Morning Pages | 20 September 2023
I'm feeling lit up by the feelings I'm experiencing after writing today's pages and thinking about how it's all connected back to that spark of an idea I had in 2000. I was alone in Kazakhstan, working for Ernst & Young as a Russian translator in my first graduate job. I'd left my girlfriend of one year behind and went with a suitcase full of Robin Hobb fantasy novels. It was those novels that brought about the spark of an idea, and I still have the email in which I tried to explain it to my girlfriend.
I cultivated my drinking rather a lot while I was in Almaty, but that doesn't mean that my ideas were bad ones. As I explore these thoughts now, I'm getting closer to figuring out why I drank alcohol in the first place. That will help me to grow in recovery. Or not just grow, but blossom and thrive. Art, creativity, literature, music, the human condition, love, philosophy, history, the humanities - these give me the answers I need to flourish. To distil it down into a single phrase, I would say that fearless self-expression is the way. That's why I keep writing every day, because it clears away the detritus that smothers the connection to God. I learn from other artists' creations and from what that leads me to create.
"I'd like to be home with my monkey and my dog" comes from Sunset Strip by Roger Waters on his Radio Kaos album.
