God

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Fuzzy

January 5, 2008 in Living in Recovery by Chris | 4 comments

I am a creature of habit. I am not as flexible as I imagine myself to be. I am not unique. Sometimes I am able don a guise of pliancy convincing enough to fool everyone, including me, but it is made of denial and pride. Underneath that guise I find myself to be a post-traumatic adolescent in the corner of the room clinging to a threadbare security blanket, crying over the Mayberry childhood that never was.

Part of my disguise is the mien of clarity; the impression that I am willing and able to see things as they really are. I affect a willingness and ability to live life on life’s terms and acuity of God’s will in my life. In fact I still suffer from spiritual blurriness which only improves by applying myself to a spiritual program of change and doing so with those who have gone before me.

I mention this because my sponsor has moved away. I am not yet willing to seek out a new sponsor. There are good reasons to continue working with Jim. He will be here in Boise every six weeks or so (his daughter lives here). We both have unlimited long distance plans and email so it is not access to communication that is the problem. He has taken me successfully through the steps and continues to guide me through the long list of amends I have yet to make. Yet his physical absence has removed some of the spiritual focus that I depend on to live most comfortably in the world.

The power of my Creator trickles through every part of my life. I am able, by taking the steps and by helping others, to nurture that trickle. I am awash in the stream of life. But where I am able to connect with that stream of Life, working with Jim, seeing him on an almost daily basis, was like standing in front of a fire hose. I have faith that that clarity and power will return, that I will soon be back in front of the real power of the God of my own understanding. I have faith that if I continue to seek that I will soon be the one wielding the hose for those around me. I had an expert teacher for that. But I miss him. And I feel a little fuzzy.

Photo credit: BHF February Challenge – 08 Something Old, originally uploaded by TheNixer.

 

Humility v. Humiliation II; Dude, I’m working a program here.

November 27, 2007 in Living in Recovery by Chris | 6 comments

nixon_tx_texaco.jpgI had an interesting and clarifing conversation with my sponsor regarding humility and humiliation. According to him, and I like this definition, I can work with this definition, humility is thinking of others more than I think of myself. Humiliation is doing something that is beneath me, for whatever reason. He said that McD is perfect right now. If I’m sober and working a program, if I’ve given myself to God, then God’s will is quite simply ‘what happens.’ Whether I understand it or like it or not. He also suggested that as I take this humiliating experience to God that I say something like (his words) “Dude, I’m working a program here. I’m ernestly seeking you. I’m trying to do as I think you would have me do. Now could you kick me down some shit?” You know, basically the last part of the third step prayer.

It just this second occurred to me that perhaps my strategy of taking a job I don’t give a shit about just to keep my nose above water (or rather slow my decent to the bottom of the ocean – let’s face it, this job is not going to pay my bills) and to not have to lose a job I care about because of my unresolved legal bullshit is a demonstration of lack of faith that God will make this all work out somehow rather than a demonstration of faith by doing what seems to me to be the next indicated thing. Maybe I should have been looking for a less humiliating job. Maybe I should have just ignored my fear about losing a job I care about and gone for a job I love.
Oh fuck.

What if that’s not the only area of my life I do that in? I mean, how could it be. You take a principle or a core belief and see how it plays out in one area of life and then reframe the some other area of life in light of the same principle and see if the same thing is happening, right? What if I push away people I care about, what if I place an absolute bar against letting love in, in favor of something worse, something humiliating, like being alone for another 14 years, because I’m afraid of losing them?

See, thats the thing about writing a thing like this. It does something to my brain. I’m all over the map normally and putting a keyboard at my fingertips seems to pull me into a stream. River. Gully in a flash flood. Whatever.

Well then, where do I go from here? I’m already working for a clown. The clown offers medical and dental so apart from the stupid shoes and ugly hair he’s not all bad. I guess I need to be looking for a less humiliating job; something more in line with what I have to offer into the stream of life and not just wresting what I think I need to take from it. I guess I need to stop playing Superman, all locked in my Fortress of Solitude. I guess this is where true humility comes in and where humiliation and the harm I do because of it, stops.

Default Setting

November 25, 2007 in Living in Recovery by Chris | 2 comments

kustomkanopies.jpgIt’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.

“so many problems he despaired of ever solving them” p.XXVII

November 24, 2007 in Living in Recovery by Chris | 1 comment

delstexacodesmoins.jpgI am, now, officially freaked out. Between yesterday and today I have accumulated enough ‘Close, But No Cigar’ kind of experience to have convinced myself that I am, like an old boyfriend once said, “a complete failure as a human being.” Intellectually I know that it isn’t true, that my problems are surmountable, that ‘this too,’ like every fuckin’ thing else, will pass. But at this particular point and in the fucked up corner I’ve backed myself in to I can’t see a way out, save to let the paint on the floor DRY first, and I used oil based enamel. It won’t be dry enough to walk on till after it’s too late. I’m depressed. I’m lonely. I actually thought about using today, which is unusual; just a fleeting thought, but enough for me to take notice and take action.

My dad asked me to come to my nephew’s christening yesterday so I got up in the morning and rented a car and drove 350 miles to be there. Since it was being held way out in the country at my sister-in-law’s mother’s home my dad said he’d meet me at a particular corner at a particular time and I could follow him the rest of the way. On the way there I stopped one time to pee and buy a coke, otherwise I drove. And drove. And drove. I arrived at the designated intersection 2 minutes late. No one was there. I waited 3 or 4 minutes and no one came. Already starting to feel like I had completely failed, I backtracked about 5 miles, thinking that perhaps they said the corner where one turns to get on to the particular road where I thought I was supposed to meet them. I found no one. I drove back to the original corner. No one. At this point I am sure I have the directions completely wrong. That I’ve driven 4 ½ hours for nothing. I begin listening to the voice in my head that tells me the same thing Charlie told me in 1992 – “You are a complete failure as a human being.” I am a complete failure as a human being.

I was in the right place at the right time (plus 2 minutes); an extraordinary feat considering the distance traveled and the fact that it was way out in the country in a place I have never been and didn’t have a map to. But still I felt like a failure. And it kept me from asking my dad for some modest financial help that I absolutely need for the short period this this whole warrant thing is cleared up and I am brave enough to get a real job again. I’m not good enough to deserve help. I’m “a complete failure as a human being.”

As a consequence of not asking for that help, my phone is now shut off. I’m “a complete failure as a human being.”

I just went to a meeting where I didn’t share about what’s really going on with me because I can’t say what’s really going on. They have to have already realized that I am “a complete failure as a human being.”

I wouldn’t have said anything at all but someone I like happened, that God, to actually look at me, and loves me enough to do what I can’t do for myself and ask me what’s going on. She had a good suggestion. I believe now there is a path to solving my immediate financial crisis. My friend Joe K., the “God in your gut” Joe, overheard and asked me to join him for lunch, which was a nice break from being inside my head for the last 24 hours.

My problems still seem overwhelming. They still, even now that I’m sober, seem to pile up at an astonishing rate. Kind of like when you spend years drinking beer in a station wagon and throw the empties in the back. Eventually, when you slam on the breaks, you get showered with beer cans. My head is still telling me I am “a total failure as a human being.” And it hurts. My life is complicated and uncomfortable, entirely because I made it that way. But that doesn’t mean I’m “a total failure as a human being.”

I think it means simply that I AM a human being.

All of Me. Good and Bad.

November 10, 2007 in Living in Recovery by Chris | 5 comments

gamma_frankhawks.jpgI have a friend, Joe K. who has been sober something like 38 years. Joe has worked with hundreds of alcoholics and addicts, not just here in Boise, but all over the country and continues to do so. A couple of weeks ago I was in a meeting and met this dynamite guy with years and years of what looks like, on the outside, really solid recovery. This guy works with probably ten men in Los Angeles, where he lives. He flew into Boise to meet his sponsor, Joe K. You get the point. On the topic of recovery, Joe knows what he’s talking about.

I have known Joe for a very long time, through previous vain attempts (if you can call them that) at recovery, and, because Joe is cut from the same eccentric pink cloth as I am, I have always trusted him and maintained a friendship even when I have not been able to get or maintain anything like sobriety. We had a conversation many years ago during a particularly difficult spell, a time when the consequences were accumulating and my desire to avoid them increased, but also a time when I was still in denial about the absence of willingness to do the work. Joe pointed at my head and then my heart. He said, “Chris, you’ve got God here and here.” He pointed at my gut and said, “You need to get God HERE.” I had no idea whatever what he meant and he was unable to describe it in a way that I understood. “You just have to do the work,” he said.

Well at that point I was unable or unwilling to do the work. I mean, really I was just a little drunk and high on crystal meth. It wasn’t MY fault that that really hot guy stole my car (which I recovered in Salt Lake City six weeks later). I was not looking for an answer to the real problem at that point. I was looking to dodge the consequences. Still, what he said stuck with me. Any time I approached willingness to accept spiritual help that conversation would come to mind. In this go at recovery that conversation has never been far from the front of my mind and has troubled me.

When I got here this time however, I was pretty badly broken. I didn’t walk in trying to avoid external consequences. I walked in because I wanted to die and the only people I knew who had been where I was and gotten out were people in recovery. I walked in ready to grasp on to a few tools and follow a few instructions as if my life depended on it. I got here with a first step.

I came to believe that a Power greater than myself could restore me to sanity; I got God in my mind. I made a decision to turn my will and life over to that Power; I got God in my heart. Then I began the inventory process. Trudging through all of that was, obviously, painful and scary for me. It showed me over and over just exactly the extent of my condition and where I failed; how my complete inability to produce a desired effect in my life had harmed people I care about and driven me farther from the effect I sought to produce. Yet I got that all out on paper.

Thursday afternoon I sat down with Jim, the man I work with (which btw makes Joe K. my great-grand sponsor) and had a long, long . . . long talk. He sent me home to spend a quiet hour reviewing my work, looking for anything I might have left out. I did, in fact, have to call him and go over some things, things I left out and things I outright lied about. When all of that was done I got on my knees (I know usually that is a metaphor, but I did actually get on my knees) and had another conversation, this one with the God I know but don’t comprehend, and something happened. All of that pain, all of that doubt, all of that fear and the sense of unworthiness vanished. It vanished all at once and all at once the knowledge of God’s presence in my life moved from my heart to my gut.

I can’t say what it feels like or describe how I got there except to say, as Joe said, you just have to do the work.

Deus absconditus

November 7, 2007 in Living in Recovery by Chris | 4 comments

startexaco1.bmp.jpgI’m terrified of trusting God with anything important. I shouldn’t be. I have an indication or two that He’s at work in my life, yet I struggle with letting go of something so big as what I’ve been facing. And why? Because I don’t have His phone number? He doesn’t have a street address? I don’t see His picture in the Yellow Pages?

Years ago I saw Angels in America at the Mark Taper Forum. There I sat, the Mormon boy, with my Jewish attorney boyfriend, overwhelmed with the surreal fun house mirror image of my life unfolding on the stage in front of me. And of all the things that stood out to me was the idea that God is absent. Prior’s angelic visitor proclaims that man’s erring restlessness: his promiscuous mobility has driven God away from the world and as a result the planet is falling apart.

That idea somehow made it’s way into my consciousness. It somehow stuck. And now, I find the task of learning to trust a God that I had believed to be missing, because of my own inability to reach Him, well, daunting. Sure, I trust the God of Small Things. But capital G God?

This is scary.

We are the Actors, He is the Director

August 27, 2007 in Living in Recovery by Chris | 1 comment

Well, actually, I am. At least from 9 to 5. Today I start my new job as the Alternative Donations Director for the NFP that I work for. I’ll be in charge of leasing or purchasing warehouse space in Boise and Nampa, Idaho and setting up manned donation centers in them, developing our corporate giving program and soliciting those gifts, writing grants to fund various programs, developing a work skills development program for our clients as well as a marketable service to employ those participants, build community relations and use those to create opportunities for our supporters to give in all ways other than the ones currently being used.

I know about half of what I need to know to do this job well. I’m relying on the fact that I’m bright and happen to know a lot of people in this town to help me learn the rest. I may be ‘the director’ but I’m not the expert. It’s a far cry from the cheesy part time job that a month ago I didn’t dare apply for and didn’t think I deserved; that, considering who I had become, I didn’t deserve. Let me explain.

I’m not the kind of guy who gets to do things like this. I’m not the kind of guy who gets to be recognized as valuable. I can’t be a friend. I can’t be a good son. I can’t pay my rent or bills. In fact I had all of the symptoms of a spiritual malady described on page 52 of the book Alcoholics Anonymous;

“We were having trouble with personal relationships, we couldn’t control our emotional natures, we were a prey to misery and depression, we couldn’t make a living, we had a feeling of uselessness, we were full of fear, we were unhappy, we couldn’t seem to be of real help to other people.”

Overcoming that, or any part of it, could hardly have been done on my own. While the success I have been given isn’t promised till the 9th step, it is an answer to the 3rd step prayer:

” . . . build with me and do with me as Thou wilt. Relieve me of the bondage of self that I may better do Thy will. Take away my difficulties that victory over them may bear witness to those I would help of Thy power, Thy love and Thy way of life.”

I may be a director in this tiny area of the temporal plane, but my Creator is the director of my life. My job is the execution of the ordered direction of His thought.

Scratching My Head About What’s Just Not There

August 24, 2007 in Living in Recovery by Chris | No comments

WASHINGTON — Astronomers have stumbled upon a tremendous hole in the universe. That’s got them scratching their heads about what’s just not there. The cosmic blank spot has no stray stars, no galaxies, no sucking black holes, not even mysterious dark matter. It is 1 billion light years across of nothing. That’s an expanse of nearly 6 billion trillion miles of emptiness, a University of Minnesota team announced Thursday.

Excuse me? A hole in the universe? When I heard this on BBC World Service last night I was stunned. I’m even more baffled this morning as I’m reading about it. How can the universe have a hole in it? How can there be such a great expanse of nothing?

I wonder, though, if there can be something so inexplicable as a hole in the universe, 100 million light years of nothing where something should be, is it too far fetched to think that a hole can exist in the human spirit?

Often in 12 step meetings one hears people talk of a God sized hole in their spirit. Lots of those same people came into the fellowship with an inexorable atheism or at least an agnosticism bordering on hate. I’m not one of those. I have always believed that I was created by some greater power that had set the universe in motion. I just thought that after His work was done He just sat back to enjoy the show. The idea that such a Creator could be concerned with and involved in human affairs struck me as ridiculous.

I am not absolutely sure I’ve changed my mind on that point. In fact I may be more agnostic than I was before I sought recovery though I am more convinced that God comes to those who seek Him. The 3rd step decision I made was to turn my will and my life over to the care of God as I don’t understand him.

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