The Last Chance Texaco

Archive for the ‘Perseverance’ Category

I hear people in meetings all the time say how they do a written 10th step every night.  Honestly, I cannot imagine doing that.  It’s hard enough to find time to do everything else that needs to be done.  But, written or not, I do regularly look back on my day, or my recent past, and look at my motives, and when I am able to, I try to make it right.

The thing is, now that I’ve been sober awhile, it is no longer the really obvious selfish choices that harm others that trip me up; it is the small, ambiguous details.

If I’m dating someone, or thinking of dating someone, when do I tell them about this blog?  Or do I tell them at all?  I can hardly keep some of the details of my past from them, but is it better to hold back on it or to up front with it.  And what if I suspect that I might actually like someone, and become afraid that my history will scare him away.  If I direct him to my story here then, am I not actually depriving him of the opportunity to get to know me, and then decide on his own what he wants to know?  Isn’t that a decision based on fear?

I did that recently.  I tried to scare someone off before he had the chance to decide for himself whether he wanted to be scared off or not.  I did it because I was afraid.  If I was going to be hurt I wanted it to be now instead of later, when it would hurt more.

If a person is curious it isn’t too hard to do a Google search, or go to a library and look in the card catalog for that matter.  There is more than one person with my name in the world, but even so, 8 of the first 10 Google results are me.  If a person wants to know they can.  The only reason for me to direct someone here is either for attention (which I wouldn’t rule out – some of my old stuff is pretty good) or I want to manipulate them into seeing me a particular way.

It’s a very fine line though, isn’t it?  Discerning our motives can be so subtle, and so easy to justify or deny.

There will be an end to this, right?  I’m still beating myself up for having been blind to, or simply ignored, all of the red flags that went up with The Bullet That I Dodged.  They were there in front of me all the time, from the very first time we met, and somehow I managed to dismiss them from my mind.

It’s a tricky little machine, isn’t it, our minds?  I can be going along fit as a fiddle, right as rain, and ready for love and suddenly, WHAM!  I become blindsided by something that had been clearly in view; something obvious to everyone but me.  At 41 months sober I feel like I handle most things pretty well.  I’m not sure I “manage” them, but they don’t manage me anymore.  Then along comes something like the notion that perhaps romantic attachment may still be possible for me and I experience all over again the same kind of insanity that accompanied my drug use.  I think this time will be different.  This time it won’t hurt me.  This time will be worth it. Read the rest of this entry »

Today, for example.  After an hour of being yelled at by an authority figure who didn’t know what she was talking about and who was under the false assumption that what someone worthless told her was true, I learned that earlier today my sister tried to kill herself.

By slashing her own throat.

And there is nothing I can do about either of those things.  If “by this time sanity will have returned” means that I’m not going to pick up over this stuff, then it is correct.  If it is supposed to mean that I am impervious to the madness around me, that I am immune to feeling angry, afraid, defensive, and confused then sanity has not returned.

Right now I am going to act like it has.  Keep calm and carry on.

It should have become clear to me a long time ago.  Perhaps it was and I simply hadn’t the willingness to do something about it, but it is clear now that I can benefit from therapy.  I don’t think I’ll make any significant gains in becoming happy without professional help.  So in addition to starting medication, I’ve started counseling. Read the rest of this entry »

I can’t believe it. Day 1000 passed without my noticing it. I was in Las Vegas at the time visiting my mom and dad. I spent the day hanging out with them, my great-uncle and his new wife and daughter, my aunt and two of my cousins. Watched some football. Took a nap. I didn’t even notice that the un-official milestone had passed.

It’s so strange. In the first 90 days there wasn’t a day that passed without me knowing exactly how long it had been. Even as recently as day 500 I would as often as not be aware of the time. It is the addictive process in reverse. Being sober becomes your “normal.” Day by day another little piece of the old way of being falls away.

While I was in Las Vegas I went on one of the “thrill rides” at the top of the Stratosphere Hotel – the Big Shot. When you’re on the ride it seems longer than it really is. Much longer. Especially the falling part. For a good part of the time you are falling at the speed of gravity so you get this eerie weightless feeling; this amazing kind of ‘powerless.’

It’s probably not surprising that the first real using dream I’ve ever had in the last 1005 days was that night. That night and the next I actually had a hard time falling asleep. I couldn’t get past the part at the beginning of falling asleep that feels a little bit like falling. That all seems to have resolved itself though. Anyway – the ride is worth doing. Once. Take that off my bucket list now.

They’re out. They’re back in. They’re out. They’re back in.

It’s exhausting. I’m afraid I have a growing prejudice against those that seem to want it but aren’t willing to ride out the discomfort in order to achieve long term sobriety. Not that I can claim anything like long term sobriety for myself yet, but at 3 months shy of three years clean, I think I may be on the right track. I have definitely endured the first difficult days and not had to go back.

The Cheerleader went out the night I thought he was doing so well. He claims to be back in. I haven’t talked to him. This is the third time he’s done this and I don’t really know how much I want to keep being hopeful for someone, only to be let down. Again.

The Farmer’s Daughter did a tour through a psych hospital after a couple of rounds of vodka and an attempted suicide by insulin. She is now at the Betty Ford Center. Truth be told, I’m jealous. I’d love to go back to treatment for three months. In many ways the 28 days I spent in treatment were the happiest days of my life. You can do an amazing amount of growing in treatment that is very difficult to do when “worldly clamors” distract you from full time healing.

Dr. Silkworth is rightly points out in a Grapevine article from January, 1947, that, “There is nothing “screwy about it at all. The patient didn’t follow directions.” Which makes me wonder if they are the kind of patients that were unable to follow the directions, or did they simply refuse to. And does it matter.

I cannot claim to have followed the directions perfectly, myself, and yet I seem, more or less, to be fine; to have recovered from the hopeless condition I found myself in three years ago. I may have missed the mark, but I’ve come close enough to score, and I intend to keep doing that. We addicts are human beings, just like other human beings, and we can protect ourselves intelligently from relapse.

“We don’t want anybody up here. We just tell people this place is nothing but a bunch of queers and weirdos,” my sponsor told me.  There is a kernel of truth in it, of course, but there is a sweetness about the place and the people there that is hard to describe.

I exaggerated about the indoor plumbing/electricity feature of the town.  Most of the people have running water.  Some of them even have HOT water.  And there is electrical service in the town which is serviced by it’s own small hydro-electric plant, but people don’t use it much.  Even so, it is remote.  I haven’t heard quiet like that or seen dark like that in a long, long time.

The first night we grilled steaks on a campfire. watched stars shooting through the night sky, and had dessert with some neighbors.  During the next day I listened to AA speaker CDs, CDs about the Eightfold Path.  I enjoyed the hot springs and the wilderness.  We had breakfast with friends and went for walks.  I took pictures of dead pickup trucks which are allowed to remain there to deter the Sun Valley people from discovering how wonderful the place it.  I read and napped and practiced meditating.

Why did I have such a hard time realizing that having a Higher Power does not mean having a deity?  I am more and more convinced that having a Higher Power without having a deity is necessary for me and that my path back to feeling connected to that Power  will largely be the byproduct of practice.  The small time I devoted to the practice certainly led me to believe that, as the book Alcoholics Anonymous says, “we can but clear the ground a bit” and that clearing the ground through a practice of meditation may be the hinge upon which my progress turns.

I was in a great place to begin a practice, not having the usual distractions of home and office around.  Even so, focusing on mere breath is not as easy as it sounds

“Somewhere in the process, you will come face to face with the sudden and shocking realization that you are completely crazy.  Your mind is a shrieking, gibbering madhouse on wheels barreling pell-mell down the hill utterly out of control and helpless.  No problem.  You are not crazier than you were yesterday.  It has always been this way, and you have just never noticed.”  Bhante Henepola Gunaratana

That’s a relief.  If there weren’t passages like this in the guide I was reading I would be sure, as I have always been, that I wasn’t doing it right.

Anyway, I imagine that things are as they should be, and I imagine that I am still on track, even if it does not appear to me that I am.  I just know that

I bought a book the other day, right after I vomited my insanity here; Mindfulness in Plain English.  And I’m encouraged because I finally found a definition of ‘faith’ that I can work with.  No GrandWizardMagicalSantaClaus required.  What a relief.  I have some nice, plainly written instructions to make a beginning, and then there are retreats, with advanced instructors.

Reading the course application, I wonder if I could even do it at this point, but I believe I could get there.

I am also considering getting rid of my television and limiting my internet time just to help reduce the amount of noise in my head.  My sense is that television interferes with my ability to think clearly and hinders my growth.

I’m headed to Atlanta, ID with my sponsor tomorrow afternoon to enjoy 3 days in the mountains without indoor plumbing, electricity, paved roads or telephones.

I appreciate all the feedback I got from my last post.  Looking back I can see that this is really an issue that I’ve held on to for decades.  The appearance of an old friend from when I lived in Sweden reminded me that there was a time even then that I was desperate for there to be something I could  have real faith in, and being surrounded by a religion that made no sense to me at all.

It appears then that it is in my nature to yearn for an understanding of or knowledge of something that I can only understand or know through my own experience.  Faith that makes sense to me isn’t belief in something because it is written in some book.  It is belief in something because I have observed it within myself.  If I’m going to have a relationship with that I have a great deal of observing within myself to do.