Lost In Recvoery...

Ok, so, in hindsight, clearly not the most righteous stance I've ever taken.  But I still don't think I did anything wrong.  And I just can't help but bristle at the idea that my attempt to view an explicit media with clear artistic merit has caused me to get lumped into the same group as the guy who spends his lunch hour spanking it in his office.  And it really bothers me that, because of this, I now have to fear for my job.  That just seems wrong to me, but I'll drop the subject now, I swear.

In other news, I think I'm going to go back to a SMART meeting tonight, if I can get home in time.  (Yesterday's Inauguration has snarled traffic all through the surrounding area.)  I haven't been to a SMART meeting in months.  It got to the point where they became more of a hassle then they were worth.  I never got very much out of the meetings, and I often felt worse afterwards, which struck me as rather counter-productive.  And having to give up every Tuesday night (and Tuesday morning for that matter, as I had to get to work early to make sure I could leave early so that I could get to the meetings on time) became rather tiresome.  I wanted to make sure I attended enough meetings on a regular basis to establish myself in the group, and to be sure to give them a fair chance (and not make any decisions based on first impressions), and get a sense of what I could expect from SMART in general, and from this group in particular.  And I accomplished that.  And if I'd felt as if I was having trouble maintaining my sobriety, or that attending these meetings would help me maintain my sobriety in any way, then I would've continued to attend.  But, as neither of those were the case, I decided to take my Tuesday nights back, knowing that this group was always there, should I ever need help again.

And now, I think I do.  I had always assumed that, in regards to my sobriety, the only person's reaction I needed to be concerned about, was my own.  It never occurred to me that other people that I care about might have as difficult a time dealing with my sobriety as I did.  I've known that my wife has been missing her "drinking buddy" since I sobered up; we established that early on, in just the first couple of months.  But, honestly, I didn't really think much of it; it just didn't seem that important.  She didn't seem all that upset about it, and my focus, frankly, especially in those early months, had to be on maintaining my sobriety, and not on whether or not She had someone to get drunk with on Friday nights.  I don't think either of us realized just how important it really was to Her, or that it was actually about much more than just missing Her "drinking buddy" - it was about my entire personality changing, again, and for the first time, changing in respect to the ways that I treat Her.  And as the months have dragged on and on, and the situation has remained unchanged, Her feelings about it have apparently grown worse and worse, until we are at the point now where it has become a painful and difficult problem in our marriage.

And I don't know what to do about it.  I thought things had unarguably changed for the better.  I'm much more even-keeled now than I ever have been before.  Yes, I still have my ups and downs, but everyone does.  But whereas before every emotion was turned up to eleven, now I never get much higher than a four or five.  I used to be full volume every minute of every day.  Every high was the highest high possible, and every low was the lowest I could get.  And in terms of how I treated Her, that meant that when I was happy with Her, she was the Sun, Moon, and Stars to me, and I loved her more than Romeo ever loved Juliet; my entire world revolved around her.  (Which sounds beautifully romantic at first, but try living up to such ridiculous and fantastical standards for ten years.  It can't be done.  And I did a lot of damage to our relationship trying to keep her up on that pedestal for so many years.)  But it also means that when I wasn't happy with her, I hated her, because she was completely ruining my entire fucking life.

Now, my feelings never get that ridiculously, over-the-top intense.  I still love her, and I still sometimes get angry with her, but I don't treat her like the be-all-end-all of my existence, nor do I treat her like the worst thing that ever happened to me.  All of my feelings for her, both good and bad, are much softer and quieter, much more reasonable and responsible, much more practical; and so completely fucking boring.  Because while both of us are clearly glad that I no longer feel such intense anger at her every time she makes me feel anything bad, from her point of view, my world used to revolve around Her.  And now it doesn't.  And that hurts her.  It hurts in a way she has a very difficult time understanding, or articulating.  And it's very confusing.  Because while she's certainly glad that I don't yell at her anymore, and while she is definitely very proud of me for all that I've accomplished these past eight months, she's also really hurt and upset; she feels rejected, because, from her point of view, I don't seem to love her as much as I used to.  Which isn't true at all; I still love her just as much as I used to, I just don't express it as intensely.  But how can she be expected to know what I'm really feeling, if I've completely changed the way that I express those feelings?

And then, on top of all of the hurt and rejection she's already feeling, she ends up feeling very guilty, too.  She feels guilty because she understands that my sobriety is clearly a good thing for me, and she wants to be able to support me in that and feel proud of me.  And by feeling hurt and upset in response to my sobriety, regardless of how else she feels about it, she feels like she is doing something wrong, and hurting me, and undermining my sobriety.  Which, unfortunately, I have to agree with, in a sense.  It definitely hurts me to know that I'm hurting her.  And it definitely makes me want to drink, because I feel like that would make her happy (and I'm kind of hard-wired to want to make her happy).  But I don't think she's doing anything wrong; on that point we disagree.  I can't blame her for how she feels, at all.  I would almost certainly feel the same thing in her place.  And I think it can be said that, almost certainly, she has been the one the most hurt, she has been the one who has lost the most, she has been the one who has sacrificed the most, for my sobriety.  And I could never expect her to just be a hundred percent happy about that.  I feel horribly naive for not anticipating it ahead of time.

But now, what do I do?  How am I supposed to respond to this?  How should we deal with it?  What can we do about it?  In the addiction/recovery cycle, most people end up feeling like they lost their loved ones to the addiction side of things, when the addict reaches the point where the only thing they are capable of caring about anymore is using.  We're really fortunate that we've never had to face that problem.  But I've never heard of anyone feeling like they lost their loved one to sobriety.  In all of my experience with addiction and recovery, I've never heard anyone say, "Now that you're sober, you don't love me the way that you used to."  And now that we're unfortunate enough to be faced with that problem, I have no idea how to deal with it.  I have no experience to draw on.

And, so, back to SMART.  I'm hoping someone there has some experience with this, or has at least heard of it before.  At the very least, I'm hoping to come away with some perspective.

Will me luck.

The Lost Sharing...

I had to skip SMART again this week.  But I wrote to the facilitator, to let him know I'd be out and so he'd know I hadn't fallen off the wagon or whatever; and also to let him know what I would've shared, if I'd been able to make it.

I thought it would be worth sharing here, too:


On Friday, my wife and I went out to our local for dinner and drinks (I had O'Douls).  I mentioned to her that I had recently realized that I could not remember the last time we'd had a fight, or even any sort of minor emotional dust-up, and asked her if she could remember.  She realized she couldn't remember, either.  Things have been really good for us lately; for a good, long while now, in fact.  I hypothesized that this was probably a result of two recent changes in my life.

One of them is a bit involved to try and explain; it involves changes to the way I perceive and interact with her, and to the way I think about Love in general, and so it would require a good bit of backstory that I don't really have time to get into right now in order for you to really be able to understand it.  Suffice it to say that the end result was that I'm no longer as emotionally fragile with her as I used to be, and that these changes began happening quite literally at the same time as I began to get sober.

And the other change that I think has contributed to our recent run of marital harmony and happiness is obviously just that:  my sobriety.  Drinking and taking drugs by definition alter your mood, and your feelings.  They lift them up when you take them, and then they fall down when it runs out.  And even if you're not taking them right at that moment, if you're doing it regularly enough, then the effect persists, and your emotions continue to go up and down, up and down, even when you're sober.  And so one of the results of this extended period of sobriety, is that I'm finding that I'm less emotionally volatile than I used to be; I'm much more even-keeled now that I'm not playing chemical yo-yo with my feelings.

This prompted my wife to tell me again, as we were sitting at the bar, how proud she was of me for being able to stay sober for so long.  And she added how proud she was of me, in particular, for being able to come out drinking with her and still remain sober.  And, I replied back to her that, as always, I found it difficult to accept that praise.  Because I didn't feel like I was doing anything.  It wasn't as if being at the bar made me want a drink, and I was having to spend the entire time resisting this overwhelming urge.  If that were the case, if I was struggling with urges, and then successfully overcoming them, then I would feel as if I had done something worthy of praise.  But as it was, being at the bar didn't make me want to drink anymore than at any other point in my day.  I just don't want to drink right now.  I'm very much enjoying not drinking.

The other half of that coin is that I am very much looking forward to drinking again, later.  We saw a bottle behind the bar that night, of Fireball whiskey; a cinnamon-flavored whiskey that we only just discovered last year, a few months before I sobered up.  And with the seasons turning right now, and the crisp scent of Autumn in the air, I had the thought, "Oh, a shot of that would be delightful for Fall.  That will be really nice to have again.  Maybe next year?"  I realize it isn't typical, but I'm lucky enough that I haven't yet had to say to myself, "I can never drink again."  I didn't fall that far.  I just didn't pay attention to what I was doing, and then realized that I was drinking too much, and that it had gotten a little scary, and so decided that I needed to stop for a while; for some unspecified period of time of at least one year.  And so I've never had to confront that issue, or deal with all the grief and loss of "I can never drink again."  I'm fortunate enough that I've been able to say just, "Not now, maybe later."  And this is just so much easier to handle on an emotional level.  And that makes it easier to stay sober.  Because I can kick that can of "later" down the road indefinitely.

And that's where I'm at right now, and where I've been for a while:  I don't want to drink right now, and I'm looking forward to drinking again, later.  Whether that "later" will ever actually come is a mystery to me.  I honestly don't know.  I imagine it will again, but no one knows what the future holds.  I don't know who I'll be after spending my first year sober as an adult, and I don't want to project who I want that person to be.  I want to find out myself along the way.  And I remember that when I quit smoking pot for a year (that time I had planned from the beginning to do it for exactly one year, and then smoke again, and see how it affected me - I designed the whole experience as a personal experiment conducted on my own brain chemistry), at the end of that year, I found it really difficult to smoke again.  I had built up so much momentum towards staying sober over the course of that year, that it was really hard to make myself suddenly switch directions and do the exact opposite.  Yes, I did want to smoke again, but a huge part of me did not want to, as well.  And in the end, what finally helped push me over the edge was that I had set out from the get-go to do it for exactly one year, and then do it again and see what happened, and I wanted to fulfill that original intent.

I don't have any set time-period of sobriety like that this time around.  I don't have any line of demarcation that I'm going to cross at some point in the future that will tell me that it's time to stop being sober.  (And that was intentional, based on the lessons learned in the experience I just mentioned above.)  So, who knows how long this will last?  Who knows when that "later" will come?  Who knows if that "later" will ever actually come, at all?

And more to the point, whether it does or not is completely irrelevant.  Because thinking about that ephemeral "later" - enjoying the idea of it, looking forward to it - helps me to remain sober now.  And even better, it grants me the ability to do things like go out to bars with my wife, and actually be able to enjoy the experience, without struggling against my desires.  It allows me to accept my desires, and still keep moving forward, comfortably, without having to indulge them.

And to my mind, that's gold.  That's pure magick.

Words Everyday...

I've decided - for my mental, emotional, spiritual, psychic, and perhaps even physical well-being - to try to post something here every day.  We'll see how long I'm able to keep that up.

I imagine most, if not all, of it will be like most everything else I write - masturbatory, self-indulgent drivel all about me, Me, ME.  But they say "write what you know," and what I know is introspection and self-analyzation.  I am, after all, my favorite subject to ponder.

I think a key to keeping it going will be to just write whatever I'm feeling right then, whatever comes into my head, whatever I want to write about.  No set topic, no set word limit, no pressure to do anything specific other than WRITE SOMETHING.  Again, we'll see how well I actually do.  But I'm looking forward to it.  It will feel good to do some small creative exercising every day.

...

Some people are able to walk the middle path.  Able to keep balance in their life.  I know that I have wanted that for as long as I have wanted at all.  And, I guess, in my way, I have been able to do that.  But not in a straight line.  Instead, looking back on my life, I see that I have always bounced back and forth from one extreme to the other, over and over and over, back and forth.  And there is definitely a kind of balance in that.  But not stability.

It's a violent kind of balance.  Not exactly the serenity one associates with the idea of "walking the middle path."  And, I must admit, not really what I want for myself, either.  I keep hoping that one of these days, I will end up in the middle.  That I will somehow bounce myself into a state of grace.  I'm not sure how realistic that is, though.  I like to believe that each time I whip from one pole to the other, that I get a little closer to the center, that I am drawing my poles closer and closer to each other with each oscillation.  But I don't know if this is true, or just wishful-thinking.

And another thought I try (and often fail) to not worry about:  is this what they refer to as "bi-polar?"

And if it is, then what does that mean for me?