On World-Making (Celebrating 1 year & 11 months of sobriety/clean time)

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about world-making—how we all construct the realities we live in, sometimes with intention, sometimes out of necessity, as a means of survival. The movie Amélie stirred this up again for me. I watched it today, and like every time, it moved something deep inside. As a ‘90s kid—artsy, introspective, a bit of a wallflower (is that still the expression?)—I remember how hard Amélie hit when I first saw it in my early twenties. It spoke to a part of me that has always believed in quiet magic: the power of small gestures, of hidden inner worlds carefully stitched together behind glances and rituals.

Back then, I didn’t have the language for it. Now, I understand what the film so tenderly portrayed: the art of world-making.

World-making has become central to how I move through life—especially in recovery. Today, I’m celebrating one year and eleven months free of drugs —alcohol included. The countdown to two years has officially begun. (But you know if you know.) Early in recovery, you learn something vital: you can do sobriety alone, but recovery is relational. It’s not just about staying clean—it’s about connection. Not just with people (oh my god, people!), but with yourself, with your surroundings, with animals, ghosts, memories, and even the parts of you you tried to forget.

Recovery isn’t about rebuilding the life you had; it’s about creating a new one altogether.

Recovery is a lot about the magic of world-making.

Amélie opens by showing how the flow of life can be abruptly interrupted by grief, trauma, and isolation. That struck differently this time. I kept thinking about the moment in my own life when the flow stopped—when I put on a mask and began performing a version of myself for others: the strong queer man, composed, witty, and unbothered. (The things we do out of fear—fear of being forgotten, unloved, fear of not belonging to the worlds that weren’t made with us in mind as protagonists, to start with.)

And beneath that mask? A wounded child I carried in silence for decades. The world I built then was one of performance and protection, where hiding the truth was the only way to survive. That, too, was world-making—painful, fragmented, and necessary.

These past seven months have been intense. I’ve been teaching two courses (and taking one), while also sending off three articles for publication—one of them, my first peer-reviewed piece in English, was precisely about world-making. I’ve also been doing a kind of therapy that doesn’t let me look away, even when I wish I could. It’s not soft-focus healing—it’s excavation. It’s sitting in the dirt, with everything you’ve buried.

Still, amid all of this, I’ve found small sanctuaries.

I have a patio garden now. Every morning, I sit there with my coffee, read, write, and spend time with my cats. I made that world slowly, with gentleness and intention—a calm that’s cost me heartbreak, tears, and more patience than I ever imagined I had. Since starting recovery, my passion for writing has returned. I’ve been writing poetry again—a lot of it—something I completely let go of when drugs came into my life. In poetry, I’ve found space to respond to the call—the pull of someone, something, inviting me to revisit what once was. You get a lot of those “callings” in recovery. They don’t always come as grace, Mary Oliver’s style. Sometimes they arrive as hauntings, Allan Poe's style.

It’s also taken a lot of people to get me here. Family, friends, mentors, sponsors, strangers. People who showed me love—the very thing I once sought through drugs. It took their patience, callings, subtexts, and nearly two years before I could speak, even quietly, about the repeated sexual abuse I experienced as a child—by people I loved, family, friends of family. And I still struggle with how to hold that truth. How to identify the way that those things that happened to me keep affecting my choices.

How do we find simplicity, frugality, that lightness Amélie is all about, when we’ve had to descend into the deepest, most terrifying rooms of our past and we are left with nothing but the messy true of who we were and the collapsed trash of the worlds we created?

In recovery, we’re all chasing our own stories, trying to make sense of who we are while still making sense of who we were.

I’ve had to admit to myself that the PTSD I never named shaped much of my life. For years, I built a reality on denial—on curated narratives that made it easier to be around others and easier to avoid myself. That, too, was world-making. But it was a world built on shaky, sick foundations. It’s taken time, reflection, and yes, hard conversations and even fights with people I love to begin unlearning those blueprints.

What I’m learning now is that world-making isn’t always a gentle act. Sometimes it’s disruptive. Sometimes it hurts. But it can also be liberating. We all construct our lives out of the narratives available to us—and in recovery, I’ve started writing new ones (recovery is full of possibilities to rewrite your shit). That’s what this moment feels like: rewriting my story, reclaiming authorship over my life. And finding, at long last, a little magic.

A magic that’s not escapism.

Because the worlds we build—whether out of fear, hope, protection or love—matter. They shape how we relate/connect to our own making and to others. They remind us that even when our foundations crack, we still have the power to create new worlds. Something truer. Something ours.