How do I feel about chaos? The same way I do about using and drinking: I’m grateful I don’t have to do that anymore. It wasn’t always so. File this all under ‘how it was’.I remember thriving on chaos. I used to be so proud of myself that, no matter how insane a situation got, I could roll with it. Or if I couldn’t, I could at least pretend like I was handling things just fine. I look back on it now and wonder just who I was fooling besides myself. In terms of my thinking, though, the more chaos the better. I was so proud of myself because I was so malleable.
Who I was changed from situation to situation, depending on who I was dealing with. There was a different me for practically every person in my life. Who I was when I was with friends was different than who I was with my family, and all that was different than who I was with women. I used to think of conversation as a game. This person says this, then I say that, then they’ll say this, and so on and so on. It was like a guessing game for me: see if I could guess the right thing to say in the right moment. If I played well enough, I might win the prize. My fellow addict/alcoholics out there know that I’m not being metaphorical here.
Being something of a people-pleaser, I loved it when others were in crisis. I could be there for them, listen to what they had to say, and let loose a barrage of solutions to all their problems. Being more than a little codependent, I loved having my own crises so that others could rescue me, take care of me, and solve all my problems for me, too. It was how I was raised; the way I learned to survive in my environment; it was what I learned life was about and how to live it.
There’s a fine line between helping others because it brings you joy, and helping them because you have no self-worth. I was one of the latter. That’s not service. The help that I gave was to people who didn’t necessarily need help. I rescued. I saved. The help I gave wasn’t about others, it was about me and my need to be a rescuer, a savior. It was about feeding my gigantic ego and covering up for that hole inside. My relationships with women were like this, too, except to the Nth degree. I look back on that behavior now and call it for what it is: I used other people to make myself feel good.
It isn’t something that changed overnight. It’s taken a lot of work on (big surprise here) myself. I’ve done work outside just working the program, too. I’ve done a whole lot of work on boundaries--learning what they are, how to make them, how to keep them strong. It’s a skill I continue to develop. But it is such a relief now, today, to know that I don’t have to participate in other people’s chaos. I don’t have to jump on the rescue cycle with them. I can let them take care of their own problems if they want to. It’s one of the coolest parts of sponsorship, to me, that I don’t solve my sponsees’ problems, I help them to take care of themselves and solve their own problems.
Sometimes my actions can seem harsh to those who don’t understand where I’m coming from. Someone will invite me to a party and they get upset that I don’t come. They don’t understand the boundary I have when it comes to not being around people who are getting loaded and/or drunk. If someone just has personal issues and spreads a lot of chaos in their life, they might get upset that I don’t want to be their friend. How about that? I don’t have to talk down to them about the way they live their life. I don’t have to tell them to change or to try and make them live differently. It’s not my place to lecture.
I’m not responsible for anyone besides myself. So I do what I can, I change what I can change, which is me. I don’t go to the places I don’t want to go. I don’t spend time with people who are unhealthy. I have learned the hard way that when I hang around with people who are insane, I go right back to being insane myself. And that is a place I don’t want to be anymore. So I am grateful, content in the knowledge that I don’t have to do that anymore, either. Ever.
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