Fear

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It’s just like riding a bicycle

March 25, 2011 in Fear, Perseverance, Resentment by Chris | No comments

Twelve miles southeast of Boise is a dam on the Boise River called the Lucky Peak Dam.  In addition to providing we Boiseans with recreational opportunities, the dam also produces a modest amount of electrical power and helps control flooding in our city.  Riding a bicycle home from the dam is a really beautiful journey along our greenbelt. Over the course of 12 miles one drops in elevation by 96 feet.  Not much really.  Enough so that when you turn around and go back you really notice, but on the ride away from the dam the grade is almost imperceptible.

My heart failure is like that.  I didn’t really notice what was happening because it all seemed like a slow progression uphill as I was healing from my lung surgery two years ago.  It just seemed like I never quite got better but in truth, looking back I can see that my heart has been getting gradually worse for at least 4 years.  So I’m taking a beta-blocker and my cardiologist wants to do a catheterization procedure because he’s found out all he can from the outside and all that is that something is wrong, both with the amount of blood my heart pumps (left bundle branch block) and with my heart rhythm (supraventricular bigemini).  Needless to say, even with my precious health insurance, there is a cost and it will be painful.  But unless I have that surgery the most I can hope to do is cover up the symptoms.  Only surgery can correct it if it even can be corrected.

And recovery has been like that lately.  Well honestly I’ve been noticing the slow but steady progression for a long time.  I have noticed that the staying sober part has been relatively easy but that gradually, over time, the living has gotten more complicated; that placing my “trust and reliance on a power greater than ourselves” has become a distant, somewhat quaint idea.  I can buy into the small “h” higher power of the program or of reality, but the God “personal to me?”

The last three months in particular the living part has been almost more than I can bear, and I can’t talk about most of it because it will all likely end up in court.  I can say that my life is permeated with fear and resentment.  I don’t even believe in that Higher Power that everyone talks about and yet I have found myself in the last couple of weeks praying that it would reveal itself to me in a way that I could understand again.  I’m terrified of having the Mother Theresa variety of spiritual experience and not getting an answer until just before I die.  I am afraid that, like with the heart surgery, I don’t have what is required for me to get what I need.  I’m afraid I lack the faith required to have a vital spiritual experience.  I suppose all of this puts me solidly back in step 2, doesn’t it.

In my condition, it really would be a miracle if I stayed sober.  My sponsor told me that everything I needed to stay sober I learned in the first 30 days; that staying sober after that is like riding a bicycle.  I just have to keep peddling.

Gradually things got worse

March 24, 2011 in Fear, Living in Recovery, Spirituality by Chris | No comments

That is my favorite phrases in the book “Alcoholics Anonymous.”  It is part of chapter 1, Bill’s Story and it is in a place where he has described his life and his alcoholism to that point in pretty graphic and heartbreaking detail.  “Gradually things got worse,” he says, though one can hardly imagine how.  Things in life are like that.  Sometimes you cannot tell anything is wrong at all until, seemingly suddenly, they are terrible and then looking back you can see that you’ve been ambling down a gentle slope for a long time.

I started a part-time job recently; a little extra income to keep my hefty health insurance bill paid.  After enduring what I went through two years ago I hope never to be without care again.  So I got this little job at a discount retail store as a sales associate in the home goods and furniture department.  The were happy to capitalize on the fact that I am 6’4″ and  I was happy to have a little extra structure in my life that has lately been an emotional, economic, and professional free fall.  And on my 2nd day at work I was asked to carry a large terra cotta pot to the front of the store.

I could not catch my breath.  The effort required to do that simple thing shocked me.  That small event drew my attention to the symptom and I noticed that breathing was often hard for me, even at rest.  I remembered shooting a small video with my cell phone back in December and noticing that it’s most pronounced feature was the sound of me breathing.  Well, having worked to maintain health insurance I took myself to the doctor’s office.

My own physician was booked several days out but the nurse suggested that my symptoms dictated that I be seen immediately so I came into the office, fully expecting that they would listen to my lungs, prescribe some kind of inhaler or pill or both and send me on my way, symptom free.  They did listen to my lungs, and heart, and then they strapped an ECG on me, ran the test for several minutes, and sent me off to the emergency room.

If you have ever walked into an emergency room with cardiac symptoms you know it is a really different experience than a regular ER visit.  I was scooped up in a wheel chair and rushed into the back faster than I could say infarction and within seconds a swarm (probably not the right word for a group of medical professionals) of people in scrubs surrounded me, putting stickers and electrodes on me, piercing my skin and drawing blood, hooking up IVs and sticking oxygen under my nose, and asking me questions.

The doctor, who to my delight was one of the most attractive young men I have ever seen, was in the room in record time.  I love that young doctors tend to introduce themselves by their first and last names rather than Dr. Last Name the way older ones do.  It makes me more comfortable.  He had his stethoscope all over me with his lovely blue eyes closed and his head tilted and I am pretty sure my heart was beating out “I love you” in Morse code.

This post will come to talk about my experience, strength, and hope regarding my addiction, but that is going to happen in part 2.  Right now I have to go to work so I can keep myself covered with health insurance.

Is it enough that I am distressed?

December 26, 2010 in Fear, Living in Recovery, relationships, Resentment, Shortcomings by Chris | 9 comments

Zosima the ElderThat I am not too well at the moment may not be the most obvious thing to those around me, but it is true.  I am not too well at all.  I have for some time now been trying to conceal the fact that I am enraged; that I wish for the slow and painful death of my enemies.  I am so angry that my work is impaired, my life is diminished.  I cannot fall asleep and once I do I have a hard time getting up.

I don’t remember being this unhappy at Christmas.  Four years ago, maybe, but definitely not since.  Maybe I’m just emotional, but God gave us emotions for a reason so I suppose there is something there that I can be growing from.   So you’ll excuse me if I rant for a second, right?

I sent my mom off to rehab earlier in the month.  My step-dad was trying to figure out a way to get her thrown in jail, but I managed to talk him into rehab and then I had to talk her into going.  Hours of screaming.  It took hours of screaming.  He promised to do several things while she was away and he promised he would attend family week.  He has done none of the things he said he would do and he is not attending family week.  He is a flaming bag of assholes and I wish he’d die.  But if he isn’t going to die, I hope my mom survives divorcing him.

The older of my two sisters has been a raving lunatic for nearly a month, (plus some 40-odd years, but who’s counting) and in spite of the fact that my other sister bought her a plane ticket to fly down from Siberia, she decided not to come and to blame everyone else in my family for causing her to not use her non-refundable ticket.

I have spent an inordinate amount of time defending myself against my step-father’s assertion that I am on the verge of relapse, an idea he is anxious to tell everyone.  It is possibly a marijuana induced delusion, but he doesn’t have a problem with pot.  He’s just an alcoholic.  Ironic, isn’t it?  That someone who claims to be sober, but isn’t, would be warning about the imminent relapse of someone who is actually sober?

I realized when I was barely able to keep myself from crying over it at a meeting tonight, that I am already fearing the day that my sponsor dies.  He’s 76, I think.  He isn’t going to live forever.  I hadn’t realized before tonight, though, how strongly I feel love for him.

And just for a wacked twist to everything, I’ll throw this in.  I haven’t thought about the Imaginary Future Ex-Husband in a long, long time.  He crossed my mind briefly on the 13th which is the anniversary of the night he vanished on me, making my recovery possible, but except for that, he is not part of my consciousness.  Tonight I ran into his brother at a meeting.  He has been sober for 4 days.

All of these things, and more, have been weighing heavily on me and I have barely been pretending to be normal-ish,  and I am only one more disaster away from bursting into tears and running away from home.  I feel powerless to change any of it.  I feel unable to even change my point of view or my attitude.  I am not sure, but I don’t think I’ve been this fucked up in 4 years.

“But what’s to be done? What can one do in such a case? Must one despair?”

“No. It is enough that you are distressed at it. Do what you can, and it will be reckoned unto you. Much is done already in you since you can so deeply and sincerely know yourself.”
-Feodor Dostoievsky, “The Brothers Karamasov”

It hardly seems like the fact that I am distressed is enough.  I suppose, however, that it is a beginning of a first step on the situations that face me.  I have been trying ‘The Best Short Prayer” for awhile now, and it seems to not yet be working.  I suppose if I just said ‘fuck it’ I would get up and go paint my bathroom or something.  Pink, I think  I have gotten all the hideous wallpaper down so I suppose it is time to do something.  There is plenty around here to busy myself ‘doing’ – and in that I might at least find myself ‘being’ productive or distracted.  If I found something to do for someone else, like Zossima suggests farther along in the narrative, I might even grow to again have faith in a plan and a purpose for me and a connection to a Higher Power that can solve all my problems.

“But I predict that just when you see with horror that in spite of all your efforts you are getting farther from your goal instead of nearer to it at that very moment I predict that you will reach it and behold clearly the miraculous power of the Lord who has been all the time loving and mysteriously guiding you.”

Still Beating Myself Up

June 23, 2010 in Acceptance, Faith, Fear, Honesty, Integrity, Perseverance, relationships, Resentment, Shortcomings by Chris | 5 comments

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 »

Some days just crap on you.

June 22, 2010 in Acceptance, Fear, Perseverance, Resentment, Shortcomings by Chris | 1 comment

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.

Chief Activator – Super-Villain

June 7, 2010 in Fear, relationships, Shortcomings by Chris | 8 comments

Most of my family came to town for Peter’s funeral.  The night they arrived, my sister, her husband and 3 children, my brother, his wife and three children, my mother, my step-father, my step-sister, my aunt and I went out for dinner.  Only my sister in Alaska wasn’t able to make it.  It wasn’t an entirely sad occasion.  I did notice that John, my step-father, had to step out a couple of times to regain his composure.  For the most part, though, it was a pretty nice evening, breaking bread with each other and remembering Peter.

Afterward my aunt and I grabbed some coffee at Starbuck’s and went to her house to talk; commiserate really.  She is in the throes of a very nasty divorce from a man I usually refer to as “Skid Mark” – and I’m licking my wounds at having chosen so poorly again.  We both choose poorly.  We have histories of choosing poorly.  After awhile she confessed to me with tears in her eyes that she is afraid of becoming the “crazy old aunt.  The hanger on.  The one the kids are afraid of.”  I could completely identify.  I hope the worst case is that I become the eccentric, fun uncle; the one the parents are a little worried about but that the kids love.  And I guess it could happen.

And all that, particularly the disappearance of the Man Who Never Was, got me thinking about the last part of the 7th step. Read the rest of this entry »

I Need An Overhauling

June 4, 2010 in Fear, Honesty, relationships, Shortcomings, Willingness by Chris | 3 comments

“Many of us needed an overhauling there.  But above all, we tried to  be sensible on this question.  It’s so easy to get way off the track.”  Alcoholics Anonymous, Page 69

And some of us more than others, apparently.  After taking a good, long time off  from any semblance of serious dating, dating with the intention of finding a Lifetime Companion, I find that regardless of the work I have done, my “picker” is still broken.  I still find myself attracted to the sickest of the sick.  If it is true that water seeks it’s own level that isn’t saying much about my progress, is it?  Luckily I’ve been buoyant enough to bounce happily right out of the last debacle.

In the part of the Big Book that discusses our Sex Inventory we find the word “ideal” or “ideals” mentioned five times; five times in four paragraphs.

  1. In this way we tried to shape a sane and sound ideal for our future sex life.
  2. We asked God to mold our ideals and help us to live up to them.
  3. Whatever our ideal turns out to be, we must be willing to grow  toward it.
  4. Suppose we fall short of the chosen ideal and stumble?
  5. We earnestly pray for the right ideal, for guidance in each questionable situation, for sanity, and for the strength to do the right thing. Read the rest of this entry »

A Memorial Day to Forget

June 2, 2010 in Acceptance, Death, Fear, relationships, Resentment, Shortcomings by Chris | 10 comments

“And those are the words of a gentleman. [Y]our arrogance and conceit, your selfish disdain for the feelings of others made me realize that you were the last man in the world I could ever be prevailed upon to marry.” – Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

It is always hardest to write when I need to most, and this time is no different.  I have done all the things we do and I suppose I have achieved something mildly resembling peace of mind about the subject, yet I am not entirely well at the moment; not even in relative terms. I am not too well emotionally and I am not too well spiritually.  I think the cramp in my back is a good indication that I may not even be too well physically at the moment.  All I am able to do from here forward is to wait and pray… and try to forget.

A good way to put a new relationship to a test is to take a little trip together and so I invited the man I have been so enamored with to join me for the Memorial Day weekend at my parent’s cabin on Payette Lake in McCall, ID, a beautiful, serene, relaxing place where I have always been able to put the clamors of a complicated world behind me and breathe.  I had packed a bunch of food; salads, rib eye steaks, etc., books, there are plenty of board games and satellite TV there.  There is a private beach.  There are trails and hot springs nearby. The place is paradise to one who can appreciate it. Read the rest of this entry »

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