Answer Addiction

Tag: Kerry Neville

  • The Perils of Dating While Sober

    The Perils of Dating While Sober

    I am acutely aware of how careful I am to minimize my recovery journey when I first start dating someone.

    A few months ago, a male friend and I were talking about the frustrations and disappointments of dating. I mentioned how lonely it can be navigating this world on my own, without a traveling companion, a long-term lover, or a hiking partner, without someone with whom to Netflix and chill on a rainy Sunday.

    He said, “Dating is complicated for everyone, but for you, with your history? I can only imagine. Maybe guys are afraid of you, afraid of your intelligence and strength.” He hesitated and then continued, “Or maybe they’re just afraid to get close because of your bipolar diagnosis and…well, you’re an alcoholic. So a drink in a bar is out. Your history makes them wary. It’s going to take someone special, someone who’s willing to accept that risk and all your baggage.”

    All Your Baggage

    All your baggage. My old shame rose up, and his words fell on me like a one-hundred story building collapsing, cinder block by cinder block, The only words I could say in clipped retort? 

    “It’s called alcohol-use disorder now,” I said. “Update your vocabulary.”

    For days I replayed his assessment in a loop, an auto-play rumination and in self-defense, even wrote out a bulleted response:

    • Men afraid of me? Seriously? Maybe he’s afraid of my brain, but I’m afraid of his brawn. I’ve been sexually assaulted twice by two different men. Statistics show that women are more likely to be harassed and assaulted and raped—their lives endangered—by men than vice versa. 
    • I’m on a low dose of lithium now, and eight years stable and on an even keel since my divorce. My psychiatrist thinks I may not really be bipolar, or that maybe my bipolar instability was triggered by the conditions of my marriage.
    • And on dating apps, so many men post pictures swigging beer, wine, and booze and list beer, wine, and booze as hobbies. Almost always the first message they send is, “Do you want to get a drink?” And when I suggest a walk, a museum, non-boozy meetup? They disappear.
    • No drama, no crazies, no baggage: an oft-repeated list of No’s on dating profiles, but then these men (perhaps women do this, too?) indicate that they are married and looking for discretion, no strings attached; they also like to post photos of bloodsport: bare chested with AK-15’s and dead animals. But no drama!
    • And finally, too risky to love me? I’m a safe bet now! Look at the evidence: Sober, stable, all my s*** sorted!

    Doth the lady protest too much? Might my bulleted explanation be my armor against latent shame? Because what I am admitting to in my list is that I am lovable only now that I am well, and that when I was unwell? I was unlovable. 

    Love Is an Inherently Risky Proposition

    “I stopped loving you when you got sick,” my ex-husband told me when we decided to divorce, and it’s what I have secretly believed for so long. Hence, my adamant insistence that I am well, well, well and have been now for years, years, years. 

    But this narrative—I am such a scary person to love that it will take someone with extra-special love powers to love me—is one that no one with any diagnosis or at any stage of recovery should ever buy into. Love is an inherently risky proposition. We are at our most vulnerable when we love, trusting our hopes and fears to each other. And there is always the risk of love’s end, but, too, always the possibility of love’s beginnings, its growing and expanding.

    And yet, finding our way to a beginning of love with someone can be daunting and terrifying as we have to negotiate our commitment to honesty, open-mindedness, and willingness. We must reconcile that old shame that rises up, sometimes in ripples, sometimes in waves, when we summarize our histories or share how we still struggle with one day at a time with a new partner. I am acutely aware of how careful I am to minimize my recovery journey when I first start dating someone.

    “Oh,” I might say, “I stopped drinking because I wanted to live a healthier life, and for a few years I struggled with depression, but it’s all good now. Really, all good now.” Again that adamant insistence, again that background noise in my head: If he can fall in love with me now in all my lovableness, then none of my previous unlovableness will matter. Of course, even for those who have not struggled with mental illness or alcohol or substance use disorders, it is impossible for “all” to be forever good.

    “Really Crazy”

    I recently ended a relationship with someone after two months of mostly happy, breezy fun but I realized I’d been dodging my shame. When we first met, he mentioned early on that his ex-wife was bipolar. “Really crazy,” he said, and gave me a look that put me on notice.

    So I casually mentioned to him that I had bipolar as well, but “Stabilized!” I said, with a giant calm smile plastered across my face, and I even fluttered my eyelashes in flirty dismissal.

    He said he could see I was in a “good place” and not at all like his ex. And because I want the world to believe that I am in a good place (and most days I am), I nodded in enthusiastic agreement. 

    But then, a few weeks later, he mentioned that my town was known for the State Psychiatric Hospital, opened in the 1840’s and now shuttered. 

    “Have you ever been there?” I asked, because it is now a tourist stop—The Walking Dead once filmed a scene at the mostly abandoned grounds and there are historical markers describing the troubling treatment of the mentally ill across its almost 150 year history.

    “No,” he said, immediately and with a laugh. “I’m not one of the crazies.”

    Of course, during a period of my own instability, I was once one of those “crazies,” in and out of a psychiatric hospital. He knew this by now, though maybe because I “presented” as so very very well, he couldn’t believe that was part of my history.

    To be fair, he made these comments casually, without malice, the kind of talk that generally surrounds those of us who suffer from mental illnesses or who are on a recovery journey. They were the kind of comments I often hear because most people assume, by looking at me and my “got it all together life,” that I am one of them, i.e., “not crazy.”

    But even if his comment was thoughtless, I felt that old shame rise up and stayed silent because I didn’t want him to suddenly see me as sick, and hence unlovable, and consequently maybe leave this beginning of us. So I made a silly remark about ghosts who must surely haunt those grounds. 

    No bulleted list at the ready but here’s what I should have said:

    “It’s hurtful to hear you call someone with my diagnosis ‘really crazy,’ and to call those in treatment ‘crazies.’ We all have our baggage, don’t we? We live and stumble and get up and try to live better, always. All of us.”

    But his remarks and my silence unsettled me. How easy it is for me to talk the talk, but how hard it can be to walk the walk. A few weeks later, I ended this beginning because, yes, I have baggage, and it is not just a free carry-on roller bag, but one of those $20K vintage Louis Vuitton trunks that have drawers and a hanger rod, room enough for my pain and my joy, my mistakes and my amends, my shame and my wisdom. 

    That is, a trunk big enough to carry all my necessities for this continuing journey.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Equilibrium, Truth, and Hope: What It’s Like to Be a Writer in Recovery

    Equilibrium, Truth, and Hope: What It’s Like to Be a Writer in Recovery

    We speak to four accomplished writers about their writing process and how it relates to their recovery.

    Writing has been the greatest gift of my recovery. Seven years ago I sat at my desk — as instructed by a sponsor who’d asked me to start journaling — with my pen poised, but with a numbness between my mind and the paper. I just didn’t know where to start — what to write, or how to say it. I was numb. My mind felt blank and my hand wouldn’t move. My sponsor told me to start small: write a plan for the day, or express how I feel. Record what you’ve done right each day, she said.

    Once I started, I couldn’t stop. Words flowed out of me like a dam had been removed from an overflowing river. Seven years later, I’ve filled many journals, become a full-time writer and journalist, published hundreds of articles online, and have begun writing my memoir. Writing is my number one means of expression — I often choose it over an in-person conversation. Some kind of magic happens when I place my fingers on the keyboard. Writing helps me to connect my mind and body, to ground myself. It gives me the breathing space to process my thoughts. Writing shows me how far I’ve come, but also what’s left to heal. I can’t imagine a life without writing.

    AWP 2019, Portland, OR

    As I’ve started to take myself more seriously as a writer, I decided to venture out into the world of my peers. I recently attended an Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference in Portland. It is the largest literary conference in North America readings, panel discussions, and lectures. What struck me the most about the conference was the sheer volume of people—there were 12,000 attendees. If you’re new to the writing world, AWP can leave you feeling a little out of your depth — looking out the lens of comparison as opposed to shining in your own light. For this introvert and empath, it was way too much. I hate crowds, and I struggle to make meaningless chit-chat.

    While I found I’m not alone in my feelings of overwhelm and my desire to lock myself in a dark room surrounded only with books and a flashlight for the next month, I did take the opportunity to indulge my curiosity about the emerging cohort of writers who have spoken openly about their recovery. I wanted to know if it was possible to co-exist in a world that is usually associated with copious amounts of wine, and whether these writers’ pain from addiction could be used as a catalyst for healing in the world.

    Writers in Recovery

    I spoke to writers Kerry Neville, Randall Horton, Kelly Thompson, and Penny Guisinger to understand their writing process and how it relates to their recovery.

    Kerry Neville

     

    Kerry Neville is the author of the books Necessary Lies and Remember to Forget Me. She is the recipient of numerous prizes in fiction, a former Fulbright Scholar, and the coordinator of the graduate and undergraduate creative writing program at Georgia College & State University, where she is also an assistant professor of creative writing.

    How has recovery influenced your writing, and in what ways?

    When I write out of my own experience, out of my own complicated relationship with bipolar disorder and about my recovering from an eating disorder and alcohol use disorder, for instance, I often navigate between the implicit bias I have that comes out of my own factual experience and the imperative to try to translate that into a more universal felt understanding. I am interested in how such struggles with these types of disorders might reveal something more about what it means for us to be in connection or disconnection with each other. When I am “inside” my own experience of this illness, it’s isolating — insularity prevents insight. So in my writing, I try to understand how grief, loneliness, and depression, the tightrope many of us walk regardless of a mental health diagnosis, might link us together and how we can help each other to continue on.

    Conversely, in what ways has writing helped your recovery?

    In my movement toward recovery and stability and back into my writing self, I understood that while it might be desperately lonely out there, we have an obligation to reach out for each other, to pay attention, to live in truth and integrity. This understanding, once I emerged from that bleak, dark well, fueled the writing, helped me find my way back through words that built sentences that created paragraphs that imagined stories — and writing is an act of hope.

    How do you deal with the ups and downs of being a writer (rejections, etc.) in a healthy way?

    In terms of dealing with rejection? One day at a time, one submission at a time. And remembering I write not for acceptance but for connection — to myself, to others. 

    Randall Horton

    Randall Horton is the author of several books: The Definition of Place, Lingua Franca of Ninth Street, Hook, A Memoir and Pitch Dark Anarchy: Poems. He is the recipient of various poetry awards and prizes, including the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award. Randall is a member of the Affrilachian Poets and an associate professor of English at the University of New Haven.

    How has recovery influenced your writing, and in what ways?

    To be honest with you, I don’t know that it has. However, when I was in JAS (Jail Addiction Services) in Montgomery County, I was introduced to the idea of writing through a group session we used to have with a social worker. This person took an interest in my writing during this time and encouraged me to continue the path that I now currently follow.

    Conversely, in what ways has writing helped your recovery?

    I will say this: Writing helps me to not want to sell drugs, pick up a package and hustle, or the myriad things I thought were necessary for me to live. For me, writing shows me how to be human; even when I resist, the writing is my equilibrium.

    How do you deal with the ups and downs of being a writer (rejections, etc.) in a healthy way?

    Well, the first word I learned as a little child was “no.” So rejection doesn’t bother me one bit. I have been to prison. I have lived on the streets and had a whole alternate existence as a human being in this society. With that said, writing and the writing life is easy because I’m playing with house money, so I never lose. Feel me?

    Kelly Thompson

    Kelly Thompson’s work has been published in Guernica, Entropy, The Rumpus, and various other publications and literary journals. Her essay “Hand Me Down Stories” was nominated for a Pushcart. Kelly curates Voices on Addiction at The Rumpus, where she also serves as a contributor.

    How has recovery influenced your writing, and in what ways?

    Recovery is a way of life. My recovery determines my writing, relationships, daily life, and choices. I prioritize my sobriety over everything else. It comes first. My recovery is based on certain principles. As Shakespeare said, “To thine own self be true and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.” So that, as well as other principles like honesty, openness to new ideas, and nonresistance constitute a daily practice in my life. That flows into my writing practice as well. So I really can’t separate the two. For me, it is all one thing. Recovery helped me uncover my truth, which led me to write.

    Conversely, in what ways has writing helped your recovery?

    To write is my heart’s desire. My passion. By writing, I am doing what I was born to do. Once I peeled away the layers of conditioning that kept me from writing —and there were many — once I committed to writing as a lifelong practice, doors began opening, and any obstacles in the way of my writing began to dissolve. I have learned that purpose is integral to recovery, so by fulfilling it, by following my passion, so to speak, my recovery is strengthened. They inform each other. My recovery and writing go hand in hand.

    How do you deal with the ups and downs of being a writer (rejections, etc.) in a healthy way?

    I think it was Barry Lopez who said, “Despair is the great temptation.” I can’t afford to go there. It’s a numbers game, so in the beginning, I started by submitting my writing frequently to publications I admired. I set a goal of getting as many rejections as possible and considering that a win. The rule I set for myself was that upon receiving a rejection, I would immediately send the piece to the next tier of submissions. By doing that, I was able to transition into not taking rejection personally. I also learned from the process. I learned that I was often sending things out prematurely. I learned to sit on my writing for a bit and then return to it. Now, as a curator for The Rumpus and “Voices on Addiction,” I’m on the other side of it, as well. That experience has taught me firsthand that rejections often have nothing to do with the quality of the writing. It’s usually more a matter of timing, fit, and the column’s needs. At the same time, the best submissions are truly final drafts and need little to no edits. That continues to teach me a lot about my writing and submission process. If you can become a reader for a publication, go for it, because you’ll learn from it.

    Penny Guisinger

    Penny Guisinger is the author of the book Postcards from Here. Her work has appeared in various publications, such as River Teeth, Guernica, the Brevity blog, and Solstice Literary Magazine. She has been nominated for a Pushcart, has won the Maine Literary Award, and was twice named a notable in Best American Essays. She is the assistant editor at Brevity Magazine, the director of Iota: Conference of Short Prose, and the founder of the popular and hilarious blog, My Cranky Recovery.

    How has recovery influenced your writing, and in what ways?

    I’m a CNF [creative nonfiction] writer, and so am constantly mining real life for writeable moments. Recovery demands that we dig deep into ourselves and develop a clear understanding of our own minds and how they work. As I go through life as a person in recovery, I have learned how to experience the experience of every experience, which is a ridiculous thing to say but it’s true. I am always taking several steps back to maintain awareness of what’s happening and how it might be impacting my sobriety. As such, it’s honed my self-observation skills which I also use as a writer. And I’d be lying if I didn’t say that recovery makes rich material for writing. (Is that cynical?)

    Conversely, in what ways has writing helped your recovery?

    Writing has not helped my recovery at all, but publishing about recovery has helped a lot. There is a lot about 12-step programs that I don’t find useful, but one very useful thing that happens at meetings is this thing where we admit our addictions out loud by saying (in my case), “I’m an alcoholic.” Saying those words helped make it real for me. Publishing this particular truth is like saying that to the whole world. It’s terrifying and, ultimately, very freeing.

    How do you deal with the ups and downs of being a writer (rejections, etc.) in a healthy way?

    I take the little downs in stride: rejection is part of the job, and usually it doesn’t bother me. (There are some significant exceptions: a few that I’ve taken pretty hard!) I get more weighed down by the big ones: imposter syndrome, comparing myself to other writers, feeling let down after this-or-that publication didn’t manage to transform my life. I manage that exactly the way I manage my recovery: through community. I would be as dead in the water without my writing community as I would be without my recovery community, and what a gift it is when those two communities overlap.

     

    Do you have some additions? Tell us in the comments.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Mother’s Day: Recovery, Love, and Light

    Mother’s Day: Recovery, Love, and Light

    At night, tucking my kids into bed, I would make a deal with myself: hold on just a little longer until they needed me a little less and then I could go through with my suicide plan.

    Mother’s Day is Mothering Day, isn’t it? A day that honors all of us who mother our children—loving, caretaking, nurturing, offering our time and energy, setting aside more selfish pursuits and pleasures to help support our children’s journeys. Of course, we love receiving the homemade, crayoned cards, the store-bought roses or dandelion bouquets, and the pancakes delivered in bed (even with kitchen disasters). These gifts remind us of our essential role in our children’s lives. But for me? Mother’s Day is my chance to offer my gratitude that I am now a sober and stable force of love, hope, and healing for my children.

    Almost 10 years ago, I started writing my blog, Momma May Be Mad, during a complete bipolar collapse: I was anorexic, alcoholic, in and out of psychiatric hospitals and rehabs, and determined to die. But what anchored me to this world were words; more specifically, my blog, a public journal that allowed me to wrestle openly with the lies and the truths of illness and wellness, of despair and hope, of isolation and community.

    At the time, recovery seemed an impossible and cruel promise: light and hope and love would always be just out of reach and I believed it would be better for my children if I died. In the morning, I woke up too early and at night went to bed too late because of a ruminative argument that forced this point: How could I ever be a safe and loving harbor for my children when I was the storm threatening to smash us all against the rocks? I did not believe that I could get sober and stable and well enough to mother my children into their own growing, complex, miraculous lives.Rather than feeling like a mother, a source of creative nurturing power, I felt like one of the furies, a toxic destructive cyclone.

    Do you know that “mother” also refers to the thick scummy substance in liquor, the filthy dregs? This truly was how I thought of myself. At night, tucking my kids into bed, I would make a deal with myself: hold on just a little longer until they needed me a little less and then I could go through with my suicide plan.

    My first post was a manifesto to truth. For years I’d been lying about how much I drank, how often I cut myself, how little I’d eaten, and how I was planning to die. It was a way to hold myself accountable to a deliberate, intentional, and public directive: to recover my health, my balance, and most importantly my integrity. My aim was nothing less than radical transparency:

    March 1, 2010: Truth: Here I am, Self and the Blank Page, fingers nervously typing. Time to write this down, to deal with the shame and the self-loathing, and turn it around. This is the story of IT: ‘IT’ is my abstract pronoun, the catch-all for my variety of afflictions. IT inhabits capital letters, an impassive, unfeeling monolith. In contrast, ‘I,’ (or for your sake, ‘me,’) who lives in love, in forgiveness, and in the shrieks of pleasure I hear coming from my kids right now in their playroom. I am thirty-seven years old, the Momma of two, the wife of one, and I have bipolar disorder, and eating disorder. Oh yes, and the nasty habit of cutting myself. And drinking, too much. I am in therapy, on mood stabilizers, anti-psychotics, and sleep meds. But what I must accept: Life on Life’s Terms. No mere 12 Step cliché, but practical truth. I’m ragged and frayed and scattered, fractured and splintered by shame. I want to be whole for my children.

    My essential sacred directive was to stay alive. Short-term goals at first. Stay alive for my son’s cookie crumb, sloppy kisses, his warm hand on my cheek, his tiny body finding mine at night, spooning up against me. He needed me in the primal way four-year-olds need their Mommas, close and tight. He is my son, and, at the time, I was his sun—the one he revolved around. When I picked him up from preschool, he would tackle me and say, “I love you Momma. Will you marry me?” A sincere proposal—live together forever.

    And to stay alive for my daughter who needed me more and differently as she navigated the intricacies of being a seven-year-old who preferred dragons, bugs, and furry creatures over Hannah Montana, the Jonas Brothers, and boyfriend-girlfriend role playing. And then there were the rapid-fire, shifting friendships that often relegated her to third-in-line best friend. My heart broke over and over as she tearfully told me that she had “a funny feeling in her belly all day long,” and wanted to move far away. “Vermont,” she said, “or Greece.”In her Mother’s Day Card from that year, she wrote that I made yummy muffins, was, contrary to fact, good at mathematics, loved when I tickled, hugged, and kissed her, and that she “relly relly relly relly relly relly relly relly relly relly relly relly” loved me.

    Twelve relly’s.

    Stay here and love us, forever: this was the sacred directive given to me by my children.

    In the years since that public declaration, I’ve done the hard work in therapy, I take my meds, respect my body (no cutting, no starving), got sober, and continue to write my way out of hell and into health. Sobriety and stability are clarifying and being a Mother in recovery means showing our children that they don’t have to stay stuck in a bad situation. By our own example one day at a time, we show them how to persevere, to stay hopeful, to recover and thrive after what seems insurmountable failure. 

    I am mostly happy these days and can hardly remember those years foundering at the bottom of the dark well, the years I believed I would never find joy again, never be the mother I wanted to be for my children again, never write another word that mattered again, never look forward to the next day and the day after that again. Now? I know that I am not (and never was) the scummy, filthy dreg at the bottom of a bottle of booze, and that while I might have been a mad Momma for a time, I have always been loved. Now? I am the safe harbor, my steady beacon blinking: Here-Here-Here-Always Here-Always Here-Always Here.

    Bipolar disorder is not curable, but it is manageable; sobriety is hard even on the easy days; and I fought to regain my life and my life with my children.

    Know this to be true: if you are where I was, please do not despair because you are worth fighting for, skinned knuckles and scraped knees, bruises and blood. Fight for your life, your joy, your own self-love. The world wants you back, the light is waiting, and your children are here.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Advent: Deepening Our Commitment to Recovery

    Advent: Deepening Our Commitment to Recovery

    Haven’t we struggled through the dark in our addictions and now live inside truth’s illumination? So why not spend these weeks in spiritual reflection and renewing our commitment to recovery?

    Advent, from the Latin, adventus — “a coming” — is, for Christians, the season celebrating Jesus Christ’s impending birth and his second coming after his death. The liturgical readings over the four weeks are centered on hope, preparation, joy, and love. It is also the season of the Advent wreath and its four candles, one lit successively each week, and of the Advent calendar and its 25 chocolates secreted behind twenty-five cardboard windows. Reflection and prayer, sweetness and light: the dark illuminated by remembrance and anticipation.

    When I was drinking? The season for wanton indulgence: cranberry cosmopolitans, eggnog, mulled wine, and Irish coffees. Parties and booze and blackouts and hangovers. Superficial, carnal pursuits superseded any spiritual meditative pleasures. How many Christmas Eves did my then-husband and I spend slogging wine into the wee hours while last-minute wrapping gifts, crankier with each downed glass? And then the wretched hangover on Christmas mornings when our kids, wiggly with Santa excitement, woke us at dawn — “Get up! Get up! Get up!”— and how we dragged ourselves from bed, desperate for ibuprofen and coffee? 

    The ritual of prayer and the ritual of drink. The lead-up to Christmas and then New Year’s celebrations can be difficult for those of us who are sober and trying to stay sober: we might be tempted by the fireside glass of wine or flute of effervescent champagne, or by friends gathering in the pub or our own loneliness when we stay home alone. Even now, eight years sober, I still can feel that pull: Join us! You’re missing out! A bottle of red, a bottle of white is the easy way to holiday cheer.

    I don’t. I don’t. I don’t.

    I don’t consider that pull for more than a millisecond because I know that drinking does not, in the end, make me cheerful; it makes me suicidal. The best gift I can give to myself and the best gift I can receive is my sobriety which is its own advent calendar: I go to sleep in anticipation of that sweet gift the next morning — waking up sober and without shame and with surety that I am alive and well. 

    But the advent season does not only have to be a Christian celebration but can guide us in deepening our commitment to sobriety. I am no longer a practicing Catholic, though I still feel a fierce keening toward sustaining rituals like Christmas carols and trees and midnight mass. Advent is a season of remembrance and anticipation of birth and rebirth, so why not spend these weeks in spiritual reflection: in remembrance of all that I lost to my addiction but also all that I have since gained in sobriety, and, in anticipation of the promises that are still waiting to be fulfilled tomorrow morning when I open my window for the day’s light.

    Because haven’t we, too, experienced our own second coming, our own rebirth? Haven’t we struggled through the dark in our addictions and don’t we now live inside truth’s illumination? Haven’t wise men and women given us the gifts of honesty, open-mindedness, and willingness so that we can say, in gratitude or prayer to our Higher Power, “Yes, I choose this day, this life, now and forever?”

    Last week, far from home in Ireland and with news of a friend’s death, I went for a very long run, miles and miles, trying to outrun grief’s hangover and Sunday loneliness and had every intention, upon my return, of climbing into bed and pulling the covers over my head and sleeping it off. And then my phone chimed its calendar alert and a little window opened: December 2nd, the first Sunday of Advent, the candlelight choral service at the cathedral.

    Immediately, that insistent voice in my head interrupted: Skip it! Skip it! Skip it! You’re tired and spent!

    That voice sounded exactly like the voice that used to say: Drink it! Drink it! Drink it! You’re tired and spent!

    Tired and spent, yes, and exactly why I needed to go to the service: song and ritual, darkness and light, what is coming and coming and coming for us all can be hope and love and community. I sang the hymns and prayed the prayers and cried the necessary tears of both grief and wonder as one candle after another illuminated all of us gathered in the cathedral, a reminder that we are not alone in the dark but surrounded by fellowship.

    We are here only to bring light in our own unique ways to those alone in the dark, to remember that light from above illuminates the unsteady ground under our feet, and that we can travel towards each other, meeting each other inside our light.

    Note: That cathedral, 850 years old, has survived Viking invasions, Norman sieges, Cromwell, Independence, and is still here, as are we, survivors all.

    How are you working on your recovery today? What are you grateful for?

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • No Vacation from Recovery: A Packing List

    No Vacation from Recovery: A Packing List

    Recovery cannot be left to chance but requires planning, even—and maybe especially—on vacation with its temptations: tropical drinks, laissez-faire schedule, swim-up bars, and late nights.

    For a long time, when my bipolar disorder, alcoholism, and eating disorder were out of control, I believed that the geographic cure, specifically travel, was the antidote to all my ills, as if I could take a vacation from addiction and mental illness. I would pack my bags and land in some exotic port of call, a Greek island, for instance, certain that I would find happiness in the reliable sunshine, the deep blue water, the daily swims, the Mediterranean food, and in a self somehow suddenly better—better in illness and better in soul.

    “Surely, surely the less frenetic island pace will slow me down,” I would tell myself. “I’m always happy there, lying on the beach, eating ripe peaches, hiking through the olive groves, and snorkeling in search of sea urchin shells.” Within days of arrival, I’d be miserable, again, flat out suicidal, wanting to swim out into the blue sea, going and going, or wanting to hurl myself off a steep cliff. No vacation from addiction and mental illness.

    What I have learned in my eight years of stability and sobriety is that there is no vacation from recovery, either.

    My first sober vacation with my now-ex-husband was to Jamaica. Hubris testing those waters, which was a paradise for my ex with its endless supply of Red Stripe and ganja but treacherous for me, only a few months sober. My then-husband had been travelling to Negril for twenty years chasing that perfect beach buzz while I was trying to stay steady, surrounded by all these happy (seeming) vacationers, and trying to remember why I did not want to drink, why I could not ever drink again. Naively, I packed without a contingency plan, bringing just a bikini, sunscreen, and a dress. Nothing to support my recovery. Thankfully, my Higher Power had a contingency plan. 

    The first day while we were lazing in the sun, another couple, Amy and Rich*, sat in the lounge chairs beside us. We made small talk and my then-husband said, “I’m heading up to the bar for a Red Stripe. Anybody want anything?”

    “Coke for me,” I said.

    “I’ll take a coke,” Rich said. “Thanks.”

    “Me, too,” Amy said.

    My antennae attuned, I said, “Are you guys in the club, too?”

    They knew what I meant and from then on, we were inseparable. Amy and Rich, sober for decades, prepared in advance for the trip. With a little online research, they’d found a 12-step meeting off the beach in a tiny church and we went together, in flipflop solidarity. Lesson learned? Recovery cannot be left to chance but requires planning, even—and maybe especially—on vacation with its temptations: tropical drinks, laissez-faire schedule, swim-up bars, and late nights. What happens in Vegas or London or New York City or Rome or Kathmandu doesn’t stay there, but stays with you, a permanent souvenir. In recovery, we don’t get a free pass.

    I now have a packing list that I stick to for all my travels, the practical essentials and spiritual necessities that support my recovery and stability. When we leave home for the unknown, we can get lost, even with the precision of GPS, even with years of sobriety or stability, even if we are confident in our now reliable happiness.

    My Recovery Packing List:

    1. Proper Running Shoes: Know whether you are running away from your life or running towards a bigger life. I have used travel as an escape from myself, from the circumstances of my life that felt out of control (my drinking, my starving, my depression). Every time I tried to run away to some other place, I wound up desperate, without family or friends, without a support system, and hit a new bottom each time. But when I am running on stable ground towards a joyful life? A few years ago, I stayed at a yoga ashram in the Bahamas. One morning, I took a sunrise walk down the beach and felt utterly content breathing in the sun and sea, at ease with myself in my solitude. 
    1. A Map: Know where you came from, where you are now, and where you are going. On a three-week solo trip to Morocco, I meticulously planned the route between the Atlas Mountains and Marrakech and Ouarzazate and Essaouria—unfamiliar terrain without a co-pilot. But more, I needed to remember how far I had come in sobriety so that I could travel alone, out into the world, without family and friends worrying that I might hit bottom, and to know that my journey forward was now one filled with adventure rather than danger. So, I wrote myself a note that I kept inside my wallet: I was once at the bottom of the well; I am now on dry land; I am heading for the horizon!
    1. Carry On (Not Checked Luggage): That is pack light. Don’t carry the weight of the past, only your sober and stable self. What use are sandals and sneakers and snorkels and sunscreen and travel guides and a Kindle downloaded with beach reads if you don’t have room for The Big Book or a journal to record 12-step work? And what use are these essentials for continued recovery if they get lost in checked baggage? If books are too heavy, download 12-step apps and The Big Book to your phone. And why bring them along if you don’t read them? Begin the day reading whatever you might find that anchors you to recovery. Me? It is usually the poem “Late Fragment” by Raymond Carver:

    And did you get what
    you wanted from this life, even so?
    I did.
    And what did you want?
    To call myself beloved, to feel myself
    beloved on the earth. 

    1. Emergency Contacts: Not just family and friends, but sponsors, therapists, and doctors. Too expensive to call overseas? Download an app (such as WhatsApp) so it is free to call people who will remind you who you are becoming, to hear a familiar voice when you’re out there wandering the world and veer off map. In the middle of the Sahara, just off a camel ride through a sandstorm, I Skyped with my sponsor. “Hellooooo,” I said. “I’m calling from the middle of nowhere though I am somewhere beautiful and not at all lost!”
    1. Local Hangouts: Once upon a time, you might have researched bars and nightspots. Now, as I learned from Amy and Rich, I research local 12-step meetings and make it a traveling priority to attend the meetings. Fellowship exists across this world and all we have to do is walk through the door to find our tribe. And if no meeting exists? Keep our antennae attuned to those around us who aren’t ordering booze. On a recent trip to Ireland, I met a local over dinner who I noticed wasn’t drinking. I mentioned to him that I didn’t drink either. “Are you a friend of Bill W.?” he asked, then invited me to go with him to a 12-step meeting later that night. Home on the road.

    Of course, make sure your passport—proof of citizenship and of far-flung travel—is up-to-date. A passport is a dream journal: where have I been and where do I want to go? And in recovery, a passport is a record of courage (those stamps) and of hope (those blank pages) that says: I want to risk myself in the world and am ready for the journey. Necessities packed. Never alone on the road.

     *Not their real names

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • True North and the Geographical Cure

    True North and the Geographical Cure

    What it was like then: misery that had me researching the methods and means of suicide in the middle of the night on my cell phone, back turned to my husband, who was fast asleep, and to my children, asleep between us.

    The geographical cure: false hope that a change in circumstance might transform us. Always seductive, isn’t it? But as I have learned from Alcoholics Anonymous, a change in external position on the map doesn’t reset the compass and point us to true north because we always meet up with the self we are, no matter where we are, by chance, by collision, by invitation. Bill Wilson writes in AA’s Big Book, “We meet these conditions every day. An alcoholic who cannot meet them, still has an alcoholic mind: there is something the matter with his spiritual status. His only chance for sobriety would be some place like the Greenland Ice Cap, and even there an Eskimo might turn up with a bottle of scotch and ruin everything! Ask any woman who has sent her husband to distant places on the theory he would escape the alcohol problem.”

    Each time I believed a vacation, a temporary reprieve from present conditions, would be the cure, the fix I needed: Jamaica, Mexico, Greece, Romania, Italy, France, Wisconsin, California, etc., etc.? Each time I was sent off to “recover” from my eating disorder, self-injury, alcoholism, and bipolar depression, to distant, inpatient programs: Arizona, Maryland, Texas, and Pittsburgh? I’d get on a plane, 30 pounds underweight, spend a month or two bullshitting my way to well, not starving, eating thousands of calories (but only because I was forced), not drinking (but only because no access to booze), not cutting (but only because no access to sharps), and claiming to feel mostly content (Ha!) with my restored (Too BIG!) body, but not too content because such rapid reversal of position would seem disingenuous to doctors and therapists (I know I still have so much work to do but gosh, I am optimistic this time!).

    Each time, I returned home and within weeks was back to restricting, purging, over-exercising, drinking, cutting, and lying. Nothing had changed at home (that is, within myself), so I kept traveling an insane circular route though a dark, abandoned, haunted house.

    Samuel Johnson, in his 1750 essay, “The Rambler,” might as well have been giving the lead for a 12-step meeting when he wrote, “The general remedy of those, who are uneasy without knowing the cause, is change of place; they are willing to imagine that their pain is the consequence of some local inconvenience, and endeavor to fly from it, as children from their shadows; always hoping for more satisfactory delight from every new scene, and always returning home with disappointments and complaints.” 

    Eventually, with honesty and a commitment to working my program, I found my way home. I did not disappear nor die, though for many years I tried to do just that. Difficult to remember that life from here: my now eight years stable life, my now divorced and independent life with a teaching job in Georgia; my own home with HoneyBea, my rescue dog; and purpose restored.

    But also from exactly here: on an artist’s residency in Ireland, where I have just had morning tea with writers and painters and composers around a kitchen table — warm scones with butter and blackcurrant jam; where the night before, we gathered around a long, candle-lit dining table for fish, roasted potatoes, carrots, broccoli, and coconut custard topped with a purple-black pansy, and afterwards, in the drawing room where we shared our paintings, writing, and music; where Bernadette, at 93, stood before us in her long red dress, her cane left by her chair, and recited, from memory, poems from her latest, and sixth book—“think of when/ the end will come/and then”; where I believe that I, too, might live to 93, still creating more and forward; where, prefacing my reading, draft pages from a book-in-progress, I told my new friends, “I am not supposed to be here. I was given up for dead. And yet.”

    At dinner, on the very first night of my stay, I noticed a fellow artist who had declined the kind offers of wine, and then the raspberry trifle spiked with sherry. So I said to him, as we were cleaning up dishes in the kitchen, “I don’t drink either,” because I am always searching for my tribe when I am not at home.

    “Are you a friend of Bill W.?” he asked.

    The next night he took me to the local 12-step meeting in the town of Cootehill and I was asked, for the next meeting, to give the “Lead,” which, in 12-step terms, means recounting in ten minutes’ time the story of what my life was like when I was drinking, what happened—the transformation to sobriety—and what my life was like now that I was free.

    “It’s easy to get lost,” I said. “Easier to stay lost so far from home. This meeting is an anchor—while you might be strangers, you know me and I know you.” As I was talking about my desperate drinking days, giving the drunkalog, it was as if I was telling the story of another Kerry—that is, the story of a fear-full woman, intent on wrecking herself in despair’s ditch, and who would be dead by 40 by active or passive suicide.

    What was my life like then? Locked in a room under 24/7 video surveillance with a thin mattress on the floor, eating bland spaghetti with a plastic spoon, though not really eating since I’d stopped that, too (a spoon and in isolation because I kept sawing my wrists with the tines of a fork in the hospital cafeteria). I kept trying to disappear and doctors kept locking me away. “We need to stop you from killing yourself,” they said. What it was like then: misery that had me researching the methods and means of suicide in the middle of the night on my cell phone, back turned to my husband, who was fast asleep, and to my children, who were curled up and asleep between us both. Plans, plans, plans. Misery that dogged me. What it was like then: impossible to ever be inside joy, to be part of the living, the loving, the longing for now and tomorrow and more of this life, and so I ruminated over the plans, plans, plans.

    And so, my recounting of that Kerry at the meeting in Cootehill? She seemed a remote wraith, no longer dogging me, with her doomsday threats: “Just wait. You’ll fall again.” What she now says? “Thank you for saving me.” I honor her and have compassion for her: she didn’t know how to love herself, how to use her voice, how to take risks in this world.

    But, too, what it is like now: years after my last dive into bipolar’s dark well and seven years sober, my thoughts can still wander off path and I can get momentarily lost, particularly when traveling away from home, alone, in distant places where I might not know anyone, might wonder if the geographical cure could work: maybe I can have a Guinness in Ireland? So I look for my tribe and go to meetings when far from home. In recovery, you seek fellowship no matter where you are. Because you are always HERE, NOW: one day at a time, even in the Irish countryside.

    But, too, what it is like now: I am in right alignment to myself, which means often at an odd angle to the universe, which means sometimes wobbly on that off-kilter axis, but mostly truly good. Such a simple word: good. An alleged root of “good” is the Indo-Eurpoean “ghedh”—to unite, to fit. I am united with myself and fit into my own part of this world. That is, with my ragtag tribe of survivors who know what it was like, what happened, and what it is like now—but a “Now” that only is possible if I remained committed to honesty, open-mindedness, and willingness to find fellowship at home and abroad.

    View the original article at thefix.com