Round 3, day 123: Trusting life

Recently I've noticed some big changes in how I approach the world. I have begun to trust. For me, that's life changing!

I've always been a little bit paranoid. It's not that I think people are out to get me, exactly. It's just that in my basic, felt but unstated assumptions about life, I haven't felt that the world is a good place for me. I've felt this mostly in my dealings with people. Small negatives have often kicked off big reactions. If I am talking to someone important to me who's having a bad day, it's not a stretch for me to think that that person has taken against me. Either they have changed their mind about me or, worse, they have come to realize that all the esteem they had previously held me in was mistaken, and that I am some version of useless/worthless/disappointing. Now, that sounds worse than it is, because for years I have known that I have this tendency, and I know that most reasonable people don't suddenly take against people. But at best I've had to engage in a massive workaround, in which I feel like the person hates me but intellectually I know that they probably don't, so I try to imagine how I might behave if the relationship were not tainted by this new hatred or disappointment on behalf of the other person, and I do my best to act that way. This paranoia doesn't apply to everyone, but if I don't see you for a few weeks, I am likely to start to assume that you hate me or something like that. And then I realize I'm doing that, and I do the workaround. Or I just ignore it all, and fall out of contact. You can imagine how exhausting that is.

Now I know some people will say that's "imposter syndrome." Sure, maybe it is, but naming it doesn't solve it for me. And some will say (or have said) all I have to do is change my thoughts! But you know, I have been working on this for years. I have had over a decade of therapy (though I was pretty messed up at the beginning of that, so I don't want to sound like I'm knocking therapists for being slow to help!) I don't find my own thoughts to be something that can be erased and rewritten. They are tangled up with feelings. And this paranoid kind of feeling has been real, and persistent, and it's been a source of extreme pain for me for many years. The best I've been able do is the kind of "act as if" approach I've described above.

So the change I'm talking about here is huge. These days, I'm starting to trust people. Seriously. For example, instead of assuming that my supervisor is losing interest in my work, for example, I have assumed he's got a lot going on himself, and I've thought about what I need from him as a supervisor and how I can make that work. I've noticed that lately I just don't start with the assumption that someone has taken against me, or is disappointed in me. What I'm doing doesn't look all that different from the outside. But it feels different.

Since I started writing about getting sober, I've talked about participating in the world. I know I can hold myself a little apart, and I also know that the full greenness of life isn't achievable if you separate from others. If you do that, you dry up. At times, I've returned to drinking because aspects of the social were more easily available when I drank, and though this stopped working, I didn't know what else to do. These days I'm sober, and I feel like I am starting to step into the world and participate more fully. I am connecting.

Because I noticed this new (and amazing) way of being, I wanted to write it down so I don't forget about it! I can have these great realizations and then just lose them again once things get busy, and that's come back to bite my sorry ass when I've forgotten all that's grounded me and kept me sane and sober. I lose my way so easily. So I'm writing this to slow down and notice the change, and hopefully hold onto it. I've been thinking about what I'm doing differently, and though I'm no great fan of lists, I think there are three things:

First, I'm sober. That clears away some of the mental dross that makes it hard to sort out feelings. I know when I quit drinking a couple of years ago, I had moments of this, the sense that I could walk up to a group of people and talk to them without the usual feelings of unease that would usually swamp me. I know alcohol does some strange things to feeling, and it feeds the paranoia. That's gone, and that's a huge help.

Second, I have been working on the cognitive part of all this. I know how to examine my feelings and thoughts and work out which feelings are based on my old habits rather than anything that's in the situation. My husband is a great sounding board here. He accepts my feelings as real and valid, even when they are a little crazy, and within that safely I am able to start to sort out what's really happening and what I am imagining, or even what I'm bringing about by what I imagine. I'm getting better at this, and it works better without drinking.

Third--and I never, ever, ever thought I'd say this but here goes--I have been praying. All my life, whenever anything went wrong or when I was waiting for news or struggling with something, my mother would tell me, "Say a little prayer now." As happens to many people, as a teenager I wasn't able to start developing a more mature faith, and the simple faith of my childhood started to ring hollow. For most of my adult life, I wasn't able to pray, or I didn't know how. I tried, but the closest I could come to anything that felt authentic was calling my mother and asking her to pray for me. Which I did, many times. We often didn't get along, and we sure didn't have any kind of ideal mother-daughter relationship, but when I needed to, I would call her and she would pray. Even after I lost faith in pretty much everything a few times, I usually held onto believing in my mother's prayers.

For the past several years, my mother has had severe dementia. She's doing as well as one can with that, but if you know dementia at all, you know talking to someone with dementia is a different kind of conversation. My mother can be present in moments, and she is very funny. She's even lovely and sweet, which she wasn't always when she had her wits about her! But her days of praying for me are long gone. So four months ago, when I knew I needed to quit drinking again and I knew I needed a deeper commitment to life to keep me sober, I started to pray. Every night, before I go to sleep, I say the three prayers that I said every night as a child. Then I thank god for everything I have, and I ask god to help me know what it is I need to do, and to give me strength to do it. Sometimes this is in words, sometimes it's more like opening myself to something. I'm not going to try to describe it in much detail, as I don't think I can. What matters is I have started to do my own praying. Somehow, this has brought me closer to my mother. And I think it's central to this trust in life I'm developing.

Now don't get me wrong. It's not that I think god is looking out for me so I don't have to do anything myself. It's much more subtle than that. It's more that I trust that things will be OK, even if they don't work out the way I want, or if there are big disasters along the way. I trust that I can act, and others can act, and we can try to work things out. I'm not suddenly sanguine about the world--there are serious problems with the environment, and we need to be working for economic and social justice. These things are not OK as they are. The best way to put it is maybe this: I trust life, and I trust that I can get on in my life.

Well, I don't know if I've made any sense to anyone here. This has been a huge shift for me, and it's important to me. I'll probably come back to writing about it again, as it's still a little beyond words. But I am grateful for what feels like a wonderful opening in my life. And yes, being sober is a big part of this.

Anyway, if you're still here, thanks for reading and keeping me company. Peace and joy to you.

(PS I edited the title after posting because I'd written "day 122" but I'm actually 123 days sober, not 122. Sure the numbers don't matter but still I want to claim them all! And 1-2-3 has such a nice ring to it.)

Round 3, Day 61: Patience, trust, and other (sober) people.

I've been settling into being sober in what feels like a different way than I had in the past, and I want to write a little bit about it, because I'm surprised. The short version of all this is, nearly nine weeks into being sober this time, I'm doing well.

The first major difference I see is that I am more patient. It's not that I know what I'm doing with this getting sober gig. I just know that drinking stopped working, and my previous stints at getting sober both ended when I began to really dislike all the emphasis on self that the sober world seemed to require. I still don't like that emphasis. But I don't know what else to do, so I am trying some different things to see how they go.

One thing that's sort of different is that I have started to go to meetings. I did this a few times before, so it's not exactly new, but I'm trying again. And that's where the patience comes in. I go just to sit and listen to what people say. I don't ask myself to plunge in and make new friends or get a sponsor or even talk to anyone most of the time. (I have, to date this time around, spoken to one person, briefly. It was OK.) I have to confess, I have been a little bitter about how meetings have gone in the past, and I still have some of that. People seem to know each other, and they smile and hug each other, and no one is actually all that friendly to me. I have a sense that if I burst into sobs and wailed, "someone help me," then someone would, but that's not going to happen, because it's just not how I am experiencing my need for help. It's not that I'm all that together, and I understand that in being vulnerable you have to give up something, but I simply don't know what it is I have to give up or do differently in order to make some of that famous connection with people in these places. The other day at a meeting, someone spoke about exactly that. He said he never did have that feeling of being part of some big thing when he came to meetings, and a lot of the language and practices left him somewhat alienated, and because of that he sort of thought it might never work out for him, that maybe he was never going to recover, or maybe he didn't deserve to. But he kept going, and he said it was like a very slow educational process as opposed to a gigantic spiritual awakening. Eventually, though, he said he did slowly change, in a way that suited who he was and felt intellectually honest to him. Well that really spoke to me! I have been trying to trust that just sitting and listening and being patient is part of some process, even if I don't know what the process is or how it works.

Another related thing I am slightly bitter about, if that's the right way to put is, is that the kind of trouble I run into isn't what most of what's on offer seems to be designed around. There seems to be a lot of help available for people who struggle with cravings and fight the urge to pick up a drink on a regular basis. (I know that's no easy place to be, so there's no sense in which I mean to sound as though I think anyone else has it easy. If what I say sounds that way, it's not at all what I mean.) My struggle is more cerebral, but it's no less a struggle for all that. If I decide not to drink on a day, I more or less know I can do that. Where I struggle is to keep my decision fixed. Now some might say I am deluding myself into thinking that's anything other than a different way of falling into a craving. But I think it is different, because I simply can't address the problem at the level of craving. I do need to keep myself focused on my decision how how to hold onto that resolve not to drink, and I don't always know how to get help with holding onto that focus. Before, when I drank after being sober I always did wait a while and think it through and still come to the decision that it was the best thing for me to do. It probably wasn't, but the problem wasn't one of caving to an impulse. In a way that's scarier, though, because it means in some important ways I can't trust my own reasoning, though I can't possible even live if I don't trust my ability to reason. I'm not struggling with that these days, but I know if I don't make some changes, it will likely come back. The trick is, I don't really know yet what those changes are. Despite all this not knowing, even in this, I feel a kind of patience,  a trust that I am on the right road and doing fine and that's enough for now.

One thing I am changing is some important stuff about my academic work. I'll talk about that more another time. But for now I want to say I feel I have managed to make some decisions, and make them from deep within being the person I am. I was able to see that, as I explained it to my husband, one way lay black death and one way lay green sprouting life, and I decided to move toward the life, even if it means making big changes. If that sounds fey, sorry! What I mean to say is that I have more of a sense of knowing who I am, and I was able to act in that knowledge, and that's utterly new to me. I am grateful for that, and I am staying with doing all the things that got me there.

OK, so I thought this was going to be a cheery and upbeat post, and I see that it may sound somewhat bleak! Dang. I don't actually feel bleak. After the first month or so of the devastating flatness that I seem to always feel at first after quitting (3x now I am starting to know a pattern), I feel hopeful. I am less likely to get my back up when someone tells me with absolute certainty that they did something or other and I should do exactly that. I have some trust that I am finding my own way through this, and I am doing that by paying close attention to what seems to work for me and what doesn't, and other people's ironclad certainties don't faze me much one way or the other.

I do need people in this business of getting sober. And I have some. There are bloggers--and you know who you are!--who have helped me along for ages. Many thanks and giant hugs to you! My husband is kind and supportive and about as great as he could be in this. I am lucky in that score! I also need to know some in-person sober people, and I find that the hardest thing to sort out. But I have some trust that I am getting somewhere in this. For now I'm sober, and most days it's not all that much of a struggle to stay there, and I'm very happy about that.

Thanks so much for reading! Wishing you all peace and joy on this rainy November afternoon.