January note
Happy New Year, everyone. I hope your Christmas-time was as enjoyable as it could be.
Thank you for being a subscriber to HORSES NOISE. It’s an odd thing to subscribe to, I suppose. It’s about four years old now, this irregular newsletter with no particular focus; it’s nothing more than what I want to write, when I want to write it. And for a long time I have felt bad or guilty about that, despite not being capable of doing it any other way — but a good friend did tell me last year that the undeclared nature of this substack was something he liked about it, and that reassured me that perhaps it doesn’t need to be anything else.
Last year I did several lengthy posts about addiction, about how hard it was to get any help. Then in October or November or whenever it was, there was one about how I had somehow at last, done it, had got myself sober over 509 days, with the help of several guardian-angel friends and a WhatsApp group — but also about how I had failed after that to stay sober. Unexpectedly, I became a frequent binge drinker. A few days sober, a few days drinking til dawn. Repeat. Hell.
There may yet be more posts on that topic but I am extremely happy and proud and smug to say that if I do write them they will be in the past tense. My last drink was on New Year’s Eve. Just the one, and deliberately, so that this afternoon, for example, on the 27th day of 2024, I can say: this is my 27th sober day. And that’s how it will continue. Getting sober without professional help was so difficult I almost didn’t manage it at all. Without those friends, I wouldn’t have. Staying sober, however, having achieved sobriety, is unbelievably easy. I’ve said that multiple times, without any fear of ‘jinxing’ it. I do not want to go back there, and it costs me no energy whatsoever to avoid it.
I am still not used to sobriety, though; and I think I will be learning its shape for a long time. It is much less claustrophobic than addiction, but I am still not well in the head, and there’s a lot to figure out. To be eating better, and much, much more, is wonderful. I’m a very early riser now, which I’ve always wanted to be. In one sense there are many more hours in my day, but in two other senses I still don’t have any time: firstly, as I say, I’m still not well, and bad mental health sets itself ravenously and unpredictably on your free time, leaves a carcass of it. Secondly, the moment you feel more capable for whatever reason, you do try to take on more things; or, at least, that’s how I’ve found it goes. As if the lid has been lifted on decades of frustration, and I can begin at last to try to do things.
Very slowly, mind. I still barely leave the flat. I’m dedicating a lot of my time to training up as a coder, because I happen to have a brain which feels happy working in numbers and algorithms, and — and honestly, I just want a fucking job. And a stable job: I’ll never return to being a freelance musician. Coding is a field in which I understand remote and reasonably flexible roles exist, and I am desperate after so long to escape the benefits trap. Long-term, I want to escape the UK. I want a salary, I want to feel some sense of personal freedom, I want to be able to send a bit of money to my parents every now and again. Prior to that, I at least want to be capable of leaving this city: financially and emotionally. In three years and three months I’ve left Nottingham exactly twice, and the more recent of those trips was for all of half an hour. Maybe when I’m more well I can come and hang out with you, whoever and wherever you are.
You can imagine how for years — I’m going to say for fifteen years — almost all of my money has gone on alcohol and drugs. The single best purchase I’ve made in months, due to this happy slackening of my finances recently, has been a pair of Austrian army combat boots — these are kind I always used to wear, but for some reason abandoned in 2020. Going outside and walking around is suddenly a pleasure again. It’s taken me four years, and getting sober, to notice that the main reason I hated so much going into the city centre is that I was doing so in trainers, and they felt so bendy and thin it was as if I was there among the crowds wearing slippers, or even just socks. Will I delete this paragraph, given I don’t remember why I started it? Fuck it: it can stay.
Perhaps I just wanted to say, hello, again; this is me, my name is Timothy written down, but ‘Tim’ out loud if you like, I don’t mind. I’m a musician, and a writer. I’m an alcoholic, and an addict. ‘Formerly’? Maybe once is always. But either way, I’m in recovery, so I carry myself differently these days. Heavy boots is a part of that, silly as it sounds — of clawing my identity back and finding how it’s changed and how it hasn’t. It’s nice to be able to remember, and really feel the truth of it, that I’m a taller-than-I-thought faggot who wears big boots and takes care to keep his hair cropped short. I’m just so fucking happy to be back — or on the way back, at least, and that alone is such a big deal for me.
After a total breakdown in 2020-22 from which I am still not yet recovered I have absolutely no talent for being in the world, but for now I am going to prepare to get myself a job, hopefully within a year, and at any rate I am going to keep writing, and see how that goes. Oh, right! In a month or so I have a new poetry book out. I will definitely spam you about that. There’ll be another post this weekend, more fiction-in-several-parts that won’t be on consecutive days this time (I don’t have time) — but I wanted to wave a greeting from my new vantage.
Best wishes, everyone. Here is a photo of the sky right now. Solidarity always—
Tx