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  • Alcoholism Pt. 4: Relapse, “Recovery,” Relapse.

    Relapse is often a part of recovery. It doesn’t have to be, but it often is. And it’s not always a bad thing – sometimes it is necessary if one is to have quality sobriety. What’s frightening is that some people don’t make it back from a relapse. They die. I was lucky.

    I had relapsed before when I was eighteen and nineteen. I’d put together three or four or six months sober and then relapse for a month or two.

    But i didn’t imagine that I would relapse after a year and a half sober.

    It’s important to catalog our time clean and sober in the rooms, but it can also be detrimental, because we can think that just being sober for a certain period of time means that we are now healthy and recovered. But it isn’t so. You could stay sober for ten years, white knuckling the shit out of it, but if you aren’t doing the spiritual work, you aren’t recovered. You’re dry. And a dry drunk is often worse than a wet one.

    I certainly thought that because I had made it past one year, everything was fine and dandy. But in actuality, I had yet to truly address the sickness in my soul. I didn’t know it was there. I was too busy dating and going to school and being twenty years old to give it much thought. I thought I felt fear and anxiety and depression because “that’s just the way life is.” But you can only ignore the soul sickness for so long. It is begging to be dealt with, and it will manifest in all sorts of unpleasant ways until you finally have the guts to get down in the sop and the goop of it, all that rotting trauma and pain, and start cleaning it out.

    Alcoholism is often referred to as a “cunning, baffling, powerful disease.” “A disease of insanity.” “An insidious monster.” “A progressive illness.” When we are not in a fit spiritual condition, relapse can sneak up on us when we least expect it and completely morph and manipulate our perception. It can convince us that we are not alcoholics and that drinking again won’t cause any harm. It wipes away all recollection of just how bad previous experiences were, or it whisper sweetly, but it will be different this time. Because the power of this is so great, so strong, so beyond human our will to defend, the core of recovery is about finding a Higher Power through which we can heal and eventually align our human will power. Left to our devices in an unrecovered alcoholic mind is risky business. And miserable.

    This cunning baffling powerful illness snuck up on me after a year and half sober, and without even thinking about it I swallowed a Vicodin. I knew it wasn’t sober behavior, but I didn’t care and I wasn’t concerned. I’ll deal with consequences later. Insane.

    Within weeks I was drinking every day, popping (and stealing) pills, smoking weed, snorting cocaine, driving drunk, and sleeping around. My usual platter of alcoholism. Because I was still only twenty-two at this time, almost done with community college and ready to transfer to UCLA, and finally free of that turbulent relationship with Mark, things looked okay on the outside and I was able to get away with drinking and drugging again for about a year. There were a few fun nights and some lucky escapes. But ultimately I ended up on my hands and knees praying for God to help me, riddled deeply with fear and despair and bewilderment. I knew in my heart of hearts that I was alcoholic. There was no question. But that’s just the beginning.

    Thus began another attempt at sobriety and recovery through AA. I started again the way you always start – In late November of 2007, I went to a meeting and raised my hand and admitted I was a newcomer.

    I was living back in Los Angeles and a full time English major at UCLA. I was in a serious relationship with a fellow sober alcoholic. In those first few months sober again, I was elated. I felt so thankful to have made it back to program without any serious wreckage. I was loving studying and wandering the beautiful campus of UCLA. I was deeply in love with Christopher and spent most of my time with him and his brother and various friends. We had fun. I miss those days, once in a while, those days of being a student and not following a 9 to 5 schedule and smoking at meetings and staying up late playing games and listening to music. It was a sweet time, and Christopher and I were very much in love. Well, we thought we were.

    Around May 2008, something began to shift. Everything would be fine, and then all of sudden I would be filled with a rage so sharp and a pain so excruciating, I’d sneak into my shower to wail. Christopher was baffled. What was the matter? I didn’t know. I thought I had that mysterious form of severe PMS that girls whispered about. Maybe I had an anxiety disorder, or my depression was coming back and I needed to go on medication. Never once did it occur to me that I was spiritually sick.

    I quickly began to fix myself from the outside in, at first in a lot of seemingly positive ways. I switched from coffee to green tea and quit smoking cigarettes. I stopped eating sugar and junk food and replaced everything with fruits and vegetables. I made myself go to bed earlier and not watch so much TV. Thus began a health obsession and an eating disorder and a period of hypochondria that can only be described as one thing: a substitute for drinking.

    Alcoholics love to obsess. It’s built into the illness. We’re miserable, we obsess, we drink, we feel better, then we’re miserable again. And we can obsess about anything. We can “get high” on anything. Because I was still essentially a dry drunk who had not given herself a chance to recover through the 12 steps (see the blog on Inside job: Men) my illness transferred elsewhere.

    I became obsessed with “healing” my body. Cleanses, diets, detoxes. Pure food, organic food, raw food. I was terrified of yeast infections and bladder infections and skin problems and all these invisible things I thought were in me. I worried about every single thing that went in my mouth or on my body. And I started to lose weight. A lot of it.

    I didn’t set out to lose weight in the beginning. I mean, I assumed some weight would come off, and I was glad about this, but I didn’t expect to drop down to a size 2 in a few months. It was…exhilarating. It was the first time in years of making attempts to turn my curvy body into a thin one that it actually worked. I got thin. I weighed 115 pounds, which blew my mind. Even at my most fit in high school, I hovered around 125.

    The exhilaration didn’t exactly last, because like any obsession, you are never fully satisfied and you just want more and more. Around the same time, the chronic pain that had been lingering in my body since I went to Boulder began to flare in a way I had never experienced. I had learned to ignore the sciatica and neck pains and I started to develop when I went off to college. I thought they were from sports injuries and the wear and tear of life. They didn’t bother me too much. But for whatever reason, during this time in 2008, the pain sharpened and increased and even seemed to spread.

    Thus began another obsession: fixing my pain. I have always been a determined person, and when I set my mind to something, I dive in full force. I was determined to find out what was wrong with me and fix what felt like a broken body. I started going to countless doctors, chiropractors, healers, massage therapists, and specialists. I let them X-ray and inject and poke and prod and rub and bend and push and pull me. And I left every appointment pretending that I felt better. I never did. And they never found anything either.

    You can imagine what a treat of a girlfriend I was at this time. I was literally incapable of being present to him. All I cared about was fixing my body, making it smaller and making it hurt less. I was under weight and malnourished. I was angry and scared. I was selfish and cold. Christopher hung in there with me for longer than he wanted to. We had loved each other so much for a time, had let each other so completely into each others lives, and it was devastating when he broke up with me. But I’m glad he did, for both our sakes.

    Miraculously, I stayed sober through this entire time. I stayed sober through severe pain and coming to terms with the fact that I had an eating disorder and all through breaking up with Chris and finishing my degree at UCLA. I made attempts to get better, and some of them let a little light into my world.

    I stayed sober a whole year after breaking up with Chris, and though it had its moments of clarity and happiness, it was a rather miserable time. I was spiritually sick and unwilling to make changes. I saw myself as a victim. I was bitter that I was in pain and bitter that I could no longer control my weight and eating habits and bitter that I was starting graduate school so quickly. I felt trapped and helpless and locked up in my head. Most of all, I hadn’t built a foundation in recovery. My entire first year sober was spent completely enamored with Christopher and wrapped in fixing my body and focused on doing well in school. I had no center in my soul and no connection to God. So I started to blame God.

    i thought God had abandoned me and that was why I was in pain and so miserable. I thought God wanted me to suffer. I thought God was the reason that I hated myself and my life and nearly everyone in it. I was lost. And I started to think about pills a lot. A lot.

    That’s how alcoholism works. It creeps back in and plants itself in the center of your brain, and then it becomes the obsession to supersede all obsessions.

    So I started thinking about pills. But I also started thinking about death. Suicide. Hanging myself. Overdosing. Driving my car off the road. I felt completely dead on the inside, consumed with self-pity and rage and fear and resentment. Completely blocked off from joy and light and grace. But I kept a happy face to the world. I’m real good at that. It was always one of my major flaws when it came to recovery since I’d first set foot in a meeting at 17 years old. I had no idea how to express my feelings and to ask for help. The sheer thought of being that vulnerable made me nervous. I was far better at pretending everything was fine and figuring it out for myself. Even with therapists and sponsors I gave off a facade of being in control and doing well. I was good at expressing ideas and articulating well and saying what people wanted to hear. But I couldn’t pour my heart out. It was too terrifying. This, however, is not an illness that we recover from by keeping secrets. No, no, no. And we cannot get better if we don’t start talking and telling the truth and sharing our deepest feelings.

    I didn’t know how to do that. My whole life, I had never known how to do that.

    And so I kept thinking about those pills. Kept thinking about dying some tragic drug-addled death. I thought and I thought and I thought, for months! Until my brain felt like it would explode.

    And then I relapsed.

  • Alcoholism Pt. 5: An Awakening

    It took about 11 days to go through all of the prescriptions I stole from my mom, and she had plenty. Leftovers from surgeries and sicknesses – she never bothered to take more than a couple. Vicodin and Percocet and Ativan and codeine cough syrup. Delish. When those were gone, I was back with the old crew of lower companions, spending all my money on Norcos and Oxy and coke and wine. Drinking daily. Smoking weed. Snorting cocaine. Driving drunk. Throwing up. Stealing pills. Sleeping around. Same old charade.

    How am I back here I thought to myself most days. How am I back here. 

    I never thought I would be back there.

    But upon reflection, of course I ended up there. It was either that or straight to committing suicide. I was in the throes of alcoholism, even before I relapsed. Mentally ill. Spiritually void. And it was manifesting physically, in a dozen different forms of aches and pains and chemical dependency. It didn’t matter that I had a college degree and a brand new car and a closet full of designer clothes and a relatively sweet disposition. It didn’t matter that I was intelligent and insightful and witty and perceptive. It didn’t matter that my parents were successful, decent people. And it didn’t matter that I was white, female, young, and privileged. Alcoholism does not discriminate and it does not look like any one thing. Just like evil doesn’t have a face. Alcoholism will attempt to destroy and ruin whoever it prays upon, whether it’s the president of the United States or the homeless blind man on the corner.

    But there is a solution. I am living breathing proof of that. Millions of us are.

    Not only have I recovered from a “seemingly hopeless state of mind and body,” but I walk today with an open and joyous heart and an unbreakable faith in God.

    I stopped trying to submit and comply to the principles of AA. I finally surrendered. And here’s how:

    During that final relapse, I was brought to my knees in a way I never had been before. And it made the early stages of getting sober again quite daunting.

    It was the first time that I was seriously chemically dependent on drugs. I had never gotten so hooked on opiates before; I had always taken them throughout the years, but I hadn’t developed a habit of needing upwards of twenty five pills a day just to avoid withdrawals and depending on what I could afford and (literally) stomach. (Most prescription opiates are also filled with acetaminophen, the drug they put in Tylenol, and it can wreak havoc on your gut.) If you don’t already know, opiates like Vicodin and Percocet and Oxy-Contin are really just heroin in a pill. Heroin is profoundly physically addicting, and withdrawals are exactly as dramatic as the movies makes them out to be. It’s like having ten thousand flus and ants crawling all over your skin and debilitating anxiety, depression, and insomnia. And NOTHING makes it go away unless you take more opiates or get a prescription for Suboxone. (Which I did on the second go around.) Withdrawals can last anywhere from three days to a week. I withdrew from opiate dependency twice. The first time I stopped cold turkey. It was like touring a few circles of Dante’s Inferno. I drank liquor and took Valium in an attempt to survive it, but I might as well have taken nothing. Three days of sweating and crying and kicking and screaming in my bed. Three days of seriously contemplating jumping off a cliff.

    The second time I stopped, I knew I could not go through that again. I took Suboxone for about a week, as prescribed by a doctor, and it was a lifesaver. I had very minimal symptoms, and I was so relieved to be free from such an all-consuming addiction.

    But the hard part was yet to begin.

    You could liken stages of true and deep and authentic early recovery to having to re-break a bone in order for it to fuse correctly. The bone is clearly broken, and it won’t heal completely unless broken again. The only way in is in, the only way out is through.

    You could liken setting a foundation in recovery to having to really get down there in the dirt and mud and sand with hammers and nails and wood and brick, your back aching, the sun blinding, your whole being desiring to quit and let someone else build it. The foundation is always harder and dirtier and uglier and can seem to take forever to build.

    Early recovery is like that: it can be brutal at times. It’s work.

    Let me be clear, that when I say recovery, I mean authentic, surrendered, down to guts and bones and soul recovery. Not mere physical sobriety, but emotional sobriety and spiritual awakening. That was what I had never had before. I had physical sobriety and some external achievements, but I lacked that sturdy foundation that would allow me to live freely and comfortably in my skin, infused with divine joy and faith. I never let myself re-break the bone in order to heal right, because I didn’t even want to acknowledge that the bone was broken.

    But after that last relapse, I was willing to do anything and everything and to Face. It. All. All of it. The addiction. The eating disorders. The chronic pain. The codependency. The emotional problems. The anger. The self-hatred. The fear. I was willing. I was also blessed with some kind of grace, because I finally felt a teeny tiny little glimmer of light within me that whispered – you can be free of all of this that haunts you and makes you want to die. 

    So where did I start? At the beginning, where you always have to start. Back to basics, as they say in AA, which usually means attending meetings, getting a sponsor, embarking on the 12 steps.

    But that was too vague a direction to follow – it’s easy to hide in the compliance to “attending meetings, getting a sponsor, and embarking on the steps,” but not experience the necessary surrender and psychic change. That’s what I had always done, and it left me with an inability to achieve quality and lasting sobriety. What needed to be different this time? I knew I needed something larger. I knew it would not be enough to sit in the back of speaker meetings and blindly follow my sponsor’s direction, reverting back to the same silent, pretending, smile on her face good girl like I had always done in the past. I knew I could not get into relationship. I knew I needed to go to therapy. I knew I needed to seek legitimate healing for my chronic pain and eating disorders. I could not address only one piece of the puzzle. I could not build a foundation on two legs. Lucky for me, I was completely willing to do all of this. Put me in, coach. Sometimes willingness is the greatest gift, because some people don’t get it.

    I began to attend to very small and intimate women’s meetings where I was encouraged to share and let women get to know me. I hated them at first, but I started to speak. I felt so on the outside and so not good enough and so judgmental and so scared. But then something happened. I started to cry in those meetings. I started to confess that I hated myself and wanted to die. I started to share about my relationship with my father and my lack of self-esteem and how I always felt afraid. I was determined to keep going to those meetings until I felt a part of those meetings. And after about six to nine months, I did. When I went to those meetings, it was like coming home. I let those women love me, as best I could. I went to dinner with them and to coffee and spoke to some of them on the phone. I attempted with as much courage as I could muster to be honest and open. It wasn’t perfect. But it was real good.

    I began to see a therapist who specialized in chronic pain, addiction, and eating disorders and had insight into how they all often come together. When I had only a couple of days sober I began googling more about chronic pain and its relation to addiction. Something told me that there was a piece of the puzzle was still missing in terms of how I understood the physical pain in my body. I stumbled upon this website that spoke of pain being associated with something called Tension Myositis Syndrome (TMS.) The theory of TMS is that pain is not caused because of actual physical problems in the body but is stemming from the autonomic nervous system (ANS) going haywire due to mental and emotional problems, chronic stress, and trauma and restricting blood flow to various tendons, nerves, muscles, and ligaments. The pain is very real and not at all psychosomatic, but it is initially stemming from the mind (and spirit.) There is no actual disease or deformity in the body. That was eye-opening for me. It made sense to me. I didn’t entirely believe it at first, but it resonated nevertheless. It was miraculous actually; I had scoured the internet for years seeking doctors and healers and practitioners to diagnose and fix me, and on day two of this new sobriety, I found what was imperative to ensuring my recovery. (I go into greater detail about my journey through chronic pain and TMS in the piece Inside Job: Health and Chronic Pain.)

    My therapist, Jill, was incredible. She was loving, patient, and completely accepting of whatever I was experiencing. It didn’t happen right away, but I did start to open up and let a world of thoughts and feelings come spilling out. I saw her at least once a week, and she was a lifesaver during that first year sober. Sometimes it was all I could do to throw on a pair of sweatpants and plop myself down on her couch, agitated, frightened, bursting with hot and heavy toxic emotion. I began to let it seep out of me through my work with her.

    Most importantly, I began to work the steps again with my sponsor at the time, Ryan. But I didn’t work them like I had in the past, like a student works at school. I experienced them. I let them work me. And I became very interested in building a new God.

    Ryan is one of those women who radiates Light. She is warm and kind and walks the walk. She showed me the passageway to a spiritual life, one filled with unconditional love and stillness and peace and connection. In AA we talk about the importance of attraction over promotion – we don’t try to convince others of anything (at least, we shouldn’t.) Ryan attracted me to meditation and books on God that had never occurred to me before – not religious books per se, but books brimming with a path that was connected to the Divine. I used my addict traits of always wanting more and focused determination to seek and find, and I applied them to coming to know God.

    I read everything. Paul Ferrini and Pema Chodron and Thich Nat Hanh and Tara Brach and Mother Theresa and the Bible. I read books about Buddhism and Christianity and mysticism and metaphysics and all different forms of meditation and prayer. They nourished my soul. They wrapped me up like warm blankets and rocked me to sleep. All the books had essentially the same message. Trust that everything is alright. Love yourself no matter what. Share that Love with others. What other way is there?

    I started to sit in meditation in the mornings. At first, two minutes felt like my insides were boiling. It was hell. But slowly, I could do three minutes. Then five. Sometimes even ten or fifteen! I started to see the monkey in my brain. The insanity of my thinking. The old tapes that played over and over and over. And over. I started to understand that I wasn’t thinking my thoughts – they were thinking me! But we can make our minds like still water. Not forever, but for a moment. And we don’t have to be monks to do it. It’s not some sit on a lily pad on a mountaintop in the Himalayas and only eat rice to become enlightened kind of spiel. It’s you on a cushion or a chair, coming back to your breath through the thousands of wonky thoughts and feelings that arise and not getting up. So simple. So challenging. I’m no pro. Fifteen minutes is a feat for me, and sometimes I squirm through five. But I sit every morning. Even if I get up after ten seconds. It has transformed my entire life.

    And I started praying. I talked to God constantly. Out loud. In my head. In my car. On my knees. Under my breath. In my journal. I asked questions and I spoke the truth and I shared my fears. I wasn’t praying for anything really. Just to be guided. To stay sober. To be helpful. To be helped. God help me is a beautiful prayer, and one I still say often.

    I look back now and I realize what I was doing: I was building a relationship with God.

    It’s just like when you start dating someone: you learn about them. You get to know them through a bunch of different ways. You hang out with them. You sit with them. You talk to them. It’s awkward at first. Can be uncomfortable. Can feel so vulnerable. And then…eventually…you’re in a relationship.

    When you get down to the sole (soul!) purpose of the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, the main idea is to put you in touch with a Higher Power. That’s really what the whole deal is about. Everything else stems from there. It’s a spiritual program. Not a religious one. Not a cult. Not a club. It’s a program about finding your own personal God that can work in your life. It can be a tree. A song. The ocean. Jesus. Buddha. A Group Of Drunks (G.O.D) getting sober. Whatever works for you.

    I found mine. I found mine, and it transformed my life. It gave me a real shot at this thing. A real shot at recovery. A chance to heal. A chance to awaken.

    I hope I never go back to sleep.

  • Hell is other people. Love them anyway.

    I sat in a meeting tonight and felt completely slimed by another woman’s share. It was so pregnant with noxious trauma and so saturated in delusion and resentment and suffering that every word that spewed out of her mouth felt like a noose around my neck. I had to clutch my throat and shut my eyes and envision a golden bubble around me. I had to get on my knees just now and pray to God to help me not further absorb a story and a life and world that is so completely not mine. And then I had to pray for compassion and for the ability to let it go.

    I’ve always been highly sensitive and empathic. I wear a skin so permeable and fluid I sometimes can’t tell my emotions from another’s. I have to take extra good care of myself when around those who can turn into emotional vampires or verbal vomiters.

    For years, I didn’t understand I was built that way, and so instead of practicing compassion, I got defensive. I felt so invaded and attacked by these people that I built up sturdy walls or attacked them back. And I often attacked them through two mental weapons: judgement and self-righteousness.

    It can be easy to think we are better than others when we are further along a path of recovery. We can think we are more enlightened or healthier or cleaner or more spiritual. Ha. That term cracks me up. No being can be “more spiritual” than another being. We are all human beings. And it is true that some people are kinder or smarter or more attractive or more giving or gentler or funnier than others, but that doesn’t make them better. I can do this often. I can judge someone for their actions or appearance or attitude or lifestyle, compare it to my own, and deem myself as better. I can also do the exact same thing and deem myself as worse. You often hear people in meetings joke about struggling with being “a person among people,” meaning that they often place themselves as superior or inferior to another person. Greater or less than. Smaller or larger. It actually takes a lot more courage and humility to simply be an equal. To simply be a fellow. To simply be another being.

    With this woman tonight, because I at first felt so offended by her share, as if she were personally trying to spew black goop back into the center of my chest, I put up my proverbial dukes and put on my self-righteous hat. I’m more evolved. I’ve been in recovery longer. I would have handled that situation better. She’s sick. She’s addicted to drama. I’m not sick anymore. Though some of these thoughts may be factually true, it doesn’t serve the situation to shut down my heart and judge her for place in the world. It is not my place to do that, and it is also none of my business.

    Instead, I have to practice compassion. And like learning to play the violin or developing as a writer or acquiring a foreign language, it is a practice. Meaning you have to mistakes. You won’t do it perfectly. That’s the whole point.

    Compassion is not my default yet. I wish it was. But it comes much more quickly now after my initial desire to flight or flee or get my judgement on. Through a few years of meditation and prayer and tools I’ve picked up in recovery, I don’t act out on my thoughts like I used to or react impulsively from a place of fear. I pause a little bit longer. I breathe. I pray. I sometimes say a bunch of crazy shit in my head. And then I try to get to lovingkindness and compassion and remembering that her path is not mine, and it’s not my job to judge it or label it. It’s also not personal.

    May she be happy. May she be peaceful. May she be free from suffering.

    May I. May You.

    God Bless.

  • Alcoholism Pt. 3: Moving Down South

    It was like summer camp in a lot of ways.

    There I was, living in a house just minutes from the beach, surrounded by a bunch of young people who felt charged with a frenetic energy that can only come from rehab.

    Rehab can be a lot of fun. It really can. You sit around garages and smoke and talk about life. Some guy’s always got a guitar to play so you can sing your favorite Beatles songs. You start reading again. You eat candy and go to movies and start sleeping a little better because you’re clean. You go to the beach on the weekends and remember what it feels like to jump through waves. You get crushes. You make out. You (think you) fall in love.

    It can also be a big pain in the ass. You have to get some shit job. Do chores. Wake up at the crack of dawn to go to meetings. Go to “group” and listen to people bitch and complain. Cook and clean. Sleep in bunk beds. Plot how to kill your snoring roommate.

    But mostly, it’s great, and mostly, it’s a gift. If you want it. But the real recovery isn’t in rehab. Rehab is just a gateway. The recovery is in Alcoholics Anonymous and Cocaine Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous and any other program that introduces you to the 12 steps. And the 12 steps are magic.

    My first hours in rehab were terrifying. My mom took me there, and as she’s helping me unpack my clothes into the little bureau next to my bunk bed, I meet my first roommate.

    “I’m Sam,” she says, biting on the huge ring in her tongue. “What’s your drug of choice?” I scan her up and down. She’s tall and thin and tan, covered in tattoos, and wearing the shortest cutoffs I have ever seen.

    I’m standing there thinking, you do know that’s my mom right? “Alcohol and pills,” I mutter.

    “Cool. Me, I like speedballs. Cocaine and heroin. Perfect combination.” My poor mother. 

    Then I meet my next roommate. She’s a lot like Sam, only she’s shorter and has black and red hair and a lip ring instead of a tongue, and her drug of choice is crystal-meth.

    Shit. Maybe I really should have shot heroin into my eyeballs before coming here…

    My amazing mother continues to help me unpack and says nothing judgmental or unkind. We hug, we cry, she leaves. I lay on my bed for hours reading this binder they gave me on the process of recovery. I am too terrified to leave my room and face everyone. I feel immensely shy and self-conscious. But after a few hours I am dying for a cigarette, and I know I’ll have to come out at some point.

    I finally do, and it takes all that courage and bravery in me to walk down that hall and into the living room and out to the patio where everyone is smoking.

    “Your eyes look sad,” one of the house managers says to me.

    “Eyes tell the truth,” I tell him.  

    It’s a Friday night, and it just so happens that the regular meeting they take us to is at the beach by a huge campfire. It’s a great meeting, full of hope and laughter and food and music, and everyone in the rehab is suddenly my friend. For the first time since I dropped out of college, I feel hopeful.

    Orange County did my well. I have mostly very fond memories of the three years that I lived there. I didn’t stay sober the whole time, and I got into chaotic relationships, and I still struggled with a lot of depression and anxiety and eating disorders and pain. But it catapulted me out that clogged glue-like numbed darkness I was stuck in when I returned from Boulder. I started going back to school at the local community college and took it seriously. I got an apartment with a girl who became my best friend for a period of time. I spent a lot of time at great AA meetings and running around with young people and playing at the beach and going to sober dances.

    I also still struggled with bulimia. Depression. Low self-esteem. Crippling fear. Toxic relationships. Dishonest behavior. Cutting. Relapse. Anger. Denial. I was scratching at the surface of recovery, but i wasn’t in yet. And I was young. I was still so very young.

    I was in a relationship with Mark for the majority of time in Orange County. Our relationship was the central focus of my life. He was my real Higher Power. I didn’t yet know how to leave him or to be alone. I didn’t really have a relationship with God, so I certainly couldn’t trust God, and my days were edged with a cloying fear I could never shake. I tried to chase it away with smoking and sex and food and caffeine. I did my best with the tools I had. Took a lot of naps. Had sex all the time. Ate sugar. Focused on school. Listened to music. Watched tons of TV. (LOST and Friends were a saving grace.) I worked the steps in AA to be a good girl. I did the best I could, but I didn’t have the psychic change and the spiritual awakening that is necessary if one is to maintain any sort of long term quality sobriety. Again, I was young. I didn’t think my past could haunt me anymore. I didn’t think I had so many feelings and so much trauma to face. I thought I just had to go to meetings and do well in school. I was so relieved to be free from how I’d felt when I was eighteen, that I wasn’t all that concerned with connecting to God and healing old wounds. I just wanted to have fun.

    The longest I stayed sober during that time was 20 months. I was proud of that time. There were moments of happiness and joy. But something returned. It always does, if we don’t fully recover. An insanity. A belief that maybe, just maybe, I could drink now and experiment with drugs, and it wouldn’t be so bad…

  • Alcoholism Pt. 2: Numb

    I’m 18. I’ve dropped out of college. I’m on Zoloft. I’m gaining weight. I’m stuffed to the brim with toxic shame and suffering. I don’t yet know how to express anything or to ask for help, and I don’t yet know how to accept that I am an alcoholic.

    Not a place I’d ever want to return to. Ever. It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times.

    But the only way out is through. Thank God I made it through.

    When I returned from Boulder, I was filled with shame. I felt like such a failure. I didn’t even want to tell my closest friends that I had dropped out. My father was disappointed in me. He thought it was because I couldn’t hack it. I believed him, allowing his projections to draw conclusions about myself. I understand now that I was incredibly unwell, and what I needed was support and compassion and unconditional love. That was never my father’s default. He never gave it to himself, so how could he give it someone else?

    I returned to my therapist and agreed to do a 90-day dual-diagnosis outpatient program through Cedars Sinai. Despite my therapists urgings, I did not feel it necessary to go into some treatment facility. I thought that was extreme and ridiculous. I still had my misgivings about being an alcoholic. I still thought I didn’t qualify. I didn’t think my story was bad enough. I let a lot of what my friends thought dictate what I thought. They saw me as a girl who liked to party and sometimes got out of control. I wanted to much for this to be true. But it wasn’t.

    It’s very very easy to minimize addiction, and it’s very very common to do so, especially when you’re young. Part of the illness is denial and rationalizing and convincing everyone that it’s not that bad. Some people will believe you, too. In my opinion, it’s a form of refusing to have to do the serious and often brutal work of addressing deeper emotional issues and trauma and coming to a place of healing. It is why so many people who struggle with addiction don’t get help or can’t get well. You can hit a lot of rock bottoms, and you can choose to seek recovery at any bottom along the way, or you can keep falling until you hit the final one – death.

    But I didn’t think my “rock bottom” was rocky enough. And I still blamed external circumstances that I believed at the time were divorced from my alcoholism. My weight, my dad, my self-esteem and tendency toward depression. I thought if I could fix those issues, then maybe I wouldn’t have such a compulsion to drink. Other way around, sweet girl. But I didn’t know.

    The trouble, too, with attempting to get sober and recover while you’re young, is that, well, you’re young. I was eighteen, and eighteen year olds don’t know shit. They just don’t have the experience and the wisdom to understand much about how the world works, let alone their feelings and their thinking. They’re just fragile, often misguided creatures. And despite me being a fairly intelligent and insightful young lady, there was so much I didn’t understand yet about myself and the true nature of this feral monkey on my back.

    But I tried. I really tried.

    It was perhaps one of the darkest periods of my life, and not because I was feeling so much pain, but because there was this complete absence of feeling at all. It was bizarre. I remember feeling that entire time like I was trapped in a glass box underwater without any clue that I would drown. I was numb. I was sick. I was completely miserable. I overate and kept gaining weight, I cut my arms with razorblades. I slept around. I was prescribed a ridiculous amount of anti-depressants that shut me down completely. I managed to put together a few months without drinking and taking drugs, but I may as well have been.

    I look at it like this: alcohol and drugs were the only tools I had to cope with life. They had been with me since I was a young teenager and rescued me from having to feel any difficult emotions or having to deal with the trauma of my childhood. I had never dealt with a thing. I had no clue how to feel. I hated myself. So when I got sober, my body and mind went into shock. I really think they did. And I think it was just too much, too fast, and the only way I could think to take care of myself was to pick up these other self-destructive habits. Sweet baby girl. It was the only way I knew how to try to take care of myself.

    Writing about this can feel very tender. This is a place I don’t like revisiting. Sometimes it makes me angry that I suffered so much. Sometimes it makes me once again resentful that my parents didn’t take better care of me. Sometimes it makes me feel that old pulsing sting of shame. Mostly, it just makes me sad. But I have compassion for that part of my life today. If I could go back in time and see myself at eighteen, I would hold that young girl and tell her I loved her no matter what and that I wasn’t angry or disappointed or ashamed and that I would never abandon her or hurt her. That I would patiently wait for her. That I would listen to everything that she needed to say. That’s what I give myself today. But I didn’t know how to that ten years ago. All I knew how to do was beat myself up and self-destruct.

    Part of 12 step programs is learning how to take care of yourself and develop healthy tools to live sober and/or comfortably in your skin, one day at a time. It is no overnight matter. It takes a lot of time and a lot of ups and downs. That is why so many people relapse early in recovery – the beginning stages of beginning to feel your feelings and to live without your coping mechanisms can feel like walking the earth without skin. That is why so many of us take up chain-smoking and chugging coffee and bingeing on sugar or getting into relationships. We need distraction. We need something to take the edge off. And that’s okay. But work does have to be done in order to build a foundation and eventually keep letting go of all the self-destructive thoughts and behaviors.

    I didn’t stay sober that first go around. And when I went back to drinking, it was worse than ever. I totaled my car completely drunk. I kept sleeping with strange men. I was doing a lot more pills and cocaine and speed. I was buried. Broken. Numb.

    Finally, in July of 2004, right after I had turned nineteen, I told my parents I needed to go to rehab. I moved down to South Orange County and entered a three to six month program in Dana Point. It was the best decision I have ever made and began a journey out of the darkness and into the light.

  • Alcoholism Pt. 1: In the beginning…

    When I turned fourteen, I started smoking a lot of pot. I loved getting high. It was like entering a new world where everything sounded better and smelled better and felt better. And food tasted so good.

    If I had a bag of weed on me, it was like security. It was a gateway to freedom from anxiety and depression and boredom. I’d smoke a bowl, listen to music, and write in my journal. I’d smoke a bowl with friends and we’d talk about life. 

    I met new people, fellow stoners like me. We’d load up the bong and idle away the afternoons watching Pulp Fiction and emptying cereal boxes.

    it was my first taste of freedom from the bondage of self.

    I started drinking, too, which I also loved from my very first drunk. I didn’t entirely love the taste of hard liquor and keg beer, but I loved the way it made me feel. Luminous. Smart. Pretty. Connected. Peaceful. I remember thinking to myself the first time I really drank: I want to feel this way for the rest of my life. 

    Getting stoned and drinking alcohol were like spiritual experiences at first. I remember being in my room at fifteen years old, in the throes of one of those delicious and perfect drunken highs, and feeling as if I had found the secret to life. The magic key. The golden ticket. They stripped away that stale heat I’d had within me since I was eleven years old. They melted depression and kicked anxiety to the curb. They eased tension and lubricated conversations with others. They created connection and joy and camaraderie. For a while.

    You learn in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous that alcoholism is a progressive illness. It starts out fun and carefree and then slowly turns ugly. Problems pile up. Over time, it only gets worse, never better. There is no way of undoing the progression or stopping it once you’ve crossed that invisible line. And it’s insidious like that – you think it’s your friend until it bashes your head into the wall.

    My alcoholism progressed quite rapidly. Almost overnight, in many ways. I never drank normally. From my first real drunk, I was always seeking more more more. I liked the effect produced by alcohol, and it was unbearable for that effect to wear off. The more I drank, the more I wanted to drink more. My tolerance became increasingly higher. Beer didn’t do the trick – I needed my own bottle of vodka. Sips took too long – I needed to chug and gulp. Waiting until 9pm for the party to start was a nightmare – I needed it now. And man, could I drink. By sixteen years old, I could put away a fifth of liquor easy. I could drink an eighteen pack of beer, no problem. I could polish off two or three bottles of wine in a few hours.

    I started to black out a lot. Especially when I drank liquor. I would wake up in my bed and have absolutely no idea what I’d done the night before or how I’d gotten home. My hangovers were terrifying. My hands and chest would tremble and I’d often dry-heave into the toilet. My head would pound for hours unless I swallowed a handful of aspirin. I was filled with anxiety and fear and despair and shame, and the only thing I could think of to make all that go away was to drink more.

    I was also a people-pleaser and highly sensitive, and I cared about doing “the right thing.” I wasn’t a balls out rebellious don’t give a fuck chick who raised hell and didn’t feel a thing about it. I was concerned with my behavior. I was concerned with how I might be affecting others. I was scared that something was really wrong.

    Sometime around the spring of 2002, when I was a junior in high school, I was at my friend Kat’s house and I saw a memoir on her desk: Drinking: A Love Story, by Caroline Knapp. She loaned the book to me and I read it in one sitting. It was essentially a memoir about Knapp’s own alcoholism and her journey to recovery. I identified with nearly every single thing she wrote about. The circumstances were different, but the thoughts and feelings were identical. It was like someone had finally expressed what I had always felt, even before I started drinking. There was even an “are you an alcoholic?” quiz within one of the chapters, and I answered yes to every question. I was sixteen.

    I chose to ignore it. What sixteen year old is an alcoholic? What sixteen year old gets sober? I honestly thought that was the craziest and most absurd thing ever. It wasn’t like I was shooting heroin into my eyeballs. (Luckily, there are thousands of teens getting sober each day and a whole movement of young people in recovery all over the world, heroin in the eyeballs or not.)

    But I couldn’t ignore it for long. The blackouts kept increasing and I was beginning to grow paranoid. My mental state was not great. I decided to stop drinking for a while. Just, you know, to give my body a break. After a weekend of wanting to crawl out of my skin, I started to feel better physically. Much healthier and more energy. Not so much fear. I still smoked a ton of pot and occasionally took other drugs, but for about six months, I didn’t touch a drop of alcohol. My friends were mostly supportive, and others didn’t seem to notice or care. But I cared. I missed it. I thought about it all the time. I wanted to drink with all of my friends. I hated that it would always turn so terrible. Surely there had to be a way I could drink like them and have it not be so scary!

    So I decided to start drinking again, with visceral determination to make it work. I tried desperately to control it. Like a true alcoholic, I attempted numerous laughable experiments. I’ll only drink beer. I’ll only drink wine. I’ll only drink after a meal. I won’t smoke pot with it. I won’t drink until 10pm. I’ll only have three. Or four. No liquor. Only on Saturday night. No wine. Only on Friday night. No tequila. I’ll take some uppers so I won’t get so sloppy. I won’t drink all next month. Inevitably, all of these experiments failed. They might have worked once or twice or a few times, but soon enough I was right back where alcoholism wanted me: head in hands, quaking with shame, wondering: what the fuck is wrong with me?

    I always got too drunk. I usually blacked out. I regularly had soul-shaking hangovers. My panic and paranoia and depression increased. And I kept trying to control it. I kept trying to not get drunk. Sometimes I would even try not to drink at all, and yet there I’d be. It was baffling. Come on, I was only seventeen!

    I told my parents about it. We all agreed to call it a “drinking problem,” and to “watch it carefully.” Remember, I wasn’t shooting heroin into my eyes. Bless them, they wanted me to be normal and easy. They wanted me to graduate high school and go to a four year college and to go to parties and have that whole rite of passage. They didn’t want me to have depression and anxiety and all this drama. They wanted me to be like them. I was not. I thought it was my fault, too, that there was something wrong with for not being able to control my drinking. I didn’t yet understand that I was suffering from a progressive illness and that I had lost all choice and power when it came to alcohol. I didn’t yet understand that I was dealing with a mental obsession far beyond my control and that once I took that first drink I had no ability to stop. And I certainly didn’t understand that, most significantly, my spirit and soul was sick.

    Then came a slew of positive distractions that would cover up the reality that something was really wrong: I graduated high school, I got accepted to a couple of colleges, I was looking pretty good, I got a great summer job at a day camp. Summer brings that sweeping freedom that tends to lift us up before an inevitable fall in, well, the fall.

    My dad took me to Boulder in July for my orientation. I was excited. So was he. Boy did my parents want me to have a grand ol’ time at a rah rah university like they did at Texas. It was an exhilarating weekend. I made instant friends, fell in love with the campus, and got hammered the whole time. I came in at 5am the first night and missed a meet and greet in the morning. It was the first time my dad expressed concern for my drinking. But I was getting good at being an alcoholic in denial. I brushed it off. I’m in college, dad. Come on. So he brushed it off, too.

    Off I went in late August to begin my freshman year. The night before I left with my mom to drive sixteen hours from California to Colorado, I got insanely drunk, had sex with this guy, and arrived home around 6am, ready to depart at 8. (Even as I write this, I’m saying oh sweet baby girl out loud to myself. Because it all sounds wild and crazy, but there was so much suffering underneath all of that partying and appearance of being young and free. With humor, with grace, with compassion and gratitude, we forgive ourselves and move through our hurts.)

    I lasted almost three months. By early November, I was suicidal. I drank every single day and did a lot of drugs. I could barely make it to class. I hated living in the dorms. I started binge eating and putting on weight, which just compounded the self-hatred and the nasty voices in my head. I cut myself. I flirted with bulimia. I threw myself at guys. I almost got arrested. I got into fights with my new friends. I was taking anti-depressants and birth control while drinking. I – I just burst into tears. Sweet Baby Girl. I love you. I am so proud of you. You are a miracle.

    I sent my mom an email one night and told her what was happening. She had an inkling, based on what she had seen over parent’s weekend the month before. I told her I had to leave. That I needed help. She picked me up that weekend.

    The tears that are coming right now are because of the gratitude I feel for my mother for being that loving and hearing me when I cried out for help. She drove all the way out to get me and help me pack up my stuff in front of a hall of whispering girls, wondering, why is she leaving? Where is she going? I withdrew from the school, and we were reimbursed most of the expensive out-of-state tuition. It was the first of many courageous and arduous steps I would take toward healing from alcoholism.

    I wrote a poem last year about sitting in an AA meeting when I was nineteen years old and how I had no clue what was ahead of me, that I had only scratched the surface of my alcoholism and recovery. Well, at eighteen and headed back from dropping out of college, I certainly had no clue about anything. All I felt was shame and fear. Some relief, too, that I was getting the hell out of a place that would surely kill me. But underneath that I was swollen and nearly numb with shame and suffering.

    It was the beginning of the beginning of the beginning. But the tornado had not yet even gathered dust.

  • On Teaching: Part Two

    Teaching is what I do for a living. It puts food on table and pays the rent. There have been moments where I have loved it. It was what I thought I always wanted to do. But like so many of us, the job begins to drain us of our inner source rather than fill us up and recharge our spirits.

    Since the start of this school year, I have felt pulled in a different direction, and I have made the decision to quit my job and travel.

    It all started on a trip I took by myself this summer to Europe. I fell in love with Edinburgh, Scotland. I didn’t want to leave. And when I returned, I decided to apply to the University there to study creative writing.

    Needless to say, despite being accepted and highly considering going, I felt in my heart it was not the right decision to make. But it indicated to me that something inside of me felt called to change. Called to adventure. If not Edinburgh, perhaps somewhere else? I knew I wanted to leave my job; deeply in my guts, I knew. But why? I knew I should do some investigating before I let self will take over and get myself into some impulsive and unhealthy situation.

    I thought and wrote and prayed a lot about my three years of teaching middle school English. I talked to other teachers, family members, and friends whom I respected, trusted, and admired. I asked myself, what did I love about teaching? Was it adding to my life? Was I fulfilled? Or was it a means to an end?

    Did I love teaching grammar? No.

    Did I love planning lessons? Not really.

    Did I love reading and teaching literature? A lot of the time.

    Did I love the kids? Yes. (99% of them.)

    I discovered that there was a lot about teaching that I did not like and some aspects that I absolutely couldn’t stand. This has been difficult to accept and embrace. But the truth always sets you free.

    I started to pinpoint my exact feelings about the profession and my role within it. The career to me is not about pedagogic practice and how well I can explain the difference between a dependent and independent clause. (I’m alright at it.) It is not about the meetings and the assessments and the overly analyzed system of implementing curriculum and classroom management. The career to me is all about the connection with the kids. At the end of the day, I discovered, that’s really all I care about. I had to admit this to myself. Even as much as I love the subject of English, I wasn’t all that inspired teaching it. (At least not to sixth graders. More there later.)

    It has been difficult coming to terms with these feelings. Sometimes I experience moments of guilt and shame about it. Is there something wrong with me feeling this way? Am I cynical? Negative? Too idealistic? Lazy? The more I have investigated, the more I trust my feelings. One person mentioned to me that perhaps I am naturally skilled at teaching, and so the nitty gritty details just seem to get in the way and muck up what already makes sense to me intuitively. Perhaps.

    Some teachers actually love all the details and nitty gritty and planning and organizing and research that goes into teaching. They love planning intricate lessons and making power points and adapting curriculum. I do not. I loathe it. I hate professional development conferences, even the ones on writing and literature, which many teachers claim inspire them and rejuvenate them. They don’t inspire or rejuvenate me – they drain and overwhelm me. I don’t like details and facts. I despise charts and graphs. I don’t like breaking things down and over-analyzing. I’m an INFJ. I like big ideas and abstract thinking and free-form creativity. I love symbols and themes and metaphors and deep meaning. I like authentic connections. Please, please, don’t fence me in!

    I think education has become so focused on standards and perfecting the pedagogic practice, that it often loses touch with what we are actually doing: spending a hell of a lot of time with young kids. We’re like their alternate parents. We’re with them all day, five days a week. They’re in our care. Why does that time spent need to be so focused on teaching standards? I get it; students need to learn to read and write. They need to know how to do some basic math. They should learn skills of problem-solving and abstract thinking and work ethic and accountability. They should definitely start learning how to express themselves and how to write. They should be exposed to some cool subjects that may inspire them or lift them up, like history and science and art and music. I get all of that. I believe in all of that. But I believe more in connecting with them. Having fun with them. Talking to them and learning about them. I don’t like the model we still have, even in progressive schools, of teaching them something and then assessing them on it and then giving them a grade. Even if the grade is stretched out over a bunch of fluffy touchy-feely categories, it is still a measurement, and it teaches them that their worth comes from a letter or number on a paper. It teaches them to fix themselves through external work. It teaches them that their good-enoughness can be measured by someone else. And that does not jibe with my inner philosophy.

    I also don’t understand why someone would want to become a teacher to scare or intimidate kids, no matter their age, and having to deal with people like this in the profession drives me nuts. Why someone would go into teaching if they don’t even like kids or are constantly at odds with them is beyond me. I don’t care how much you love your subject or have depths of knowledge in it – if you don’t treat the kids with dignity and respect and compassion, get out, man. Some teachers think intimidation is cool or something of which to be proud. They like being head honcho and big teacher on campus. They get their ego stroked. They develop double-bind relationships with their students, much like a narcissistic parent and helpless child. This is scary stuff. These teachers are everywhere and are often highly respected and revered. Striving to earn the respect of an asshole is a very American thing.

    But anyway, all of this soul-searching has led me to believe that I need a break from teaching, at least for a while. Maybe I’m burnt out or disillusioned. Maybe I need a different environment or different age. Maybe I am actually being pulled in a direction that may allow me to make a living doing what I truly love: writing. Who knows. I’m not naive, and I’m not trying to complain about. I guess I am trying to express that we often have feelings come up about our current circumstances that are necessary to listen to, and we are allowed to have the feelings and listen to our inner compass. If I do return to teaching after taking a year off, I don’t expect to return to some perfect school with perfect teachers. In any workplace, there are always imperfections.

    It’s really me who needs some changing, and the only way to change is to change.

    So I’m going to Asia.

  • Perception: Body

    Perhaps perception plays its most deceitful and nasty and fascinating and sometimes wonderful tricks when it comes to how we view our bodies and the bodies of others. Especially when you are a woman coming of age in the western world anytime in the past two centuries.

    The overriding perception is often this: there is something wrong with my body.

    How strange. How strange to be conditioned to believe that the vessels in which our souls dwell, that the only vessel we have and will ever have is somehow inherently and fundamentally and irredeemably flawed.

    Clearly there is something amiss here. We all know that.

    We all know that our culture is nuts when it comes to body image and size and shape and beauty. We are beauty-obsessed, thin-obsessed, flawless-obsessed, sexy-obsessed. We are taught from a very young age that our worth resides in what we look like and how attractive we are to men. This is no revelation. We all know this.

    The plot thickens. Some of us lucky ones witness our parents and the first adults in our lives embrace and appreciate their bodies, no matter what. We are sent message of love and respect and appreciation for our bodies and the importance of treating them well and taking care of them. Others of us, unfortunately, see negative behavior modeled through our parents and are sent messages of hate, rejection and shame. We watch our parents or siblings or friends bash their bodies and try to change them. We are told either directly or through certain behaviors and circumstances that our bodies are flawed and ugly and something of which to be ashamed.

    So it’s not just culture that is shifting the perception. For many of us, it’s right in our backyards, and we grow up with the unshakeable notion that our bodies are not good enough, too this or too that, and sometimes downright disgusting. For those of us who grow up this way, we could have all of society line up and tell us we are beautiful and sexy and fantastic and radiant, and we would still have trouble believing it or feeling it because our perception of ourselves was shaped in such a negative fashion from a very young age. We have to be the ones to change that perception, from the inside out. It no longer matters what people tell us.

    I’ve written on here some about my childhood and my father and some of the messages I received from a very young age. It’s no one’s fault really, and I am not blaming anyone anymore, but the fact was that I taught from a very young age that I was ugly, fat, unworthy, lazy, too sensitive, mediocre, disappointing, and a nuisance. Some of these things were uttered directly to me, while others were sent accidentally or vaguely through neglect and disinterest and the result of divorce and two parents who had never dealt with their own inner landscape. I’m not trying to knock my mother or my father or anyone else who took part in my childhood. No one was sitting around plotting how they could harm me. And I was a sensitive child. Perhaps had I been born with a thicker skin and less awareness of my environment, I would have been able to step around some of these messages that became land mines to my sense of self. I didn’t. It is what it is. I have made peace with it.

    Like any girl would who grows up in this culture and suffers a turbulent childhood filled with mixed messages and a lack of protection, I spiraled into years of self-hatred, body obsession, and disordered eating. I firmly believed for a very long time that if I could just get skinny and pretty than I would be happy and lovable. It makes sense, given what we are taught. Disney Princesses are never ugly or even average looking. Barbie dolls are anatomically impossible. Supermodels make up less than 1% of the population and are airbrushed and photoshopped and suffering with their own disordered eating and negative practices of controlling their bodies. Actresses fall into a similar category. We grow up seeing beautiful, seemingly flawless women as the ones who are successful and paid attention to and the ones who get the guy. We go to school and notice how the boys pay the most attention to the prettiest and sexiest girls. (And they too have been brainwashed by society about the very narrow perception of what is beautiful and “hot.”) So I bought in. Boys at the beginning of high school paid very little attention to me. I was a little bit chubby and not very stylish and mostly focused on getting stoned. But I wanted to be one of those girls, too. So I started running. I started counting calories. I started skipping meals. I started restricting carbs. I went to more yoga classes. I smoked cigarettes and drank coffee instead of eating and occasionally took pills that would eradicate my appetite.

    It worked, too. I looked “better.” Boys took notice. I felt more attractive. And it wasn’t all bad. It felt good to get exercise and eat some healthier options. It felt nice to feel pretty. I completely fell in love with yoga. I always enjoyed my dance classes. But the seed was planted. The diet/exercise/lose weight to be good enough world was in me.

    It stayed quiet for a while as I tended to alcoholism and drug addiction. It was far more distracting and effective than the diet and exercise world. But that diet and exercise world reared its ugly head once more when I least expected it, when I was twenty-three and sober and finishing college at UCLA. I spiraled into anorexia and bulimia and an all-consuming obsession with being skinny. I wanted my bones to stick out. I wanted to be a size zero. I wanted to lose another twenty pounds after already losing nearly thirty. I liked that I had no period and no libido. I felt, however fleetingly, like I had finally entered a world of which I had been formerly been denied access: the skinny world. And I wore it like a badge of honor.

    But not for long. And it didn’t really work. Because it was never really enough. And I still completely hated myself.

    I’ll save the road to recovery for another time, because this entry is really more about the perception of bodies and thinness and what we deem “good” and “bad.” Needless to say, I am still on that road to recovery, and it is the most up and down, challenging, terrifying thing I have ever done next to getting and staying sober.

    Talk about reprogramming your perception. I have to do a complete overhaul of everything I thought I knew and believed about myself and beauty.

    When I look back on pictures of myself from a few years ago, I often have the same experience: wow, I think. I looked pretty good. But I can remember how I felt when those pictures were taken, and I thought I was ugly, fat, and worthless.

    I can remember how I felt about myself sometimes, even when at my thinnest. I am ugly, fat, and worthless. The outsides did not matter. It was all perception. It was rooted in no kind of reality. It was all conditioned responses based on what I had learned growing up.

    Part of healing from eating disorders is learning how to eat again and making piece with food. That, in some ways, is the hardest part of all, because it requires doing something that is terrifying every time you sit down to eat. It requires a willingness to gain weight. It requires an acceptance of food as neutral, not “good” or “bad.” It requires sometimes feeling too full or bingeing or feeling out of control.

    For the most part, I have made it through that phase. But the real work, the true work required to change and heal completely resides in the perception, not just of self, but of bodies and beauty in general. My body and weight has seemed to settle. My menstrual cycle has normalized, my libido is in full swing, my appetite is fairly neutral. I don’t really under-eat or overeat or binge anymore. My body is at a size that I have to come to accept as good enough and perceive as worthy. Because it is.

    But sometimes I have to work at it. I have to do things that will shift my perception.

    For example, I love following “plus-size” (whatever that means) models on Instagram. These women are beautiful and sexy and healthy. They are anywhere from size 8 to 14, and they are smokin’ hot! They normalize all different types of bodies. They literally train my brain to understand that beauty does not only reside in the images I was formerly used to seeing, whether I liked it or not- super tall super skinny supermodels. When I look at these “plus size” women I don’t think, Eew, they are fat. (Thank god.) I think, wow, they are so beautiful and amazing. Look at all the different ways bodies can be beautiful. I think they radiate an even deeper beauty, too, because of the example they are setting for all of us and how they are pioneers in a much needed movement for young girls and women everywhere.

    That is what makes perception is fascinating. It is never entirely based on fact but merely a willingness to look at something differently. A willingness to change our minds. Because when I have been larger than a size 4 or 6, my perception of myself has always been, I am FAT. And yet that is simply a skewed perception, because I wholeheartedly and authentically am attracted to these women on Instagram! It’s a great tool for reprogramming and retraining my sometimes whacky perception.

    I also have to get rid of clothes that don’t fit. Period. The willingness to do this took me forever, but now I welcome it. In a perfect world, we would all have clothes made for us and pay no attention to sizes and labels and all that nonsense that fucks with our heads. But it’s not a perfect world, and once in a while I can feel completely worthless because I no longer fit into size 28 pants. I can feel worthless because I’m a size 8 or a 10 in a dress. There’s this strange perception of it being “too large.” I used to save all of my smaller jeans that were purchased during different phases of my eating disorder in hopes that I would one day fit into them again. Sometimes, in a sort of desperate frenzy, I would try them all on to measure myself. Of course they would all be tight, and the entire exercise would exhaust me and depress me. it was sheer insanity. Today, when I put on clothes that actually fit, I feel instantly better. I am not shoving myself into pants that are too small or jackets that are too tight.

    I like to take notice of women out in the world. Because I find many women so very attractive and beautiful, and not just the ones who are meeting the status quo of beauty. Sure, those women are beautiful, too, but I often see girls who look more like me or who are bigger or shorter or taller or rounder or shaped completely different, and I see beauty within them. I often wonder if women have looked at my body and found it beautiful. I’m sure it has happened at least once.

    It is always easier to turn these shifts in perception to others. Turning it onto myself is the real work and the true measure of healing. And it’s happening. Very slowly, little by little, up and down on that jagged recovery line, but it is happening.

    There’s a saying in recovery to “act as if.” Act as if you are happy, and soon you will be. Act as if you are grateful to be sober, and soon you will be. Act as if you love and accept your body and think of yourself as beautiful, and soon you will be. This may be the magic ingredient. It’s like what mom used to say: nothing is more attractive than confidence and self-esteem.

    Perception is often where the magic happens, when we can seek a right-sized and spiritually centered one. The heart-centered kind. The kind that I hear when I am quiet and still and connected to God, and it tells me that I am beautiful and lovable and absolutely unconditionally good enough exactly as I am. When I can let all the conditioning and crazy cultural nonsense slip away, I hear that that voice and believe it in my very bones. That no longer jut out.

    And did I mention that libido is in full swing?

  • The Wonder of Perception

    Perception is an interesting thing. In general, it is defined as our way of seeing or understanding something. It can also be defined as our way of interpreting something. Even further, it can be narrowed down to a specific sort of intuition or insight.

    In recovery we talk about perception very much being a choice we make each day. We can choose how we want to see the world. We can focus on a half empty glass or a half full one. We can wear dirty glasses or clean ones. So much of recovery is about creating a new perception so that we no longer see the world through a dark and dreary lens that leads us down a path of destruction and despair.

    Recovery or not, perception is very much a subjective, personal beast. In philosophy you learn about the Noumenon and Phenomenon, the former being the thing simply as it before interpretation, and the latter being what it becomes when it is experienced through the senses. Romantic writers and poets explored this idea a lot. What is something before it is interpreted? Well, you can’t really say. Once you start to try to define it, you dilute its very meaning. It only stays pure when left alone. When left to simply be what it is. And what is it? You can’t say! Then it no longer is what it is. It’s being given meaning and definition based on one’s subjective perception. Boggles the mind, doesn’t it…

    This is also explored in recovery and forms of meditation, namely mindfulness, the idea of acceptance and letting things be as they are without judgment and control. When we accept things as they are and let them simply be, it prevents them from having power over us and wreaking havoc on our thinking. When we do not assign an interpretation or a story to a thought or feeling or event, it doesn’t turn into anything other than its simple impersonal existence, and then it dissolves and melts away. When we do not believe our thoughts and take them as gospel, when we let them be what they are, just things that the brain creates for kicks or whatever, they do not turn into a tornado of fear. The Buddhists often call this tornado of fear or uncontrolled thinking the “monkey mind” or the “small sense of self.”

    Perception as intuition and insight is slightly different. It could essentially be classified as spiritual. When the mind quiets down and we don’t apply neurotic meaning to our thinking, we can sense in our soul a sort of universal truth. The message I often hear is, I am safe and loved no matter what. This is what yogis often refer to as leading from the heart center and what I believe Bill and Bob (AA’s founders) were talking about when they said we needed to experience a shift in perception in order to live our lives sober. I think they meant tapping into our hearts, not just controlling our minds. There is a difference between assigning meaning from a mental place based on our background of conditioning and experiences and coming to understand something from our heart center, rooted in Truth.

    But perception, the mental kind, is still something we inevitably have. Humans are always seeing and judging and interpreting and coming to conclusions. Some of us do it more than others. Some of us are more open-minded than others. But that is still a piece of our perception. It is simply what we do, perceive, and it is not inherently bad. In fact, it’s quite fascinating.

    I love the topic of perception, because of its very subjectivity. I love that I can look at a painting and find it absolutely breathtaking and beautiful, and someone else can look at it and deem it unremarkable or even ugly. No problem there. But why is that? What is causing that difference in two people’s perception? As they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but why? What molds one to see something so differently from another, and why does this change, and how does this change? How come some people are better able to open their minds and change their perceptions more so than others? Why are we so attached to our past and our stories and willing to let them always dictate our perception?

  • On Teaching: Part One

    Ah, the work place. Is there a better environment in which to stir up all of your deepest triggers and fears and childhood wounds and place them on the table to finally have a reckoning? It has been for me.

    I teach at an independent K-8 school in Los Angeles. It’s sort of a progressive and crunchy, highly stressful, sometimes energizing, mostly draining place. For me, anyway. I’m introverted and require lots of quiet and alone time in order to recharge and feel my best. I stop breathing right and I can’t think after too much stimulation and external distraction. And of course the nature of a school is going to be rather externally stimulating.

    I started teaching at the school five years ago as an assistant while I finished my masters and completed requirements for my preliminary teaching credential. I was then hired on as a full time English teacher in sixth grade three years ago. What a journey it has been.

    My first year looked a lot like this: It has to be perfect.

    I thought constantly about what people were thinking of me. What if I screw up? What if I get in trouble? What if the parents hate me? What if I get fired? What if I teach the lesson wrong? What if I don’t know the answer? I held my breath too much and grew more exhausted each day. I was often in tears. I felt completely overwhelmed and under supported. I didn’t feel all that appreciated either.

    I also felt rather joyous at times. I connected deeply with my students and quite naturally. I developed mostly positive and nurturing relationships with them. We played and laughed and had fun. I created some rather cool and interesting curriculum. We studied The Giver and Maniac Magee. We read poems and played preposition bingo. The parents were thrilled. The kids were engaged.

    There were also a few students who I didn’t connect with. Who were tough and aloof and spoiled. Their parents were worse. There was my boss who I still to this day have never felt  ]comfortable around or connected to. There was this feeling that I was drowning and flailing and had no one to support me and tell me that it was going to be okay. I felt competitive with my colleagues and worried about being the best. I wanted to be the most popular teacher. I wanted to be well-liked. I wanted to look good while doing it. You know, thin and pretty and in the right clothes. I was only a year sober. I was green in every area of my life.

    I thought I had to do it perfect and I thought I had to do it right. I thought if I made a mistake it meant that I was a complete failure. I thought if I had a disagreement with a colleague or a conflict with a parent, then I was a disgrace. I thought if the students were bored or tired it was because I was a boring and exhausting teacher.

    Clearly, none of this was teaching’s fault, though it is a quite a challenging career. Like most things in life, what we see is our choice and stems from our perception. I wasn’t a victim. But I was definitely overwhelmed, and I was so brand new to the career and still brand new to recovery and healing, that I had no other tools than perfectionism and fear. I look back now with compassion, for I worked so hard and was so hard on myself, and no one was mad at me.

    And it got better.