Dildo Mountain, and the Hangover to End All Hangovers

"Dildo Mountain" (djh, 2015)

Today is my soberversary. Five years ago last night -- very late last night-- I took my final sip of what was, for me, slow poison. Five years ago today was The Hangover To End All Hangovers.

It's been an amazing five years. I quit my increasingly suffocating dayjob, thanks to a voluntary severance deal and a supportive nesting partner. I finished writing the novel I'd been pretending to write for the previous decade -- I finally completed that awful first draft, then took it through two more painful drafts. (It just needs one last bit of revision before I can send another round of queries. I'm finishing the draft of a different project in the meantime: a memoir about sex and sobriety. Hence the title of this blog.)

I decided that not drinking alcohol meant I could eat anything I wanted, drink anything that wasn't poison; I learned some fabulous mocktail recipes and the best brands of vegan ice cream. (Personal picks: Half juice and half tonic water, with Fee Bros. NA bitters; coconut milk ice cream by Luna & Larry.) I lost some weight; I gained some weight. But crucially, I shed a huge burden of self-loathing. I am wildly more comfortable in my body now, on the cusp of 50, than I ever was in my cute young binge-drinker days.

In the memoir project, I'm writing about how my very long-term relationship (VLTR) has evolved from monogamous to open, and evolved in other ways, while staying honest and loving and fun. I'm writing about sex stuff, and I will write about some sex stuff here, so anyone in my immediate family who's found this blog, you might want to stop reading now? It's up to you! But I'm not writing this for you. I'm writing it, at the moment, mostly for all the fantastic people I met at the Woodhull Sexual Freedom Summit last weekend, which included a lot of sex bloggers. And sex workers. And sex educators. And sex activists. They were brave and fun and amazing. My plan for the next few weeks is to blog about my favorite workshop sessions and the insights I took away from the conference.

First Links!

https://www.woodhullfoundation.org/

https://www.sexualfreedomsummit.org/

You can follow @dirty_sober on Twitter to get the link to each new blog post. Any other chitchat happens at my personal Twitter, @dorothyjhickson. I'm also planning to add links here for the many amazing sex-bloggers I met at Woodhull or have found via other sex-bloggers' twitterfeeds since.

The sculpture in the image is "Dildo Mountain," which I made for the 2015 Artomatic show in Maryland. Many of the raw materials came out of a sex toy workshop at Dark Odyssey Winter Fire. I am grateful to @IntellectHomo both for the informative session on safe and unsafe handling of sex toys and for saving me all the broken and melted sex toys after the workshop was over. Ask For What You Want!


(e-speaking of asking for what you want... paypal.me/DorothyHickson)