Clung. Or Clinged, At Least

Clung:  Adhere or stick firmly or closely to; be hard to part or remove from.


I've been pondering the tendency of alcoholics to blow everything up and then think we can simply rebuild our lives on the rubble and ruined foundations.  I know I didn't want to do the work to clean up the rubble.  There was a lot of rubble there.  It looked like a lot of work to clean it up.  I just wanted my old life back -- the life I had been building before the alcohol and drugs took me down, that is -- not the life I was left with at the end of my drinking.  That life had morphed into a tiresome chore.   I had actually taken that life out to the curb with a "Free" sign stuck on top, but nobody picked it up.  The garbage guys wouldn't even touch it.  It was crawling with bugs and disease.


 Like most drunks I had a lot of promise and was well on my way to a successful life, at least on the surface.  I was going to have some financial security and some ego prestige so it was hard to walk in The Rooms tattered and lost, with the bugs and disease and everything.  I didn't want to give up the vision I still carried around of who I was going to be.


I know that I never got most of that back.  I know that I clung onto the mental image of what I was going to be far too long.  And I really know what I got was much, much better.  But at the start I just didn't trust the process.


The kind of work I ended up doing didn't have anywhere near the cachet of the career that I was trying to construct during my Age of Promise.  But I can see that I was ill suited for that kind of work and that what I ended up doing fit my personality very well and that I enjoyed doing it.  It worked out quite well.


But clungI don't remember any of the other kids in my 3rd grade class saying, when asked what they wanted to be when they grew up: "I want to sell electronic test equipment to heavy industry in the Rust Belt."