Five Years.

I am feeling immensely nostalgic and sentimental today. It is my last day teaching at the pre-school, ever. It is also my five year sobriety/e.d. recovery birthday. Both things are making me even more reflective and clumsily emotional than usual.

I'm also downplaying both of them, mostly out of an attempt to hold back the tears.

I have been teaching at the pre-school for four years, and I have been sober for five. These last few years have been crazy and also amazing. In the last five years, I have been through a lot. Getting sober and e.d. free. Shaving my head and losing dreadlocks full of handmade clay beads (and probably several other unidentifiable things). Having my heart broken by my first girlfriend. Experiencing desperation. Surprise at the power of my own anger. Learning to live alone without unhealthy dependence on drugs, alcohol, and food. Dealing with the aftermath of trauma. Dreams, anniversaries. A spell of nearly three years without being able to compose. Meeting Stacia. The intense, confusing courtship we had from opposite sides of the world. One of my best friends being diagnosed with cancer. Her long, excruciating illness. Her death at 28. The death of my gentle, blue-eyed grandmother. Graduating from undergrad, somehow with a commendable GPA even after all the dropping out I had to do along the way. Getting a certificate in teaching English. Never really using it but taking a good friend away from the process. Losing that friend when our boundaries blurred. Starting a traveling music studio after quitting the terrible job I had with a music-teacher staffing company. Leaving Stacia. Leaving an entire support system. Leaving Luna. Leaving the garden of perennials. Driving to Lake Nokomis and jumping in at dusk because I didn't know what else to do. Traveling to New Zealand. Summit treks by myself. Getting involved in the local music scene. Meeting Dan, my producer and unbelievably generous friend. A string of not-quite-ready attempts at dating. Polyamory. Reconsidering orientation. Climbing to the highest and lowest points in Arizona within the span of four days, high on new love and desert air. Getting my first (maybe only?) commission. Learning to whitewater kayak. Learning to run. Discovering Reiki. Yoga. Finding a new, empowering support community. Recording an album in January, with snow piling in the dark behind us, through a room of windows. Being graced by the talents of my incredible and collaborative friends. Applying for an MFA. Getting a teaching assistantship to pay for graduate school. The sudden death of my 7-year-old cat. Surprising friendships and unexpected community. Maintaining anxiety in healthy ways.

Struggling anyway.

Surviving anyway.

To put this into perspective, five years ago today I was in a residential eating disorder treatment center in rural Wisconsin, drunkenly confessing to the powers that be that I had been sneaking soapy vodka into my bedroom in an empty shampoo bottle and chugging it while my Canadian roommate who referred to her breasts as "ta-tas" talked for hours on the phone to her boyfriend in Toronto.

Only weeks before that I was lying in the ICU at Fairview-Riverside, recovering from a dangerously close suicide attempt.

Fairview-Riverside knew me well then. I once walked into detox (or, more accurately, stumbled into detox) and was greeted by name. "Hi, Liz," the doctor on-duty said, plainly. "I see you're back."

These days, detox and soapy vodka seem like pieces of another lifetime. Someone's else life. This life I have built in the following years is one I am proud of. It's nice to stop and remember how much my life has changed because I so often take for granted the day to day tasks that once seemed impossible to manage. There was a time when a "good day" was measured by how many calories I had ingested, or whether or not the scale tipped a hundred pounds, whether or not I had been kicked out of an all-you-can-eat buffet for eating too much (it can actually happen--it happened to me twice), or whether or not I had blacked out the night before. These things were the central, consuming pieces of my life.

The things that consume me now are much different and much more productive. Yes, today I am happy and proud and grateful, as cliche and buttery as that sounds. There is so much change occurring in my life right now, and I have a lot of fear and uncertainty about what these next years hold for me, but I have clearly been through much worse. And I have learned that I can handle change and even thrive.

Recently, I walked into the co-op and was recognized by a staff member. "Oh, hi," he said to me with a smile. "You're a reg, aren't you?" Slightly embarrassed, I said, "Yep. I'm a regular." Something about the dissipation of my anonymity as a co-op shopper made me feel at first funny, like I had been figured out or caught. I told this story to a friend, asking insecurely if maybe I shopped too often at the co-op. My friend laughed and said, "I think that's one place where it's a good thing to be recognized."

And he's right: I would much rather be recognized as a "reg" at the natural foods co-op than on the detox floor of Fairview-Riverside.

Oh, how things change!