Flyover country of the soul

Today I am three years sober.

I wrote a post not long ago that referred to my first year of sobriety as feeling as though I was crawling out of my skin. The more I think about it, the more apt that phrase seems. I really did feel as though I could not just sit with all my chaotic feelings about the awful things that were happening.

In retrospect, a lot of the awful things that happened were precisely because I couldn’t sit still with my feelings, because I couldn’t just realize that sometimes bad things happen, and sometimes people are assholes, and sometimes I make costly and embarrassing mistakes.

Bad things still happen. People are still sometimes assholes. And, unfortunately, I still make costly and embarrassing mistakes. But the feelings around all that are different. I no longer feel as though the whole world is against me, that I’m standing in the face of a storm that won’t stop buffeting me long enough for me to catch my breath.

When I make an expensive mistake or a social faux pas or lose my shit with my kids, I remind myself that everybody does stuff like this. I’m not the worst, most pathetic person who ever lived. I am just a person in the world, like everybody else.

When I was drinking and newly sober, I cycled between feeling intense shame because I was The World Person in the World, and righteous indignation because other people didn’t treat me like I was as perfect as I wanted to be and in moments of grandiosity convinced myself I was.

Shame and grandiosity. Self-hatred and narcissism. These are the poles between which we swing when we’re drinking. When we stop drinking and take those first shaky steps on the road to recovery, those poles are all we know. We know nothing of the bland flyover country of the soul, where we are just as valuable – and just as flawed – as every other person. We don’t know how to acknowledge our mistakes without self-flagellation, clean up the mess as best we can, and move on. We don’t know how to forgive other people because they’re only human and doing the best they can, even when they hurt us.

Life is so much better now than when I was drinking. I still have problems. I still get angry. I still get embarrassed. But the problems are not catastrophes, the anger isn’t rage, and the embarrassment isn’t soul-killing shame.

None of this would have happened if I hadn’t developed a drinking problem and then got sober. When I was new in AA and people would introduce themselves as “a grateful alcoholic” I was like, WTF? Now, I get it. I’m grateful that drinking too much broke me open, and sobriety put me back together, better than before.

Step 2: Part 2

Step 2:  Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

One night last week, when I fell asleep, the idea of telling my mother and my ex about AA filled me with cold terror. This morning when I woke up, it was gone. There was still nervousness, but a normal kind of nervousness, not the crippling, heart-pounding dread I felt when my sponsor first mentioned the idea.

I was texting the other day with a friend who is four years sober, and he said, "You can't be anonymous with your family." I suppose not.

I came to terms with the idea that I needed to tell my kids, which I didn't mind -- or didn't think I minded -- but which meant telling adult family members who tend to be judgmental and not very empathetic. I was afraid they would judge me, criticize me, even if not to my face, then behind my back or in their own minds. And that bothers me why??? 

Because I am a craven, pathetic creature who cares too much what other people think, and is ashamed of caring so much. I hate that I do. I hate myself for doing it. I know self-hatred is bad and I want to stop hating myself, but I can't seem to manage it.

Instead of spiraling down into the darkness of overthinking and obsession and self-criticism, I forced myself to do it. I told my kids, emailed my ex and another relative, and will give my mother her letter when I see her today. I thought telling the kids would be easy, but it was hard. My eldest insists on clinging to the certainty that I am not an alcoholic, that I stopped before I got as bad as those people, so I wasn't really an alcoholic, just concerned about my health and being a good mother and not spending money on wine. If that's what she needs to believe about me, then I guess it is. She will probably come to accept it eventually, once the shock and the newness wears off.

It was kind of reassuring that my kids were totally surprised. People often say (rather smugly, it seems to me sometimes) to alcoholics that even though we thought we were fooling people, we really weren't, and everybody knew it all along. Well, my kids didn't. When they wouldn't believe it, I even mentioned a party where I know I'd had too much, and they remembered the party but said they didn't know I'd had too much to drink. Only one friend said, when I told her, "Yeah, I was starting to wonder. It seemed like you had wine just about every night." She had never seen me have too much, just had concerns about frequency.

I don't know if this is the end of Step 2, if my sponsor will say, yes, you trusted your Higher Power and prayed and lost your fear and did the hard thing. You have come to believe that a Power greater than yourself can heal you. I don't know if she'll say that. Part of me thinks she will, but the paranoid nut case part of me is sure she'll come up with another goddamn Survivor-style test I need to pass before I can move on to the horrors that await me in Step 4. Yes, I know I skipped 3. She said once you do Step 2, really do it, then Step 3 follows immediately on its heels and you're on to 4.

The speaker at the meeting I went to yesterday morning said something that helped me, something I needed to hear. That happens a lot at meetings, I'm realizing. He said that when he was newly sober, his sponsor told him to pray every day for his mother, for whom he had a lot of resentment and with whom he had a bad relationship. Even though he wasn't even sure he believed in God, he prayed for his mother (who really was a bitch, he assured us) morning and night for three months, and at the end of that time, something had changed. Not everything, but something, for sure. 

So yesterday I started praying for my mom and for my ex. It's only the second day of it, but you know  what? It feels right. It feels like what Jesus tells us to do, and we usually don't. It's easy to pray for my children, since my heart positively overflows with love for them, and when they irritate me it's just the ordinary bullshit that kids do and the irritation is just a drop (okay, sometimes several buckets, or even a small swimming pool) in the sea of my love. But praying for people who have been so judgmental and cold, people with whom I have such difficult relationships, that isn't easy. Only it is, strangely enough. And it feels good. What do you know?

Pettiness and Self-Hatred

Some days finding something to be grateful for seems like just another job on my to do list, and I feel resentful, then guilty for feeling that way because how dare I, and so forth with the self-criticism that borders on -- and often crosses the line into -- self-hatred. 

My problems are so petty and First World, and yet I can't seem to force myself to stop letting them get me down. I know this isn't just me. This is what people do. A quote from Adam Smith that I've seen several times before but just ran across again in the audiobook I'm currently listening to reminded me that this is true:

Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe,who had no sort of connexion with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all, express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment. He would too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings concerning the effects which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in general. And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquillity, as if no such accident had happened. The most frivolous disaster which could befal himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own.

This is what people do. We care more about our little fingers than millions of people we don't know. That's why Stalin said, aptly, that one death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is a statistic. It's human nature to feel that way, so why do I feel so guilty about it? 

The book where I heard the quote anew this week was Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, a wonderful book that contains much that I could have written myself (and some that I actually did write in a book I wrote but never published). The Adam Smith quote reminds me, on an intellectual level, that it's not just me, that everyone does this, which is one of the fundamental ideas in Kristin Neff's Self-Compassion, a wonderful book but one whose principles I seem to be able to accept on an intellectual but not an emotional level. 

I know everyone does this, so why do I hate myself for doing it? I know it is hard to feel truly and profoundly grateful for not having Ebola or living in Afghanistan or being blind or deaf or paralyzed or dead and let just being whole and alive and healthy and American be enough already so STFU about your stupid, petty problems. I know it isn't just me. So why do I hate myself for it?

What Other People Think

Just read this post on A in Sobriety about external validation. That is one of the biggest things I struggle with. When I feel self-hatred, it is often because I care so much about what other people think, and can't make myself stop caring even though I know I should. I know it shouldn't matter what anyone thinks.  I know I shouldn't take things personally, because what people say is as much (or more) about them than it is about me. I know all that, and yet...I still care.

My ex-husband used to tell me all the time that I cared too much about what other people thought. He hated that about me.  I hate that about me, too.

I know it isn't just me. I know other people do it. Most people do. Does everyone? Did my ex-husband only put on a big act that he didn't care what other people thought, but really he did, and in criticizing me for it, he was doing that thing we all do with the speck in our neighbor's eye and the plank in our own? Was he projecting his own self-hatred onto me, because he hated the fact that he cared what people thought, too? Or am I overthinking it, and he really was free of that problem but the fact that I had it just bugged the shit out of him?

If it wasn't a problem for a lot of people, there wouldn't be articles like this or this or this or this.   It's not just me. But it still sucks that it is me.

Update:  ....or this, on being worthy.