Breathing Exercises

With an update

During my first year of sobriety, I was breathalyzed around three times a day. Morning, noon, and night. Always praying for that triple zero lottery.

The reason being that any number of things could set those pesky machines off. Too much mouthwash. A keto diet. Plain old bad luck. And if it did go off, it would become a whole thing. Staff members would scramble to bring in other equipment, make you pee in a cup, interrogate you in a dining room while everyone else was eating.

The beeping. The red LCD display. Every time I got tested, the worry that, for some reason beyond my control, I would blow hot. Not because I was secretly drinking, but because I didn’t know how to handle things that were out of my control. What’s to say my bad luck wouldn’t stop with the breathalyzer? What if I blew numbers and no one believed me? What if they sent me back to detox?

…and so on, and so forth.

The fear of not being in control.

The same fear that comes when I sit down to write.

This is all to say: I have no idea what I’m doing, but I’m still writing.

And as I’m still writing, I’m figuring out what the next stage is. How do I better get my work out into the world? The upside of never having yet sold a piece of fiction is that there aren’t editors and people with money with their hands on my keyboard. However, that’s also seems to be a downside.

The reader is as much a contributor as the writer.

All you wonderful subscribers. All my amazing workshop friends. Any future agents or publishers I might have. I need as many hands as I can to write things right, to get the stories that I write in front of the people who didn’t know they wanted to read them.

And if there’s anything I’ve learned about how I’m going to achieve that, it’s that I require a lot of time.

A few months before I “graduated” from rehab, I had finished work early, bought myself a pizza, and went back to the sober house. The house manager was there to breathalyze me as he always was. But this time, when I did, I blew numbers.

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The fear of not being in control.

Together we sat at a table as we waited for another staff member to check me out. A second opinion. I ate slice after slice of pizza as if it were my last meal, while my housemates eyed me in suspicion. Others in disbelief. When the other staff member arrived, he had me blow again.

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But then he blew in the machine himself. The beeping. The red LCD display. After a few moments, instead of showing a number, the thing just said “HOSPITAL.”

We found another breathalyzer. A working one. And when we did all of us blew zeros.

Sometimes I forget I can just keep breathing—that every moment leads to the next.

So that’s what I’ve been practicing here. Giving myself the space to breathe. Giving myself the space to write. Taking my time.

As such, I suspect it may get a little quiet here on The Spittoon.

Not for a lack of stories (I have several in my queue, including the beginnings of a new book) but because magazine publishers don’t like when the work you’re submitting is already available online. Agents don’t like when you have entire novels free for the public to read.

But never fear, dear reader, once the writing works its way through our capitalist pipelines you will all be the first to know. A story is never complete without a reader, and I can never thank you all enough for fulfilling that part. For your constant support.

Now…if the anticipation is killing you, if you just can’t wait, I know of another Andersen—a much better writer—who just released her new book.