“November Thoughts”

This recovery thing is interesting, to put it mildly. As time goes by and I continue to work the program, I find new things about myself to discover. There are still issues which need addressing. The layers of the onion keep peeling. The work on ‘me’ is never finished. Something that’s been a struggle lately for me is feeling bad.

It feels weird just to write that. After all, once upon a time I spent every waking moment feeling this way—a wretched emptiness, the god-shaped hole, as some call it. Like so many others who suffer from the Disease, I sought escape from my own feelings in a substances-induced stupor. I doubt I will ever forget the release that being intoxicated brought. At long last, I felt good. Or was it that I just no longer could feel the bad? It didn’t matter.

Then came recovery. With my mind no longer under the influence, I had to learn how to deal with all that I’d been suppressing and repressing for so many years. The ‘bad’ feelings came back with a vengeance, but by working the program I found a way to deal with my feelings. By working steps, going to meetings, and becoming a part of the fellowship, I found a way to allay the long-reigning emptiness. I began to actually deal with me, with my life, who I had been. I discovered, too, that I could forge a new me. And bit by bit I began to stop feeling bad and began feeling good. It’s even reached a point where I feel good more often than I feel bad, and on those times when I do feel bad I have ways of dealing with it that are healthy.

Still, I won’t claim to enjoy feeling bad. In fact, I’ll go ahead and stake a claim right here: I still really hate it. A lot. It’s been a learning process to understand that life has its ups and downs. There will be good times and there will be bad times. And sometimes, the bad will persist. And persist. And persist. And I can do all the 12-step program working in the world and STILL the bad feelings will stay because that just happens to be what life is doing. Did I mention the part where I still don’t like it?

* * *

We talk often in recovery about the aching emptiness that goes hand in hand with the Disease. What many call a ‘god-shaped hole’ inside themselves, I prefer describing more simply as loneliness. God has never been far from my life. In recovery, I pursue my work of increasing my conscious contact with my higher power frequently throughout each day. I am not one of those who turned against god or felt that god had turned against them. Being in the program, I have worked to foster my relationship with god, increase it, deepen it. I consider myself fortunate to have a higher power that works so forcefully in my life. And yet, the hole inside me has not been filled by god; it is filled when I am in communion with others.

When I sit in a meeting and listen to others share the deepest part of themselves, whether its pain or joy, that’s when I feel connected and that’s when I feel the emptiness inside myself lessen. It’s when I’m having dinner or coffee with fellow members after a meeting, and we’re talking about our lives, noting the similar things we think and feel and experience—that’s when the loneliness subsides.

* * *

I’ve written before about how it seems that, no matter how I might progress in my recovery, I always still feel ‘different’ from other people. It’s like a comment I heard another member say once at a book study, that they keep on waiting to feel like they’ve ‘made it’. It’s more than just how life takes work. It’s more than my experiences in life have separated me from others. It just feels like there’s something different about me. This isn’t a feeling I particularly enjoy, either, by the way. It’s lonely, isolating. Sometimes I don’t feel it. Sometimes I do feel it and I don’t mind. Right now is one of the times when I feel it and it bothers me. It hurts.

I have not had a lot of friends in my life. Real friends, people I’ve felt truly close to, have been few and far between. There have been those times, too, when I thought I was close to someone and it turned out the relationship was mostly in my head, or that the relationship had been deliberately fabricated—that I’d been taken advantage of, manipulated, for one reason or another. Those have been some painful experiences. I imagine they are for everyone; no one likes to feel used, or to learn that they were deceived by someone they took the risk in trusting.

And as I think about these things, my thoughts turn also to relationships I’ve said ‘no’ to, times where I chose instead to let go. I think about these and remember my reasons why. Perhaps because my trust was betrayed, or because the relationship had proven itself to be a risk to my self or my sanity. Maybe my integrity was threatened, or I was just plain unhappy and it didn’t strike me as fair to string someone else along. I don’t know; I think I’m waxing philosophical on all this. I’m not even sure I have a point, except perhaps that being lonely is not something I enjoy, and how strange that is considering how much of my life has been spent feeling lonely.

* * *

I’ve been writing on this blog off and on for over three years now. It’s not a record of my recovery journey, exactly, just as it’s not a public journal or diary of my life experiences. There are elements of both, of course. I have been told, strike that, accused of keeping a dairy in this space, that this blog is very personal. People have expressed to me how impressed or amazed they are at how much I reveal here.

I always find these comments somewhat strange. It’s the same way with people who tell me how much they appreciate the depth I share in meetings. I’ve learned to not look at folks like they’re crazy when they say these sorts of things, but that hasn’t changed my inner response.

For me, I may reveal much here or in meetings, but there is so much more inside that doesn’t get shared. Sometimes it feels as though my consciousness is bursting at the seams. Sometimes I think it is in this way that I am different; sometimes I chalk it up to my home environment as a child and the lack of boundaries so familiar to the family structures of those of us who grow up with the influence of the Disease.

(Almost as an aside, I wonder: was isolating something I learned from parents who were themselves isolators, or was it instead a solution I discovered in my attempts to find separation from a home where boundaries weren’t present or respected?)

* * *

In the end, I suppose this space here is little more than my own place for letting out what I think and how I feel. Does that make it a diary/journal? Perhaps. The traffic to this site has always been light, and I’ve never tried too hard to increase it. I’m not a psychologist or an addiction therapist. This space is mine where I get to say what I think. Occasionally, it helps someone else. And so after all this long documenting of what’s been rolling around in my clean and sober noggin lately, what is the point?

Where is it written that I have to have one?

But here, for those who have made it through this diatribe, I offer a condensed version to takeaway: I’m still clean and sober; I still feel loneliness and it still sucks when I do; and I still feel different from others.

Be well.