Scaling The Sublime

Sublime:

 

1. Characterized by nobility; majestic.

2.a. Of high spiritual, moral, or intellectual worth.

b. Not to be excelled; supreme.

3. Inspiring awe; impressive.

4. Archaic Raised aloft; set high.

 

My work stint is done for the time being and, as if I haven't whined enough about it, I feel the need to describe the experience to you yet again.  Like some whiny kid who got sent off to camp for the summer when she'd rather stayed home and played with her friends.

But truly, for the past four months, since I knew I was taking this job, I've felt like a wimpy kid that was being sent off to one of those wilderness camps to toughen him up.  I was terrified every single day, and when I say terrified, I mean terrified.  I've come to realize that my biggest fear is looking stupid.  That fear has held me back from so much, and I'm sure it had more than a little bit to do with my drinking.

I woke up every morning this summer terrified that I would make a fool of myself, and I did.  I was clumsy, I was out of practice, I heard stupid questions coming out of my mouth that I wanted to gobble back down as soon as I heard them escape my lips and saw the look of incredulity that crossed the person's face that I was talking to.  

And I had nothing to combat this stupidity and fear with except getting up every morning and facing it again so I'd get less stupid and less fearful day by day.

But every day was a new opportunity to display my lack of knowledge, and boy, did I.

 

With nothing in my own power to abate my terror and embarrassment, I turned to my Co-Writer and I got up thirty minutes early every morning and said a rosary, some mornings that meant getting up at 4:30 am.  I didn't pray for him to make it easier on me, well, not every day, instead I prayed for strength to get through the day.  

I prayed that he would give me the strength to be the person he needed me to be that day and I prayed to Mary to lend me a measure of her grace and kindness. So at least when the day was finished, my co-workers might look at each other and say, "Well, she might be thick as a post, but she sure is nice." lol

With four days left on my contract, no one had said anything about extending, which didn't surprise me.  Besides, I'd already decided even if they begged me to stay, I wasn't going to,  God didn't mean for me to be this unhappy.  This was a sign that I needed to move on from the nursing profession.

Then they asked me to stay.

I worked another two weeks and on my last day, Friday, one co-worker pulled me out of a patient's room to hug me goodbye and say that he wished I would stay and that some of the others would go.  Another co-worker said she would miss my smile, my laughter and my disposition. Another that he had never heard me complain or criticize and he had worked with traveling nurses for ten years and that just didn't happen.  My charge nurse said she wasn't going to let me go.

I got my morning prayers answered.

 

In spite of my terror-filled summer, I had so many sublime moments.  Moments when everything was right in my world.  Where I was right in my world.  Even when I felt the stupidest and most scared, I loved myself and I was proud of myself.

I never had that when I was drinking.

And you can't reach sublime until you do.

P.S.  I'm glad to be back, I missed you guys.

 

 

 

 

Just LIving Life

Ok, I guess I better check in, if I must, do I have to ?

My work assignment finished up on July 20th and I have been living a very self-indulgent life since then.

Last week my two oldest grandsons, they're cousins, came to stay with me.  Just me and them with no Gameboys, no Xbox, no Playstation, hell, the DVD player didn't even work!  Boy, did we have fun!  I have to admit that I did lose my patience a couple of times though.  One night as we were playing Pictionary the younger of the two kept switching what he was supposed to be drawing in the middle of his turn.

Now I don't think I'm that hard core when it comes to playing friendly board games, but at one point the older cousin turned to the younger one and said, "Whoa! Don't get her so frustrated that she starts cussing again." ( I let a couple GD's  slip this week after one boot down the river incident and one ball-kicking incident. I'm not talking soccer or footballs, I'm talking gonads.)

I never laughed so hard in my life.  I told them they were more fun than a bunch of drunks.

This week, I have been completely on my own up here, (don't worry, the cap'n is still in the picture, he's just working.).  I can't even begin to explain how wonderful it has been. I get up in the morning, I piddle, I'm not talking about that kind of piddle but I do that too, and I write.  I eat lunch, btw I've gone back to an old diet site I used to follow Dr. Gourmet, the recipes are great, even though I have to admit I cheat a little bit on the no-salt and no-fat mayo and sour cream dictates.  I've lost a little weight but the best thing is, I feel healthier and the sugar cravings seemed to have abated.  A little bit.

Anyway, I eat, I procrastinate, I write a little more, I read about writing, I think about writing, I check my fb page, Mr. Stan decides he has to go out and piddle.... Let me tell you, this business of writing the world's greatest, most life-changing American novel is time consuming, hard shit.

So there you have it, an idyllic, extraordinarily, ordinary life.  I'd be lying if I said that old asshole liquor doesn't whisper my name sometimes. It does, some days more than others.  Some days it tries to convince me that I've learned my lesson, I'd know better next time. I'd be able to stop.

Fucking liar!

I just gently remind myself, that some people can drink and have the life described above.

But I can't!

But my little hermit world is about to come to an end, the cap'n returns home tomorrow then I leave on Sunday to go back to work at the same hospital where I was working before this short "stay-cation."  They actually want me back, can you believe it?  They must be desperate! LOL

Mountains

Last night my brother, sister-in-law,  nephew and I were returning from the cancelled fireworks show in our little mountain town.  The windshield wipers were slapping at the rain and my sister-in-law and I were singing along to "Chapel of Love" on the radio as we turned onto the "bumpety" washboard road up to our cabin.  It was full dark but you could see the hulk of the dark mountains in the night cloud mist.

I thought of those settlers that had lived in the group of log cabins up the road from our place more than one hundred years ago.  I thought of how those mountains had stopped them in their tracks and kept them from getting to where they wanted to go.  The promised land of California or Oregon or Washington, where the soil wasn't stingy and full of boulders, where the winters didn't last most of the year, where people could hang onto the promise of spring.  I thought of how even in the dark, you can feel those mountains looming over you, threatening at any moment to crush you, both physically and spiritually.

And I thought, I can't believe I'm singing along aloud to the radio with other people listening and I haven't been drinking.  And I can't believe that I my brother and sister-in-law brought my nephew back to see me after their last visit.  The visit that spurred this blog and my recovery, you can read about that catastrophe here in my very first blog Forgive Unto Thyself .

To give you a short synopsis, that visit started with me giddily drunk and playing ballerina across the stream, breaking my toe while trying to rescue an escaped flip-flop.  Somewhere in the middle of the visit my sister-in-law threatened to hide my bottle from me, I just smiled woozily at her and then promptly puked up the dinner she had just fixed as she sat beside me on the couch (nice, huh?).  The last three days of the visit I was in withdrawal and couldn't get myself out of my bed in the loft of our cabin while they tip-toed down below.  Did I mention that my six year old grandson was also visiting?

Suffice it to say, that I wouldn't have blamed them if they never came back.  But they did come back. Because, since that last visit I have climbed me some mountains and I've moved or torn down the ones that were standing in my way. 

 Mountains don't scare me anymore. I am no longer trapped in the dark, waiting for that crushing blow to come. 

I know how to climb.

Russell Brand on heroin, abstinence and addiction » The Spectator

I have to say I'm not a fan of Russell Brand's acting or humor, he should have been a writer because he can sure as hell write.  I'm not a heroin addict, but I can taste the envy he has for his former addicted self because I have felt it myself lately, that misguided sick yearning for the way things used to be,  right down to the middle of the night lonely sips of wine, right to the boozy lethargic ambivalence.

The escape at all cost, that's what it is.  It makes no sense at all to yearn for that misery but when booze or drugs has always been our go-to-guy for avoidance of all things bad and uncomfortable, it only makes sense that we would miss that instant sweet relief and dwell upon it when things are falling to shit around us, turning a blind eye to the piles of shit that booze and drugs wrought in our lives.

Don't get worried about me, I'm not gazing with longing at every liquor store or bar I pass, I'm just going through a stressful growth period and I know I'll come out the other side stronger. Because in the end all I have to do and the only thing I can do, as Russell says, is not drink. Period.

Russell Brand on heroin, abstinence and addiction » The Spectator

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!!