Home Buying Update – Sobriety Helps.

It’s kind of amazing how you can tell five different people the same thing and the sixth (who ostensibly has all the information you’ve given to the previous five) can tell you you forgot to provide them with the information you told the other five doesn’t exist. In this case, documentation of income from last year that I didn’t have last year. But I think it’s sorted now. Everybody seems to know the situation.

The house appraised for 106% of the selling price, which means that the bank is theoretically willing to give a loan for it, because if the loan wasn’t repaid they could seize the house and get their money back. Now I just have to convince them that I’m someone worth giving that loan to. I’m hopeful, and the people I’ve spoken to seem hopeful, but the loan needs to go to something called “underwriting”, which sounds far too much like “undertaking” for my comfort level.  As if the loan approval might involve some kind of witchcraft with coffins and chicken blood and virgin sacrifice.

But I’m reasonably confident that it’ll go through. One of the great blessings of sobriety is that I have learned to live within my means, control my debt, pay my bills on time. It still stresses me out to do all those things, but I recognize their value, and apply myself to managing my life. Step one, the big part of step one for me, says that my life had become unmanageable. And that was very true for me. But now, now I have the skills and discipline to manage my life so long as I remain sober, and working an active program of accountability.

It’s amazing how little of the world I understood when I got sober. I had traveled to dozens of countries, had a doctorate, was married. And I knew nothing. I knew a great many things about theory and none of the practical aspects of life. And in only a few years of sobriety, working my way, guided by men in the program who figured it out before me, I have learned to do the things that normal human people learn by, you know, 25 or so. I had to lose a great many things. Family, wealth, time. I’m late. But I’m here. And I’m building castles in the wreckage.