Stuck Inside

Hello world!

Unless you've been living under a cactus, you know it's hurricane time.  We're all stocked up on canned food and batteries.  I wiped down all of our porch furniture and brought it inside.  All of our laptops, cell phones, iPods, and tablets are plugged into surge protectors and fully charged.  I've bothered to scour every single concerned e-mail from my desert-dweller mother for survival tips.  My fiancé even bought an 'emergency pumpkin' to carve in case of extreme boredom. 

So far so good, except I hate being stuck inside; I get major cabin fever.

I've been thinking about why I get so antsy when stuck in the house.  Maybe it just reminds me of times when I was so depressed that getting out of bed was a nearly insurmountable task.  Maybe I'm getting used to this no-isolation policy.  Those would be good things.  But I think I get uncomfortable because I allow myself to spend way too much time stuck in my head when I'm alone in the house.

My head is a war zone. 

My sponsor always says she needs her thinking supervised.  I definitely identify; being alone with my thoughts is dangerous.  If one could earn a couple bucks by creating crises, I'd literally be a pro.  When left festering in my mind, an insignificant error makes me a mistake, a tiny disagreement makes me a pathetic failure, and a momentary embarrassment makes my entire existence a shameful skidmark on society's underpants. Sick and suffering indeed!

So I'm doing stuff.  I cooked breakfast, did loads of laundry, cleaned the bathroom a bit, took out the recycling before the rain really started, and even dusted off the ukulele.

After all, there's nothing quite like actually doing stuff to make me not feel useless.

Until next time!

Retreating!

Hello world!

I'm slacking on blogging.  My bad.  I've even been slacking on my sponsor calls; they've dropped from once daily to twice every three days or so.  It's not that I feel the need to call her daily.  It's more like it's a good habit I've developed and I don't want to establish a precedence of calling-only-when-I-feel-like-it.  Because who knows when I won't feel like it--that'll be the time I need to call for sure.  So I call daily, usually with not much to say except, "Hi!  Just calling to check in.  Talk to you soon!".

But you get the point.  If I should be calling daily, then missing a call every few days isn't OK.  Plus I've been slacking on gratitude lists.  And I haven't been making a meeting every day.  It's not like any of these things is a crisis in and of itself.  I'm going to guess that most people with four years sober don't need a meeting every day.  I just wonder what's going on in my head that I'm moving backwards.  They say in sobriety that you're either moving forwards or moving backwards; there's no staying stagnant.  I gotta get back on track!

That said, in a few weeks I'm going to hit a milestone in sobriety: my first retreat!  Wow!  A women's retreat!  Wow!

I realized recently that I went several years without making a women's meeting.  I broke my streak by accident a month or two ago.  I used to attend a women's meeting every week when I first got sober, and found it an annoying complaintfest about spouses and kids.  It's taken me this long to realize that maybe it was me and not them.

Uh...duh.

But anyway.  I'm going on a women's retreat the first weekend of October, and I'm actually really pumped.  I read the itinerary today and I'm assigned to lead a meeting on Step 7: "Humbly asked him to remove our shortcomings".  There's only one paragraph on the subject in the Big Book (pg 76 of 'Into Action') so I started re-reading the chapter in the 12 & 12.  It's all about humility.  

I dug a little deeper and searched 'humility' on my e-AA iPhone app and realized that just about every reference to humility is connected with spirituality.  The gist is that one cannot have a connection with his higher power without humbling himself.  And I'm realizing now I haven't been praying or meditating regularly at all for a while.  

So maybe I should get on that.  And research Step 7 more.  And meditate more.  And say hi to my HP.  Maybe it'll be that simple to get me moving again!

Enjoy the Silence

Hello, world.

I'm having a slow start this Sunday.  I went 'down the shore' (if you're from the state I live in, then you'll understand--if you live here but are from elsewhere, you'll understand why the phrase makes me cringe)... right, so I went 'down the shore' last night with my fiance, his sponsor, and his sponsor's girlfriend.  We had a blast!  I couldn't imagine a night on the boardwalk until I saw it for myself.

But this morning I'm either sleepy or slightly depressed or both.  I'm going to go with sleepy until proven otherwise; somehow, terming myself as depressed sort of becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when I'm only slightly down.  

Anyway.  I was sitting in bed after making breakfast doing nothing of consequence (writing a grocery list) and catching myself staring off into space.  I noticed a solid collection of pill bottles accumulating on my dresser next to my speakers (playing "Enjoy the Silence" a little too loudly).  Normally, my reaction would have been something like "I need to throw out the empty mood stabilizer bottles", but in that instance, I thought, "I must be over-medicated".  

I am not over-medicated.

I feel a range of human emotions.  A normal range.  I think.  I don't sob uncontrollably when little inconvenient things happen.  I don't spend days manically crazed to conquer the world.  Pretty good, I think, and pretty normal.  And I feel.  I feel sadness, happiness, boredom, interest, embarrassment, pride, ... , you get it.  I think it's just that my racing thoughts kept me awake for a decade and a half, and I'm not used to the silence in my head.

So for today, I'll take a leaf out of Depeche Mode's book.  I'm going to appreciate my day without mania.  I'm going to enjoy that silence!

Cheerfulness for Usefulness

Hello world!


A quick thought: my goal for today is to have a good day.


(Well, um, who doesn't have that goal??)


I think I sometimes put too much effort into doing useful things as opposed to fixing my mindset as I do them.  The irony is that a negative mindset hinders my usefulness.


So for today, I'll be accepting; through acceptance I'll be positive; through being positive I'll be useful.  This reminds me of one of my favorite AA Big Book quotes of all time, from Chapter 9, "The Family Afterward":

"But we aren't a glum lot.  If newcomers could see no joy or fun in our existence, they wouldn't want it.  We absolutely insist on enjoying life.  [...W]e think cheerfulness and laughter make for usefulness."

A mildly-relevant postscript: my fiance differentiated bipolar disorder from a different mental illness as follows: "He's the crazy where he hurts people; you're the crazy where you go on a shopping spree then kill yourself."  It was funny (and mildly offensive) in his delivery, but profound in his truth.  Being frivolous in 'having fun' is dangerous in that it can lead to an overwhelming depression. So I try to stay happy and focused, not manic and detached from reality.


Until next time!

Repaying Debt [Literally]

Hello world! 

At this point, my standard greeting is more than a figure of speech and geeky reference.  I actually have readers from all corners of the world!  Awesome!  Welcome, welcome, welcome all of you to the disconnected corners of my thoughts.

Order of business number one: I am ready to start to eat real food again.  (Groan.)  Seriously.  More on that in my next post.

This is actually funny timing.  I was doing more work with my sponsor on the seventh step a few weeks ago.  Removing character defects.  More groans.  Damn, emotional growth takes effort?! 

We revisited the character defects list I had made during my fifth step and assigned them scores, ranging 1-5, indicating my willingness to have them removed:

1. already almost removed
2. completely willing to remove
3. almost willing
4. give me more time to reconsider
5. no, never, ever going to be willing

The great irony is that I assigned a '4' to procrastination.  Haha.  

They say in AA that you don't just say a prayer and, poof!, God removed those pesky defects of character.  Nope, you'll just find that opportunities to practice change are plopped in your lap out of nowhere.  I joked with my sponsor that I was sooo looking forward to my first 'opportunity for growth' to arise.  

So the point is that overeating showed up on my list of defects, as did avoidance.  As a prime example, I've been in collections for a pretty minor bill for a couple years.  I've been aware of it for this whole time.  And somehow every time I receive a statement from the debt collectors or a phone call from a strange number, my heart races.  I toss the bill directly into the trash.  I even sometimes let calls go to voicemail.  Really.

And here's the kicker.  The day after I talk about these defects with my sponsor, I receive a statement from the debt collector.  I didn't bat an eyelash.  I called and paid the debt off in full.  I went to my laptop and checked my credit reports and paid another debt.  It was totally exhilarating. 

I went outside to smoke a celebratory cigarette.  And then it occurred to me.  I was just presented with my first 'opportunity' for emotional growth.  And shit, I just might have passed.  I got teary and left my sponsor a manic voicemail.  

It was awesome.

Take care until next time!

Alone at Perfect Ease

Good morning, world!  I woke up a couple hours earlier than I needed to, so I thought I'd check in with you again.

Sitting alone in the morning is admittedly foreign to me.  I live in a modest studio with my best friend slash fiancé (I mean that!), and I can't remember the last time he had to leave for work or school before me.  But my work schedule changed starting this week, so I'll have lots of opportunities to either (a) sleep in, or (b) greet the hot, humid mornings with crusty eyes.  I opted for the latter today, and hope to continue to do so. 

Sleeping a regular schedule is such a crucial part of my treatment for bipolar disorder.  Besides, going to bed at the same time as my fiancé is an equally vital commitment to my relationship.  Not that an insufficient dose of cuddling has ever landed me in a psych ward, of course, but I'm at the point in my treatment/recovery where I am working more on enhancing life than merely maintaining or prolonging it.

So the point is that I'm alone on my couch at 7:30 AM, picking at breakfast and trying to make sense of my thoughts in writing.  (Typing.  You know.)  And that's just fine by me.  Which is fascinating for these reasons:

• I'm awake early.
• I'm alone.
• I'm perfectly content.

I've never been a morning person, at least not since age seven or so when my cycling sleep began.  A month or so of waking up exhausted after 10+ hours of sleep, a month or so of my racing thoughts keeping me up until 3 AM.  Repeat. 

Oversleeping (we're talking twelve hours of sleep nightly if no one stops me) is still a major issue today when I'm depressed.  On the flip side, I'm learning techniques (read: meditation) to slow down the mental races when they try to stop me from getting rest.  And when my mood is normal, I find myself doing normal people things in the evening (laundry, cooking, socializing, etc.), forgetting that I really do need to schedule my sleep.  In mentally healthy phases, I need nine hours.  So inconvenient.

They say that alcoholics are the only people who want to be held while isolating.  (Is it really only alcoholics who push others away and with the expectation that these people will fight their way back in?)  Umm, guilty.  At least when I'm not feeling life. 

I've been fighting isolation for a couple years now with solid success.  At first, I had to learn to not be alone when I wanted to isolate.  Slowly, it becomes a habit.  When I notice myself dragging through mental molasses, I lift my seemingly thousand-pound iPhone and make calls.  I meet people for coffee.  I tell on myself.  I get through it.

Pretty recently, I've started to recognize a tiny detail that I had no way of understanding earlier: being alone is just fine when I'm not isolating.  (Come again?)  There's times when I need to sit alone and process, or do productive things, or work on myself.  These times don't happen if I'm in that dangerous mindset where I'd prefer to avoid people altogether.  Rather, they occur when I'm perfectly happy either way.

This makes me think of the fifth step promises on page 75 of the Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book.  Most recovering alcoholics in AA familiar with the oft-quoted ninth step promises on pages 83-4, outlining the awesome spiritual growth we'll have as a result of making ninth step amends.  The shorter fifth step promises indicate the peace of mind we receive by sharing our inventories with God and another human being:

"We pocket our pride and go at it, illuminating every twist of character, every dark cranny of the past.  Once we have taken this step, withholding nothing, we are delighted.  We can look the world in the eye.  We can be alone at perfect peace and ease.  Our fears fall from us.  We begin to feel the nearness of our Creator.  We may have had certain spiritual beliefs, but now we begin to have a spiritual experience.  The feeling that the drink problem has disappeared will often come strongly."

Until next time!

Cotton Balls, Tissues, and Panties

OK.  So.  It's been a really, really long time since I last blogged.  Oops.  Life happens.

I celebrated four years of continuous sobriety on June 3.  My anniversary fell on a Sunday, and my homegroup meets Saturdays, so I waited a whopping six days to celebrate. (Womp womp.) 

I cannot tell you how amazing it felt to receive a coin in front of 150+ group attendees (yes, big meeting) who have loved and supported me for years.  (OK, I received some beautiful flowers from friends, too.  That was awesome.)  The meeting has been my only homegroup throughout my sobriety; I even celebrated 30 days at the same podium.  And what an amazing journey it's been so far!

In this part of the country, celebrants receive only one coin for an anniversary, from their sponsor.  (At home in the west, friends will give celebrants coins, too, so you could walk away from a meeting with pockets full of sober change.)  I somehow received three coins anyway.  My fiance had conspired with my sponsor to buy me a gorgeous hand-painted coin in my school colors, but my sponsor ended up finding a coin that she had.  So I received both of those.  Nice.  Plus I had already agreed to take a speaking commitment a couple hours away on that same day; a friend surprised me with a beautiful coin with my birthstone on it at that meeting.  I keep all three in my wallet at all times.  (I can't tell you how many times I have tried pulling out an AA coin to pay for parking meters!)

Four years!??!

In the time since I've last blogged, I've switched some sponsees around.  I currently have three beautiful young ladies (21, 27, and 33) whom I absolutely adore.  These three sponsee sisters look out for each other, too.  Sponsoring women has enriched my recovery almost as much as having a sponsor myself.  I tell my girls that I get more out of sponsoring them than they do out of working with me.  I'm not sure if they believe me.  I almost hope they don't.  Maybe that'll keep them on their toes.

(A side note: I find it fascinating that each of them identifies heroin, a drug I never touched, as being her drug of choice.  For me, the mentality of addiction is the same.  Details of our pasts are irrelevant, and the solution that recovery gives us is the same.)

My sponsees and I have so much in common that it scares me sometimes.  Especially in terms of insecurities.  Of course, each of us is at a different phase of development, but I'm confident that all three of them are moving in the right direction. 

One of them recently celebrated that major early-twenties birthday milestone that qualifies her for the "never had a legal drink" title.  I gave her a recovery-related quasi-gag gift containing the following:

• A bag of cotton balls. There's a great saying in AA that newcomers should remove the cotton from their ears and place it in their mouths.
• Several pocket packs of tissues. I've joked with her before that she needs to carry tissues for her issues--a reminder that a lot of our problems are solved by realizing they're not problems after all.
• A pair of pregnancy panties. (I didn't realize such a product exists!) Because we all have times in which we have to pull on our big girl panties and just deal with it.

Thank god, she wasn't offended.

More later!

L-M-A-O!

Hello world!

It's been a while!  I'm starting to get that feeling of impending doom with my independent work.  It's due May 1, and the more I work on it, the more I realize I have to re-do what I've already done.  Such a bummer!  My adviser suggested a harsh timeline of work for this week, which makes working on the project all that more terrifying.  

So what's my knee-jerk reaction?  Not work on it, of course.  I need to constantly address my tendency to avoid the uncomfortable and get moving.  Fear tends to manifest itself as procrastination in my life.  Fear is bad.  Ergo procrastination is bad?  I gotta work on my "if p then q"s, but you get the point.

I've been working on another music composition assignment this last week, too.  The composition was supposed to involve, er, anything.  (I've gotten pretty used to open-ended prompts like that in the last year.)  I decided to work with the Deutsch speech-to-song illusion that I mentioned in a previous post; a huge inspiration for the project has been Reich's "It's Gonna Rain".  (Side note--I picked readings for my computer music reading group this week on this and other auditory illusions!)  I've brought ten or so people in my recording studio so far to read their text messages to each other.  

My goal is to extract little snippets of conversations that are so quintessentially Generation Y texts (lol  OMG!!!!  hahahahaha bro) as opposed to long conversations.  I intend to start the piece with layers of coherent chatter (ie. full sentences that could have been recorded from real conversations) then having the words slowly make way for less intelligible text-speak--sort of a statement of how socializing has evolved (devolved?) over time.  I instructed my voice artists to not laugh at their texts if possible, but it's inevitable to bust a belly over guys sending each other :-* and stuff like that.  So I think I'll use those clips to break the fourth wall, so to speak, at the end--showing that we don't actually take ourselves seriously!

I've had friends suggest I post some music I've recorded here, on YouTube, or on Facebook.  I'm still debating, partially because I don't understand copyright laws (help!) and partially because I just don't understand how anyone could possible be interested in anything I've done.  Self-deprecation much?

Lately I've assigned myself other (social) tasks, like answering the phone when I don't want to, checking voicemails when I don't want to, calling people back when I don't want to…pattern?  It's simple tasks like these that keep me connected with reality and get me out of my head.  

More importantly, I've been making a concerted effort to spend time with other sober women, especially young women.  I think one of my major barriers against reaching out to women is being judgmental.  As in, I've always been quick to judge chicks, so I assume they're judging me back.  So what's been the result of my latest efforts?  Finding out that other girls are not, in fact, rude/conceited/mean/whatever, but instead fun people.  WHAT?!

I should stop typing and start working.  Until next time!!

Settling for Inaction

Hello world!

Question: when's the last time you played a board game? 

If your answer involves Candyland, that's just too bad.  Board games are awesome distractions for kids, but they seem less and less enticing as we get older (and wiser?).  I guess some adults do like chess though, right?  But I got turned off to that one at an early age; my older brother is a bit of a prodigy, and I was dragged to tournaments as a kid.  Having to be silent in a room full of creepy men gets old fast when you're a bubbly seven-year-old girl.  Seriously. 

But I digress.  I'm asking in order to lead seamlessly into mentioning the game Settlers of Catan.  I was introduced to it a year or so ago, and I've found it an awesome way to pass a few hours with two to five friends.  (It would be more awesome if I weren't so cutthroat.  I tend to get really, really pissed at other players during heated battles over the longest road card.) 

During one memorable five-player game, a friend was lost in thought on his turn.  (We call that "winning the longest turn card" [read: taking forever to make a move].)  We decided that he must have an elaborate scheme in mind.  He assured us otherwise with one of the wisest lines I've ever heard: "Do not mistake inaction for contemplation."

Genius.

I was reflecting on that difference this afternoon during an eleventh step meeting.  The leader picked a reading from the 12&12 involving the difference between determining God's will by yourself and checking in with others before you act on a thought or situation.  (Disclaimer: I was raised staunchly atheist and never refer to my higher power as "God" except when shorthand is necessary.)  The discussion following the reading wandered a bit from there, and it ended up being very insightful for me.

More than anything else, I got a renewed feeling of acceptance out of the meeting.  I think that we value action over contemplation as a general rule.  Conjure up some dictionary of inspirational quotes, and you'll surely find that doing tends to be high-fived over thinking.  Absolutely no citation there, but you get my point.  We have this assumption that there is always something that can be done about those obstacles we face.

But I need to be reminded more that there are situations in which I'm completely powerless.  I need to be reminded not so much that I can change certain situations as that I cannot change others.  I need to stop valuing action over contemplation.  And I cannot mistake powerlessness for uselessness.  There are times when thinking and not doing is far more admirable than vice versa.

[side note: I took a break from blogging yesterday to clean my room.  I felt compelled to read today's entry from the Daily Reflections book for no particular reason--I never read it!  And the topic was exactly what I'm writing about...coincidence?]

I'll leave you with a quote from my favorite story in the Big Book, "Acceptance was the Answer":

"[...A]cceptance is the answer to all my problems today.  When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing, or situation--some fact of my life--unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at that moment.  Nothing, absolutely nothing, happens in God's world by mistake.  [...] I need to concentrate not so much on what needs to be changed in the world as on what needs to be changed in me and in my attitudes."

Take care!