Month: March 2017

Be still

I am a very restless person. I loathe sitting for more than five minutes at time.  I pace when I think.  I’m a toe-tapper, knee jiggler, and had the mama “rock and sway” stance down perfectly when my kids were fussy babies fighting their own stillness.  I tend to be most comfortable when in motion.  Even as a small child, my mother would take one look at me standing on the stoop with my wild energy and say “twenty laps around the house before you come in.” And I’d come back all out of breath and sweaty with my grubby little face and she’d look carefully into my eyes, measuring and sometimes she’d pull back the squeaky screen door to let me in and other times she’d say “ten more laps?” and off I’d go with my wild strawberry hair flying behind me and my bare feet pounding the dirt.  I vividly remember thinking that my energy was some foreign thing to her.  My mother is an artist.  Which means she sits for hours, painstakingly creating; drawing and painting.  She escapes and manages her lifelong struggle with anxiety and depression through creative expression.  As children we would watch her in deep concentration, watch the rhythmic motion of her pencils, hear the sounds they made scratching on fine drawing paper, smell the tang of linseed and oil paints, note the tilt of her head as she considered a blank canvas and we knew to let her be. She would spend hours in her studio and then emerge blinking like she was disoriented to the fact that it was daylight and she was a mom when we asked for snacks or help with homework.  She was always a little other-worldly and I felt she never quite knew what to do with my too much, too loud, too high wild child ways.

Even when I am still, my mind is going a thousand miles per hour.  Some would call this a manic defense. Not ever slowing down enough to consider the reason for the constant motion. I have been a blur for most of my adult life.  I walk fast, talk fast, think fast, drive fast.  So the concept of stillness, of sitting IN something is incredibly foreign.  And its’ been like lowering yourself into a too-hot bath this past year. First one toe, then one foot, one knee, then the other side, then your bum, then your waist until all of you is submerged and you can’t tell if you are burning or freezing, just that you are uncomfortable and then you… aren’t. I guess that’s the best metaphor I can come up with for early sobriety. At first it’s unthinkable but then you get used to it and then it even starts to feel comfy.

I am good with not drinking.  I am lucky enough that the cravings have passed. I am comfortable stating that I am a non-drinker, and for the most part am honest when people ask me why. I kind of laugh and say “well, it tried to kill me” and when pressed am able to articulate why drinking became such a problem with me and why now I don’t drink anymore.  And I’m clear about the fact that I’m BETTER not drinking.

But this stillness thing.. the idea of REST.  I still struggle mightily with it.

A few weeks ago I had some unexpected down time when my oldest came down with a whopping case of the flu. All of my productive plans for the week, all my workouts that keep my crazy at bay were cancelled as I cared for my very sick girl. I was physically tired but feeling wired. The enforced rest, and confinement in the house really hit me hard.  I got low.  Low low low like apple bottom jeans boots with the furrrr low.  I started having suicidal thoughts, dark hopeless thoughts like I hadn’t had since before I quit drinking.  And I kind of stood on the edge of a deep, dark chasm and thought, “oh.”  That’s what I’ve been avoiding all this time.  Deep thoughts of worthlessness, failures, fear, regrets, bad memories. All the things I drank over and under and through and kept at bay by always moving, moving, moving.  I got a sudden sense that THIS is what the next year of sobriety is going to  be about.. moving forward from all of the things that lie behind. Making peace with them. Acceptance.

Running has been like a spiritual practice this past year. I’ve come to find that I do my best thinking when I’m in motion, and in the process I’ve worn out three pairs of sneakers.  While running and walking, I’ve thought through a lot of the past five years; trying to understand how my drinking got to the very dark place it took me.  I’ve dissected a lot of the whys, the patterns, the things that I need to work on.  At the urging of several sober friends, I’ve been attempting here and there to meditate. It’s probably something I need to do more, since being so still in body or mind is a challenge.  I’ve been doing a lot napping, aka”horizontal life pauses” and giving myself permission to slow down and even stop. Which is kind of huge. And I need to do it more.

One big question I’ve been pondering is whether I necessarily need to go back and try to do the post-mortem.  Do I really need to re-live every crushing rejection, re-visit every time I added a layer of armor to my considerable wall, explore every bad choice? Every trauma, every loss? Every pebble that paved the road to my struggles with addiction. Is that necessary? It’s an honest question. And I’m open to opinions and thoughts from people further along than me.

Is it ok to close the chapter on it, forgive myself, and stop this endless attempt to “get back to who I was before the alcohol changed me”?  I hear that a lot in the recovery community– phrases like “the person I was meant to be,” “the innocent me”, “the un-jaded version of me”. I don’t think there’s any going backwards.  I am who I am because of the things that I have been through, including the considerable damage I inflicted on myself and those around me from my drinking.  But go back? Impossible. I am irrevocably changed, for better or for worse by that self-violence.  I can only move forward. Challenge the lies.  Find new coping. Share the darkness with others when it rolls in like a fog over the mountain. Allow my scars to teach others who may be struggling with a similar battle.

It occurs to me that what I am longing for, and what I possibly fear I won’t find in all my restlessness is Peace. When I look at nature and the created world, I have a deep sense that we as humans were also created for rhythms in life– delight and joy and not just suffering and pain.  Yet so much of our culture, our accepted rhythms mean that we do things just for the sake of doing them.  Because we “should”, or just because we “can”. And we feel the weight that comes when we don’t rest and re-charge because we were created for that as well.

So, my goal for the next few months is to learn to slow down. To embrace the idea of Sabbath or holy rest. The Hebrew word Sabat means ” to stop, to cease, or to keep.”  And it doesn’t have to be the traditional Saturday or Sunday sabbath. It can be a short pause, with intention. Whenever it’s needed or even better, before it’s needed. With cognitive restructuring we are taught to ask “is this true?” when confronted with a feeling. I still have the relentless drill sergeant in my head, pushing me to do more, be more, tackle more, more more more… it doesn’t stop to ask why. The same lack of moderation that led me to drink lakes of booze is still underlying and it needs to go.

I’ve said no to a lot of things and made some big changes to support my new sober life and so in year two I want to focus on adding things. Adding the PAUSE button to my manic life. Adding more rest.

I want to learn to Be Still.

Never judge a run by the first mile

My 10 and 11 month marks have come and gone. The days came and went and I didn’t even realize it was a “soberversary” until friends texted me with congratulations.  And it hit me that I am getting comfortable. And then of course I immediately became uncomfortable. Because I don’t want to take it for granted.

Next week I will be sober a year.

It’s been a ride. The last few months have seen the election, my first sober holidays, the collective grief and hysteria of the nation, some health scares and the disintegration and attempted resurrection of my marriage, job struggles and through all of it I’ve been 100% present. Life is gradually less and less about just not drinking and more about building a life I don’t need to escape from.  And handling things that would have dropped me to my knees and made me chug huge quantities of alcohol now roll off me like raindrops. That’s the miracle of it all.

So the trickiest thing about being a blogger chronicling the early days of sobriety is that you actually need a functioning computer. Something I didn’t have for 5 months. Which means that I have little scraps of paper that accumulate. When I open my purse, or grab my journal, little papers fall out and fall to the ground like flurries. Snippets of thoughts, quotes, ideas, mostly in my favorite green felt tip pen in my little scratchy handwriting. I lose them.  None of it was coherently gathered as I had imagined in the beginning when I set out to write about getting sober.  Nothing has gone to plan. And that has also been a blessing.

In hindsight, not trying to “unpack” or analyze those moments and instead just live them was the best thing for me as I learned to be present.  Even writing creates distance from what you are writing about. You become an observer, a reporter of your own experience. In striving to find the perfect phrase, choosing the right words to bring an idea to life in a way that someone else can possibly understand or experience it, the writer becomes a creator. In putting it into words, the idea or story becomes something separate from you. So in holding tight to my experiences and just soaking in them instead of trying to record them, I have for the first time become my own storykeeper.  I have had to trust my own heart and mind to remember.  Which is frightening for someone like me who has huge gaps in memory and the memories that do jump out from the past few years are often painful and full of shame.

But, in not trying to capture or label them, these months that have passed are truly mine. Authentically, not blurred around the edges, not fading into gray. Sometimes they still feel too sharp, too clear. There is part of me that still wants to change my state; to escape or hide. And yet, my life is no longer about “taking the edge off”, but finding my edge, coming back to myself.  To do that I have to be in it. All in. Otherwise I am all fuzzy middles and I spent too many years doing that.

So, I’m back. Thanks to the generosity of a beautiful sober friend, my computer has been resurrected and I’m able to write again.  I’m mulling over how to possibly share all the things I’ve learned over almost a year of continuous days of sobriety strung together, like a necklace with beads and trinkets. Some days are a shiny pearl and other days are a battered old button but they are all there, in a row. And the changes that have been wrought in those continuous days are astonishing.

Many times in the past year as I have been healing, and coming back into my “right mind”, I’ve equated this journey to running.  And the classic phrase that all runners know is to never judge a run by the first mile.  And I think about that as it applies to sobriety, as I see people struggling to get and stay sober.  The back-sweaty fear we have when we are on day one, week one, month one.  Wondering if this is all there is.. just this constant state of having your nerve endings screaming, of feeling so uncomfortable and having your brain be a loud, messy tangle of jangled nerves and cravings. When you go to bed at 7pm and feel like a freak and wonder if you will ever be comfortable in your skin again and what about all the feelings and where the heck do those go and on and on… And to that I say… KEEP GOING.  With running, the good stuff; those moments where you hit your stride and your breathing is almost imperceptible and you feel the air flowing over you and in and out of your lungs and you feel like you can run forever.. only happen after you have gone through the first mile or even the second when you feel herky-jerky and your muscles aren’t warm yet and each step feels like a slog and all you want to do is stop and sit down.  But if you stop, you miss the miracle. And believe me, the miracle of sobriety isn’t one you want to miss. But its going to hurt. Often.  But I promise it will be worth it.  Because the alternative is constantly being stuck on mile one. And that hurts beyond words.

There is no way around, no shortcuts, no “magic pill” you can take.  There is only through.  Each day, one foot in front of the other. Until you look back and you see how far you have come and you only want to dig deeper and find the strength to go higher up and on and on…

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