The more I think about it, the more I believe that other readers being confused about your gender is symptomatic; not of gender confusion on your part, but of a tendency to not be straight-forward; possibly in the interests of appearance. As good creative writing demands good technical writing, so good creative art demands good techinical drawing.

Plus, if I understand you correctly, you're depressed.

Plus, if I understand you correctly, love was too risky, so you played it safe and went for Like; which, though a requirement, is not enough. Catch that Patty Griffen song where when all hell's breaking loose, love throws a line. For you there's no line. But, yes, you're right: love can be a shitty line-thrower.

All kinds of things cascade in on me, my parents' divorce when I was 24, which still fucked me up, that I'd been the product of a breaking home; never any more holidays with either of them; never getting to know them as adults, though we never knew each other anyway. So I reactively got married, for love, which ended 4 years later because of my callow youth. Then she kidnapped our kid; who just now found me as she turns 37.

So my next marriage I vowed to not take the easy way out, and once I stop drinking it's still hell to pay and we go miles, up down, up down, on the resolution that we'll each clean up our own side of the street, though we're not great at that. Things have improved, but in conclusion I can say no more than that marriage is weird. I may have compromised my integrity to make this marriage work nearly as much as I did in fucking up my first one. I have hung on through aggrevations much worse than I did with the first one, though my second wife is saner. I suppose I could have swapped out this marriage for another one, which might have been better through another honeymoon plus a couple years, though my second daughter would have been torn up.

Marriage is weird. That's all I can say. Well, no, I know what's really really fucked up and that I'm not doing that. But besides that, follow your heart of hearts.

Best,

Monty

(More, for free: google "Rabid Fanatic" +"Monty Johnston"

Love. That's the word. Wine-Love. There's your red flag. I don't mean to be harsh, judgemental, or shaming, but I hear you saying that you've begun the forbidden affair with the bottle. It fulfills the deep craving for meaning, purpose, and wholeness which is at the same time shamefull. It must be hidden from your husband because it is adulterous. Or so it feels, for in the whole swirl of your life from before first memory till now you have been around unholy alliances and know and can be drawn in by their click. "I have three glasses of wine and then my judgement or willpower or whatever is dampened..." For me it was the three beer buzz.

Though even just for civility I want to back off and say that I know no more than Cary where you're going with your drinking, when I was reading those responses filled with logical handy hints about what you could do about drink and food, I thought, "Oh, they just don't understand. There's a slippery slope, a whirlpool, a black hole here, and she is deeply drawn to serious flirtations with the edge." Yes, lead me into temptation. Tolerance builds. Cunning, baffling, and powerful. When it comes to playing hardball, this is the real thing.

The moderate drinker never needed to learn how to drink moderately.

And then you got an occasional curt response from some of those wise to alcoholism. Don't mind them. Their hearts are in the right place and maybe in time they'll get help for their codependence. They're a small minority.

The disease can play the trick of making it seem almost more shameful to find meaning, purpose, and wholeness through health than by drinking. My experience is that at the beginning most people want to hide the fact that they're going to meetings. It doesn't usually last long. Sure, sneak off to noon meetings. But before long it'll no longer seem like a secret affair. There need be nothing shameful or fanatical about it. Even the family disease's call for a hit of salaciousness can evaporate.

Best,

Monty

(more, for free: google "Rabid Fanatic" +"Monty Johnston"; though, dear Wine-Loving Mama, you might want to save this book for a year or two down the road. They say, First things first.)

Charming, almost, an atheist coming up with a theory for the origin of God. Wolpert seems like quite a nice fellow.

Egolessness, whether manifested as enlightenment or inspiration or love, is the origin of religion, and also of the experience of a non-personal higher power, and is also accessible to atheists who continue as atheists. Perhaps it is no more than electrochemical brain activity. Cool, as they say. Accessing this activity with drugs, however, does raise questions about fanaticism and addiction; about, that is, other-direction and self-hate, which are inimical to healthy egolessness.

But there is no harm in anyone realizing the meaning and purpose of life inherent in experiencing life through organic electrochemical egolessness. Walking and meditation and doing art can provide a technology of transcendence, as the tranpersonal psych people say. Cool, as they say.

I'm not talking about the mystical fog which both the religious and the atheistic tend to poo-poo. I'm talking about experiencing one's unique irreplaceable aliveness through an electrochemistry that doesn't tend to occur in human brains preoccupied arguing about religion and atheism.

Best,

Monty

(More, for free: google "Rabid Fanatic" +"Monty Johnston"