The Exact Nature

Where do I start today?  Chronologically?  Sure.

As I alluded to at the end of my last post, I'm starting something totally new and out of character for me: eating healthy foods.  I've battled serious weight fluctuations throughout my not-yet-long adult life (back and forth, from under 115 lbs to over 170 lbs) and have been pretty frustrated with it in the past.  When I was younger, I based a lot of my self-worth on my weight.  Past efforts at losing weight involved the barely-eating-always-exercising-smoking-lots-of-cigarettes diet.  Needless to say, I have some body image issues.  I should mention that working on myself with therapy and stepwork has led me to liking who I am much more than I ever have, and, consequentially, my weight doesn't concern me as much.  Still.  I should shed a couple pounds.

Enter the doctor-recommended South Beach diet.  I'm on day four of phase 1 and simultaneously furious at myself for starting and proud as all hell of myself for sticking to my guns.  I've never tried to control what I eat before.  I'm also seeing a nutritionist for the first time this week.  Nice.  Just high-fived myself.

Moving on.

Today I finally started an AA fifth step with my sponsor.  (Step 5: Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.)  Yeah, yeah, a few years late.  I've done work on a few fourth steps but this is the first I've ever completed exactly as requested.  (Step 4: Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.)  My sponsor had me separate the task into four sections: resentments, fears, sex inventory, and harms.  (Check out the How It Works and Step 4 chapters of the Big Book and 12&12 online, respectively, for more details.)  

 

Side note of humor--my sponsee sent me this a while back, referencing the tradition of complaining about sponsors.

We spent five and a half hours together and finished discussing a lot of my resentments and my part in them.  At that point, we were both emotionally drained and agreed to reconvene at a later date.

I left and walked straight to the University chapel.  It's an amazing building, built in the 1920s in the Tudor Gothic tradition (according to its website, I know nothing about architecture myself).  It embodies serenity for me, which explains why I never go there.  I need to work on my serenity at school. 

The University chapel, as seen by my phone.

It was completely vacant, giving me an awesome opportunity to meditate and reflect on the discussions I'd just had with my sponsor.  I started to clear my mind by focusing on my breath.  I'm not at all religious, but I meditated on the words of the third step prayer: 

"God, I offer myself to Thee--to build with me and to do with me as Thou wilt.  Relieve me of the bondage of self, that I may better do Thy will.  Take away my difficulties, that victory over them may bear witness to those I would help of Thy Power, Thy Love, and Thy Way of life.  May I do Thy will always!"

As my mind's wandering slowed, I became aware of a choir singing faintly in the distance, probably in a side room of the chapel.  As I meditated, I could hear the choir only when my mind was completely still.  Whenever thoughts would return, the sound left me.  At one point, the sound became so clear that I opened my eyes to see if they had entered the room--only to see that I was still completely alone.  

When I had walked in, one of the banners above me was moving.  There's no central air or fans in the chapel, and all of the doors were closed, so I couldn't understand what gave it the momentum.  By the time I finished meditating, all of them were swaying back and forth.  None of the doors had opened since I entered.  I don't know how that happened, but it brought me a lot of comfort and serenity.  It was an amazing experience.

Now that I've rested a bit, I'm about to get dinner with sober friends and go to a local detox to speak.  Nothing quite like being of service!

Until next time.

That Feeling of Uselessness and Self-Pity Will Disappear?

Happy Friday!

Sometimes, it feels great to sleep in, to be lazy, to watch TV, to eat comfort food... I get it.  But sometimes those lazy days actually get me down a bit.  

One contributing factor is that I need to maintain a strict sleep regimen as part of my treatment for Bipolar Disorder: Type I.  (I don't really know the causal relationship here--does a lack of sleep make me manic, or is it an indication of mania?  What about depression?)

I think there's an additional, equally compelling reason for me to not sit in bed all day--to counteract "that feeling of uselessness" that was overwhelming when I was drinking.  Doing nothing productive for months on end can be a serious bummer.  Not too surprisingly, the 9th step Promises on pages 83-84 of the AA Big Book (the major go-to text of Alcoholics Anonymous) actually address this feeling and how, with serious stepwork, we'll be free of it.  (I'll keep addressing stepwork as I blog, so don't worry if that's all Greek to you.)

The passage is absolutely lovely; I'll quote it here:

"If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are half way through.  We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness.  We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.  We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace.  No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others.  That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear.  We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows.  Self-seeking will slip away.  Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change. Fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us.  We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us.  We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.

"Are these extravagant promises?  We think not.  They are being fulfilled among us--sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly.  They will always materialize if we work for them." (emphasis mine)

Nothing is quite as uplifting as reading that passage.  Moving on...

The last couple of days have been great for me in terms of being neither useless nor self-pitying.  I met with my adviser for next semester's Junior Paper (a mini-thesis required by the University).  We had a great hour-long discussion about plans for my work; if you have little interest in computer music, skip the next paragraph (I loved Choose Your Own Adventure books as a kid!).  

I'm planning to use the Kinect to track the movement of a dancer.  This information is relayed to my laptop ensemble, which will have some sort of code/instructions to manipulate that data to produce sound.  I'm considering taking advantage of some auditory illusions I learned about in a class last year, including Deutsch's speech to sound illusion.

In other, far more exciting non-useless news, I had the opportunity to do some great 12th step work as well!  (The 12th step of AA: "Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.") 

In short, I received a phone call from a friend from school who knows that I'm in recovery.  It turns out that the friend's roommate needed urgent care, and I was able to bring him to the hospital and get him checked into a local detox.  We went back to visit the next day, and the roommate seems to be open to the idea of stopping drinking.  I can't tell you how rewarding it is to help out another person in need!

I also went on a commitment to another local detox facility that night with five other AAs.  The group was pretty receptive, but I'm sure I got at least as much out of the experience as they did.

I'm off to get groceries to cook relatively healthy food tonight...more on my dietary restrictions another day!

Goals: Fearless and Thorough

Hello, world!

I guess I'll start by saying that this is my first experience in blogging.  Well, correction: I wrote a guest post for Young Joe's blog once.  So this is just my first experience in having my own blog.  There.

edit: "action shot" of me reading the 12&12

I'd like to create a statement of purpose (of sorts), more to keep me on track than to keep you interested.  My goals for this project are something like this:

• Focus my posts on recovery from addiction and psychiatric treatment.  Experience, strength, and hope, as they say.
• More specifically, I'd like to address less the problems that I face and more the solutions I've found work for me.
• Not devote blog posts to long-winded narratives about unrelated stuff.  Especially so-and-so did such-and-such.  Ugh.
• Blog at least once a week.  (That sounds reasonable, right?)
• Never let blogging get in the way of things I actually have to do.  I'm pretty proficient at avoiding responsibility, as you'll discover.

This is also a reasonable time to explain the title of my blog: "Better to Face the Music".  As I hinted a couple sentences ago, I generally prefer ignoring the uncomfortable/unknown rather than facing it head-on.  Plus I'm a music major.  So "Face the Music" is totally logical.  But why "Better to"?  

The phrase on the title page is extracted from a letter by Bill W., co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), which is a pretty awesome fellowship for people with a desire to stop drinking (like yours truly).  The quote is on page 251 of As Bill Sees It, which is a great collection of writings:

"[... M]aybe you are doing just what all of us have done, at one time or another: Maybe you are running away.  Why don't you think that through again carefully? 

"Are you really placing recovery first, or are you making it contingent upon other people, places, or circumstances?  You may find it ever so much better to face the music right where you are now, and, with the help of the AA program, win through.  Before you make a decision, weigh it in these terms." (emphasis mine)

I think that's sufficient for now.  Rather, I hope it is--I have my psychotherapy appointment in half an hour. 

More to come.