It’s almost inconceivable to me that I started writing for the Change Exchange over a decade ago. It started, as many things do, with a Tinder date.
Back then, I was desperate for company, still reeling from a divorce and a subsequent break-up with the mother of my young child, still an infant. (Yes, I know… and if you’re tempted to judge me on this, imagine how I judged myself?)
My life was blowing up. A re-singled father, heading into the dark days and nights of a journey into addiction and its mayhem. It’s easy to see it unfolding, in hindsight, and chilling too.
Still, vaguely semi-functional, I could hold things together for a few hours, every now and then. A wafer-thin semblance of order desperately cast over my day-to-day life.
I told my Tinder dates that I didn’t want a relationship. The arrogance! As if I was fit for one! But that I didn’t want intimacy either. I just wanted someone to share a meal with.
And on this particular date, something must have struck a chord with my editor-to-be, who has since become a dear and cherished friend to me, a rock in the foundation of the life I’ve built subsequently.
I told her that I had been using food, and particularly, making myself a meal, as a way to dignify my solitary existence.
As a way to cultivate a smidgen of self-respect, sitting down to eat by myself, without my children, in the silence. Even if it was a piece of toast. To care about myself enough to eat something.
And then, I wrote about it, every night, in a manuscript I dedicated to myself, called The Divorced Cookbook.
Yes, it’s a pretty execrable and pretentious quasi-literary attempt, uneven, confused, contorted. But it served its purpose and held me together.
Writing provided a handrail for me to stay upright, keep walking. Keep waking up. When daily, I would groan. Not here again!
So I said to my then Tinder date, “See you next time.” She scowled at me. “If there is one,” she said. I flinched.
And then a week or so later, she wondered if I’d like to try writing about being a single dad, in a family newly constellated. What was the change taking place? How was I navigating it? What was happening to me?
It was a surprise, her asking me to do that. A vote of confidence, when it was in short supply. Not much else gave me much hope.
I’ve just re-read it, and gone back in time, to packing the car for a family trip on my own, to the establishment of a new rhythm for our children. To the first fumbling steps of trying to rebuild my life.
I’m gratified that I didn’t take myself too seriously, and could laugh at things. I think that’s important. And laugh, again now, at that time.
But still, I see that I was just grasping at things. In a lot of pain. My brain felt like it was overheating, that I had many minds within minds, spinning.
Mostly helpless, I finally got myself into recovery eight years ago and have not, by the grace of a power greater than myself, used a mood-or-mind-altering substance since then, nor taken a drink.
For many of us in recovery from addiction, we speak of our old selves, the people we used to be. Ironic that, while writing for the Change Exchange, I experienced such profound change.
Slowly, step by step, but inexorably, becoming a better version of myself, the one I have chosen to be. Still, nothing is constant.
Just that now, when darkness crowds in on me, it does not last as long. I have less self-pity, and more tools to manage life on life’s terms.
Writing here has been a privilege, and a joy. Each idea I’ve been honoured to explore, to turn inside out, has often provided some kind of revelation.
Writing has become an act of shared discovery. Never knowing what I’ll find, the act of writing itself has been revelatory, as I’ve watched the words appear on the screen in front of me, like filling up the page, as if by magic.
Examining the smaller changes and shifts and challenges along the way provide a timeline of my relationship to material things, to time, money, family, children, myself, work and its lack, and what matters most in this brief life.
Stories which seem written a lifetime ago, in a brief decade. I’ve seen that change happens, that it’s inevitable, but also that it’s possible, when it seems it might not be. I’m much happier than I used to be. I’m more at peace too.
I used to think that hope was facile. I never imagined a future for myself. Sure, I could compress a little silver dust into an 800-word piece, but when it was over, there I was, back with myself, a person I didn’t like much, and loathed at times.
To climb out of that, fashioning a lifeline from a rope of words – that has been my salvation. Because words themselves are actions, I’ve found.
Words matter. Someone gave me the chance to learn that, again and again, which has done nothing less than help save this life of mine, give it some space to breathe, and help me find joy.