I've been thinking about the straight life lately, realizing that no matter how many 24 hrs. go by sober, it's never the same as the normie life. Once you've been way out where the disease of addiction takes you, you're an outsider the rest of your life in the "normal world." We can pass better in the white picket fence crowd, the Fry's grocery or Sam's Club or car lines picking up our kids or what have you. But inside, we know we're from a different reality altogether. This sense of being an outsider isn't unique to us, but it's at the center of who we are. Another reason a recovery community is so powerful. I think one reason this has been on my mind is that I'm back in the old 9-5 grind, working with young people again, and there's a lot of weird cultural and internal pressure to conform in various ways. To be a role model, to appear competent and "normal," to keep it all together. The contrast between the fringe life that I used to live and that I still do live in many ways and the assumed demands of having a job working with kids is an interesting contrast. Like, Among Schoolchildren, good old WB Yeats. I walk through the long schoolroom questioning; A kind old nun in a white hood replies; The children learn to cipher and to sing, To study reading-books and history, To cut and sew, be neat in everything In the best modern way—the children's eyes In momentary wonder stare upon A sixty-year-old smiling public man. Etc. Etc. Anyway, one of the motives of moving over here was to speak more freely. A few people knew of the old blog and two of them had asked specifically that I not write about them. I honored their requests because I respect both of them and understood their boundaries. But I plan to keep this wide open, and to write whatever I want. “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”—Anne Lamott Mostly what I feel now is a lot of disorientation and distraction. Anger and resentment also. It goes in cycles. I feel like this current wave of anger is some stuff I had been pushing down for a long time, and there's just a little bit more space now to look at it. Part of staying in the straight life is doing the work. It isn't work that brings one into white picket fence land. It's just work that keeps one on the safer side of the street.