Willingness

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And There I Was . . .

July 11, 2008 in Faith by Chris | 10 comments

Caught in the Snide
And in that dreadful place
Those spooky empty pants and I
Were standing face to face.
I yelled for help. I screamed. I shrieked.
I howled. I yowled. I cried.
Oh! Save me from those pale green pants
With nobody inside.
-Dr. Seuss

Isn’t that the essence of fear?  When we finally find the courage to face our fear we often discover it is empty.  Having conquered one, we move along in life, unaware of which of our unknown or unacknowledged fears lies ahead; what opportunity for incredible spiritual growth remains to be discovered. Read the rest of this entry »

Surrender

July 6, 2008 in Living in Recovery by Chris | 6 comments

I don’t normally duplicate work I produce elsewhere, but there are only so many ways you can say the same thing.  In this case, it’s something I need to say in every channel I write in.

Just like with drugs and alcohol, it seems to be a natural part of my character that until I have exhausted every other possible means of doing something, tried out every tiny, mad idea about how I can manage on my own power to get my life to work out the way I want it to, entertained every lurking notion my ego can generate, and laid waste to every reservation disguised by unwillingness, I am incapable of surrendering that part of my life to the Higher Power and the principles that got me sober. I simply do not surrender unless I have failed in every possible way I can think of. Read the rest of this entry »

The God of Cash and Prizes

July 4, 2008 in Living in Recovery by Chris | 6 comments

The God of Cash and PrizesI wrote a post over at the Second Road the other day about the hurdles we face in finding the Higher Power of 12 step programs. The idea for the post came from a conversation I had with a friend a few nights ago wherein he told me that the only ‘God’ he was willing to believe in, when he got to AA, was what he called “The God of Unintended Consequences”. The conversation was interesting enough to me that I immediately started researching the 2nd step observations of the early AAs and the neurobiology of belief.

I garnered some great knowledge in this, and I gained some really useful clarity about the roles of honesty, open mindedness, and willingness in having an effective spiritual experience. I understood, as I never had before, why it had been so important for me to cling to the alternate names of God we use; Higher Power, Creator, and Spirit of the Universe. Read the rest of this entry »

I Feel So Sleezy

June 29, 2008 in Living in Recovery by Chris | 6 comments

Remember these? High school gym shorts from the 1980′s. Wow. At the time I thought they were pretty hot, at least on certain guys. You had to have pretty great legs to pul[ this look off, but there were always a couple of guys in gym class who fit the bill. I think the poly-knit ones we had in high school were actually a bit tighter, perhaps a bit shorter which was only made possible because the slits up the side were not quite as high. The closet of my youth was filled with the hope of a ‘costume failure’.

No one would ever dream of wearing these today, except perhaps on Halloween. High school gym shorts today are perforated nylon, loose, and come to the mid-thigh. Equally hot, on the right guy of course, if you ask me, but I’ve always thought that men are the most beautiful creatures. Read the rest of this entry »

If You Lived Here You’d Be Home Now

June 10, 2008 in Living in Recovery by Chris | 8 comments

In the late 80s and early 90s they were not an uncommon site along the freeways leaving downtown Los Angeles; huge condo projects festooned with banners that read “If you lived here you’d be home now.” When the topic was brought up at a meeting, what are you doing today for your recovery, it’s what I immediately thought of. In the rooms we usually hear the same sentiment described as, “I live in the rooms and visit the world.”

I’m an egomaniac. I like my way better. Read the rest of this entry »

Letting Go Without Giving Up

May 18, 2008 in Living in Recovery by Chris | 3 comments

I spent yesterday in service to AA. I began the day at 7 AM with my friends Owen and Robert driving to Oregon to attend my first Area Assembly, the semi-annual meeting where the General Service Representatives (me) from around southern Idaho (the area) gather to conduct the business of Alcoholics Anonymous. It is intensly, what’s the word? Boring. It really is amazing to me that when you get a group of 150 alcoholics in a room that anything productive gets done at all.

I used to have a terrible bias against the service structures of AA, thinking that “AA as such ought never be organized” should exclude the kinds of middle management “service” that we do. But having attended this meeting I see the importance of this work and the value of having the process be so cumbersome. There is no more efficient way of carrying the conscience of individual groups up, to the larger group conscience, to get important work done. The most important work we’ve done recently has been to provide financial and experiential support to carry the message to Idaho’s large Spanish speaking community, including books and other literature, translation equipment so those groups can participate at assemblies and round-ups, etc. I am happy to have been able to participate in directing the use of 7th tradition money for that purpose and I am grateful to know what this kind of service is about. The process of getting that done, though, is an exercise in letting go of the outcome and not giving up on the process.

I got home at 7:30 PM and made my way to the 8 o’clock meeting and when I got there I called one of my sponsees who I had given directions for starting his 4th step a couple of days before. Without going into any of the sad details, in the last conversation I had with his parents at 9:45 PM I shared my experience with them that no one who ever stood in the way of the natural consequences of my use ever did me any favors. Helping me never helped. Because of the terms of my sponsees out-patient program and his disregard of those terms, he was thrown out of his house last night.

I had great hopes for this kid. He’s smart. He’s attractive. He’s talented. And he’s a real alcoholic, at least as nearly as I can tell. He’s the kind that actually has the best shot at getting sober the way we do it in AA; what we call a Type IV Alcoholic. He has that level of powerlessness and that level of unmanageability. I still have great hope for him, but I can’t manufacture willingness for people. God knows my own willingness was hard to earn. I know if he somehow manages to find that willingness he’ll be able to recover. He has to find his own way here. I pray he will find it soon.

Much Better!!!

May 10, 2008 in Living in Recovery by Chris | 5 comments

Challenges @ despair.comWow.  I’m glad that’s over with.  Now aside from burping up fish oil, which, if you’ve never experienced it, I really think you need to, and the minor annoyance of 14,000 people trying to cure breast cancer blocking the road to my aunt’s house, I am feeling like myself again.

I don’t often have episodes like yesterday.  Actually I’ve never had that specific kind of episode.  But there are others.  There are times when I feel overwhelmed.  There are times when I seem to notice everywhere I go I travel past somewhere I used drugs, bought drugs, sold drugs, suffered the consequences of my drug use.  There are times when I experience new and uncomfortable knowledge of the extent of the unmanagability of my life and my powerlessness over mind and mood altering substances and behavior.  I don’t often have episodes like yesterday anymore, so when I do it is incredibly disconcerting.  I think I should be better now.  I seem to suffer from the delusion that “restored to sanity” means I never experience the symptoms rather than that when I am symptomatic I have a solution.

I’ve heard over and over, and it’s been my experience, that mistaking remission for cured precedes a return to active addiction.  People stop going to meetings and stop carrying the message.  They stop working with other alcoholics and addicts.  It’s easy to see that brushing your teeth once doesn’t keep them clean forever.  Practicing the principles of the program in all my affairs is ‘mental floss’.  It keeps the decay at bay.

There are areas of my life, one area in particular that I haven’t written about yet at all, that are troublesome right now.  Since writing has been the most important tool I have for shedding light on my flaws and promoting healing, I know I’m going to have to start writing on the mystery topic soon.  There is one thing out in the world I need to do first before I dare start writing, since an occasional reader is directly impacted by this problem and deserves to be addressed directly, and I plan to take care of that on Monday.

So, oh, barf!  Fish oil, again.   I have no more control over burping fish oil than I have over any other part of my life.  I do these things, fish oil, recovery, that are good for me because the benefits outweigh the discomfort.  I care enough about me to do it.

My mother, on the other hand, I’m torn about.  I haven’t spoken to her in over a year.  Last Mother’s Day I called and left her a message.  My sister had her on the phone at the time so I went straight to voice mail.  It’s a brilliant strategy, actually.  But I wonder if I shouldn’t drop by her house tomorrow with a card and some flowers.  Just so she knows that I actually do think about her and that I actually do care, even if I’m not willing at the moment to be involved in her life or to have her involved in mine at the moment.  I need to write about that some and talk to my family and my sponsor.  And pray.

To Work is to Pray

April 20, 2008 in Living in Recovery by Chris | 4 comments

ora_et_labora.JPGI genuinely like and admire who I am because of my work.
-GrrlScientist

I alluded recently to the Benedictine motto, “Ora et labora.” That is actually only a derivative. The actual motto is, “Orare est laborare, laborare est orare.” To pray is to work, to work is to pray.

It is not exactly accurate for me to say that I have ever prayed without ceasing unless the diligent willingness to try to cast aside my ego in favor of coming to know God can be called prayer. If showing up in meetings, examining my character, sharing my experience with others is prayer, then I pray a good deal of the time. It is tricky. An amazing amount of selfishness can be found in the most (superficially) unselfish acts. Worse yet, when you realize THAT little nugget of crap the stakes change entirely.

That’s what has been happening with me lately. My understanding has shifted and the stakes have changed. My conception of “infinite” as it pertains to my H.P. has, this sounds weird, grown. Infinite is bigger. The edges are falling off.

The IFX (to those of you new here, he’s the boy who broke my heart – the catalyst of my ‘moment of clarity’ that got me to recovery) came to the clubhouse of the meeting I was at tonight. I had heard from a co-worker/former customer/mutual friend that he is out using again; using and hanging out with gay men. I had hoped it wasn’t true, of course, but he’s obviously taken this path before, with me for example. Sober he always maintained that he is absolutely straight and went out of his way to be rude to me.

He showed up at the clubhouse but he didn’t come into the meeting, choosing instead to go upstairs where he could buy a coffee and be near the fellowship without being scrutinized by a crowd under florescent lights. I worried that he may not be coming into the meeting because he doesn’t want to face me. Heaven knows I’ve been in those shoes. More than once it has been all I could do not to run out of a meeting because he was there. My sponsor (his old sponsor) went upstairs to talk to him and I stayed in the meeting, tears streaming down my face for him, and for me, and for what was and what will never be; all the kinds of things one might anticipate of the grieving.

And I suddenly realized that there was nothing truly compassionate in it. I was sad for me. The fact that he hasn’t yet committed himself to sobriety yet makes me think that we are different from each other, and by extension, that I am superior. I seem to sit in judgement of him by making him a “will not” rather than a “cannot”. Grieving for him is really a way internalizing my judgment of him; of making it about me. Obviously I need to keep trying to take a look at the points where I block myself from experiencing love, serenity and peace; to keep rooting out the causes and conditions that make me want to judge him and judge others in the room who haven’t yet been relieved of the compulsion and obsession.

It’s easy for me to remember today what life was like before, to recall the hopelessness and the pain. It is harder for me to differentiate that I was a would-not and not a could-not. But I was a would-not. The same as my friend. And the program really has nothing to offer a would-not except to maybe show them that there is another way of life available. I genuinely like and admire who I am today because of the work I’ve done. I like the life I have because of the results of that work. I have never met anyone who became miserable or who’s life fell apart because they committed themselves to a spiritual path of some kind, but I’ve seen a number of people suffer because they believed the lie in their minds that they couldn’t.

Image credit: Jorieke Putman

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