Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Quote of the day.


"When one door of happiness closes, another opens, but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us."

-Helen Keller


Thursday, October 25, 2007

It's not all about me?

When we are drinking, the world tends to revolve around us. It's about our problems, our insecurities, our irresponsibility. Many times, we are so deep into ourselves that the impact of our alcoholism on those around us tends to become trivialized.

I remember being told by friends and particular family members that they thought I may have a drinking problem early on. One example, in college, when a group of friends got me in a room and pressed me to curb my wildness. I did not comply. Another time, a family member threatened to oust me if I did not seek help. Again, I did not comply. I simply blew them off. What did they know? They couldn't POSSIBLY understand my needs and turmoil. My thinking was that no one person understood my desperate attempts to avoid my life. As my addiction progressed, my failure to heed any advice became more apparent and I simply avoided anyone who tried to help.

Toward the very end of my drinking life, I found myself secluding myself completely. I was angry at everyone and trusted no one, including myself. And, in alcoholism, it was about me. It was entirely up to me to end my life as an irresponsible woman. It was entirely my choice to stop drinking, because I finally saw what everyone else had been seeing for years. A confused, angry, depressed child who never let go of her past mistakes and misgivings. And that realization is what caused me to move my life in a different direction.

So many times, people who are close to or live with an alcoholic ask me "What can I do to get him or her to stop?" or "What can I do differently?" and "I feel so responsible".

In reality, the person who is responsible for his or her drinking is also the person responsible for getting sober. As someone close to him or her, it is easy to confuse enabling an alcoholic with helping them. It affects every one's life and it is so difficult to know that someone is going through such tumultuous cycles and there is little the outside person can do. There are ways to cope, however. Support groups, on-line resources and books to just help the non-alcoholic deal with the alcoholic. And those resources are for you to know that you are not alone.

From this side, I wish I had listened to all the people that had told me. I regret it every day of my life. I regret the pain and anguish I caused so many different relationships throughout the years. And I cringe at times at all the worry and stress I inflicted on those who loved me so much. But I also know that nothing mattered to me but erasing everyone from my addictive mind. I was so desperate to be helped but so deep into myself that I didn't know how to get out.

From your side, it becomes a matter of providing as much support as you are able. If an alcoholic is all about them, they may take your advice but the denial may be too great.

Today, I have someone in my life who has a drinking problem and I am now on this side. I worry and think about this person every day, hearing reports about a stint with sobriety that usually doesn't last very long. I go to sleep at night and pray that I will not have a message on my phone. I comb the papers everyday to ensure this person is still alive. And the emotional toll is great because I caused pain to this person in my days of drinking, leading to the demise in our relationship. But, there is a point in which I had to understand that everyone makes their own choices. As much time as I spend worrying, this person is where I was a long time ago....inside their own addiction. Ideally, if this person approached me, I would be there. If this person needed anything, I would be there. The only thing I can do is keep that door open, hold this to my heart and hope that the day will come when life begins for this person as well.

Hope and faith in people's strength is amazing. We know that change needs to come, at times, we just need to find the strength within ourselves.

Monday, October 22, 2007

Greetings From the Bottom

I wrote this a few years ago, but someone asked me to repost.



Greetings from the Bottom.

My entire life has been a cycle of wanting to live with vengeance and needing to numb the constant pain I feel. Pain that I found unbearable. Numbing entailed irresponsibility. Denial. Aloofness. Any way to keep myself from feeling fledging terror and anger has been my modus operandi. The hurt. The pain. All these things exist in depression.

So, I began the arduous task of researching the label for this pain I have been feeling since I can remember:

Adversity, anguish, calamity, cross, crux, difficulty, disease, disorder, distress, grief, hardship, illness, infirmity, misery, misfortune, ordeal, pain, plague, plight, scourge, sickness, sorrow, suffering, torment, trial, tribulation, trouble, woe

It's astounding that all of the aforementioned synonyms can be applied to an emotional process. Some of you think of it as drama. I think of it as my daily existence. I cannot distinguish between what is truly detrimental and what simply exists as life. I cannot express my anger and rage towards the people who cause it. Instead, I have turned inward. What you see when you are hurt is what I see each hour of my day. The sense of impending doom hinders my ability to live in a moment. I retreat. I create fantasies to ease my sense of reality.And in doing this, my life illustratively becomes vast acreage. A pliable bit of earth in which I call home.

I live on my expansive piece of proverbial property and see the many holes I have dug over the last thirty years. The holes I bury my emotions. The holes I bury the hatred and anger that I am afraid to set free. The hole I must dig to feel protected from my own enraging heart.The holes in which I dig are not unique. They are the same holes you may dig when you feel panic. Or grief. In your world, these are smalconceiveses. The difference is that I live in these holes. I rarely find myself on the outside looking in. Instead, I am constantly on the inside looking out. Watching lives being led with true zeal for happiness. While I sit underneath life, enveloped in angst.

Three weeks ago I dug one of my holes so deep, I thought I might not make it out intact. I was in such conflicting darkness that my eyes could barely distinguish any light. When I dove in, I forgot to bring my tools. My flashlight. My shovel. I simply dug and dug with raw, aching fingers. And this is where I remained. Time passed so slowly, I was unable to calculate just how long I had been underground. Nothing sustained like the darkness I felt. I withdrew from reality and sat in a quiet numbness that only one suffering this affliction can feel. I mourned. I grieved. I panicked. Yet these feelings seemed to pass in front of me in those shadows. I was unable to feel anything but my own self-pity. My emotions so raw that I worried that I may bleed to death. I was a product of my own rigorous self-deprecation. Constantly berating myself for feeling so deeply.My hand reached out. My raw, tormented fingers barely reached out of the hole.

I found a sliver of light that was able to help me regain some awareness. Suddenly the darkness became scarier than the life that was waiting for me. I reached and reached. I was waiting for someone to grab my hand. And, someone did. He inadvertently put his hand out and I grabbed it. I used it to hoist me from deep within the confines of my misery. A tiny move upward saved me from burying myself completely. I was given the opportunity to start the climb back up from the bottom.And this climb entails a considerable amount of recognition. Recognizing that this darkness is a disease within itself. That the feelings I possess are not simple figments of my overactive imagination. They are real and validated. What you feel is different than those feelings I have.

I walk along life scared. Scared to feel. Scared to be hurt and rejected. I tread heavily on my property, searching the parameters for a way out. A path. An exit. You may or nay not live near me. You may have holes, but they are not similar to the deep depressions in life.So, I say: Greetings from the bottom. Where I have begun to unearth those emotions that have been buried so long. I am no longer digging downward. I have begun the laborious task of filling in the holes that are no longer part of my present. I move dirt to make way for acknowledgement. I find that I am throwing seeds over to begin the new growth. I am extending my hand to those who will take it. I am the caretaker of my property.


www.kjpartstudio.freeservers.com copyright, kjpartstudio 2007

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Questions

Do you have a topic or question you would like to see addressed here? Please send me an e-mail at kjpartstudio@hotmail.com

Monday, October 15, 2007

Emotional Responsibility

One of the most difficult facets of being sober has much less to do with not drinking, I've found, and more to do with taking responsibility for our emotions.

After almost six years of not drinking, the need to drink has subsided substantially. I rarely have moments where I found myself with an uncontrollable urge to wash away my fears and problems in life.

What I do find, however, is that I struggle with the very real need to be emotionally responsible. I have spent years learning how to contain the emotional outbursts and avoidance that I have lived with most of my life. And even with all the practices of being sober and living in a new life, it can sometimes take ONE emotional trigger to push me to behaviors that my drunk life afforded.

The one difference that I see now, however, is my ability to rectify these behaviors and be truly aware of those trigger points. Drinking for me was mostly about avoiding a lot of pain at life events that had transpired. Drinking allowed me a moment's reprieve from the clutter and noise that filled my emotional void. And getting as drunk as possible, my thinking was, allowed me to cry at those memories and hardships that I had never fully dealt with.

So, today, I take all of the aforementioned drinking behaviors and thought patterns and I work tirelessly on rectifying my emotional patterns. Not an easy task, especially since it's not the most comfortable place emotionally.

For instance, my reaction to someone who may be critical in the past would to IMMEDIATELY take it personally and lash out defensively. This is a tough one for me and I still have to stop and take a breathe before I react. One of the reasons I turned to drinking were my emotional insecurities. I had a difficult time regarding myself as anything but worthless, even if I did step through many impressive and worthy milestones in my life. Today, I am consistently working to understand that criticism isn't necessarily personal, it is essential to looking at a situation objectively and allowing another perspective to come through.

Another challenge I find is maintaining an even keel of emotion when things don't go as planned. The other night, I was lost in Albany and late for an event where I was scheduled to receive an award. I was driving with incomplete directions and my frustration level kept rising to the point that my significant other was getting uncomfortable with my grunts and tsks. Instead of getting frustrated at his reading of the incomplete directions, I had to stop for a moment and take responsibility for the fact that I had actually not printed out the correct pages. So, I pulled over, called the venue and the situation went from full Kim crisis mode to manageable.

But, these triggers and our ability to pinpoint the source of frustration, hurt or anger is perhaps one of the biggest challenges one faces in sobriety.

The one exercise I have learned is to list every single trigger that I have become painfully aware of in my journal. I have a page called "Triggers". It's a long long list that I review everyday....and every once in a while I succeed in keeping my emotional trap door shut when I feel it necessary.

Thursday, October 11, 2007

Physical Angst

This week, I was making stew (the fall is definitely approaching in NY) and I was pouring in a can of Guiness to be cooked off after nine hours. I realized that if I took one sip, no one would ever know the difference. I stood there for a moment, justifying all the reasons for one ridiculous sip of beer. And it hit me, all over again. It didn't matter that I have been sober for almost six years, it still felt like day one of not drinking. It was an occurence that is so infrequent, it took me by surprise.

Of course I never took the sip, but I was reminded of how close one must keep sobriety within their reach.

So, I pulled out this article I had written a few years ago to remind myself of how often the past comes into the present looking for a quick fix:

October 2002

Though not drinking for me has been relatively easy in the last eight months (I eventually cut out most of the activities that were conducive to my drunken behavior), I had a very scary episode a few weeks ago. In the middle of the night, I woke panicked from a dream. I got up, went into my kitchen and had this incredible urge to drink. So incredible, I shook. I opened the refrigerator out of sheer alcoholic habit. I paced. I ran through every life event in a matter of three minutes or so. I was angry, hopeless, sad, and enraged all at the same time. It was horrible. It was so real and present in me.

So, I stood there. And decided that I was just going to let it all go through me. Almost like going through a tunnel, seeing all of these people and places go whizzing by. And man, did it hurt. But I felt it all. I refused to just try and forget about it.If you were to visualize this whole incident....it would have started in my head, gone through my heart, and out my toes. It was emotionally draining in one sense and refreshing in another. And the moment passed.

So, I used this the other day (to speak of your foreboding emptiness). I was driving down the road with the leaves changing colours on either side of the road. I was listening to Les Miserables on the stereo and I had this overwhelming sadness. I missed my ex husband. I missed being irresponsible. I was mourning everything. I felt so so sad (of course, the music didn't help). So damn melancholy. I decided instead of changing the music to some happy yappy station, I would let myself feel all of this again. Feel it right through to my heart. And again, it hurt. Pain is remarkable in that aspect. But,in doing so, I was so much happier that I was capable of feeling deep emotion. That I had worked so hard over the last months to be able to be in touch with these emotions---sad, angry whatever. And I cried....and the tears came out like crazy. Cried so hard that I had to pull over with my Les Miserables blaring the most sappy song and just weep.And then?

It was over. It passed. And I found my resilience to the situation enlightening. I had released so much....and that is something that I had never been able to do in the fourteen years I had been drinking. So, to sum up....the feelings of sadness, the need for alcohol haven't gone away. They are still present in some capacity. The tools that you have within yourself just get more refined and stronger to deal with these situations. You become more aware of your emotions and strengths...and pull them out when needed. And that, I suppose, has been my on-going method.

The Last Glass

People have requested that I post this again, I wrote this piece published many times over the years.. I started with twenty-four. Twent...