Belly of the beast

 

My housemate went off to a farm to buy blueberries and on her way she met a family of honey badgers. I made her describe them to me about five times and gnashed my teeth with envy. Even though I have a garden full of tree frogs and geckos and rare spiders and chameleons and porcupines and geometric tortoises and cute dogs and the neighbours’ cats. And dozens of full-throated birds in song. How I would love to sit and watch a family of honey badgers at play in a woodland clearing.

And to think I once wondered what i would bother with when I got sober, what would relieve the boredom of living drinkless.

A troubled man on one of my many lively mailing lists wrote to me and wanted to discuss his sex addiction. He compared it to having an eating disorder. What did I think about sex addiction, just in general? I read his email and a response formed itself in my mind, made up from malleable and unstable emotional gelignite. I went for a long walk and then I wrote back and said I know nothing about sex addicts and wished him luck with therapy. I prefer not to blow unsuspecting correspondents out of the water with homemade explosive.

But in reality I know a great deal about being on the receiving end of sexual addiction. And this is the letter I wrote as I walked up a hill in the rain.

Sometimes I get a tired feeling when I see this subject comes up. What I am going to post now is not comfortable reading but  it does put sex addiction in a certain perspective.

If you want to talk to someone about sex addiction, talk to a paedophile. My father was first convicted for molesting small children back in the 1950s. he went to prison for a while and then emigrated to British East Africa. He would seem never to have sought help and I am not surprised. He would have faced criminal chanrges and social ostracism. He sexually abused his own childreen, the children of servants, the neighbour’s children, any child he could approach without being caught. We moved  home whenever he felt that  there might be suspicion from a teacher or parent or doctor.

He felt ashamed of the sex addiction but had all kinds of excuses  for doing it (his wife was an active alcoholic), he thought prostitutes were dirty, he liked children and found them more interesting than adult women. He objectified  children as sex objects and did not believe it caused any harm to them. He liked to collect photos of children and much of his activity was voyeuristic or masturbatory. He said that he felt very lonely and misunderstood. He acknowledged that the need to have sex with small children was compulsive, that he could not help himself. He found seducing children and the breaking of taboos both exciting and  intensely pleasurable despite the shame. He liked the ‘hint of violence’ that lurked in stalking and attacking children but made it up to them by  giving the children sweets and gifts. He had no significant relationship with anyone that was not characterised by lies, extreme selfishness and  simply ignoring that person’s hurt or anger. Often he would use  images of children as a numbing game in his mind, something that soothed him and took his mind off problems. Paedophile fantasies were his way of relaxing. Finding the Internet was the great joy of his later years. He linked up with other men who had the same tendencies, but despised or criticised them because he wasn’t that bad or that seedy.

Here in South Africa men with sex addiction sit in groups with convicted paedophiles and protest because their sex addiction only involves sex workers or adult women or boys or men or animals or strangers on the Internet. If they have to sit in therapy with those they have used or lied to, they numb out or distance. Only the presence of paedophiles seems to cause them distress because they are nothing like that, don’t think of their addiction that way. They are normal family men who use compulsive sex as a way of coping. Nothing as repugnant as paedophiles who use compulsive sex as a way of coping.

Nothing like a rant from the daughter of a paedophile.

My father died a few months ago. I love him and struggle to mourn him. I have forgiven him as far as I am able to forgive him. I hope for more healing to take place as I  grow in sober maturity and compassion. But if somebody asks me what I think my father should have done  when  he was first sent to prison, I don’t think therapy or marriage or geographical escapes. I think he should have locked himself up in a hermitage and stayed there for the rest of his life.

Terrible, I know. But his sex addiction caused so much harm to so many children over the course of the next 50 years. Somewhere in the diaries of the mystic  and Trappist Thomas Merton he talks about the fierce and lifelong expiation of those monastics who enter solitary contemplative orders because they are unfit for human society, and how the mercy of God works in their lives. I think I know what he was talking about.

 

Sometimes posting is cathartic, sometimes it is like bleeding onto a nice white desktop. But I know there are others like me reading these words and that something here may resonate.

And I would also like to see sex addictions placed in a more accurate and brutally realistic context.

Bringing colour to the blank canvas

 

A dark and rainy Monday morning with muddy dogs running in and out of the kitchen, myself clodhopping in wellington boots for the garden, planting out opal basil, garlic chives, coriander and ruby chard. Summer rain  smells of torn leaves and wet earth and the drenched honeysuckle tumbling down from the back wall of the garden: it always brings back my schooldays when I was 15 and late for class walking under dripping jacaranda trees, squishing mango pulp into my mouth as I walked along the pavements getting wetter and wetter with the cicadas screaming blue murder and raindrops spattering my straw basher with dark-green and gold hatband. I was expelled three times from the local high school but still made it to deputy-head girl.

I’m reading about neuroplasticity, a hopeful concept for those of us at the mercy of our moods.

‘I believe this single word gives people hope; hope that change is possible. For example, we used to think that we all had a “happiness set point” much like with weight, and that no matter what our circumstances, we would always end up back at baseline. Good scientific evidence substantiates this theory, for example, people who win the lotto or those who are in a terrible accident and become paralyzed, after an initial spike in the expected direction, return to their baseline levels of happiness. Thus it was concluded that we had a happiness set point that was not very moveable. This is great news if you are born happy, however if you aren’t, it leaves you feeling pretty hopeless…And yet the new research in neuroplasticity demonstrates that we can change our level of happiness because we can modify both the activity and structure of our brain through meditation training. Recent research shows that meditation practice increases activity in areas of the brain associated with positive emotion, and shows structural changes in the brain due to long term meditation practice. This new research is quite hopeful, suggesting that although happiness may not change due to external circumstances, changing our internal circumstances, through mindfulness training, can change our level of happiness.’

 

As I garden and mop down muddy dogs, I’m saying prayers for a beloved friend who is going through a terrible time with alcoholism, coming out of withdrawal only to plunge again into the abyss – thatfrightening and downward spiralling cycle we all know so well.

There is a new collection of the letters of Vincent van Gogh just published. A life of such suffering, depression and mental illness. Despite which, he continued to paint:

‘Many painters are afraid of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the truly passionate painter who dares – and who has once broken the spell of ‘you can’t.’

Life itself likewise always turns towards one an infinitely meaningless, discouraging, dispiriting blank side on which there is nothing, any more than on a blank canvas.

But however meaningless and vain, however dead life appears, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth, and who knows something, doesn’t let himself be fobbed off like that. He steps in and does something, and hangs onto that, in short, breaks, ‘violates’ – they say.’

It is so good to be sober and alive, receptive to the viccissitudes of life and falling rain, the simple mundane tasks of the day ahead, talking to friends on the phone, answering emails, chopping vegetables for soup. Listening to housemartins chattering on the verandah, smelling the frgrance of bruised honeysuckle. Moving beyond the appearance of meaninglessness into the great throbbing heart of life, so warm and mysterious. Carpe diem! Let us seize the day!

The miracle of community

 

Last night I went out with some AA friends from the city for supper and we sat and talked and listened to one another on the topic of resentments. Along with digressions into shoes and ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings, why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings. We stayed until the restaurant was past closing time and the manager wanted to throw us out.

It interested me that most of my friends wanted to talk about the resentments of here and now, not the major resentments that they had uncovered in Step 4.  Those they had long forgotten. But all of us have hurts and resentments that stick with us today, as we go about our routines, as we interact with others: slights and grievances and pinpricks, small disgruntled molehills swelling up into volcanic mountains, the anger that we hold onto until it festers within. Momentary passing anger that doesn’t pass.

My fellow diners talked about lingering family resentments. The difficulties of living with a sulky insolent teenager. The heartache and suppressed fury of living with an addict or alcoholic in the family. The long disengagement after divorce, the fraught  relations with step-children, mothers-in-law, the former partner’s new husband or wife. The resentments around the workplace: financial conniving by  business partners, the unfair promotions, the bitterness of being excluded or left behind. The resentments incurred in AA, through pettiness and gossip and members ‘ganging up’ against other members, social networking rather than fellowship, the perils of choosing your own company with the likeminded rather than reaching out to the newcomer and those struggling. I’ve noticed on occasions that the ‘meeting after the meeting’ can undo all the warmth and honesty of the meeting, through speculation and  gossip masked as concern.

‘What you hear here, let it stay here.’

And how each of us has to find a way to come to terms with thie hurt and anger, let go of resentment and move on. ‘Resentment is not an aberration,’ commented one person. ‘It is very rare that anger just passes like lightning and we are able to let go immediately. Most of the time, I know I should let go but I am not ready to do so. I have to make an act of will, say I am willing to forgive, and then just wait for the damn resentment to ebb away. I try not to feed it or encourage it.’

 

There is so much wisdom, generosity and compassion in AA community. As I sat there listening and sharing my own battles, fumbling my way forward to greater understanding, I had the feeling that my particular cherished resentments were melting away,  becoming insubstantial as a small lump of mud dissolving in a bowl of clear water.

 

I’ve had this feeling before. When I sat in a crowded meeting one Sunday evening and suddenly heard my own voice saying out loud that I wanted to drink and felt confused and  unsure what to do. Without addressing me directly, others spoke up at once and shared on how they could identify and what they had done to surrender and work the Steps, how they had been helped, how they had given in to the drink and  then struggled to come back, how they had discovered a Higher Power, how they had reached out in service and the desire to drink had been taken away. As I listened to them with tears in my eyes, four months sober and wobbling on a tightrope, I felt the desire to drink just vanish. By the end of that meeting I knew I would go to sleep sober that night.

We have a community that is one great collective miracle.

 

To change the subject:  a small but necessary disclaimer. I do not publish comments relating to vanity publishing or writing teachers or authors’ professional websites. I don’t publish comments emanating from rehab centres in South Africa or abroad. Don’t send me books for review, I will not give you an obligatory mention. I will not help publicize recovery memoirs in return for a mention on your website. I will not let you use my comments function to sell anything or to criticize  Alcoholics Anonymous. You are welcome to criticize my opinions. I write as a grateful member of AA, but my opinions are my own, on AA or any other aspect of my life.

While each member of A.A. is free to make his or her own interpretations of A.A. tradition, no individual member is ever recognized as a spokesperson for the Fellowship

 

Opening the door to the unexpected

 

The wind is blowing the garden to pieces. I run back and forth with a watering can chased by small dogs convinced that this is the best game yet invented.

Off early to the farmers’ market. As we crossed over the dam created on the old Riviersondereind Rivier (the River without End), there were white-capped waves and a gale-force wind. Pine and gum trees toppled across the mountain slopes. And when we pulled off the road to the old pine-clad farm stall,  the Bedouin tents had blown over in the night so the market was cancelled. There is nothing under our control in this life.

We drove to one of my favourite old hotels for coffee, the oldest coaching inn in South Africa. It was rundown and neglected, filled with tacky Indonesian furniture, and I had a lump in my throat remembering how lovely it had once been, the pretty light rooms with polished furniture, the sash windows and sprigged  cotton curtains. A coaching inn Jane Austen would have liked. Then we went off to a new restaurant set up high on a windy hill, long airy barn-like interiors with views  across the wheat fields and vineyards of the Overberg, and had a unexpectedly wonderful lunch of duckling with tangerines and lamb cutlets next to a deep golden slice of  dauphinoise potatoes. The place buzzing with families and visitors from Gauteng, a dozen or more languages ululating in the air. We bought still-warm ciabattas, bottles of grape juice and apple juice,  pots of planted basil and rainbow-stemmed Swiss chard. Then we took a long scenic drive to see crowds of blue cranes stalking about in newly harvested fields. Gorse a bright bitter yellow on the mountain slopes and electric-blue agapanthus lining the farm roads. But it was not a relaxing drive: reckless or drunken drivers speeding and overtaking us on corners  along the quiet country  roads, a new BMW convertible overturned in a ditch.

I love this sober life. There is nothing I can do about the unpredictable and the uncontrollable elements of my reality, they must be accepted. People do hurtful or tactless or tacky stuff. There are always last minute cancellations. There are always those  who do not realize that they are going to climb into a car and endanger another. That what they post online may strike a false note or wound another deeply. That we misunderstand one another constantly. We are always transgressing boundaries or coming into conflict, falling into short-lived intiomacies, risking betrayal, carelessness, relapse.

And of course the heat may wilt my basil plants, so green and tender.  But there are such wonderful surprises hidden away in each risky enterprise, each attempt at togetherness.  The pleasure on the young chef’s face when he came into the dining room and we all put down our knives and forks to applaud him. Exciting food, an spontaneous atmosphere of festivity. A father swinging his young daughter up onto his shoulder, a family rising to their feet to toasting the silver wedding anniversary of their parents. Hugs exchanged  at a table crowded with crew-cut  young men back from Helmand province.  Small children jumping into the murky waters of a farm dam watched over by an anxious water spaniel.  Lives well-lived for those of us who are lucky enough to have rejoined the world.  Live, love, la heim.

In sobriety, the world comes alive again, we join in that dance with the human community.

Humble perspective

 

This from the late Eric Hoffer, writing in The Art of the Notebook in 1954.

 ’The most important point is – and remains – not to take oneself seriously.  You pass your days as best you can, doing as little harm as possible. Let the desires be few and treat expectations as weeds. You read, scribble as the spirit moves you, hear some new music, see every week the few people you are attached to. Again: guard yourself, above all, against self-dramatization, a feeling of importance, and the sprouting of expectations.”

A place created out of lives

A quiet reflective morning. My deepest sympathy and love to Pam and her family.

Nanowrimo is going well! I wrote nearly 6 000 words before breakfast. Terrible stuff but so many words, all sound and fury signifying nothing.  My housemate saw me talking to myself in the kitchen. ‘I was born doing reference work in sin,’ I said to her in a moment of borrowed inspiration. ‘I hope that is a quotation and not a religious conversion,’ said housemate. Sarcasm!

News flashing around the world about the terrible shooting at Fort Hood. I had just put aside a New Yorker article on murder in America when I saw the news.  ‘The United States has the highest homicide rate of any affluent democracy, nearly four times that of France and the United Kingdom, and six times that of Germany.’  Here in South Africa we have a soaring homicidal zeal not unrelated to our belief that everything can be solved with guns rather than due process of law or more effective policing or ending poverty. We know zilch really  about war-induced PTSD. Or why violence spins out of control.

I have solved my alpaca-manure-meets-rolling-puppies problem. I am putting manure only on the flower beds at the front where puppies don’t go, and packing stinky manure into pots and tubs. It should be in the Promises. ‘You will no longer be defeated by shit logistics.’

 

The poet Louise Gluck:  “I feel quite passionately that the degree to which I have stayed alive as a writer owes much to the intensity with which I’ve immersed myself in the work of people making sounds I haven’t heard.”

 

Syd has kindly pointed out to me that calamari are squid, not octopi/octopuses. I love people who help me get it right. Sadly, the delicious tender baby squiddies known as calamari were tough as old boots despite my simmering them for hours and I am inclined to think they were neither squid nor octopi but some recycled rubber stockings worn by sex fetishists in the 1970s. Everything untrendy and unchic happened in the 1970s. Look at Gary Glitter.

Tomorrow I am going to a farmers’ market  to buy an organic ham for Christmas. Then I am going down to the coast to have fun with some noisy and recalcitrant AA friends. I intend to ask them about resentment and it will be fun listening to them disagree. Sometimes I wonder if there are really 1 200 Steps and nobody tells  the newcomer this for  at least a decade.

 

The poet Claudia Rankine: “I believe that where we are, how we are allowed to live, is determined by the politics of the land—the big politics and the little politics. And it varies depending on where you’re located. I’m very interested in the landscape in general as the site of living, of a place created out of lives, and those lives having a kind of politics and a kind of being that is consciously and unconsciously shaped. Decisions are made that allow us to do certain things, that give us certain freedoms and ‘unfreedoms.’”

How I look forward to a sober weekend full of roses and dolphins and farmers polishing white organic pumpkins.

Random thoughts that come and go

A neighbour has dropped off six sacks of alpaca manure for me, an early festive season gift. I am very grateful but  ambivalent. The garden will stink for a week and then flourish. The puppies will roll in manure and the house will stink morning, noon and night for at least six weeks. I need to find a solution and there is none. Alpacas are bred in the mountains near here. They are smaller than llamas and doe-eyed and perky with heads on curvy dinosaur necks. Their shit stinks to high heaven. It is full of luscious nitrogen that will help my faltering garden to bloom. I cannot face the idea of manure smeared on the carpets and sofa covers and  happy little dogs that reek of manure.

Moving on. Some of you asked in emails about the difference between anger and resentment. I may do a blog on that next week. My point yesterday was that if you are someone who has never been able to feel angry, you are not going to let yourself feel resentful either. All those volcanic and furious emotions are buried under layers of morally justified concrete. You go through the motions of forgiveness without acknowledging there is anything to be forgiven, without feeling the outrage and  anguish and  injustice of what has happened to you. And therefore you have no idea why forgiving you may be harder for others.  You may not know what the word ‘harm’ means.  One of the biggest acknowledged problems with church communities is what we call ’smothered conflict’ which is what happens when nice and ladylike and positive is the only way you feel able to present yourself.

I’m reading about sexual jealousy in Jane Austen.

‘Sexual jealousy is not normally what we think of as Jane Austen’s terrain. But her novels are full of jealousy’s tragic potential. If it weren’t for her intervention, her heroines would be forever losing men to more moneyed or vivacious rivals. In Persuasion she colludes with her heroine to the extent of throwing the other woman off a sea wall. Almost as murderous in its vengefulness as Tolstoy.’

Nanowrimo is not going well. I have a simple theory about how to get published. You write until your hand falls off and then you send  your priceless jewel of a novel to somebody who tells you to rewrite it from scratch. You write until your hand falls off and then you send it back to the same encouraging person who tells you to start yet again. You write until your hand falls off and then your first version is published and it sells badly and you make no money and every single reviewer tells you what you should have written, but that makes no difference because you are writing the next novel that needs to be rewritten from scratch and then your hand really  does fall off and you retire to become a one-book wonder. After your death you are discovered and  people who never knew you make  millions and the best-selling biography dwells on your horrible alcoholism with half a page at the end on how your recovered.

But here is the author Jasper Fforde being encouraging to beginners:

‘I once wrote a novel in 22 days. 31 chapters, 62,000 words. I didn’t do much else—bit of sleeping, eating, bath or two—I just had three weeks to myself and a lot of ideas, an urge to write, a 486 DOS laptop and a quiet room. The book was terrible. 62,000 words and only twenty-seven in the right order. It was ultimately junked but here’s the important thing: It was one of the best 22 days I ever spent. A colossal waste of ink it was, a waste of time it was not. 
Because here’s the thing: Writing is not something you can do or you can’t. It’s not something that ‘other people do’ or ‘for smart people only’ or even ‘for people who finished school and went to University’. Nonsense. Anyone can do it. But no-one can do it straight off the bat. Like plastering, brain surgery or assembling truck engines, you have to do a bit of training—get your hands dirty—and make some mistakes. Those 22 days of mine were the start, and only the start, of my training. The next four weeks and 50,000 words will be the start of your training, too. ’

How grateful I am to be sober. This evening I am going to grill baby octopus (octopi?) called calamari and toss them with chilli and garlic and fresh parsley. There is summer rain falling on the garden and all the roses are in flower, white and pale gold and baby pink. My friend Char is going to stay in the village and not move  after all. My housemate is  going whitewater rafting on the Orange River at the age of 68 and has bought herself lycra leggings in bold orange, purple and black. She is a foolish and brave and wonderful woman. Life is full of surprises and many of those surprises are good things.

Invisible drunkard

 

From an unpublished novel by Aaron Bady of Zunguzungu:

 

‘No one knew that he started each day with a drink, or that he never stopped until falling asleep in front of the TV; he monitored his blood alcohol like a diabetic watched their insulin. Which is to say, even he no longer thought much about it. It was no longer interesting to him. It was just what he did. After years, he understood the range of breath and the danger of close conversation so well that no one ever smelled a thing on him, so well that he even forgot that he was lonely. He never stumbled, never slurred. And that particular openness of expression had become the face his co-workers knew, the person they identified him as when they greeted him in the morning or said good night to. Had they met him sober — not an impossibility, but it never happened — they would have known him, but would also have been bothered by some creeping subconscious fear, a sense that there was something just a little off. And while they would have gone home without being able to articulate what exactly it had been, what precisely had bothered them, they would have dreamed about it that night. But they would have forgotten it in the morning.

‘He was such a high functioning alcoholic, in fact, that when he was killed in a car crash, driving drunk, the accident wasn’t even his fault; the other car had swerved across the median when the driver bent over to change cds. And since no one checks the breath of a dead man, the eulogist stressed what a senseless  tragedy it had been, the hand of fate reaching down to pluck one of us, any of us, for reasons that would known to none of us.’

Swallowing anger

 

The newly sober woman friend I mentioned yesterday, whom I shall call Jacqui because she has dark hair  and reminds me of Andy Warhol’s images of Jacqueline Onassis, came around for supper.  Moussaka with a green salad. She had three mouthfuls of moussaka and two helpings of green salad and kept reaching for the wine glass that wasn’t there. I used to do that too.

‘The thing is,’ she explained to me, ‘I don’t have any resentments. I am just not an angry person.’

I used to think that way too. Getting strong or reprehensible emotions out of me was like trying to pry an oyster shell open with a plastic spoon. And while I was drinking I just kept swallowing anger, feeling no pain. Except that every now and again a simmering rage would bubble up and I would be horrified at myself.

Once I was at a church gathering with a moderately bad hangover. A very kindly balding theologian came over and told me  that as a Catholic he prayed every day for the souls of unborn children whose misguided mothers had resorted to abortion. I knew then and I know now that abortion is not a topic  for debate over coffee with strangers.  It is an explosive minefield. The theologian was either a social nitwit or one of those passive-aggressive types who likes to drive people crazy. But I wasn’t far off the crazymaking stuff myself.

I turned around to this kindly man in his dog collar and said: ‘Do you realise that if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament?’

Simmering rage.

I grew up into a ferment of sexual politics. The war between men and women. When I left home and moved to another country and went to university, I did voluntary work for two years for a Rape Crisis counselling centre. I thought it would help me work through things. I didn’t realise I was ‘restimulating’ traumatic memories for myself. I used to talk to a student counsellor every now and again and I would sit in front of him with an earnest  but pleasant look and say: ‘I may have a trust problem with men.’ What I couldn’t say was that I hated men. Every last man left standing.

I know now this sentiment isn’t uncommon in abused women. But it remains unsayable.

I stopped studying political science because I  worried about getting too rigid and strident. It infuriated me that the men in the seminar didn’t worry about dominating the  discussions or becoming rigid or strident, I felt very resentful of their indifference to what women thought of them. Instead I did a course in the cultural history of Western Europe and  wrote a term paper on fairy tales. A nice safe topic.

One night I was sitting up in the  university library with moths fluttering around  in lamplight, reading through commentaries on Perrault and Grimm. I kept thinking about all the wicked witches and heartless stepmothers. And then I thought about Sleeping Beauty and Snow White.

Why would a man,  even in a fairy tale, fall in love with unconscious women, I wondered. Why would  a man want to kiss a woman who has been in a coma for a century? Why would a man want to make love to Snow White who is lying dead in a glass coffin with a piece of poisoned apple stuck  in her throat?

Why are the only good and lovable women in fairy tales sleeping or dead?

Simmering rage doesn’t just cool down by itself. I went to an academic drinks party in a department  with fifteen women lecturers where  the only  staff with tenure were  white men. Angry smiling women all around, gulping down nasty cheap wine. A balding professor ambled up to me and said, ‘Do you know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in a dress? You’re not the most feminine of women, you know.’

I smiled at him  pleasantly and said: ‘Well you’re not particularly masculine, so that makes us quits. Plus, you’re bald and I always associate balding with erectile dysfunction.’

He looked at me and I could see him thinking: ‘Ballbreaking dyke. I’ll get you.’

I left home when I was 17 and had already  started reading Germaine Greer, Betty Friedan, Andrea Dworkin, Adrienne Rich. But it was not until I was 27 that I realised my father had battered my mother. I grew up thinking men  had a right to hit women. Women were hysterical and  childish and vicious and  deserved to be treated like children if they behaved like children. I also thought it was fine for adults to hit children, especially if they behaved like children.

When I was 27 and started thinking about  what had happened in my own  home, I wanted to kill someone. I wanted to see men who raped or hit women or raped children lined up against a wall and blown to pieces. These feelings frightened me so much that my drinking went awry for that year. I walked around like a time bomb with the fuse lit. Then the feelings drowned in alcohol, the anger turned inward and I sunk into another decade of depression.

Fast forward. When I was about eight months sober, I sat in on an anger management course for men run by my gentle friend Christopher. He was talking to a large and belligerent man who was protesting that he had never hit his wife. He had only punched walls and smashed mirrors and broken things.

“Well, you see ,’ said Christopher patiently and reasonably. ‘That is all you need do. Society does the rest. Women are terrorized and silenced and rendered powerless all the time  because they know what might happen to them. What would you feel like if your wife carried a gun around with her all the time and pointed it in your direction each time you tried to say something? Would she need to pull the trigger to keep you in your place?’

I sat and looked at my gentle friend Christopher and for the first time I knew there are men like him everywhere. Compassionate and aware men who know the score. And that  the anger calms down when  somebody is listening to women talk about pain and terror.

So what about the newly sober Jacqui who is not an angry person? I just say to her: ‘Give it time. If the feelings are there, they will come up when you are ready to deal with them.’

Blunted, muted, starved

 

From Nancy Connors’ review of Lit: A Memoir by Mary Karr, a story of finally getting sober:

Karr drifted in and out of Alcoholics Anonymous. She wouldn’t pick a sponsor, made fun of the way attendees dressed and acted and adamantly refused to succumb to AA’s major requirement: giving oneself over to a higher power.

“For me,” she writes, “all color is leeched from the landscape. I’m blunted, muted, starved, yet stubbornly refusing the one suggestion everyone sober for very long makes: prayer. I recoil from any talk of spiritual crap, though I can’t fail to notice that the happier, less angry ex-drunks talk about such matters without any strapped-on, phony-sounding zeal.”