Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah

Can I come home now?

I went to camp twice in my life and I hated it both times.  I was never the kid that was picked first for the tug-o-war, or the girl that the thirteen year old boy with a mustache and side-burns wanted to sneak into the woods with, or even the girl who got short-sheeted by all the mean girls.  Instead, I was the girl, whom, when everyone looks back at their old camp photos, everyone will have this to say about.

"I don't remember her."

I spent the whole long week at camp, both times, trying my best to be invisible.

Which is exactly how I feel right now.  Only, I'm fifty-one years old now and it's pretty ridiculous to feel like a twelve year old back at camp trying to escape notice.

Don't get me wrong, I'm going into work every day and busting my ass, and doing my best, and whistling while I work, but....I don't know.  I just don't want to be here.

I'm counting down the days until I can go home.

Here's the thing, I had a long run when I was the "cool" kid, the girl always picked to be the captain, the one who everyone else wanted to "hang" with.

And you know why?  Because I drank.  Because I was the life of the party.  And right now, I know, that if I was still drinking, if I got together with the rest of the gang after work for a couple of beers or glasses of wine, my experience here would be a totally different one. A warmer one.  I would belong.

I know, I know, I can still go out with the gang and not drink, and I have, but it's just not the same.  And the fact is, I  really don't want to. As I said on one of the message boards the other day, I'm too damn old to waste an evening doing something I don't want to do just to try to fit in.

I'm just ambivalent about this whole damn work thing, I'm not ambivalent about the work, I'll never be that, but it doesn't set me on fire anymore like it used to.   I no longer need to be the wittiest person in the operating suite, or the one that all the docs like, why was that ever important anyway?  I just want to go in and get my work done and then go home. 

And I hate that.

Boy, I do sound  like some whiny kid writing home from camp, but the thing is I miss you guys and I miss having the time to be a part of all this and my message boards and my toy drive and my flowerbeds and, of course, the cap'n and Stanley, the blind killer bichon.

The good news is that the panic has abated and been replaced by this ambivalence, but I'm not sure which is worse.  I have to admit that I have missed drinking, but I haven't wanted to drink, there's a big difference, but I have missed having that crutch or, more accurately, I have felt its absence more acutely. No more instant nerve soother, confidence booster, friend-maker, witty repartee tumbling off the tongue generator ready at the finger tips.

That's okay, I like the real me better anyway.  And if "they" don't, it just doesn't matter.

Leave Of Absence

Hey guys,
I'm back at work and my stress and anxiety level are at volcanic levels, so I'm going to put this poor little blog even further back on the stove until I get a little equilibrium back. This too shall pass. K

Much Needed, Much Appreciated Good News

Apparently the "something" that the radiologist saw on the daughter-in-law's scans were her ovaries.  He had assumed that they had been removed when they did her hysterectomy (For the record, I think they should have been removed, get everything out of the war zone you can!) and he thought he was seeing a mass that shouldn't have been there.  So the scans were all clear after all!!

Thank you Jeezus!

Now she will be following up often, often, often and developing a very close relationship with her dr. for the next seven years which I'm sure will become a big pain in the butt.  But a very appreciated pain in the butt because she's going to survive every single one of those seven years and she'll be around for her kids to terrorize in their teens.

She's a lucky girl!!

Moore Prayers

Life asked Death,

Why do people love me,

But hate you?

Death replied,

Because you are a beautiful lie,

And I am a painful truth.

One day when I was in kindergarten, I walked home from school to find a huge, gaping hole in our backyard.  My dad had decided to dig a storm cellar because my older sister was deathly afraid of storms and went into hysterics every time the tornado sirens would howl.  He thought having that hole under our back porch would calm her fears.  It did better than that, it scared off all the tornadoes.  Never in all the following years did we ever have to seek shelter from a tornado in that cellar. When I was young, I'd head down there with all my favorite stuffed toys, and some cheese and crackers every time the tornado watch ticker came across the bottom of the tv screen.  It was a lark.

I no longer consider tornadoes a lark.

 

 Not after Hoisington, Greensburg, Joplin, Moore x 2....

 

Not after I think of scared little kids who were counting down the hours until summer vacation, thinking of swimming pools and barbecues and tee-ball, huddled shoulder to shaking shoulder in a hallway.

 

I can't think of that without bursting into tears.  A few more days and school would have been out.  

 

Why?

My daughter-in-law went in for her scans today.  They saw something.

 

Why?

Tonight I want to be in a bar with a bunch of others, our eyes peeled to the TV watching news reports of the tornadoes and motioning to the bartender to keep them coming until we forget why we're there.  I want to drink until I no longer care why.  I really do.

But God and I decided two years ago that now was the time I needed to be sober, I needed to be STRONGER.

I don't know why.  I am afraid of what may be coming. 

But I will stay strong and I will stay sober.

Because.

Has Anybody Seen My Confidence, I Know I Left It Here Somewhere

 Until you start believing in yourself, you ain’t gonna have a life!
- Rocky Balboa





I just wanted to let you know I didn't hit the pinnacle of 600 days and then decide to do a free fall into barrel of whiskey.  You weren't really worried, were you?  You know me better than that, right?

I'm gearing up for work again this summer and I've worked myself into the same frazzled, second-guessing, downplaying my abilities, wrecking ball to the old self-confidence mode that I usually get into.  I think I have post-traumatic stress syndrome from the old-school asshole surgeons that I trained with in my early days, you know, the ones that would throw sharp pointy instruments at you, if you made the mistake of handing them the wrong thing, or asking them the wrong question like, "Good Morning, how are you today?"

So the other night I couldn't sleep and I got up in the middle of the night to worry and fret and try to memorize the PDR, then about the time the sun was over the mountain ridge and the cap'n was getting up, I decided I was tired and was going  back to bed.  As I stretched out in bed, I hollered down to him from the loft, "This is kind of reminiscent of my old drinking days, isn't it? (I was notorious for getting up and drinking a bottle or two of wine at 2 am just to try and get back to sleep).  Then I said, "You're probably looking under the couch for my wine glass, aren't you?" 

And he said, "Nah, I know you."

 Confidence restored.  Isn't that a wonderful thing?  The thing is, if he'd looked under the couch, he probably would have found a wine glass or two because it's probably been over 600 days since I cleaned under there.

Back to memorizing the PDR...

DAY 600!

There's yours truly down in the dungeon, looking for Princess Euphoria.  I think there's a couple of decades where you wouldn't be able to find a picture of me with out a glass in my hand. lol

 And here's me a couple of weeks ago with my grandson.  I found something better to hold onto.


CONGRATULATIONS TO ME!!!!!!!!!

A Fairy Tale

 an•he•do•ni•a (ˌæn hiˈdoʊ ni ə)
n. Psychol.

lack of pleasure or of the capacity to experience it.

I had a couple of comments on my May Day Blog that I'd like to try and address.  One was from Signe who basically asked which came first, finding something that I could fall in love with or giving up drinking.  The other was from a member of the MM Mainlist who said I made such a complicated issue sound simple.  There are no easy answers, we all know this, I told my MM friend, once we get some distance from alcohol everything becomes less complicated, and to do that, Signe, I had to push myself to find something, or many things, that I thought could become more important in my life than alcohol. Then I had to quit drinking to make them worth it.

But there are devious forces at work that keep us from doing either one of these,

Let me introduce you to Princess Euphoria and Princess Anhedonia, they're sisters and they go hand-in-hand and they live in the land of Alcoholism.  Where one goes, the other goes.

First let's talk about Princess Euphoria, we'll call her Phoria for short.  Phoria is the one we met that night we took that first drink.  We felt like we had just met our long lost best friend.  She was always there for us, anytime we needed her.  Phoria was one great gal, even if she was a little flighty, and insincere, even if she was a little dangerous and convinced us to go places where we wouldn't normally go. "Feel like jumping naked off the back of a boat while the crowds watch?"  Sure, why not? "Wanna go home with that cute stranger at the end of the bar?"  Hell, yeah!  She made us feel more alive than we ever had.  She was like the Pamela Anderson of friends, she was fake as hell,  from her false eyelashes to her triple D's, but she was fun and she made us feel so good about ourselves. Hot damn, we loved that gal!  She had lots of friends that she wanted us to meet and they all worshiped her.

The only problem was she had this ugly sister name Princess Anhedonia, we'll call her Annie.  Annie was a loutish, brutish, clod of a gal, she followed Phoria everywhere she went because, hell, she couldn't get any friends on her own.  She was a real sour bitch and she got great pleasure from making us feel bad.  She'd make fun of us, and tell us that we were worthless pieces of shit, and then she'd cover her bristly mouth and giggle, "Just kidding. he-he  You know I love you."  She made our skin crawl and our stomachs turn.  She scared the shit out of us, but we tolerated her.  For Phoria.

Some people wised up fast to Annie, and as much as they liked Phoria, they couldn't put up with her malevolent side-kick, so they regretfully bade their farewells to Phoria, or else they arranged to meet her on the sly for short little get togethers, and as soon as they sensed that Annie was going to show up, they got the hell out of there. These were some smart cookies.  Others, like me, lingered longer,  we loved Phoria so much that we continued to withstand Annie's abuse, just so we could spend as much time as possible with our best friend. She was worth it.  She'd been so good to us.

Now unbeknownst to us, Annie hated Phoria, she wanted all of Phoria's friends for herself. She was secretly plotting to kill her, but first she kidnapped her and put her in a dungeon.  She would let her out every once in awhile just so she could lure us closer, but then she'd quickly throw Phoria back in the dungeon, and we would be forced to tolerate Annie's increasingly sadistic behaviour. We couldn't get rid of her, she started hanging around longer and longer.   Again, some of the friends wised up, and as much as they loved Phoria, they decided they couldn't tolerate anymore of Annie and they escaped.  But others, like me, kept coming back, we'd tolerate anything just for those few moments spent with Phory.  Those few moments of light with her were all we had left in our darkening world.

Annie began letting Phory out for shorter and shorter periods until she had lured all of Phoria's most steadfast friends and trapped us in the dungeon, it was then that she finally killed Phory.  Phoria's friends wouldn't believe it, we  kept looking for Phoria, through all the dark hallways and vomit tainted cellars and into the bottom of every dusty bottle we found, we kept calling out her name.  Some got lost down in the catacombs beneath the dungeon and wandered about aimlessly, looking for Phoria, until they perished.

But some of Annie's prisoners, and this time I was one of them, decided they had to escape, they couldn't live with Annie, and Phoria wasn't coming back.  But Annie was a vigilant and punishing warden and time after time she caught us and pulled us back into her chamber of terrors.  Every attempted escape resulted in a harsher punishment which broke our spirits and made mush of our wills.  Annie was a master at brainwashing and she was especially adept at making us believe that there was nothing waiting for us outside the dungeon walls, we were reviled and worthless beings, blights on the face of the earth.  We were better off where we were. That's what she would have us believe, and she was very convincing.  We shook our head in resignation, we were doomed.

But wait!  There was another sister that we'd forgotten about.  Princess Joy!  We'd actually met her first, before we'd met either Phoria or Annie, she may not have been as crazy fun as Phoria, but she was beautiful, in her shimmering clothes,  and most of all kind.  She also made us feel good, but she made us work for it and her rewards were enduring.  Joy was no pushover, but she was real and she was loyal and we knew she would rescue us, if we but asked. She was our only hope.  We went in search of her, struggling past Annie, we broke free from our cell and ran through the endless dark halls  calling a new name.   Finally we rounded a corner, and a dim glow lit the the walls, it was her, Joy.  She'd been waiting for us, waiting all along, to lead us out of the dungeon that surrounded us,  all we had to do was follow her and keep her in our sight.  

Annie didn't give up that easy though,  she gave chase.  She was big and lumbersome, but she was persistent. Some of us got  outside the dungeon walls and saw all of the obstacles looming in front of us and ran back in.   Some of us looked back long enough to let Annie catch us and throw us back in the dungeon.   She managed to wrap her hands around the ankles of some of us and we had to pull her along until we could break free.  That horrid bitch dogged all of us for a measure but the further we got from her lair, the weaker she got and the closer we got to Joy.

So Signe, your daughter may never find her "passion" or joy until she escapes the clutches of the anhedonia that alcoholism cultivates, she needs to find something that she once cherished, or something she could cherish as a means of escape, and then she needs to keep her eye on that object and quit drinking until that object starts to shine.  Here is a link to a discussion about alcohol induced anhedonia that might convince her.

http://www.soberrecovery.com/forums/newcomers-recovery/188184-emotional-anhedonia.html

And my MM friend, it sounds as if you're gaining distance, don't look back and keep going.

P.S.  I know that some of us embrace the anhedonia that alcohol wraps around us, it insulates us from the pain of life but it also keeps us from the antidote to pain which is joy.