These Revelations

I sent a complaint letter.

I've never done this before, me, people pleaser extraordinaire, forget the thought of me speaking up when mistreated or handled in a clumsy way, but I did it.

I have revelations all the time- Oh! I can do this! Oh! This seems so normal! - it's disconcerting how I realize and understand so much about myself in these short bursts, like an explosion of light bulbs above my head, it's so blinding and so illuminating all at one big time. Sometimes I have to laugh because I feel so off center and wobbly that if I don't laugh I might just cry and revelate forever. I reassure myself with little victories: I'm learning to walk, how to stand while bearing weight on both legs- to be in my body. I can take deeper fuller breaths than I could a year ago, I'm not always holding my breath. My accomplishments may seem small in the grand scheme of things- I can keep my chin level now instead of a little up ready to defend, I think about sex without wanting to seethe, disappear or hide, I danced with other people in the room, I sent a complaint letter. Revelations. Grand scheme ones.

I've gone from reading about sex to reading about grief. Unexpressed grief is basically like shoving giant wads of gunk into your feelings pipes so they get mucked up, impassable, and you become anxiously paralyzed by the fears you'd meant to cry out but drank down for twenty years instead. I can connect the two so clearly, sex and grief go hand in hand for all of my life. I can see how the grief was the beginning, I can take myself back to me at five sweet years old, strawberry blond hair hanging down my back, past the ties of my favorite pinafore, sucking in my tears because I was too dramatic and so so stupid for crying, my parents teasing me for having feelings. I can feel how much it hurt when I needed tenderness and my parents had no idea what that even meant since their parents had no clue how to do things like feelings either. How that grief led me to using sex for hurting myself and being hurt, how drinking helped me unrealize who I was enough to do it, over and over until the beauty of my body was lost and I spread my legs again, bereft. Revelation.

I can feel how much I try to hide myself, too big to disappear and too unwieldy to blend in.

I sit on the couch across from my therapist and stay a good girl, unable to sob out the tears that are dying to get out because I want her to like me and have me please come back again next week. I have stuffed it all down for so long that I'm afraid to let it out because I could possibly head into a nervous breakdown, never to return- we only have one small hour, and then I have to head to work. Not a lot of time for falling apart and then back together.

I imagine a time when I don't have all this work to do, that these moments of glaring understanding, these revelations, will happen only a few times a year instead of a few a week. These things that come up, these elementary understandings that could have been lessons learned long ago had I only been bravely paying attention instead of fearful and drinking. I feel so stupid sometimes that I'm just now getting the idea that I can ask for what I need and it isn't a crime, it isn't wrong. Why wasn't I this person I am now all along? My years of work boxing up and shoving down all of the feelings and it turns out they never disappeared after all. All that work, down the drain.

The other day I was talking to my mom about being sweet when people are hurting and she said she uses humor to make people feel better. WHAT? I felt so sad and angry thinking of all the times I cried, hurting, and got humored by my own parents. They were using their humor, the very people who were supposed to love and heal me instead making it worse. Making it funny. I'm in total disbelief that she thought that teasing was what made people feel better. I want to stomp my five year old foot and scream stop laughing at me! right in her smiling face. Which would have only made her laugh harder.

No wonder I have no clue about what a normal emotional response is. No wonder I don't know how to take myself seriously, or how to speak without questioning myself, or how to be tender, or where to put all these big feelings. No wonder when I sit on the couch at therapy when the most hurty things come up I laugh. God, no wonder. No wonder my life is full of revelations, these connections that lead me from disappeared to conscious again and again.

I'm all spun up, so much happening, so many feelings that I don't know where to put them all. They're all unruly as puppies, scattered and making messes everywhere. I don't feel like myself anymore, but I don't know who I feel like either- sometimes it feels so much like me and then I hardly recognize who I am. It's like giving birth, but for years.

I feel so fortunate to be coming along in my understanding, and also so right at the beginning, like I've been running for a hundred years and somehow I'm still within sight of the starting line. It's frustrating in this gracefully annoying way, this is where I have to laugh, where it actually is funny, and lovely, sweet and amazing. Me, at forty-five years old, stumbling along, learning to walk. Learning to fly. Being exactly myself at my life. Being born, by revelations.

The Daily Struggle

There is progress.

Here is what happens when you force yourself to get up and try not to be heartbroken every day: you heal. You eventually get to not feel heartbroken, or even heart impaired. I sometimes forget how hard I work every day to get to where I automatically feel like my self. Where I don't question it, I know it. That place where I forget where I am for a few minutes because I'm lost in what I'm doing. That place where I am not constantly every second steadily berating myself for the simple crime of being. Oh, the being.

I get an email or two a week (not hundreds like someone suggested which made me feel so good and gave me a good laugh) from people who are just starting out. They reach out and say help me. They say I am like you. I want to be sober.

Sometimes I think we give the surface issue all the attention and forget what we're really running from. I gave myself permission to drink too much, and then blamed the drinking for my sad sack life. And so I drank too much. I feel like if I had said "I hate myself" rather than "I hate my drinking" I would have been being more truthful. Drinking was the symptom of a much bigger problem. It's like having a headache while you bang yourself in the head with a hammer. You have to stop hitting yourself and treat the headache. It doesn't really work unless you do both.

The daily struggle began for me when I was five. I can remember feeling forgotten. I can remember trying to be noticed, trying to feel important. I can never clearly remember feeling like I was the person someone was delighted to see. I was an afterthought. For everyone- my parents, my friends. I was an outline of a girl and I was on the sidelines.This may not have been the intention of anyone, but it is a consistent truth in my life. Because of this I cradle my children close every single day and look them in the eyes so they know that they are the lights of my life. I tell them: you are a joy to me. I tell them: you make me happy. That without them my world would be less than. That they are tall as to space important in this world. I tell myself these things too. There is nothing like the comfort of being loved just because you are just you.

One December day in 2012 I decided I was finished. And it turns out that that day I actually was. Looking back the quitting drinking was the easy part- for me. The hard part has been facing myself, dealing with the years of guilt, shame, anger, and pain. Not wanting to face myself was why I drank in the first place. Do you see what I mean?

I've been trying to think of what the secret is for me. Like, what was the magical thing that changed my mind? What made it NOT ok for me to guzzle another couple bottles of white wine that night? How did I decide that was it? And what made it stick then when I was writing in journals about "I had too much to drink again. I know I need to stop" for all my life? I made morning promises several times a week, and broke them on the same night. It used to only take me a few hours to change my mind about being sober, how did I make it this far?

It was this: I wanted to love myself more than I wanted to kill myself. My heart and soul were tired of the daily struggle to drown myself. It was this: I listened when the me part of me said "I love you. It's going to be OK." It was this: I believed I could do it. And I didn't look for reasons to drink again. I look for every reason to stay sober, and never reasons to drink.

I drank because I thought it made me better. And not better as in better than but better as in healed. It blocked the hurt I could not muster the courage to face because it hurt. And so I would get drunk. And then sometimes black out drunk. At the end it was black outs all around.

But I have been facing things. Facing things that are true. Facing things that aren't. Learning what the truth is (I'm OK) and what the truth isn't (I'm not OK). My daily struggles are ones that see progression. Like learning a language or an instrument I am finding myself more in tune. Instead of the same daily struggle (to drink or not to drink) I am having lessons in life. Which actually sounds sort of lovely but can really suck except for when it is really lovely.

For the first time in as long as I can tell I feel peace of mind. Actual peace. In my mind. I feel like it's because I started stopping all the mind stuff and addressed some physical issues. That I am getting into my body and out of my fucking mind. For me it isn't all about what I'm thinking, but what I'm feeling in my body. You know, paying attention to real feelings rather than ones my mind has manufactured for me. It helps so much to see how I'm physically feeling. It's easier to not dismiss the concrete evidence.

The daily struggle is still here: it will stay forever. It's how I handle it that's different. I can handle my self.

There is progress. I can see it. I can feel it. I can trust it. And I am thankful.

Moving House

I have been wanting to write but moving took up loads of time, and then the internet was working, but not really. And then there was the moving, and then more moving, and then more troubled internet, and then tra-la! A brilliant husband who understands fixing internet stuff and a just-enough-to-trap-us snow/ice storm hit yesterday and all I've got is time!

Moving was a great reminder of how well I can handle things now that I'm sober. (I sang 'sober' in a little sing songy voice in my head.) We moved for five days- getting our things here, cleaning things there- it was a chore. The children fried their brains on video games and ran around in the big new backyard while we stacked firewood. My husband and I did not fight one single time: we each had an "I want to strangle him/her" moment on the fourth day, but did not blaze and swear at one another. We just kept right on going.

None of this would have ever happened so gracefully if I was still drinking. Picture drinking me stressed out and hungover trying to accomplish a feat requiring infinite patience and patience, and then more patience. I think walking on water might be easier than being that.

It was difficult, but in a kind of good way.

Instead of drinking and being hungover and stressed and then drinking more because I'm stressed and then more hangover culminating into a quadruple double hangover by the fifth day I had a lot of bengal tea and nice snacks. I am taking my time putting things away- stowing things in the attic in labeled boxes, putting things where they go rather than just shoving them into hiding places because I feel like ass crap.

I do that on the regular now though. Taking my time that is. Understanding that when I feel, need, or want something that it may take some time for it to untangle itself and be resolved. By regular I might mean about 47% of the time, but that's a vast improvement over the frantic woman I was, always straining for the finish line and not paying attention to what was going on around me. I can clearly remember the feeling of just wanting the day to be over for chrissakes. That's why I would have my first glass of wine around five o'clock: it signaled that the day was over and I was free to be finished and finished. And in a strange way it was a way to say, "Oh, well. I didn't quit drinking today. But there's always tomorrow." So it was like hopeless and hope full all at one time.

This house doesn't have any of me drinking in it. When I look at the back porch I don't automatically think of the flower pot overflowing with wet cigarette butts, of me out there slowly drinking my life away while my little boys slept upstairs. The kitchen is just our new kitchen- not where I made big glasses of wine and seltzer while pretending to cook dinner but really just boiling water for an hour while I went back and forth outside to smoke. This neighborhood isn't where I drank myself silly with my neighbors and then woke up to wonder if I'd made an ass of myself. I won't be herding the kids out to the car to make a quick trip to the store for a coke but I really just need wine.

That woman doesn't live here.

I'm still prone to outbursts of impatience that are sort of *ahem* over the top? I'm still me, but a clearer version of it. I still like pretty much all the same stuff, except for all the booze I used to adore and hate all at once. It's strange to think of myself in a house where I don't have any drinking history. It's comforting to know that here, in this new place, I won't wake up wincing and hungover wishing for more sleep and better willpower.

I have moved my life so much in this past year and some. Now there's a new location to go with it. A house that already feels like home. It feels so safe here without the booze specter rattling chains and moaning about. I am able to feel the regular feels of moving: where am I, excitement, nervous, unsettled, grateful. I am able to handle something big without booze. What a relief.

What a welcome home.