Life’s Instruction Manual June 22, 2009

Okay, so life doesn’t come with an instruction manual.  And the movies and TV shows we’re raised on are less about real life than they are escapes from it.  What would a movie about real life look like?  It would be awfully slow.

I don’t know that it’s real lfe I’m interested in seeing, so much as a serene way to approach whatever it brings us.  Someone in a meeting yesterday quoted her pastor, who is apparently in one of the 12-step programs, and he said “serenity is not finding freedom from the storm, it is finding calm during the storm.”  I think some of that calm comes from the belief that we are not existentially alone, that there is a Higher Power there to guide and care for us, and sometimes I feel sure of that, others I don’t.  Part of life in my family was a sense of feeling – and often being – very much alone.  Not alone in terms of basic needs – clothing, shelter, food – but in terms of not being known or seen or particularly liked.  It occurred to me last night that I’ve only once had a sense of being surrounded by “my people,” when I was at a summer college program in high school.  We were all so excited to be together, piled on beds stroking each other’s hair and talking and talking, watching “Harold and Maude” and crying, and I felt for the first time like I truly fit in.  Being gay contributed to the lack of that feeling, for sure – I’m such an incredibly affectionate person, tickle my skin or stroke my hair and I will never tire of it – and I was afraid to be close with other girls from a very early age, though I couldn’t have put my finger on why at the time.  Only now am I much more comfortable with affection, much more inclined to give and receive hugs.  But I still don’t have “my people.”  They’re not in academia.  They’re not my biological family, for sure.  My sponsor feels like my people, but she may be the only one.  Is having that group around whom one can be totally authentic a myth?  Is the authenticity something I need to seek from within myself, knowing that if I’m comfortable with myself, I can be at home with anyone?  Is this again where the HP relationship comes into play?  I am constantly reminded that needing anyone should always be followed up by those Sting lyrics – set them free.  Needing someone is a set-up for dependency, for expectations, for anger, whereas being grateful for someone but knowing I will be okay without them…detachment?  Zen concepts of non-attachment?  Where is the middle path, the tenuous pull between that sanctified notion of family, which requires dependence and specialness; and spiritual health, which demands a level of detachment and reliance only on ourselves and a power greater than we are?  Why is my head so busy with all this?

It’s Always Good Until It’s Not May 26, 2009

I wonder just how long I’ll have to live before I can write a memoir about love, and about what makes a relationship work.  Is it the genuine love for and support of one another?  Is it intellectual compatibility and stimulation?  Is it someone who makes you laugh?  Or is it nothing more than our own attitude, with almost no relation to the other person involved?  What can be compromised, sacrificed, before we say uncle and find greener pastures (or mirages)? For the first time I can remember, the NYT had a female same-sex “Vows” column, and it set off nearly all my little land mines: one proposed to the other on their second date.  How very “U-Haul” lesbian.  One was vegetarian when they met, the other decided to cook them up some yummy beans…with bacon.  Nice.  But they both love words, have sharp senses of banter and intellectually-toothsome careers.  I know exactly what I’m doing – I’m comparing my insides to their outsides.  Yeah, yeah.  And I was so happy most of this day, most of this weekend, until suddenly and immediately I wasn’t.  I must be such a joy to be in a relationship with.  Moody, distant at a second’s notice – only a few days ago I was sure I was going to fuck up this greatest relationship of my life, and here I am in a matter of milliseconds questioning whether she and I are going to make it.  Oh, ye of no faith whatsoever.

There is good news, folks – I didn’t act out on it, I knew what I was doing, and even though C is the most emotionally sensing person I’ve ever known and has definitely picked up on my struggle, it hasn’t ruined anything.  But the bigger questions are these: if love is a decision, how do we decide to keep making it?  Is it the level of compatibility that allows some people to not constantly question and doubt, or a personality trait?  In one of the “State of the Union” columns, one spouse credited the success of her relationship to the fact that she said she simply never allowed doubt to creep into her mind, even during the hard times.  Part of me wants so much to do that, to just buckle down and say this is the person with whom I’m spending the next 40-odd years, so let’s start getting used to it and nail up all those back doors.  Something about that is so appealing to me.  And I do have so much here – so much support, love, humor, ease, pretty great and getting better sex, food likes, affection, expressiveness, generosity, a great dog caretaker – so much.  I don’t truly think I could get more in one package.  But the wit isn’t there.  The intellect isn’t there.  And I doubt it will ever be.  And sometimes that is so incredibly okay.  Until it isn’t.  And I need to get better at soothing myself during the “isn’t” moments so I don’t blow them all up and have nothing but charred bits in my wake.  I know how good this is.  What I can’t and don’t know is if it’s forever.  And learning to accept that is really the greatest challenge – that we make plans and God laughs, that I can try to force my will upon my life like shaping pipecleaners, but it’s really not mine to mold.  I can just pray for enough light to take the next right step, and know that every time I see a future – be it shining or desolate – it’s nothing more than a figment of my imagination anyway.  Maybe if I could put a little less stock in the happy-ever-after convictions I have sometimes, I could learn to put a little less in the sturm-und-drang ones, too.

If I Had No Love to Give, I Wouldn’t Give it to You March 21, 2009

I never quite understood what that lyric meant.  Joan Armatrading, assuming you’re reading this, could you please explain?  And yet, it knocked at my brain to be the title for this post.  This reader-beware post that will likely be more 15 minutes of neurotic panic than anything insight-bearing.

How can love just vanish?  My sponsor reminds me that it always comes back, and so far she’s right, but in the moments when it’s gone, it’s the scariest fucking thing.  I’m waiting for C to arrive, which was a change of plans as I was going to go to her tomorrow (today), which by the way I also resented because I’ve been doing so much driving this past week and it takes an hour and a half to get to her, and I’m putting on something a little nicer than the stained white turtleneck I’d been wearing most of the afternoon (it wasn’t stained when I first put it on, but that’s another digression), which I probably also resented as I was making a lot of headway work-wise and wouldn’t necessarily have stopped then, much less to prettify myself or change the sheets or tidy up the place, and I suddenly think, “this isn’t going to work.  I don’t enjoy talking to her.  I’m not intellectually stimulated by her.  This isn’t going to work.”

Now, if this were in any way new information, I might have reacted differently.  But this, sadly, is the flaw I bump up against every goddamn time I’m feeling distant from her.  And when we’re good, I’m fine with it: her emotional IQ is off the charts, she’s smarter than I first gave her credit for, I tend to be drawn to women who are not as intellectually agile/informed as I, yadda, yadda, yadda.  But it’s been 6 months, and my entire relationship life is peppered with these existential crises about my partners, only this time it’s not that she’s not loving enough, or doesn’t make enough money, or isn’t communicative or thoughtful enough – oh, no, all that’s perfect beyond my wildest incarnations.  She’s just a little slow in the verbal department sometimes.  A little obvious.  Lacking in subtlety. Boring. Repetetive.  Nothing at all like this rant.

I’m not going anywhere, so it’s pretty clearly an opportunity to distance myself and not feel love.  But why?  Why am I choosing to protect myself rather than be close?  Because I feel encroached upon?

I’m off to a meeting.  That always helps.  Self-care, in general, usually does.

The Ego Giveth, The Ego Taketh Away March 20, 2009

Being human is just so darn funny sometimes.  I gave C my key, which after 6+ months and having a key under my welcome mat (yes, I am a living cliche) of which she was aware the entire time, I figured no big deal, right? Ha!  Not in my disease-addled brain.  Pretty much from the minute I casually handed it over, I started looking for reasons why she wasn’t good enough for me.  And, as my therapist has pointed out on many occasions, I could find something to pick on about anyone.  George Clooney – couldn’t you just stop being such a prankster for once?  Mother Teresa – that burlap really doesn’t do anything for your complexion.  I know, I know, but in the moment it all feels so fucking real – the committee is saying the same stuff I pull out every goddamn time I’m feeling threatened, and we all know the power of sirens…like a zombie, I return, repeating “she’s not worthy, she’s not worthy…”

Thankfully I have a sponsor whom I believe in and whose relationship I respect, so when she tells me it’s my disease picking the fight, I listen.  And then something magical happens – I find out she’s right, and get to see my own part in the drama.  And that’s always the biggest relief, honestly, to find out it’s not her, but me; that I can’t control what she says but I can control my attitude about it, where I decide to take it.  I am a verbal snob, ridiculously nimble on my conversational feet.  If I have to choose between someone who is loving and grounded and communicative versus someone whose energies go into being a good sparring partner, I’ll gladly take the former, and besides, it’s not a Chinese menu, I’ll take one from column a and one from column b and in neat little containers with a set of chopsticks comes my perfect mate.

I just wrote to an old friend that there is good awaiting us of which we cannot even conceive because we don’t yet have a template for it.  If most of what I got as a youngster was criticism, anger, and volatility, how can I possibly conceive of a different model on my own?  We have to be shown new ways in order to live them ourselves.  That’s where other people come in, where the growth potential is infinite depending on who we choose to walk with.  Someone in one of my meetings said that perception is merely evidence-gathering for our own beliefs, and I think that’s so profound: we don’t see reality as it is, we see reality as we are.  We notice what stands out to us, and what stands out does so because of our own histories, because of what has been made apparent or familiar to us.  So the trick is to get that shaken up a bit, but in a good way.  The trick is to step out of one’s comfort zone, but in a healthy direction.   Therapy can do that if it’s really good, and 12-step meetings can because people share their experience, strength and hope through incredible adversities, and because they don’t judge one another for the lessons that get us there.  The other day, someone in an open AA meeting was counting days, and he had 6.  6 days of sobriety, and when he said it out loud, everyone clapped loudly.  No blame.  No finger-pointing.  Just welcome back, you’re in the right place, the prodigal son returns.

What I vigorously don’t believe is that we can do it alone.  With only my brain, I can only think my thoughts, through the filters of my experience.  That limits me tremendously.  I realize meditation can serve as a channel to something higher, but if my translator isn’t familiar with the language, I’m not going to hear it or understand.  So I keep coming back.  To meetings, to my sponsor, to my girlfriend, to sources of wisdom I believe have been placed in my path as loudspeakers for the messages I need to hear.  My job is to remain open to them, but the rest comes from humility and connection.

Would You Like Some Tea with those Keys? March 5, 2009

I did the thing that makes writers quake in fear and self-loathing: bumped into my little, ridiculously unstable TV dinner tray with my hip, and heard the slosh of my nearly-full tea mug as its contents tipped over this darling, brand-new little netbook.  And yes, the tea contained honey, though thankfully not milk, which I’ve now read is basically a laptop hollow-point bullet.

I’m writing on it now, but the bottom left keys just don’t have the click they once did, and I’m debating on whether to try to return it or not, as I’ve only had it a couple of weeks.

The truth, though?  I’m standing at my kitchen island typing this out on its keys, and guess what’s sitting right next to my arm?  A big ol’ mug of coffee.  With sugar and soy milk, no less.  This morning I realized I was grappling with a lot of shame over what I’d done, the parental voice shouting at me about how I’d treated something new and costly.  But now, I’m just a student/writer/gadget geek who likes a beverage with her stream of consciousness.  I’ll be more careful on that wobbly little Ikea TV tray, but truly, expecting myself not to drink, eat, or pet my animals when I’m working from home is a bit ridiculous, and these things happen.  Imagine if I had a puppy or a kid who knocked over the mug – would I scream at them about how they knew this would happen and did they know how much it would cost to replace?

Maybe I can think of this as more of an electronic hazing ritual: kind of like when we drop that gorgeous new cell phone on the pavement and it gets some huge scratch, but it’s otherwise fine.  We’re disgusted by our clumsiness at first, but then it’s just a cell phone, and it works just as well with its laugh lines and crows’ feet – the scratches and dings become part of its identity.  And we often don’t drop it as calamitously ever again.  What the hell is that about?  At any rate, maybe that’s what I’ve done, and my little machine now has a lazy “z” to remind me of what we’ve been through together.  Like we got a tattoo to drunkenly, stupidly mark this new love forevermore.  Or she did, at least.

Shame’s a toughie, though.  So incredibly useless.  So paralyzing.  Are there people who can feel regret or anger without it turning to shame or self-blame?  Could I interview them, please?  Or get a wee bit of their brain fused with mine?  Awareness, as always, is the first giant step, and I was very loving to myself every time I awakened during the early morning hours with a heaviness in my chest and a mild sense of persecution – I literally wrap my arms around myself and kiss my skin, saying “it’s okay, I love you” over and over again.  It helps – it really does.  It’s what a good parent would do, or a good partner/spouse.  It’s what C would do if she’d been here with me – she’d have talked me down, stroked my skin, suggested all the things that could be done to make the situation better.  To be able to do that for myself is seismic.  What I’d really like this morning is to get to a meeting, but as recovery-intensive as this area is, there isn’t one on Thursday mornings, at least that I know of.  I attend an open AA meditation meeting on Friday mornings that I’m definitely going to tomorrow – there is so much wisdom and humor in that room, and I think one thing AA folks have way over us Al-Anoners is their sense of humor.  When you face death and choose to return, I guess you can find a lot to laugh about.  Not that aspects of my life and recovery haven’t been pee-pants funny, but somehow as a group we seem to take ourselves far more seriously, always probing, thinking, processing.  I guess that’s why we can still drink.  Oh my, that’s kind of funny.

Newton Faulkner is my new music crush.  “Hand Build by Robots” is the album, and I just can’t stop listening to it.  He’s got this sexy, gravelly voice and great guitar skills, which pretty much amounts to love in my book, but he also writes some great lyrics and has a couple of rhythms that I hear in my head and can’t help dancing around to.  One’s on right now (for real – not in my head) – “All I Got.”

Okay, so the laptop’s performed well through this first typing test (all typos are the tea’s fault, though – not mine).  It’s time to get some morning chores done and then settle into using this for its intended purpose – getting my qualifying exam up to snuff.  And if I get stressed, well, maybe you’ll hear from me again later.

Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There March 4, 2009

I think self-care is a foreign concept to many of us – certainly its unfamiliarity is pretty much a prequalification for being an Al-Anon member.  Learning how to be still in one’s own head, learning how to be comfortable in one’s own skin without constantly looking around for some kind of validation, without a touchstone that dictates how we’re supposed to feel, think, act is revolutionary and at times outrageously, squirmingly uncomfortable.  I’m finally here, home, by myself, after a week of busy-ness to rival my mother’s.  She was part of that insane agenda: I worked from the city Wednesday through Friday, stating so early and ending so late there was no way I was going to make the 1.5 hour drive back and forth to my farmhouse each time, so I asked my mother if I could stay in her extra apartment.  When she agreed, it felt ridiculous and rude not to see her, so we managed to find a half hour at 9pm on Thursday in which to catch up a bit about our lives.  When she left, I tried to go to sleep but my heart was pumping so hard I could feel the blood rushing in  my ears.  Like a crisis had been averted through which I’d remained calm, and now I could feel all the attendant feelings, all the panic and “what-if”s of narrowly-missed disaster.

Writing in this calms me – I think it’s a method of self-care, to just put my unedited feelings down, feeling the clickyness of this little machine beneath my fingertips (my new Samsung NC10, by the way, which I think I like very much), tap-tapping my way back to a sense of calm.  Learning how to sit still, how not to quell the panic with still more activity and more interaction, is most definitely the key to self-care for me – going back to my last post, if I know that in the end, food, chocolate, retail therapy and sex aren’t ultimately going to soothe my anxious beast, I need to do the very thing that causes so much of the anxiety in the first place: stay and endure.  Stand still.  Don’t worry about looking pretty.  Just stay.  Breathe, and stay.

Piss and Vinegar February 24, 2009

I’m full of both today.  What sucks about wisdom/insight is that, once you have it, you can’t really ignore it or pretend you don’t know about it.  Yestarday was a really tough day for me emotionally, which is generally what makes it hard physically if it’s going to be, and at the end of it I was getting hungry and decided I was going to take myself out to dinner.  Nice gesture, but I’m sitting in my therapy session, literally fantasizing about this meal I’m going to have – I find myself weaving in and out of conversation presence as I’m thinking about panchan, and squid in hot pepper sauce, how it’s going to look when they bring it to the table, and am I really going to go to Han Bat or should I try someplace closer even if I’m not as familiar with it? I brought myself back enough for the session to be somewhat productive, but when I did finally get to the restaurant and the food was brought to my table, I realized something.  This food, no matter how perfect, how delicious, was absolutely not going to sate the hunger going on inside me, and for that reason I knew I’d likely overeat and then feel all full of self-loathing and shame for my distended belly and my percieved lack of will power.  I’m reading Caroline Knapp’s “Appetites: What Women Want” and hope to hear further insights from her on this issue, but it was a major epiphany for me right there in the moment to realize my efforts to anaesthetize with food, with anything external for that matter, but particularly with food.  I’ve been using it to those attempted ends probably since I hit puberty, so I don’t know why at this moment it became so clear to me – no different than the cigarette someone smokes or the slug from a drink someone takes right after a stressful event.

So here I am, left with the knowledge that no retail therapy, no imbibed or consumed substance is going to help me with my current inner state of teeth-gnashing.  So what do I do?  Sit in the discomfort?  Know that this too shall pass and bide my time?  I’m attending Al-Anon meetings though maybe not as many as I should, and I’m aware life is a little stressful now for a combination of reasons so banal as to really be unworth the document space to list.  When we realize we need to turn to something not on the outside, is that when we look deeper for something on the inside?  Is that where prayer and meditation come in?

January 10, 2009

Elizabeth Gilbert, Eckhart Tolle, Marianne Williamson, Al-Anon/12-Step tenets, even probably Pema Chodron though I don’t know her work as well – they’re all saying the same thing in different words (and with different publishers): that loving the self and coming from that loving place is the key to everything.  We materialize into our lives whatever we hold in our thought – I think it was Richard Bach who said that.

Love Heals December 29, 2008

If I could convey one message in the span of my life, it would be that.  Love heals.  it is the safety net that catches me when I try something new; it is the launchpad from which I grow and experiment and ultimately, seemingly, take off for heretofore uncharted and unimagined destinations.  It’s been over 8 months since my last post, and having now read them over, I cannot believe how far my life has come in that time.

Easy Does It April 20, 2008

It’s been a while since I’ve written here, and I’ve missed it.  I got scared off (turned off?), I’m sad to say, by the snarky comments of another writer whom I respect, and the funny thing is, they weren’t even talking about me.  One of my biggest character defects, I’m learning, is my outrageously narcissistic inclination to take everything personally.  And I don’t even mean narcissistic in a critical way, just an honest one: so much less is about me than I ever think it is – everyone else is thinking about themselves.