September process

It helps when I wake at 3am and can’t get back to sleep and sit reading James Frey’s hyperbolic Million Little Pieces and then lie in the cold darkness feeling diminished and belittled and angry and useless, it helps to know that I am sober and haven’t got a hangover on top of all the uncomfortable feelings. Which are just feelings and nobody ever died from just enduring the feelings. On the other hand, many have died from attempting to avoid feelings, especially when the escape turns into a motherfucker of an addiction, as James Frey would put it. (What a pity he didn’t just tell his story without exaggerating, lying and playing for extra sympathy.)

September is getting underway, the beginning of spring and my natal birthday month, a Libra air sign of a month. Looking out of the study window I see that some of the snow on the mountains has melted, although it is still very cold.

I’m making a large white-and-blue pot of grated ginger tea, which is not tea at all but grated fresh ginger and boiling water, with a squeeze of lemon. For lunch I shall have some lentils with cumin, garlic, chilli and fresh rosemary. Is rosemary the right herb? There’s some origanum but no more coriander. When I’m not reading Frey and wanting to go out and sit over coffee wth suffering alcoholics, I’m also reading Julie/Julia, which I first read as a blog. Julie spent a year saving her sanity by cooking every single recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, one day at a time. She saved her marriage, her sanity and landed a publishing contract. I wouldn’t choose Julia Child myself (Elizabeth David or Maddhur Jaffrey or Claudia Roden maybe) but the therapeutic value of cooking is nothing new to me. I see that lovely cookery writer Elisabeth Luard has also just published a memoir recounting how living with her brilliant charming adventurous and philandering alcoholic husband, Nicholas, made her take up cooking in order to survive the terror and misery and shame of his chaos. Cooking is a metaphor for so much in life…

So I am going to spend a couple of hours working, then go for a walk in the frosty spring air, then make lunch and do some more work. And hopefully the bloodyminded mood will lift somewhere along the way.

And that the alarming new twinges of toothache will resolve themselves quietly because I can’t afford a dentist. Dentists and therapy tend to be crucial at those times when they are out of the question. The dentist may not be optional and I am going to have to ‘make a plan’ as we are so fond of saying here in Africa.

But in the meantime I can browse my recovery bloggers and borrow a little es&h (experience, strength and hope) because, well, it could be worse and any day sober is a miracle. Whether or not it feels that way.

Take my hand

Yesterday, as I was coming out of a lunchtime meeting In a nearby market town, a newly sober woman stopped me and asked me to help her.

 

We went up the road to sit amongst borders of marguerites and astrantia and honey-scented buddleia., drinking tea and eating a delicious buttery cake or biscuit. I talked about Step One and listened to her quibble and argue with herself. More tea, more biscuits!

 

‘We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable.’

 

So simple and so obvious. But for years I cherished the idea that I was only powerless sometimes and did not like to think that my life’s unmanageability was linked to a daily habit of drinking to excess. I wouldn’t admit that alcohol was my solution and escape and drug, that to go anywhere  or any length of time without alcohol made me miserable. That alcohol helped me push aside all the distress and urgency I sometimes felt about so much going wrong in my life, the disappointment and procrastination and missed opportunities, the health scares, the loneliness and failure to sustain relationships.

 

And until I was ready to say that the unmanageability of a sorry excuse for a life was somehow connected to being powerless over alcohol, nothing and nobody could help me. I was unable to save my own life. I still wanted to be able to drink. I didn’t want to stop, didn’t feel I had to stop.

 

Looking back now I can see that the illusion of choice was just delusion. I needed alcohol because I was trapped in alcoholism, had no idea of being able to live without alcohol. It was only possible to go without alcohol  for any length of time if I knew there would be drinking at the end of the temporary abstinence.

 

And yesterday I was so grateful to feel free within — no craving, no fighting  myself within my head ( that endless internal squabbling!) about drinking or not-drinking, no shame, no sense of being unable to cope, no muddle, no unwellness. I could sit and be present and just listen. Bringing her back to the same points again and again, but lovingly.

 

The choice is hers — the effort is hers. But if she reaches out for a helping hand I am more than happy to be there for her. Everything can only get better in sobriety. All I can share is what worked for me: and hope she wants the same miracle in her life.

Exposure and focus

Just reading about the new American poet laureate to succeed Charles Simic, Kay Ryan. A comment she made in relation to the increased publicity and privacy caught my eye: “I realized that whatever we do or don’t do, we’re utterly exposed.”

 

Exposure and risk. I think about the way I talk about my life so openly in meetings, the recovery process in which to be secret is so often to be sick. About this blog. About the painful autobiographical roots of  my fiction.

 

To stand out there on an exposed ledge, shivering and feeling a cold wind, feeling vertigo, the fear of falling. But a sense too of living on the edge and choosing to look up or down, choosing to live with risk. And aware that if I fall, others will catch me, that there are a few others out on that ledge alongside me.

 

Friends, new friends for me, around for supper last night and an uncomfortable evening. The food passable. The conversation strained at times but good will and humour all around. He is a difficult man, talented, pedantic, an unreconstructed snob and brilliant musician who decided to become a solicitor. She was much easier. A singer, a cancer survivor, quick and kind and witty.

 

After they left I dreamt I was listening to the male guest talk and kept holding up a glass of water to him with trembling hands. He became agitated and exasperated and asked me not to do so eventually, pointing out how distracting and unnecessary this was. I was shocked at myself and then lost my temper — got up and said ‘I can’t sit here any longer’ and went out to sit on the back steps of the old family home in a country that no longer exists. Waiting to see if anyone would come out to me, invite me back. Nobody came.

 

It was a dream about self-sabotaging behaviour but also about the misunderstandings around expectations. And of course in the dream he resembled my father. Thirst and water, thirsting for something other than water. Interrupted narratives. Belonging and not-belonging, and walking away from an unbearable situation after rejection. Offering something that the other really does not need or want.

 

Woke up and the dawn was just beginning, the skies grey and streaked with crimson. Sat in the study enjoying the sun, bright and fierce as metal, a glittering mirror.  Thinking about writing all through the day, working at exposing the unspoken and bringing a story into being from nothing. How hard and lonely it is, but I would not be myself without this daily challenge.

 

Thinking too that little by little  I am finding my voice, growing a voice (how strange that sounds) but as I construct a new self in recovery, so I hear a stronger and braver voice speaking from the solar plexus.

 

Tha naked self out in the world, ultimately alone and daring to stand near the precipice. Watched by others and unprotected from their gaze. The wind blowing, darkness falling. But standing there exultant because the self has chosen to stand here, in precisely this spot, shining and transparent, lit from within. A visible life, unshadowed as a pane of glass, burning and radiant. ‘See through me/see my through’, as the poet James Merrill once wrote. To risk being known and coming to know.