At the end of 2006 I wrote a blog post about how I was planning to take a look at a lot of my life and make some changes. I had no idea the foreshadowing that was happening right in front of my face. I was mostly talking about individual choices and running with those decisions, but of course those illicit different reactions in different people and sometimes you aren't the only one to feel the results - or even the one always making the decision. In that post I wrote:

"Some of the decisions I live with on a daily basis I reconsider all the time and I'm fairly confident that what I'm doing is what makes the most logical sense. Others I made a long time ago and never looked back - I'll be 32 in a few months and I'm thinking that some of those probably deserve a closer look, even if only to reaffirm."

Since I wrote that my entire world has changed - some of those changes are more notable than others but the order of much of it is as important as anything else. I've talked myself in and out of writing about this for months but feeling like I'm keeping secrets is shit I don't want to deal with these days so I'm just running with it. Everyone who knows me knows I've been straight edge since I was about 12. The majority of those folks also know I stopped wearing X's on my hands long before I hit age 20 and that I've always had just as many friends who were the furthest from straight edge as those who were all about it. Truth is the older I get the less I care about labels and the more I care about individual actions - I've never been much of a flag waver anyway. The more I looked at this decision the less I thought it still fit in my life. My initial attraction to straight edge was that it was 100% opposite of what people expected from me. I was being a rebel by saying no and most people didn't know how to react to that.

At some point in the last 10 years that changed. People stopped being surprised by my decision and started expecting it. Additionally new people I met weren't shocked to meet someone who didn't drink, but rather assumed I was some kind of recovering alcoholic. All of this forced me to really take into account why I was making these choices. Was I making them for myself, or for others? And was the thing that I originally was rebelling against the thing that was now keeping me in the same mindset? I didn't know, and I don't know, but I do know I didn't like the realization that choices I was making in my life were at least partially based on other people's expectations. When I realized that, I knew I was over it. Though that's not easy to explain in itself, nor do I really feel the need to. I have nothing but distain for the folks who ran around screaming about how straight edge they were and then 2 years later were the drunkest guys in the bar. I don't like extreme hopping and that's not what this is about. The decision I made wasn't so much to start drinking as it was to stop not drinking. In the same way that I think saying people need religion to know what is right and wrong is bullshit I wanted to make my own choices because they are the ones I think I should be making, not because of a label.

This is a hard thing to explain, but that's one of the things I've been trying to figure out how to do for the last six months. Or even if I should for the last six months. Of course that got much more complicated in mid March when Caryn told me she didn't want to be married any longer. Again this isn't news to close friends, and not so close friends probably figured it out on their own, but now suddenly it would be an easy assumption for anyone to tie these to events together. Of course they weren't connected at all. So then I was right back in the situation of worrying about how people are going to perceive my actions. I was worried that people would assume if I wasn't saying I was straight edge and was getting divorced then clearly I must be drinking away my sorrows. I wasn't, and I'm not. More than anything I needed to be comfortable that the decisions I was making for my life were made by me and not by the lyrics coming off some piece of vinyl.

Without intending to I kind of followed up that post from December with a post 5 months later at the end of May. I noted then that I was happier than I've been in a very long time. Friends were picking up on it as well and telling me they hadn't seen me as happy in years - and it's a bit ironic that in Dec I said I wanted to change things in my life and over the next few months so many things changed, things I had a say in, things I didn't, and I went through some of the darkest times of my life. I certainly don't think I'm on the other side yet, by any means, but I don't feel trapped by outside decisions or expectations like I did when I made that post in December which is a big step for me.

Like I said I've been trying to figure out how or if I even need to talk about these decisions publicly. I've certainly talked to some friends about them privately but yesterday I realized I was putting pressure on some of those friends who helped me so much over the last few months - not so much to cover things up but, well, yeah, maybe to cover things up. Which is pretty much just as bad as making decisions based on what other people expect of you. And I don't want to get into that, especially when it is all about taking responsibility and ownership of my own choices.

So what does this mean? To you it means nothing, to me it means everything. And if you offer to buy me a drink chances are I'll still turn you down.