Life Just Turned on at 37.

I feel like such a failure sometimes, and lately it has been hitting me in places I didn't even know I had avoided. I grew up as a musician, and for a long time my guitars were probably the closest things I had to me. They let me say things I couldn't say out loud, gave somewhere for sadness to go, and somehow let me turn some of it into something beautiful. Music wasn't just something I did. It was one of the few places where I knew how to exist.

My kids are six and eight, and I barely play for them.

Writing that hurts more than I expected it to. They have spent their entire lives living with a person who has this enormous part of himself sitting quietly in a case somewhere, and they barely know it. They haven't grown up hearing me play in the living room or watching me disappear into a guitar for an hour. Something that once felt almost inseparable from me somehow became something my own children haven't really gotten to know.

Then there are stupidly ordinary things that suddenly feel enormous. My kids still can't ride their bikes without training wheels. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that at six and eight, and I know children learn things at different times, but that isn't really why it bothers me. It bothers me because I keep looking backward and realizing how many times I wasn't the person saying, "Come on, let's go outside and figure this out."

I am coming up on five years sober, and for a long time I thought sobriety was the thing that was supposed to fix me. Alcohol had obviously caused enormous problems in my life, so removing it felt like the answer. Getting sober absolutely saved parts of my life, and I will never diminish what it took or what it gave me. But I understand something now that I couldn't understand then: removing the thing I was using to survive didn't automatically teach me how to live.

In some ways I think sobriety put me in amber. I stopped drinking, stabilized everything I could, and learned that if I didn't move too much, didn't change too much and kept everything under control, maybe nothing would collapse. I worked constantly because work gave my brain somewhere to go, and I kept myself occupied because being still inside my own body was uncomfortable. From the outside I was functioning, accomplishing things, raising a family and staying sober, while internally I was mostly trying to maintain the conditions under which I could continue doing all of that.

I thought that was living because it was so much better than dying.

Getting on medication that actually seems to fit me has complicated that story in ways I wasn't prepared for. I can suddenly see things I genuinely could not see before, and some of those realizations have been brutal. I have cried over things I would have intellectually understood a year ago without actually feeling them. I have written apologies because I can finally see the distance between the father I desperately want to be and some of the ways I have actually behaved.

There have been moments recently when something breaks open and I cannot put it back where it was. I see how anger feels from the other side. I see how often I said no because participation felt overwhelming, how often I substituted providing for being present, and how much of my energy went into keeping my own mind manageable. None of that means I didn't love my family during those years. It means love and capacity are not always the same thing, and I am finally able to see the difference.

That realization comes with a tremendous amount of guilt because my children did not stop growing while I figured myself out. They were babies, then toddlers, and suddenly they are six and eight. There is no version of recovery where I get those exact years returned to me so I can replay them with the information I have now. I hate that, and I think part of what I am feeling lately is grief for time that technically wasn't lost at all because I was standing right there while it passed.

I also have to be careful about what I do with that grief. If I turn every realization into another reason to hate myself, I am just finding a different way to disappear from the people I am trying so desperately to be present for. My kids don't need me sitting in a room conducting an archaeological investigation into every way I could have been better. They need the version of me who can finally see them clearly to get the fuck up and come outside.

So maybe we take the training wheels off.

Maybe I pull one of my guitars out and leave it out instead of treating it like an artifact from somebody I used to be. Maybe my kids hear me play badly at first because my hands aren't what they used to be, and maybe eventually they learn the songs that carried their dad through years they know almost nothing about. Maybe they ask me to teach them, or maybe they couldn't care less and tell me to stop playing because they're trying to watch something. Either outcome would at least mean music is happening in our house again.

I don't know how to describe what is happening to me lately without sounding dramatic. I am thirty-seven years into being alive and somehow it feels like somebody just turned the lights on. I am seeing beautiful things and painful things at exactly the same time, which means some days I am incredibly grateful and completely fucking devastated within the same hour.

Life just turned on.

Apparently it is a lot brighter than I expected.