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!
Sunday, 19 July 2015
Saturday, 30 May 2015
What changed my mind?
I'm not sure I'll be able to write clearly about it, but I wanted to describe why I decided to try drinking again after being sober for 16 months. (As I mentioned last post if you're reading sober blogs mainly to read like-minded people and you're going to feel uncomfortable reading about trying drinking after being sober, you should probably not read on. I understand. I wish you well.)
But for those who are still here: A few weeks ago, when my partner was recovering nicely from his accident and I had a little time to spare before school got super busy again, I took a few days off and lay around reading mysteries. It's something I do from time to time when I'm exhausted and I really want to relax. I had come across a new mystery writer (for me), Susan Hill, and I was gobbling up her Simon Serrailler mystery series. Hill is a great writer. Her mysteries deal with interesting social issues--hospice, end of life care--and the characters are well drawn and engaging. She's not a cozy writer--it's not all cats and recipes--but her mysteries are set in an English cathedral town, and they aren't drenched in gore in the way that many new mysteries are, so they are a good balance for me.
Now, just before that I had read "The Girl on the Train," and I guess I disliked it about as much as it seems people are liking it. I found the character's drinking was somehow too pat, too easily explained by the story, and her blackouts and embarrassing episodes were convenient for the story but alienating for me as a reader. I thought the writer wasn't quite striking the right notes, somehow. When I sold my copy, I was relieved to talk to a bookseller who had also disliked it, as it's always strange to genuinely dislike a book that everyone is raving about.
So that might have set me up somehow for the Susan Hill books. Because something I noticed as I read them, besides all the great writing and characters and so on that I just mentioned, was this: I liked how the characters drank. They sometimes had wine with family meals, or a drink with friends. And they sometimes looked forward to that. But they also often said no, because of having to work the next day, or because they were taking days off between having wine, or because they were driving, or because they just wanted water. In conversations in the books in which drinking came up, there was always due consideration given to whether the character would drink, and what else was going on.
I was surprised to find myself drawn into that way of thinking. Not in the way one can be drawn on when the drink is falsely romanticized--it wasn't about candlelit dinners or picnics on beaches or picturesque nightcaps. Instead, drinking seemed like a normal, pleasant thing that people did sometimes, the way they sometimes heated up leftovers for supper or made a salad or ate some rhubarb crisp or stopped at a cafe and had a coffee or a bite to eat. No one seemed fixated on having a drink, or on not having one. And other than a few characters in one book who were on wacky new age healing diets (because new age healers featured in the plot of one book), no one obsessed about food, or sugar, or caffeine.
Reading the books, I kept noticing this. And then I thought, I wish I could do that. I want to have pasta with wine, and dessert and a coffee, and not worry so bloody much about it all. And then, a while later, I thought, you know, I think I could do that. In the same way that the sober blogs spoke to me a couple of years ago, showing an alternate vision of how to get through without drinking too much, these books seemed to show a way of life that included alcohol as a part of life, neither the central problem nor the central pleasure in that life. Cake wasn't central, either. People were portrayed as finding their way through the problems and joys of ordinary life. It might be the best modelling of what gets called "moderation in all things" that I've seen. And it looked appealing to me.
I know there's more to it than that, but I think those books were my wee turning point. Obviously this is something I have thought about from time to time. When I quit drinking, I wanted to stop drinking too much, and not drinking at all was the only way I could see my way clear to that. The first time I tried drinking again, it may have been too soon (after almost four months without). At that time, I know I felt pretty alienated by the self-improvement focus that can creep into the sober blogs, and I wanted to get away from the therapeutic worldview altogether. But I was also a little bitter about some of the sober "support" that ended up ringing a bit shallow to me, and I turned back to my regular life, without being able to take in what I'd learned by not drinking.
This time around, I had stopped for just over sixteen months. I could accept that maybe I could never drink again. And somehow, that meant I could accept that if I were to drink, I would have to do it very differently. Also, I think I have learned a lot by not drinking for so long. I like keeping a clear head, sleeping well, remembering my evenings, and lots of those things that I lost when I drank too much. And I'm not bitter about anyone or anything. Plenty of things aren't for me, but we are all gloriously different, and that's just grand!
So far, it's been an enjoyable experiment. I've had wine with dinner a few times, with food, and in company. I've enjoyed it. I've been looking to see whether I would get that old familiar "wanting more" feeling, but so far I have not. I've liked the taste of the wine, and the experience of drinking wine with my meal, something I really did enjoy for years. One thing that's hard to describe is a feeling of having come home to myself in a strange way. For the most part, after I stopped drinking I didn't experience abstinence as a great restriction. I enjoyed doing other things, drinking other drinks. After the initial struggles, the obsession with drinking waned, and that was an enormous relief. Drinking again is a different kind of relief. I feel like I'm not keeping a part of the world at bay, and I'm not paying now for not having learned to drink properly as a younger person.
Over the past couple of years, I started to notice that when I am drinking a really great coffee in the morning, I have often thought, "I'll have another one when this is gone." Same with eating a cookie or having a sweet treat. It's bizarre to me, and it's the exact same feeling I used to get with wine. (Though I only noticed it when I stopped drinking and started to pay attention to a lot of things. I hate buzzwords, but "paying attention" or "mindfulness" has been a great help to me.) I think I was somehow keeping myself on a set of restrictions and doling out pleasures to myself, something I likely learned from years of restrictive eating. When those thoughts crop up, I have been acknowledging them, not yelling at myself or chastising myself for them, but also not having that second coffee (makes me jittery) or the second sweet (makes me sick). Recently, it seems I have found a way to be less restrictive, to want what's good for me in reasonable amounts, and not to sing for more like a deprived child when I have some nice thing. What I'm hoping is that I can do the same thing if I do sometimes get that "moreish" feeling with wine. If it works, and I think it will or I wouldn't be trying this, then it seems like a nice way for me to live. If it doesn't, I'll figure out a different way. And as I probably said before, I already know I can enjoy life without drinking, so if drinking doesn't work, that's always an option.
So that's what I've been up to, and how it's going. As I said before, I get it if you think I'm wrong, or this is too dangerous for you to read. I won't hold that against anyone who does stop. (You don't all have to so kindly chime in again to tell me you're still here now, though that really was super sweet after my last post!) I'm not especially interested in anyone's scare tactics or advice about alcohol always being the road to hell and doom, either. I mean, we all know alcohol can become a problem, so you'd have to think I was some kind of moron if you thought I needed a reminder of that, and if you think I'm a moron, I'm guessing you're not still reading my blog. That crankiness aside, if you're still here, thanks for reading. I probably won't post all that often, but in the interest of painting a picture of how trying drinking looks for me after 16 months sober, I'll keep the blog posted. Holding to the wider use of the word sober, as in "not drunk," I'll still think of this as being sober, though I know that's a minority view here!
Happy sunny weekend to you all.
But for those who are still here: A few weeks ago, when my partner was recovering nicely from his accident and I had a little time to spare before school got super busy again, I took a few days off and lay around reading mysteries. It's something I do from time to time when I'm exhausted and I really want to relax. I had come across a new mystery writer (for me), Susan Hill, and I was gobbling up her Simon Serrailler mystery series. Hill is a great writer. Her mysteries deal with interesting social issues--hospice, end of life care--and the characters are well drawn and engaging. She's not a cozy writer--it's not all cats and recipes--but her mysteries are set in an English cathedral town, and they aren't drenched in gore in the way that many new mysteries are, so they are a good balance for me.
Now, just before that I had read "The Girl on the Train," and I guess I disliked it about as much as it seems people are liking it. I found the character's drinking was somehow too pat, too easily explained by the story, and her blackouts and embarrassing episodes were convenient for the story but alienating for me as a reader. I thought the writer wasn't quite striking the right notes, somehow. When I sold my copy, I was relieved to talk to a bookseller who had also disliked it, as it's always strange to genuinely dislike a book that everyone is raving about.
So that might have set me up somehow for the Susan Hill books. Because something I noticed as I read them, besides all the great writing and characters and so on that I just mentioned, was this: I liked how the characters drank. They sometimes had wine with family meals, or a drink with friends. And they sometimes looked forward to that. But they also often said no, because of having to work the next day, or because they were taking days off between having wine, or because they were driving, or because they just wanted water. In conversations in the books in which drinking came up, there was always due consideration given to whether the character would drink, and what else was going on.
I was surprised to find myself drawn into that way of thinking. Not in the way one can be drawn on when the drink is falsely romanticized--it wasn't about candlelit dinners or picnics on beaches or picturesque nightcaps. Instead, drinking seemed like a normal, pleasant thing that people did sometimes, the way they sometimes heated up leftovers for supper or made a salad or ate some rhubarb crisp or stopped at a cafe and had a coffee or a bite to eat. No one seemed fixated on having a drink, or on not having one. And other than a few characters in one book who were on wacky new age healing diets (because new age healers featured in the plot of one book), no one obsessed about food, or sugar, or caffeine.
Reading the books, I kept noticing this. And then I thought, I wish I could do that. I want to have pasta with wine, and dessert and a coffee, and not worry so bloody much about it all. And then, a while later, I thought, you know, I think I could do that. In the same way that the sober blogs spoke to me a couple of years ago, showing an alternate vision of how to get through without drinking too much, these books seemed to show a way of life that included alcohol as a part of life, neither the central problem nor the central pleasure in that life. Cake wasn't central, either. People were portrayed as finding their way through the problems and joys of ordinary life. It might be the best modelling of what gets called "moderation in all things" that I've seen. And it looked appealing to me.
I know there's more to it than that, but I think those books were my wee turning point. Obviously this is something I have thought about from time to time. When I quit drinking, I wanted to stop drinking too much, and not drinking at all was the only way I could see my way clear to that. The first time I tried drinking again, it may have been too soon (after almost four months without). At that time, I know I felt pretty alienated by the self-improvement focus that can creep into the sober blogs, and I wanted to get away from the therapeutic worldview altogether. But I was also a little bitter about some of the sober "support" that ended up ringing a bit shallow to me, and I turned back to my regular life, without being able to take in what I'd learned by not drinking.
This time around, I had stopped for just over sixteen months. I could accept that maybe I could never drink again. And somehow, that meant I could accept that if I were to drink, I would have to do it very differently. Also, I think I have learned a lot by not drinking for so long. I like keeping a clear head, sleeping well, remembering my evenings, and lots of those things that I lost when I drank too much. And I'm not bitter about anyone or anything. Plenty of things aren't for me, but we are all gloriously different, and that's just grand!
So far, it's been an enjoyable experiment. I've had wine with dinner a few times, with food, and in company. I've enjoyed it. I've been looking to see whether I would get that old familiar "wanting more" feeling, but so far I have not. I've liked the taste of the wine, and the experience of drinking wine with my meal, something I really did enjoy for years. One thing that's hard to describe is a feeling of having come home to myself in a strange way. For the most part, after I stopped drinking I didn't experience abstinence as a great restriction. I enjoyed doing other things, drinking other drinks. After the initial struggles, the obsession with drinking waned, and that was an enormous relief. Drinking again is a different kind of relief. I feel like I'm not keeping a part of the world at bay, and I'm not paying now for not having learned to drink properly as a younger person.
Over the past couple of years, I started to notice that when I am drinking a really great coffee in the morning, I have often thought, "I'll have another one when this is gone." Same with eating a cookie or having a sweet treat. It's bizarre to me, and it's the exact same feeling I used to get with wine. (Though I only noticed it when I stopped drinking and started to pay attention to a lot of things. I hate buzzwords, but "paying attention" or "mindfulness" has been a great help to me.) I think I was somehow keeping myself on a set of restrictions and doling out pleasures to myself, something I likely learned from years of restrictive eating. When those thoughts crop up, I have been acknowledging them, not yelling at myself or chastising myself for them, but also not having that second coffee (makes me jittery) or the second sweet (makes me sick). Recently, it seems I have found a way to be less restrictive, to want what's good for me in reasonable amounts, and not to sing for more like a deprived child when I have some nice thing. What I'm hoping is that I can do the same thing if I do sometimes get that "moreish" feeling with wine. If it works, and I think it will or I wouldn't be trying this, then it seems like a nice way for me to live. If it doesn't, I'll figure out a different way. And as I probably said before, I already know I can enjoy life without drinking, so if drinking doesn't work, that's always an option.
So that's what I've been up to, and how it's going. As I said before, I get it if you think I'm wrong, or this is too dangerous for you to read. I won't hold that against anyone who does stop. (You don't all have to so kindly chime in again to tell me you're still here now, though that really was super sweet after my last post!) I'm not especially interested in anyone's scare tactics or advice about alcohol always being the road to hell and doom, either. I mean, we all know alcohol can become a problem, so you'd have to think I was some kind of moron if you thought I needed a reminder of that, and if you think I'm a moron, I'm guessing you're not still reading my blog. That crankiness aside, if you're still here, thanks for reading. I probably won't post all that often, but in the interest of painting a picture of how trying drinking looks for me after 16 months sober, I'll keep the blog posted. Holding to the wider use of the word sober, as in "not drunk," I'll still think of this as being sober, though I know that's a minority view here!
Happy sunny weekend to you all.
Monday, 18 May 2015
Not so sure.
Sometimes I'm not so sure about the whole sober gig. I'm glad I stopped drinking a while back, and I'm glad I have figured out how to not rely on drinking to get me through things. I needed that, and I still need it. But I get suspicious of the recovery world. It just seems rife with the kind of perfectionism that I'm not sure is helpful, a kind of endless self-improvement project that I don't quite trust and can't buy into. Or maybe it's not perfectionism, but the sense that there is a narrow range of how we can be in order to be OK. Whatever it is, I'm not so sure it's for me.
Every now and then I do a whole batch of reading about moderate drinking. You may know the resources. You may read them, too. When I do, I don't talk about it here, as the word "moderate" seems to call up a heated debate, although the positions are pretty clearly marked out in advance, so not much is gained in the argument. But some people do seem to find a way to drink occasionally, and no, those are not people who keep writing sober blogs, since it's kind of de facto in the sober blog world that sober means abstinent. Another school of thought argues that sober means "not intoxicated" and that doesn't mean absolute abstinence. I'm getting curious about that version of sober.
So I'm writing here to say I'm reading this sort of thing these days, and I'm thinking about it. I don't want a warning, or ominous talk about wolves or witches. And I'm not trying to start a debate. I just want to say I'm reading this stuff, and thinking about it. I might drink again to see how it goes. After more than a year away, and with some good support to help me figure this out for myself (which I have) it might be fine. If it isn't, I'll stop again. If it is, I'll be pleased with that.
This sort of thing upsets lots of people, so this post is a kind of fair warning. Please don't read my blog if this is going to bother you. I'm doing this to find my own way, and writing about what I think is part of my way. About every third post I talk about refusing to edit my posts to fit with some idea of a recovery world that I didn't sign on for. But I do get it: reading someone who has stopped drinking thinking about drinking again can be hard if you're using sober blogs as sober support. So I won't take it badly even if you all go away and I'm left back where I started, writing for myself. Promise!
That's about all I have to say on this for now. All is well here. It's a sunny day in May, the first shorts day for me, and life feels good. Whether you're sticking around for a while or you're leaving, keep well.
Every now and then I do a whole batch of reading about moderate drinking. You may know the resources. You may read them, too. When I do, I don't talk about it here, as the word "moderate" seems to call up a heated debate, although the positions are pretty clearly marked out in advance, so not much is gained in the argument. But some people do seem to find a way to drink occasionally, and no, those are not people who keep writing sober blogs, since it's kind of de facto in the sober blog world that sober means abstinent. Another school of thought argues that sober means "not intoxicated" and that doesn't mean absolute abstinence. I'm getting curious about that version of sober.
So I'm writing here to say I'm reading this sort of thing these days, and I'm thinking about it. I don't want a warning, or ominous talk about wolves or witches. And I'm not trying to start a debate. I just want to say I'm reading this stuff, and thinking about it. I might drink again to see how it goes. After more than a year away, and with some good support to help me figure this out for myself (which I have) it might be fine. If it isn't, I'll stop again. If it is, I'll be pleased with that.
This sort of thing upsets lots of people, so this post is a kind of fair warning. Please don't read my blog if this is going to bother you. I'm doing this to find my own way, and writing about what I think is part of my way. About every third post I talk about refusing to edit my posts to fit with some idea of a recovery world that I didn't sign on for. But I do get it: reading someone who has stopped drinking thinking about drinking again can be hard if you're using sober blogs as sober support. So I won't take it badly even if you all go away and I'm left back where I started, writing for myself. Promise!
That's about all I have to say on this for now. All is well here. It's a sunny day in May, the first shorts day for me, and life feels good. Whether you're sticking around for a while or you're leaving, keep well.
Saturday, 9 May 2015
A tough few weeks but still happily sober at 16 months!
The past few weeks have been tough ones, and the one thing I keep thinking is this: I'm so glad I'm not drinking anymore.
A few weeks ago, my partner was in a very bad accident. He is going to be OK, so I can write about it now, though this is my blog not his so I don't want to get into his personal info or his story. But there was some scary hospital stuff and major surgery and long waits to see how things would go, and every time I thought I was handling things OK a doctor would tell me some terrifying thing that had just been ruled out or that there was still some risk of. I spent most of a week at the hospital during the days, and I think the only thing that saved me was walking back and forth to transit stops and coffee shops on the way back and forth to the hospital. There's something about walking that keeps things real, and keeping some grip on the real world was very hard to do in the middle of all that.
A couple of days before he was released, I was running around one evening after I left the hospital trying to get in place some of what we would need to get him set up at home, and I became fixated on getting ice cream. He is on a blender diet for a month or so, and I decided that having ice cream in the house was absolutely critical. I had to go to a different grocery because my usual one was closed, and on the way I walked past the liquor store I used to frequent, which was, of course, open. Now, to say I wasn't tempted to drink would be a massive understatement. As I passed the store, all I could think was that if this had happened two years ago, I would have been drinking wine every night after coming from the hospital, and I would have been in no shape to do what I had to do, whether that was help make decisions or offer emotional support or or get the apartment ready for my partner's convalescence or just take care of myself. Two years ago, I would have used wine to "get me through it." Now that seemed so bizarre to me, and I was incredibly grateful that I am sober and present in my life and able to deal with this difficult stuff for my partner and for myself.
I didn't want to turn the accident into a pat silver lining story. It isn't one. It's just a terrible thing. But terrible things happen sometimes, and we live through them. And I'm not saying I'm all that great for coping. I'm just doing what I have to do, what we all do when there's coping to be done. But I am super 100% get-down-on-my-knees-and-pray thankful that I am sober while all this is going on. And I know my partner will recover from this a whole lot better with me being present and helpful, rather than being in any of the drunk/hungover/emotional-nightmare states that used to be what I called normal life.
I'm hoping to get back to my schoolwork this week because I really need to do that. By now we're ticking along OK here, and I'm learning lots of ways to make interesting and healthy soups and stews that might still taste like something after a whirr in the high-speed blender. (Today's special: potato-leek-bacon in pork stock with a little cream and tarragon. Yum!) This week I passed a sober milestone--16 months sober! Hooray for that! So that's where I am these days: there's plenty of soup and love and healing, and that's getting me through. That and gratitude for being sober and being alive.
Peace and love to you all. Be well.
A few weeks ago, my partner was in a very bad accident. He is going to be OK, so I can write about it now, though this is my blog not his so I don't want to get into his personal info or his story. But there was some scary hospital stuff and major surgery and long waits to see how things would go, and every time I thought I was handling things OK a doctor would tell me some terrifying thing that had just been ruled out or that there was still some risk of. I spent most of a week at the hospital during the days, and I think the only thing that saved me was walking back and forth to transit stops and coffee shops on the way back and forth to the hospital. There's something about walking that keeps things real, and keeping some grip on the real world was very hard to do in the middle of all that.
A couple of days before he was released, I was running around one evening after I left the hospital trying to get in place some of what we would need to get him set up at home, and I became fixated on getting ice cream. He is on a blender diet for a month or so, and I decided that having ice cream in the house was absolutely critical. I had to go to a different grocery because my usual one was closed, and on the way I walked past the liquor store I used to frequent, which was, of course, open. Now, to say I wasn't tempted to drink would be a massive understatement. As I passed the store, all I could think was that if this had happened two years ago, I would have been drinking wine every night after coming from the hospital, and I would have been in no shape to do what I had to do, whether that was help make decisions or offer emotional support or or get the apartment ready for my partner's convalescence or just take care of myself. Two years ago, I would have used wine to "get me through it." Now that seemed so bizarre to me, and I was incredibly grateful that I am sober and present in my life and able to deal with this difficult stuff for my partner and for myself.
I didn't want to turn the accident into a pat silver lining story. It isn't one. It's just a terrible thing. But terrible things happen sometimes, and we live through them. And I'm not saying I'm all that great for coping. I'm just doing what I have to do, what we all do when there's coping to be done. But I am super 100% get-down-on-my-knees-and-pray thankful that I am sober while all this is going on. And I know my partner will recover from this a whole lot better with me being present and helpful, rather than being in any of the drunk/hungover/emotional-nightmare states that used to be what I called normal life.
I'm hoping to get back to my schoolwork this week because I really need to do that. By now we're ticking along OK here, and I'm learning lots of ways to make interesting and healthy soups and stews that might still taste like something after a whirr in the high-speed blender. (Today's special: potato-leek-bacon in pork stock with a little cream and tarragon. Yum!) This week I passed a sober milestone--16 months sober! Hooray for that! So that's where I am these days: there's plenty of soup and love and healing, and that's getting me through. That and gratitude for being sober and being alive.
Peace and love to you all. Be well.
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, 14 March 2015
Real life, real sober! (And some real graffiti!)
Still here, still finding my way. I was away at a conference and busy with school, but I see it's been a month since I posted. It's so unlike me, this silence!
Recently I had written about going to meetings. I think the program is great, and I see the benefit of it. But, for now anyway, it's not for me. I tried for a month, and honestly, though I had some moments of feeling connected with people across the room, I mainly felt alienated and isolated. Now I know, I know, I may be bringing that on myself. But I am me, and I don't think I can just become someone else to make something work out for me. I am a big fan of trying on new perspectives to see if I can take up new ways of thinking and being. But I have a strong sense of when it feels more like fakery than a new way of thinking, and that's how I was feeling with the meetings.
There are a few things behind this, I think. Nearly everyone there spoke about how they came to a meeting out of sheer desperation. And I don't feel that these days. It's as if I missed my window there, when I could just be open and desperate and maybe connection would flow. People who came in looking desperate seemed to have people flock to them. But that's not my situation these days. Many people at the meetings seemed to know and like each other, so there was warmth and hugs and hilarity shared among them. Others, like me, came in and sat and left with almost no interaction. But what I didn't see was how to cross that chasm-- how to get from being isolated to being included. The last meeting I went to, I had made a deal with myself that I would talk to someone there, and I did. But it wasn't welcomed, and the person turned back to someone else right away after I introduced myself, obviously wanting to talk to someone she knew already and not a new person. It was a bit like high school for me, in the worst kind of way. I hear stories of warmth and acceptance and I know they exist. But that wasn't my experience.
I don't know. After a while, I was feeling more like an ethnographer than I was like a person. That's not fair to the other people in the room (who are people in their own right, not interesting specimens) but it's also not fair to me, because it removes me too much from my own experience. I've had enough alienation in my life, ad I don't intend to court more of it. Also, I had that classic thing people talk about, feeling like I am not as bad off as the people who told their stories, and I am therefore some kind of impostor. I know, the point is I'm supposed to focus on the similarities and not the differences. And I did. But I can't check my critical thinking at the door, and I can't help but see that there are many differences as well as many similarities. It's not that I think I'm a better person because my situation is different than others. But the "not yet" argument doesn't help me, either. I know things could have gone differently for me. They could yet. I have met many people who suffer(ed) from many different kinds of addiction and abuse and homelessness. I think it might do a disservice to me and to them to say that we are dealing with essentially the same problem. I may be wrong about this. But it's where I am these days.
Also, at meetings, the stories were often told in a way that was designed to entertain the audience. As you know if you're reading here, I resist the impulse to frame my thinking in an entertaining narrative. I could go on about lots of dramatic things that have happened to me, and link them to my drinking, but I'm not sure they're all related, to be honest. I think many people get a lot out of stories that talk about how bad things were. Frankly, I never read them, and I avoid telling them. And I don't want to start, either.
But there's another thing too, and I want to say that clearly for myself if for no one else. I have been very much supported by the blog world--in writing and reading and participating in ongoing exchanges with people I have come to admire and care about deeply, all online. And that's real life, too. I wonder whether I have been deprecating that a little in my (admittedly small) attempt to find an in-person community. Yes, I need real people. My (truly wonderful) partner has been with me in this since the beginning, and he gets this addiction/alcoholism thing as much as anyone can, though it's not a problem he deals with himself. I've also told a few friends and my sister, and they have been supportive and helpful. I get that you have to give it up a bit to get people onside, so I have told some people how things were for me, and why I quit, and how it's worked. But I've done that sparingly. I don't want to be defined by it, any more than I wanted to be defined by other problems I've faced in my past.
This morning, on another blog, I saw a comment that said something like, "Blogs are nice but they don't keep you sober." I appreciate that the comment was made in a different context, and I didn't want to weigh in with my opinion in a place that it would not be appropriate. Just the same, here on my own blog, I want to respectfully disagree with that sentiment. Blogs are more than "nice." By fully participating in this blog world, I have got sober and stayed sober for 14 months and counting. Part of this success may be that I'm highly imaginative, so I have no trouble thinking of the people who blog as real people, just as I often think of book characters as real people. Part is luck, maybe. Part of it is being analytical. I look at what has worked for people and try those things, and I look at what doesn't work and note those. I see that different things work for different people, so I try things out and see what works and keep on with those practices, and I keep trying to find new ways of thinking and doing. I really do think this getting and staying sober isn't something I could have done or could do alone. But I also really don't think I am alone here when I'm online. You're all here too, sometimes reading and commenting, sometimes writing other posts that resonate with me or linking to something I've said that opens up new ways of thinking and being for you and for me, too. I love that. So maybe this post is just to stand my ground here and say, actually, blogs are real life too, and yes, they can get you sober and keep you sober. They might not work for everyone, and of course it makes sense to keep trying new things to see what works. But they can and do work. I am sitting here in my living room wearing a stripey shirt and jeans and blue woolie slippers, sipping tea and typing. Today I went to the farmers' market and the butcher shop, and later I will do a whole lot of reading for school, and then go for a long walk. I guarantee you, I am real. And I am sure if you're reading, you're real, too. (Unless you're a clickbot. If so, hello clickbot! Welcome!)
That said, I really am trying to find ways of being with people, so I'm trying a few other things. I have joined with some people in starting an academic reading group, and that's another whole new way of learning to listen to people and listen to currents in the room. So far that's been going well, though it's a challenge. Also, after having declaimed against meditation, I signed up for a zen training class, as I see that might be a way for me to practice deep listening in a different context. I'm up for trying things. But I wanted to write this to make the point, for myself, and for anyone else it might help, that what I'm doing is actually working, and it does seem to work for some people. Not for everyone. None of us is everyone. But we are all someone.
In the spirit of keeping it real, I thought I'd share a real life picture I took yesterday, evidence of other real folk out there. Looks like some badass sober tagger has been hitting the streets! This made me smile:
Peace and love to you all, bloggers and readers and meeting-goers and everyone else. And you, too, you lovely sober taggers! Thanks for reading, and thanks for being here.
Recently I had written about going to meetings. I think the program is great, and I see the benefit of it. But, for now anyway, it's not for me. I tried for a month, and honestly, though I had some moments of feeling connected with people across the room, I mainly felt alienated and isolated. Now I know, I know, I may be bringing that on myself. But I am me, and I don't think I can just become someone else to make something work out for me. I am a big fan of trying on new perspectives to see if I can take up new ways of thinking and being. But I have a strong sense of when it feels more like fakery than a new way of thinking, and that's how I was feeling with the meetings.
There are a few things behind this, I think. Nearly everyone there spoke about how they came to a meeting out of sheer desperation. And I don't feel that these days. It's as if I missed my window there, when I could just be open and desperate and maybe connection would flow. People who came in looking desperate seemed to have people flock to them. But that's not my situation these days. Many people at the meetings seemed to know and like each other, so there was warmth and hugs and hilarity shared among them. Others, like me, came in and sat and left with almost no interaction. But what I didn't see was how to cross that chasm-- how to get from being isolated to being included. The last meeting I went to, I had made a deal with myself that I would talk to someone there, and I did. But it wasn't welcomed, and the person turned back to someone else right away after I introduced myself, obviously wanting to talk to someone she knew already and not a new person. It was a bit like high school for me, in the worst kind of way. I hear stories of warmth and acceptance and I know they exist. But that wasn't my experience.
I don't know. After a while, I was feeling more like an ethnographer than I was like a person. That's not fair to the other people in the room (who are people in their own right, not interesting specimens) but it's also not fair to me, because it removes me too much from my own experience. I've had enough alienation in my life, ad I don't intend to court more of it. Also, I had that classic thing people talk about, feeling like I am not as bad off as the people who told their stories, and I am therefore some kind of impostor. I know, the point is I'm supposed to focus on the similarities and not the differences. And I did. But I can't check my critical thinking at the door, and I can't help but see that there are many differences as well as many similarities. It's not that I think I'm a better person because my situation is different than others. But the "not yet" argument doesn't help me, either. I know things could have gone differently for me. They could yet. I have met many people who suffer(ed) from many different kinds of addiction and abuse and homelessness. I think it might do a disservice to me and to them to say that we are dealing with essentially the same problem. I may be wrong about this. But it's where I am these days.
Also, at meetings, the stories were often told in a way that was designed to entertain the audience. As you know if you're reading here, I resist the impulse to frame my thinking in an entertaining narrative. I could go on about lots of dramatic things that have happened to me, and link them to my drinking, but I'm not sure they're all related, to be honest. I think many people get a lot out of stories that talk about how bad things were. Frankly, I never read them, and I avoid telling them. And I don't want to start, either.
But there's another thing too, and I want to say that clearly for myself if for no one else. I have been very much supported by the blog world--in writing and reading and participating in ongoing exchanges with people I have come to admire and care about deeply, all online. And that's real life, too. I wonder whether I have been deprecating that a little in my (admittedly small) attempt to find an in-person community. Yes, I need real people. My (truly wonderful) partner has been with me in this since the beginning, and he gets this addiction/alcoholism thing as much as anyone can, though it's not a problem he deals with himself. I've also told a few friends and my sister, and they have been supportive and helpful. I get that you have to give it up a bit to get people onside, so I have told some people how things were for me, and why I quit, and how it's worked. But I've done that sparingly. I don't want to be defined by it, any more than I wanted to be defined by other problems I've faced in my past.
This morning, on another blog, I saw a comment that said something like, "Blogs are nice but they don't keep you sober." I appreciate that the comment was made in a different context, and I didn't want to weigh in with my opinion in a place that it would not be appropriate. Just the same, here on my own blog, I want to respectfully disagree with that sentiment. Blogs are more than "nice." By fully participating in this blog world, I have got sober and stayed sober for 14 months and counting. Part of this success may be that I'm highly imaginative, so I have no trouble thinking of the people who blog as real people, just as I often think of book characters as real people. Part is luck, maybe. Part of it is being analytical. I look at what has worked for people and try those things, and I look at what doesn't work and note those. I see that different things work for different people, so I try things out and see what works and keep on with those practices, and I keep trying to find new ways of thinking and doing. I really do think this getting and staying sober isn't something I could have done or could do alone. But I also really don't think I am alone here when I'm online. You're all here too, sometimes reading and commenting, sometimes writing other posts that resonate with me or linking to something I've said that opens up new ways of thinking and being for you and for me, too. I love that. So maybe this post is just to stand my ground here and say, actually, blogs are real life too, and yes, they can get you sober and keep you sober. They might not work for everyone, and of course it makes sense to keep trying new things to see what works. But they can and do work. I am sitting here in my living room wearing a stripey shirt and jeans and blue woolie slippers, sipping tea and typing. Today I went to the farmers' market and the butcher shop, and later I will do a whole lot of reading for school, and then go for a long walk. I guarantee you, I am real. And I am sure if you're reading, you're real, too. (Unless you're a clickbot. If so, hello clickbot! Welcome!)
That said, I really am trying to find ways of being with people, so I'm trying a few other things. I have joined with some people in starting an academic reading group, and that's another whole new way of learning to listen to people and listen to currents in the room. So far that's been going well, though it's a challenge. Also, after having declaimed against meditation, I signed up for a zen training class, as I see that might be a way for me to practice deep listening in a different context. I'm up for trying things. But I wanted to write this to make the point, for myself, and for anyone else it might help, that what I'm doing is actually working, and it does seem to work for some people. Not for everyone. None of us is everyone. But we are all someone.
In the spirit of keeping it real, I thought I'd share a real life picture I took yesterday, evidence of other real folk out there. Looks like some badass sober tagger has been hitting the streets! This made me smile:
Peace and love to you all, bloggers and readers and meeting-goers and everyone else. And you, too, you lovely sober taggers! Thanks for reading, and thanks for being here.
Saturday, 7 February 2015
Listening to others, listening to myself
I went to another meeting. Once again, nothing terrifying happened. I think I was right that putting myself face to face (or rather side by side) with other people is something I need to do. I didn't actually talk to anyone or anything as bold as that. There's no hurry. What I did do is listen to the people who spoke, and watch the people in the room, and notice my reactions. And that was illuminating.
Here's what I noticed: my reactions to being there swung wildly back and forth between thinking it was a good idea to vowing I could never come back. And that was just in the five minutes or so before the meeting started, when I was just sitting in a chair, waiting. Also, I was watching people get settled, deciding who I thought was interesting and who wasn't. How hilarious is that? Apparently I know this sort of thing about people on first glance. I didn't know I did that! I caught myself thinking all this, and realized I was reacting to everyone else because I was nervous, and it's way easier to decide who's great and who isn't based on appearances than it is to just feel nervous, isn't it? So for a couple of minutes, I was just uncomfortably nervous. And I survived.
The meeting started when someone read a text, and I once again reacted strongly to the words. Oh, I could argue with that text! But I looked around, and I could see that lots of people seemed to be sitting politely but not getting all caught up in the words, so I thought maybe I could do that, too. I just ignored it, thinking maybe that's not for me right now. No argument required.
Then some guy talked. I managed to stop myself see-sawing between thinking "I belong here" and "I am never coming back" and actually listen. And he said some things that really helped me. Yesterday, Primrose wrote what I thought was a great post about being willing to change, and how that seems to have to include getting connected to other people. I loved what she had to say there. The speaker talked about such similar stuff, so it really resonated with me. Then a few other people spoke, and at different points, everyone said something that struck me deeply. One woman talked about Carl Jung as having said (quoting roughly), 'If you find spirituality in the second half of your life, the first half was worth it.' At that, both me and the young woman next to me teared up and caught each other's eyes for a moment, and smiled. Hard to say why that was so powerful, because the words don't cover it. Words matter, but this is about way more than the words. The experience of sitting listening with people is where the power comes from. I'm not much given to certainty, but I feel sure of this.
A number of years ago, I used to do some serious Zen meditation, but I decided sitting meditation wasn't for me. I spend enough time alone in my own mind, so silently observing my thoughts any more than I do can send me into a spiral that isn't so great for me. More recently, I have tried to listen to the various meditation gurus that get talked about on sober blogs, but they just make me angry. And yes, I know that anger is all about me, not them, but that doesn't stop it from happening. But I try to use the zen training in my own way. For me, it's better to watch my thoughts while I'm out walking or biking, or when I'm sitting in a classroom. It's a kind of meditation in action, and it suits me better. Seeing how I react in real time, that's what I've been trying to do.
And on that score, I think the meeting was good. Because just listening and paying close attention to my own reactions showed me how wildly I do react to what people say, or just the way they look, how quickly I jump on some opinion in my mind, even while I seem calm and balanced. And I could see that when I get uncomfortable, I am very, very quick to interpret my discomfort as disliking someone or something. It's easier, right? If some person or event is annoying and that's why I'm annoyed then I have a kind of equilibrium. It's false, though. And when I caught myself getting annoyed--as I did about a hundred times in the hour--instead of falling into believing that the person talking was at fault, I was able to notice my reaction, and accept that I was feeling uncomfortable, and then try to open my heart to my own discomfort and to the person speaking. And in that openness, sometimes I felt connected. The speakers were uncomfortable sometimes, too. And sometimes they were funny, and everybody laughed. More than once most people were in tears, as was I. Whatever was happening, we all seemed to sit in it together, sharing a little bit of human connection on a rainy Saturday morning.
While I was there, I realized that today I am 13 months sober. It was nice to quietly share that in person with people who would get it. And I did feel like I was sharing it, even though I didn't talk to anyone. So that's my second meeting. I still don't know my way about in all this, but I think I'm OK with that. I'm paying attention, anyway, and sitting with other people. And maybe that's enough.
Thanks for reading. Peace and joy to you. And love.
Here's what I noticed: my reactions to being there swung wildly back and forth between thinking it was a good idea to vowing I could never come back. And that was just in the five minutes or so before the meeting started, when I was just sitting in a chair, waiting. Also, I was watching people get settled, deciding who I thought was interesting and who wasn't. How hilarious is that? Apparently I know this sort of thing about people on first glance. I didn't know I did that! I caught myself thinking all this, and realized I was reacting to everyone else because I was nervous, and it's way easier to decide who's great and who isn't based on appearances than it is to just feel nervous, isn't it? So for a couple of minutes, I was just uncomfortably nervous. And I survived.
The meeting started when someone read a text, and I once again reacted strongly to the words. Oh, I could argue with that text! But I looked around, and I could see that lots of people seemed to be sitting politely but not getting all caught up in the words, so I thought maybe I could do that, too. I just ignored it, thinking maybe that's not for me right now. No argument required.
Then some guy talked. I managed to stop myself see-sawing between thinking "I belong here" and "I am never coming back" and actually listen. And he said some things that really helped me. Yesterday, Primrose wrote what I thought was a great post about being willing to change, and how that seems to have to include getting connected to other people. I loved what she had to say there. The speaker talked about such similar stuff, so it really resonated with me. Then a few other people spoke, and at different points, everyone said something that struck me deeply. One woman talked about Carl Jung as having said (quoting roughly), 'If you find spirituality in the second half of your life, the first half was worth it.' At that, both me and the young woman next to me teared up and caught each other's eyes for a moment, and smiled. Hard to say why that was so powerful, because the words don't cover it. Words matter, but this is about way more than the words. The experience of sitting listening with people is where the power comes from. I'm not much given to certainty, but I feel sure of this.
A number of years ago, I used to do some serious Zen meditation, but I decided sitting meditation wasn't for me. I spend enough time alone in my own mind, so silently observing my thoughts any more than I do can send me into a spiral that isn't so great for me. More recently, I have tried to listen to the various meditation gurus that get talked about on sober blogs, but they just make me angry. And yes, I know that anger is all about me, not them, but that doesn't stop it from happening. But I try to use the zen training in my own way. For me, it's better to watch my thoughts while I'm out walking or biking, or when I'm sitting in a classroom. It's a kind of meditation in action, and it suits me better. Seeing how I react in real time, that's what I've been trying to do.
And on that score, I think the meeting was good. Because just listening and paying close attention to my own reactions showed me how wildly I do react to what people say, or just the way they look, how quickly I jump on some opinion in my mind, even while I seem calm and balanced. And I could see that when I get uncomfortable, I am very, very quick to interpret my discomfort as disliking someone or something. It's easier, right? If some person or event is annoying and that's why I'm annoyed then I have a kind of equilibrium. It's false, though. And when I caught myself getting annoyed--as I did about a hundred times in the hour--instead of falling into believing that the person talking was at fault, I was able to notice my reaction, and accept that I was feeling uncomfortable, and then try to open my heart to my own discomfort and to the person speaking. And in that openness, sometimes I felt connected. The speakers were uncomfortable sometimes, too. And sometimes they were funny, and everybody laughed. More than once most people were in tears, as was I. Whatever was happening, we all seemed to sit in it together, sharing a little bit of human connection on a rainy Saturday morning.
While I was there, I realized that today I am 13 months sober. It was nice to quietly share that in person with people who would get it. And I did feel like I was sharing it, even though I didn't talk to anyone. So that's my second meeting. I still don't know my way about in all this, but I think I'm OK with that. I'm paying attention, anyway, and sitting with other people. And maybe that's enough.
Thanks for reading. Peace and joy to you. And love.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)