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!