Theme: Moderation
Quote:
"Excess is the root of ruin; the wise know that the mirrour’s beauty lies in its simplicity." —Jean Puget de La Serre
Resolution 25: The Halfway Point
We've reached June. The sixth month of 2025. Week twenty-five out of fifty-two. Resolution 25. The midpoint of the year, and of the promise I made to myself in January.
I didn’t call it a resolution at first—not in the way people usually do. There was no gym membership, no diet plan. Just this: to face myself honestly, month by month, through the mirror of writing. To name what I’ve hidden. To make peace with what I cannot change. To live without flattery.
I couldn’t have known how difficult some truths would be. How heavy it would feel to revisit certain memories. Or how liberating it might become to finally write them down.
If I could speak to myself at the beginning of this year, I would say: You will not be healed by discipline alone. You must also learn tenderness.
This halfway point isn’t a transformation. It isn’t triumph. It’s quieter than that. It is a deepening. A grounding. A realization that growth is not always forward—sometimes it is downward, into the soil with the roots.
Moderation, this month’s virtue, arrives as a necessary teacher. I’m beginning to see that excess doesn’t always look like ruin. Sometimes it looks like success. Sometimes it looks like normal. But beneath it, something frays.
This month, I do not write to confess. I write to continue. To carry forward the vow I made at the start of this year: to live truthfully. The mirror must remain unbroken. And to do that, it must reflect the shadows too.
Reflections on Truth
Part I: Before – The Slow Creep
Quote:
"The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all."'— Søren Kierkegaard
The first time I drank, I was nearly twenty-one, and I remember it vividly—not because it was illicit or dangerous, but because it was good. I was fishing with friends, sunburned and tired, our hands still smelling faintly of lake water and scales. We fried the day’s catch over an open flame, and someone passed me a Coors. Ice-cold. Just bitter enough to be interesting. They didn’t know it was my first, and I didn’t tell them. I liked that it felt easy, effortless. Like I’d always belonged there.
There was no drama. No collapse. No dark foreboding. Just a drink, a fish fry, and a warm Missouri evening in late Spring. If you’d asked me then what moderation meant, I might’ve shrugged. I hadn’t yet learned that excess doesn’t begin as a fall. It begins as a comfort. A reward. A habit.
Kierkegaard wrote that the greatest hazard of all—losing one’s self—can happen quietly, as if it were nothing at all. That line has haunted me. Because that’s what happened. I didn’t lose myself in a single moment. I misplaced myself slowly, quietly, across years. In bars. In laughter. In hangovers passed off as jokes. I lived in the margins of what seemed normal—especially for someone in their twenties. Long nights. Loud music. Bottomless glasses. And still, I made it to work. I drank coffee to chase off the fog. I told stories about being young and tired and burning the candle at both ends.
And in some ways, I was doing what everyone else seemed to be doing. I was playing the part. But something in me was drifting. I started drinking not for celebration, but for silence. To hush the noise of self-doubt, disappointment, fatigue. I began to pour more when I was lonely. When I didn’t want to talk. When I didn’t want to feel.
By the time I married, drinking had become a structure in my life—an unspoken part of the routine. Dinner and drinks. Friday night whiskey. A bottle always nearby. I wasn’t reckless. I wasn’t violent. But I wasn’t present either. I wasn’t listening. And I wasn’t honest. I didn’t drink to excess in ways that would alarm anyone—but I drank enough to dull the discomfort of a relationship in quiet decline.
I didn’t stop to ask what it meant to be moderate. I made plenty of mistakes and all too often made a fool of myself. Drunk at Halloween. Drunk on Holidays. Drunk on trips. Drunk with friends. Drunk at home. I just made sure I wasn’t the drunkest one in the room most of the time. I thought that was enough.
But moderation isn’t about comparison—it’s about clarity. It’s about being able to stand still, look yourself in the eye, and say: This is enough. Not because you’ve hit the limit, but because you’ve heard the voice inside that says, You don’t need to run tonight.
I wasn’t running toward anything. I was just running. And it worked, for a time. Until it didn’t.
I didn’t know it yet, but I was already well into the middle of a story I’d be telling differently for the rest of my life. A story not of rebellion, but of erosion. Not a tragic fall—but a quiet surrender to habits I didn’t want to examine too closely.
And then, one day, it caught up with me.
Reflections on Humility
Part II: During – The Moment the Mirror Cracked
Quote:
"The mirrour, untainted by flattery, doth humble the proud by showing them not what they wish, but what they are." — Jean Puget de La Serre
It was a friend’s wedding. A night of laughter and dancing, of stories told under strings of white lights and empty kegs. The kind of night where joy feels simple again, where no one watches the clock. The beer was flowing and the tap was open. I remember exactly what it was—Tank 7, my favorite. A farmhouse ale brewed with strength behind its charm. High gravity. One of those beers that counts for two, even when you're pretending it's just one.
I stayed late to help clean up. I stacked chairs and folded tables and talked about nothing with people I’d known for years. And then I got in my truck.
I believed I was fine. Not because I had measured anything, but because I felt fine—and that was the problem. Moderation had long ago stopped meaning measurement. It had become a feeling. A gut check. A guess. That guess ended at a checkpoint not far from the venue.
There wasn’t a moment of denial. No pleading. No grand display of innocence. I stepped out of the truck and sat in the van. I let them draw my blood. I didn’t argue because I knew. I knew what I had done. And I knew what was coming.
I was broken in that moment—not because of the charge, but because of the mirror it held up. I had imagined this kind of moment for years. Feared it. Feared being exposed as that kind of person. Someone careless. Someone reckless. Someone caught.
But what I hadn’t expected, in those early minutes of humiliation, was kindness. I was offered a chance to call someone. No jail that night. Just quiet shame. A pair of friends picked me up and took me home. I was silent. And so were they.
The next morning, I returned for my truck. Someone had broken into it during the night. They'd forced open my toolbox. My tools were gone. But worse—so much worse—was the loss of my grandfather’s baseball glove. The one he’d worn when we played catch in the yard. The one that still carried the scent of his hands, his oil, his life. That was the thing that broke me. The glove was irreplaceable. A small relic that represented few good memories we had together, stolen on the very night I had proven how unsafe I could be.
Life after the DWI was misery. It wasn’t publicized—I was lucky, in that small and shameful way. Newton County. No article in the Carthage Press. No name in the Joplin Globe. But it was public enough. I told my boss because I had to miss work for court. I pled guilty because I was guilty. I accepted probation, paid fines, attended classes.
I learned about SR22 insurance—what it meant, how to get it, how to hide it. I had to have a breathalyzer installed in my truck. I learned how to blow into a machine while pretending I wasn’t. I avoided giving rides. I avoided communion at church, terrified that even a sip of wine would cost me everything.
I built a fortress of secrecy. I stopped letting people in—both metaphorically and literally. My truck became a private prison. I lived in fear that someone would see the wires, would ask questions, would know. I stopped seeing friends. I stopped trusting kindness. I hated myself.
I served my probation. I counted the days. I watched others move on with their lives while I lingered in suspended shame. And then, at last, the breathalyzer was removed. The technician smiled and said, “See you soon. You guys always come back.”
He meant it as a joke. Or maybe he didn’t. But I heard it as a statement.
That was the moment I understood the difference between punishment and change. The courts had sentenced me. The technician had doubted me. But the real question—the one the mirror kept asking—was whether I believed I could be different.
Not just someone who wouldn’t do it again, but someone who could live in the open again. Without hiding. Without shame. Without fear.
I wasn’t ready to answer that yet. But I knew this much: I never wanted to see the mirror crack like that again.
A Yearlong Journey
Part III: After – Learning to Hold the Cup Differently
Quote:
"Temperance is simply a disposition of the mind which binds the passion." — Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica
Since that night, I haven’t had so much as a parking ticket. Not because I’ve become fearful, but because I’ve become clear. Something in me shifted—not all at once, but gradually, like a tide pulling back from a shore I didn’t realize I’d wandered so far from.
When I first read Aquinas’s line—that temperance is a disposition of the mind which binds the passion—I felt something in me settle. He wasn't speaking about repression. He wasn't talking about denying desire altogether. What he was describing was alignment. A soul no longer driven by its urges but shaped by something steadier. A person who could hold their own appetites without being held hostage by them.
That’s what I had to learn. Not to pretend I never wanted to have drink—but to understand why I had wanted it in the first place. Why it had become so easy to reach for numbness instead of presence. Why it had become a pattern rather than a pleasure. Temperance, in Aquinas’s sense, is not about refusal—it’s about right relationship. Between the self and its passions. Between desire and restraint. Between what feels good and what is good.
I no longer crave drunkenness. In truth, the very idea makes me feel ill. Not because I fear consequences, but because I finally see the full cost—not just to my body, but to my sense of self. What I missed wasn’t alcohol—it was ritual. A cold drink on a summer evening. The casual camaraderie of a shared pint. I’ve since found that again in a new way, through non-alcoholic beers like BERO. They offer the taste I loved, minus the weight I no longer wish to carry.
This may seem small. Trivial. But it isn’t. Finding something that allows me to participate in the good part of a former vice without stumbling into the excess is a kind of redemption. A reordering. It allows me to enjoy pleasure without losing balance. This, I believe, is what Aquinas meant: a disposition of mind—not a moment of willpower, but a habit of the soul—formed through trial, failure, and, ultimately, self-awareness.
I’ve come to understand that addiction, in many forms, is the mind’s way of negotiating pain. It says: I cannot sit with this, so I will reach for that. The problem isn’t that we desire too much—but that we too often desire what cannot satisfy. And in chasing those desires, we let our passions govern us.
Temperance doesn’t ask us to kill those passions. It asks us to bind them—to know them, name them, and carry them without being carried away by them. That’s what recovery has become for me—not a renunciation, but a reconciliation.
Forgiveness was harder. Not because I believed I should still be punished, but because shame is a subtle tyrant. It doesn’t need bars or breathalyzers to keep you trapped. It just needs a whisper that says, You’re not who they think you are. For years I have lived in fear of being discovered—not for what I’d done, but for what that mistake might make people think I was.
But healing came through confrontation—through facing the mirror honestly, again and again, until I no longer looked away. Until I could say, Yes, I failed. But I am not my failure. Yes, I made a mistake, many in fact. But I am not unworthy of peace. That is what binds the passion—not shame, not punishment, but clarity.
My mirror now holds no flattery, but it no longer mocks. The cracks remain, but I have stopped seeing them as signs of ruin. They are simply reminders of the pressure I’ve survived. They remind me of what can be rebuilt.
Looking Ahead
Moderation is no longer a limit placed upon me. It is a gift I offer myself.
It is the space between desire and compulsion. It is the breath between question and answer. It is the room I make in my life for grace, for presence, for enough.
In the days ahead, I want to keep tending that inner disposition Aquinas describes. I want to hold my passions gently, knowing they can harm but also point toward beauty when rightly bound. I want to live as someone who has looked in the mirror, seen clearly, and chosen not to flinch.
Because healing is not forgetting the past. It is carrying it differently.
Afterword: A Note on Addiction and Grace
Alcoholism is serious. Addiction is real. And the difference between a bad habit and a lifelong illness is not always visible from the outside. For some, one mistake is the beginning of a long descent. For others, it becomes a wake-up call. I was fortunate. I was loved. I had support. And even then, the road back to myself was long.
This reflection is not meant to suggest that addiction is simply a matter of choice or clarity. I know now how complex it is—how rooted it can be in pain, in trauma, in unspoken shame. And I know, too, how often people suffer silently, afraid to ask for help. Afraid of being judged or misunderstood.
What I learned from this experience is that grace is not given once. It must be practiced. To receive it, and to offer it.
I have learned that my responsibilities extend beyond my own choices. I have a duty to be a better friend. To notice when someone is struggling. To speak honestly when concern is needed. To offer presence, not just advice. And to never make light of what I once carried so heavily.
I do not look back on this story with pride, but I do look back with clarity. And with hope. I am not who I was. And I do not carry this mirror alone.
If you or someone you love is struggling with alcohol or substance use, please know that help is available. You are not alone. Reach out to a counselor, a doctor, a support group, or a trusted friend. Resources like Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), SMART Recovery, and local treatment centers exist for a reason: to walk with you through the hard parts.
Recovery is possible. Healing takes time. But grace is real—and both you and me are worthy of it.