Since I have, well, many cats, we will just say many. Every morning I have a plethora of cat food cans to open and distribute.
I know, what you are thinking...where the fuck is she going with this one?
Hang in there, I promise there is a point.
So every day I open said cat food cans and then I provide a not equal share to each cat. Why not equal? Because some of them eat faster than others, and if I do not give them more, then the others get less, because the fast eaters come for the slow eaters portion. I swear to God you can see Darwin’s principles every morning in my kitchen...
Anyway, because I have a lot of cats and they are pretty fucking bougie cats, they get these tiny cans of food, aptly named “Fancy Feast” and scrape though I do to get every morsel out, there is still a residue that I laboriously rinse out every day. Then I deposit them into the recycling like a good Californian before Trump takes away that too.
Why is this important? Why would you care about this? Fuck, why do I care about this and why the fuck do I think it is important enough to dedicate a whole blog to?
Because once upon a time, I had another grip of cats and I had the same routine with said cats. But I would not rinse the cans (and I did not recycle because we were heathens back then and it was Florida) and I would just throw them in the trash.
At the time, I had this dog that could not help herself...she would retrieve the dirty cans from the trash and then proceed to lick the tainted cans and give herself a horrible stomach ache and attendant disgusting evidence of said stomach ache which I will leave off any further descriptors...instead I will say it was a fucking shitshow...literally.
I would lose my mind. I would usually wake up or come home to this fucking disaster in my house. Shit literally everywhere, the smell fucking horrendous and my house some sort of toxic waste dump.
I would love to tell you that this only happened once. But that would not be true. Like at all. I cannot even count the number of times this occurred...all because I would not take the couple of minutes required to rinse the fucking cans. This whole shitshow was avoidable after the first time it happened, and yet, yet I still behaved as though THIS TIME THE FUCKING DOG WOULD NOT DO WHAT SHE ALWAYS DID AND THEREFORE THE RESULT WOULD BE DIFFERENT.
Side note - it never was ever different.
Flash forward to this morning, I am feeding the feline contingency and just like I do every morning, I am rinsing the fucking cans. I no longer have the dog that used to get them out of the trash, my current dog would NEVER do such a thing! She is very well behaved and far more civilized. And yet, now I do the thing that I should have done all those years ago even though now I have no consequences for my actions should I fail to take them.
What changed?
Me. I am sober today and that did in fact change everything in my life...to include the ability to follow through with life’s mundane tasks, each and every damn day.
So this morning at my kitchen sink I had this awakening of sorts, this spiritual nod from the universe that I was and have been for a long time on the right path. I have grown up. Simple tasks that were asked of me in the past that I could not complete, despite the tragic and disgusting consequences, I am now able to do without even thinking about it. And for the record, I do not like the time it takes to do it or doing it just as much as I always have. The fact that I am annoyed by the ask is still the exact same, nothing has changed there. I do not want to, nor have I ever, wanted to rinse cat food cans. Ever.
And yet I do it every day. I just do it. And I am not sure where I changed into this person that can do something a whole bunch of days in a row. I know, for sure, that I did not possess this skill before getting sober. And I fucking tried. I got up every day, unless the hangover was too bad and I attempted to life. I failed every day, most days before my feet ever hit the floor because I just couldn’t get up when I was supposed to or needed to.
I can tell you for sure that I did not get sober so that I could have the discipline to rinse cat food containers. I did fucking not! But here I am doing the deal every single day and it is a gift. The consistency and stability my sobriety brings to my life is insane. Like C R A Z Y! How did I become this person who shows up for her life and does tasks that she still resents and dislikes a great deal but just does them without a thought or refusal? I got sober. That is how.
I have the life I do today because I am sober. And because I continue to do the work to beat back my inherent self destruction that I seem to have just been born with, my life today doesn’t resemble that old life at all. Well, except for the cat food cans which seem to remain a steady constant in my life drunk or sober.
Again...still.
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