#50 On being a messy traveler

and self-improvement as "a subtle form of aggression against who we really are"

Greetings from Hove, England, a place I didn’t know existed until a few days ago and where I’m a week into a three-week long trip, currently staying with a friend who reminded me yesterday that next week marks ten years since I quit drinking. On April 14th my sobriety will become a fifth-grader, and by some kind of miracle I will be in my favorite place in the world which is Sicily.

Every year since I stopped imbibing ethanol I’ve written a thing about it on the anniversary (like “Nine years of not drinking” or “103 ways my life improved in 3 years without alcohol”—all of them are in the archive if you’re extremely bored), and yesterday I told Cath (the friend I’m staying with, who is also sober) that I might not mark the anniversary this way for once, that because I feel differently about so much it might not make sense to continue to the tradition. But then I started thinking perhaps that’s the very reason to write about it, because it feels so different ten years in, so maybe next w…