Default Setting

It’s amazing to me, I guess it shouldn’t be at this point in recovery, but it’s amazing to me how quickly I return to my default setting; to return to the way of thinking, if not behavior, that always gets me back to where I came from unless I take purposeful action. Like when I turn on my computer after a power outage, extra stress in it’s many forms, seems to erase the growth I’ve had since the last time the machine was shut off. It is just so easy to fall back on the old way of being. It takes so much conscious effort to keep trudging forward.

Since I became aware of this warrant thing and became spiritually ready to face it I’ve had an extra set of challenges that I didn’t have before it came to my attention. I am finally an employable person but with unresolved warrants out in the world I am afraid to go to work, lest I destroy another job by being hauled out by the police. Lest I lose my home and what few artifacts of civilized living that I have accumulated in the last year after losing everything. A power surge of fear and BOOM! I’m back at my default setting. Fear. Perhaps to a lesser degree than at any point before in my life but fear just the same.

Because of that fear and not being economically productive in that last month my finances have gone completely to hell. Completely. Here are the facts of the situation. Yesterday my phone was shut off for nonpayment. I have $15.74 to my name. I don’t have any idea where the next money is coming from. I have mentioned the situation at meeting level and to my sponsor on a few occasions in the last couple of weeks, trying to be make it more clear that I was asking for help and direction and the bottom got nearer. By yesterday, when my phone got shut off, I hit full tilt panic. I have prayed. Ceaselessly(ish). I have been working with others and getting out of myself (regularly). I have attended meetings regularly - with days free now I’ve added a noon meeting to my regular 5:30 and 8:00 schedule so I average 21+ meetings a week. I have done step work.

My friends point me to the book. My friends remind me that “fear of economic insecurity will leave us.” My friends ask me if there is a roof over my head, if my electricity is on, if I have food. While I can only see the day that those things disappear is nearing they remind me that it isn’t that day today and I need to place my reliance on God. I counter with “how far do I have to let this go before I scream for help?” They smile. “You’re right where you need to be.” “Fuck you, asshole” I smile to myself. I go home and cry.

Coinciding with that stress, I have the unprecedented apparition of Mr. Astonishingly Handsome Tall-Smart flirting with dangerous abandon but from the safe door-to-door distance of 1698 miles. Except for wrestling with a handful of boys who weren’t actually interested in me, I have been alone, and by that I mean not even a date with anyone who might be a potential companion, for 14 years. It hurts. I don’t think I’m ugly. I don’t think I’m stupid. I don’t think I’m ‘too picky’. I don’t even think I’m too broken, not for someone with the right stuff, the stuff a life together is made of. I’m pretty sure I have exactly that stuff lying dormant in me. I can say with some certainty that a major contributing component to my justifying relapse in the past is the absolute hopelessness I feel about ever hearing someone I love breathing beside me; how much I miss kissing a man’s neck as he shaves in the morning, the feeling of an arm around my shoulder pulling me toward him, the sleeping weight of a thigh on top of mine.

Here my default setting splits me apart. Run to and run from but run blindly. I want things from it that are quite real and quite reasonable. Know me. Let me know you. Share. Reason. Some of them are the height of selfishness, the most egregious manifestations of my disease. Save me. Love me no matter what. Make me feel loved. Kill the loneliness. Be the Carpenters/Bacharach/Bayer-Sager/Mitchell song in the soundtrack of my life. You be the Professor and I’ll be Eliza. You be the Doctor and I’ll be Tammy. It all looks the same to me. Be my higher power (small caps - big shoes). Just like the relationships I had in the Dances with Junkies part of my life, I am still ill equipped to discern ‘the true from the false’.

My friends keep reminding me that I’m not going to be successful at this as long as I’m not placing my trust and reliance on G*d. They think I’m not placing my trust and reliance on G*d.

That’s silly. Of course I am. I would have been high already. And that’s the thing about recovery and spiritual growth. The default settings improve over time. Mine have. I know they have. I would have been high already. I’m not where I want to be but I’m closer than I was a year ago. A year ago I would have been high already. Of course I’m placing my trust and reliance on G*d. He is obviously doing for me what I could not do for myself though I would have liked to.

Before the grace of G*d, I would have been high already.