just hanging out waiting to die.
Here’s the goddamned point I keep dancing around: If I could? you definitely can.
And if that means reducing the amount of time you spend drunk from seven nights a week to four, and then down to two, well that’s huge progress too. I can’t moderate so I don’t. You probably can’t either, but you can absolutely quit drinking, it just takes a change of mindset. My only regret is that I wish I had known how much better my life would be post alcohol, since I had wasted so much time to get here. A TON of people told me it would be, but I just had to arrive on my own schedule or else it would never have taken affect.
And then I stopped eating like shit:
Food is the spikiest and messiest addiction there is, especially from the viewpoint of society.
Like, quitting smoking makes sense. It’s easy to understand why you should quit, even when those ashy tentacles are wrapping themselves around your synapses, and they tell you just one more won’t hurt and you can easily see that yes, in fact one more would hurt- but what if what you had to quit was also something you would die without (like my comedy album, Magpie, available at Blonde Medicine Records) No, I mean, food. You would die without food but you’ll also die if you keep eating like shit so let’s talk about it.
My history with food and weight is pretty typical for an American. I was a little fat kid my entire life. In fact, I was The fat kid in school. This was back in the 80’s when we only had one or two of them per class. And then I was fat as a young adult, and then my spinal disease took over my life and I drank and did coke to numb it all out and then I ate anything I wanted because I felt like such shit from the previous night’s bender. The only reason I am still here is because they didn’t have DoorDash when I was really going through it.
At one point, on my 5’2 frame, I carried 250 pounds on it. And I was in total denial. I knew I was fat but I didn’t know. It’s so weird. You can contort your face to look ok in the mirror before you get in front of it, you can filter yourself and dress for your size and you can either be happy in that space or you can be me: putting on weight which was aggravating my persona; diseases ever worse, which made me eat more because the depression ensuing from the physical pain told me I should.
It was kind of like that time I had a shitty air conditioner that expelled hot air out of the window but one night the tube fell out and landed on my living room floor, and then I woke up to it being 100 degrees in my house because the warmer the air was, the harder the air conditioner worked to cool things down, which only warmed things more. It’s a fun little Ouroboros of self harm!
OK, so now you know why I was fat, but here’s how I, as a 41 year old woman, for the first time in my life am no longer fat: only eating food that I cook for myself.
I didn’t learn how to cook until the Pandemmy but it turns out that heating things up in an organized way is so easy and you’re going to feel really cool like you’re in The Bear and have 10 veg portions ALL DAY CHEF at the ready. And it’s so much cheaper. I looked at my budget last week for all food, every single meal that I ate, and I spent a total of $140 at the store for that week. No restaurants, no bar tabs, just eating genuinely delicious food that I am solely in charge of.
You already know what’s good and bad to eat, so go heat up some vegetables and season them in one pan, and a protein in another, and dedicate a few hours twice a week to meal prep and get into a mindset about how you’re now going to eat for fuel instead of entertainment. Think about that for a moment; eating fast food is the same nutritionally as watching shitty TV and aren’t you better than that? It’s ok once in a while but for every meal? Food is fuel and the more literally you take that the better. Fast food is diesel gas for your internal combustion system and yes this metaphor is also about why you fart so much.
You need to fix your diet because it is responsible for your mood, which will dictate how your day goes which will add up to the rest of your life and if you’re crashing on sugar and headaches and nausea I don’t know if I would consider that type of mood to be the one that helps you feel good about, like, your ENTIRE life.
Food was an underlying addiction for me, meaning that it was one I couldn’t battle until I fought off alcohol, especially since one of the most attractive parts of alcohol is when it pushes your Fuck It Button, which is why Taco Bell is still in business. Alcohol turns off your ability to plan for the future, and choosing to eat healthy is literally just thinking a few steps ahead, and I can’t think of any more ways to explain this point but I think you get it. You can’t eat healthy if you have no judgment. But once you devote yourself to eating for nutrition, you’ll extend your life by years and you’ll save so much money and feel so much more empowered and all of this leads me to believe that it’s truly the foundation of creating a better life for yourself. If all of the grand ideas I am presenting here are the branches of self improvement, your diet is the trunk.
I never ever would have thought that I could’ve done intermittent fasting but after being dry for 75 days and gaining weight, I got so mad I just decided “fuck it” and went straight to a 16:8 ratio, meaning that I eat for 8 hours of the day. And it hurt a lot. And I think the only way I was able to grit my teeth through those initial hunger pains was because as an alcoholic I have endured more unnecessary pain in my life than any casual drinker could understand.
During hunger pains I just thought about those sweaty pukey mornings and all the pain I had already suffered and basically instead of doing transcendental meditation to go to a calming island watching clouds pass by, I was directing my psyche to a black metal mosh pit, and somehow that perspective, that mindshift, made it easier to endure the temporary hunger pangs. (Did that make any fucking sense at all? I have been writing this alone with only my dog to talk to)
What I’m trying to say is that when the hunger hurt too much I thought about all of the other ways I had harmed myself, and threw myself deeply into those moments, just like how I concentrated on how badly that last hangover felt whenever I craved alcohol, and these moments where I met the pain with mindfulness made it all the more bearable. And they were always temporary. They’ll hit you for a gruesome five minutes but as they wane, so eventually will your need for food at that time of day, and while it hurts you get to sit there and examine the pain and literally look forward to getting to fall asleep so you won’t be hungry in the night, and then you can start to wonder how many people are facing that moment every day and how lucky you are that you are doing this to yourself instead of having it inflicted upon you.
Being uncomfortable is growth and pain is transformative and so is clemency. Once you start reaching goals, after the withdrawal period (and yeah sugar withdrawal was as intense as alcohol) you will simply no longer crave sweetness like you used to. You’ll feel like a former smoker standing outside of the bar breathing in secondhand smoke and feeling how gross it is, and eventually you’ll feel the same way when you’re walking past all of the offerings in the freezer aisle.
In order to intermittent fast you are going to need to know that it hurts, and it will for a while, but once you’re over that hump you will appreciate food more than you ever have before. Eventually, once you adapt to your new eating cycle, you won’t even be able to binge eat because your stomach has shrunk and you become satisfied with less food. It took me 6 months to get there, and I dunno how common that is, but that’s been my journey.
Then I Fixed How I Spent My Time
I’m not great at reclaiming all of my time, some of the things I’ve done instead of writing this include Tinder, snuggling with Sadie and making sure that she knows she’s the cutest Lil Beastie in the whole world, staring at the wall, wondering why no one likes me, obsessing over bookings, making sure Sadie knew that she is definitely the one hundred billion times most cutest Baby Wolfie ever, and figuring out how to cum harder. Not all of it was wasted but a lot of it was.
You and I both need to be as productive as possible with the dwindling moments we have left on this planet, and we can’t be productive if we feel like shit, which is why fitness and nutrition are such a major component of living your best life. If you have a splitting headache or brain fog or a blood pressure spike you can’t possibly feel content, and if it’s because the last meal you ate made you feel like shit is it actually worth it? I’m asking because you only enjoyed eating it for like 15 minutes but if it keeps making you feel like shit all day, every day, then it can’t possibly be worth it.
When I gave up sugar and alcohol and tobacco I had to place my mindset outside of the concept of time. I had to tell myself “How long did you just last without that cigarette? Five minutes? You can go another five, easy. Get to it, Tiger” and I repeated that sequence to myself as an echo, and the segments of time got longer, and it taught me to no longer yearn for the fleeting moments of joy but to search for the sources of dopamine that are more impactful and are mined from experiences that are harder to achieve and more complicated than “I’m gonna go to the kitchen and cram a bunch of chips in my face and wash that down with a beer”
Today, my version of cramming calories all up in my guts is “I’m gonna eat this edible and play fetch with my dog for an hour” and after doing that for six months I am pleased to announce that I have an ass. It’s a firm one that sticks out and everything! I don’t exactly know how it’s doing in a pair of jeans yet because I’m scared to look, but I have hope that someday I will and it will be amazing. And folks? I think it’s so important to end this with a message of hope. A hope that someday, my ass will look amazing and I will be brave enough to look at it.
And Now Everything’s Perfect
Please enjoy and please share with your friends and family- but try to do so in a way that isn’t like “Hey your life sucks, read this!” ok? Have some tact for fucks sake! Speaking of tact, if you would like to donate towards the effort that went into publishing this essay; the one where I put all of my time and heart into preparing this and living it and sharing it, my venmo is @andie-main. Please be generous, I hate my day job and this is my only way out.
