New to sobriety (or just generally in the struggle)?
I’ve got some balm for your soul.
Grab my free e-book, Six Mantras for Early Sobriety.
This week's original episode went in the trash. We spent 90-minutes talking about the history of our love lives and when we pressed "end" on the recording, knew that it would never see the light of day. So, we recorded another, wherein we talk about the things we don't share, and why, curiosity, trauma porn, privacy, secrets, secure relationships, and more.
This week, we get the full backstory on how Meadow came to do the work she does. She talks about the first company she owned, working for Martha Beck, being on Oprah, digging herself out of a half-million in debt, and more.
Self-care is not a bubble bath. I mean, it might be, if you’re the kind of person who feels they’re committing a mortal sin by allowing themselves to wade in hot, lavender-scented water with a candle or a book for twenty minutes, alone. If that’s you, then yes. Please allow yourself a damn bubble bath. Regularly.
I thought it was about social media. But it was about all of it. It was about being on, all the time. Being connected, and open to connections, and available, and expected to respond and expecting to get a response, and creating thousands upon thousands of tiny slivers of interactions to “connect” and “be productive” simply because I could. It’s actually worse than that. I had fallen into a very intentional trap laid by tech companies who only make money if I keep picking up my phone and putting my eyeballs on their apps.
I’d been battling constant fatigue, energy swings, inability to focus for long periods of time, or sometimes at all—as though there was a thin, cloudy film around my brain—for too long. A month ago, I decided to go grain and sugar-free, and it worked.
I’ve learned to do the most important things in the morning: write, sweat, journal, meditate because it’s when I’m most clean and clear and sharp, by far. If I wait, the chances of those things happening falls drastically. And if those things don’t happen, my mind and life fall off track astonishingly fast. It’s practical. And practical every day equals profound. This is how you make your bones.
The phenomenon has revealed itself over time. In the beginning, traveling was nail-bitingly stressful and not fun at all. It took time for me to appreciate the concept of traveling without imbibing, to rewrite all those tracks in my brain that said the only way traveling would be a full experience was if I was drinking my way through it. For a while—like a couple years—I equated new places with the uprush of intoxication. It felt sad, boring, and incomplete to even imagine a vacation unpunctuated with cocktails, let alone actually do it.
What if you consciously committed to failure and rejection? This week we share some of our own big failures (past and current), how to actually tell if you’re failing (because sometimes it’s not obvious!), and the difference between failing smart and failing, well, dumb.