Vicarious Rising

Wayward Signs of Affection

My phone session with my therapist today felt odd. Since we've been going this fall, I haven't had a whole lot to say to him. There have been many awkward silences in which I scramble through my mind to find some topic of interest to discuss. I try to find some problem of mine to resolve, or some issue I think needs to be addressed or some query to explore. To my chagrin, my therapist reminds me that I am not required to perform or already have everything all resolved before I come to the table. But for some reason, I always do think I have some sort of role, a job to do. That I am going to be letting him down if I haven't got something of import to say. I put myself through paces of what I "should" be saying. Then I half convince myself I am hiding or denying something that I should be revealing, ad nauseum. Arf, arf. See Judy the performing wack-job alkie seal and her brightly colored neuroses all in a row.

I went through this rigamarole today. And I finally lapsed into an uncomfortable silence. It was like all those needy grasping hands of my psyche that have been trying to desperately connect to someone, anyone were left flailing for air. I waited for them to tire and still. They didn't.

When Scout dropped me the meme challenge the other day, I back-linked to the person she had been tagged by. The blogger, Chris, had said on his list of things he was grateful to have learned in sobriety was that he had learned he yearned for intimacy but that was also what scared him the most. I'm wondering if I might have that problem as well. Lately I don't feel like I am saying what is on my mind but rather what I think people want to hear. I'm further and further away from getting the closeness I desire.

For whatever reason, tonight I just wish someone were here to hold my hand. I've been trying so hard to figure everything out. I want to lean on someone awhile. I want to know I'm ok. That I am loved.

Lessons in Sobriety

My son thinks it is crazy to do homework when it is no longer required. It's funny how much wisdom we gain as we get older and how youth really is wasted on the young. I'm also glad that I am a relatively young parent and started my sobriety young because, well, just because. There may yet be a chance for me to do something worthwhile with my puny life. My grandfather likes to say "only the good die young so I'm not going anywhere for awhile." He's 87 and still fairly spry, so I might take after him.

I have been procrastinating on my homework that Scout sent me because I don't feel especially learned at the moment. I'm not going to tag anyone because by the time I've completed my tardy work, this meme has done the rounds.

First, the rules (as copied from Scout's site):

• Link to the person’s blog who tagged you.
• Post these rules on your blog.
• List seven random and/or weird facts you have learned in recovery. (This is where I’m changing it to seven things I’m grateful to have learned in recovery.)
• Tag seven random [?] people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.
• Let each person know that they have been tagged by posting a comment on their blog.

1. I can have an adult relationship with my mother that I never could have imagined before being in recovery. It may not be the mother/daughter relationship I dreamed of, but it is still something worthwhile.

2. Life is a journey not a destination. Enjoy the ride. And don't go too fast.

3. That I really, really, really have an issue with powerlessness. Probably should underscore this one about fifty times.

4. I don't have to do everything alone. If I start feeling all solitary, it is likely my own doing. It may not be quite so easy, but I can find people out there who are compassionate and understand and who can listen. All I have to do is share.

5. The serenity prayer really calms me down and I don't know why. I'm not going to question it. Just glad to have it. And I also have grown to like the promises as well.

6. My inner voice rarely lets me down, if I bother to stop and listen to it. The trouble is that I still let too much outside noise get in the way of letting me hear what it needs me to. I have a ways to go in learning to trust myself.

7.  I don't always have to be actively doing something. Just being is sometimes good enough.

Not a terribly impressive list, but it's what I've got. The bottomline is that I am grateful to be sober, no matter what I am feeling right now. For me, drinking would not make it better or more bearable. It would just put me on the fast train to dead and disgusting.

Today I am struggling with my powerlessness. Again. I can't decide if I am just bewildered, scared, lonely, angry, lovelorn or sad. I just feel wrong. I couldn't even specify at whom or what or why. Not having any answers or direction regarding my interpersonal life leaves me adrift and scared. I don't know which end is up. I don't know what I am doing. I'm not even sure how I feel. I really don't know how to connect or act or behave or relate. Am I sure I am even human? Egads, I am a spaz.

A sober spaz, none-the-less.

Setback Mountain

I had started to diligently do my meme homework when Postpaleo put a comment on my "Chasing Gratitude" post that brought an image in my mind of where I am in my recovery.

I suddenly pictured myself as climbing a steep mountain. I'd been doing well, adjusting to changes in altitude and terrain. But suddenly an avalanche of snow and ice just dumped down over me. Because I have been steadily working my way up and have been well prepared, I've got my gear and ropes and whatever climbing shit it is your supposed to have to keep me connected safely to my spot on the mountain and not blown off a cliff. However, I've been covered by about six feet of snow and cannot move. I have to figure out how to "swim" out of the sea of snow and ice to continue my journey up the mountain.

I dream quite frequently about being trapped in snow. I am oddly sweaty and damp, yet freezing cold when there. The sluggish struggle to free myself from that predicament usually ends with the dream shifting rather than me actually breaking loose.

There's a part of me that just wants to sit cocooned under that pile of snow for awhile, numb and hibernating until I am ready (if ever) to finish g(r)o(w)ing up the mountain. And once I get out from under the mound, do I continue up or do I retreat and go back down? Is my equipment all buried?

OK, the analogy is kind of dead here, but I do like the image of being frozen in ice. I can't be hurt, I can't feel anything, it's all just stopped.

Chasing Gratitude

I had a pleasant, if uneventful, Thanksgiving. We went down to Florida to my inlaws and enjoyed some warmer weather. I do think I am affected by the seasonal change here in upstate NY, maybe now more than ever. My mood felt improved after a few days down south. I needed some sun.

I still don't think I am in an especially good place right now. I've been increasingly detached from my emotions, falling back into the 'everything's okay' external routine and just waiting for the days to pass me by. Until what end, I don't know. That worries me. Or it would if I felt much of anything.

I did fold and email my friend again. Even worse, told him what I was doing. I have very little self-control when it comes to some things. I'm not certain, but I think he may be a little peeved with me for wanting to put distance between us. I can hardly blame him. I give mixed messages and can't stand by what I say anyway. It really would be better for me to not have contact with him. I do feel better when I have restrained myself for a few days. Then the next thing I know, I've fucking blown it. Why do I sabotage myself?

I am going to do that meme Scout sent me later today and hope it will remind me why recovery is better than staying on this dead end path. As familiar as this road is, it is not comfortable or easy and has only bad possible outcomes. I just wish I knew where I faltered on my path to begin with to start back here again. Somehow my desire to love and be loved led me astray. I must be looking at things from the wrong perspective or looking in the wrong directions. I know many people have suggested I need to love myself first, yadda yadda, but I don't even know if that is where the failure comes in. I do think it is a problem with connectivity with others versus something within myself. Although I would not discount that I need to work on more internal stuff to get the interpersonal things to work better.

Like I have a fucking clue. I will say I am thankful to have this place to spew my idiocy and not feel entirely alone.

Low Tide

My sponsor sometimes gets in funks that she terms "low tide." She describes her state of mind as the water being out at sea and all the little bits of crap are laying exposed on the sea bed out for anyone to see. I rather like this analogy. It also is how I have been feeling the past several days.

I've been working on some writing, although it has been clumsy and unfocused. It still feels good to put words on paper, but the effort hasn't been terribly cohesive. I fear I've been a bit of a couch potato and in need of exercise. Lethargy and general disinterest in doing anything that involves getting out of bed or my favorite chair weigh down my day.

I have to thank Scout for tagging me for a meme that involves gratitude from things learned in recovery. (My twin sister, I will get on it. How did you know I needed this? Oh, nevermind ;) I love you to pieces.) I will need to meditate on it, but I seriously need to focus my inert ass on something positive. My spirituality is definitely flagging. I don't want to drink, but I don't feel like the most sober person around these days.

So, I'll get busy on my homework and hope that it changes my attitude for the better. I really like Thanksgiving as a holiday, so I ought to exploit that for everything I can.

Although, all my favorite foods at dinner won't exactly get me on track with an exercise plan, but, eh, gotta start somewhere and I am not going to pass on the chestnuts, cranberry sauce or pumpkin pie.

True Grit

I'm not having the best of days. I've been trying to wean myself off of communicating with my best friend, and frankly, it's making me miserable. I miss him. I want to beg him to love me. I want to make an ass of myself. I want to ask him what it would take to make him mine.

I'm such a fucking idiot. I never pegged myself for a romantic fool.

My willpower in staying away from him is shaky at best. But I've managed to stand by it. Rather than going cold turkey, I've sort of decreased my exposure. I tried cold turkey a couple of times, and it lasted less time than this has and mostly embarrassed myself. It just feels unnatural. I think about him constantly. And I feel really immature as well. What I would really like is to have some sort of adult conversation with him and flip some switch inside myself where I don't feel all queasy inside anymore. Fix things. Even better would be to go back to the previous state of obliviousness when I didn't realize how strong my feelings were for him. But I can't un-ring that bell. I have to stick to this resolve to distance myself from him. As much as I hate every second of it.

This would be something that could send me back to drinking if I'm not careful. I have to be honest with myself about this. It'll grab me by the throat when I'm not looking if I don't admit it. If I keep exposing myself to him when he continually rejects me, I'll start looking for escape from the pain the way I best know how. It'll only get worse if he meets a woman to marry and start a family with. I won't be able to watch. I know this.

I wish there were another way. I wish it weren't so complicated. I wish he returned my feelings. I wish... I wish...

Friends Without Benefits

My tendency to spend time alone can become a real problem at times. I think Syd hit on something when he wrote that sometimes fear and insecurity slips in when you're not around people who care about you. I think my recent decision to separate myself from the two loves of my life, my husband and my best friend, has left me standing on shaky ground. No wonder I am feeling disillusioned and frightened. Two of the people I would normally go to in a time of crisis are part of the crisis.

I've never been very good about sharing my fears, though. I feel fully responsible for my decisions, and therefore, feel like I should suck up any residual scaredy cat shit that follows. Perhaps that's a little unfair to myself.  I don't know. What I do know is that I feel like I don't want anything to do with romance and intimacy anymore, for all my ranting and raving about it these past months. I'm fucking tired. I just want to be left alone and lick my wounds and feel sorry for my unloved self. Wahhhhhh.

Could I be any more tedious? Alright, maybe not so snivelly, but I don't think I have any energy for any sort of romantic relationship. I do feel mighty discouraged about the whole thing and think it's much easier to hang out with myself. I'm tired of feeling hurt. I can't imagine putting my heart out there again. I don't want to.

I think I'll take up a passion for stamp collecting or something. Buy stock in personal massagers. I obviously have crap taste in men. Who needs intimacy anyways? Screw it.

People Are No Damn Good - Redux

My therapist is the person who told me about this cartoon by New Yorker cartoonist William Steig. It's captioned "People are no damn good." I think it was first published in the 1940s. It rather fits my demeanor this week. I do feel a lot like I want to hide out in a box of sorts. Not that me keeping to myself is an unusual  behavior, but me having antipathy about people as a whole is not my norm. That kind of grumpiness is relegated to my husband more often, with me playing Ms. Brightside.

I did a little research on William Steig, and what's interesting is that the fellow holds the philosophy that "people are basically good and beautiful, and that neurosis is the biggest obstacle to peace and happiness." Steig wrote and illustrated many lighthearted childrens books in addition to his work for the New Yorker. You may know him better as the guy who created Shrek. I remember him from "Sylvester and the Magic Pebble" book when I was a kid. His illustrations are beautiful. Steig wrote positively about humanity. I think I should go back and read some of his books and enjoy the pictures. I'm not too old for childlike essence.

I found this other cartoon on BoingBoing that was from the 1970s they speculated was a riff on Steig's original work. I thought it was kind of funny.

I'm fairly certain I will default back to my usual goodwill towards men, but right now I feel like I've been beat up with a baseball bat. I'm not entirely sure why. Crushed. Untrusting.

I'll ride it out. I'm just not used to feeling so awful. Maybe I should celebrate that I am feeling. Hooray MeloDrama Queen.

In the meantime, I'd love to find a coffee mug with this moody rascal on it for my therapist. That would make my day. I could use a smile.

Divorced from Myself

That fissure thing happened to me again today. The one when my insides and outsides were acting in polar opposites.

I made my once-a-monthly drive to NJ to see my therapist this morning. Sessions on the phone with him have been pretty boring lately. While I have a lot on my mind, my emotional state has been stable. I've been overall cool happy-go-lucky teflon girl.

Which doesn't explain why during the three hour drive each way I bawled like a dejected baby.

I've mentioned before that I am not a crier. My husband and son have only seen me cry maybe once or twice, ever (ok, slight exaggeration, but not by much). One time I cried it was on the phone with my husband while I was in rehab. I was sedated on librium and thirsty and felt like the hospital staff was being mean to me. I called him on the phone distraught. When I got off the phone with him, he in turn called up the hospital and reamed everyone he could get on the phone out for making me cry. I ended up having to explain to the staff that, no, my husband was not an abusive sonofabitch to me - he was simply scared to death because he wasn't used to me crying and couldn't figure out what those people were doing to cause me to do so.

My horror flicks have been a fine distraction, apparently, because as soon as you took that pacifier away and I was stuck in my car with nothing but my iPod tunes, my brain went to thoughts I'd been avoiding. And the dam opened.

Yet the second I stepped into my therapist's office, the tears were dried and I felt fine. Not a remnant of the sadness and longing I'd been feeling for the past hours. I wasn't masking it from him. It was gone. Of course, I really should have brought it up in therapy. "Hey, Doc, my heart was breaking a few minutes ago. But now I'm perfectly cool. Wassup with that?"

But I didn't.

I walked out of therapy in an upbeat mood thinking, "Gee that session felt good. I guess that melancholy passed. Must've been something I ate. It was nothing of import." Then I sat behind the wheel of my car, turned on the music, and wept all over again.

Fuck.

This Jekyll and Hyde shit needs to be taken care of. This is where the platitude of "act as if" so utterly fails. The second that the opportunity for reality to poke itself in, when all my toys are put away, the facade cracks. Honestly, it should. Things should be corrected from the inside out, not the outside in.

I have to ask myself why I don't want to talk about it with my therapist. Just because the despair had dissipated by the time I walked into his office didn't make it gone. Although I've been doing a good job of pretending it is; I've even fooled myself.

Some enterprising person needs to come up with a detox program for relationships. Lock me away somewhere for awhile so I can straighten my head out about a friendship that's doing me more harm than good. At any rate, this letting go isn't easy. Every time I think I've got my feelings under control, I find out, I don't.

A Meaningful Life

Maybe it's all the horror movies, but I'm finding myself in a weird mood. I don't want to call myself cynical about my fellow human beings, but I can't quite think of a better term about my sense of people at the moment.

I don't think I am going to be able to explain myself well, but I'll give it a try. I've been lurking around the web, trying to find answers about love, relationships and intimacy (admittedly not the best primary resource, but it is the largest) and I've just found the whole thing fucking depressing as hell. While there are pockets of what I would deem genuine people out there, most of what I see posted out there reads to me like a bunch of trumped up hooey. As tame as my sex life has been, I have a very difficult time believing the rest of the world is getting as busy at it purports to be. Or if it is, how completely empty that it seems. Either way, it makes me feel pessimistic about people in a way I never have before. Are there really that many pedophiles out there looking at and hooking up with children on the web? Am I naive to think it's overblown in the media? Or are we really that deviant? The world is just run on cowardice, ego and nothing interesting. Definitely not sexy. No personal connections or greater meaning. It's seems about power and control and cheap slapping of body parts rather than enlightenment, freedom, affection and sharing.

Fuck. I sound like a lunatic. And no, I am not drinking. I'm just not finding the right words to express my state of mind. I'm trying to let go of some of my old expectations and old relationships but I'm also looking forward and trying to figure out my place in the world. I still don't have any sense of how I fit. I'm thoroughly perplexed by how people interact with each other sometimes, what desires we seem to be driven by. Our capacity to hurt each other is enormous. I still feel like an outsider, not knowing how it all works - and not entirely sure I want to play.

I need to believe people aren't as superficial and hedonistic as they are portrayed. But maybe I need to work more on not worrying about the general state of humanity and focus on the state of me. Sometimes when I do that, however, I feel like I am isolating again. I want to reach out, but when I look out there, it looks sorta bleak. There is no normal. People who aren't in recovery are the ones who just don't give a shit and aren't trying. Or something like that.

Something's bugging me and I can't quite put my finger on it. Not disappointment. Slight desolation? Hmm. I hate it when I can't find the right words. Guess I'll just wait. I think some of it is because my own eyes have not perceived my past relationships without distortion, and I need a vision check. I want to see the truth of things as much as possible. My hesitancy is warranted, but I don't want it to be chains holding me in place either. I used to have confidence in my ability to judge character. For some reason, I've lost that. I don't know what to expect from people anymore. I don't know if that scares me or just makes me off-balance.

I just want something real, even if it is scary. There have to be other authentic people out there who want to be on the same adventure. I've met a few of them here and there. But it seems like it is a minority of people who are interested in really digging into life. It seems to me the majority of folks use fear to build an existence without ever really being. People are more likely to behave in inappropriate ways than examine it and confront it. Maybe that's why I like horror movies. There's the boogeyman. You know what to do. The lines are clear. There's blood and guts rather than the slow poisoning of someone's soul. What people do to each other in our daily lives is more terrible to me than anything in a Saw movie. Hell, I think kooky ole Jigsaw isn't so far off the mark in making people appreciate being alive.

Then again, I always had a soft spot for the bad guy. I figured he had his own bad childhood. Nothing is ever black and white.

This is a pretty pointless post. It's like I want someone to explain it to me. Like I'm telling you: "here are the dots - connect 'em for me and describe what you see and by the way, the dots are in no particular order and don't mind me if I keep adding a few more points in as you work because I don't know what the hell I am doing." Yah. It's like that.

Honestly, I'm not in a bad place at all, but I feel like I'm on the tip of something. A discovery maybe. I need a shove over the edge. Or some lights to follow? I know I am not alone, finally, but I'm still bemused with what's out there, needing true friends.