Hurts so good

This really is a whole new life and it feels both wrong and right to write that.

It started with the quitting of the drinking and it just snowballs and snowballs and sometimes I feel like I'm just rolling downhill with it, completely out of control.

I'm gone five nights a week to learn how to get a handle on this sobriety thing and that's good and that's hard. It feels both wrong and right. It feels busy and overwhelming and yet I know it's right.

I'm reading little booklets given to me by my chemical dependency counselor with titles like, Intimacy and Understanding Emotions. Identity. Trust. Insecurity. When I'm reading, it all seems so obvious, but I've never really let the knowledge of how to live these things get from my head to my heart. It's overwhelming too, and you guessed it, it feels both wrong and right.

In her book Drinking: A Love Story, Caroline Knapp writes,

"When you quit drinking you stop waiting. You begin to let go of the wish, age-old and profound and essentially human, that someone will swoop down and do all that hard work, growing up, for you. You start living your own life."

That's exactly what's happening here. It's so impossible to describe and so I feel this rift with my friends and family. I feel somehow alien. Like I'm me, but not me, and I don't know exactly how to be. I make the same jokes and I listen to them and something is just so different. I'm different. Everything is different because everything looks different to me, and so I'm thinking and feeling differently. It feels so wrong and so right at the same time.

Not long after I quit drinking, maybe a week, I sat with one of my best friends at a coffee shop. She asked what this was like, how I was doing, and I just looked out the window. I said I just can't explain it, that everything is so different somehow and even though there's this new peace, it's just so much. I said that I feel like a new person and that scares me because starting over is hard.

She started to cry with me and she reached for my hand and said, we're going to be okay. And that was it, exactly what I needed to hear. I was scared that we wouldn't be...at all. That I had somehow irrevocably changed the we of our friendship by turning my half upside down and inside out in a way that maybe wouldn't fit the us of so many years.

I don't think I could walk around in life without knowing she's out there thinking of me and calling me friend. It's always been there, this comfort in a kindred replica of me, alive in her person, totally understanding who I am. A soul reflection, a heart monitor.

We're going to be okay.

My closest friends, the ones that will be with me and look at me and say we're going to be okay, are back in the place we just moved away from. They are still in my life through the phone, a call or text, an email or a short visit, but they feel really far away right now.

So I am grieving. I miss my friends and I miss a way of life that's gone. I am not alone but much of the time I feel alone here with sobriety. Shoving and pushing and pulling, moving all the things I thought I knew from my head to my heart.

All of it is working together, and as Caroline Knapp said, I'm starting to live my own life. I know this is really good, but this is really hard.

And it feels right.

~~~~~~

To my online friends who are on this sobriety road with me, please don't get all worried about the "alone in sobriety" thing. I'm working on that too. I'm going where I need to go to develop friendships with people in recovery. It just takes time, especially in a smallish town. So guess what? It makes me extra grateful for YOU.

I wore makeup - A picture story

I wore makeup yesterday. (And yes, the same sweater I wear all the time. I wore that too.)


(I asked google if makeup should be makeup or make-up or make up and google said, all of the above.) (All of the above makes me feel itchy. Any of them will be fine? Huh, I don't know. I like one right answer...I'm working on that.)

Ryan and I brought our beautiful boys-with streaks of makeup on their faces-to my Mom, and then we kissed them on their soft cheeks, goodbye we said, and then we drove to Minneapolis to see Ryan's brother perform at the Walker Art Center. You see, Ryan's exceptionally talented musician brother, Dave was being honored at a two day event...


The concert was a wordless kind of amazing.
(I would have taken pictures, but I was all worried that it was against the rules and that's another thing that makes me itchy, breaking the rules.)

I did take a picture in the lobby, of an artistic shell with Ryan and his Mom reflected in the background.


Dave is a part of about eleventy-seven bands. His gift reaches across genres and shakes drumming hands with excellence in whatever he touches. He's a creative soul of the genius variety, and I'm not just saying that because he's my husband's brother. (Although that helps.)

Other people say this stuff too: "One evening is not sufficient to showcase the varied talents, consummate showmanship, and genre-defying innovations of Dave King, one of the most prolific jazz/rock percussionists of his generation." - Walker Art Center

We sat and listened and ate candy and elbowed each other and looked at each other with awe over the songs. Then we sometimes laughed at Dave's jokes and switched positions in our seats to stay comfortable. You have to be comfortable when you hear one of Dave's bands play because you surely don't want to focus on anything but the transcending sounds.

The show finished and we were proud of Dave and filled up with tired and goodness. Then we drove through thick fog and belted out the lyrics to Sister Christian on the 80's station. It was very late and when we drove in the driveway I said, I love the bed five times fast. So Ryan laughed and then we slept.

This morning I woke up and thought, that was so good and then I thought, I love home and the people in it.

And then today I did not wear makeup. Or make-up. Or make up.

The End.

Before

I found the post below sitting quietly in my drafts. I had completely forgotten it. I wrote it before we moved and before I quit drinking. I came across it today and realized that I must have known then. I knew I was going to quit drinking. It was coming. I had no idea, really and I didn't believe that I could. But I knew.

Written on December 20th, 2010 - exactly one month before:

Maybe she's not even a version of me. It's more like there's a piling up of these things that I've practiced being until they've covered up the real me.

I still have a lot of rubble to rifle through, and yet, I'm finally hopeful. Maybe it's the new chapter in our lives opening up, a move to a new place, a fresh start. The things I still struggle with, like we all do, seem smaller. I'm threatening to eradicate those things I'm tired of living.

Anger is there in the pile, this irritable, frustrated and negative absolute boulder of a thing sitting on the real me.

A habit boulder.

A person can think a certain way until that thinking is real and true, even if it didn't start out that way. We can tell ourselves lies until we believe them with nearly our whole hearts. That's what I did, anyway. I thought and thought defeating thoughts until I didn't even know I was thinking them, and then they took root in my head and heart and that's a very dangerous thing to do. A person can waste their entire life trapped like that, thinking they aren't good enough or their marriage isn't good enough or their mothering isn't good enough...and then doing things to stay in the rubble of thoughts.

I can still remember sitting at our first tiny little table years ago, pregnant with Miles and mad at our house for being too small. Mad that we bought it without thinking. Mad that there was dust everywhere, piling up like this other version of me while an addition was added for more space. Disgusted and self-centered and so easily done with it all.

It was then, I think. Then that I actually decided to stop trying to be positive, claiming exhaustion and I just can't handle this. No, I was not suffering, and yet there I sat like a spoiled child, wishing we had done things differently, giving up on who knows what. Somewhere in me, I allowed those defeating and irrational thoughts to trump the positive ones. I had no idea the stress we were about to endure with Asher's colic and hydrocephalus and I set myself up, ruminating around the negative thoughts. I set myself up to cope rather than conquer.

Even if I have been through some awful and ugly things in my life, even those things are not excuses for what I'm doing. Because the truth is that we can even be freed from the most traumatic of things, but only if we seek hope and stop thinking about ourselves all the time.

Now, my boys are here and they pull joy from my rubble and show me how to see life. So I try. I claw and I pray and I reach out when I start to stumble toward a funk. I simply try.

Because of them, that version of me that is covering me, is being shed from my life. They are the catalyst, the reason for me to say, I'm leaving her.

~~~~~~~~~~
It kind of blows my mind that I was writing this and not thinking about drinking but kind of letting myself think about drinking but still not allowing myself to have this thought...

I wasn't just drinking to cope with anger and sadness...
anger and sadness were amplified because I was drinking.

Denial and rationalization are broken power tools.


This post is a part of Flashback Fridays over at Mylestones. Thank you, Jo.