Hope and Change

The title of this post implies that this post will get political in a hurry.  But, I do not want to talk about the president.  I want to talk about why those two themes were such a powerful campaign message.  And I think it is because they are such a powerful human message.

Without hope, without believing in the possibility that things can change for the better, many of us would have a hard time continuing to live.  Personally, I am plagued by an overwhelming fear of other people.  It is something my brother has said that he faces, too.  Our father used to physically and verbally abuse us based on unpredictable and sometimes unavoidable offenses.  Spilling milk was not anything to cry over, but his fury that we spilled the milk certainly was.  Trying something new was particularly scary.  Folding laundry, cleaning bathrooms, and mowing lawns had to be done the way that he subjectively believed was correct, sometimes without any instruction, or he could fly off the handle.

So, I am scared of everybody.  I am scared that every new person I meet might find my idiosyncrasies so upsetting that they will physically hurt me.  And I am afraid that everything I do at work will meet with revulsion, rejection, and cruel words.  I worry that, even if my way of doing things makes more sense, I will be punished for not doing things the way other people prefer.

I do not think that I could survive if I thought that there was no chance that I could reprogram my psyche to lessen the daily terror that I feel.  Without hope that things will get better in my head, that the mindfuck my father pulled on me during my childhood is not immutable, I think that I would just curl up into a ball and cry until I wasted away and died.

But, for better or worse, I cling to the hope that things can change.  When my grip on that hope is strongest, I am usually at my best, and life is not so bad after all.  When I am hanging off the edge of that hope, dangling on a cliff abutting the ocean of my despair, I tend to shut down.  My grip starts to slip.  And I am fortunate that I have had so many good people in my life to grab me by the wrists and haul me back onto solid ground.  I know that not everybody is that lucky.

But, even living in hope can be exhausting.  The fear I hold inside wears on me.  It holds me back from immersing myself in the small joys and great opportunities of my life.  And I think then about Epicurus, and how he allegedly said that the greatest of all pleasures is the complete absence of pain.  And I think that anybody who has suffered knows the truth of that.  So I will keep chipping away at this cancer inside of me, by emotional surgeries, or chemotherapy, and sometimes even by snake oil and witch doctoring.  And while I may stumble and weep with exhaustion at times, I will cling to hope desperately.  Even though I stumble and lie motionless, face down in the earth and loam, may I always push up slowly, my muscles aching, to trudge on until my burdens are lighter.  Or until I am stronger.

No ground to run to

I feel like some small ground-dwelling creature, like a field mouse who knows that they have no ground to run to.  Like I woke up in an endless concrete landscape, far away from the comforting underground refuges of my homefield.  My additions provided me with cover, the knowledge that at the end of a bad day, if I could just numbly plow through it, I could take refuge in the oblivion of substance abuse.  I could wrap myself in thick layers of emotional gauze and drift the nights away into sleep.  Like listening to the bomb go off, somewhere distant, cradled in an impenetrable concrete womb, deep inside the earth.

And now, I know that I can never go underground again.  I cannot let myself.  Because I am an alcoholic.  I am an addict.  And the longer I stay underground, the more my eyesight will adjust to the darkness of my rathole, the more terrified I will become of the blinding light of the hot sun and the chaotic ambience of life above ground.  I will see birds of prey in every passing cloud, even though they are far more rare than my terror would allow me to believe.

I am not a rodent.  I am a fucking person.  And I deserve to stand upright, proud, and fearless before the daylight.  And part of me believes I will get there.  But part of me thinks that my fear will always reign over me, that I will always crave the comfort of being buried alive under the weight of my own disease, leading to the cold comfort of my own death, the absence of my own fear.

But the more I stand in the light, the more I expose my jugular, the more I come to understand that my fears are not aligned with the dangers of living.  I know this in my head, already.  But I need to feel it in my body.  I wish that I could just fast forward this process of acclimation, to already feel comfortable in my own skin without doing the hard work of slowly building internal reassurance that not every interaction with a person requires a fight or flight response.  But I do not want to give up this time.  I do not want to dig my own grave anymore.  Because I am starting to believe that my addiction is a disease of the mind, body, and soul, not just another defect I need to be ashamed of.  And that means that facing my alcoholism each day does not need to be a constant reminder of how fucked up and worthless I really am.  It can be a condition, an ailment that I need to treat.  It can be something that is not me, that does not reflect on me.  The only thing that reflects on me is whether I am willing to take my disease seriously, to take my mental health seriously.

I very much hope that AA can help with that.  If I try to do this on my own, I am worried that the eddies and currents of my toxic internal monologue will eventually suck me down into the deep darkness for good.  I need to make sure I am reaching out to people who can throw me a rope and pull me out of myself.  To me, that is what I am coming to understand AA means by a higher power.  It just means we cannot do this shit all on our own.  And I am starting to think that I can live with that.

Addiction

I am starting to realize that I am an addict.  What started as a coping mechanism that replaced cutting myself up as a way of pushing off severe anxiety, crippling depression, and suicidal thoughts has become its own monster in my life.  My drug of choice is alcohol.  It is readily available and it hits quick and hard.  But it leaves me worse off, emotionally and physically, and it changes how I treat the people who are important to me.

My alcoholism is like a parasite that can override my brain and put thoughts in my head that I would reject as illogical and morally reprehensible in other areas of my life.  It does so to protect itself, to ensure that it thrives.  I deceive myself into thinking I will just have a few beers, no big deal.  A couple of high gravity forties later, I am shit faced drunk and lying to my wife about how much I have drank, or that I drank at all, trying to manipulate her so that I can protect my drinking.  It is sick.  It is cruel.  And it is not the type of thing I would have imagined myself doing ten years ago.  I have repeatedly hurt and deceived the one person who means the most to me, just so that I can continue down a path that leads only to my own self destruction.

I do not want that.  It might be hard to believe.  "Why haven't you quit yet if you don't want to be a drunk?"  you might ask.  And it's a fair question.  But facing an addiction is really fucking hard.  It means taking an honest look at yourself and all of the awful things you have done.  It is depressing.  And when I get depressed, I feel a strong compulsion to drink.  So, it is a vicious cycle.  And my addiction whispers a litany of excuses for why taking a drink is understandable, no big deal.  And once I drink the first bottle, the war is over, because my resistance will become less and less strong the more I get drunk.

And I have subconsciously justified this way of living because I was physically and verbally abused by my father, because my job is stressful, and because I can be a pretty good guy most of the time.  But if I really take a close look at myself, those are not the reasons that I drink.  They may help explain why I started drinking.  But I have been working hard the past few years on understanding the mental health problems that my childhood abuse causes me in my adult life.  I have coping mechanisms and ways of processing those emotions now.  Now, when I drink, it does not need to be because I feel sad or am struggling to process my emotional baggage. I drink because I am an alcoholic.  I drink to get drunk for the sake of getting drunk, not to run away from things.  I hurt the people I love just for the sake of drinking.

And I cannot stop without help.  So I am going to go to an AA meeting today.  And I am going to try to look at myself honestly, and stop running away.  Because when I honestly face myself, my actions, and my potential actions, it is a lot harder to justify drinking. If I say "I am an alcoholic, and I can never drink again," and I say that out loud to myself, and know it as the truth, how can I then take a drink?

So, I will try to move forward, one day at a time.  And I will try to starve this parasite until it shrinks so small that I can finally feel like I am myself again.