Raise your hand if, five minutes ago, you too were eating homemade cream cheese icing out of a Tupperware container with a spoon. Extra points if also, like me, you were leaning against your kitchen cabinets and slowly eating the icing while watching (but not really paying attention to) The Office episode where James Spader throws a bacchanalia at his house and jumps naked into his pool.

A therapist once told me that she believed sugar addition was the root of alcoholism. Instead of watching Ryan and the guy from Silicon Valley try to win James Spader’s favor, this is what I was thinking about as I was eating big soup-spoon sized spoonfuls of the sweetest thing I could find in my fridge. When I first started seeing this therapist, I had been sober for more than a decade. I was experiencing a crushing level of anxiety about my job and not being able to find a new role—or, at least, that’s how the anxiety manifested. My professional life.

My therapist at the time told me that I may be sober, but I wasn’t doing the work. Which now I realize is ironic. Not doing the work was making my work life hell.

Standing in my kitchen, mindlessly eating cream cheese icing and trying to disassociate from the ongoing stream of what-the-fuck-is-happening news headlines, I thought about what that therapist told me more than five years ago and her take on addiction and alcoholism and sugar. This year marks 18 years since I’ve had a drink, but still, I have work to do.

It’s not just sugar. I’ve been thinking a lot about my writing, or better, my not writing. How I talk about writing, and make lists of the essays and book titles I want to write, and journal about all I want to accomplish with my writing career, and on and on and on. It feels very much like before I stopped drinking when I did a lot of talking about not drinking. Talking to my therapist about why I didn’t think I was an alcoholic. Promising my husband, “I’m not going to drink that much tonight. I swear.”

I would make deals with myself about my drinking. I now make deals with myself about writing. Very much like the deals I used to make about not drinking—totally and completely empty deals that go nowhere. I block out hours during my day to write and then fill them with other tasks. The only excuse I have at this point is that I think I’m addicted to not writing.

Two nights ago, I came back to here to finish this post. Without typing a word, I closed my laptop and started doing laundry. LAUNDRY. Today, a day when our roads were covered in enough snow and ice that the local weather reporters recommended not leaving your home if you didn’t have to … a day where I could drink as much coffee as I wanted while working on something of my own, glancing up only to stare at the snow blowing so wildly it made my dining room windows look like a black and white photo … on this perfect writing day, here’s what I did instead of write:

Delivered carrot cake to neighbors. In the snow. More laundry. Watched The Darjeeling Limited for maybe the hundredth time. (But only because my 16-year-old asked me if I wanted to watch it with him. I think it’s one of the saddest movies I ever saw. Obviously, I love it.) Made barbeque chicken in the crockpot. Napped. Played ping pong. Walked on the treadmill. Payed bills. Submitted an offer for a pink vintage corduroy blazer on Ebay. Scrolled social feeds.

(Ugh. That last one. It’s the only one in that whole paragraph that makes me wonder what the fuck am I doing with my life.)

So this is me, owning my addiction and doing the work. Because the work is the whole point. It’s what saves me over and over and over and over again. And right now, to do the work, all I have to do is the thing that I want to do most in the world. Write.

At this very moment, reading over what I’ve written on a blog where I haven’t published anything for more than six months, I can hear Paul McCartney on the TV singing, “Once there was a way to get back home.” And on that literal note, it’s time I finally publish something.