Reinvention Time: Cannabis Activist
What Do I Want To Be When I Grow Up? A Pot Advocate!
To Rid Myself of Toxicity, I Need to Reinvent Myself
My resignation from the California State Bar became official late last year. Am I still struggling over the removal of a fundamental pin of my being for over thirty years? Of course, I am.
It was and is fun to watch TV and play guitar. I have been playing around throughout 2021 with various identities. At first, exhaustion forced only one answer: Retirement.
Then, I formed a non-profit organization, BipolarLivesMatter.org, as a therapeutic and constructive way of dealing with my trauma of being beaten by police officers.
I was initially going to write the book #BipolarLivesMatter. By mid-Summer, I picked up writing in earnest. I now have fifty thousand words in my draft book: California Sober: My Personal Formula for Stopping Drinking.
But I found out that almost nobody gives a shit that cops routinely kill mentally ill people at rates worse than black people. I have found it not nearly impossible, but ultimately totally impossible, to organize people around civil rights for mentally ill people, other than the lawyer organizations, the ACLU, and the Judge Bazelon Center. I am keeping BipolarLivesMatter.org going, but I am not into throwing good money after bad, as the saying goes. I am instead going to just let it grow organically, if at all.
I wrote a book, but I never intended to develop my reputation as an “author.” Nor am I interested in being hired for writing jobs. I am writing my book to help fellow sufferers who are not satisfied with the existing “quit lit.” Not many lawyer-alcoholic books out there. And there are no positive California Sober books out there, even though there are finally some support groups for people like us.
So, I am going to keep up my blog on Medium. I will double down and crank out stories as often as possible. So, welcome 2022! It’s time to be an activist.
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