Willing

A sober friend said recently that he tried to quit drinking for years, but if he was being honest, he wasn't trying that hard. This struck me as significant.

A lot of us tried for years, or are still trying, and think we were/are trying hard. Were we? Are we? It sure feels like it when you're struggling to stay sober and keep backsliding and drinking.

Another friend, who has been struggling to quit for years, and is still struggling, told me that a woman at AA told her she didn't really want to be sober or she would be. At the time, that comment struck me as incredibly, horribly, unforgivably mean. I still think it's mean. But underneath the meanness, something significant lurks.

A few people in my online group recently have commented with impressive honesty about how they are not really sure they want to stop drinking. I've been thinking about that for the past few days, and my friend's comment about in truth not trying all that hard made all the thoughts come together.

Between the time I first had the thought "I drink too much" and the time I quit for good, I didn't really want to stop. What I wanted was to be a social drinker. I wanted to be able to moderate. I wanted to be able to go out and have drinks with everyone else and feel like an ordinary person and not someone who had this label. I wanted to come home after a hard days work and pour a glass of wine or three and numb my feelings. I wanted to run a hot bath and soak in it while drinking a glass of wine and chilling out. I did not want to go to 12 step meetings and be preached at. I did not want to drink club soda when everyone else was drinking wine and either make up some bullshit excuse about why I wasn't or tell people I had a problem. I did not want to be The Other.

I wanted to stop having hangovers and making an ass of myself, but I did not want to stop drinking. I wanted – and this is one of the three things that Buddhists say cause pain – things to be other than as they were. I wanted to be the kind of person who had two glasses of wine and no consequences. I didn't want to stop drinking. I wanted to be that person again.

At some point, something shifted. I turned a corner. I wanted the madness to end more than I wanted to be able to have a long hot soak in the bath with a ginormous glass of Pinot in my hand.

Wanting to do the work of recovery came later. And it was only after I did the work, and received the gift of having done it, that I started really wanting to be sober instead of wanting to be able to drink moderately.

So no. At the beginning. I didn't really want stop drinking. I was angry that I had to stop drinking. Resentful that I didn't get to drink anymore. It was doing the work of recovery that allowed me to transcend that resentment, to be grateful for sobriety and recovery.

At some point, I stopped fighting against the resentment that I couldn't be a moderate drinker. At some point I became willing to try something new and see what happened.

Became willing. That's Step 2. Almost everyone here has done Step 1, admitting that their lives have become unmanageable. But Step 2? That's a hard one. Becoming WILLING to believe that a power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity.

For me, that power wasn't God. I've had issues with the higher power thing. For me, that power was the program itself. I saw my father and all these other people living happy, fulfilling lives in sobriety after following the program, and I became willing to try and see if it would work for me, too.

That was the key for me. Not willpower, but willingness.

Patient Acceptance Pop Quiz

So here I am being all patiently accepting and feeling smug, until I get a pop quiz to see how I'm really doing in Buddhism 101. I drive out to the house I just moved out of to do one last once-over before the walk-through with the new owner. I think I'm just going to have to do a few things, since I paid my former cleaning woman (I haven't had one regularly for years now, am much less posh than I used to be) $150 to clean the empty house and garage and another out-building on the property.  I get there today and realize she only did the house, and didn't do that well enough to keep me from being mortified to have the new owner see it like that. So I have to get all my cleaning stuff and go out there first thing tomorrow morning and do the job I paid her to do. Just what everyone wants to do on the Sunday of a three-day weekend.

I am trying to be totally cool with this, trying to be patiently accepting and not feel put-upon and bitch about it, not put a poor-me post on Facebook. I am getting a B- so far, I think. No Facebook post (someone might see it and then stumble on this and OMG my cover would be blown because I know everyone just lives to learn my real identity and I am not in the least paranoid) but had some feelings of being put-upon and engaged in a smidge of bitching via text before I forced myself to cut it out and be patiently accepting, goddamn it!

I am down with the B- because that means I get an A in Battling Perfectionism but oh shit, that means I don't get an A because I was so smug about being satisfied with the B-.  Oh, Lord, my craziness never ends, does it?

Buddhism 101

I have been listening in the car to a CD by Tibetan Buddhist monk Kelsang Gyatso. I picked it up on the New Books on CD shelf at the library. I knew very little about Buddhism until the past few years, and I still don't know much. The Sanskrit words are all Greek to me (well, not really, because I studied Greek a million years ago so I should probably say all Urdu to me or something like that) and the concepts are ones I only semi-understand, but listening to it calms me down.

He talks about patience, and patient acceptance. That I understand. Understand, and most of the time don't practice. But I've been trying to practice it this week, and it feels good.

It reminds me of the time when my eldest was a toddler and my second a baby, and I was having lunch with my dad and the two kids in that big-ass double stroller that was building me some biceps pushing it all over town. My dad, who is many years sober and has his emotional shit far more together than most people, because decades of 12-stepping will do that to a person, remarked about how calm I was, how I took all the little kid messes and hassles in stride, and was so calm and patient with them.

I was, then. I took things in stride. I was joyful and grateful to be a mother at all, after fearing I'd waited too long and blown it and would never have kids, just an endless series of miscarriages. I was so grateful to be a mother, and really trying to do it right. In retrospect, I see that there was a lot of perfectionism in my attempt, but that's another post.

After that I had more kids and moved out of state, away from my awesomely sober dad and my friends and my support network, my marriage fell apart and I started swearing again (I had totally given it up during my Perfect New Mom phase), got divorced, tried to navigate my way through the working single mom thing, stopped writing and started drinking too much.

Now I have stopped drinking and started writing again, which is much better. And reading things I didn't use to read, like Buddhist stuff. I read something else, I think it was Buddha's Brain (it was the neuroscience rather than the Buddhism that I was after; I love reading about how the brain works),that said all suffering is caused by three things: craving pleasure, trying to avoid pain, and fooling ourselves that things are other than as they are. That made sense, but I am still trying to work out some of the bugs in my head about the pleasure part. More on that in a future post.

Kelsang Gyatso says on the CD that all of our problems stem from what he calls self-grasping ignorance, a concept I am still trying to wrap my very Western and non-Buddhist brain around. What he says about anger I totally get. Anger sucks. I get angry at myself for getting angry, which is both ironic and idiotic, but there you go. Paradox, I guess. But that's Jung, not Buddha, so we'll save that for another post. That's the cool thing about my anonymous blog: I can write stream of consciousness and who gives a shit (I am holding off on that not swearing thing, and calling it battling perfectionism) whereas on my public blog I would feel as though I have to stick to the subject at hand.

So anyway, about the anger. Gyatso is totally dead on about that. Anger is deadly, and the way to combat it is through practicing patient acceptance. I have been practicing the shit out of patient acceptance all week, and it feels great. It's also getting easier. Even without the double stroller.