The vitamin B1 deficiency and allergic asthma have been difficult speedbumps in the process but now around 3 months dry and smoke free.
For me, the greatest pleasure that is emerging from my recovering body is the return of my laser sharp memory recall. Sure, I probably blotted a substantial amount of it, or dampened it, in the 25 years of intermittent alcoholism, but a top percentile memory is not something that you want to lose.
As clarity reigns and my noticing the noticing becomes more noticable, I notice that I very much depend on my sharp memory to do some of the oddball things I like doing, like navigating in the dark in messy environments, because my memory for space works with only tiny visual and mostly tactile triggering to recall the state of this mess I am tiptoeing through.
It's a funny thing, because as a child a recurring nightmare, and a dream that certain drugs quite consistently triggered this vision over and over again, has 3 parts in it, and one of them is something like the final scene in Labyrinth with the old lady with the pile of old memories on her back.
In it, the junk is miscellaneous, the light is dim and blue, and I just have this constant awareness that I may step on the trigger of a beartrap like jaws on ugly, rusted steel skulls.
If I were to say what the biggest gratitude I have about having finally found the motivation to stop the self poisoning, it would be, to not lose that wonderful gift of a memory so vivid that I am constantly swamped with the images and meaning it washes over me with.
You can take out my eyes, make me deaf, take away my legs, but my memory and my imagination are a private joy that can never truly be snuffed out except by also snuffing the whole thing.
Everyone has a super power, and that super power should is precious, as it is something that you create by continuing to feed into it, with practise, with exercise, with whatever thing it requires to be kept live in your circuits.
Hold on to it until the last lights of your inner kingdom of computation goes out.
