Day 105 and counting

Icy and overcast Saturday morning.

Woken by a noisy house sparrow perched in the scarlet poinsettia tree. Today is day 105 sober, and I feel both grateful and scared. Procrastinating about freelance work, feeling irritable with myself. One of those days where I hand over and hand over and hand over to my Higher Power. No cravings and no desire to drink, but finding it hard to be with myself, hard to pay attention. 

This from my Hazelden Thought for the day, very apposite:  ‘Alcoholics are unable or unwilling, during their addiction to alcohol, to live in the present. The result is that they live in a constant state of remorse and fear because of their unholy past and its morbid attraction, or the uncertain future and its vague forebodings. So the only real hope for the alcoholic is to face the present. Now is the time. Now is ours. The past is beyond recall. The future is as uncertain as life itself. Only the now belongs to us. Am I living in the now?’ 

That ‘unholy past’ amuses me. My fingers are chilly and numb as I sit inputting here – in a short while I shall go and make lasagna from scratch, finely chop up Rosa tomatoes and onion, dice ripe avocado for a salsa. Balsamic vinegar and olive oil, a grind of black pepper, Maldon salt. Very therapeutic, home cooking.

Sunlight and cold

Dazzling Friday morning, went and trudged around a muddy vineyard in Franschhoek, looking at a new boutique hotel emerging like a costly gilded phoenix. Una stayed at the car playing with an all-white baby bullterrier called Boomer.

Day 104 of sobriety, feeling great and wondering if I can ask Peter to be my sponsor or if I should wait a while. Tense and driven at moments, but no desire to drink. Mindfulness. Pay attention. Stop worrying so much. Thinking rather dolefully about the serenity prayer.

On our way back we stopped and chatted with Sean who smokes his own bacon and is thinking about smoking olive oil, having a stall at the Franschhoek market. Lovely looking down through pines to the blue waters of the dam.

Help me move forward and learn how to work more steadily and conscientiously. Help me grow and reach out to others, move beyond self, give of self more readily. Just help. Such a rushed messy track through life, mindless and unresolved. Step 3, reaching out in the dark and trusting the dark.

Day 103 and going strong

Thursday, icy weather across South Africa and snow blanketing Johannesburg for the first time since September 1981. I am on day 103 without a drink and feeling grateful. Tense about the slow-moving copy for Andrew S’s website, but getting very little feedback from him one way or another. The copy isn’t that bad given my aambivalence about destination tourism and luxury game lodges. 

A remarkable and moving AA meeting in Hope Street on Tuesday evening, lay awake thinking about it for hours afterwards. The kindness of fellow-sufferers. Knot of anxiety and struggle with trust. To go forward and keep going back, to stop thinking so hard and just get on with it. That irrepressible amusement that rose in most of us sitting there when a young woman at the back said in plaintive indignation: ‘I went to see my sister and mother to do my step 9 and they slapped a restraining order on me.’ What wasn’t she recalling right there in the midst of her well-meant reconciliation attempt? What might she have forgotten? Oops …

Life on Life’s Terms

Gusty and cold Monday morning. Woke up from a strange dream of eating decaying fruit, near a flight of stairs leading to a flat where I was renting. Cup of coffee in hand, it took me a while to realise today marks 100 days of sobriety. None of my doing, huge gratitude. Let go, let God.

  

Sent off some tourism copy to Andrew S who said it is too long and wants ‘punchy’ copy, in capital letters. Does he mean punchier, or that my copy is not punchy at all? Dos he know punchy from po-faced?

  

And David C coming to see me this afternoon about citations (sigh), a visit earlier from Pam Syndecombe and Jean Thomas – Ula’s scones a wild card success. Rising by leaps and bounds like glossy profiteroles. Laughter and neighborliness. I have posted on cyber sites and thought about the easy uncompromising nature of genuine surrender. Wondering why we make life so complicated for ourselves.

  Noeleen called – she has mumps and is sending a friend of hers from the Karoo to talk with me about interiors. Not sure what is happening at work or if I am having supper with Diana tomorrow. Rain belting down outside, a bleak cold front descending from the north.

Weekend

Saturday. Started in on Step Four, the moral inventory, and was immediately overcome by a feeling of guilt and dread.  

Most encouraging quote, discovered on Sunday: ‘The moral inventory is a cool examination of the damages that occurred to us during life and a sincere effort to look at them in a true perspective. This has the effect of taking the ground glass out of us, the emotional substance that still cuts and inhibits.’ ~Bill W, 1957  

I am not really ready to do this yet. Especially alone without guidance. Sitting here and noting the despondency, the feeling of being unable to get any further. In part because I am trying to do too much on my own. Too much to try and recall all at once, too much unfinished business. New-found peace vanishing. This quote from one of my sites: ‘Conscience is what hurts when everything else feels so good.’ 

Fierce winds all afternoon. A neighbour, a shy and fussy elderly bachelor, came in with a wrapped parcel to show me a curious pedestal jardinière he had bought somewhere. I thought it ugly but with Empire lines, possibly an 1830 piece. Handpainted china under-plate of a country church, with a flower border, gauche blues and pinks. He thought the funny little object ravishing and told me has hankered after it for 40 years. I pretended admiration. Out in the street, a huge branch had been wrenched from a keurboom tree. 

Sunday, 99 days. Woke up and decided to lighten up. Not beat up on myself, not try to force everything, not get into a knot of anxiety about things I can’t control. Very awkward time with Una’s sister in Worcester. Brunch with A.’s kind friends. I feel her eating disorder is getting worse (at the age of 50). Careless  and dismissive talk about local therapists getting a divorce, the psychiatrist leaving his wife for a psychologist from another Boland town. Does nobody have any boundaries? A. seeing these people professionally. Disconcerting to realize how much she keeps from us. But leaving, I felt sorry for her and glad that Una is prepared to see her regularly with no hard feelings. A very difficult, troubled woman struggling to get over her divorce. The green budgie snickering in its cage.

Came back and  posted on two sites, glad to have done so, paying attention to the tone and reading other people’s comments, trying to interact as much as possible. Worrying about work, the travel pieces, planning to start them tomorrow. Noting the procrastination but acknowledging the work done elsewhere on another area of my life. Hoping for a good night’s sleep — the temperature dropping, the village still and wrapped in a muffled quiet, occasional rushes of wind.    

The First Step: a reminder

First Step of Recovery: We admitted that we were powerless over alcohol, and that our lives had become unmanageable. 

Having posted for the first time on a recovery website and joined two closed online women’s groups. Praying this first step in a spirit of surrender; shaken by an unexpected conversation with Paul A who told me Cxxx B, co-director of a well-known treatment centre, has relapsed after 19 years. She was a sponsor of mine many years ago in the mid-1980s. Sharp, perspicacious, kindly but pragmatic rather than insightful. I wonder what happened. Tremendous sympathy — I hope she picks herself up, dusts herself off, etc. No time for false pride. 

Praying in my own case about the dreary fabric of lies and wasted years of the past, the tense anxious feelings that hound me at times. Is this the right way to move forward? One step at a time. Asking for peace of mind. To let go and let You. Today it is 98 days, another fresh miracle in itself. 

Saturday morning. Strong hot wind, dusty and withering. My email filled with encouraging messages from closed women’s AA support groups to which I have been replying all morning. Posting cyber bulletins too. Some persisting anxiety about the slow pace of work, but lightening up in mood. Taking time to smell the roses. Not that there are any roses here in the winter-blasted Overberg at the end of June. The wind smells of dry grasses and bitter fynbos and the dust of the veld.

Friday morning, taking it slow

Woke up and felt an immediate pang of guilt for postponing meetings and delays on deadlines. I haven’t been realistic about work schedules and I need to look at forthcoming work deadlines more realistically.

Gratitude. A day at home, time to edit at my own pace. It is strange weather, warmer than  usual, with a strong feverish wind blowing across the field and down from the mountains to the north. More rain? Another winter gale?

We said goodbye to Hamilton who is flying out to Dubai and then France later today, not very keen to go. Since his wife’s death, his life has been a matter of distractions to keep himself busy and pass the time. He turns 77 this year and I don’t know if the grief has eased very much. He was happily married for more than 50 years.

Down at Jean T’s home, pale pink cyclamens on the dining room table, blooming in the filtered light. A gentle satisfying sight in the tidy but fussy room, old-fashioned, the interiors of an elderly English couple managing on a careful retirement package. Family photographs, barometers, a model sailing ship high on a cabinet, lace curtains and blinds. Jean still frail after the heart attack but enjoying Una’s robust humour, the story of Hammy creeping round the side of the church to peer through the darkenened windows to see if she was sitting there in the prayer meeting when he was delivering half a pig from the farm. Him saying to Una as he climbed back into the car, ‘There they are, all the ones who don’t bother to get to kerk on a Sunday.’ Wrong as slurs go. I would have laughed so if I had looked up and seen him in his old fine-checked cap peering through the windows like some evangelical peeping Tom. The farmer delivering the slaughtered meat to townies and all of his customers in church praying for a revival. We were a round dozen (‘like the apostles’ said silly Olive and I wondered who would care to be identified with Judas) and the prayers mildly fervent, thankfully less wordy and gossipy than usual. It is a very repressed church in many ways, but some kindhearted, live-and-let-live people. Perhaps it is best to let go of the analysing and simply stick to praying. For several years, after a hurtful beginning with the community church here, I felt it was important to be self-protective. Now I’d rather put self aside and just see if You can use me in any way.

Winter Solstice

Winter solstice and a flare of unseasonble warmth.

 Saw David K in his art house with blue, cream and grey mosaic walks and wall murals, Zimbabwean sculptures, Chagall prints, Jungian-themed books. An intense perceptive man in his late 30s with dark bushy hair – I like him very much. We talked about the Topamax. My sense of being no longer haunted by the past, no addictive cravings, no self-soothing behaviours, no need to try to medicate distress or stabilize moods as an amateur in isolation. His wife the mosaic-maker and artist. He showed me an extraordinary charcoal gouache by a Zimbabwean woman, deep horse-shoe or uterine shape. I will see him in three months time and stay on the smallest possible dosage.

Today it is 96 days of sobriety, oddly effortless. Difficult days at work, concentrating on holding steady, not letting myself try to do too much or get over-anxious. One day at a time. Reading an online recovery forum and praying.

I planted up succulents – climbing aloes, echeveria, aeoniums – for Una’s sister when we went through to Worcester. She has invited us for Sunday brunch. Noting that I had a tension headache on the way back, I suggested we drive up over the mountain pass towards Kaimansgat (untranslatable). Magnificent, heartbreakingly beautiful. A hidden valley, the Elandskloof Dam like a steel etching far below us, the mountain slopes scarred by last year’s veld fires. Thinking as we drove: relax, let go, have faith. Leafless apple trees, grey mountain fynbos, ridged peaks the colour of iron rust.

Wrote to SW this morning, who has bought a farm in the Eastern Cape as a spiritual retreat only to return there after Findhorn to a very unspiritual reception, that I will pray with her for discernment. What will be will be.

Taking it slow

Taking it slow, going gently and calmly. One step at a time.

 Woke up anxious and after browsing an online recovery forum sat up in bed reminding myself to stay in the present, one day at a time. Had a bath and worked on features, immediately feeling better as the text came together. Working slowly, but not fixating or stressing. Spoke with Sarah L about the website copy for the travel destination company and realized there is a great deal of conflict going on there. Not really my problem but I shall have to work most of the structure for the copy out by myself. Sarah says she and her co-workers feel they have spent too much time on this website already and just want it over and done with, off their desks. 

Made a simple vichysoisse soup for lunch with baby leeks, potatoes and a little freshly ground nutmeg. Cups of tea, coffee, glass of milk. It is very cold here and I have no idea what the weather will be like in the city tomorrow. The municipality has sawed or sawn up the fallen tree outside and carted it away. A casserole bubbling away on the Dover stove for supper.

Gratitude and inner quietening, planning a short story of 7 000 words. The introductory pargraphs read like Henry James suffering from an attention deficit disorder. It is intensely and unabridgedly autobiographical, so I shall have to change all kinds of details as I go on. Once I have a first draft, I can revise with an eye to paying markets. One small manageable step at a time.

Three months

Three months and 92 days.

 I am wondering how much I owe to Topamax – I suppose I may never know. No desire to touch any stimulants, no cravings, no sense of struggle at all. And I was put onto a very small dosage of Topamax for something quite different. There may be other factors: shock, the eye surgery, the therapeutic interventions, the enforced rest, realizing how much I had distressed and alarmed others. But suddenly the anger and confusion and desperate need to anaesthetize myself had vanished like a faint grey mist hanging over the dam at sunrise.  Gratitude. In church this morning all I could think about, feel in my heart, was thankfulness. My emotions so much more level (not exactly flat or prosaic but definitely more down-to-earth).

 The mystery of answered prayer, of happiness and the richly fulfilled life, overflowing with joy. My eyesight so exceptionally sharp, better than it has been for almost a decade. Clarity and vulnerability within, a heart of flesh. Yearning in me to live more thankfully, calmly, trustfully.

I kept praying that somehow You would help me because my life was out of control and I could not help myself, did not know what to do, how to go on. I was so angry that my life was being destroyed from within and there was nothing I could do, I was powerless to help myself. And You achieved what I could never have done, never have believed possible.

This, the first breakthrough in almost 30 years.