I own it, I did that, not proud, but that was me, and when I face it, I take back a little dignity, not looking for excuses, I just want to be free from power.

Weakness had on me.

Free, free, free, free, free.

Hi, everyone, and welcome to the bubble hour where real people tell real stories of addiction and recovery.

I'm Gene McCarthy. I write the blog Unpickled. I tell my story there of life after alcohol since my very

first day of sobriety in 2011. So that is 10 years that I have been writing about what it's like to be sober,

and I hold space for your stories here. And lately I've been holding space for nobody because I

have taken off the summer and also took off the fall. And now we're all the way into December.

So somehow my summer vacation extended into December. And I'm not

quite sure how that happened, but I gave myself permission to rest, which is something I am

always encouraging other people to do. And I guess it was time that I took my own advice.

So when I thought that it was time to come back and

start doing shows again, I realized I just wasn't ready. I just wanted some more time because,

you know what happened when I took off some time this summer? What would you do with an extra

day a week? Right? You'd fill it up with stuff you love to do. And that's exactly what happened.

Magically, my time filled up with other things. And I just wasn't ready to give those things up yet

and return to weekly production. It's caused me to just give some thought to things. And if you

stay tuned to some future episodes, I will explain to you what's

going to be happening going forward on this podcast. But on this episode, I just wanted to give you

an update about my summer vacation, which seems so long ago, I'm sure now, as we're all

getting ready for winter. But sobriety really served me well during this downtime. And I thought this was a great

chance to share some of that, talk about it with you, let you know how that felt for me. One thing I

...