It's been a couple of months since I decided to reconsider being sober. A few people have commented or emailed to ask how it's going, so I thought I'd write a quick note to say I'm doing fine. (But listen: If you are reading sober blogs because you are struggling with the drink and looking for support from like-minded people, don't read this post. Take a look at the sidebar on my blog, where you will find posts by many people who are committed to being sober. If you're looking for support, that's what you should be reading, not this post! If you think you know better than I do and you want to save me from myself, please keep those thoughts to yourself, OK? We're all just figuring out how to live and no one has all the answers: not me, not you, not some expert! And as usual, no talk of wolves or witches are welcome here. There are lots of places online where you can talk about that sort of thing and be greeted warmly, and that's grand, but it's not my cup of tea. If you're just curious how I'm doing, or interested in a take on drinking by someone who was sober for a year and a half and now drinks, OK, read on. )
Phew! Now that's all out of the way and I can talk. Sorry to sound bossy there. I'm just heading off some conversations I don't want to have, that's all. Other than that, hello!
First, yes, I decided to drink again, and I have. And I like it. I had forgotten how much I really love wine, and how little I care for most other kinds of alcohol. I feel like I've become reacquainted with an old pleasure. And that's lovely. I have found that in certain kinds of social situations, I have more fun, and I'm more part of what's going on, when I am joining in the drinking. That's not the main part of my life, and if it were it would probably stop being fun. But as it stands, it's nice.
Also, there have been no great dramas or tragedies. I was joking with my partner that there's a truism in sober circles that tells you to "play the tape to the end." For me, sometimes the end seems to be I have some wine and a nice time. Once I drank more than was a good idea, and then I went home to bed. It wasn't much difference than what happens to people once in a while, just a confluence of being too tired and having some wine. Most likely I was sillier than usual. I don't mind that. I don't need to absolutely control every moment of my life. So my tape isn't looking so scary, or at least, not to me!
There was one evening where I shared wine with some friends and later wondered whether I may have had a better time without drinking. One of the friends I was with also has a complicated relationship with alcohol, and may have been disappointed that I decided to drink again. It was interesting, and I realized that, with that particular group, next time I probably wouldn't drink. No matter. I'm still figuring out how to do this, and I'm learning as I go.
Aside from the pleasure of drinking sometimes, and the feeling of fuller participation with the world that comes along with that, the big relief for me has been to let up on the incessant self-examination that for me has gone along with being sober and blogging. As I have said many times, I don't have much faith in the ongoing self-improvement project of contemporary psychology. Sometimes, yes, things in life get messy, and something needs to be done to make a change. But I don't think we are the sort of creatures that respond well to an endless process of analyzing and bettering, as though we were products that could be continually tweaked for greater market share or increased customer satisfaction. There is a lot of talk about acceptance on sober blogs, and sometimes that's been helpful to me. But I keep wondering whether sometimes that shades into accepting the world as it is, which I think is a problem given that the world we are in needs some change. Maybe deeper kind of acceptance would be to accept ourselves as flawed, and maybe always to some extent unknowable, and to get on with trying to make the world better.
Not that I'm engaged in a grand world-improvement project now either. But I am reading lots and working on my thesis and paying attention much more to the world and much less to myself. I don't think that's incompatible with not drinking, by the way. I just found that to keep up the not drinking, I had to keep up a set of beliefs about being sober that were nourished by reading sober blogs, and that led me to pay more attention to myself than I want to pay. Having questioned that practice, I am neither reading blogs nor being actively sober. And my take on it is this: I'm living well.
Years ago I went through a terrible depression, and when I was getting better and returning to the world, a friend expressed disappointment with me because he didn't like my pace or tone as well any more. He liked me better when I was more quiet, more interior. (In other words, when I was depressed.) I mention that because I feel the same shift in me now--I'm bored with all that being quiet and interior, and yet that may be a great deal of what makes up the bond between me and the world of sober bloggers. It's not that I can never be like that these days, it's just that it's only a part of me, and one that's less front and centre when I'm more engaged with the world, as I have been this past while. That goes along with my decision to drink again, but it's part of a bigger process of being in the world in a different way. So if I seem different, I am, and I know that, and I know it's not always welcome to everyone. But it's who I am, and I am pretty darn OK with that.
In any case, this may be my last post, as it doesn't seem to make sense to write in a sober community about the joys of drinking, or to write among people who are working on self-improvement to say that I think a lot of that is bunk. I don't want to be the poster girl for drinking, or to be put in a position in which I'm defending drinking to people who think it's an unhealthy practice. I really am just figuring out how to live, and that may end up being a more private process than this blogging adventure has been. But I did want to say hi, and say I'm doing well, before I sign off altogether.
Happy July to you all!
Showing posts with label acceptance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label acceptance. Show all posts
Sunday, 19 July 2015
Saturday, 4 April 2015
Resistance and rage: why I don't always trust peace and calm
The last few posts I've written a lot about listening and acceptance. But in many ways I feel as if, for me, getting sober is a tug of war between acceptance and resistance, peace and rage. Talking about acceptance in sober blog circles goes down well, but I'm not always so sure it's OK to talk about resistance. But I'm going to try, as I want to see if I can make some sense of it: what I'm resisting, and why it matters to me.
So what am I resisting? One of the things I've learned about getting sober is that a person goes through a lot of changes. Of course, I am the same person, but I am also becoming a new person. That's wonderful. There's so much promise in it. But there's danger, too. Who do I want to become? I need to think about that, because I believe the methods I use to take care of myself will in part fashion the self I am becoming. Foucault calls this sort of thing "technologies of the self," and after railing against Foucault for ages it turns out I like his work a lot. But you don't have to go to French philosophy to see that the kinds of things you do to change affect the person you become. That's what's at the heart of the "I want what she's got" approach to getting sober. You find someone who you want to be like, and do what they did to become like that.
But often, I seem to need to do the opposite. I have a big dose of, "Please God don't let me end up like that!" Not when I see someone who's struggling. For some reason--and that's what I'm trying to figure out in this post--I react that way when I see someone who has been set up as a guru, someone who I am supposed to want to emulate, a beacon of peace and calm and so on. Confronted with these gurus, all I can see is their faults, and I recoil. And I rage against that as an ideal.
Here's an example. So many of the sober bloggers seem to love Tara Brach. Sometimes I want to love Tara Brach. People I really respect love her and find her helpful. What can't I just love Tara Brach, dammit? But the thing is, I can't stand her. I have tried listening to her online. I bought her book and read it, and a while later I took another look to see if I could take up what I couldn't get the first time. But she tells a story about her kid interrupting her meditation session because he needed a ride to school, and she sounds so precious and feeble, and I wanted to yell at her, "Get a grip lady! Drive the kid to school, admit you're pissed with him, and move on!" Reading her, I get the feeling I'm supposed to beat myself up when I'm not perfect and then use this meditation stuff to alleviate that self-flagellation. But I think, no, just don't beat yourself up in the first place! Clearly I will once in a while be annoyed with the people around me. I don't want to have to set myself up in a protected bubble where I am calm as hell all the time. To me, Brach performs the most horrific mix of Western psychology and self-indulgent buddhism and sanctimoniousness, all in one calm and patient show. And I don't believe her. To me, she looks like she is as tense and angry as all get out. When I watched her video, I want to get her to walk out of that quiet room and come stand on top of a cliff with me and rage at the ocean and the sky for a while, and maybe then when we got tired of yelling we could sit down and laugh at how ridiculous it all is.
I felt the same years ago when a friend gave me her Eckhardt Tolle book to read. His pious calm enraged me! (I didn't want to take Eckhardt out cliff-yelling, so maybe my Tara Brach reaction is a kind of progress.) Ditto my attempt at yoga class. My blood pressure actually increased in the class. I had to go for a walk or a bike ride afterward to calm down. I have tried several times to get back to being Catholic after years away, but the stuff I hear makes me want to stand up and yell at the priest, and I know that's not on. At the AA meetings I've attended, I wanted to call sexism on the chairman's side comments, and the fact that everyone laughed enraged me even more.
Similarly, a lot of what passes as the "science" of psychology infuriates me. So much simply doesn't stand up all that well to criticism, and so much is takes as true because it's spoken by experts. For example, one hears a lot about the virtues of "self-regulation" but self-regulation has a lot in common with becoming more docile, more easily governed. Maybe a little chaos is healthy, then?
Now this might sound like I'm filled with rage all the time. I'm not. But I have a healthy respect for anger and I appreciate that tension and conflict are helpful and productive at times. Anthropologist Ruth Behar writes about "using your subjectivity" as an analytical tool, and maybe that's what I'm trying to do here. One of the things I know about meditation is that I'm supposed to notice my own reactions. Behar adds to that and says, don't just notice what you feel, use your feelings to help give yourself a new perspective on a situation.
And yes, I know, part of the thing is not being attached to those feelings. But aren't they me? How am I supposed to have a personal engagement with the world if I accept that all my feelings and hopes and fears are all going to pass like so much water under some bridge. Yes, some day I'll be dead, but I'm alive now. How do I know I'm alive? I guess in part because I feel something. So come on feelings! Bring them on! Years ago when I was depressed, I didn't have a whole lot of preferences or feelings. These days I have them in spades. And I welcome them. I think they are probably how I know what to make of what's going on around me. I sure don't want to distance myself from all that!
So I guess the resistance I'm talking about is integral to all that listening I've also been talking about. I pay attention when I am enraged, because in that rage I start to get a sense of what I am actually thinking and feeling.
Sometimes I agree with what I read. Recently, I read an article by Simone de Beauvoir in which she rejects the idea that personal happiness is a good basis for a life, on the grounds that happiness is often conflated with "being at rest," which is a kind of death. Instead, she argues from an existential ethical standpoint that freedom is a more worthwhile basis for life decisions. De Beauvoir writes that liberty "is achieved only through a continual reaching out to other liberties" and she seems to condemn acceptance when it means "the brutish life of subjection to given conditions" (in New French Feminisms, edited by Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, 1980, p. 55). Instead, she talks about possibilities. Now that lifts my spirits! I worry about the project of psychology and the ongoing exhortations to psychologize ourselves. What if it just make me docile? Do I really want to accept the world as it is?
Here's my real worry. I am so bloody happy that I quit drinking. It's been almost 15 months now (hooray me!) and I feel a deep sense of the possibilities that life might have that I simply couldn't get to before. That's fabulous. Now that I'm here, I don't want to stagnate in a mire of self-indulgent concerns and shallow self-improvement. I want to find a good way to live, make good choices, contribute to the world. I'm not sure how to do it, but that's my project. I think it's worthwhile. And I think resistance and rage is helpful to me in this. The world is moving in some scary directions, and it might take some spitting rage to help me push back against what feels like a pressure to be calm and docile and accepting.
So for me, that's the other side of acceptance. It's less pretty and poetic, and it's not likely to be popular. And as always, it's possible I'm wrong about everything and I'll learn that in a while. OK. I'm fine with that. But for now, I want to stand on my cliff and yell and say I don't always want to accept things and I will not calm the fuck down and even in my rage I have to say that I am very, very happy about that!
Wishing you love joy and maybe even a healthy dose of rage.
So what am I resisting? One of the things I've learned about getting sober is that a person goes through a lot of changes. Of course, I am the same person, but I am also becoming a new person. That's wonderful. There's so much promise in it. But there's danger, too. Who do I want to become? I need to think about that, because I believe the methods I use to take care of myself will in part fashion the self I am becoming. Foucault calls this sort of thing "technologies of the self," and after railing against Foucault for ages it turns out I like his work a lot. But you don't have to go to French philosophy to see that the kinds of things you do to change affect the person you become. That's what's at the heart of the "I want what she's got" approach to getting sober. You find someone who you want to be like, and do what they did to become like that.
But often, I seem to need to do the opposite. I have a big dose of, "Please God don't let me end up like that!" Not when I see someone who's struggling. For some reason--and that's what I'm trying to figure out in this post--I react that way when I see someone who has been set up as a guru, someone who I am supposed to want to emulate, a beacon of peace and calm and so on. Confronted with these gurus, all I can see is their faults, and I recoil. And I rage against that as an ideal.
Here's an example. So many of the sober bloggers seem to love Tara Brach. Sometimes I want to love Tara Brach. People I really respect love her and find her helpful. What can't I just love Tara Brach, dammit? But the thing is, I can't stand her. I have tried listening to her online. I bought her book and read it, and a while later I took another look to see if I could take up what I couldn't get the first time. But she tells a story about her kid interrupting her meditation session because he needed a ride to school, and she sounds so precious and feeble, and I wanted to yell at her, "Get a grip lady! Drive the kid to school, admit you're pissed with him, and move on!" Reading her, I get the feeling I'm supposed to beat myself up when I'm not perfect and then use this meditation stuff to alleviate that self-flagellation. But I think, no, just don't beat yourself up in the first place! Clearly I will once in a while be annoyed with the people around me. I don't want to have to set myself up in a protected bubble where I am calm as hell all the time. To me, Brach performs the most horrific mix of Western psychology and self-indulgent buddhism and sanctimoniousness, all in one calm and patient show. And I don't believe her. To me, she looks like she is as tense and angry as all get out. When I watched her video, I want to get her to walk out of that quiet room and come stand on top of a cliff with me and rage at the ocean and the sky for a while, and maybe then when we got tired of yelling we could sit down and laugh at how ridiculous it all is.
I felt the same years ago when a friend gave me her Eckhardt Tolle book to read. His pious calm enraged me! (I didn't want to take Eckhardt out cliff-yelling, so maybe my Tara Brach reaction is a kind of progress.) Ditto my attempt at yoga class. My blood pressure actually increased in the class. I had to go for a walk or a bike ride afterward to calm down. I have tried several times to get back to being Catholic after years away, but the stuff I hear makes me want to stand up and yell at the priest, and I know that's not on. At the AA meetings I've attended, I wanted to call sexism on the chairman's side comments, and the fact that everyone laughed enraged me even more.
Similarly, a lot of what passes as the "science" of psychology infuriates me. So much simply doesn't stand up all that well to criticism, and so much is takes as true because it's spoken by experts. For example, one hears a lot about the virtues of "self-regulation" but self-regulation has a lot in common with becoming more docile, more easily governed. Maybe a little chaos is healthy, then?
Now this might sound like I'm filled with rage all the time. I'm not. But I have a healthy respect for anger and I appreciate that tension and conflict are helpful and productive at times. Anthropologist Ruth Behar writes about "using your subjectivity" as an analytical tool, and maybe that's what I'm trying to do here. One of the things I know about meditation is that I'm supposed to notice my own reactions. Behar adds to that and says, don't just notice what you feel, use your feelings to help give yourself a new perspective on a situation.
And yes, I know, part of the thing is not being attached to those feelings. But aren't they me? How am I supposed to have a personal engagement with the world if I accept that all my feelings and hopes and fears are all going to pass like so much water under some bridge. Yes, some day I'll be dead, but I'm alive now. How do I know I'm alive? I guess in part because I feel something. So come on feelings! Bring them on! Years ago when I was depressed, I didn't have a whole lot of preferences or feelings. These days I have them in spades. And I welcome them. I think they are probably how I know what to make of what's going on around me. I sure don't want to distance myself from all that!
So I guess the resistance I'm talking about is integral to all that listening I've also been talking about. I pay attention when I am enraged, because in that rage I start to get a sense of what I am actually thinking and feeling.
Sometimes I agree with what I read. Recently, I read an article by Simone de Beauvoir in which she rejects the idea that personal happiness is a good basis for a life, on the grounds that happiness is often conflated with "being at rest," which is a kind of death. Instead, she argues from an existential ethical standpoint that freedom is a more worthwhile basis for life decisions. De Beauvoir writes that liberty "is achieved only through a continual reaching out to other liberties" and she seems to condemn acceptance when it means "the brutish life of subjection to given conditions" (in New French Feminisms, edited by Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, 1980, p. 55). Instead, she talks about possibilities. Now that lifts my spirits! I worry about the project of psychology and the ongoing exhortations to psychologize ourselves. What if it just make me docile? Do I really want to accept the world as it is?
Here's my real worry. I am so bloody happy that I quit drinking. It's been almost 15 months now (hooray me!) and I feel a deep sense of the possibilities that life might have that I simply couldn't get to before. That's fabulous. Now that I'm here, I don't want to stagnate in a mire of self-indulgent concerns and shallow self-improvement. I want to find a good way to live, make good choices, contribute to the world. I'm not sure how to do it, but that's my project. I think it's worthwhile. And I think resistance and rage is helpful to me in this. The world is moving in some scary directions, and it might take some spitting rage to help me push back against what feels like a pressure to be calm and docile and accepting.
So for me, that's the other side of acceptance. It's less pretty and poetic, and it's not likely to be popular. And as always, it's possible I'm wrong about everything and I'll learn that in a while. OK. I'm fine with that. But for now, I want to stand on my cliff and yell and say I don't always want to accept things and I will not calm the fuck down and even in my rage I have to say that I am very, very happy about that!
Wishing you love joy and maybe even a healthy dose of rage.
Saturday, 31 January 2015
Other people
I'm starting to think I'm in a second stage of getting sober, or of being sober. The first year, it was all about how to live with myself. I was pretty big on acceptance all year long. And that's going to be an ongoing process, but I tell you, I'm doing a lot better now on that score than I was a year ago. But these past few weeks, there's something new going on, and I think it's a different kind of acceptance: accepting other people. Lately, I'm paying more attention to learning how to live with others, something it seems I don't know all that much about.
People have said that things shift once you get a little sober time. And they do. I'm less reactive than I was. I feel myself getting caught in problems, but it's slower, and I have some time to pull away and think. But a few months ago, I got kind of swamped by the emotional tensions in a group situation that weren't all that much of my own making, and I didn't see it clearly until well after the fact. I tried to talk to a counsellor about this, but I felt like I talking wasn't going to be the answer on this one. The thing is, I think I don't much know how to be with other people. There are exceptions, of course. My partner and I have a great relationship, and I get on well very with his family, and I have some friends who I genuinely feel close to. But these all seem like exceptions to me. In the general run of things, when I am in a group of people, I often feel as though I am somehow a little off to one side, as though I'm somehow not really there. Classes are usually an exception to this, because then I'm engaging intellectually, and I'm very comfortable in that realm, as long as it stays there. But when the situation is more social or emotional, I don't quite know how it's supposed to go. I used to call this doing "people as a second language," and I have probably written about that here before. Like lots of people working in a second language, I can do it, but I'm not completely fluent. I don't always know the idioms. What happens next?
None of this is new to me. But now, I've been sober just over a year. (And that only came after kicking against the fears and the wisdom of other people on the folly of drinking again and then realizing, after drinking, that it didn't much matter what they said. Booze was sucking the life out of me. The very life.) Now, sober, I'm feeling that my sense of alienation is a restriction I don't much need anymore. I don't quite know how to get rid of it, but I do think that's the next thing I need to work on.
Blogging has been amazing for me. It's let me learn from others and figure things out for myself and get to know some amazing people online. Still, when I'm here, I am sitting alone in a room, typing. I have laughed and cried and felt real warmth from people online. But that's not the same thing as being in the same room as other people and feeling that. It's not bad, and it's not fake. It's just one step removed, somehow. When sober bloggers have met face to face, and talked about how amazing the experience has been, I've felt envious. And when people who attend meetings talk about fellowship, I have felt a longing for something like that.
Anyway, I decided to do something about this, something more direct than thinking about it or talking about it. So I went to a meeting. And it was all right. Yes, I was nervous. But it felt pretty good to sit in a room full of people, all in different stages of dealing with pretty much the same problem. People had all different kinds of ways of listening to the speaker. Some were entranced. Some fidgeted. Some smiled in recognition at different bits that were said, and some looked at each other significantly. As it happens, I liked the main speaker, and felt a kind of connection to her story. She was talking about living in her head for so long, and how she has had to learn to live in her body, too. Now that doesn't sound like much when I repeat it. But it was powerful, sitting in the same room, feeling connected. There were a lot of people and I was nearly late, so I sat near the back and off to one side. I could barely see the front of the room, as there were maybe a hundred people there! (So many alcoholics! Who knew?) At one point, someone in front of me shifted how she was sitting, and I had a direct view of the speaker. And I had one of those moments I sometimes have, where the world seems to break open for a moment, and everything feels different. It's hard to describe, but it happens to me sometimes, moments like this. I have come to think of them as grace, maybe. Time slows down, and everything sounds different, clearer, and the world seems to glow. Or maybe vibrate. Anyway, at the meeting, I had one of those moments, and in that moment, I felt like the woman at the table in the front of the room was speaking directly to me. And I was listening.
Of course, she was speaking to everyone. Soon the crowd shifted slightly and I couldn't see anymore, and the room settled back to normal. Then some guy talked, and he was annoying, the way people sometimes are, and that was fine, too. Afterward, I didn't stay and chat with anyone. This was enough for me for one day. I think I will go back though. There is something here for me to learn. And I think it's a kind of physical learning, something I just can't get from reading or writing, as good as those things are. I know we are a social species, and there's a lot about the non-verbal ways we communicate that's not so well understood. Of course, I would like to understand it. But the most important thing might be for me to actually experience being with others, being a part of something they are also a part of, and not trying all that much to figure out how it works.
I've been reading a little of the Belgian philosopher, Isabelle Stengers, and in one interview she talks about the "care of the possible," something she takes from William James. I like that a lot. Her point, as I understand it, is that we pass over so much experience, but a different approach might be to consider the possibilities that our actual experience opens for us, rather than only acknowledging what we accept as the facts. (I have not at all done justice to Stengers' wonderful work here, but I am making sense of the world with it as best I can, and I'm OK with that.) I used to care a lot about what was called addiction and what wasn't, and whether I was an alcoholic or not. When I thought about those things, I thought about them as if they were somehow real categories, things that either applied to me, in truth, or did not. I think this is the way we are taught to think. Now I am trying something different. It seems to me that "alcoholic" is a pretty good concept, in that it opens the door to a new way of life, once you accept it. If you don't like it, don't worry. Find a concept that works for you. And in going to a meeting, I'm not worrying too much about any single version of the truth. I expect the truth is more in the practice, in the experience of getting together with people and listening to them (and yes, one day maybe even talking to someone there!) What I need to learn from it is more in the experience of being with the others, and feeling a glimmer of belonging. The experience of that, not the objective proof of it's efficacy.
I'll see how it all goes. This feels like a new kind of acceptance to me, one that includes other people: their wisdom and their follies, yes, but mostly their very presence.
This was a bit more complicated to write about than I had thought it might be, and I'm not sure it's all clear, even to me. I'm just figuring this out. So if you're still here, thanks for reading! Peace and joy to you. xo
People have said that things shift once you get a little sober time. And they do. I'm less reactive than I was. I feel myself getting caught in problems, but it's slower, and I have some time to pull away and think. But a few months ago, I got kind of swamped by the emotional tensions in a group situation that weren't all that much of my own making, and I didn't see it clearly until well after the fact. I tried to talk to a counsellor about this, but I felt like I talking wasn't going to be the answer on this one. The thing is, I think I don't much know how to be with other people. There are exceptions, of course. My partner and I have a great relationship, and I get on well very with his family, and I have some friends who I genuinely feel close to. But these all seem like exceptions to me. In the general run of things, when I am in a group of people, I often feel as though I am somehow a little off to one side, as though I'm somehow not really there. Classes are usually an exception to this, because then I'm engaging intellectually, and I'm very comfortable in that realm, as long as it stays there. But when the situation is more social or emotional, I don't quite know how it's supposed to go. I used to call this doing "people as a second language," and I have probably written about that here before. Like lots of people working in a second language, I can do it, but I'm not completely fluent. I don't always know the idioms. What happens next?
None of this is new to me. But now, I've been sober just over a year. (And that only came after kicking against the fears and the wisdom of other people on the folly of drinking again and then realizing, after drinking, that it didn't much matter what they said. Booze was sucking the life out of me. The very life.) Now, sober, I'm feeling that my sense of alienation is a restriction I don't much need anymore. I don't quite know how to get rid of it, but I do think that's the next thing I need to work on.
Blogging has been amazing for me. It's let me learn from others and figure things out for myself and get to know some amazing people online. Still, when I'm here, I am sitting alone in a room, typing. I have laughed and cried and felt real warmth from people online. But that's not the same thing as being in the same room as other people and feeling that. It's not bad, and it's not fake. It's just one step removed, somehow. When sober bloggers have met face to face, and talked about how amazing the experience has been, I've felt envious. And when people who attend meetings talk about fellowship, I have felt a longing for something like that.
Anyway, I decided to do something about this, something more direct than thinking about it or talking about it. So I went to a meeting. And it was all right. Yes, I was nervous. But it felt pretty good to sit in a room full of people, all in different stages of dealing with pretty much the same problem. People had all different kinds of ways of listening to the speaker. Some were entranced. Some fidgeted. Some smiled in recognition at different bits that were said, and some looked at each other significantly. As it happens, I liked the main speaker, and felt a kind of connection to her story. She was talking about living in her head for so long, and how she has had to learn to live in her body, too. Now that doesn't sound like much when I repeat it. But it was powerful, sitting in the same room, feeling connected. There were a lot of people and I was nearly late, so I sat near the back and off to one side. I could barely see the front of the room, as there were maybe a hundred people there! (So many alcoholics! Who knew?) At one point, someone in front of me shifted how she was sitting, and I had a direct view of the speaker. And I had one of those moments I sometimes have, where the world seems to break open for a moment, and everything feels different. It's hard to describe, but it happens to me sometimes, moments like this. I have come to think of them as grace, maybe. Time slows down, and everything sounds different, clearer, and the world seems to glow. Or maybe vibrate. Anyway, at the meeting, I had one of those moments, and in that moment, I felt like the woman at the table in the front of the room was speaking directly to me. And I was listening.
Of course, she was speaking to everyone. Soon the crowd shifted slightly and I couldn't see anymore, and the room settled back to normal. Then some guy talked, and he was annoying, the way people sometimes are, and that was fine, too. Afterward, I didn't stay and chat with anyone. This was enough for me for one day. I think I will go back though. There is something here for me to learn. And I think it's a kind of physical learning, something I just can't get from reading or writing, as good as those things are. I know we are a social species, and there's a lot about the non-verbal ways we communicate that's not so well understood. Of course, I would like to understand it. But the most important thing might be for me to actually experience being with others, being a part of something they are also a part of, and not trying all that much to figure out how it works.
I've been reading a little of the Belgian philosopher, Isabelle Stengers, and in one interview she talks about the "care of the possible," something she takes from William James. I like that a lot. Her point, as I understand it, is that we pass over so much experience, but a different approach might be to consider the possibilities that our actual experience opens for us, rather than only acknowledging what we accept as the facts. (I have not at all done justice to Stengers' wonderful work here, but I am making sense of the world with it as best I can, and I'm OK with that.) I used to care a lot about what was called addiction and what wasn't, and whether I was an alcoholic or not. When I thought about those things, I thought about them as if they were somehow real categories, things that either applied to me, in truth, or did not. I think this is the way we are taught to think. Now I am trying something different. It seems to me that "alcoholic" is a pretty good concept, in that it opens the door to a new way of life, once you accept it. If you don't like it, don't worry. Find a concept that works for you. And in going to a meeting, I'm not worrying too much about any single version of the truth. I expect the truth is more in the practice, in the experience of getting together with people and listening to them (and yes, one day maybe even talking to someone there!) What I need to learn from it is more in the experience of being with the others, and feeling a glimmer of belonging. The experience of that, not the objective proof of it's efficacy.
I'll see how it all goes. This feels like a new kind of acceptance to me, one that includes other people: their wisdom and their follies, yes, but mostly their very presence.
This was a bit more complicated to write about than I had thought it might be, and I'm not sure it's all clear, even to me. I'm just figuring this out. So if you're still here, thanks for reading! Peace and joy to you. xo
Monday, 15 December 2014
Acceptance, again.
I've been struggling with a whole lot of things that I think have to do with acceptance. You know, it seems like I figure some things out and then later I come back and figure them out all over again. Same lesson, just deeper. I guess we all have that.
A number of years ago, I was taking an art class, and I got talking with an instructor who was visiting from the east coast, where I'm also from. She'd always been a good girl: Catholic school, art college on scholarship, career making and teaching art. She'd done everything right in her life. Eventually, she started to feel so shaped by the forces around her who defined what "everything right" looked like that she didn't have much sense of herself. I remember her telling me that it took her a long time to get over needing some sort of approval from the world for everything she did. Needing approval is not the best road to making great art. For a time she stopped presenting her art publicly, and she ended up developing a whole new practice, returning to working with clay--something she loved, but that isn't exactly high status in the art world. By the time I met her, she was making art and teaching and enjoying it all again, and it felt more real to her than it had. She said her turning point had been a conversation with her husband, who pointed out that she was still acting like the schoolgirl who really wanted the teachers to say what a grand girl she was.
Ouch. I feel like that these days. At the time, it didn't much apply to me at all. I'd been one of those high achieving kids, but as an adult I'd quit lots of things that people thought I was supposed to be doing. Even sitting by a kiln chatting with an art instructor, as I was doing that evening years ago, would have been considered a waste of time by many of the people I knew. I didn't care.
But being in school somehow brings a lot of that old approval stuff back again. I love reading and writing and researching. It's interesting and intellectually stimulating, and I feel lucky that I'm allowed to spend my time doing it. But whenever I submit a project to be graded, I feel like I'm waiting for a God I don't entirely believe in to reach out and pat me on the head and tell me I'm a good girl after all. There is no winning this game. A perfect grade means I have to live up to that next time or I'm not so good after all. (And anyway, maybe the professor was being kind, so it doesn't quite count.) Anything even slightly less than perfect has me replaying all the problems in my work.
I'm embarrassed to be writing about this. It doesn't feel like an adult issue. I thought I'd got past this years ago. I guess not. Now I think leaving the whole academic and career world as I did was more like a giant workaround. I thought I'd given all that worldly approval a big old, "Screw you!" and gone off to do my own thing. (It might not be surprising that "my thing" ended up involving a lot of wine every evening.) But it's one thing to keep away from the world of approval altogether, and quite another to be submerged in it and not completely shaped by it. Now that I'm a full time student, I am judged and graded all the time. Trying to be OK with that is tricky. It's pretty darn draining, oscillating out there on the end of some approval system that feels like it matters. And it's hard to talk about, because I don't expect much sympathy or understanding. Maybe it looks like some sort of humble-brag. But it doesn't feel like that. It feels like not knowing my way around in the world, and not knowing who to ask for directions.
And maybe it seems like this has nothing to do with drinking, either. But it does. It's been a bit over 11 months since I quit drinking. The semester was not only my first as a full time student, and my first in grad school, it was my first school semester ever (or since I was 19, anyway, and that seems like forever ago) without drinking to smooth away the rough edges of insecurity and panic. And I did it. I finished my courses and fulfilled all my teaching assistant obligations and sent out my conference proposals for the upcoming year. And I'm doing some interesting work. Interesting to me, and sometimes to a few other people. Honestly, I think that's pretty good. Maybe even great. It's true, I was wildly insecure at times, and many days I came home and wept, sure that everyone in the room had hated me. I think that feeling has to do with the approval thing I'm talking about. Being critical of ideas means taking a stance that's sometimes unpopular, and when I do that, as I do, I am keenly aware of the undercurrents of feeling in the room. And that's uncomfortable. I think I'm managing to stay with what's interesting to me, and that means going against the grain sometimes. So there's lots to be uncomfortable about, and being hyper-aware of the currents of social and academic approval doesn't make it smoother. Not drinking means I don't make it worse for myself, but it also means I don't get to hide from it, ever.
So that's the acceptance I started writing about. I really thought I was a punk rock rebel who didn't care what people thought. I'm appalled to find that I notice every nuance of what people think of me. And I care. Ouch, again. But that's exactly the thing I have to accept. You can't separate yourself from the world and live, protected and authentic and pure. Maybe that's what I thought I was doing, all those evenings drinking too much wine, staying separate from life. It doesn't look like much of a way to live, though. Participating in life means swimming in the wonder and the muck of the world. It's painful, and I don't know my way about in it. But I'm part of it. We all are.
Now it's mid-December. I have a little free time to enjoy here and there, and some Christmas plans (we're cooking a duck!). Then were taking a small trip to see family, which means late mornings sleeping in and reading and days hiking and lovely slow meals and evening fires. I bought some cordials at the farmers' market the other day, so I can mark the festive occasions with toasts that don't need booze to make them special. I'll raise a glass of blueberry-lavender fizz to you, my fellow sober bloggers and readers and lurkers. Thanks as always for your fine company. Wishing you all peace and joy, and happy holidays.
A number of years ago, I was taking an art class, and I got talking with an instructor who was visiting from the east coast, where I'm also from. She'd always been a good girl: Catholic school, art college on scholarship, career making and teaching art. She'd done everything right in her life. Eventually, she started to feel so shaped by the forces around her who defined what "everything right" looked like that she didn't have much sense of herself. I remember her telling me that it took her a long time to get over needing some sort of approval from the world for everything she did. Needing approval is not the best road to making great art. For a time she stopped presenting her art publicly, and she ended up developing a whole new practice, returning to working with clay--something she loved, but that isn't exactly high status in the art world. By the time I met her, she was making art and teaching and enjoying it all again, and it felt more real to her than it had. She said her turning point had been a conversation with her husband, who pointed out that she was still acting like the schoolgirl who really wanted the teachers to say what a grand girl she was.
Ouch. I feel like that these days. At the time, it didn't much apply to me at all. I'd been one of those high achieving kids, but as an adult I'd quit lots of things that people thought I was supposed to be doing. Even sitting by a kiln chatting with an art instructor, as I was doing that evening years ago, would have been considered a waste of time by many of the people I knew. I didn't care.
But being in school somehow brings a lot of that old approval stuff back again. I love reading and writing and researching. It's interesting and intellectually stimulating, and I feel lucky that I'm allowed to spend my time doing it. But whenever I submit a project to be graded, I feel like I'm waiting for a God I don't entirely believe in to reach out and pat me on the head and tell me I'm a good girl after all. There is no winning this game. A perfect grade means I have to live up to that next time or I'm not so good after all. (And anyway, maybe the professor was being kind, so it doesn't quite count.) Anything even slightly less than perfect has me replaying all the problems in my work.
I'm embarrassed to be writing about this. It doesn't feel like an adult issue. I thought I'd got past this years ago. I guess not. Now I think leaving the whole academic and career world as I did was more like a giant workaround. I thought I'd given all that worldly approval a big old, "Screw you!" and gone off to do my own thing. (It might not be surprising that "my thing" ended up involving a lot of wine every evening.) But it's one thing to keep away from the world of approval altogether, and quite another to be submerged in it and not completely shaped by it. Now that I'm a full time student, I am judged and graded all the time. Trying to be OK with that is tricky. It's pretty darn draining, oscillating out there on the end of some approval system that feels like it matters. And it's hard to talk about, because I don't expect much sympathy or understanding. Maybe it looks like some sort of humble-brag. But it doesn't feel like that. It feels like not knowing my way around in the world, and not knowing who to ask for directions.
And maybe it seems like this has nothing to do with drinking, either. But it does. It's been a bit over 11 months since I quit drinking. The semester was not only my first as a full time student, and my first in grad school, it was my first school semester ever (or since I was 19, anyway, and that seems like forever ago) without drinking to smooth away the rough edges of insecurity and panic. And I did it. I finished my courses and fulfilled all my teaching assistant obligations and sent out my conference proposals for the upcoming year. And I'm doing some interesting work. Interesting to me, and sometimes to a few other people. Honestly, I think that's pretty good. Maybe even great. It's true, I was wildly insecure at times, and many days I came home and wept, sure that everyone in the room had hated me. I think that feeling has to do with the approval thing I'm talking about. Being critical of ideas means taking a stance that's sometimes unpopular, and when I do that, as I do, I am keenly aware of the undercurrents of feeling in the room. And that's uncomfortable. I think I'm managing to stay with what's interesting to me, and that means going against the grain sometimes. So there's lots to be uncomfortable about, and being hyper-aware of the currents of social and academic approval doesn't make it smoother. Not drinking means I don't make it worse for myself, but it also means I don't get to hide from it, ever.
So that's the acceptance I started writing about. I really thought I was a punk rock rebel who didn't care what people thought. I'm appalled to find that I notice every nuance of what people think of me. And I care. Ouch, again. But that's exactly the thing I have to accept. You can't separate yourself from the world and live, protected and authentic and pure. Maybe that's what I thought I was doing, all those evenings drinking too much wine, staying separate from life. It doesn't look like much of a way to live, though. Participating in life means swimming in the wonder and the muck of the world. It's painful, and I don't know my way about in it. But I'm part of it. We all are.
Thursday, 15 May 2014
Acceptance and rage
I've been quiet for a couple of weeks over here. I've started classes again and I'm back to my regular work schedule. And I was avoiding writing, because I didn't know what to think about what's going on with me these days.
With this sober gig, I'm well into feeling things I haven't in a long time. And the lovely parts are fine. Watching the crow on the building outside my window, prancing back and forth cawing like a politician stumping for votes, makes me laugh. It makes me love the world. Or noticing the full soft canopy of green leaves, feeling the sun on my arms or the soft rain on my face when I'm biking to school or to work. That's all good stuff. I love being awake enough to be in that. But I have pockets of rage and despair that are all out of whack with whatever is going on in the situation, and I'm just sitting through those, sometimes trying to figure out what's up with all that and sometimes just sleeping off the exhausting after-effects. Rage. Man, I didn't have any idea how angry I am, or how often I'm angry.
The other day, I was in a school meeting with a group of women and the conversation turned to how people had spent the time between semesters. It quickly turned into what to me seemed a competition, in which a few of the women spoke of how they have trouble taking time off because they feel guilty, and how that guilt is good because you have to produce and the guilt will keep you working and keep up that production. I said that sounded ridiculously unhealthy, that no one could do good work without taking breaks, but my voice was drowned out in the chorus of supposedly amusing examples of obsession and guilt and reassurances all around that it was all part of the academic life. I tell you, I was angry. I had that awful feeling where, at the same time, I felt like crying, and I also felt like spinning around the room smashing glasses and computers and whatever smashable object I could get my hands on. It's disconcerting to sit quietly while feeling this smashing rage. It scares me a bit. I have never, not once in my life, actually trashed a room, and I've never been around anyone who does it, so the strength of it all is weird. But the feeling isn't unfamiliar, now that I recognize it.
At times like this, I don't quite know what I'm so angry about. Part of it is what seems like stupidity among really smart people who are at least sometimes critical thinkers, that they think running themselves into the ground "to produce" makes any sense at all. Or that it's amusing. Part is rage, because pandering to the guilt and production thing only feeds the beast, and makes that foolish busy-ness necessary in the first place, and that excludes people who are smart and have a lot to offer and whose voices need to be heard, but either don't have the physical stamina or they have kids or jobs or other real-life commitments and they can't afford the luxury of academic obsession. (Or worse, they do all that, and trying to do it all, all the time, is part of what's toxic in our achievement culture.) Part of what's going on is I'm angry because I was trying to say that's not the only way to do this, and there was no room for my voice in that slice of conversation, and I guess that feeling of having my experience paved over by people who know "the one true path" has always enraged me.
But you know what? I spoke with one person later (who hadn't said much at the time but who often does avoid sleep and other healthy habits in order to get work done) and she didn't even remember that part of the conversation until I prompted her. It certainly wasn't the point of the conversation. So at the same time, I know my rage is real and it's about something, but it's way (way way way) out of proportion to what's happening at the moment.
I'll give another example, because I think it might make it more clear how this furious anger I'm talking about is disproportionate to the situation, even if it's not entirely misguided. I have been reading Tara Brach's "Radical Acceptance," a book that combines some Buddhist ideas about acceptance and meditation with some standard Western self-psychology. A lot of the book is great, though I have some deep criticism of the author's uncritical adoption of some of Western psychology. But at times, I had that same feeling of utter rage at the author! I was somewhat floored by that, and kind of put it down to a mood at first, but I felt it over and over throughout the book, no matter how often I set the book aside and came back when I was calm and peaceful. Sometimes I hated her, or wanted to shout at her, with all her meditative wisdom and anecdotes about her own obsessions or her patients' problems. What's up with that?
I'm not sure. Yes, I'll admit, I have some inchoate anger going on. I'm paying attention to it, and I'm starting to know what it feels like in my body, so that's new to me and, after decades of not being able to connect body sensation with emotion, I'm grateful for getting to know that feeling, no matter how awful it is. Also, it's no coincidence that some of this rage, and both my examples, are brought on my women I admire who are uncritically adopting what to me seems the most toxic, dehumanizing achievement-orientation of our culture. I'm angry with them for seeming to see success as worth more than anything else, even though, they probably don't really think that way. And I'm angry at our culture for bringing us all to value that achievement above all when we should value the lives of these great women and find ways that they can do the good work they want without grinding themselves down, without seeing family and life and work as something you trade off, one against the other.
And yes, I know this has a whole lot to do with me personally. Probably its this: I'm afraid that I can't find a way to do good interesting work without grinding myself into the ground. I don't fare well without enough rest and sleep (see: those are two separate categories for me!) and time to read for pleasure and eat well and ride my bike and love my partner and do fun things and live in the world, the whole big world. I am a bit afraid of cracking up, because I've cracked up before when I tried to do interesting stuff. But opting out into the slow life doesn't seem to work for me either, because I'm interested, really bloody interested in the ideas I'm studying, and after years of my own private reading and writing, I found that I wanted to be around people who were also interested and reading that kind of thing and working on it, and doing it on my own wasn't going to be enough for me. For all our romantic ideals about the solitary scholar, thinking really is something that happens in a community of books and teachers and other thinkers and writers, past, present and future.
OK, that sounded like a bit of a rant, but maybe I'm getting at something here. I think this might be a longish post that reads more like therapy for me than anything worth saying to someone else. But this is the stuff I really need to figure out. I've spent years drinking when I was stressed or angry. It's more than a bit scary to find that, sober, I'm dealing with more of a bonfire than the occasional cosy campfire.
But there's some comfort in all this, too. A few years ago, the Dalai Lama was in town and someone got me a ticket to go hear him talk. I went, though up to that day I had actually strongly disliked the Dalai Lama. I thought he was just a kind of rock star royalty born into his position and treated like a god, privileged beyond anything a normal mortal could imagine. I thought he was all show. At the event, he was interviewed by Maria Shriver, and I have to say I came away from that event loving both of them! The Dalai Lama kept smiling and eluding her questions--exactly the kind of thing that I disliked--and Maria Shriver called him on that. She called out the Dalai Lama! Sitting in the audience that day, I was kind of stunned. She said something to the effect of this: look, you're sitting there smiling and talking about peace and you won't give me a straight answer about anything I'm asking, but I'm here to talk to you and these people came her to listen and what I want to know is, how can we just accept all this? How can we not be angry when there's so much wrong with the world and we can see what's wrong, and if we just accept it all peacefully we'll never change anything. And then the Dalai Lama took her question seriously. He answered, no, I don't think you must never be angry. It makes sense to be angry. If you look at the world, the way we live, how we treat each other and the planet and all of life, we must be angry. And he said anger is good! It can be the source of the energy we need to make the changes we need to make. He explained that his teachings meant not getting caught in the anger itself, because that's where the danger lies. But feeling angry is good, and necessary, and it can drive some much needed change.
I'm nowhere near as enlightened as all that. And I don't think all my rage is rational. But I think feeling a deep rage, even when it's out of proportion to the moment, might not be so crazy after all. I'm not all that sure yet what's up with it, but it's not completely irrational to me anymore. And that's a start. I'm a week or so past four months sober, and I know that for me, being sober has let me open up to feeling what's going on, and feeling is the only way through it. It's not always easy, this sober gig. But I think it's worth the work.
Now I'm off to ride my bike and meet some coworkers for a tea and cake sendoff. I think the rage will lay low for the afternoon. If you're still here, thanks for reading. Peace and joy to you, and I guess rage too if rage is what the situation brings you. Let's just try to feel it without staying stuck in it.
With this sober gig, I'm well into feeling things I haven't in a long time. And the lovely parts are fine. Watching the crow on the building outside my window, prancing back and forth cawing like a politician stumping for votes, makes me laugh. It makes me love the world. Or noticing the full soft canopy of green leaves, feeling the sun on my arms or the soft rain on my face when I'm biking to school or to work. That's all good stuff. I love being awake enough to be in that. But I have pockets of rage and despair that are all out of whack with whatever is going on in the situation, and I'm just sitting through those, sometimes trying to figure out what's up with all that and sometimes just sleeping off the exhausting after-effects. Rage. Man, I didn't have any idea how angry I am, or how often I'm angry.
The other day, I was in a school meeting with a group of women and the conversation turned to how people had spent the time between semesters. It quickly turned into what to me seemed a competition, in which a few of the women spoke of how they have trouble taking time off because they feel guilty, and how that guilt is good because you have to produce and the guilt will keep you working and keep up that production. I said that sounded ridiculously unhealthy, that no one could do good work without taking breaks, but my voice was drowned out in the chorus of supposedly amusing examples of obsession and guilt and reassurances all around that it was all part of the academic life. I tell you, I was angry. I had that awful feeling where, at the same time, I felt like crying, and I also felt like spinning around the room smashing glasses and computers and whatever smashable object I could get my hands on. It's disconcerting to sit quietly while feeling this smashing rage. It scares me a bit. I have never, not once in my life, actually trashed a room, and I've never been around anyone who does it, so the strength of it all is weird. But the feeling isn't unfamiliar, now that I recognize it.
At times like this, I don't quite know what I'm so angry about. Part of it is what seems like stupidity among really smart people who are at least sometimes critical thinkers, that they think running themselves into the ground "to produce" makes any sense at all. Or that it's amusing. Part is rage, because pandering to the guilt and production thing only feeds the beast, and makes that foolish busy-ness necessary in the first place, and that excludes people who are smart and have a lot to offer and whose voices need to be heard, but either don't have the physical stamina or they have kids or jobs or other real-life commitments and they can't afford the luxury of academic obsession. (Or worse, they do all that, and trying to do it all, all the time, is part of what's toxic in our achievement culture.) Part of what's going on is I'm angry because I was trying to say that's not the only way to do this, and there was no room for my voice in that slice of conversation, and I guess that feeling of having my experience paved over by people who know "the one true path" has always enraged me.
But you know what? I spoke with one person later (who hadn't said much at the time but who often does avoid sleep and other healthy habits in order to get work done) and she didn't even remember that part of the conversation until I prompted her. It certainly wasn't the point of the conversation. So at the same time, I know my rage is real and it's about something, but it's way (way way way) out of proportion to what's happening at the moment.
I'll give another example, because I think it might make it more clear how this furious anger I'm talking about is disproportionate to the situation, even if it's not entirely misguided. I have been reading Tara Brach's "Radical Acceptance," a book that combines some Buddhist ideas about acceptance and meditation with some standard Western self-psychology. A lot of the book is great, though I have some deep criticism of the author's uncritical adoption of some of Western psychology. But at times, I had that same feeling of utter rage at the author! I was somewhat floored by that, and kind of put it down to a mood at first, but I felt it over and over throughout the book, no matter how often I set the book aside and came back when I was calm and peaceful. Sometimes I hated her, or wanted to shout at her, with all her meditative wisdom and anecdotes about her own obsessions or her patients' problems. What's up with that?
I'm not sure. Yes, I'll admit, I have some inchoate anger going on. I'm paying attention to it, and I'm starting to know what it feels like in my body, so that's new to me and, after decades of not being able to connect body sensation with emotion, I'm grateful for getting to know that feeling, no matter how awful it is. Also, it's no coincidence that some of this rage, and both my examples, are brought on my women I admire who are uncritically adopting what to me seems the most toxic, dehumanizing achievement-orientation of our culture. I'm angry with them for seeming to see success as worth more than anything else, even though, they probably don't really think that way. And I'm angry at our culture for bringing us all to value that achievement above all when we should value the lives of these great women and find ways that they can do the good work they want without grinding themselves down, without seeing family and life and work as something you trade off, one against the other.
And yes, I know this has a whole lot to do with me personally. Probably its this: I'm afraid that I can't find a way to do good interesting work without grinding myself into the ground. I don't fare well without enough rest and sleep (see: those are two separate categories for me!) and time to read for pleasure and eat well and ride my bike and love my partner and do fun things and live in the world, the whole big world. I am a bit afraid of cracking up, because I've cracked up before when I tried to do interesting stuff. But opting out into the slow life doesn't seem to work for me either, because I'm interested, really bloody interested in the ideas I'm studying, and after years of my own private reading and writing, I found that I wanted to be around people who were also interested and reading that kind of thing and working on it, and doing it on my own wasn't going to be enough for me. For all our romantic ideals about the solitary scholar, thinking really is something that happens in a community of books and teachers and other thinkers and writers, past, present and future.
OK, that sounded like a bit of a rant, but maybe I'm getting at something here. I think this might be a longish post that reads more like therapy for me than anything worth saying to someone else. But this is the stuff I really need to figure out. I've spent years drinking when I was stressed or angry. It's more than a bit scary to find that, sober, I'm dealing with more of a bonfire than the occasional cosy campfire.
But there's some comfort in all this, too. A few years ago, the Dalai Lama was in town and someone got me a ticket to go hear him talk. I went, though up to that day I had actually strongly disliked the Dalai Lama. I thought he was just a kind of rock star royalty born into his position and treated like a god, privileged beyond anything a normal mortal could imagine. I thought he was all show. At the event, he was interviewed by Maria Shriver, and I have to say I came away from that event loving both of them! The Dalai Lama kept smiling and eluding her questions--exactly the kind of thing that I disliked--and Maria Shriver called him on that. She called out the Dalai Lama! Sitting in the audience that day, I was kind of stunned. She said something to the effect of this: look, you're sitting there smiling and talking about peace and you won't give me a straight answer about anything I'm asking, but I'm here to talk to you and these people came her to listen and what I want to know is, how can we just accept all this? How can we not be angry when there's so much wrong with the world and we can see what's wrong, and if we just accept it all peacefully we'll never change anything. And then the Dalai Lama took her question seriously. He answered, no, I don't think you must never be angry. It makes sense to be angry. If you look at the world, the way we live, how we treat each other and the planet and all of life, we must be angry. And he said anger is good! It can be the source of the energy we need to make the changes we need to make. He explained that his teachings meant not getting caught in the anger itself, because that's where the danger lies. But feeling angry is good, and necessary, and it can drive some much needed change.
I'm nowhere near as enlightened as all that. And I don't think all my rage is rational. But I think feeling a deep rage, even when it's out of proportion to the moment, might not be so crazy after all. I'm not all that sure yet what's up with it, but it's not completely irrational to me anymore. And that's a start. I'm a week or so past four months sober, and I know that for me, being sober has let me open up to feeling what's going on, and feeling is the only way through it. It's not always easy, this sober gig. But I think it's worth the work.
Now I'm off to ride my bike and meet some coworkers for a tea and cake sendoff. I think the rage will lay low for the afternoon. If you're still here, thanks for reading. Peace and joy to you, and I guess rage too if rage is what the situation brings you. Let's just try to feel it without staying stuck in it.
Monday, 3 March 2014
Round 2, Day 56: Cheering me on, feeling the love!
I'm going to start off with a big whopping Hooray!!! It's been eight weeks since I drank, and that's a whole lot of days making a whole lot of small, good decisions. Hooray me! Go me! Oh yes, folks, that's me, cheering me on in real time!
I'm playing the part of being my own one-person cheering committee for a reason here, and it's not that I have a big ego. (Well I do--but who doesn't? Sometimes I want to defend our much maligned egos, poor fragile things, egos, bouncing around the rough and tumble world like eggs without safe cardboard cartons. But that's a different post.) Nope. It's this: I am starting to get an inkling of how freaking hard on myself I am. I swear, I had no idea. I do all kinds of things that look like I am taking it easy on myself. I eat when I'm hungry. I sleep when I'm tired. If I catch myself looking in the mirror with any sort of critical eye, I say something nice to myself, out loud, to counter the criticism. I have little treats all the time, so much so that the idea of a treat for being sober doesn't work for me because I refuse to link treats to any performance outcome, and anyway I have them all the time. I really thought I had this being kind to self thing nailed. Oh man, was I wrong! Is getting sober all about realizing how wrong you are about everything?
But I have been doing a slightly crazy job plus full-time school, both at a pretty hectic pace, for a few years, and I don't cut myself much slack on either front. Even when things go well, I hardly register the success because, of course, I am supposed to do well. Last summer, having received an A+ mark in a directed studies class, my partner said I didn't seem pleased with the grade (which is bewildering, right?) and I commented that the professor was probably just being kind because he knew I'd worked hard. Last semester, I minimized another A+, figuring the professor just wanted people to do well. I was not just saying these things. I really thought them. On another tack: I weigh 5 pounds more than I did last summer, and I have been fretting about those 5 pounds in a way that no one could call rational. I could list more examples, but I worry anyone reading would lose patience with me. I would. Examples are hard, because they sound petty. They sound like I'm saying, "See me! Almost perfect!" Please trust me, that's not what's going on here.
This past week, I have started to break through this faulty thinking. The other day, I was buckled into deep, sobbing tears over this. (Yes, I know, I cry a lot.) I realized that I still, far too often, think that if only I lose five pounds and get A+ in everything and do everything right and be smart and funny and nice to everyone all the time, then the God of my childhood will reach out and pat me on the head and say, "Good girl," and everyone will love me and then, only then, will everything finally be OK. Like all the money problems and old broken relationships and mean things I've said or other people have said, all the old problems with my mother and my family and the fact that I drank too much for too long, all the social awkwardness and not believing in myself when I was not being awkward, all that and a whole whack of things I don't even want to list here, all those would be washed away, and life would start again, perfect, bathed in the milky new light of early morning.
That may sound pathetic. It is. But even writing it here makes me go all teary-eyed. I just didn't know I still thought that. That's pretty much me as an eight-year-old, right there, still thinking the same way, almost forty years later. It's a shock to see that I'm still living that view of the world.
If anyone I knew talked like this, I would want to give them a giant hug and say it's all going to be OK. (Sober blog warning: quitting drinking really does make you want to hug everyone all the time!) So that's what I'm trying to do here. Just be really, honestly kind to myself. Take in the giant universe hug and see that it's all already OK.
None of this should surprise me. I know this stuff intellectually. You have to be kind to yourself, accept yourself, etc. But you can know it without feeling it. Now something different is going on. I'm slowly starting to feel what it is to accept myself, and that's a different way of knowing altogether.
So that's me today. I quit drinking eight weeks ago, and I'm proud of that. I'm starting to feel the big love that is part of living in the world. Even if it does feel like being lost a lot of the time, we're going in the right direction here.
Thanks for reading. Hooray you! Hooray me! Hooray world! Peace and joy and big hugs for everyone!
I'm playing the part of being my own one-person cheering committee for a reason here, and it's not that I have a big ego. (Well I do--but who doesn't? Sometimes I want to defend our much maligned egos, poor fragile things, egos, bouncing around the rough and tumble world like eggs without safe cardboard cartons. But that's a different post.) Nope. It's this: I am starting to get an inkling of how freaking hard on myself I am. I swear, I had no idea. I do all kinds of things that look like I am taking it easy on myself. I eat when I'm hungry. I sleep when I'm tired. If I catch myself looking in the mirror with any sort of critical eye, I say something nice to myself, out loud, to counter the criticism. I have little treats all the time, so much so that the idea of a treat for being sober doesn't work for me because I refuse to link treats to any performance outcome, and anyway I have them all the time. I really thought I had this being kind to self thing nailed. Oh man, was I wrong! Is getting sober all about realizing how wrong you are about everything?
But I have been doing a slightly crazy job plus full-time school, both at a pretty hectic pace, for a few years, and I don't cut myself much slack on either front. Even when things go well, I hardly register the success because, of course, I am supposed to do well. Last summer, having received an A+ mark in a directed studies class, my partner said I didn't seem pleased with the grade (which is bewildering, right?) and I commented that the professor was probably just being kind because he knew I'd worked hard. Last semester, I minimized another A+, figuring the professor just wanted people to do well. I was not just saying these things. I really thought them. On another tack: I weigh 5 pounds more than I did last summer, and I have been fretting about those 5 pounds in a way that no one could call rational. I could list more examples, but I worry anyone reading would lose patience with me. I would. Examples are hard, because they sound petty. They sound like I'm saying, "See me! Almost perfect!" Please trust me, that's not what's going on here.
This past week, I have started to break through this faulty thinking. The other day, I was buckled into deep, sobbing tears over this. (Yes, I know, I cry a lot.) I realized that I still, far too often, think that if only I lose five pounds and get A+ in everything and do everything right and be smart and funny and nice to everyone all the time, then the God of my childhood will reach out and pat me on the head and say, "Good girl," and everyone will love me and then, only then, will everything finally be OK. Like all the money problems and old broken relationships and mean things I've said or other people have said, all the old problems with my mother and my family and the fact that I drank too much for too long, all the social awkwardness and not believing in myself when I was not being awkward, all that and a whole whack of things I don't even want to list here, all those would be washed away, and life would start again, perfect, bathed in the milky new light of early morning.
That may sound pathetic. It is. But even writing it here makes me go all teary-eyed. I just didn't know I still thought that. That's pretty much me as an eight-year-old, right there, still thinking the same way, almost forty years later. It's a shock to see that I'm still living that view of the world.
If anyone I knew talked like this, I would want to give them a giant hug and say it's all going to be OK. (Sober blog warning: quitting drinking really does make you want to hug everyone all the time!) So that's what I'm trying to do here. Just be really, honestly kind to myself. Take in the giant universe hug and see that it's all already OK.
None of this should surprise me. I know this stuff intellectually. You have to be kind to yourself, accept yourself, etc. But you can know it without feeling it. Now something different is going on. I'm slowly starting to feel what it is to accept myself, and that's a different way of knowing altogether.
So that's me today. I quit drinking eight weeks ago, and I'm proud of that. I'm starting to feel the big love that is part of living in the world. Even if it does feel like being lost a lot of the time, we're going in the right direction here.
Thanks for reading. Hooray you! Hooray me! Hooray world! Peace and joy and big hugs for everyone!
Wednesday, 26 February 2014
Round 2, Day 51: Big changes (and a little book review)
Yesterday afternoon I went for a walk in the park with my partner, and we talked about how this time, quitting drinking is different for me than it was when I quit last summer. I wanted to write about this now so I remember it later, when I will need it.
First, I am taking quitting the drink more seriously, or maybe more personally is a better way to say it. Last time, I started out quitting for a few days, and then a few more, and then I found the 100 Day Challenge. That was great because it gave me a longer stretch of time without drinking. But I was so focused on the challenge part that all my attention honed in on getting to that day, as though something magical were going to happen at the end of 100 days. Of course, nothing did, and by the time I got there, I had stopped focusing on why I was quitting, and stopped doing all the little things I needed to do to stay sober. (I'm not denigrating the challenge here! Not at all! It's a great thing to do. I just didn't realize how much else I had to do besides make it to 100 days.) In a way, I think I was so set to prove I could do it--though I don't know who I was proving it to--I forgot why I even cared about setting sober.
This time, I'm taking a lot more downtime, and much better care of myself along the way. So in a way, that nasty depressive spell that flattened me in January and February was a gift (but no repeats, thanks!) because it forced me to slow way down. No superhero awards for me this month, or last month, or next month either. I am still sleeping like a sleep-demon, walking outdoors lots, reading about meditation and self-care, seeing a counsellor, paying attention to my feelings, all the things I'm going to have to keep doing. I'm shedding that competitive, muscular get-'er-done attitude that I didn't even know I had and, without that carapace of tough-me, I'm doing what I can only call real healing.
Dropping that persona means I have become much more aware of the denial that went along with my drinking. I just read a great novel, The Good House, by Ann Leary. In the book, the main character is Hildy Good, a sharp, funny 60-year-old New England realtor whose daughters sent her to rehab and who has, at the start of the book, resumed her drinking, though she restricts herself to drinking alone. I highly recommend the book. Ann Leary does a great job of showing what it's like to be an alcoholic, both the insane attraction to drinking despite consequences, and the enormous denial that the drinker feels. (My only reservation is that, early on, she makes drinking look so darn good that it could make someone want to drink. I read the whole book in a day so I moved through that part quickly, but it might be hard to read the book slowly and spend days and days in the narrator's "born three drinks short of comfortable" headspace. It's a good line, though.) As I read the book, I identified so much with Hildy. Like her, I have had that insane sense of being drawn in by booze, the feeling that I was only happy and myself when I was drinking, and the sense that keeping away from other people in order to drink alone was the route to my own personal happiness. As Hildy's life starts to fall apart (I'm not giving the plot away to tell you it did--she's an alcoholic and she started drinking again. File under, "Will end in pain," right?) I was horrified by her drinking. With my whole body, I did not want her to do what she was continuing to do. Like in those horror movies where you want to scream at the main character, "Don't go down that hallway!" I wanted to shout at her, "Put down that bottle!" It wouldn't have worked, of course, and that's the genius of the book. No one can tell Hildy what to do. She is an alcoholic, she's in denial, and the reader can feel what it's like to be her while also seeing the tragedy of what she's doing. It really is a beautiful book.
But I was talking about me, and denial. What's that have to do with Hildy Good? Well, she is an alcoholic in denial, and all through the book, I was reading along, seeing myself in her, over and over again. I had to admit that I was, I am, very much like her. Hello. Me, in denial? I hate those bloody recovery keywords. I am so utterly different than other people. I'm not going to let some generic description of an affliction--alcoholism--describe me.
In the novel, Hildy has a talent for what people think is a kind of psychic reading, but she explains that she's just a good observer. Here's what she thinks about it:
"Nobody wants to believe the obvious and visible reality that we are all quite the same. Most would rather believe in the invisible and the improbable--that fate is determined by the alignment of the stars, that there is a spiritual entity rooting for them, for unique and wonderful them, that humans can read minds, that their destiny can be foretold and possible altered. The simple truth is this: Most humans are very much alike. The simple and obvious truth is that there are very few variables to what a person might do, think, fear, or desire in any given situation" (p. 110).
That might sound hard and cold, but I find it oddly comforting. I am like Hildy. I am like you, maybe, and like a whole lot of other people. I am an alcoholic. Not a bad person, or a loser, or someone who just can't get her shit together. Not someone who will be OK at some future point when I will have fixed myself and started to do everything right, at long last. Just an alcoholic. There are lots of us. And now that I know that, there are lots of things I can do to live better. Some are obvious: don't drink; find out what works for other people, and try that out. Some are less obvious: don't worry about the future so much, or about much outside the next few minutes, if that's all I can manage. I'm telescoping it in real small here these days, and I'm OK with that, mostly.
And here's the really big change: it's all a huge relief. I feel so much different, so much better! That hard shell of tough-me I was talking about didn't do me much good, but it did stop me from connecting with people. Now I have never been much of a hugger, but good god in the past few days I have wanted to reach out and hug everyone in the world who is having troubles, who feels low, who is being hard on themselves, anyone who feels like they are not enough. I'm like a one-person giant love-in, sitting here on the couch, typing. I want to jump up and down and yell, "You are enough! I am enough! Right here and right now, with things exactly as they are, we are all enough!!!"
I have neighbours, so I'm holding off on the yelling. I'll go out for a walk instead while it's still sunny, and just smile at the world for a while. And yes, I know, these peaks are sometimes followed by more pits of despair. But I do feel a genuine change in myself. I'm not trying to prove anything to you or to me or to anyone else. I'm just here and alive and better able to see myself for the flawed but whole person I am, and I feel so much more connected to the world because of that.
Thanks for reading along with me here. I couldn't do any of this without my fellow sober bloggers and readers. Many many thanks for the company. Peace and joy to you.
First, I am taking quitting the drink more seriously, or maybe more personally is a better way to say it. Last time, I started out quitting for a few days, and then a few more, and then I found the 100 Day Challenge. That was great because it gave me a longer stretch of time without drinking. But I was so focused on the challenge part that all my attention honed in on getting to that day, as though something magical were going to happen at the end of 100 days. Of course, nothing did, and by the time I got there, I had stopped focusing on why I was quitting, and stopped doing all the little things I needed to do to stay sober. (I'm not denigrating the challenge here! Not at all! It's a great thing to do. I just didn't realize how much else I had to do besides make it to 100 days.) In a way, I think I was so set to prove I could do it--though I don't know who I was proving it to--I forgot why I even cared about setting sober.
This time, I'm taking a lot more downtime, and much better care of myself along the way. So in a way, that nasty depressive spell that flattened me in January and February was a gift (but no repeats, thanks!) because it forced me to slow way down. No superhero awards for me this month, or last month, or next month either. I am still sleeping like a sleep-demon, walking outdoors lots, reading about meditation and self-care, seeing a counsellor, paying attention to my feelings, all the things I'm going to have to keep doing. I'm shedding that competitive, muscular get-'er-done attitude that I didn't even know I had and, without that carapace of tough-me, I'm doing what I can only call real healing.
Dropping that persona means I have become much more aware of the denial that went along with my drinking. I just read a great novel, The Good House, by Ann Leary. In the book, the main character is Hildy Good, a sharp, funny 60-year-old New England realtor whose daughters sent her to rehab and who has, at the start of the book, resumed her drinking, though she restricts herself to drinking alone. I highly recommend the book. Ann Leary does a great job of showing what it's like to be an alcoholic, both the insane attraction to drinking despite consequences, and the enormous denial that the drinker feels. (My only reservation is that, early on, she makes drinking look so darn good that it could make someone want to drink. I read the whole book in a day so I moved through that part quickly, but it might be hard to read the book slowly and spend days and days in the narrator's "born three drinks short of comfortable" headspace. It's a good line, though.) As I read the book, I identified so much with Hildy. Like her, I have had that insane sense of being drawn in by booze, the feeling that I was only happy and myself when I was drinking, and the sense that keeping away from other people in order to drink alone was the route to my own personal happiness. As Hildy's life starts to fall apart (I'm not giving the plot away to tell you it did--she's an alcoholic and she started drinking again. File under, "Will end in pain," right?) I was horrified by her drinking. With my whole body, I did not want her to do what she was continuing to do. Like in those horror movies where you want to scream at the main character, "Don't go down that hallway!" I wanted to shout at her, "Put down that bottle!" It wouldn't have worked, of course, and that's the genius of the book. No one can tell Hildy what to do. She is an alcoholic, she's in denial, and the reader can feel what it's like to be her while also seeing the tragedy of what she's doing. It really is a beautiful book.
But I was talking about me, and denial. What's that have to do with Hildy Good? Well, she is an alcoholic in denial, and all through the book, I was reading along, seeing myself in her, over and over again. I had to admit that I was, I am, very much like her. Hello. Me, in denial? I hate those bloody recovery keywords. I am so utterly different than other people. I'm not going to let some generic description of an affliction--alcoholism--describe me.
In the novel, Hildy has a talent for what people think is a kind of psychic reading, but she explains that she's just a good observer. Here's what she thinks about it:
"Nobody wants to believe the obvious and visible reality that we are all quite the same. Most would rather believe in the invisible and the improbable--that fate is determined by the alignment of the stars, that there is a spiritual entity rooting for them, for unique and wonderful them, that humans can read minds, that their destiny can be foretold and possible altered. The simple truth is this: Most humans are very much alike. The simple and obvious truth is that there are very few variables to what a person might do, think, fear, or desire in any given situation" (p. 110).
That might sound hard and cold, but I find it oddly comforting. I am like Hildy. I am like you, maybe, and like a whole lot of other people. I am an alcoholic. Not a bad person, or a loser, or someone who just can't get her shit together. Not someone who will be OK at some future point when I will have fixed myself and started to do everything right, at long last. Just an alcoholic. There are lots of us. And now that I know that, there are lots of things I can do to live better. Some are obvious: don't drink; find out what works for other people, and try that out. Some are less obvious: don't worry about the future so much, or about much outside the next few minutes, if that's all I can manage. I'm telescoping it in real small here these days, and I'm OK with that, mostly.
And here's the really big change: it's all a huge relief. I feel so much different, so much better! That hard shell of tough-me I was talking about didn't do me much good, but it did stop me from connecting with people. Now I have never been much of a hugger, but good god in the past few days I have wanted to reach out and hug everyone in the world who is having troubles, who feels low, who is being hard on themselves, anyone who feels like they are not enough. I'm like a one-person giant love-in, sitting here on the couch, typing. I want to jump up and down and yell, "You are enough! I am enough! Right here and right now, with things exactly as they are, we are all enough!!!"
I have neighbours, so I'm holding off on the yelling. I'll go out for a walk instead while it's still sunny, and just smile at the world for a while. And yes, I know, these peaks are sometimes followed by more pits of despair. But I do feel a genuine change in myself. I'm not trying to prove anything to you or to me or to anyone else. I'm just here and alive and better able to see myself for the flawed but whole person I am, and I feel so much more connected to the world because of that.
Thanks for reading along with me here. I couldn't do any of this without my fellow sober bloggers and readers. Many many thanks for the company. Peace and joy to you.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)