November 11, 2014 · 9:24 am

Off the Beam – Head Static Returns

Sorry, there’s no inspiring blog this week because Louisa doesn’t have her shit together.  That’s right, I’ve wandered off the spiritual path and found myself befuddled in some remote, unspiritual bog surrounded by brambles and having just accidentally used my only map as TP.

Why am I so off the beam?  I guess because I’ve been deluged with work, something I kept praying for with those stupid Santa prayers that aren’t supposed work.  For the past few weeks I’ve been zooming around town meeting clients and editing like a mo-fo in between, so my eyes are all bloodshot and my poor brain feels encased in pantyhose.  Every now and then I feel a lurch of vertigo that would flare into a full blown panic attack if I couldn’t spot their wolf-cryin’ asses a mile away by now.  Hyperventilating, again!  In other words, I’m running on fear.

So, how does being off the beam show up?  Regression!  It’s ridiculous.  I get to go through high school all over again.  Take the other night, when I went to my mountain climbing group’s annual gratitude embarrassedbanquet, where the faces of the (cool kids’) Glacier Climbing Course I was once so active in have all changed for the younger.  I arrived late, so there were no seats.  I felt like a has-been.  But then my ego got a great idea to fix this: I tracked down two of the new leaders and said I’d be happy to deliver some of this year’s presentations if they needed someone – you know, sort of like Barry Manilow offering to perform at the Grammys.

Or at least, so it seemed to me the next morning.  I was mortified.  With dozens of new grads able to present, why had I nosed in?  Ach!  What should’ve been dismissed with a quick “f*ck it” prayer seemed like a huge deal and colossal embarrassment.  My old buddies – wounded pride, concern with what others think of me, and self-loathing – stopped by for breakfast and hung out all morning.  We hadn’t seen each other in a while, so we chatted for hours about how pathetic I was, how dumb I must’ve looked – lots of productive stuff.  There was even a dark, dreary day plus some menopausal symptoms toThe-Scream set the stage.  Good times!

To knock that stuff the hell off when I’m in spiritual disarray seems next to impossible.  No matter what I tell myself, I’m back to square one, worrying about the same shit.  It’s like waving away a determined yellow jacket.

Contrast me in this tizzy with the Native American panhandler I talked to last week while the light was red at the Aurora Denny exit.  He described the “irony” of having felt lucky the day before to find a sheet of plastic so he could wrap his backpack against the rain, only to return from walking the car line and find it – everything he had – stolen.  “Who would do that?!” I asked, incensed.  He flashed me a toothless smile.  “Just somebody being a jerk,” he shrugged.  “I’ll be okay, though.  Today’s been a good day.”

This man’s acceptance blew me away.  He wasn’t drunk.  He was just unafraid of life with nothing.  Can I say that again?  Unafraid.  Of life.  With nothing.  Every bit as poor as Jesus or the Buddha, his outlook was brighter than the majority of us schmucks lined up in  traffic.

In only one area do I have that man’s caliber of faith, and that’s around my sobriety.  I know I’ll be okay, so long as I hang on to god.  No matter how frazzled I get, whether by small stuff or big stuff, this description from the Big Book’s pages 84-85 still applies:

“For by this time sanity will have returned. We will seldom be interested in liquor. If tempted, we recoil from it as from a hot flame… We have not even sworn off.  Instead, the problem has been removed. It does not exist for us… That is how we react so long as we keep in fit spiritual condition.”

How does that work?  I know that on one level, I have nothing to do with this gift.  As described in the Robin Williams post, I’m sober because of grace alone, for reasons I’ll never understand – a miracle that is never guaranteed.

Yet there is such a thing as underlying spiritual fitness, which offers grace a landing strip to show up in our Starry Night Skylives, even during tizzies.  Mine shows up as an understanding that I’m never in charge, ever, of anything – least of all emotions that come over me.  I’ve somehow internalized Step 3.  In the past, thoughts, emotions, and judgements that defined my reality amounted to an unacknowledged false god, one that used to tell me I could fix stuff with booze.  Through practicing the steps consistently, however, I’ve withdrawn my trust from those voices and given it instead to a higher power, a god of love.  Nothing that happens to me can shake that.  It’s in my bones, even when self-defeating thoughts ricochet around my silly brain.

If I live to be 100, I think I’ll always have episodes like this, when I transform into SUPER TWIT and anguish for hours over a visible booger or even an imagined visible booger.  I’m kind of glad about that: I’ll always be a fool.  Being a fool – freaking out about piddly-shit – is actually one of the most endearing aspects of being a fallible human being.  Part of me misses it already, and I’m not even dead.

I know I need to slow down, maybe even decline some work to make time for self-care.  I will.  But listen, my lovely alcoholic readers, I do want to add this:  No matter how busy or pressed for time, I always go to my meetings, meet with my sponsees, and pray all over the place.  No matter how wacky I get, I know these actions are my only recourse against the disease that wants to ruin my life.  On them, I never compromise, because if that monster ever escapes from my brain stem, it won’t compromise with me.

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POST SCRIPT, 2/8/15:  It turns out I was asked to give a presentation on gear to this year’s Glacier Climbing Class, which I delivered yesterday.  And out turns out it did prove valuable to climbers both new and old, for which everyone was grateful.  Who knew?

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November 4, 2014 · 10:27 am

Hitting Bottom, Remembered

Looking back can make us grateful

I grew up in an alcoholic home where we could never say, “Dad’s drunk again,” because it might sound like we didn’t love dad.  And truly we all loved Dad, so we showed it by keeping silent.

I grew up in an alcoholic home where we couldn’t say, “Mom’s frustrated with Dad’s drinking,” because it might sound like Mom didn’t love Dad.  And we all knew Mom loved Dad, so we respected them by keeping silent.

I grew up in an alcoholic home where I could never say, “I’m afraid I’m not good enough to be loved,” because it might sound like there was something wrong with me or my family’s ways.  I knew I needed to do what others wanted in hopes of being loved, so I stayed silent… until gradually I forgot how to know what I felt.

As a child I grew to resemble an android navigating templates of what I thoughtstar-wars-stormtrooper-deluxe-statue copy others wanted me to do.  Inside my polished shell, a sea of vibrant emotions and passions raged, a crazy frothing of all different colors longing to get out.  I’d been taught to censor whatever didn’t fit the judgements my family held, but as my body grew up, forbidden urges sometimes burst out of me, shameful and bizarre compulsions that frightened me.  I hid them.  There was no way to integrate my outer good girl and that inner chaos – no way that I, at least could see.

Until here came the magic of alcohol.  Alcohol dilated the zillion pores in my shell-like skin so the truth of me could gush out into the world, like it or not!  Alcohol dissolved those walls of shoulds and musts, blasted to hell that relentless rubric of inner criticisms.  I flowed; I fit; I flourished!  Soon life had only two states: drinking, and waiting to drink.  Naturally, I could never say, “I’m ill with alcoholism,” because that would cast aspersions on the one thing that made life livable.

Plus it would throw light on a family disease, declare that my father and I were equally ill.  And the song we all knew, the chorus we sang whenever we still gathered, was all about how nothing was wrong with any of us – though plenty was wrong with outsiders.

But, as the years passed, my android shell, because it was made of unnatural materials and not grown from within, began to obsolesce – to fall apart.  More and more it cracked at the joints – my elbows, my waist – so that my inner mess, which had churned around unsupervised through ghostbusters_25012the years until all its vibrant colors merged to a muddy ugliness, began to spew on the sensible arrangements of my life.  It smelled bad.  It hurt people.  But I told myself, “Ah, well!  Everybody spews!”

Now the mess for alcohol to clear got heavier – landslides filled with large, trashed objects it had to plow aside to reopen the flow.  And given that it had only masqueraded as love, but really grew from self-hate, it began to slack in its duties. The magic grew thin.  Ludolf_Bakhuizen_-_Ships_Running_Aground_in_a_Storm_-_WGA01131And so I hit bottom.  The keel of my consciousness ran aground on the rock of despair.  I’d tried all I knew with all that I had and ended here: failure.  Existence sucked.  And Option B, to abandon ship, began to seem the saner solution.

But, wait…  Wasn’t there something I’d forgotten? Hadn’t there been – before the android sealed me off, before my passions turned putrid – something?  So distant a memory but faintly recalled – that once there was a time when I believed in… goodness.  And now, if all roads were marked with skull and crossbones but one, a path signed “Goodness →,” would I follow it, no matter how cliché and pointlessly breakfast-cereal-box-maze-like it looked?

AA~?!  Me, going to AA?!  Ha!  What a grim joke.  These people’s problems were generic.  Mine were unique.  And yet, among all these stupid, brainwashed nobodies who failed to see the world rightly as my family did, around these cultish zealots with their scrolls of numbered steps and traditions on the walls, was I just imagining it, or was it in the air?  Goodness.  And maybe from under the floorboards, subsonic, maybe diffused in some elaborate code these people sprinkled through their words, that ancient, sacred radiance I’d long since dismissed as worthless: Love.

A plant with just one dangling leaf may still rejuvenate.  Slowly, the love from these strangers permeated the cracked husks of my old armor.  “You can lay that stuff down,” they smiled. “If you work these 12 steps and stand up in honesty with all your deformities and wounds exposed, the sunlight will heal them.”

Wonderland Trail

Sunlight?!  Of course I didn’t believe in sunlight!  So what if I’d never even tried looking up! I saw stuff because it was there – not because of some hokey-ass Light Bulb in the sky!  And yet, reluctantly, one piece at a time I shed those dented old plates and cuffs meant to protect me.  Then I felt it: something warmed my skin, my face, and before I’d even realized it, my heart – sunlight!  Colors revived, my sores healed, and the textures of the world that I’d been numb to for so long became vivid.  I remembered how to play.

So began a lifelong inner expedition that continues to this day, bumbling around the dim passageways of my consciousness, discovering how I really feel, what I really love, and who I really am – each step illuminated by my own small lantern of sunlight, which I need to recharge daily.  In the rooms of AA, Al-Anon, and ACA, I meet people who grew up in the very same house I did.  Imagine that!  They’ve given me field guides to flora and fauna to help me to identify those strange creatures I come across in my psyche, some older than I am, spawned by my ancestors.

My father died in regret, and my siblings text that I’m wrong – but I know joy, and I know its source.  I’m now loved freely in a raucous, imperfect new family where I like to sing out loud – as you may have noticed!

This is the story I tell in my addiction memoir.

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October 28, 2014 · 7:19 am

Compassion – the best thing you can do for yourself

“Think of others as you would have them think of you.”

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Self-centered like me?  Love others.  Got problems?  Give it all you got.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but practicing “love and tolerance” (p. 84) for all brings enormous spiritual, mental, and even physical benefits.  What I think about you inevitably colors the attitude I have toward myself, which in turn shapes my experience of life. We can know this based on anything from having lived it to abstract theories of quantum physics telling us the universe is made of energy.  What you dish out is ultimately what you get.

Years ago I recognized myself in a share by my friend, Andrew K..  He told about a time near his bottom when some friends Door peepholestopped by to see him.  From the upper story of the split-level where he lived, he silently crept down the stairs as the friends went on ringing and knocking.  Cautiously he peered out through the peep-hole to see them standing on the front slab exchanging conjectures about him.  What did they want?!  Whatever it was, he couldn’t handle it.  He just didn’t have it in him. Pleased at his evasion, he retreated oh-so silently up the stairs.

Andrew contrasted the story with his experience around Step 7:  “The more I judge you, the more I’m sure you’re judging me, so I actually experience that judging and judge myself.  And on the flipside, I’ve found that the more I let you be you and maybe even love you for it, the more I assume you’re okay with me, and so I’m okay with me.”

Our culture of scarcity encourages us to hoard love, but spiritual axioms teach the opposite.  The doors of the heart need to be oiled daily so that they’ll open even for strangers who “don’t deserve” our love and the very people who irritate us, as well as those in our inner circle.

We do pour out love toward a certain class of strangers all the time.  Yesterday during my ballet class, babyfor instance, we could hardly keep dancing for all the affection we were flooding through the studio’s big storefront windows.  With Halloween a week away, neighborhood retailers were holding a “Safe Trick-or Treat,” so the sidewalk featured a constant stream of bumblebees, superheroes, and characters from all kinds of stories.  Dressed as a dolphin, a woman handing out candy stood with her back to us, so the children would pause facing the glass, where we could see them perfectly.

Our teacher couldn’t help interrupting herself again and again.  “Oh my god, it’s Princess Leah!”  We all looked, and what I saw almost overwhelmed me.  She stood about two and a half feet tall in a flowing tunic, the classic dark buns on either side of her head slightly askew.  Tentatively, knowing what she was supposed to do, she approached the dolphin woman, her eyes staring up with a mix of trust and caution.  People flipped her off.  They called her a fucking bitch.  They judged her as a slut or a failure or beneath their concern — not yet, not yet, mind you.  But in her future.

Tiny Princess Leah was only doing her best, as she will throughout her life, and as will the Incredible Hulk who followed her with his impossibly muscled little green chest.  Already, they’re being taught who to be and how to get stuff.  We find it natural never to judge them (greedy little schmucks!) for what they “ought” to know or do.  To love them freely is ingrained in our culture.

Just for today, what if you practiced seeing the toddler in every person you interact with?  The spirit within that person is exactly the same.  Or what if you tried calling up a “legitimate” feeling of love – a glimpse of your loved one’s inner beauty or a sleepy kitten snuggling against you – and purposefully grew that energy in your chest like an expanding sun until it shone on every sight, sound, and experience?  Commit to loving.  Keep it like an inner homefire that must never go out, not even when fear tries to snuff it or anger tries to blast it from you.  Hold onto it as your homage to goodness, and practice radiating what it generates in all you think and do.

Sun

This under your sternum.

What you’ll get is a world transformed by love.  Today I notice small gestures of love from others that I used to discount as empty manners.  I joke with strangers about the dumbest shit, and to me our shared laughter rings out more beautifully than church bells.  I’ll never be some spiritual giant.  I wrestle daily with a shitload of fear.  But love is god’s power, and I’ve found that channeling it actually lends me power over fear: I sense an active energy of goodness all around me.  The world will feels safer.  If you’re coming from a place of love and encounter darkness in others – cruelty or deceit – you feel it as the anti-matter of goodwill and respond with mourning more than angry contempt.  The difference is huge.

Finally, when you least expect it, awareness will slip in that you, too, are loveable.  It’s hard to grasp, but in this moment, you – despite everything you regret in your past – are as innocent as you were at Princess Leah’s age.  Society sells you its weird customs and you suit up and give it a shot.  You look up toward life’s unknown with the same mix of trust and caution.  You, too, are vulnerable and unique.  It’s okay to see that with love.

Loving the good in others and yourself will swing wide the doors of spirit so you can breathe, and play, and thrive in the freedom of generosity.  It’s either that, or keep peering through the peep-hole.  You can choose.

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October 21, 2014 · 3:04 pm

When the Darkness Comes…

Ways to stay chipper

I’m resolved to be happy, to enjoy life.  In the summer months, happiness comes easily.  I’m active, whether alone or with friends, and never short of energy or enthusiasm.  But when fall comes I start to feel the tides of darkness encroaching, dragging me down.  Now’s the time I have to make a note: candleDepression Alert!  Because I’m prone to Seasonal Affective Disorder and live in Seattle, because I suffered depression throughout my 30s and my brain chemistry still teeters on that brink, and because I’m a damn complex and moody alcoholic in recovery, I need to be careful.

I once read that depression evolved as a survival strategy to prevent us from doggedly pursuing unrealistic goals or otherwise squandering energy without a high return.  I envision some primitive humans all gung-ho to build a tower to the gods despite all setbacks; some kind of “fuck this!” switch had to evolve somewhere along the line.  primitive2-1024x681More practically, in fall and winter there’s just not as much food out there for a hunter-gatherer to net, so we developed the impulse to hunker by the home-fires to avoid fruitless expenditures of energy.

The trouble comes when my brain decides to categorize the entire enterprise of living as a fruitless expenditure of energy.  I look around: the house will never stay clean; dishes and laundry never stay done.  My bank account acts like a storage tank with a gaping hole at the bottom.  I gleefully deposit checks only to see that some damn auto-deduction – the gym, car insurance, internet – has slurped up half of it before I even drive home.  I keep getting older and ricketier plus people seem to forget about me if I don’t keep showing up for social stuff.  Doesn’t that make all of these unattainable goals?  Shouldn’t I just give up and hunker by the home-fire?

I choose not to take prescription antidepressant drugs because, lucky for me, my depression is only seasonal and not debilitating. It’s just the daily challenge of my emotional weather. I want to learn to navigate life in stormy as well as in clear sailing.  Wisdom, I believe, gets pounded out in that struggle. I don’t mean to poop on meds or those whose brain chemistry leaves them no other option. Chemistry is chemistry.  For myself, though, I envision my depression as a pit of darkness I have to circle until spring, walking a narrow, angled, and slippery path on its perimeter.  The tactics below help me pick my steps.  But if I were to fall in (become clinically depressed) none of them would do any good.

THE SIGNS

  • I filled with a low-level dread but have no clue what it’s about.
  • I may or may not decide I’m scared of finding myself broke and alone.
  • The prospect of socializing seems an Olympic event, demanding coherent remark after coherent remark like a series of hurdles I barely clear.
  • The prospect of going to work feels like storming a hostile dagwood napempire of steel, concrete, and synthetics, where nothing natural or charming can survive.
  • The world’s goin’ to hell in a handbasket.
  • All I want to do is to eat cookies and nap peacefully.

What to do?  I fuckin’ pray.  I don’t want to, but I do.  I ask god to help me remember how to live.  God, I have found, is all about can-do and positive action.  It doesn’t empathize with lackadaisical whining, but counters, What can you do now?  It tells me I already know the answer.  And I sort of do.

THE CURES

Whether I feel like it or not, I have to FORCE myself to…

  • Exercise – take a ballet class, go for a run, something
  • Make coffee/pho dates and go to more meetings
  • Go outside and do SOMETHING – anything!  Rake leaves, walk the dog
  • Practice gratitude; love others; be of service
  • Meditate more
  • Eat healthy, for god’s sake!
  • If it gets really bad, bust out the Happy Light, St. John’s wort and/or 5 hydroxytryptophan

All these tactics help a little.  But I also have a secret list of unofficial aids that help me – things I’ve never seen in magazines.

 UNOFFICIAL AIDS

  • Make something – bake, draw a picture, knit
  • Light candles to an impractical degree, maybe even in daylightmusicnote
  • Play happy music
  • Smile and yawn more – both give your brain a lift
  • String up indoor Xmas lights irrespective of Xmas
  • Watch no TV; avoid pop-culture magazines; limit social networking
  • Practice mindfulness, focusing on loving what I am doing now

Here’s my thing with mindfulness: sometimes, it can get boring.  I mean, obviously, it’s a discipline, so if I’m getting bored, that means I’m not practicing well.  Still, I’ve developed some tweaks to make it more interesting – and most of them involve pretending.  Recreational pretending, in my opinion, is vastly underrated. My brain chemistry doesn’t seem to distinguish much between real and imagined sources of happy, cozy thoughts.   In fact, pretending, if executed skillfully, can feel like a little uplifting,  drug-free trip to another place.

Bourges-Fiji

MINDFULNESS TWEAKS

  • I pretend…
    • that I live in a charming, romantic country or exotic tropical place.  My home is in some village of France or on the island of Fiji.  I can smell the odors of baguettes or tropical flowers.  This can work when you’re driving if you pretend you’re touring quaint vistas.
    • that I’m super rich but eccentric and choose to live exactly as I do
    • that I live in an amazing dollhouse.  I was once on a ladder fixing a small window that looks in on my living room.  Inside, the evening sun was lighting the space with a warm yellow, and it looked to me like a weirdly classic doll’s house with every detail delightfully realistic.  I can still call up that feeling which changes mess to fantastic precision.
    • that I’m a 14th century monk used to abjuring all physical comforts, but just for today, I’m cheating!

The goal of all these quirky imaginings is actually to practice love and acceptance.  The act of assenting to the circumstances of our lives – calling them good – is what brings contentment.  I’ve developed these roundabout means of doing what you can practice directly: loving everything your senses bring you, loving being alive.rainbow_heart

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October 14, 2014 · 9:21 am

Step 9: Mending the Past

I’m sorry!  I’m sorry!  Who the heck wants to read about amends?  Nobody!  I don’t even really want to write about them, but I’m going to trust, and ask you to trust, that taking a good look will reveal their beauty.

Angry-WomanSo here’s the quandary.  You may hear people in the rooms kicking around the question: “Who are amends for?  Me or the other person?”  I recall about a dozen years ago hearing a woman announce with contempt, “I’m not making this amends for her!  I’m doing it for me!”  Something sounded wrong in that, but I wasn’t sure what.

Sure, the steps are our pathway to freedom.  But they work because they’re a pathway to change, not self-help.  Didn’t we try every way of helping ourselves when we were drinking, doing whatever our monkey-brains thought would work best?  And what happened?  As I seem to recall, most of us ended up alone and fucking miserable.  The fact is, self-help refers to motivational adjustments to an otherwise successful model of living, such as, “I’m going to exercise more!” or “I’m going to procrastinate less!” not, “I’m going to quit submerging my entire existence in a cesspool of self-disgust caused by senselessly poisoning myself on a daily basis!”

So, no.  We don’t need self help.  CAM00400What we need is a transformation, a psychic change beyond anything we could engineer ourselves that redirects our energy toward maximum usefulness to god and our fellows.  If Step 3 led us to stake the best 4th step inventory we could, if we’ve read it to a sponsor who’s made clear our faulty thinking, then something has shifted in us.  In Steps 6 and 7, we opened to asking god to render us better human beings.  Now we revisit our past in this new light.

When my sponsor asked me to generate compassion toward those I’d resented, it felt like she was asking for some crazy move of spiritual gymnastics.  But really, all I had to do is acknowledge that I’ve fucked up many times myself, out of fear and pitfalls in thinking.  Let’s say I was trying to protect my beloved A when I accidentally nudged B into the boiling oil.  “Doh!”  Or in reaching after that prized X, I forgot I was supposed to hold Y and let it fall into the mile-deep chasm.  “Shit!”  Maybe I heard the enticing, faint calls of  J through the tall grass and, in stepping toward them, crushed underfoot the tiny, delicate K.  “Oh, no! Poor K~!!”

Such botched moves fill at least 75% of my addiction memoir; they’re the stuff of which all our deepest conflicts are made.  That’s why my double backward flip in the pike position comes about as I accept that you, like me, were doing only the best you could.  Now watch this move in slo-mo: I decide to cut you the same slack I wish others might cut me – the slack to be human.  It may take me days or years to get there, but eventually, your wrongs become moot.  The focus closes in on the behavior I exhibited toward you.  Would I want those wrongs carved on my tombstone?  Do I want to carry them until then?

Oops!
Remember, though, that 9 comes after 8, and “became ready” refers to more than just working up nerve.  In early sobriety, I thought I was working Step 9 by writing impulsive letters to my ex’s and telling them way more than they needed to know. By contrast, when I worked Step 8 in earnest, my sponsor wrested my ways of thinking from old to new.  For each person on my list, she crossed out and scribbled notes all over the accounts of harms I thought I’d caused, eliminating 75% of what I’d thought was the issue.  Each time she had me…

1) highlight ONLY those behaviors and attitudes the person was well aware of, to avoid causing further harm

2) boil down the harms via the rubric of selfish, dishonest, thoughtless/inconsiderate

3) come up with one specific example to illustrate each

I was not to apologize.  Rather, I was to articulate the behavior I’d shown and the ways it was wrong, and to ask what I might do to set it right.  She said, “It’s like you left a turd lying somewhere in this person’s life.  You swoop in, say, ‘I believe that’s mine!’, scoop up the turd, and ask if you got it all.”

doveAmends don’t mean you become buddy-roos with the person.  And some may continue to lob fireballs at you, requiring you to maintain a safe distance.  But when I’ve sat down with people from my past and owned, often with my voice shaking, my very human fuck-ups, I’ve witnessed in almost every one of them the blossoming grace of compassion.  Many have spontaneously confessed fuck-ups of their own.  And sometimes, in the pool of truth we shared for those moments, I would behold in them a dignity and beauty to which our old conflict had blinded me.

The 9th step means taking our new way of life out into the world and trusting god in a free fall.  As I once heard it put: “I make amends to restore that person’s faith in basic human decency.  And when I do that, I restore my own.”

 

peace

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October 7, 2014 · 7:27 am

Humility and Gratitude

“If you claim to have humility, you don’t have it.”  That saying has some validity.  But there’s a bigger picture here.  Saying you have humility is a bit like saying you inhale.  That is, it’s never a constant state we can hang onto, but part of a fundamental rhythm.  I’m not really sure what the hell I’m saying here, but I’m going to keep writing.

BoxerWe all have egos and self-will built in to help us hold our own in this hazardous world.  It’s when they exceed their useful scope, as they often do for alcoholics, that we run into trouble.  We become selfish and egotistical because those states seem to grant us power, to make us bigger and badder so we can vanquish whatever we fear (i.e. most of life).  Unfortunately, what they really do is shut us off from faith in god – our only true recourse against fear.

Richard Rohr, in his discussion of the Twelve Steps (Breathing Underwater), quotes the bible in relation to Step 7.  Now, don’t run screaming from this blog!  I’m not a Christian and, trust me, not even a monotheist, but that doesn’t mean I can’t recognize wisdom from a Franciscan friar who dares to challenge his church.   Just roll with me a minute.  Anyway, Rohr quotes Luke quoting Jesus: “It is easier for a camel to pass through camelneedlethe eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”  But he moves right along from there.  He says it’s not the possession of stuff per se that blocks us from god, but an attitude of entitlement. “I am the shit!” is a stance that blocks us from spirit, as does its mirror image of self-c0nsumed self-pity, “I am a piece of shit.”  Neither can co-exist with humility and faith.

The points Rohr asserts that I want to highlight are these:  1) That our truth is not in what we claim to believe, but in the way we live.  2) That we pray not in order to “change God” (i.e. kiss ass and win approval) but to “change ourselves.”  3) That prayer opens us to god, and that the gist of all prayer – here I’m paraphrasing – is essentially, I lack.  I need you.  Rohr writes,

So it is important that you ask, seek, and knock to keep yourself in right relationship with Life Itself.  Life is a gift, totally given to you without cost, every day of it, and every part of it.  A daily and chosen “attitude of gratitude” will keep your hands open to… receive life at ever-deeper levels…

What really wakes me up is to substitute the word “sobriety” in place of “life,” above.  Sobriety is indeed a gift, given to me freely every day.  And it started on the day I turned to god and said simply, “I lack.  I can’t do this.  I need you.”  Something shifted then, some channel opened that allowed god to help me do what I’d spent years and thousands of desperate, failed attempts trying to do: Get well.  God, not I, removed my mania for drinking.

Prayer relinquishes the illusion that I can do life, including sobriety, on my own.  As a spiritual being, I am intricately connected to both my Source and my fellows.  Prayer acknowledges this, re-opening the channel.  And it stays open at meetings if I listen knowing I can’t stay sober on my own.  Here’s where that mixed nature of humility comes up.  Truthfully, I go to meetings in a hybrid of mind frames.  Part of me (ego) says, “I’m comin’ up on 20 freakin’ years, dude!  I so know this drill!”  Part of me (compassion) says, “I’m here to help the newcomer and those who are struggling.”  Meeting snowflakeBut a key part of me – the seed of genuine humility – says, “I am here to be taught.  I am here to listen to god speak through my fellow addicts; and whether they drank just this morning, are fresh out of prison, or have thirty years and sponsor a jillion alcoholics does not matter.”

Humility and gratitude are inextricably interwoven, and both are essential to the fabric of sobriety.  Both can be cultivated in mindfulness – living in the simplicity of the present moment, saying to ourselves, “I am a living creature doing this here now,” and seeing, as Rohr says, that all of it is a gift we can love.  Ego lives in the thought-movies that our minds play, in the loveless illusion that we make shit happen, in the Teflon of coolness that causes meaning and responsibility to slide off us until we’re only half alive.  Ego refuses to appreciate that we are everywhere dependent on one another for survival, and on god for sanity (and everything).

One more note, though.  It’s important, too, for me to cultivate humility about my own arrogance.  Here’s my fav quote from Thomas Merton (another Christian, but oh well), part of which kicks off my addiction memoir:

This is the terrible thing about humility: that it is never fully successful… [O]ur humility consists in being proud and knowing all about it… and to be able to do so little about it. *

Pride goes with the turf…and Merton  didn’t even Facebook!

The bottom line is, I’m human and I’m flawed.  I have a big, gaping hole in my guts and an ego determined to fill it with bullshit.  I can either grab at mood altering drugs, attention, food, merchandise, etc. to try to fill the hole ego’s way, or I can acknowledge my incompleteness, my flawed nature, and turn to god for help.  I can do this not only about drinking, but about my unmanageable life in general.  When I open with asking, when I am humble and admit I am wounded, I let god in.  And god lets me flourish.

Love to you, alcoholic!  Love to you, seeking person!

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*Thomas Merton, Thoughts on Solitude, p. 59

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September 30, 2014 · 9:31 am

Not-Enoughness

A worthy life is simply one of honesty with oneself and god…

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I go through phases when I wake up almost every morning with a gut-level anxiety, a feeling of guilt that I’m somehow not doing all I’m supposed to, shame for lacking “success,” and alarm that I’m getting old at a mile a minute.  My whole life, the feeling claims, is a failure.  Before I’ve even sat up in bed, this “not-enoughness” jabs at my mind, perfect lifeprompting vague solutions that pop up like slot machine combos:  “Earn more!”  “Lose weight!”  “Socialize more!”

Whether my not-enoughness, a default setting from childhood, will ever go away I don’t know.  What’s changed is how I respond to it.  Today I understand that it’s just a feeling launched by the part of me that’s still broken.  I return its topspin tennis serve with a quick prayer: “God, please take this away and guide my thinking today.”  While I put on my morning clothes and weigh myself, not-enoughness still chides at me.  I dismiss it automatically and try to focus on the moment: gift of what I am doing, the good fortune of where I am, and the blessings of my reality.  I commit to loving what is instead of lacking what isn’t.

The power for this practice comes from my god, a connection nurtured through many years of working all 12 Steps.  Back when I relied on active drinking and codependency, I believed not only the not-enoughness, but the solutions my mind proposed.  My high school refrain, “Excel more!” gradually morphed into “Be more liked!”  If I could just win your admiration, I’d overcome not-enoughness.  Sans alcohol I was terrified to converse with people, not realizing the main obstacle had to do with the coordinates of my head, which was firmly lodged up my ass.  I could scarcely hear what you were saying, so preoccupied was I with self: what was up with me, what I thought you thought of me, and what I might say to impress you (usually figured out after you left).  Sober socializing was, in short, torture.

Drinking, of course, fixed all that.  It made me smart, funny, beautiful, and worthy.  Glamour drinkSure, I was still biding my time while you talked, but who gave a shit?  I’d get my turn to blab soon enough and, whether you were impressed or not, I, at least, was fine with whatever the fuck I’d just said.  The drunker I got, the wider my range of just fine became.  Maybe you didn’t care to hear about ex-partner’s sexual foibles, but fuck it!  Lissen!  It’s hilarious!

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Moi, back in the day

The infatuation addiction detailed in my memoir was really just a souped-up version of that same dynamic, with all my need concentrated on a chosen, magical person whose admiration (or even company) worked like cocaine.  Sadly, these worth-seeking projects frequently morphed into real relationships – meaning that the magic one, by committing, lost all magic.  Subsequently, when attacks of not-enoughness struck, I had no “soon things will be different!” to counter it with.  I could only muffle its penalty buzzer with more booze and great ideas.  All I’d end up with was a wreckage of mishaps, huge amounts of money blown, and a hangover like a brain full of puss.

Sobriety has by no means been a picnic.  I spent over two years dry and tortured – fleeing the conversation clusters after meetings with mutters of “fuck ’em!” – before I finally worked the steps and became teachable.  Slowly teachable, that is: I spent nine years in a codependent cocoon focusing all my anxious attention, from the moment I woke, on fixing my partner’s “problems” and ignoring my own.  Really, that morning gong of not-enoughness did not emerge for me as a distinct phenomenon until I found myself waking up alone.  “What is this feeling?” I finally asked.

Self-knowledge may not save us from drinking, but it sure helps with other problems!  The steps have transformed my economics of worth.  The only worth I can feel, I understand now, is self-worth.  I am the only agent who can generate that rebuttal to not-enoughness, no matter what anyone else may think of me.  God has shown me how to cultivate self-esteem by doing estimable works.  It has guided me to grow a loveable life by loving my life.  It has taught me to connect with others more through my heart than my words.

Despite what the zillion ads we’re bombarded with would have us believe, a worthy life is simply one of honesty with oneself and god – whatever that may look like for the individual.  For me, it means I do the best I can with what’s right in front of me Goodmanand trust god that whenever a suitable door approaches, god will not only alert me, but open it.  Why did I start up the small business I run today?  Doors would not open to the 500+ jobs I tried for following my layoff, whereas with just one little ad, the business practically threw itself at me.  Like incremental promotions at a firm called Happiness, Inc., small choices I’ve made have gradually steered my life away from money and prestige toward more time and freedom.  Thrift at home is part of my work.  True, I drive a beater and shop at Goodwill, but I also get to walk my 13-year-old son to school each morning, laughing about this and that.  I get to write instead of wishing to.  I see friends.  I take loads of ballet classes, raise cute hens, and execute my own half-assed home repairs.  Overall, my life today reflects the truth of who I am – a plenitude of what I value and a shortage of what I don’t.  That’s the true test.

In fact, by the time I go to bed each night, I’m overwhelmed with gratitude for my beautiful, rich, love-filled life.  My only prayer is, “Thank you, god, for all of it.  I love you.”

Tomorrow, I know, it all begins again.

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September 22, 2014 · 7:56 am

The Courage to Surrender

Courage: the ability to do something that you know is right or good, even though it is dangerous, frightening, or very difficult.
—————————————————————————-Macmillan dictionary

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American popular culture tends to associate courage with kicking ass.  Most of our movie heroes don’t need to overcome fear because they don’t feel any.  All we see from them is the anger and righteousness to smash the bad guys.  This invulnerable version of courage is reflected in Dictionary.com’s definition, as that which “permits one to face Die_hardextreme dangers and difficulties without fear.”

But what if fear is essential to courage?  That is, what if courage involves not just outward action, but the inner struggle to overcome all that holds us back – confusion, doubts… and fear?  In that case, courage means acceptance of our vulnerability, even our weakness, as well as the faith to move beyond it.

What’s this got to do with alcoholism?  People outside the rooms often assume recovery is about the ego’s type of courage: we’re sober because we’ve kicked addiction’s ass.  We conquered that mofo by being strong, disciplined, and – my favorite – taking control!  But there’s a lil’ problem with that.  Where drinking’s concerned, I can pull off none of those things.  I drink myself shitfaced.  That’s just what happens.  No matter how angry or righteous I may feel toward addiction, it’s the only one doing the ass-kickin’.

HOW coinOn the other hand, what I witness and learn in the rooms of AA is another form of courage – the courage to surrender.  Those two words don’t match up in most people’s minds, but for those of us in recovery, they have to.  When we tell ourselves, “I’m gonna beat this thing!” we seem to end up drunk.  But if instead we surrender, something inside us begins to shift, and we develop courage through the three essentials of recovery: Honesty, Open-mindedness, and Willingness.

Honesty
Nobody wants to be an alcoholic.  But even more, nobody who’s known only that way of life can imagine surviving without alcohol – a terrifying prospect.  I don’t know a single person who came to their first AA meeting without half a mind to bolt out the door.  What keeps us there is loyalty to certain moments of clarity – also known as honesty – when we either recognized death on our not-so-distant horizon or, in subtler cases, realized we could no longer endure the mental contortions necessary to sustain denial.  To hang onto that insight despite all the disclaimers our disease flings at us requires courage.

What’s more, every instinct cries out against admitting to a room full of strangers, “I cannot stop drinking and I don’t know how to live.”  Such words may not be voiced at our first meeting, and for some they never are. But alcoholics committed to recovery find the courage to speak these truths, no matter how difficult or painful.  Hearing them still brings tears to my eyes, even after almost 20 years.

Open-mindedness
Alcoholics tend to abhor the idea of groups.  We like to see ourselves as fiercely independent and temperamentally unique, so we’re repulsed by anything that smacks of conformity.  We also can’t stand the prospect of talking to others without a few drinks in us.  The last place we ever thought we’d spill our guts is a goddam cult, meetingwhich is what we’ve been calling AA, between swigs, for years.  Who wants to crawl in and, stone cold sober, ask for help from a group they’ve talked nothing but shit about to anyone who’d listen?  Nobody!  But we do it anyway, strange and frightening as it is.

Neither do I know a single newcomer who read the Twelve Steps on the wall and thought, “Oh, boy! That’ll help!”  The steps seem useless and irrelevant – some ‘hokey-pokey’ dance involving a magic Easter Bunny that has NOTHING to do with our very huge and real problems.  When alcoholics move ahead with these steps despite the certainty that they’ll never work, they’re stepping out on pure faith, reaching for the possibility of other ways to experience life.   The disease continues to offer them “Fuck Everything Free!” cards, but they decline to take one.  To turn away from everything familiar toward something unknown and intangible just because it feels “good or right” takes – you got it! – courage.

Willingness
The road to recovery is lengthy and, in places, steep.  We hear early on, “There’s only one thing you need to change – and that’s everything!”  Not only does that sound creepy, but “change” here is a verb – meaning we have to make it happen.  To find and work with a sponsor, write and read inventory, show up and listen at meetings, make amends, and eventually to sponsor and be of service to others – all these efforts require a willingness we’ve formerly lacked.  Our degree of willingness may wax and wane over the years, but if we steer by what we “know is right or good, even though it is… difficult,” we gradually come to call it by a different name: maybe god’s guidance, or maybe loving-kindness.

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Whether in terms of the battlefield or bottle, surrender means accepting as reality that which we’ve been fighting to deny.  But while a soldier surrenders only once, for the alcoholic, surrendering to one aspect of reality just moves us to a new perspective where we have to repeat the process.  Once we accept that our lives are unmanageable, we have to look at our relationships, which points us to our selfishness, which alerts us to our fear, which signals us to look at our connection to god and what it truly means to us.  The greatest paradox is that courage gradually leads us to our spiritual source, and yet it was that source (aka god/HP/ loving-kindness), once we opened the channel, that granted us the courage to change.

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September 14, 2014 · 9:52 am

Drama Addiction vs. Emotional Sobriety

Drama – emotional turmoil for its own sake – is one of those things that may entail drawbacks for normal people, but in the mind of an alcoholic, can lead to serious trouble.  When I get too whipped up by anything, real or imagined, I ‘m pulled off the beam spiritually, which means I’m a further from god and closer to a drink.

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Self-portrait, 1980 – 1/28/1995

One of my favorite lines in the 12 x 12 is this: “We learned that if we were seriously disturbed, our first need was to quiet that disturbance, regardless of who or what we thought caused it” (47).  In the past, we used to “quiet” our inner disturbances by drinking, which enabled us to excel at not giving a shit.  You remember those days, right?  Nowadays, though, we have to do manually what we once did chemically.  That is, living in sobriety, we have to find ways to become calm by letting go of what we can’t control.

Some call Al-Anon the grad school of AA – at least for those of us who are “Double Winners!”  (Can’t type that with a straight face!)  In any case, Al-Anon is where I finally got it – that axiom in the Big Book that whenever someone else seems to be upsetting me, it’s really me – my reactions – upsetting me.  My instinct is to point at the other person and say, “You’re the problem!”  But in every case, that conflict and pain is actually all coming from me fighting reality.  I can either be RESISTING something real, or MANUFACTURING something unreal, or both.

In years past, I’ve been addicted to infatuation.  While obsessing on that magic person, I’d play all these mind-movies of me doing stuff and them being impressed. “How extraordinary Louisa is!  Look how X and Y!”  As I’d bask in the idea of them thinking this, I’d get a glorious, glowing kickback of what felt like self-worth.  It wasn’t reallyDaydream-Cartoon-1966169 self-worth, though.  It was just a sweet dopamine hit caused by delusion.  (Because, lord knows, I couldn’t just have worth as a human being!)  Anywho – I’ve always assumed that when god took away that infatuation thing, I was also cured of the whole delusional projection business.

Except for something that happened the other night.  See, I write this blog with a lot of trust in you as an open-hearted reader, so when I figured out that a family member highly critical of me had subscribed to it, I became “seriously disturbed.”  My heart pounded.  I called friends.  And that night, I absolutely couldn’t sleep, because I kept imagining this person poring over every word, judging and condemning away.  Toss!  Not going to think about that.  Turn!  Except, what will they think of that part where it says…

God, as I’ve often noted, visits me mostly via a little “BULLSHIT” indicator light somewhere in the back of my mind.  I’m super busy signing onto my bullshit, which seems to be truth, so I’m certainly not going to recognize anything bullshitty about it, myself.  But after years of praying, “Please guide me, please help me grow,” I sometimes get this faint, subtle signal:  “BULLSHIT…  BULLSHIT… BULLSHIT…”

It’s like a smoke detector going off when you have no idea what’s burning.  I have to root around for the source.  What, god, where?!

So I sat up, turned on the light, and grabbed my journal. As I wrote, I came to see how I was wrapped up in the opposite of infatuation, which involved just as much projection.  This time I had the little Louisa-hating puppet in my mind reading this or that part of the blog and thinking, “How awful that bitch Louisa is!  Look how X (shitty) and Y (shitty)!”  And this time the kickback was the opposite of self-worth – a hit of self-loathing and guilt.

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Good ole’ self-flagellation

Why would my ego want this?  The same reason I worry about stuff I can’t know or control – that delusion of beating pain to the punch, of somehow bracing myself for the worst.  But in shining light on my bullshit, I saw this projection had NOTHING to do with reality.  Yes, I can know this person does not like my blog.  But there I have to stop.  End of topic.  No matter how many times the old phonograph needle of my mind wants to return to that groove of our story in progress, I have to remove it and say firmly, “Not real.”

Maybe my ego’s just addicted to the self-importance of drama.  Compared to my projections, reality’s storyline is pretty tame.  “I’m here now” doesn’t merit much of a compelling soundtrack.  I realize it’s only human nature to imagine what we can’t know and, likewise, to feel emotional reactions to those conjectures.  But as an alcoholic, I can get addicted to just about any diversion from the work of being myself – that ordinary woman wiping down her kitchen counter.  What might it be like to really give up the idea that these projections, these personal dramas, have any bearing on reality?  What if, rather than losing myself in mental commentary and spin-offs, I were willing to be humble one moment at a time, and to live in the simplicity of what is?

God, I’m pretty sure, would click LIKE.  (jk!!)

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September 9, 2014 · 9:32 am

Service for the Lazy Alcoholic

So here we are, hopeless alcoholics, and we find out we can’t stay sober without god’s help. Dammit. Next, we learn we need to work the Twelve Steps to remove all the clutter blocking us from god, which entails a lot of time and work. Bummer.

But it gets even worse!  Service? Usefulness? These are scary words for the self-centered. The Big Book is kind of craftyhyper in not laying too much on us at the outset. In chapter 1 Bill W. describes being “catapulted into the 4th dimension of existence,” where we will know “happiness, peace, and usefulness, in a way of life that is incredibly more wonderful as time passes.”

Happiness. Yep, that’s on our spiritual shopping list! Peace. Definitely want us some o’ that! But usefulness? What’s so wonderful about that? Hmm. Apparently, we begin to sense, it’s essential to getting the previous two. Chapter 2 tells us, “Our very lives, as ex-problem drinkers, depend on our constant thought of others and how we may help meet their needs.” Yuck! we think. Constant thought? I don’t even like others!  Still, if our sole alternative is misery, we move forward.

Solution-based meetings urge newcomers onto a bunny slope of usefulness via a service position – two-coffee-urnsmaking coffee, answering phones, helping with set-up or tear-down. Reluctant as I was to take on one of these, I found that, strangely enough, during my duties I experienced a sense of ease and comfort I’d never known before without being drunk. I didn’t get why, but I knew I liked it (and still do). Same thing when I started sponsoring other women. I remember marveling each time I closed my front door at the end of the hour, how was it that “getting out of self” felt so damn good? How had those all-consuming morasses of my own problems dehydrated to little flecks of scum in just sixty minutes? What was this lightness, this joy that let me turn back to my own life with love and gratitude? I didn’t understand it.

Now I do.

What flows through us when we’re helping others is the energy of god – no less. We become that “channel” the Saint Francis prayer opens with, and, as the power of compassion, the desire to help, and the love that asks for nothing streams through us, we ourselves are replenished and healed. Beyond AA, almost any spiritual tradition worth its salt tells us helping others is essential to a meaningful life; Christianity and Buddhism are two that come to mind.  My own view of god as the collaborative power behind life works even better.

It’s as if the nutrients our spirit needs to flourish can materialize only in circulation, in flow from and to. The ego, walling us in, promotes stagnation.  By contrast, whenever I pray to feel god’s love for me, the prayer is answered in my flow of love for you.  All this makes sense.  But what it’s taken me years to abandon is that mistaken notion of service I developed early on – that we do X in order to get Y.

I remember the moment when my Al-Anon sponsor pointed out this disturbing passage embedded in step 9: “At the moment we are trying to put our lives in order. But this is not an end in itself. Our real purpose is to fit ourselves to be of maximum service to God and the people about us.”  What?  Not an end in itself?  A smile came over her face, probably in response to the look of puzzlement/ horror on mine. She said, “So many of us put the cart before the horse. We don’t help others so god will fix up our lives. No.  God fixes up our lives so that we can help others.”

So… what starts off as a quest for relief gradually morphs into a reason for being.  My body exists in order to let me move about in the world, and the more I use it, the more it thrives. My spirit exists to express love, and the same principle holds. To love each other is why we’re here. Period. The purpose of life, right there, Charlie Brown.pitfalls

A few quick addenda:

  1. Martyrdom is selfishly oriented, though easy to mistake for service. When I give help based on a preconceived notion of how someone should view/ respond to it, I’m not channeling god. I’m manipulating. I may want their fucking gratitude, or for them to live in a certain way to reinforce my rightness. Love, by contrast, is open-minded, freeing each person to find their own relationship to god.

2) Judging others is kryptonite to the part of you that loves. “Many of us sense that real tolerance for other people’s shortcomings and viewpoints and a respect for their opinions are attitudes that make us more useful to others” (19). Love does not “should” on anyone.

 3) Love is not enabling. “It is not the matter of giving that is in question, but how and when to give. The minute… the alcoholic commences to rely upon our assistance rather than upon God,” we’re both screwed (98).

Today a lot of my service work outside sponsorship involves just answering my phone.  This week alone I’ve gotten three alcoholic HELP! calls. I don’t try to solve anyone’s problems. Instead, I listen and love – and whatever comes out my mouth comes out. They can take it or leave it.

The most difficult of these calls I ever took came from an acquaintance crying almost too hard to speak.  She’d fallen in mutual love with someone she shouldn’t have, and though extremely aware of the moral stakes involved – why she was sobbing uncontrollably – she insisted this love was, for her, non-negotiable.  They hid nothing, but everyone had turned away from her.  She was in a living hell, losing her mind from all this pain!  I’d been weeding when she called, and I remember praying by my flowerbed to be both honest and useful to her.  My own feelings about such romances, having suffered the butt end of one, are intense. So much churned inside me – old hurts, judgments, pronouncements! – but compassion won out.  Pain, I told her bluntly, was the inevitable price for breaking her own morals and causing someone else even more pain. There was no way out.  But that said, I did have a lot of experience with living sober through pain, and I shared what had helped me most.  She was avidly grateful – more, I think, for my clemency than the suggestions themselves.

It’s a far cry from making coffee! And I can’t say I felt joy when I hung up, either. Rather, what I felt was a deeper acknowledgment of the difficulties of being dandelionhuman and compassion for all of us – including myself – who struggle with them. Bad weeds, bad loves!  There’s an element of arbitrariness in all our designations. I appreciated my own life not as an individual effort but as inextricable from my culture, which was in turn part of the larger unfolding of life – all of us trying to find our way. To feel connected with all things is the most profound form of peace, and for the next few hours – still pulling weeds but now a little more merciful – I had it.

Alcoholic or normie, we can’t help but be motivated by the rewards of service.  Today, though, I view them more as a chicken/egg phenomenon.  Being happily sober, we can be lovingly useful, which keeps us happily sober.

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