on becoming a dick

When I was a baby in sobriety, I used to hit a meeting in Pratt, Kansas, before heading to my parents' cabin at 99 Springs. It was a discussion meeting, not my favorite kind, but the droning of my fellow travelers gave me plenty of time to think. And one of the things I pondered at length was the meaning of a sign on the wall. It said "When you're off the beam, you don't know you're off the beam, because you're off the beam."

Although "the beam" is mentioned several times in the body of AA literature, the sign always struck me as ridiculous. In AA clubhouses and meeting rooms across the planet, there are all sorts of signs plastered on the walls. "Think, think, think" is one. "Don't think" is another. (I know, but it makes sense to us.) I've never seen the beam sign anywhere but Pratt.

To me, the on-the-beam, off-the-beam, sounded silly. And the last phrase, almost a taunt, "because you're off the beam." Nah nah nah NAH nah. So there. Like that.

Just this week, though, I have received from the Universe the perfect lesson in being off the beam, and not knowing it, because I'm ... well, off the beam, and so I couldn't know, could I? As a result, I've lapsed into being a dick. An asshole if you prefer. A jerk if you want to keep it clean.

I have been argumentative, calling others out for their condescending tone or words, while condescending myself in presuming I know better than they do. I have been judgmental, quickly pointing out to others their judginess against those I felt sure couldn't defend themselves. Hellooooo condenscension, my ever present friend. Of course, in my view, I have been on the side of angels, but the truth is I've just been an ass, and worse, I have been smug (oh! I hate smugness!), certain that my own beliefs and experiences are superior to those of others because, you know, I'm right.

I am right. As I write that, I'm hearing the echoes of sponsors past, "Would you rather be right? or happy?" I'd like to be both, please. I want it all, the joyous righteousness of being correct, and oodles of happiness to boot. I want it all, always have, forever after, I always will.

But they were right, those men and women who helped me along the way. If right becomes an argument, there's no happiness there. And why have I been so wrought up in being right anyway? Me, who for years made the case that any version of a Power is fine, that a Power is a Power is a Power and it's our personal definition that's the key, the key to freedom and joy and happiness. I have been the greatest booster of find-your-own-way thinking. What's right for you is right, that kind of thing.

Along with my recognition that I'm off the beam, I've figured out the root cause of my recent dickishness. It's perfectly correlated with Mike's good and bad days. It's my form of projection and protection. All of the anxiety I feel about being unable to help / control / make perfect his health, I project out into the world and I pick fights and by God, if I can win there, then I've won and that would ... oh hell, I don't know. In my new on-the-beam-ness, I see the stupidity in the thing, but who ever said the brain will always make sense? It won't, at least not mine. And picking fights with strangers won't make Mike well. Winning won't make him okay. Or me.

And if I keep it up, things will still not be okay some days (and some days, thankfully, they will) and I'll be a dick for real. Because my dickishness right this minute is a temporary state of being. Like all ugly habits, it could become permanent if I feed it and make it grow and allow it to settle in.

Today I choose not to, and I'm grateful to the Universe for this little lesson, and eternally grateful to the people of Pratt, Kansas for that goofy little sign that captured my imagination 28 year ago. Some of us are slower than others and sometimes I learn things again and again and again before I actually learn them. One thing I know for certain is that I don't want to be a dick, whatever happens to Mike. It's not fun and it won't make the sun shine. It's just a distraction from getting back on that beam, and that, my friends, is the place for me.

what if?

In the her book How of Happiness, Sonya Lyuobimirsky proposes that people writing about how something wonderful might not have happened experience a greater boost in joy than those who simply recount how the happy thing came to being.

. . . People who wrote about how they might never have met and fallen in love with their sweethearts had a bigger jump in happiness than those who wrote about how they did meet and fall in love.

Apparently, contemplating the fact that a key event might never have happened, at all, makes it more surprising and mysterious. Just think how close you came to having a different fate - your life could have gone in another direction, so easily!

For years when asked how I met Mike, I'd tell the long version of the story rather than simply saying "oh, at an AA meeting." The long version is a story of near misses and out-of-character behaviors, all leading to the moment in which he asked and I said yes and so began 17 years of a wonderful life together.

In AA, it is commonly accepted that people with a lot of sobriety are not to become romantically involved with folks who have just a little. It's a wise prohibition, having much to do with vulnerability and discouraging those who would take advantage of that, as well as maintaining a safe space for recovery.

As a relative old timer of nine years, when I met a three months sober Michael, I was friendly, as I am to every other newcomer. Over a period of a couple of months, I noticed that he was unusually happy and excited about recovery. I was too, and so we chatted after meetings, and I sometimes steered him away from the occasional bristling long sober old toads who attempt to steal the joy from another while avoiding the personal work necessary to acquire their own.

In all of my life, I haven't come across anything as exhilarating as watching a real, live, in the flesh spiritual transformation taking place before my eyes. I have shared it here before, but there is nothing that convinces me of the existence of a Power more than watching a hopeless, desperate, dying alcoholic catch fire with recovery. That transformation, the miracle that puts the light back into dead eyes, that puts an end to the suffering of alcoholism ~ to the desperate mental obsession, to the agony of physical craving ~ that Transformative Power is my God, my proof of a Great Reality. It is all I need, and all I need to know, to be assured that there is Something.

Mike had that fire, that electricity that arrives with the gift of a sudden freedom from the horrors of the disease. I have always envied him that, since my freedom came over a period of years, many some of the most miserable of my life. Given that instant release, he was boundlessly joyful. Having come to the rooms of AA fresh from thirty days of treatment preceded by two weeks of DTs and three weeks strapped down in an ICU, he was like a fresh-hatched chick, waking up in a new, perfect, and beautiful world.

This man I love is the worst kind of alcoholic. Physically damaged by the disease with cirrhosis and chronic pancreatitis, physically addicted to alcohol as few people really are, his alcoholism seemed to him to be hopeless. I have met a number of men ~ and a few women ~ like him. Knowing they can't quit drinking, they look forward to death as the only hope of relief.

Mike's pancreatitis and a severe seizure sent him to the hospital where he was told he'd have to be admitted or he could die.

"How long do I have?"
"Not long."
"I can't go in the hospital, doctor. I drink."
"I know."
"No, I drink. A lot."
"I know."

Mike didn't know that pancreatitis is, about 90% of the time, the result of alcoholism. He likely reeked of alcohol, as most physically addicted, late-stage drunks do. It wasn't news to the doctor that he drank, but her matter-of-fact acceptance of it somehow made him feel there might be hope for him.

I wasn't around for all of this, but I know the little miracles hidden within that story. Had he not developed pancreatitis, he would have been able to continue drinking. Had he kept drinking, he'd never have had that seizure and he'd have surely died of cirrhosis. Had he not been delivered to that ER, given that compassionate doctor, he might not have been given a way out.

And then I know the miracle of our meeting. Why would he have chosen that particular meeting in that little clubhouse, from among 300 meetings in this town? Why did I sit in that room rather than the other five in the building? Why did we strike up an acquaintance and find that connection of joyful sobriety?

And then there was the night we really did connect. I was at a Friday 5:30 meeting, one I usually didn't attend. Mike was there with his spanking new little Chevy truck, a nice change from the $500 Goodwill Datsun he'd been driving for five years. It was April 18, 2002, and everyone was talking about Springtime in the Ozarks, the annual conference in Eureka Springs.

After the meeting, Mike was standing outside, talking to four other men. He wanted to go to the conference and none of them were planning to take the trip. I walked by and Mike looked up at me and smiled and said "What about you, would you like to go?"

"Where?"
"The conference in Eureka."
"Oh, I . . ."
"It will be fun and I've got a new truck!"
"Maybe I . . ."
"I'll pick you up, we'll be back tomorrow night."
"I guess I could reschedule . . ."
"Do! Let's go on a roadtrip."

And so we did. I rescheduled. He picked me up that morning and we set out and we never shut up. We talked all the way there. We talked over lunch and between the meetings. We walked the streets of downtown Eureka talking, talking, talking. I never talked so much to any man, ever, and my experience with men is extensive.
It was entirely different, this thing with Mike, from the moment we set out on that trip.

But here's the thing. I'm not one to cancel plans with others. I never went to that Friday night meeting before. I am really not inclined to launch out on the road with someone I barely know, without any means of escape. I'd never gone to that conference, never wanted to. Mike always laughs when he says he'd never have asked me if he'd still been driving the Datsun. Too embarrassed, though now he knows I care little about the material. He just wouldn't have asked.

And so we fell in love almost instantly, the two of us. That evening after the meeting, we ran into each other at a poker game. I played across from Mike and drew the only Royal Flush ~ in hearts, what else? ~ of my life. And it hit me today what a fluke it was and how it could so easily not have happened. Had those circumstances not occurred, would I have met someone else? Would he? I don't know. Don't want to.

I think when everything is right it just happens. Maybe the Universe thought we looked cute together. Whatever it was, whatever it is, Ms. Lyuobimirsky is right. My happiness has increased in telling you why it almost didn't happen. So before I go and kiss my dimpled sweet man, what about you? Have you had a near miss that led to something wonderful? Maybe it wasn't a true love, maybe it was a lifelong friend, a wonderful job, a change of direction in life. Tell, please.

and food?

There's that food thing. My lifelong addiction craving insane bingeing purging starving over-exercising just giving up and giving in eat everything in sight take pills and don't eat dance all night and drink and fuck around a lot so I don't have to eat eating thing.

That food thing is just fine. It seems impossible. It is peaceful beyond anything I could have hoped for. There's no obsession to get on a diet, no punishment. I'm not hunting down the next insanely restrictive plan to follow. Just working out at the gym regularly, walking every day, eating only when I'm hungry, quitting when I'm full and I haven't gained any weight and am slowly losing a pound or two here and there.

The thing that is so fine and magnificent I really can't even put it into words is that I am at peace. Whole days go by that I don't even think about eating except when I'm hungry. If I eat a cupcake, it doesn't trigger a binge because the cupcake's not a relapse and there's no diet to start in the morning. Peace. Sanity. It's unlike anything I've ever experienced with food and very much like the relief I found in AA with alcohol. I am so grateful.

boo hoo hoo

A post at Long Story Longer made me think of the first time I let loose and cried after a 13 year tear hiatus. It was early New Year's Eve, 1982. There was a year-in-review retrospective on television and it caught my eye. I was about three weeks sober and something about the Vietnam Memorial hit me and suddenly my eyes filled and then my cheeks were wet. Within a few seconds I was sobbing with that breathless gut level urgency that bespeaks tremendous pain or an unexpected escape from something dreadful.

LSL wrote ". . . I also cried like a schoolgirl with no lunch money. Actually, I think it would be called sobbing. I had to concentrate to not go into the loud cry." This was the loud cry: uncontrollable, the body's wet and wracking response to hurt that is, at least for the moment, unspeakable.

I quit crying at twelve, about two weeks after my mother vanished. It seemed I had spent those two weeks at the front window, listening, watching, expecting that she would return only to reach a point of certainty that she was never coming back and crying wouldn't make it happen. I gave it up. Tears reminded me of those hopeless two weeks at the window. This loud cry on New Year's Eve was 13 years of stuffed, wrapped, constricted, should-have-long-since-been-let-loose need to cry and it went on and on and on. The post-tears calm was notable in that I felt peaceful and free. Remarkable.

Over the next several years, the tears were like slow leaking springs in a rocky outcropping. I was a hard, hostile, angry young woman with tears in her eyes. My AA card players, those precious old men who "adopted" me when I first got sober, would smile when the tears would come, then one or the other would get up and come around the card table to hug me and rock me and make it okay. They couldn't make the hurt better, but they could make it okay to be a tough, rowdy, foul-tempered, profane child-woman with a tear streaked face.

In my mind, tears were evidence of weakness, of tenderness, of a soft inside that was vulnerable to hurt, and they accomplished nothing beyond letting others see my humanity. Exposing the soft center of me did not appeal. There was a crazy kind of strength ~ and an awful loneliness ~ in pretending to be invulnerable. But absent alcohol, absent excess food, absent all of those things I've used to manage life, there was no way to keep the wet inside. I leaked.

Once the well was emptied, I found a balance and now tears just come and go as I suspect they are supposed to. It's a shame that our society looks down on or makes light of tears expressed by men. Having had the advantage of crying freely for the last 24 years, I am saddened that the men I love have to struggle so with letting go in this way.

It seems that in my younger years my emotional life was constricted to a single point: anger. Rage, actually. As I got better, my range of emotions widened until I was capable of experiencing all of them. In the same way, the painful episodes of crying in my younger years have diminished and I've reached a point of being able to cry for all sorts of reasons.

Tears today come with hurt and sadness, of course, but also as the result of having a sense of peace, of spiritual connectedness, beauty, love and affection, tenderness. I think the best day I can have is one in which I laugh so hard I can hardly breathe, and also have the opportunity to cry just a little. I don't want to live a constricted life. I want a big, rich, full life brimming with every normal human experience and then some. Being the way I am, I want maximum emotion, maximum experience, I want the most there is, all the time, with great intensity. I think it's possible if I just let go.

Thin

Just watched the documentary Thin on HBO. My husband sees these women as different from me, but he wasn't around during the bulimic years, during the insanely excessive exercise, the abuse of laxatives, diuretics, thyroid pills. Sometimes I think that an eating disorder of such extremes burns itself out over time. If you live long enough. I quit throwing up, for the most part, in 1987. I still remember the horror of the relentless weight gain thereafter. Twenty years later, it's still a temptation. I listened to two hours of misery and hope and anger and sadness and childishness and all I can feel is hopeless. I just don't know if it ever goes away. It transmutes. It is better, I guess, to struggle with weight and eating today than with bulimia of 20 years ago.

But I am really, really sick of it. I am just sick of having this shit in my head, of always thinking about it in one form or another, whether good or bad. It's always there on some level of consciousness. Always. What a waste. Eat this, don't eat that, what will the scale say, what does that mean for today, how do I feel about that, what will happen if I let go, can I start over ever, will I start again tomorrow if I give it up today, am I really an addict, is this all in my head. Most days I am grateful for freedom from the kind of insanity that afflicted me in my younger years, the kinds of things I saw in these women today, in Thin. I really am grateful most of the time, but right this minute I am angry and resentful and just flat pissed that it is still something I have to deal with every single fucking day of my life.