I am 35 years sober today. How does it feel?

 

I'm not sure why I seem to want to turn this blog into a private journal. I've tried to avoid oversharing up to now, but if no one is reading this, what's the problem? I'm not doing Facebook any more - GOD keep me from doing Facebook  any more. It's just such a dead end for me, but isn't everything seeming just a little dead-ended now? 

I'm trying. And it's hard. I keep telling myself: look, they didn't find  cancer! Why aren't you running around celebrating and clicking your heels? Because part of me can't believe it. It always comes in from the left side, like an actual, physical, geographical miasma or thick, black fog rolling in and attempting to cover me. Much as that sounds like a drug trip, it's sort of familiar, but - I have to go way back, and do I want to?

The short answer is: I'm afraid to. 

Thirty-five years ago today, I washed up on the shores of AA, sober for the first time in God knows how long. I was scared to death. I stayed with AA, and stayed sober, for some 15 years, finally getting so disillusioned with the hypocrisy I saw around me (and abandoned by my so-called friends while I suffered a horrendous manic episode) that I had to walk away. The fact I had a "mental health episode", as they so delicately express it now, meant I really didn't have any meaningful sobriety at all, for being sober means being 100% sane (not to mention happy and fulfilled) all the time. My church wasn't much better - people edged away from  me like I had some mysterious and highly-contageous plague. Being spiritual meant never cracking up, I guess, so the fact I did crack up meant my spirituality had been a total sham.

I stayed with my church for another couple of years, but could no longer maintain the illusion that our deeply-fractured community still had any meaning left for me at all. And the personal side of it, the way I was systematically abandoned by everyone who said they supported me - never mind. I told you I shouldn't do this.

If the grandkids hadn't come along. . . but they did, and I was reborn. And now, they're all adults, and my daughter just told me that not only are we NOT exhanging any Christmas gifts this year, but that we aren't doing stocking stuffers (something I still delight in doing, silly me, for those kids who saved my life). I begged her to let me do them, and she said, OK, so long as there are no silly toys or stuffed animals, which I LOVED picking out every year. Some years, every single item was individually chosen based on their interests and enthusiams. I don't think one of them even noticed - at any rate, there was no acknowledgement that I had ever done anything special for them. It's very plain  to me that the kids now think of me as an embarrassment, and we are NOT to have any more fun on Christmas Day, period. It's  just silly and immature and maybe even looney,  like Grandma herself.

It's not just an arrow to the heart, it's a railroad spike. 

I'd say this was the hardest year of my life, but wait a minute, 1990 wasn't exactly steller either, though it ended better than it began. I didn't start to feel even a little bit comfortable in my sobriety until my third year. At that time, as I remember, I was still feeling positive about my church, until the minister I had bonded with (who was responsible for my  returning to the church after 20 years) left in anger that we weren't all giving our life  savings over to the  church.

We went through SIX ministers in the space of a dozen years. Six. Nobody ever remarked on this. Only one, an interim we had for one year, really strikes me now as a sincere leader with something to say. He'd walk back and forth at the front of the church on Sunday morning and speak, no notes, no rehearsal, nothing. It was like watching an inspired improv after seeing rigid, badly-acted stage plays for years.

Then he was gone, and so many others I loved - they just died, one friend after another after another, and now I have no close friends left at all. Losing Bohdan hit me very strangely, as he was the worst offender with abandonment. I  tried to talk to him on the phone about what  was happening to me, but he quickly put me off and never called back. He did not believe in mental illness, he once told me - it was a "weak personality" (and no matter what you might say about me, THAT is not me!). He also  said at some point that being gay was just being immature, and if people grew up they'd automatically be straight. That combined with the way he crossed every boundary that existed, physical and mental, should have clued me in. Visiting him a year ago was a strange, strange experience, and in some ways I was repelled, and I had good reason.

You shouldn't try to go home again, not if "home" is just shark-infested waters.

So, December begins, and I don't know what's ahead, what to expect, if my health will hold - or if they just haven't found the origins of all this yet. I know a new year is virtually meaningless, as only the numbers on the calendar change. Putting tags/dates on things, significant events, social movements, etc. is just a way to organize the material, in retrospect.

So I am left with today, and I wasn't in as much pain  today, but still in pain. It seems to be daily now, and I try to live around it. That thick fog, that black miasma, I don't know what it means or why it won't leave me alone. Haven't I  suffered enough? Look  at all I did to try to put my life back together again - no one tried harder than I  did - but it all blew apart anyway.

I  suppose this is just another version of that. 

So, these are my thoughts for today, without the cute little visuals I like to include. How  many times can you post Munch's The Scream?