I'm not a fan of July anymore. The angle at which the Limelight hydrangeas droop from a neighbor's yard over my backyard fence; the peculiar way the light of each day drags on so late into what should be night that the sky never quite gets black enough to call "night" before it starts lightening again; the insistence of last-of-the-season straggler fireflies lighting up with warning signals meant just for me; all of those things combined crowd my senses and cloud my thinking, all pointing back to a year ago, to an entire month of summer-perfumed regret -- a month where I could feel my own internal barometric pressure changing, of being keenly aware of looming danger.
I've been warned about sobriety anniversaries. Warned that along with a sense of achievement, also sometimes comes a deep sense of shame. August 12 is my sobriety date, and the last forty days has been the toughest so far. I don't want to drink, no worries there. But July of last year was a truly terrible time and the first few days of the thicket of last August were even worse. And every one of these past forty days has been saturated in deep embarrassment over my behavior then -- I remember more and with each tiny spark of memory comes another shadow of shame. People who have been quite successful at recovery tell me all the time to not live in the past, to not regret any of it. But that's impossible; I wake up every day convinced that everyone remembers every tiny bit of misbehavior on my part. "Oh," they're thinking, "today's the anniversary of the day when DG drank a bottle of Fireball before noon and got too drunk to cut his steak." They're not really thinking that, of course. But it's hard to convince my brain of that, to get rid of the hilarious need to put myself in the middle of everyone else's universe.
Yesterday was when the earth rotated back around to the exact point where it was last year, when it got as bad as it could get, and as I took every sip from each bottle that day, I knew it was the last weekend of it, one way or another. I was perfectly happy to drink myself to death...or to stop drinking and not die. I somehow couldn't make the decision, though. I was very lucky to have the right combination of people working behind the scenes trying to figure it out for me, and everything fell into place as I've documented here over the past turn of the wheel. It could have gone the other way. It didn't.
Will next July be the same? Will I refuse to bring one of those cut backyard hydrangeas into the house because they remind me of a vase of them that sat on my dining room table that horrible weekend? Will I avoid going to the funny little marina steakhouse with foil-wrapped baked potatoes because I'll remember too much about the night I behaved so badly that I rendered five other people awkwardly silent for the better part of an hour? I don't know. I can't see into the future. I can barely see into the right now. But every day after August 12th will be the anniversary of a day when things got better. Every day after August 12th is a year-plus-whatever further away from the worst days of my life.
I have a friend who is thinking about giving up drinking. I don't know what her reasons are, and to be honest, I kind of give terrible advice. I am clearly not official sponsor material quite yet. But I'm always ready to answer direct questions about the whole experience and when she asked me outright "what does sobriety look like?" I only had to think for a second: "it looks like a styrofoam coffee cup most of the time." That's the glib answer, but then I do like a good line. The real answer isn't much more complicated, though. What does sobriety look like? It's six feet tall, with thinning hair and it's forty pounds overweight and it needs to run spell check on this post just as soon as possible.
I'm going to get past August 12th and then I'll see you next year. All of it.
Sunday, August 10, 2014
Monday, June 16, 2014
Tethered
This week marks a truly terrible anniversary. I hate using that word - anniversary - to mark tragic things because it's a word I always associate with party hats and clever, designed invitations and passed trays of finger foods. But I looked in the thesaurus and there's really no other word for it. It's the anniversary of my great friend Jay's accidental death. I don't really know the specific date he died offhand; I only know that we all heard about it on the Monday following Father's Day. So that'll always be the day that feels the longest and the worst: the hot, stupid Monday after the second Sunday every June.
Jay and I became friends as waiters over two decades ago. We worked together for years. I was his manager for a while; later, he was mine. Then neither of us was the manager, back to being just waiters. He was a good drinking friend. Though he never drank like I eventually did, he could certainly keep up when the situation warranted back in those early days. We discovered together one evening that there is indeed a limit to how much chartreuse should be consumed by two people. We drank it from the bottle cap, one glowing green sip at a time. Until we, uh, undrank it all over our friend Marleen's picnic table as the sun rose.
Time passed and he opened a restaurant with his partner and I worked for them for a while. I worked as a host and I did it for the free wine. I'm sure I got a paycheck too, but the constant glass of wine in my hand was the real payoff. I stayed there for a couple of years, drinking more and more...and then I just sort of drifted off. It was easier to drink at home, easier to drink alone. Less risky.
And then Jay died in a freak accident. A few days later, I wore a black wool jacket on a fucking hot June afternoon and I cried a little, I hugged his sisters, I wore a little pallbearer boutonnière and helped carry the casket from the hearse to the grave site in a country meadow and watched it lower into the ground. A group of us stood there in stony silence while the gravediggers filled the hole back up. They stomped the earth perfectly flat and practically stitched the grass back together over the rectangle of soil. After just a few short minutes, there was virtually no trace of Jay left...the headstone wasn't due for some time. Part of the funeral party drove to a nearby friend's house and drank well into the evening. Some people came from hundreds of miles away, all friends and co-workers. I wish I could remember any of that part, any of those people who drove in that day, any of it at all.
I did all the things I was supposed to. All but one: I completely, even willfully, neglected to sober up long enough to grieve my friend. A year later, when the first anniversary of his death rolled around, I was still drunk, still not facing the fact that he was gone. It was just simpler not to.
In the ten months since I quit drinking, I have bumped up against this unprocessed grief more than once. At times, it feels like a trap; at others, like an excuse. I am still uncertain about why I've been so unable to move past it. A tiny part of me thinks it's about the drink, that that's the thing that keeps me tethered to him because that's the thing that connected us for so long, especially in the early years. We worked in a drinking environment, we got off work, we drank. I wonder if I am worried that the longer I stay sober, the further I move away from our shared past, the further I move away from our friendship. Grief is complicated. There's your bumper sticker for the month: grief is complicated. I'm beginning to suspect that it's never over, either.
I miss my friend.
Jay and I became friends as waiters over two decades ago. We worked together for years. I was his manager for a while; later, he was mine. Then neither of us was the manager, back to being just waiters. He was a good drinking friend. Though he never drank like I eventually did, he could certainly keep up when the situation warranted back in those early days. We discovered together one evening that there is indeed a limit to how much chartreuse should be consumed by two people. We drank it from the bottle cap, one glowing green sip at a time. Until we, uh, undrank it all over our friend Marleen's picnic table as the sun rose.
Time passed and he opened a restaurant with his partner and I worked for them for a while. I worked as a host and I did it for the free wine. I'm sure I got a paycheck too, but the constant glass of wine in my hand was the real payoff. I stayed there for a couple of years, drinking more and more...and then I just sort of drifted off. It was easier to drink at home, easier to drink alone. Less risky.
And then Jay died in a freak accident. A few days later, I wore a black wool jacket on a fucking hot June afternoon and I cried a little, I hugged his sisters, I wore a little pallbearer boutonnière and helped carry the casket from the hearse to the grave site in a country meadow and watched it lower into the ground. A group of us stood there in stony silence while the gravediggers filled the hole back up. They stomped the earth perfectly flat and practically stitched the grass back together over the rectangle of soil. After just a few short minutes, there was virtually no trace of Jay left...the headstone wasn't due for some time. Part of the funeral party drove to a nearby friend's house and drank well into the evening. Some people came from hundreds of miles away, all friends and co-workers. I wish I could remember any of that part, any of those people who drove in that day, any of it at all.
I did all the things I was supposed to. All but one: I completely, even willfully, neglected to sober up long enough to grieve my friend. A year later, when the first anniversary of his death rolled around, I was still drunk, still not facing the fact that he was gone. It was just simpler not to.
In the ten months since I quit drinking, I have bumped up against this unprocessed grief more than once. At times, it feels like a trap; at others, like an excuse. I am still uncertain about why I've been so unable to move past it. A tiny part of me thinks it's about the drink, that that's the thing that keeps me tethered to him because that's the thing that connected us for so long, especially in the early years. We worked in a drinking environment, we got off work, we drank. I wonder if I am worried that the longer I stay sober, the further I move away from our shared past, the further I move away from our friendship. Grief is complicated. There's your bumper sticker for the month: grief is complicated. I'm beginning to suspect that it's never over, either.
I miss my friend.
 |
| After I left the nervous hospital last summer, I had an out-patient counselor who suggested that major grieving was perhaps too big of a hurdle to try and deal with during early recovery. But he did assign me grief-related homework over the six weeks of out-patient therapy, one of which was to create a visual manifestation of this very specific event. It seemed like a tall order, and an impossible one, but here's what I made. |
Tuesday, June 3, 2014
Places, Everyone
Whoa, June. See, I wasn't kidding at the end of last year when I said I thought about time in a different way. How has five months passed since my last post? I'll tell you: soberly! A few weeks past nine months now; I could have had a baby and you never would have known. Well, maybe you would have, because it does seem like if I had a baby that might be somewhat newsworthy and would probably show up on the news or whatever, but still. Nine months. Hmmm.
Last December, I was preoccupied with capital-T Time and since then, it seems to be Place that's kept my brain busy. I've lived here a long time and it was inevitable that I would eventually end up in a place that held some awkward, embarrassing memory, or one where perhaps some sort of marker dedicated to my historic misbehavior might be erected.
I attended one meeting in a cinder-block room that shared a wall with a bar where I worked for a few years. The space was positively vibrating with recollection -- at first it seemed like I might need to leave; I couldn't reconcile the new feeling with the old memory of the space. Even parking my car on the street felt funny -- why, right there was the parking meter I used to chain my bicycle to and then later each night, unchain it and drunkenly pedal it the few dark blocks home. Did the parking meter have any memory of me? Was it steeling itself for a good haranguing if I couldn't get the bike lock open the first few tries? It sure heard enough of that back in 1990.
On the opposite end of that spectrum, I attend a meeting pretty regularly that takes place in the same non-descript strip mall space where I attended my post-rehab out-patient therapy. It's jammed between a Subway and a laundromat. It's not my favorite meeting but there's something about the space, the way it's only been completely and utterly a safe one for me, in which there is no shuddering of vision when an old bad-behaviored-ghost creeps into my peripheral vision, that keeps me going back to it. No one in that meeting ever remembers my name and I think they even think it might be Gigi, but whatever. Other than having a chip on my shoulder about being mistaken for a French can-can girl, it's a pretty solid healthy hour of my life.
The thing these places -- any places, really -- have in common is that they are only as nerve-wracking or as calming as I can make them be. The spaces themselves are inert; they don't really remember me, or even exist to offer me anything other than an escape from the occasional late-Spring thunderstorm. I'm discovering that the latitude and longitude of my sobriety is not a fixed point. I bring it with me wherever I go.
Last December, I was preoccupied with capital-T Time and since then, it seems to be Place that's kept my brain busy. I've lived here a long time and it was inevitable that I would eventually end up in a place that held some awkward, embarrassing memory, or one where perhaps some sort of marker dedicated to my historic misbehavior might be erected.
I attended one meeting in a cinder-block room that shared a wall with a bar where I worked for a few years. The space was positively vibrating with recollection -- at first it seemed like I might need to leave; I couldn't reconcile the new feeling with the old memory of the space. Even parking my car on the street felt funny -- why, right there was the parking meter I used to chain my bicycle to and then later each night, unchain it and drunkenly pedal it the few dark blocks home. Did the parking meter have any memory of me? Was it steeling itself for a good haranguing if I couldn't get the bike lock open the first few tries? It sure heard enough of that back in 1990.
On the opposite end of that spectrum, I attend a meeting pretty regularly that takes place in the same non-descript strip mall space where I attended my post-rehab out-patient therapy. It's jammed between a Subway and a laundromat. It's not my favorite meeting but there's something about the space, the way it's only been completely and utterly a safe one for me, in which there is no shuddering of vision when an old bad-behaviored-ghost creeps into my peripheral vision, that keeps me going back to it. No one in that meeting ever remembers my name and I think they even think it might be Gigi, but whatever. Other than having a chip on my shoulder about being mistaken for a French can-can girl, it's a pretty solid healthy hour of my life.
The thing these places -- any places, really -- have in common is that they are only as nerve-wracking or as calming as I can make them be. The spaces themselves are inert; they don't really remember me, or even exist to offer me anything other than an escape from the occasional late-Spring thunderstorm. I'm discovering that the latitude and longitude of my sobriety is not a fixed point. I bring it with me wherever I go.
Tuesday, December 31, 2013
The Lateness of the Hour
So here I am at the end of this year, which I have alternately called my annus horribilis and my annus mirabilis, depending upon what part of the year I'm talking about. Spare me the annus jokes. The lateness of the hour will keep these notes short, but I wanted to get them in before the turn of the calendar year.
The calendar year. That's a funny way to think of time now, because for weeks and weeks now, everything's measured not from January 1, but from August 12 - when I decided to not drink again. That's New Year's Day now; that's the midnight I look forward to clanging in with a pot and a wooden spoon. So just pray that you're not my neighbor late next summer.
But time in general feels so different now; it's all measured in ways I never measured it before. Lots of sixty-minute chunks, or days in multiples of thirty. The big cliché is "one day at a time," but just last week I found myself needing to live life one minute at a time for a bit...which worked out so well that I turned around and offered it as advice to a friend in turmoil. That's not a deep thought or anything; sorry for the bumper stickeryness of it. I'll try to keep the aphorisms to a minimum from here on out.
I do feel like big-T Time is adding up in my favor, that I'm gathering more of it each day, that more of it ends up in the plus-column. All that time dedicated to my addiction -- to looking for the money to pay for it, to figuring out how to keep that money secret, to going to get the wine, to drinking the wine, to passing out and sleeping poorly through the best hours of the night -- is now time I'm not quite sure what to do with. It seems to be pointing back to art-making and ha, that would be funny after all this time of thinking that part of my life was over. Arts and craft hour at DG's! Come on over and bring your yarn and popsicle sticks; we'll make those spinny twirly things. And there's more time to go on a hike, or go somewhere and pitch a tent and start a fire and watch the night sky spin. I'm still figuring out what to do with it all. I haven't had a drink; that much I can tell you. And I can tell you exactly how many days it's been: one hundred and forty-two.
Toward the end of fall, when the weather still showed signs of clemency, I made a habit of rising earlier than usual to let the dog out. Mabel would sniff out traces of nighttime rabbit frolics in the front yard while I sat on the porch and thought about different things, practicing my new morning meditation. My brain was usually docked in that in-between place, where I was thinking about whatever dream I had just had and the mechanics of the day I had ahead and I loved it if I could extend that feeling just a little longer, if I could keep my dream and the day ahead intermingled for as long as possible...sort of a mental salt point. Eventually the time wore on and the fresh water of morning would arrive and the day would open up before me. But this was time I never had before, so every one of those autumn mornings surprised me.
It's colder now, of course. I've been run off the porch by the season's sharp frosts and I've been run out of the woods whenever I thought it would be a good idea to go spend some time there. Frozen fog and rime are no friends of the tent camper. But I can look ahead at the calendar and make some marks and some little penciled promises to get back out there when the weather turns again, when all this time I've found adds up to a day or two here, a day or two there. For all of the manic drunken panic during my frenzied drinking life, all the worry and stress that things wouldn't, couldn't get done, it turns out there is just loads of time. Twenty four hours of it every day.
The calendar year. That's a funny way to think of time now, because for weeks and weeks now, everything's measured not from January 1, but from August 12 - when I decided to not drink again. That's New Year's Day now; that's the midnight I look forward to clanging in with a pot and a wooden spoon. So just pray that you're not my neighbor late next summer.
But time in general feels so different now; it's all measured in ways I never measured it before. Lots of sixty-minute chunks, or days in multiples of thirty. The big cliché is "one day at a time," but just last week I found myself needing to live life one minute at a time for a bit...which worked out so well that I turned around and offered it as advice to a friend in turmoil. That's not a deep thought or anything; sorry for the bumper stickeryness of it. I'll try to keep the aphorisms to a minimum from here on out.
I do feel like big-T Time is adding up in my favor, that I'm gathering more of it each day, that more of it ends up in the plus-column. All that time dedicated to my addiction -- to looking for the money to pay for it, to figuring out how to keep that money secret, to going to get the wine, to drinking the wine, to passing out and sleeping poorly through the best hours of the night -- is now time I'm not quite sure what to do with. It seems to be pointing back to art-making and ha, that would be funny after all this time of thinking that part of my life was over. Arts and craft hour at DG's! Come on over and bring your yarn and popsicle sticks; we'll make those spinny twirly things. And there's more time to go on a hike, or go somewhere and pitch a tent and start a fire and watch the night sky spin. I'm still figuring out what to do with it all. I haven't had a drink; that much I can tell you. And I can tell you exactly how many days it's been: one hundred and forty-two.
Toward the end of fall, when the weather still showed signs of clemency, I made a habit of rising earlier than usual to let the dog out. Mabel would sniff out traces of nighttime rabbit frolics in the front yard while I sat on the porch and thought about different things, practicing my new morning meditation. My brain was usually docked in that in-between place, where I was thinking about whatever dream I had just had and the mechanics of the day I had ahead and I loved it if I could extend that feeling just a little longer, if I could keep my dream and the day ahead intermingled for as long as possible...sort of a mental salt point. Eventually the time wore on and the fresh water of morning would arrive and the day would open up before me. But this was time I never had before, so every one of those autumn mornings surprised me.
It's colder now, of course. I've been run off the porch by the season's sharp frosts and I've been run out of the woods whenever I thought it would be a good idea to go spend some time there. Frozen fog and rime are no friends of the tent camper. But I can look ahead at the calendar and make some marks and some little penciled promises to get back out there when the weather turns again, when all this time I've found adds up to a day or two here, a day or two there. For all of the manic drunken panic during my frenzied drinking life, all the worry and stress that things wouldn't, couldn't get done, it turns out there is just loads of time. Twenty four hours of it every day.
That's cider in those glasses.
Wednesday, November 6, 2013
Three Little Things
I'll hit 90 days this Saturday. Three months. I've had wine without that much age on it. I'm settling into the day-to-day of it all, how to live a regular life with this as a part of it. The things that happen now are smaller, the revelations come at a slower pace. I'm fine with that.
So just small things this time around:
Shakespeare. Y'all know I have a Shakespeare thing, so of course he's all over recovery - and now I see some Shakespeare things through recovery-tinted glasses...The Henriad in particular strikes me as a recovery story. But anyway. He shows up a time or two in the Big Book and "To thine own self be true" shows up on a handful of sobriety chips. A lot of people think that quote is biblical or Aristotle-ian or whathaveyou, but nope, it's Shakespeare - from Hamlet, to be precise. It's a strange thing to have on a chip in my pocket, since the quote is spoken by the conniving Polonius, who ends up stabbed behind a curtain. They leave those details off the chip, by the way. And like most Shakespeare quotes taken out of context, it doesn't quite mean what it seems like it should. But it works for people, so I have no objection to it. When I read Hamlet aloud last month, though, I was keenly aware of the 30-day chip in my pocket with Polonius' words on it.
The Lord's Prayer. When I started this whole deal, I promised to be honest about it all with myself. Part of that honesty is to not embrace any specifically Christian dogma -- the things that I am willing and eager to embrace spiritually have absolutely zero to do with any of that. So I found myself in a sticky wicket when I found that the prayer a lot of meetings close with is the Lord's Prayer. I said it - mumbled it - for a while, until I realized it was counter-productive for me...dishonest. I've quit reciting it recently. I just look around while other people bow their heads and say it. I was surprised to see several other people opting out, so now I feel less weird, less "other," about it. Someone told me that it's a Southern thing - that you don't run into it at as much outside of the South.
The Meeting I Hate. I've been going to one particular meeting every week and I just can't stand it. It's a little puzzling, since some of the people there overlap with two other meetings that I like just fine. But there's something about this one...some strange one-ups-man-ship, where one war story follows another, each tale featuring increasingly feverish and dire circumstances until you half expect a committee of judges to start handing out ribbons. It feels a little like an audition...and I didn't even prepare a song! And I find this meeting a little scolding - when anyone with less than five years of sobriety attempts to engage, there's a definite feeling in the air that some horrible crime is being committed. So I've been struggling with how to deal with that - it seemed so weird to me that here I was in a program designed to help me deal with Resentments with a capital R and here the meeting was creating one! Well, sobriety hasn't made me much smarter because it took me a month to figure out I could just go to a different fucking meeting and never think about this one again. So! Problem solved.
So just small things this time around:
Shakespeare. Y'all know I have a Shakespeare thing, so of course he's all over recovery - and now I see some Shakespeare things through recovery-tinted glasses...The Henriad in particular strikes me as a recovery story. But anyway. He shows up a time or two in the Big Book and "To thine own self be true" shows up on a handful of sobriety chips. A lot of people think that quote is biblical or Aristotle-ian or whathaveyou, but nope, it's Shakespeare - from Hamlet, to be precise. It's a strange thing to have on a chip in my pocket, since the quote is spoken by the conniving Polonius, who ends up stabbed behind a curtain. They leave those details off the chip, by the way. And like most Shakespeare quotes taken out of context, it doesn't quite mean what it seems like it should. But it works for people, so I have no objection to it. When I read Hamlet aloud last month, though, I was keenly aware of the 30-day chip in my pocket with Polonius' words on it.
The Lord's Prayer. When I started this whole deal, I promised to be honest about it all with myself. Part of that honesty is to not embrace any specifically Christian dogma -- the things that I am willing and eager to embrace spiritually have absolutely zero to do with any of that. So I found myself in a sticky wicket when I found that the prayer a lot of meetings close with is the Lord's Prayer. I said it - mumbled it - for a while, until I realized it was counter-productive for me...dishonest. I've quit reciting it recently. I just look around while other people bow their heads and say it. I was surprised to see several other people opting out, so now I feel less weird, less "other," about it. Someone told me that it's a Southern thing - that you don't run into it at as much outside of the South.
The Meeting I Hate. I've been going to one particular meeting every week and I just can't stand it. It's a little puzzling, since some of the people there overlap with two other meetings that I like just fine. But there's something about this one...some strange one-ups-man-ship, where one war story follows another, each tale featuring increasingly feverish and dire circumstances until you half expect a committee of judges to start handing out ribbons. It feels a little like an audition...and I didn't even prepare a song! And I find this meeting a little scolding - when anyone with less than five years of sobriety attempts to engage, there's a definite feeling in the air that some horrible crime is being committed. So I've been struggling with how to deal with that - it seemed so weird to me that here I was in a program designed to help me deal with Resentments with a capital R and here the meeting was creating one! Well, sobriety hasn't made me much smarter because it took me a month to figure out I could just go to a different fucking meeting and never think about this one again. So! Problem solved.
Sunday, October 20, 2013
Lost in Thought
For the past few weeks, I've been meditating. Not sitting around on my porch or anything....I mean going to organized, guided meditation. I've been going once a week for ninety minutes, about half of which is Buddha talk and since that's not really my thing, I meditate extra during those parts. I'm sure I'm doing it wrong, but I'm finding it helpful. I'm not emptying my mind, if that's what I'm supposed to be doing. I'm just re-arranging the things in it and prioritizing them, and that's good enough for me right now.
I'm not certain if it's part of the "official" meditation instructions, but each time I've been, as the leader of the group guides us into wherever it is we're headed as we're sitting there with our eyes closed, he says "nothing needs to be done right now." Every time he says it, I can feel hot tears pressing against the inside of my eyelids. Because recovery is hard. Really hard, like full-time job hard. I spend a lot of time thinking about meetings - which ones to go to, which ones I like, which ones I don't...and that's on top of my regular job. One of the recurring things I hear in meetings is "if you work a tenth as hard on recovery as you did on drinking, you'll make it" so I must have been working REALLY hard all those years.
Like any normal person with a job, I do find it hard sometimes to find the time to do the things that help me re-set my life when things get a little messy and history shows that if I don't do that, the consequences get ugly. So I'm taking a few days and going to the woods to unplug, to sit and be quiet, to breathe in and out and be conscious of my breath. Nothing has to be done right now.
I'm not certain if it's part of the "official" meditation instructions, but each time I've been, as the leader of the group guides us into wherever it is we're headed as we're sitting there with our eyes closed, he says "nothing needs to be done right now." Every time he says it, I can feel hot tears pressing against the inside of my eyelids. Because recovery is hard. Really hard, like full-time job hard. I spend a lot of time thinking about meetings - which ones to go to, which ones I like, which ones I don't...and that's on top of my regular job. One of the recurring things I hear in meetings is "if you work a tenth as hard on recovery as you did on drinking, you'll make it" so I must have been working REALLY hard all those years.
Like any normal person with a job, I do find it hard sometimes to find the time to do the things that help me re-set my life when things get a little messy and history shows that if I don't do that, the consequences get ugly. So I'm taking a few days and going to the woods to unplug, to sit and be quiet, to breathe in and out and be conscious of my breath. Nothing has to be done right now.
Monday, October 14, 2013
Weight, Loss
What is the weight of a single resentment? Of a particularly nagging fear? Of months of sadness and grief? What does the physical presence of those things look like?
These things come up because I'm starting to do the part of all of this that involves looking at fears and resentments and my part in them all and if you think that sounds like something you would like to do...well, have fun. It's hard, and I'm struggling with it and would rather be doing almost anything else. But I'm not. I'm doing this, because I can't do the rest until I do. It's not all sixty-day chips and free coffee, apparently.
At the same time, I am losing weight like crazy. I'm down twenty-plus pounds in just over a month. As each pound disappears, it's hard to not imagine it walking off hand-in-hand with whatever particular resentment or fear I'm trying to rid myself of. Ohhhh, that lady cut me off in traffic! Let it go, let it go. Oh look, there it goes, in tandem with a half pound from my left side. I've started thinking that the more I clear my brain and heart of dark things like fear and anger, the skinnier I'll be. So that's my new fad diet idea -- look for it at a bookstore near you soon.
I don't think it's nuts of me to make those connections. People say it all the time: I feel like the weight of the world has been lifted off of me. Well that's what it's like: every time I get rid of something bad, my back gets straighter, my shoulders go up, and the dial on the scale inches counterclockwise. Some of the things that were weighing me down were easy to get rid of...one of my biggest triggers in the past was that I was incapable of saying "no" to invitations. I would say "yes" (and mean it) to every e-mailed invite that came my way and then as those dates neared, I'd look for ways to cancel. I mean! I could drink at home! Right? And then that would start a whole cycle of resentment: whoever I stood up would be mad at me for canceling and then I would be mad at them for being mad at me and then I would drink and eat until I needed to go put on my fat pants. Well, that's all over now. I've learned to say "no" in the damned first place and to be honest, I find it very slimming.
But some are harder. Grief, for instance. I'm not ready quite yet to deal with some of it head-on, but I am allowing myself to nibble at the edges of thinking about it. At a meditation session last week, I used almost the entire time to meditate on my lost friend and put in order the different things he was to me over time. Acquaintance, drinking buddy, co-worker, friend, confidant, not a friend, friend again. It was important to put them in the right order so I could deal with losing each one of those people. I'm not dealing with it yet, but I'm getting ready. That's all I can do for now, other than look really skinny for him.
These things come up because I'm starting to do the part of all of this that involves looking at fears and resentments and my part in them all and if you think that sounds like something you would like to do...well, have fun. It's hard, and I'm struggling with it and would rather be doing almost anything else. But I'm not. I'm doing this, because I can't do the rest until I do. It's not all sixty-day chips and free coffee, apparently.
At the same time, I am losing weight like crazy. I'm down twenty-plus pounds in just over a month. As each pound disappears, it's hard to not imagine it walking off hand-in-hand with whatever particular resentment or fear I'm trying to rid myself of. Ohhhh, that lady cut me off in traffic! Let it go, let it go. Oh look, there it goes, in tandem with a half pound from my left side. I've started thinking that the more I clear my brain and heart of dark things like fear and anger, the skinnier I'll be. So that's my new fad diet idea -- look for it at a bookstore near you soon.
I don't think it's nuts of me to make those connections. People say it all the time: I feel like the weight of the world has been lifted off of me. Well that's what it's like: every time I get rid of something bad, my back gets straighter, my shoulders go up, and the dial on the scale inches counterclockwise. Some of the things that were weighing me down were easy to get rid of...one of my biggest triggers in the past was that I was incapable of saying "no" to invitations. I would say "yes" (and mean it) to every e-mailed invite that came my way and then as those dates neared, I'd look for ways to cancel. I mean! I could drink at home! Right? And then that would start a whole cycle of resentment: whoever I stood up would be mad at me for canceling and then I would be mad at them for being mad at me and then I would drink and eat until I needed to go put on my fat pants. Well, that's all over now. I've learned to say "no" in the damned first place and to be honest, I find it very slimming.
But some are harder. Grief, for instance. I'm not ready quite yet to deal with some of it head-on, but I am allowing myself to nibble at the edges of thinking about it. At a meditation session last week, I used almost the entire time to meditate on my lost friend and put in order the different things he was to me over time. Acquaintance, drinking buddy, co-worker, friend, confidant, not a friend, friend again. It was important to put them in the right order so I could deal with losing each one of those people. I'm not dealing with it yet, but I'm getting ready. That's all I can do for now, other than look really skinny for him.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)