At the wedding I wore a green dress and felt pretty,
and it was disorienting because half the time
you watched it, flickered, but then you stopped watching,
and then I became ugly.
I still chase dad sometimes, don’t I – so charming and absent,
who blinks my foundation to dust and rubble as if through magic.
And watches, says, what did you want.
It’s when I want to be stooped and tied and bent and tied
and on all fours, tied,
so you can remind me of what I used to think I was
what I sometimes think I am
(in a photograph
a bad night’s sleep)
that I remember on my hands and knees that I am everything.
And that I read once that to smoke through an entire wedding party
is a means of isolation. Is mean.
I remember how we met, the second
thing you said, the last, and the way you seemed to speak
as if we were sitting and watching, as if I followed your words
like a collared dog – as if I were grateful and reverent,
and I remember – I want to be stopped so I can keep walking
and not care that you’re not watching.
A Full Life
writings
about
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When I made attempts at writing novels and short stories as a teenager, all of my main characters were girls in the throes of pill addiction. (Prophetic in a way, as my pill addiction grew to its full force in my early twenties.) They were pretty girls addicted to “Demerol” and “Benzedrine” and “Valium.” (The novels of Joyce Carol Oates must have really made an impact on me.) I laugh when I think back to this, because those aren’t the drugs that kids get a hold of for recreational use anymore. It’s all Vicodin and Ativan and Adderall these days.
Writing through my twenties, many of my attempts at novels and short stories have continued to include characters in their teens brushing up against drug abuse or depression or some kind of disorder. Divorced parents. Raped at a high school party. Cutting. Vodka drinkers. After all, you write what you know. You also write to get the demons out. And then you move forward. I have started to move forward.
Like all such crafts, if we stick to them, they evolve in ways we do not anticipate or imagine. I never would have imagined that I would be 70,000 words into a manuscript set in a fantasy world of witches and ruthless monarchs, prostitutes and peasant-boy fools. But here I am. Having a ball.
What I like about writing in this rather unfamiliar genre, is that I am attempting to dismantle the genre-ness of it. Which may prove to be incredibly naive and stupid and ridiculous…but how else do we learn? I was not inspired to write the tale because I am obsessed with witches or a massive J.R Tolkien fan. (Though I do love me some George R.R Martin.) I am trying to build characters that a kid who tried to kill himself or whose dad left or got strung out on heroin could relate to, but instead of wearing blue jeans and Chuck Taylor’s they’ve got on armor and long dresses. Instead of pot they’re drinking too much ale. Instead of grappling with Jesus and atheism, they’re wondering if witches and magic could actually exist. And then everything else is the same: struggles with identity and family. Coming to terms with and abuse and who we become based on those experiences. Why the choices we make don’t always align with what we actually want or know to be right. Examining more closely that most people aren’t ever completely evil (or completely good) and that there is always something lingering beneath the surface that would cause one to hurt another, or herself. Why people always assume something outside of them is their salvation. Why people assume true love to be something that it usually is not. Why people live in fear.
No Benzedrine or Valium in this novel. But there is clearwine and Elixa, and there is a purple river that kills you if you fall into it. There’s also family. Relationships. For most novels, when you cut to the chase, are really just about the screwed up, messy, gorgeous madness that goes with one person being, whether they like it or not, connected to another. Witches and druggies alike.
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There is a woman. And she’s flawless.
She’s tall and sleek and tanned and blonde. Or maybe brunette. Long full hair and skin like honey. She wears makeup, but she doesn’t need it. She’s even prettier without it. Not a blemish on her. Slight shoulders and long lithe arms. Skinny skinny. Skinny skinny.
Her beauty is unparalleled, her sexiness undeniable. Like a model. She’s cool, too. You’d want her. You’d want her so bad you’d go to great lengths just to get one chance.
Who is this woman?
I don’t know. I don’t know if she even exists. But it’s the woman in my mind who appears when I imagine what a man wants. It is the woman who appears when a guy doesn’t want to see me again. It is the woman who appears when a man speaks of someone who was “so hot.” It’s the woman I think all men want, and it’s the woman I think they’ll leave me for, and it’s the woman I think they wish they had instead of settling for me.
It isn’t real.
This is old default thinking, and it’s clearly conditioned by a culture that encourages and reveres a flawless (and narrow) ideal of beauty. It is clearly rooted in echoes of shame and self-hatred and growing up feeling flawed and not good enough. It is illusory and shallow and impulsive and fear-based. It is highly saturated in what all humans face – the comparison of ourselves to ideas in our minds that are not planted in reality, the idea that all the others, any other, is somehow better.
Call it a conspiracy, if you’d like.
Thankfully, I see it through it today. As I’ve heard people say in recovery, my first thought is not always my sanest.
Thank god for second thoughts.
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One of my absolute favorite poems by one of my absolute favorite poets, Sharon Olds, has a section that goes a little something like this:
“I could see her in a temple, tying someone up,
or being tied up, or being made nothing,
or making someone nothing,
I saw she was full of cruelty
and full of kindness, brimming with it-
I had known but not known this, that she was human,
she had it all inside of her, all of it.
She saw me seeing that, she liked that I saw it.
A full life – I saw her living it”The first time I read this, I remember gasping with recognition. I am that woman. We all are.
Sometimes in recovery, or even just in regular old normal people life, we get on a quest to get better. To improve. To get fixed. Many of us are perfectionists or are taught at a young age that in order to be okay we have to do things right and be good. Many of us are trying to run from “bad” feelings and negative emotions because we learned that they were something of which to be ashamed. Many of us feel that as we grow spiritually we are not supposed to still have anger and resentment and fear and judgement. Many of us think we are supposed to become so very good that we no longer hurt people or say unkind things or feel superior.
But we do. We are human. We are full of cruelty and full of kindness. We have it all inside of us.
One of my favorite mindful meditation teachers, Jack Kornfield, speaks about this frequently, how meditation is not supposed to become some grim duty that we use as a tool for self-improvement, but is a joyful and messy practice we choose to show up to in order to accept ourselves, exactly as we are. To start seeing how our problems arise in the mind, because, as he says, “the mind has no pride and will think anything.” To see that all minds think this way. There are no human minds that are completely free of passing thoughts that may include hatred and anger and fear and all those less enticing emotions. They are in us, if we are fully human. They move through us, if we allow ourselves to be fully human. The recovery we hope to find, is practicing not acting on these thoughts and causing harm. But even that we sometimes do. Fall seven times. Get up eight.
Many of us who grew up in frightening or dysfunctional households feel a deep need to be good in order to be loved. We were taught that our negative emotions were wrong and people would only like us if we were pleasing and easy and nice. We were ashamed of our emotions, and so we blocked them off and chose to not feel them.
When we finally enter into recovery and begin to let those emotions surface, they feel like hell. We think they’ll kill us. But they don’t, and we learn ways of dealing with them without completely self-destructing.
Then what? I know for me that I can sometimes think I am supposed to be so very good and pure and whole in the eyes of others, because after all I am in recovery, that I can still feel like there is something wrong with me that needs to be fixed because of the darker emotions I experience. I can compare myself to others who appear to not have them. I can think that everyone is mad at me and judging me for my less than perfect personality.
But I’m not here to be a Stepford Wife or a Pollyanna. I am here to be an authentic and full human who embraces and accepts all feelings and allows them to be what they are and where they are at any moment. If I can do that for myself, I can do that for others. The more I accept myself completely, every single nook and cranny, even the darkest and ugliest spaces, I can accept the humanness of others and always come to a place of forgiveness.
Every now and then I remember certain things my dad did that scared me or hurt me. If I think about them for too long, I can drift into self-pity and resentment. I can start to blame this grown man for treating his child in such a way.
Then I remember, he was a child once, too. He had parents who raised him in a similar fashion. He grew up with the same fear and anxiety and denial of emotion. He did the best he could to raise me with the tools he had (or didn’t have.) He cannot hurt me anymore. And I love him. I bow to him and all of his deep wounds that haven’t healed yet. I pray for him to be free from his suffering. I don’t want to be angry at him. The stories in my head of the past are no longer real or all that powerful. I have grieved and raged and forgiven.
This sort of process and growth allows me to live a full life. I am not bogged down by shame and fear around the madness, and it is madness, that lurks in my mind. It is still sometimes hard for me to accept that I am imperfect and human and therefore full of character flaws (“defects” as they are called in 12 step programs, but I’m not a big fan of that word) because I am afraid of how I am seen in the world, and I can still think people are out to get me and hate me and judge me if I do something wrong. This is a very old belief that I am continuously praying to be free from.
But I am coming to trust that all of that is held in a sacred space. All of everything is ok. My cruelty and kindness, my potential to hurt another or myself, my small sense and large sense of self, my capacity for joy and my capacity for suffering – all of that is held in a space so much larger than I could even imagine, and there is nothing I can do to not be loved.
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I’m having anxiety today. Some guilt. Waves of old feelings. And what whey all boil down to is this sense that I’m not doing it right. Whatever it is. Life? My day? My choices for the the next few months? It can get crazy in these heads of ours. Sometimes the more I meditate, the crazier it seems to get. Contrary to a common misperception, meditation isn’t a means to escape – it makes us confront our mind and teaches us to practice not buying into what our mind tells us. Practice not buying in. I still buy in all the time, like today.
Sometimes I get scared that I’m not doing recovery right. Which makes me laugh out loud, because it’s such a preposterous idea that one could do recovery wrong, and yet it’s still a common belief in my brain. It is true that most of us who are trying to recover from addiction and various forms of self-destruction are often tremendously hard on ourselves and afraid of making mistakes. We double-bind ourselves to where we can’t win. So I can get that way about my recovery. Am I not going to enough meetings? Is it bad that I don’t have an official sponsor right now? Am I going to inevitably revert back to the way I felt three years ago before I joined al-anon and found some relief from fear and people-pleasing?
Sometimes I think it’s enough that I believe in and have a relationship with God. That it’s enough that I meditate on a daily basis, write my feelings out in a journal, call friends and fellows when I get scared or feel overwhelmed. That I reflect on my behavior and pray to be guided to new experiences. That is essentially what the 12 steps are all about. But I don’t have a sponsor. I’m not sponsoring any women. I am not on an official step in a book. I paused on a very rigorous 4th step a few months back (which was quite liberating and relieving) and have not returned to it. I plan to be traveling for at least four to six months come September, and what do I do then? Plan my traveling around meetings? Of course not. We enter recovery to live our lives. Not to good at recovery.
But…
Sometimes I hear these old ditties in my head: am I a bad girl for not sponsoring any women? Girls ask me, and then they stop calling. But I don’t seek them out. Does this mean I am selfish and not being of service? Am I headed for serious trouble by not going to at least 3-4 meetings a week, Al-Anon or AA? Does it even work that way, accruing meetings? Am I “sick” because I haven’t worked all the steps in Al-Anon? Is there something wrong with me, and that is why I am so resistant to continuing to work the steps in Al-Anon? Is it my very issues that make it so hard for me to maintain relationships with sponsors?
In terms of the last one, I do have a very hard time being sponsored. It’s not always that I don’t want to do the work; I’ve always been a “good student.” (In fact, setting a boundary and saying no to continuing to work the 4th step with my previous sponsor was a loving act of self-care.) It’s that all my people-pleasing comes up, and I make sponsors my Higher Power, and I dislike the feeling that I have to check in with them. I dislike the feeling that I am obligated to call, that if I don’t call, or if I don’t call often enough, I am doing something wrong. I dislike the label of sponsor, in the sense that I don’t like this idea that we have entered into some sort of strange contract that puts them in charge of me. I know that is not the case, but that is how I still perceive it. My perception is that all this work in recovery takes from my life today, instead of adding to it. It feels like one more thing to do, and after a long day or week of teaching, I often just want to be left alone. Why should I make my life more challenging? Hasn’t it been challenging enough? I don’t like that it is so in me to be afraid to rebel and not do things perfectly. I wish I could care a lot less about all of this. I wish it could feel like enough, and maybe be enough simply to rely upon God. Then I have to listen to what God is guiding me toward. I wish my perception could more often than not be: whatevs, it’ll all work out. But that’s not me. I care. I’ve always cared. I’ve always been concerned with doing the right thing.
And yet the truth is, I don’t want to do the work right now. At all. I don’t want to keep working on a 4th step and checking in with a sponsor and going to a lot of meetings. Of course I want to stay sober, and of course I want to be happy, joyous, and free, but I want to do what I want to do. My way. Is that bad? I feel like women in particular feel guilt about this. That to just do what we want to do (even if it is rooted in love and self-care and causes no harm) is some kind of shameful selfish act. I feel like God must be bigger than that. I feel like I can be happy, joyous, and free without doing recovery the way I think I am supposed to. I feel like I already do so much work when it comes to my actual job, and what is left over is spent relaxing, socializing, walking, writing, reading. Perhaps when I enter a year off from teaching, things will shift. I also have the rest of my life to do this work, so…
Oh, but jeez.
I wish I wasn’t so concerned with doing it right and being good. I wish I could just let myself fail and not feel so scared or like I’m a bad girl. I often think that is my real work. As my former-sponsor used to say of what God means to her: How much more loving and accepting can I be of myself. How much freer can I be of the inner critic? How free can I get from always feeling like I’m doing something wrong? How emancipated from Fear can I become, ever present in the loving embrace of God, as I understand God?
I expressed this once to a friend in AA, and she understood. I thought at the time that I should go back to therapy because I was feeling a lot of fear. She said I should be having more fun, not doing more work. That made sense to me. I have been working on this recovery stuff for over ten years. The past five years of my life have been extremely challenging and busy and filled with profound growth and change. Which is a blessing a gift, and I wouldn’t change a thing. But we can get so mired in the heaviness of reconstruction. More often than not we need to just play.
So maybe it is enough right now. Maybe the recovery is just to love myself through these feelings and not rush out to do anything or change something in an attempt to try to fix them and control them. Let God be in charge and stop trying to be a good girl.
You hear a lot of beautiful messages in the rooms, but you also hear a lot of sickness. Mixed messages. Fear-based recovery that is about staying one step ahead of our “disease.” I don’t know if I agree with all of that. That is why one of the slogans is “take what you like and leave the rest.” And of course, “to thine own self be true.” What works for another might not work for me. The 12 steps are meant to be lived, I believe, not worked: perhaps, yes, after initially going through them with a sponsor (when they might as well be in German.) But then what? I think the message of recovery can often be misinterpreted as one of continuous self-improvement. But what I think we are after is continuous self-acceptance. Allowance. Surrender. Letting things be. Stopping the tinkering. Stopping listening to our minds and then running out and trying to do something to fix things and make it all better. We can try to use the 12 steps to fix ourselves and get so healthy and pure and spiritual that we never have to bother with earthbound issues again, but that is a hoax. There’s no arrival and no graduation, no grade or quiz. We don’t get rid of our humanness. We learn how to be human with a little more peace and serenity. To stop fighting our humanness in all of its messiness and glory and fascinating patterns.
Then again, this might just be my perception. But it feels pretty good, arriving to this place right now. There’s nothing I need to do. Nothing I need to fear. Let me just sit here a while and listen to the sound of my fan blowing across the room.
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There’s something wrong with me.
I think anyone who has ever struggled with addiction, trauma, or depression can understand this negative record that gets stuck on repeat in our minds. Maybe you’ve thought it in passing about the way you look. Or the way you think. Or your inability to have intimacy in relationships. Or your lack of excitement about your work.
Or maybe, you’ve thought that literally there was something wrong with you. As in your physical body and health. Maybe you thought that you were literally broken.
Not exactly the same thing, and yet, from my experience entirely connected.
(Note: I am in no way attempting to diagnose legitimate health problems that people may be suffering from. This is only my opinion based on my experience. By all means consult with a doctor for any forms of pain or health issues you may have.)
I thought this for a very long time. In fact, I still sometimes default back to this fear, and that is essentially what it is – running-wild fear.
I grew up dancing and playing soccer. Around fifteen I started practicing yoga regularly. I also started jogging on the treadmill. At the time, the motivation for exercise was often to lose weight, but there was also an element of loving the way it made me feel and how it seemed to burn stress and fear and depression out of my body. Especially yoga. It never occurred to me that I might injure myself or suddenly feel pain and discomfort in my body and that I would grow afraid of exercise. But it happened.
When I went off to Boulder I started to feel this pain in my left leg. It felt like it was in my knee and hamstring. Nothing majorly painful, but I noticed it when I walked for long periods around campus and town.
After a month, it started to really bother me. I remember taking a yoga class in late October and having to leave midway through because the pain felt unbearable and I was afraid I was injuring myself. I recalled that I had pulled my hamstring pretty terribly over the summer while stretching after a run. I also recalled falling down a couple of times while partying in high school. I started to wonder – did I injure my body in a serious way and not realize it until now?
I didn’t think too much about it, though. I was distracted by far more serious issues and coming to terms with the fact that my entire life was falling apart. It never once occurred to me that the trauma of that may have something to do with the pain I was feeling in my body.
A few years later, doing my best to stay sober and work through school and have a relationship, I started to grow paranoid that I was sick. Like really sick. At its most serious, I convinced myself at any given point that I had contracted HIV or was stricken with cancer. Sometimes I was paranoid that I had other mild STD’s, yeast infections, and UTI’s whenever anything felt the slightest bit off down there. When I couldn’t breathe right I thought it was because I had a serious case of asthma. When I got acid reflux, I thought it was because I was eating the wrong foods. I thought I had candida overgrowth and interstitial cystitis. Though I wasn’t in excruciating pain, I was still vaguely aware that my lower back and left leg felt “off,” and so I didn’t get much exercise. I completely ceased running and practicing yoga. My perception around all of this was that there was something broken, damaged, and malfunctioning in my body and therefore something wrong with me as whole. My solution was to go to medical doctors and search the internet for cures. Never once did it occur to me that perhaps my mind was the issue, that it was my thinking that was distorted and creating or exacerbating symptoms. I felt ashamed and frightened of the symptoms, like it was my fault and like I was defective. That’s what shame tells us, ultimately: that there is something wrong with us to the core.
And then the physical pain came back. Around 23 years old, in the throes of eating disorders and finishing my English degree and struggling in a relationship, I started to feel that terrible pain in my leg again. It had always been there, but I had grown accustomed to ignoring it. There it was though, back again, and seemingly worse. Now I felt pain in my lower back and shoulder and neck, too, and only on my left side. I sometimes felt strange tingly sensations and pain that seemed to radiate. I started to feel angry and resentful, because I assumed I was injured and that it kept me from exercising again (which I was desperate for in order to get and/or remain thin.) I grew determined to find out what was wrong with me and get it fixed. I searched the internet frantically for possible diagnoses and doctors who might be able to help me. I began to label myself as someone suffering from chronic pain. And it seemed to get worse. The more I searched for answers, the more hopelessness and self-pity set in and the more the pain and suffering seemed to increase. But I hadn’t connected the dots yet.
My entire life became about my pain. How unfair it was. How terribly sad. How much I couldn’t do. How depressed I was because of it. How much people didn’t seem to care or understand. How I couldn’t enjoy a single thing in life because my body hurt, and I was trapped in my body. Doctors didn’t seem to understand or really care. Nothing helped me feel better: not massages or physical therapy or acupuncture or Lidoderm patches or Tylenol or injections or chiropractic work. Nothing. In fact, the only time I seemed to feel any sort of relief was when I screamed and cried about it. There did seem to be some sort of relief that would come when tears left my body.
What was wrong with me??? Why couldn’t the doctors find anything and fix me??? Fuck!
And then I relapsed because of it. I felt so sorry for myself and so angry and so helpless, and this led me to losing any and all spiritual connection and willingness to keep showing up, and so I drank and got high again.
When that inevitably failed to solve the problem and I was desperate for recovery, I felt in my heart: there has to be a way out of this.
And that’s when I stumbled upon Tension Myositis Syndrome (TMS), or what is sometimes called Mind-Body Syndrome (MBS). A man by the name of Dr. John Sarno developed the term years ago after seeing countless patients complaining of acute and chronic pain that seemed to come from nowhere or maybe from an injury but that would not go away with regular treatment. Most of them complained of back pain that then seemed to “spread” to the arms and legs. Some had chronic migraines and stomach problems. Others felt pain in their hands and feet. Whatever the location was, the symptoms appeared the same, and the patients had many similarities in terms of their relationship to the pain: an obsession with it, a fear of hurting themselves more, and a belief that something was broken in the body. He discovered further that most of the patients seemed to have a similar personality type: perfectionist, people-pleasing, hard on themselves, conscientious. People who wanted so much to be good and do the right thing.
Long story short, he discovered that there was in fact nothing wrong with them in their physical bodies. The main problem lay in their minds. (To learn more about TMS, I highly recommend reading Sarno’s books, The Mindbody Prescription and The Divided Mind, both available on amazon. You can also find tons of valuable information all over the internet as well as doctors who practice treatment for it in or around your area.)
The problem is not psychosomatic in the sense that the pain is not really there. We are not crazy or imagining our pain. The pain is very much there, it’s just not caused by what we assume. The problem stems from the unconscious mind and all that is buried beneath our immediate consciousness. Past and present trauma, rage, anxiety, fear, and daily stress all accumulate in the unconscious mind and do not get released to the surface. In fact, our mind is trying to protect us in a way. It assumes that we would rather not feel any of those nasty and uncomfortable emotions, and so they get transferred to the body, primarily the autonomic nervous system (ANS) which in turn restricts blood flow and creates a whole slew of physical symptoms. Once these symptoms take hold, they are further aggravated by our obsession with them and our fear of hurting ourselves and therefore not exercising or doing certain movements, which prevents the body from being healthy and releasing the very emotions that cause the whole shebang to begin with!
Recovering from TMS can be a lot like recovering from alcoholism. In fact, the two are often linked, as those of us who suffer from alcoholism are more prone to having a mind that would induce a TMS like state. The first and most imperative piece of recovery (and often the hardest) is accepting that there is nothing physically wrong with you. I can tell you from experience that this is certainly no picnic. We have to un-train our minds from thinking that because of past injuries or years of feeling pain that we have damaged our physical bodies beyond repair. We are so conditioned in the western world to think that if we feel physical pain, there is something amiss and we need to see a doctor and get treated. Most of the time, this just isn’t the case. This was very challenging for me at first. I was convinced that my spine was damaged or the nerves and muscles in my leg had gone awry or the tendons and ligaments were irreparably inflamed. It takes a long time to accept the TMS diagnosis and that there is nothing physically wrong in your body. Until you do this, real healing and relief is postponed.
What comes next is beginning to move through all that garbage buried in the unconscious and dealing with the stresses of daily life. This is a lot like the continuing 12 steps, where you take inventory of your behavior and begin to clean out the black goop. Therapy is often recommended, as is journaling, meditation, and resuming physical exercise as soon as possible.
This was terrifying for me, as it is for most of us who suffer from TMS. I was so afraid of feeling pain or injuring myself or hurting my body. But like anything, you start slow. I started taking walks here and there. I finally went back to a beginner’s level yoga class and worked my way back to intermediate and advanced. I went hiking. Bike-riding. Sometimes it hurt and I was terrified. But I kept doing it, all the while telling myself that there was nothing wrong with my body.
It is very much a two steps forward, one step back process. Like alcoholism, you are not cured and free of never dealing with it again. It can come back in times of high stress or breakthroughs in therapy.
It can also come back through different disguises.
I have had TMS manifest in every possible way, not just the physical pain I felt in my back and leg. I’ve had rashes, irritable bowel syndrome, headaches, migraines, skin infections, bladder problems, nausea, dizziness, eye problems, and random pain in my hands. Whenever these symptoms have initially arisen, my first thought is still – oh no! There’s something broken in me! Then I have to do TMS work, much like it helps to go back to steps 1, 2, 3 (in a nutshell: I’m powerless to control this, do I trust I can make it through with the help of a Higher Power, ok, I’ll stop trying to control it and see if HP can help) when facing a really challenging problem. TMS work means I have to trust that there is nothing wrong with my body and that the symptom is an indication of an emotion bubbling beneath the surface. Anger. Fear. Resentment. Overwhelm. Grief. Again, the mind would rather not have to feel those emotions, so it give us physical pain and symptoms to distract us – and it works! That is, until we recognize that it’s our whacky brain playing tricks on us, however benevolently. When we confront the emotions, our focus leaves the obsession with the symptoms, and the symptoms disappear. Sometimes immediately, sometimes over a period of time.
It’s pretty amazing. The human experience is such a trip.
I look back on all that time I spent thinking there was something physically wrong with me. And it didn’t just start when I was eighteen at Boulder, although it certainly heightened then due to the significant trauma I was experiencing and repressing. But even as a child and adolescent I would have occasions where I couldn’t breathe very well or my stomach would hurt severely or I would constantly have to pee and thought I had major bladder problems. I had a headache nearly every single day in high school, despite self-medicating. I suffered from acne for years, and while it can be genetic and hormonal, I think a lot of it was TMS related. I strongly believe that most of this was TMS related.
We live in such a stressful time and a society that encourages and applauds busyness and perfection and stoicism. We are trained to look at our bodies in parts – the foot doctor, the ear nose and throat doctor, the therapist, the neurologist. We fail to see that everything within us is connected. Of course there is a mind body spirit connection – how could there not be?? We don’t always realize or believe that most everything actually is an inside job. But it really is. Everything I have ever healed in my life came from within and from a magnificent power greater than me. We don’t get healing outside of ourselves and for most illnesses and physical ailments, we don’t get sick outside of ourselves either. It’s all within. Which is great news, because it gives us the power to heal our lives. (Just read, You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay and watch transformation unfold.) We don’t usually need a pill or a cream a shot or a back brace or a special shoe. We need to address what is happening in our minds, hearts, and spirits. That’s where sickness usually starts, and where we must go in order to heal.
May you be healed and free from suffering.
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You get sober. Quit the booze and the pills or the meth and coke and pot or whatever it is that had its hooks in you. You get some time sober, and you start to feel better.
You start to work the steps. You begin to build a concept of a Higher Power. Start to build a relationship there. You pray, even if you feel like a fraud. You meditate, even if it burns to the bones to try to be still. You write out your thoughts. You share your feelings. You speak up in meetings. You ask for help. You begin to feel moments of peace and serenity. You practice faith, even if you can’t always feel it.
You quit smoking. Chew Nicorette. You see a therapist. You take more walks. You still sometimes binge when you don’t want to feel or don’t know what other tool to pick up. You still sometimes restrict food or starve yourself because it feels safe to control. It makes you feel like you’re getting somewhere. You look in the mirror and hate what you see. You think the hatred is because your body isn’t up to standards. You don’t know it’s something else. You keep going.
You work hard at your job. You get stressed. You move through it. You read hundreds of books. You keep building your God. You date. Make new friends. Try new things. Pray. Meditate. Become very aware. See yourself. Warts and all. You try to love it. You start feeling your feelings, even though it’s like knives. You let them move through you without having to do something destructive to block their passage. They leave you, and you bow to your courage.
You start to unravel your resentments. Get some perspective. You see your behavior and reaction to things. You pray to forgive and to be forgiven. You make amends where you have harmed people. You start to feel free and clean on the inside. Your faith expands. Your courage grows. Peace comes more and stays longer. You see your part in all of your life.
Your thinking neutralizes, and when it’s dark and stormy, you recognize that it isn’t real. It isn’t telling the truth. You trust infinite God rather than finite self. You trust your large sense of self instead your small. You watch your thinking, and you see it clearly. You start feeling pure golden love. For yourself. For others.
You take really good care of yourself, and in turn you help others. You laugh and play and feel authentic joy. It’s so glorious, sometimes it makes you weep. You are so very grateful to be sober and to be free. Your creativity soars. Your heart and your Higher Power sing loudly to you, and you listen. They speak louder than the old black tapes in your mind.
You start to see that you have recovered from a disease that wanted to kill you, that you are connected to God, that you are taken care of and carried no matter what. You no longer want to die or drink or cut or binge or starve or spend or shop or smoke or flee. You just want to be. You let yourself be.
And then up comes another layer of gunk.
Recovery can look a lot like that. It did for me, and still does. Onward on the jagged line we go. Never trying to get anywhere, Just experiencing life and growing in spirit. Spirit doesn’t grow up. It grows out. It expands, and it does so limitlessly.
The last bogeymen standing on the journey of recovery are shame (self-hatred) and fear. They are by far the deepest and most penetrating feelings one can experience, the most challenging ones to face, the most corrosive to our systems, and in turn the most emancipating ones to heal from. They are the most violent and destructive to the spirit, for they are in complete misalignment with the spirit. Fear is a lack of faith and a belief in destruction, and self-hatred/shame is a complete rejection of self and belief that you are wrong and unloved by God. Their very nature clashes with God, and yet it is God that has the power to shine light on these toxic emotions and cleanse them from our systems.
There is nothing wrong with having these two feelings. Feeling we are “wrong,” is exactly what fear and shame are trying to accomplish! All humans experience them at one point or another, and nearly all of us addicts and alcoholics suffer from them greatly until we enter recovery. There is no sense in feeling shame or fear about having shame and fear, for they are not our fault; they are the simply the pillars upon which addiction stands, glowering. They are not our fault, but they do become our responsibility to heal. It just takes time, a lot of willingness, and as much faith as we can muster.
On the road of recovery, we peel off layers little by little. We aren’t healed in a flash of white lightening or stripped of all character flaws in sixth months. We don’t overcome a resentment and then never face one again. We don’t lighten our load of grief only to never grieve again. But we do start to clean up on the inside. We start to clear away the toxic emotions and trauma and sludge that has kept us sick for so many years. We start to become aware of our thinking and behavior and rely on a Higher Power to help us live, and this allows us to not accumulate further toxic sludge within us. But we’re not perfect. And it has been my experience that the hardest and toughest and oldest gunk to scrape off the crevices of our hearts comes from self-hatred and fear. I will even argue that they are the only negative emotions there really are and that all the rest stem from them: resentment, jealousy, envy, arrogance, self-righteousness, judgement, cruelty, selfishness – those are all essentially emotions and actions we pick up when feeling threatened or not good enough or like we won’t get what we need or we’re going to lose something we have. They are all defenses and attempts at hardening our hearts so we don’t get hurt.
But underneath all that is the very tender wound. The sweet baby girls and boys who just want to feel safe and loved. We all just want to feel safe and loved. We all deserve to feel safe and loved.
And that right there, is the way out.
The only solution to shame and fear is to love yourself unconditionally and to trust that nothing can really hurt you. Even when life feels terrifying, it’s just a feeling; there’s no monster. This is no easy task. This requires great power. This requires finding faith in your center that is larger than your fear. That your fear would bow to. You have to love your shame and fear, when in the thick of them, that they would crumble right their under the weight of all that love.
Shame has by far been the most uncomfortable experience to face for me. Shame feels like poison; it can feel swollen, infected, stuffy, pulsating, stinky, dirty, and hot. It can also feel rubbery and thick and glue-like. Because of its nature, it is very much stuck in the body. It’s hard to clean. It hides in crevices. It disguises itself. It can feel so suffocating. It tells you that you don’t deserve to be alive. That everything is your fault. That you are disgusting and worthless. Imagine how good we feel to get free of such toxicity!
Fear is sharp and jittery and taunting and dangerous. It’s thin and runny and tastes of battery acid. It wants to beat you up. Wants to make you wrong and a bad girl. It’s a deceptive and cruel bully. An emperor with no clothes. It locks us up and makes us tight, disabling life force and energy. When we’re free from it, we feel pure and radiating joy. Our minds function healthily. We are connected.
Both experiences for me have taken a few years to come to terms with and find healing. Fear is more wicked and stressful and shame is so very painful. Both stem from old wounds that spent years festering. They do not arise from any sort of Truth or reality in my present life. They come from the mind and the earthbound body. Neither one is more powerful than faith and the Higher Power working in my life today. But when they arise, I must seek that faith and pray for guidance as to what is necessary to encourage healing and protection. They are very much like waves that loom large in the distance but never actually break. We learn to trust that they will not break.
The truest and deepest recovery for me has been all about self-love and faith. That’s really what it all boils down to. I had a sponsor who used to say that to her, God was always how much more loving she could be to herself.
She was right: Everything is always about how much more loving we can be to ourselves.
Don’t let those last men standing throw you; let those last men stand around all they like for however long. Your spirit is infinitely larger. Promise.
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I wrote the following email to the creator of the blog, The Fuck It Diet, which I stumbled upon by accident a couple of years ago and consider one of the bravest and most honest forums on women and food. Like so many of us, Caroline went through years of dieting and body-obsession, sometimes in the name of thinness, sometimes in the name of health. She wound up where we all do – exhausted, bewildered, frustrated, and sick. She started the Fuck It Diet, which is not really a diet at all, but a big fuck you to the whole machine that keeps us focused on food and body and therefore neglecting what really counts: our passion and creativity and capacity to live joyfully and present.
I wrote this email to her a couple months back, charting my progress and giving her some love for inspiring me.
Dear Caroline,
I have written you in the past, and you have always responded with kindness and compassion. I still follow your blog and really appreciate your approach to food recovery. I loved your latest one on how easy it can be to spiral back into restrictive thoughts and how nothing good can come from it. It’s actually such a relief to really believe that restricting certain foods, even in the name of “health,” doesn’t make me better or more worthy or healthier. It’s a joy to not restrict today.
I wanted to check in and just share with you my progress and gratitude. I first started out on a “I’m not going to diet anymore ever” well over a year ago, and though I had good intentions, I still had quite a few reservations in the back of my mind and found myself regularly not eating enough. I was still wary of bread and dairy and pastries and other foods that felt dangerous. Needless to say, things didn’t quite change. But I had the willingness, and I believed they could. Finally, at the beginning of the summer, I think exactly in mid June, I said FUCK IT. I got to a place of absolute done-ness with dieting and restricting of all kinds. I got to a place of, if I have to get fat to heal, so be it. I was so sick and tired of being tired and hungry and hating my body.
The summer was the perfect time to cut loose. I started reading your blog more and books by Matt Stone and others who encourage diet recovery. I knew that the past six to seven years of my life had been insane around food and body: dieting, cleanses, anorexia, bulimia, severe restriction, orthorexia, obsession with a certain size clothing, the incessant belief that I was unworthy and disgusting and ugly if I wasn’t skinny. I felt ready to walk away from all of it. I knew it was a prison. I knew it had damaged my body, my period, my metabolism, my skin. I knew that, man I wish I had just loved and accepted my BEAUTIFUL body at 22 years old. There was nothing about it that needed changing! Alas… I couldn’t change the past, but I could begin to change the present…
I started to eat. Waffles, Nutella, burgers and fries, soda, donuts, cookies, cereal, candy, dairy (I love cheese!!!) I went to Europe by myself for two weeks and let myself enjoy Fanta and crepes and toast and butter and chocolate and greasy sandwiches. I bought some new clothes, reluctantly. It was liberating and terrifying. I felt healthy and unhealthy all at once. I gained weight quickly. My skin broke out. I felt HAPPY, even though I cringed at times when I looked in the mirror. I slept better. My body felt fed. I still kept going for long walks and occasional jogs when it felt good. I didn’t push it. My boobs got huge. I bought new bras. I sometimes sobbed at how scared and out of control and guilty I felt. I wrote in my journal about it constantly. I prayed and meditated and continued my path of spiritual recovery. When I had my biggest fears and doubts and anger and rage, I always came back to, “the only way out is through.” I KNEW in my heart I would never purposefully diet or restrict again. I tried my best to love myself through those gut-wrenching moments of self-hatred. I googled “beautiful healthy women of all sizes,” A LOT. Started following plus-sized models on Instagram. It normalized different body sizes for me. I reminded myself how, even at my thinnest, I was consumed with self-hatred and not good enough-ness. So I kept going. By August my body was bigger, and it was uncomfortable, but I kept going. I already had shifts in what I was craving to eat. My body really liked dairy again (I had restricted most of it for years and years) and it liked certain carbs, but it was getting tired of junk food. I listened to it and ate what I wanted. I was back at work from the summer off, and having a more regular schedule changed the way I ate a bit. I still would find myself reading too much about food and what to eat. I still found myself surrounded by women on certain diets that made me think, “maybe I should go back to juicing and mostly vegan…” and then I would remember, never diet or restrict again. It’s just too exhausting and boring and frankly, a waste of my time, to let what I eat be the central focus of my life.
My creativity soared through this process. I have always been a writer, and I started writing two different novels as well as keeping at it with my poetry. I taught myself to play ukulele! I started to wonder about my future… traveling more or maybe going back to school. My life really opened up in a lot of ways.
And now, here I am, eight months later, beginning to feel a whole lot more comfortable in my skin. I have a long way to go, but the recovery overall has been huge, both externally and internally. I eat breakfast every day. I sometimes eat Snickers and donuts. If I eat a donut, I don’t go searching frantically for more food because I’ve “broken” such a big rule. I drink orange juice always (something I never used to do), I eat cheese everyday, and if I have a craving for a burger or Sour Patch Kids or popcorn I will eat them. I don’t freak out over junk food or bad oils or processed food. I also notice that certain foods don’t make me feel good. So I don’t eat them as much. I truly used to love popcorn, but now it makes me feel a little nauseous. But I don’t worry about it so much. I eat food to satisfy hunger and usually move on. I haven’t had a binge in I don’t know how long. I eat more during PMS because my body is screaming for sugar and carbs. I allow it. It feels good. Sometimes I forget to eat or don’t feel like eating or am lazy or nothing sounds good, and I observe my silly mind try to turn that into a diet. I don’t allow it.
I also accept that I am very imperfect and will have slips. I made myself throw up once in the past few months, and not because I had binged. I felt sick to my stomach from eating a weird dinner, and I used an old coping mechanism. The truth behind that, though, was that I was feeling incredibly stressed out and overwhelmed with some work stuff, and I picked up an oooold tool in order to cope. I called my friend right after and told her, and then I wrote about it and prayed, and the shame was gone.
Sometimes my mind will try to get me on an exercise “regime” but my body always steps in and stops it. It’s actually pretty funny. It just doesn’t want to run everyday or take an exercise class everyday or “3-5 times a week.” But it loves to run sometimes and walk a lot and occasionally do yoga or take an exercise class. But not obsessively. It just doesn’t like it.
I’m dating now. Talk about bringing up feelings in general, especially around body and self-image. But it’s going alright. I look forward to a regular sex life, because my libido is off the charts! When I restricted for years, you couldn’t get me excited no matter what.
It is a process, and it has been a process, and I know it will continue to be one. But I am so grateful to be healthy and relatively sane around food. Thank you so much for being a beacon for so many of us on this path of recovery. You are a Light!
Sincerely,
Stephanie
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Teaching is hard. I don’t care who tries to say otherwise. Those who do have clearly never taught.
It’s one thing to constantly be “on” at work and very rarely given a moment’s peace. It’s another to write lesson plans, implement them, give assessments, grade them, manage the classroom, model consistently positive behavior, communicate with parents, differentiate and cater to the needs of your various types of learners, help the students who are regularly disruptive, and “develop professionally.”
Beyond this though, is the relationship with students, which is first and foremost the most important part of teaching. You could have the greatest lessons in the world and a wealth of knowledge brimming from your gifted brain, but if you can’t connect with the students, it’s rather meaningless.
And of course, connecting with students is not always easy.
I have always been the kind of teacher where forming positive and close relationships with most of my students has come naturally. Maybe it’s because I spent so much time babysitting as a kid and being a (much) older sister to my dad and step-mom’s children. Maybe it’s just something I was born with. Regardless, it does come naturally for me, and yet it is still so challenging to have positive relationships with my students in the sense that sometimes they drive me absolutely crazy, I take their behavior personally, I judge them for their idiotic and immature antics, and frankly I sometimes want to scream at them and shout who do you think they are?!?
Then I remember: they are barely twelve years old. Many of them have not so good role models for parents. They are growing up in a confusing time of instant and in your face information vis a vis social media and internet. They are twelve.
Sometimes I flat out don’t want to have compassion for them. I am too bothered and irritated and offended by their disrespect and refusal to be accountable for their actions. I think most teachers, if they are brutally honest, would admit to sometimes having these thoughts and feelings. Spending day in and day out with kids can get very annoying and draining. When you’re an adult and can control your behavior (relatively) you expect everyone around you to be able to do the same. But twelve year olds haven’t learned yet. Sixteen year olds haven’t even learned yet. Growing up ain’t easy.
And the very thing I often don’t want to give is exactly what they are crying out for. Compassion and acceptance and kindness are just what the doctor ordered. I don’t mean being a doormat and letting kids walk all over you. Boundaries, guidelines, and expectations are essential. But I have learned from my years of experience that managing the classroom with love and levity and empathy as to where your students are developmentally is essential and sets a far better example. The same would go for parenting, I assume. (If I ever cross that bridge, I’ll let you know.)
Sometimes I don’t want to give it, and I think it’s because it wasn’t always given to me. It wasn’t what I was initially taught. I can remember teachers (and parents) being very harsh with me when what I really needed was to be listened to and understood. I can remember teachers yelling at me and it piercing my heart. I can also remember that when a teacher was compassionate and patient and understanding, it was like a soothing balm to my nervous system.
I try to remember this when I am with my kiddos. Sometimes my mantra is keep your heart soft and open. Keep your heart soft and open. It can be easier to react and get angry and tense up or let them know their behavior is annoying or not be kind. I don’t know why that is in me sometimes, a preference to be cold and not connect, but I think all humans grapple with it. I think so much of the work we do in recovery is practicing continuously allowing our hearts to be vulnerable in order to connect.
It can be so easy as a teacher to take it all far too seriously and judge your students for their ridiculous adolescent behavior. How they like to drop things on the floor intentionally to get a rise out of the classroom. How they constantly call out and kick their chairs. How they shut down and act rude or talk back or get into giggle fits or refuse to stay on task. It’s just what they do. What they’ve always done. What they always will do. Even with the best teachers and the best lessons and the calmest environment. It is still bound to happen at least once.
It’s like wrangling a bunch of labradors together in a room. They are bound at some point to bark, pee, sniff, chase their tails, and retrieve items for you. It’s just what they do.
So for my own peace of mind and for the respect and dignity my students deserve, I attempt to practice acceptance and compassion. I attempt and often succeed. Sometimes I fail. Sometimes I get cynical. Sometimes I get so very tired and so very frustrated.
But I can always start over. Can always, just as the students do, “take a break.” (TAB) Can always come back to my mantra: keep your heart soft and open.
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I often tend to see the world in symbols and metaphors. I’m an INFJ and a Cancer and a highly sensitive intuitive, and with that kind of resume, it’s impossible for me to not always seek the deeper meaning within any given situation and draw connections between events, people, and circumstances. It’s a significant part of what makes me who I am, and it’s a rather rich and satisfying way to live. Sometimes I may get a little too out there or dismissive of cold hard facts and logic, but more often than not I found that observing the world through such a lens is a special way to live.
When I was nine years old, I thought I had asthma. I started to breathe funny. Sometimes I couldn’t catch a deep breath. It was like my chest was clogged with some kind of sticky substance that had also wrapped itself around my heart and esophagus and throat. My mom took me to the doctor to get my lungs check and to test me for allergies. Nothing there. No asthma. I was too young to be considered a child struggling with anxiety, so like a good little girl after my results came back clean, I ignored it and carried on.
It probably was anxiety, but that wasn’t the whole story. That was part of the trouble breathing, but I liken it more to the fact that I was being raised by parents who didn’t know how to offer me the sort of protection and safety and freedom of expression that I so desperately needed. My parents were getting divorced and my father could be tough and rigid and my mom didn’t always pay much attention. I had two older brothers competing with me for their love and care. I was always fearful and sensitive and terrified of my father’s temper. I was not (and still am not) the type who is immediately forthright and expressive of my feelings, seeking a shoulder to cry on. So everything stayed deep within me like a hot breath of carbon dioxide with nowhere to go. I was literally and figuratively holding my breath in fear and unknowing.
All that held breath built up and began to feel like black goo, blocking my insides. Off and on through my adolescence, it would swell and pulsate and I would struggle for breaths the way one struggles for steadiness while being thrown around in the ocean. Sometimes it would settle back and harden, therefore feeling like it was gone. I didn’t feel it as much when I drank and did drugs. That was the whole point – self-medication.
But when I started a journey of recovery and was stripped of those once foolproof coping mechanisms of checking out through mind-altering substances, that black sticky sludge was still there, and it was as rotten and putrid as ever. It was everywhere. In my chest. My stomach. My throat. My head. My heart. I was infected. It was killing me. It was choking me. Looking back now, I realize it was trauma. Trauma is far more a visceral beast than simply a mental recall – it gets stuck within parts of body and can lie dormant for years. My parents didn’t beat me, and I always had a bed to sleep in and a lunch for school and birthday parties and sleepovers and a lot of what is considered magical and joyful for a childhood, but the bottom line is that underneath the visage of happiness, everything was messy and chaotic. Divorce is never pretty, even the “amicable” one my parents had. Your parents dating other people when you are five years old is confusing. Your father yelling at you and cursing and telling you that you are fat and lazy when you’re nine years old (and just fine, thank you) is psychologically wounding. Your mother not protecting you or defending you from your brothers teasing when it’s clear that you are an especially sensitive little girl makes you feel worthless and ashamed. There were many fine moments in my childhood, but overall, I always felt afraid and sad. I learned very quickly how to control my environment and block my feelings in order to feel relief. Because of these basic survival instincts, my little girl attempts at keeping myself safe and tending only to fixing the outside world, the trauma had nowhere to go.
During that first year sober again around four years ago, I struggled with my breathing everyday. I had to concentrate and get very quiet and still in order to breathe well. It was like walking around in armor that was not only too tight but also sharp and cutting. I was so uncomfortable in my skin it was like I was a walking infected nerve-ending.
A friend of mine, Rachel, noticed it once when we visited the Self-Realization Temple in Pacific Palisades (where I grew up.) We sat on a bench and attempted to meditate, and for ten minutes I could not catch a deep and satisfying breath.
“Are you okay?” she asked me gently.
“No. I just. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I can’t ever seem to breathe well.”
She nodded and thought for a moment. Rachel was a special person. She was into crystals and funky forms of meditation and visualizations, and she had done major work in the rooms of recovery. She was another carrier of Light who showed me a path I hadn’t dreamed of before. She always told me, faith can move mountains. I really admired her and clung to her example.
She looked at me closely, her eyes narrowing as if she perceived something. “You have what looks like a black snake wrapped around your solar plexus. It’s choking you. But don’t be alarmed. It will come undone and leave you as you keep walking this path.”
As out there as it sounded, I wholeheartedly believed her and understood. Though I hadn’t considered it a snake, I always knew there something black and tight and slimy coiled around my torso. I could feel it. Hearing someone else validate it made me not feel so crazy and out there and figurative.
After another year of immersion in all things recovery and God-centered, I started to breathe better. Without trying, there was just suddenly more space in my lungs and throat and stomach. Breaths would come and feel like God. Whooshes of freedom. I started to feel so clean. Like there was cool water running into my system and slowly dissolving all that black crud. I see now that it was years of denied trauma beginning to loosen and finally leave my system.
I started to feel this subtle warmth in my heart. Not the stale and rubbery heat I felt so often as a child, but a clean, shining, radiating energy that seemed to come in through the crown of my head and move down through my neck and shoulders into my heart and belly. And then it would extend outward. Like a channel of peace. It was like these major blockages in my body had finally been swept clean and there was space for feelings to move, energy to flow, and toxins to depart.
The more I gave myself over to my practice of recovery, the cleaner I felt. The better I breathed. Even still today, if life gets a little busy or stressful or scary, it can feel as if I am clogged again. If I get disconnected from my center, my perception can grow murky. But it is sort of like phantom pain or phantom recall. It’s not as if all that black goop has suddenly returned; it’s that I imagine it has, and our imaginations are great at creating things that aren’t there. Today, I can clear the channels more quickly and let that radiating energy come back through me. Sometimes it takes a few walks or a mental health day from work or writing in my journal or going to a meeting. Sometimes it requires simply thinking about or talking to God.
But I am clean today from an onyx sludge that haunted me for years and attempted to choke the life out of me. Call it trauma, call it alcoholism, call it the forces of darkness or the accumulation of years of held breath – black goop makes sense to me. And there is something larger than it and that will always triumph if you allow it to: the Light of God’s Love.
A Full Life 