The Fundimental Unfairness of Addiction

God, this is awful. Horrible that this exists. Some of the logic I just can't grasp or totally endorse. But so beautifully and painfully written. As the adult child of an alcoholic/substance abuser, I find my empathy strained. I have been hurt. I have been neglected and abused so that my father could use, so that he could serve the unholy twin gods of whiskey and cocaine. I have my challenges in life, but I have never been reduced to helplessness, and for that I am grateful. Truthfully, I want someone to blame.

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2013/mar/09/russell-brand-life-without-drugs

Some artists have to contend with this unending misery in order to create. And then some get swallowed by it. My own brother went down the rabbit hole of drinking too much and I watched helplessly from a far distance as he went missing and turned up dead on the floor of his own apartment. I had said that he was burning too intensely to carry on for long, and rightly predicted that we would have to contend with putting him in the ground. The circumstances surrounding his death are clouded partially in mystery, but it is well documented by the Navy that he was having a major drinking problem before he died. He was 25.

I want to blame my father, or his father who schooled him in the ways of the bottle and emotional abandonment. I want to rage at the loss of my brother, my college fund, at my hopes for family normalcy. I want to show him how he made me feel worthless. I want to level these things at my dad. But then I look at him, and I see a frail, sickly, and finally sober shell of what my mom says swept her off her feet in hopeless romance. I don't see the man who wrote her drippy romantic, soulful poetry. I don't see the young man who pushed me on the swing as a very small child.  I see someone who, if faced by the full measure of my experience, would crumple like burnt tissue. He's there, burnt already, and holding his shape by sheer force of will. A whisper would scatter him.

Really, that dynamic, romantic artist is gone. Like the angelic boy soprano he was, when he hit puberty he did not mellow into a mature tenor. He cracked and was no more. He couldn't ever after carry a tune any more than he could carry responsibility or joy. He couldn't deal. He was a lead pencil in a broadband world. His capacity was reduced to nil.

I hear from him every few months now. I see that he is trying to be somewhat present in my life. He calls after months of forgotten or failed attempts to remember I am a part of his family. I hear his remorse. If I wanted to reconcile with my father, he is still here on this planet. I see his desire for my forgiveness. I blankly and without much feeling absolve him, my hands in a nonmagic gesture of benediction. I tell him I need nothing from him, not so much because it is true, but because I know I will never truly get what I need, not from him anyway. I am letting him off the hook. I have given what I can to him. I have thrown years of love down a dark hole to him, but he never took my lifeline. He only memorably told me that he wished I was born male so he could punch me in the face. No amount of telling me feebly that he loves me now will erase that. That takes bigger, more fearless and transcendent love that he just cannot produce or hold in his heart. I am left to work on it within myself. Despite being told I am worthless, I have to believe in my worth, love myself, and somehow forgive a man who probably was too wasted to remember saying that to me and shattering me into fragments.

Maybe only other addicts can really understand him, really help him. I am from the other world, with all my judgements and moral superiority for having never fallen prey to the bottle or the freshly chopped line. The hole in me mirrors the hole in him. I fill it with minor peccadilloes, perhaps. I am no saint. But somehow my need to consume Chex Mix doesn't seem to interfere with my ability to love others, although perhaps parts of myself. I am sometimes driven by the desire to be perfect, even though that conceit is the worst form of self-loathing.

But, lacking perfection, how am I to offer myself to the world? How do I consider myself worthy of the love I want in my life? I can bake a killer cake, save the life of a sick person, and even comfort the dying. But what if people knew that I couldn't save my brother? I couldn't heal my father? I couldn't be enough to stop the gnawing monster of addiction from greedily devouring the people I cared most about? Does it matter how kind or good I am? I will bet it does, to people with the capacity. But some people lack that. You can call down to them forever, and ultimately have to rise up from the chasm's edge and step back, lest you fall in yourself.

I am not an addict. I know I can go to Al-Anon for support if I wanted to. I just don't want my father's failings to define me.

I am trying to resonate with kindness and compassion in my life. This lesson is a hard one. It is going to take a lot more work. But I am alive today. I am aware today. I am grateful for that. The frustrated tears I shed over this are just part of the landscape. I don't have to be perfect. I just have to be trying to be good. That is enough. That is a lot more than others may have. Just by virtue of looking at this and attempting to unravel the Gordian Knot , I am better than I was on days when I merely felt sorry for myself. One day I will claim my destiny and cut the knot with one stroke and be done with it. Alexandrian solutions are not lost on me. In the meantime I hope I can at least see it for what it is: a yoke bound to an ox-cart. Just a symbol of what could be. Can I combine my conqueror's heart with the will toward compassion? I can try.

Remember, But Absolve

Yum, madeleines...

Oh, sorry. I got looking at this picture and was lost in thought.

I had an interesting weekend. Not so much in outer events, but in inner ones. I was very in my head, since I was writing a research paper among other things.

I should have tried to write this yesterday, but my hands hurt from all the typing I was already doing. I'll try to do my epiphany some justice here anyway.

I was a little put out to hear that the people who tried unsuccessfully to sue me for libel actually took their appeals to the Supreme Court. Then I found out that after the high court refused to hear their case, they elected to write a "memoir" about their experience. They used everyone's real name and had some not so great things to say about me and my editor and friend, Ted. We come off as a regular Hitler and Mussolini vaudeville act, twisting mustaches and all. Feh. That made me a little dyspeptic.

I decided that on Saturday I would allow myself to have whatever feelings I wanted about it, and then I would get over it. Since giving it any more attention than that would just give these people the attention they so desperately crave, I elected to make a phone call to the legal department of the newspaper on Monday and then take no other action unless...unless I don't know what.

Then I went to the gym and had an epiphany on the elliptical trainer thingie. I really, REALLY don't want to end up like that, obsessed over and continuing to be hurt by the past and allowing things to "ruin my life".

Then I thought about the various things and people in my past I am obsessed about and continue to be hurt by. How am I different from them, after all, if I still feel bad about those things?

And then I head the thought. And it was a good one: "Those people can't hurt me, because I have all the power. I can decide whether to absolve them. That is way more potent than what they do to try to hurt me."

Something like that. It came to me in a rush of feeling, and I felt the truth in it. What if I just had compassion for the people who have tried to "ruin my life" and saw that for what it is: more about them than about me. That is just sort of sad. I can be the bigger person in that scenario without feeling like a chump.

What would happen if I could apply that feeling not only to the people who wrote the book, but to heavier hitters in my life? How about all of them? What if I just refuse to give people permission to injure me, and just felt sorry for those that try? Like, real pity?

The people that hurt me when I was just a kid are still jerks. I was not the adult, and as the child in those situations I deserved love and protection. I didn't get it. But I can absolve them and refuse to be diminished by holding on to those judgments as though they are relevant to who I am now.

Already things are happening as a result of this shift in perspective. I have been validated in my truth. This idea will work. It doesn't mean I don't learn from those experiences or remember the events. But as the one doing the absolution, the power is all in my hands. I finally get it.

So, David and Beverly (King) Pegasus, I absolve you. In trying to hurt me, you have given me a gift. In hating me, you have taught me how to love myself so I never end up like you. It is a powerful lesson, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Put it in the "what if" machine

Image: http://xkcd.com/17/

Sometimes I wonder "what if?" about things in my life. Who doesn't? I can either drive myself crazy with it, or I can list some to amuse you, my silent, never commenting readership.

1. What if I never left Ohio? Oh my. What if I went to Mount Union College and stayed in Alliance? Eeek. I would not be recognizable as me, that's for sure. I would have a greener garden, a barrel-chested sports fan for a husband, probably. I would have clung to that spiral perm hairstyle longer. I would still be the wierdest girl on the block. I would probably be living in my grandparents' old house and going over to my dad's for pasta on Thursday nights and listening to his ranting.

2. What if I had married someone else? I wouldn't have Tony and that just wouldn't do. He's the only man in the known universe who could stand to live with me long-term. I might have had biological children, but then I wouldn't have Little A. Can't have that. Sometimes I look at my exes and wonder if I could have made it work with any of them. But I married the guy my dog liked. Heidi was a smart dog.

3. What if I went to the looney bin? I'd still be drooling in my Jello, I bet. This one scares me. I can't imagine ever recovering from something like that. Luckily, when my father thought it would be a good idea to institutionalize his rebellious teen daughter, the doctor disagreed with him. It feels like just luck that kept me out of the hospital. Probably that I wasn't really crazy had something to do with it. That last point is the subject of some debate, but I'll just go with how that turned out, thanks.