The other night, I chaired an Al-Anon meeting at a women's prison. It's nothing new for me to chair a meeting; I've chaired meetings before, and told my story of how it was, and what happened, and how it is now. But I've never told my story to a room full of prisoners who I'd never seen before and whose stories and backgrounds I really didn't know. Maybe the strangest part of it all was how natural it felt, and how comfortable I was, and how nervous I wasn't. Possibly what I didn't see coming was the outpouring of solidarity and the connection with every other woman in that room and the sobering conclusion that I'm really no different than they are and that maybe jumping on my yoga mat 5 years ago is the only reason I ended up on a somewhat sane path while they ended up in prison scrubs and mandatory 12-step groups. Let's face it, we all lacked the same skills and sense of normal; I just happened to stumble into a few sun salutations that made me question everything and that forced me to learn what love is. I didn't expect to feel so similar to these women; I didn't expect taht I wouldn't want to leave.
When I can talk about what I went through, and people listen and cry and tell me they needed to hear it, then I feel like the decades of pain and sadness do not equal a wasted life. When people care what I say becuase it helps them, I feel useful. I want to think that maybe sharing my experience for other people's benefit is my purpose. Talking at the prison was like a soft gentle nudge from something bigger than i am, whispering into my ear that my past is not the thing that blocks my path, but rather the path itself. When I consider that I can go into a prison and not feel afraid and do something as both simple and wrenching as tell my story annd have it help people, I am amazed at the meaning I feel in this life. I want more.
P.S. They asked me to come back every week, which I will.
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Monday, February 1, 2010
Be disappointed
I love going to the therapist. Where else can you be completely, recklessly honest and not care about offending anyone? I also love trying out new therapists, so that I don't get into a rut of putting anybody's perspective on a pedastal. So thank you, employee assistance program, for providing me with 3 shiny free sessions with a new therapist, whose office is located conveniently right across the street from my apartment!
Growing up in an alcoholic home where the standard rules are to ignore the elephant in the living room and "don't talk, don't trust, don't feel," I learned how to pretend everything was okay when everything was really the farthest thing from okay. Keeping an ever-vigilent eye on the ticking, drunken time bomb and surviving the day was the main priority; I knew so little about myself that up until 2 years ago I couldn't even have told you my favorite color. I'd simply never even considered what I liked or what I wanted. The focus was always on keeping the alcoholic happy so that I could avoid the screaming; I was a stranger to myself. When I got to college and got some distance from the craziness and began to see how messed up it all was, pretending everything was okay became impossible. One Thanksgiving break I sat scowling on the couch and my mother snapped at me, perhaps intuiting that I was on the brink of throwing her precarious dance of denial off kilter.
"Slap a smile on your face and be nice to your family" she leered, and this threat became the mantra of my conditioned life.
When I spilled to the new therapist today about how my job is consuming my life and taking away from the time I need to spend on my own recovery, she asked me, "Why don't you just start asking for stuff? Ask for less work. Ask to move deadlines out. Ask to move your desk. And if they don't give it to you? Be disappointed. Look cranky and upset. Stop acting like it's your job to make them happy. Look disappointed the way they'd be disappointed if they didn't get what they want from you" In essence, stop slapping a smile on my face and be as irritated as I feel. What a freeing thought. One that I've been told to do dozens of times already, but was never ready to hear. As always, lessons are repeated until learned. Maybe I'm finally ready to learn it.
I always say I want to have a job where I can be authentic; what happens if I start being authentic in the job that I have now?
Growing up in an alcoholic home where the standard rules are to ignore the elephant in the living room and "don't talk, don't trust, don't feel," I learned how to pretend everything was okay when everything was really the farthest thing from okay. Keeping an ever-vigilent eye on the ticking, drunken time bomb and surviving the day was the main priority; I knew so little about myself that up until 2 years ago I couldn't even have told you my favorite color. I'd simply never even considered what I liked or what I wanted. The focus was always on keeping the alcoholic happy so that I could avoid the screaming; I was a stranger to myself. When I got to college and got some distance from the craziness and began to see how messed up it all was, pretending everything was okay became impossible. One Thanksgiving break I sat scowling on the couch and my mother snapped at me, perhaps intuiting that I was on the brink of throwing her precarious dance of denial off kilter.
"Slap a smile on your face and be nice to your family" she leered, and this threat became the mantra of my conditioned life.
When I spilled to the new therapist today about how my job is consuming my life and taking away from the time I need to spend on my own recovery, she asked me, "Why don't you just start asking for stuff? Ask for less work. Ask to move deadlines out. Ask to move your desk. And if they don't give it to you? Be disappointed. Look cranky and upset. Stop acting like it's your job to make them happy. Look disappointed the way they'd be disappointed if they didn't get what they want from you" In essence, stop slapping a smile on my face and be as irritated as I feel. What a freeing thought. One that I've been told to do dozens of times already, but was never ready to hear. As always, lessons are repeated until learned. Maybe I'm finally ready to learn it.
I always say I want to have a job where I can be authentic; what happens if I start being authentic in the job that I have now?
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Let it be shown to you
When I wake up in the morning the first thing I ask myself is, “What do I need to do?” and the answer I always, always hear without fail is “Take good care of yourself.” I usually don’t know what that means, and it feels so frivolous and trivial. Take care of myself? I have a to-do list to get through! There are bills to pay! People are dying in Haiti! In my best moods, I ignore the guidance. In my worst moods, I get in my car and yell at God for telling me what to do but then leaving out the part about how to do it. In these moments I really just want a mom to hug me and make me dinner and do my laundry and tell me I’ll be okay, but since I moved to California 3.5 years ago my mom is far away, 3,000 miles away, in fact, and so I’d be best to look elsewhere for comfort.
Lately I’ve been uninspired, unmotivated and generally slugging my way through the days. I’ve outgrown the job I’m in and the lack of having a clear alternative for financing my life has sent me spiraling into fear that manifests as trying really hard to cram my personality into a position that just doesn’t fit, to just-make-it-work-god-damn-it. I feel fatigued with living a life that doesn’t work for me anymore and I forgot that I can’t sleep away my problems.
My boyfriend left to surf at 5:30am, but I stayed in bed, perpetually pressing the snooze button every 10 minutes. Months ago I would wake up before the alarm and race down to the beach to jump in the ocean with reckless abandon, but lately I’ve forgotten what that was like, to care about doing what I love. To his and my frustration, I’ve spent the last few weekends sleeping through the good parts. During one snooze button interval this morning a radio commercial came on and the announcer said, auspiciously, that having the life you want just requires taking small steps in the direction you want to go. He needn’t say one more word, because if I’ve learned anything in the last few years it’s that when God throws a life preserver, I’d be best to catch it, so I jumped out of bed and drove down to the beach.
In the winter it’s often too cold or the waves are too big (or I convince myself that it’s too cold and the waves are too big) and so I watch the surfing instead of participate in the surfing, and such was the case today. I arrived in time to see the almost full moon still glaring to the West like a spotlight revealing all that is illusion, and to the East, the sky soaked the ocean in a soft red glow. I chatted with the friends of my boyfriend, a comforting community of surfers and early-morning dog walkers that I’m slowly learning to let in to my reserved, hesitant, still healing life and I watched the person I love glide effortlessly through the ocean doing what he loves most, and I felt happy.
I stood in the crisp , clear California morning and recalled that at this time 4 years ago when I lived in Boston amidst active alcoholism I watched surf documentaries at 6am because keeping my focus on where I wanted to go was the only way I knew to make life bearable, and the only way, day to day, that I could motivate myself to shovel snow off my car and to drive to a job that I hated and to come home again to stand by helplessly, watching the person who created me kill himself slowly with Budweiser as his weapon of choice. I remembered that my journals from that period in my life, filled with photos from Yoga Journal and Surfer Magazine and Coastal Living, are a veritable scrapbook foreshadowing and illustrating the life that I have now. Pausing in the cold January ocean air I ached for a means to communicate adequately the immensity of gratitude that I feel for having the life I imagined, and for knowing that although there is still so much pain and sadness, thing are so much better than they once were. I pleaded silently with God, or the universe or whatever you want to call your higher power that the transformation that happened to me over the last 4 years wasn’t a one-time freak miracle, and that I’ll be able to do it again, this time with the job that I hold. I prayed to God that even after all these years, the rule is still the same: difficult situations can change.
When I left the beach this morning I was moved inexplicably to stop at CVS and buy myself a bag of foil wrapped Valentine ’s Day chocolate hearts. I flashed back to all the times that my mom, a Registered Nurse who worked 11:00pm-7:00am shifts the whole time she raised us, would sometimes on weekends come home in the early morning and leave a box of Dunkin Donuts or some muffins or some bags of chocolates on the kitchen table for us to eat while she took her nap until early-afternoon. Although it was just 8:00am, I ate some of the chocolate hearts for breakfast this morning, because mostly, self-love means revolting against society’s norms. As I unwrapped each heart the distance between my mom and me began to disappear, and I somehow knew all of a sudden the love for us that she must have felt in order to stop at the store after a long night at the hospital to pick up something sweet for us to have in the morning. For a moment I forgot about all the let-downs and all the disappointments and all the times that she wasn’t the mother I wanted or needed her to be and I saw past the merciless, devastating grip of my father’s alcoholism on our family and I realized, in spite of it all, only how much she loved me, both back then and right now. For a moment the love was bigger than the sadness and for a moment I felt like my mom was with me even though she’s so far away and for a moment I could give to myself the love that she used to give me and for a moment I knew how to be for myself the mom that I’ve always needed.
For a moment, I took good care of myself.
Lately I’ve been uninspired, unmotivated and generally slugging my way through the days. I’ve outgrown the job I’m in and the lack of having a clear alternative for financing my life has sent me spiraling into fear that manifests as trying really hard to cram my personality into a position that just doesn’t fit, to just-make-it-work-god-damn-it. I feel fatigued with living a life that doesn’t work for me anymore and I forgot that I can’t sleep away my problems.
My boyfriend left to surf at 5:30am, but I stayed in bed, perpetually pressing the snooze button every 10 minutes. Months ago I would wake up before the alarm and race down to the beach to jump in the ocean with reckless abandon, but lately I’ve forgotten what that was like, to care about doing what I love. To his and my frustration, I’ve spent the last few weekends sleeping through the good parts. During one snooze button interval this morning a radio commercial came on and the announcer said, auspiciously, that having the life you want just requires taking small steps in the direction you want to go. He needn’t say one more word, because if I’ve learned anything in the last few years it’s that when God throws a life preserver, I’d be best to catch it, so I jumped out of bed and drove down to the beach.
In the winter it’s often too cold or the waves are too big (or I convince myself that it’s too cold and the waves are too big) and so I watch the surfing instead of participate in the surfing, and such was the case today. I arrived in time to see the almost full moon still glaring to the West like a spotlight revealing all that is illusion, and to the East, the sky soaked the ocean in a soft red glow. I chatted with the friends of my boyfriend, a comforting community of surfers and early-morning dog walkers that I’m slowly learning to let in to my reserved, hesitant, still healing life and I watched the person I love glide effortlessly through the ocean doing what he loves most, and I felt happy.
I stood in the crisp , clear California morning and recalled that at this time 4 years ago when I lived in Boston amidst active alcoholism I watched surf documentaries at 6am because keeping my focus on where I wanted to go was the only way I knew to make life bearable, and the only way, day to day, that I could motivate myself to shovel snow off my car and to drive to a job that I hated and to come home again to stand by helplessly, watching the person who created me kill himself slowly with Budweiser as his weapon of choice. I remembered that my journals from that period in my life, filled with photos from Yoga Journal and Surfer Magazine and Coastal Living, are a veritable scrapbook foreshadowing and illustrating the life that I have now. Pausing in the cold January ocean air I ached for a means to communicate adequately the immensity of gratitude that I feel for having the life I imagined, and for knowing that although there is still so much pain and sadness, thing are so much better than they once were. I pleaded silently with God, or the universe or whatever you want to call your higher power that the transformation that happened to me over the last 4 years wasn’t a one-time freak miracle, and that I’ll be able to do it again, this time with the job that I hold. I prayed to God that even after all these years, the rule is still the same: difficult situations can change.
When I left the beach this morning I was moved inexplicably to stop at CVS and buy myself a bag of foil wrapped Valentine ’s Day chocolate hearts. I flashed back to all the times that my mom, a Registered Nurse who worked 11:00pm-7:00am shifts the whole time she raised us, would sometimes on weekends come home in the early morning and leave a box of Dunkin Donuts or some muffins or some bags of chocolates on the kitchen table for us to eat while she took her nap until early-afternoon. Although it was just 8:00am, I ate some of the chocolate hearts for breakfast this morning, because mostly, self-love means revolting against society’s norms. As I unwrapped each heart the distance between my mom and me began to disappear, and I somehow knew all of a sudden the love for us that she must have felt in order to stop at the store after a long night at the hospital to pick up something sweet for us to have in the morning. For a moment I forgot about all the let-downs and all the disappointments and all the times that she wasn’t the mother I wanted or needed her to be and I saw past the merciless, devastating grip of my father’s alcoholism on our family and I realized, in spite of it all, only how much she loved me, both back then and right now. For a moment the love was bigger than the sadness and for a moment I felt like my mom was with me even though she’s so far away and for a moment I could give to myself the love that she used to give me and for a moment I knew how to be for myself the mom that I’ve always needed.
For a moment, I took good care of myself.
Beginning Again
Each night l ask my boyfriend, “What was the best part of your day?” Whether it was the adrenaline rush of a particularly good wave that he caught, or the support of a friend helping him with his music, or the feeling of accomplishment from having built some part of a house, his answer is always at root the same: his favorite part was that which inspired him most, that which fed him on deep levels and gave meaning to his life. I love watching his whole body smile and relax as he remembers the good stuff, and in listening to him, I feel myself relax , too. As he softens I am reminded that when I focus on what inspires me, I tap into the essence of what makes me feel like the boss of my life, like the “captain of my soul,” so elegantly put in the poem that serves as the namesake of the recent, and notably inspiring film, Invictus. Put more simply, when I maximize the positive, I feel better.
I know writing about my life empowers me to essentially steer my life, but so often I resist this constant intuitive guidance of mine with the excuse that life is too busy and I’m too tired and I don’t have time to write long essays anymore. But right now I am particularly stuck. I have outgrown a long-standing and limiting job description and yet I don’t have the clarity to see what I want my new role to be. I’ve got a job and I long for a purpose. I ache for a livelihood that is a natural extension of my own values and abilities and that allows me to feel empowered and to be of service and connected to other people. But I know that to achieve that end I must be more specific about what I seek. I am at a crossroads and the road looks foggy; I cannot tell where to turn. But I do know that when lack of clarity ails me, writing is my prescribed, tried-and-true medication. The thought occurred to me that maybe I don’t need to be so black-and-white in my perception of what a blog should be. Maybe it need not take hours to discern my purpose each day. Perhaps I could write each night simply the distilled essence of what thought, word, action or otherwise inspired me during that day. Perhaps I could simply log here the best part of my day, or even, the worst part of my day (and what it says about me that it was so bad), or perhaps, the most important part? Perhaps in the moments where I feel the most sensation, there is truth, and that is why I feel them so deeply. Perhaps those truthful moments are where I need to place my attention, because in a way these moments are signposts, directing me along on my path. Even in my foggy present I am comforted and anchored by the memory that when I wrote on a regular basis, I never questioned my decisions. I just knew what I needed to know.
When the world felt crazy, writing saved me. I know it can do so again.
I know writing about my life empowers me to essentially steer my life, but so often I resist this constant intuitive guidance of mine with the excuse that life is too busy and I’m too tired and I don’t have time to write long essays anymore. But right now I am particularly stuck. I have outgrown a long-standing and limiting job description and yet I don’t have the clarity to see what I want my new role to be. I’ve got a job and I long for a purpose. I ache for a livelihood that is a natural extension of my own values and abilities and that allows me to feel empowered and to be of service and connected to other people. But I know that to achieve that end I must be more specific about what I seek. I am at a crossroads and the road looks foggy; I cannot tell where to turn. But I do know that when lack of clarity ails me, writing is my prescribed, tried-and-true medication. The thought occurred to me that maybe I don’t need to be so black-and-white in my perception of what a blog should be. Maybe it need not take hours to discern my purpose each day. Perhaps I could write each night simply the distilled essence of what thought, word, action or otherwise inspired me during that day. Perhaps I could simply log here the best part of my day, or even, the worst part of my day (and what it says about me that it was so bad), or perhaps, the most important part? Perhaps in the moments where I feel the most sensation, there is truth, and that is why I feel them so deeply. Perhaps those truthful moments are where I need to place my attention, because in a way these moments are signposts, directing me along on my path. Even in my foggy present I am comforted and anchored by the memory that when I wrote on a regular basis, I never questioned my decisions. I just knew what I needed to know.
When the world felt crazy, writing saved me. I know it can do so again.
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