I’m in one of those places where I want to pull my sleeves over my hands and cry… like, all the time. I want to put my hood up and shut the world out and walk forever in circles downtown.
(It’s hard to be all serious and depressed – or, to connect with being all serious and depressed and write about it to try to sort some stuff out – with Boy George pumping through the Starbucks speakers. Why can’t they hard wire KEXP in here? Yes, I really want to hurt you. Sheesh.)
I got up early today, went to the gym, and now I’m here writing. I’ve made sensible food choices since I woke up, I’m going to a meeting tonight, and I asked the Universe for help this morning. I know things just might still feel like crap even if I’m doing everything I can to take care of myself, but I think I should at least give myself a fighting chance, a blank slate, a nourished physical being and as calm of a mind as I can find.
Sometimes I wonder whether or not I’m holding Raf hostage. Not literally, obviously, but just wonder from time to time if I’m fit to be in a relationship in general. I talk about it with Donna and she’s real laid back about stuff. Look, Victoria, this is just how things are right now. It will pass. Everything passes. When your life is bursting at the seams there’s no room to feel any of this stuff, and when it slows down, you just have to go through patches like this sometimes. And it doesn’t mean that I’ve made bad relationship choices or bad life choices or that a day that I don’t feel so hot about myself means that I’ve done something horribly wrong that I can’t find. It just is, things feel how they feel, and it passes.
Tell that to the army in my head. Seriously.
I heard a speaker last night who had just turned 77 and he had 55 years sober. I almost fell off my chair. And you know, he said the same stuff everyone else said – I knew nothing except the way my life was, I didn’t drink, I went to meetings, and my life started to get better. And now I don’t have to drink myself into oblivion anymore. But he had the time and the wisdom to talk about things, like how it took 25 years for the circus to leave town - I loved how he put that. How he fell apart and had his first wake-up to everything then, and realized he still had no coping skills and no nothing and no gauge and no starting point, so how the hell was he supposed to know where to start? So there he sat, almost 50 years old, with a ton of time, having lost all his money and everything around him and got to a place where things started to change for him. He talked about people blowing 15, 20, 40 years sober and going back out and drinking, and it was the same thing – they stopped going to meetings, stopped using the phone, got disconnected, and drank. Period. I guess, in a basic way, that the tune really doesn’t change… I mean, we all have clay feet (as Donna likes to say) so I’m not going to take every word the guy says as the Gospel of Everything Sober Ever, but you can bet I’m going to pay attention. Same message, different decade.
So what does that have to do with now, and my head being inside out? I think it’s that the base solution works. We all have our trips and our experiences and whatever, but under all that are these stepping stones to recovery and then the life that ensues as a result.
I miss my mom. It’s almost a year already since she died, I am beside myself with that reality just – staring at me, I guess. I feel the year of time having passed, the year of pain and healing and pain and change and all of that, but if I hadn’t had a calendar or interactions or seasons to mark it by, I’d swear it was maybe three or four months at the most. A year. And that my dad’s been dead for five years. And that it’s been fourteen years (!!!) this spring since I graduated high school. See, when I look at that one, it really feels like there’s about twelve lifetimes that went by, half of it sober, half of it not, relationships and apartments and bliss and insanity and everything in between.
I am in such a state of restlessness, I’m irritable and discontent. Apparently there’s only one solution for that, and a big part of it is me sucking it the fuck up and getting my shit together. I need to play nice, make my bed, and take some help from my friends… I really hate a lot of the people I know right now. I’ve got a short list, kids. Short. A lot of people I’ve been sitting in meetings long enough with to know that they are insane, and then there’s the handful that started good and wound up not wanting to talk about things like not wanting to go to meetings. Right now the only people I’ve got are grownups, women I know that I’m sort of detached from that have been sober through patches like these, and Donna, Kristin, Meg, Kacia, and Lesley. I mean, there’s a huge secondary list, but some of it is full of young people’s meetings brand drama… the first list (grownups) I think would consist of Hillary, Robin, Betsy, Gale, not Pauline because she doesn’t call back anymore, and maybe Lori and Elizabeth… it’s time. I don’t fit at meetings where the most time tops out at two years and everyone is texting and just general chaos is ensuing. I’m not 23, I’m 31.
I just realized that a big part of the struggle is just being okay with where I’m at – not like I didn’t know that, but it’s more defined in this minute – it’s literally where I am, my age, my finances, my body – things are changing. I can’t get away with being a kid anymore (not in the running around outside way, I mean more like the childish emotional not dealing with things popularity contest way).
“Finally, we begin to see that all people, including ourselves, are to some extent emotionally ill as well as frequently wrong, and then we approach true tolerance and see what real love for our fellows actually means. It will become more and more evident as we go forward that it is pointless to become angry, or to get hurt by people who, like us, are suffering from the pains of growing up.”
This is going to take a lot of fucking work. Wish me luck.
vvb
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