Unmanageability

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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.

The last time I felt like this . . .

February 16, 2011 in Forgivness, relationships, Resentment by Chris | No comments

The last time I felt like this I was headed for a relapse.  That is a terrifying thing to realize, but the last time I caught a resentment toward 12 step programs I wasn’t very far from heading out the door and over to my dealer’s house.  I’m nowhere near actually using or drinking.  I’ve even been able to keep the urge to smoke cigarettes in check.  That isn’t to say I’m not acting out but I haven’t acted in a way that can harm anyone except possibly me, and even that is doubtful.

I have given up my service commitment at my home group and don’t intend to go back there for awhile because I just don’t feel like I can be honest, even in a general way, and be safe.  I cannot rely on being anonymous there.  I certainly can’t be anonymous here.   I recognize that I am the one responsible for having ever had my real name attached to this blog and I am the one responsible for sharing it with people that I know.  I accept my part in that.  In 4 years though I haven’t had to monitor the comments for vicious, libelous, bigoted, and hateful statements.  It has been so bad that I shut down commenting for awhile and have decided that none will be published without my review.

People around here are always patting themselves on the back because, according to them, there are “so many meetings” around here.  I suppose they are right.  We have something like 200 a week.  After you subtract the smoking meetings and the women’s meetings (only because I’m a man) it is more like 100.  Take out the 10 PM and Midnight meetings and we’re down to 70.  I guess even that is alot, but I haven’t been to a meeting in quite a long time where I don’t know at least half the people there.   And I’m sorry, but AA is not a hotbed of mental health.  You know what?  In all the time I’ve been going to meetings I have never “hooked up” with anyone there and I just can’t believe how many people either try to fuck their way sober or simply fuck their way through the rooms.  I can’t believe how many people seem to have nothing to do except meddle in peoples lives and gossip.

I realized today that one of the people whom I feel so hurt by has always been a gossip.  She has told me how she feels about someone she sponsors.  She has told me how someone she knows feels about someone she sponsors.  She has told me the flaws in other people’s programs.  And through all of that it never occurred to me that she might turn around and say the same kind of stuff about me, or that she would say that kind of stuff to people who intend to harm me.  Never occurred to me.  I feel like such an idiot.

Here at the tail end of this really shitty month though I have had a couple of wonderful and deeply needed reminders that my staying on the path and that my sharing as honestly as I can is not meaningless.  I’ve been reminded that when I do this it occasionally generates some good in the world.  I am deeply, deeply grateful to Jonathan, Cody, and Stuart, three men I have never met, who reached out to me this week.  If it hadn’t been for you I may well have abandoned this and perhaps abandoned the path entirely.  Thank you guys for making a difference in my life.

Anyway, I know I’ll get through this.  I need to step back and pull focus back to the real thing; away from personal drama and back to recovery.  I know that I will have to find a way to forgive these people for my own sake.  I know there is a lesson about recovery in here somewhere.  I know I’m going to grow spiritually somehow.  I just want to know the lesson and be done growing now.

OK.  Enough ranting.  I’m going to go work on getting spiritually fit again.

Coming Home

January 8, 2011 in Acceptance, Justice, Perseverance by Chris | 1 comment

My mom completed her treatment and came home from Minnesota last night, and in spite of walking into a month of mail, an imminent divorce, and more, she seemed OK.  It was very late in the evening, and I could see as she went through the mail that she was becoming more and more distressed, her voice tightening and her hands trembling.  In the best situations coming home is a big deal.  She isn’t coming home to an ideal situation.

Home for me is in many ways the kind of emotional sobriety that I usually abide in.  Home is serenity, sanctuary, stability, safety.  Home is the place where I can be myself; where I don’t feel like I have to meet someone else’s expectations.  I haven’t been to my emotional and spiritual home since before my mom left to begin her journey there.  I need to be home and I have been working to get back there with a fervor and I have only just begun to get back there.

Mom coming home hasn’t really caused me to get back here.  Coming home has been the product of step work and prayer and honesty and it has been the product of how a Higher Power works in my life.  In spite all I have been angry about and hurt by, coming home, coming home to that place of acceptance and forgiveness, has helped me see that I’m free now from the noose I alone created.  It has been taken away, root and branch, and even though I occasionally snap back into believing that the memory of it is the thing itself, my conscience is clear.  And I am free now of the intense burden and stress that I have been bearing alone for so many months; I am free of it and yet I have kept my side of the street clean.

It is clear to me, also, that I could not solve this problem on my own, that without some work and some people with whom I am able to be honest, I might yet be trapped in an emotional landscape that is a continent away from where I belong.

Now that she is back in the dangerous location where she lives, I am hopeful that my mom can keep using what she has been shown in her own journey to her real home.

Presto

July 9, 2008 in Living in Recovery by Chris | 2 comments

Bullwinkle: “Hey Rocky, watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!”

Rocky: “Again? That trick never works.”

Bullwinkle: “But this time for sure. Nothing up my sleeve.  Presto!” . . . “I’ve got to get another hat.”

Rocky:  “And now, here’s something we hope you’ll really like!”

Don’t ask me how it works, or why.  Don’t ask me how I always seem to respond in a manner contrary to what my experience has been.

At 8:30 tonight I still had no idea what I was going to do.  At 8:30 the problem was solved twice over.

More to come.

Love Is Not All

March 12, 2008 in Living in Recovery by Chris | 6 comments

 

feetLove can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.

 

Edna St. Vincent Millay

 

I’m moving. At the end of the month I’m moving. And I am moving in to my own apartment. I realize that all you ‘grown ups’ out there have already done this, probably by the age of 18 or 20. But I have never successfully navigated this particular rite of passage. And it is time.

Among the considerations in choosing to live alone over moving in with a roommate was my desire to make it easier to begin dating again. Aside from the fellationship with the Imaginary Future Ex-Husband at the end of my using, there hasn’t been a man in my life, a man of any consequence, in about ten years. Sure, there have been tricks. I’m not a saint. I don’t know who would want to be a saint, really. If it was a trick I was interested in having I’m sure I could find a way to navigate that, anyway. I want to open the door a bit to the idea that if someone worth sharing time and space with should wander into my field of opportunity, that field is not cluttered with 3rd party agendas. If some Sunday morning desires to be spent with us in bed, drinking French roast and doing the NY Times crossword puzzle, I’d like it to be privately.

Somewhere along the line in this progression from ‘stuck’ to ‘recovering’ something has happened that I suppose I could have anticipated but didn’t. The age of the men who capture my attention has changed radically. In my late teens and twenties, all the way up to 40, really, the men who caught my attention were without exception older and richer than me. I had a fierce need for security. One of the 12 & 12 talks about those who place too much dependence on others, describing me perfectly.

I ran away from home when I was 17 and somehow landed in West Hollywood. Young and cute and smart and Mormon and a Boy Scout. I was a commodity, which was a good thing. It helped me survive. It helped that I was intensely attracted to men who could, and who wanted to, take care of me. I certainly couldn’t have done that on my own then. That insane need to be taken care of, the scar on my heart where my father belonged and miscellaneous other quirks landed me solidly in the arms of men over the age of 35 right up till I was 40. Even the IFX, though he was much younger than me, was a father figure of sorts.

In treatment I got a relationship with my father back. I’ve been moving toward ‘growing up’, and this bizarre phenomena has occurred. I am suddenly deeply attracted to men that are approximately the age I was when my addiction kicked into high gear – the men I would have been loving if I hadn’t been an addict. I’m really hoping that by doing the work the 4th step calls for that I’ll find myself accelerating quickly past this quirk. I’d like to get to the point where I’m most attracted to men my own age and am mature enough to relate to them, but that seems pretty far fetched when the object of my affection is another 20 year old straight boy.

At least I haven’t acted on that. At least at the point I figured out that he was straight, something that isn’t readily obvious in this boy, that I backed away and made sure that I hadn’t inadvertently upset him; that we were, indeed, friends.

Perhaps more surprising to me, in light of the off the chart, insane lust I have for, had for this boy, when I discovered he was straight it didn’t make my heart bleed. I was OK. The preoccupation, the intense desire, simply vanished.

I no longer feel, as I once did, that I am dying from a lack of intimate companionship. Though I haven’t been intimate with a man in 15 months I am not too tortured by it. I notice it. I know that I am alone. I am largely accepting of that. But I am still going to get an apartment of my own. I’m still going to create a path for him, whoever he is, should he choose to take it.

Let’s start at the very beginning; a very good place to start.

December 7, 2007 in Living in Recovery by Chris | 2 comments

“Let’s see if I can make this easy.” - Maria Kutschera von Trapp

Market StreetHawthorneAveSalemOregon1978.jpgMy experience in recovery and in taking the steps is that what began as a “turning point” or a “moment of clarity” 51 weeks ago was the beginning of a series of points or moments which have each brought me to a keener understanding of my addiction and so have helped me remain willing to continue to seek to know this Higher Power which has done for me what I could not do for myself, namely, keep me sober. Doesn’t that sound wonderful? How could someone not be impressed with such a change of heart, such a psychic rearrangement, especially when it is the result of applying one’s self to learning to live by a set of principles that are so noble that even those with spiritual prejudice can embrace them as ethical and worthy?

In my own experience those moments and points can best be described as ‘rude awakenings.’

I had one today, related closely to my first one.

At 11 months sober and 12 months since that first moment of clarity, nearly a year since my Creator gave me a vital first step, I realized that, um, my life is unmanageable.

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