WTF

I made it 30 days, and i made it to the tail end of my 7th meeting to pick up a chip for my efforts. My parents were making a special trip into town to celebrate. Well, at least, that’s what we had discussed. I texted a picture of my chip to my parents, some close friends, and the girl that im seeing. Everyone except for my parents responded with enthusiastic support. When I met my parents at the restaurant a little while later, my mom asked what wine we were drinking. I looked at her and cocked my head to the side, widened my eyeballs and said, “im celebrating 30 days of sobriety today.” On top of that bullshit, my dad, who is an alcoholic himself and a shining example of WHY i should stay sober, was in a pissy whiny mood, pretty much his baseline lately. So, what was supposed to be a celebratory supper turned rather quickly into something difficult to stomach the 50 minutes we were in the restaurant. I’m not sure why im supposed to devote life energy on situations that arent joyful and in fact, are detrimental to my mental health, downright toxic. The good thing that came of it all is that i was able to practice enough self control not to flip out on both of these people at the supper table. TANSTAAFL

Hemming It Up

I really wanted to when i left my partner in November make it as painless as possible. I dated a woman once who discussed our breakup and helped me ease out of it in the kindest and gentlest way. She is a therapist though so she has a leg up on those kinds of endeavors. Whenever I’ve tried to perform similar magic, it was met with resistance and only recently have i realized i just have to plow right through the pain rather than dancing and tiptoeing around i, at least in this instance because, damn, we have been fizzling out and fucking around with separating for half a year. The worst is over as of yesterday because my ex and i disclosed to each other that we are seeing other people. I knew that she was but she just couldnt come out and say it which was frustrating to me. We live in a small town so everyone has to get along and im a firm believer in love and acceptance conquering ot things, especially stupid things like jealousy–even if it means i have to se my ex girlfriend, whom i had plans to marry and raise children with, frollock around town with another boy. He is a nice boy, the one she is seeing now, and he comes into both places i work so i sent him a facebook message that i dont want him to feel weird around me and that i hope that he can offer my ex girlfriend some sunshine in her life. But now that all this info has been disclosed, my ex girlfriend has put up another wall. She hugged me bye after our talk and said everything is fine, but she isn’t speaking to me. Again. It hurts so badly, and it mademe want to boot five beers around 4pm yesterday, but I didnt and instead i called a friend and said, “i need you for a few minutes.” And talking with her made me realize I have to accept that my ex has different ways of everything which is why we didn’t work out, and that i need to leave her alone if we are to eventually be the friends i want us to be right now.  Ugh. Patience.

And then on my end of things, along comes ms perfect. Fuck. My therapist has just told me to stay single for at LEAST 6 months. But this person, on paper, is seriously perfect. Imessaged her on a whim through OkCupid cuz, ya know, she’d  looked at my profile (which is a fucking work of art!) and liked it and so i initiated some discussion about the ATL. It has gone so amazingly from there that it is hard to believe and i don’t want to jinx it, but she is coming here this weekend to meet me, an i am soooooooooo excited. I did mention right off the bat that i was hemming up the ends of a breakup and that was something that required some heavy talk, but in an afternoon’s time, we worked through it, and i was like, damn, am i kookie for being so emotionally invested in this person already? Ive never experienced something quite like that. I mean the compatibility is strangely high, and im so stoked to see if the cyber version of compatibility translates to reality. If it does, then I dont want to wait on “good timing,” I can’t. I can’t pass up an amazing person bc, geez, i have this arbitrary time frame im working with, but i do want to be mindful about the entire thing because i do not want to bring emotional garbage into a new relationship. I don;t want to vent to this new person about the old person and lately i havent even talked to my mom about the old person. I do want to give my mom time to grieve or process my last relationship because she was extremely invested in my ex girlfriend and it isn’t fair just to be like “well, here is the new one, mom, gtfover it!” So, im stoked about the weekend, the happiness that it will bring, and im writing when the waves of sadness crash on the rocks. The worst is over. The best is yet to come.

First Meeting

I’m pretty sure i was the youngest person in the room, the crowded room in the episcopal church, not even a block from my house. The guy who was leading the meeting, it was his “belly button birthday,” and he said without his AA birthday, he probably wouldn’t be celebrating his “belly button birthday.”  Everyone was super warm and welcoming. I got name overloaded in the first couple of minutes. Because being off drugs and almost all alcohol fro five weeks gave me such clarity, i am inclined to hang on to it and not slip back into getting fuckd up to deal with life. I thought i had a grip–after all, i wasnt in a ditch, i wasn’t stinking drunk, i wasn’t experiencing medical issues, i didn’t freak out not having drugs in me on vacation for over a month . I was getting to work early, making money, expanding programs associated with my camp, overall being a productive member of society. I was also having a couple of beers regularly between shifts and spending loads of money on ecstasy and not at all dealing with reality.  This is all part of step one–getting the fuck out of detail about your addiction. Still, maybe this is part of that denial, but i can pick up or put down any substance when i set my mind to it so im not convinced im an alcoholic.  Im going to humor my therapist, however,  and pretend that i am and see how it goes. I dont have anything to lose from it, and i have loads to gain.  One thing i don’t want to do though is go around telling everyone.  Ive watched my friends be SO weird about folks who dont drink and drug anymore–like they FTFO about whether or not to have alcohol out at parties and FTFO about whether or not to discuss drug use, that kind of stuff. Drugs are all around me. Im in F&B. I can’t nor do i want to get out of F&B. My friends all drink and do drugs. Are they addicts?  Some are. Some just have a dysfunctional relationship with substances. But i dont want them adjusting their behavior for me. That is something i cant control–other people and so as the serenity prayer goes, not something im supposed to be worried about.

Anyway, so here are all these warm fuzzies bouncing around this room, and im nodding my head along with everything being said and overall, i had an enjoyable time listening to folks and drinking coffee. Some ladies came up to me after the meeting to offer their phone numbers and told me to call any time. One guy said, “get hooked up with the women.” And the women were very eager to get me to the women’s group. The binary-ness and urge to lock me into gendered meetings really kinda rubbed me the wrong way. I have a friend in asheville that has told me about queer aa meetings, and im now very interested in that because binary bullshit makes me at best uncomfortable and at worst fucking suicidal. That is something i guess i will bring up later. I dont want that to serve as a deterrent to meetings so i won’t let it, but it is something i will need to talk to someone about eventually–sooner rather than later. The cool thing about going to these meetings is that i want my hostel that will eventually support my camp to be a space for aa meetings so maybe i can have a queer meeting there.

Good, Better, Best Jess

So, i left for a vacation, a sorta vacation–traveling alone and on a tight budget to strange places is more like a working adventure than it is leisure time.  It is still worth every penny because, if it goes right, it is transformative in only the ways that travel can be.  Here i am five weeks later, home and transformed, ready for further transformation.

What exactly would require transformation?  Well, as i just told my therapist yesterday, right before i left, I was doing ecstasy multiple times a week along with drinking every day which demonstartaed to me (as I’d already heard 20 years ago) that drugs and alcohol really do only numb and delay pain.  I cried for two weeks straight on “vacation.”  Ya cant go around it–ya gotta go through it.  So my therapist’s recommendation, and the only way she would take me on as a client, is for me to promise to abstain from drugs and alcohol and to attend AA/NA meetings while in therapy.  That is NOT what i wanted to hear. Yes, i wanted to maintain the clarity I’d achieved on my trip and yes, i had just said i want to be my better self, but what the FUCK?!Now im an alcoholic. “Um, I’m kind of resistant to that label.” “Yeah, we’re rebellious by nature and don’t want anyone telling us what to do.” The funny thing is I’d already considered going to meetings when i got home, just as a form of free therapy, but someone telling me i needed to go, well, that is a different thing altogether. However, i have always been drawn to doing things that are difficult and that i don’t necessarily want to do.

Today i will try out my first meeting. Well, my first meeting for myself–i went a long, long time ago with a girlfriend, and i just didn’t get it, and was not interested in the least to be sober anyway so i was like, “well, this is weird” and never went back. Looking forward to not being my better self but my best self and since this is MY year, this seems like the time to do it, AND and no one ever said the path towards that was going to be easy or how i imagined so i t seems right to examine this path that someone else, an objective observer is pointing me to