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!