Weekend sobriety

Went off to bed early with a large mug of Horlicks, fell asleep and woke at midnight with a raging temperature, shivering and my stomach very upset. Lay awake and convinced myself that I was going through a bout of malaria. Got up and sponged myself down, went back to bed and slept dreamlessly for hours. The fever seems to have broken.

It is really just unseasonal flu and because I can’t take antibiotics, it is taking a while to work through my system. Reminds me a little of those early weeks of jittery sleeplessness and emotionally oscillating like a yoyo that I went through when I first sobered up. The impact of alcohol on the body is devastating and when that alcohol is removed the body goes a little crazy, as does the mind and the emotions. I remember that I couldn’t think straight or concentrate and was amazed at AA members advising me to read the BB when I could not take anything much in. I needed the support of meetings and phone calls and just to sit it out until the withdrawal symptoms stopped.

When I was in the UK I would often see a grey-faced and wobbly newcomer being given a great big indigestible copy of the Big Book by some well-intentioned member with 16 years sobriety and grin to myself, thinking, ‘It will be a while before you get to that!’ Some recovering alcoholics have shockingly bad memories and many cannot really recall what early sobriety felt like. They want to discuss the intricacies of Step 9 with somebody who can scarcely keep down a glass of juice in the morning and is addled by withdrawal. A friend emailed me yesterday and told me in a postscript that while in rehab she did all Twelve Steps in her first three weeks, being coached and guided by a gung-ho counsellor at the rehab centre. ‘When I got out of there,’ she wrote ‘I realised I couldn’t remember any of them except something about having my sanity restored and that made me indignant because I didn’t think I was insane.’

Getting sober and moving on from our drawn-out alcoholic adolescence takes time. I realise that more and more as I learn to live from day to day without being intoxicated or self-medicating or numbing myself out. Just staying conscious and aware, letting the moods come and go, learning from whatever the day has to teach me

There is a beautiful misty dawn coming up over the fields and it looks as if this will be a hot spring day, leaning into summer. A rooster’s cry in the distance (many villagers on smallholdings keep poultry). I feel grateful to be awake and able to appreciate the sweet dawn air. It could all be so much worse.

The heartache will heal in time. The writers’ block will ease up. There will be better days and harder days. Right here and now I am just drinking my lukewarm coffee and looking at the sun burning mist off wet grass.

Bright & early

Woken by sunshine sliding in through a crack in the curtain. After i finish this post I am going out to repot a small curry bush, grey and smelling like freshly made tandoori paste. It overpowers all the herbs around it and has some insignificant dirty yellow flowers late in summer, but for me it is such a part of the South African back yard that I can’t create herb gardens without it. I’m not sure if it is the same botanical species as Hypericum revolutum, or related to the helichrysums, and it resembles santolina. The smell of curry with turmeric and ground coriander is very strong. My neighbour Jackie thinks it is an ugly old thing that smells terrible.

Another long day of writing and editing, hoping it goes better than yesterday. The research takes ages even though I enjoy researching topics and checking copy for obscure errors. My imagination still gets in the way of accuracy but the accuracy always works better in the long run. Facts carry their own element of conviction.Whenever I read these ‘hic’ agony memoirs by recovering drug addicts or alcoholics, the skipping of detail or replacing everyday fact with gothic irks me. If you want to write about your childhood, you need to recall with some precision what your parents were wearing and what was playing on the radio and how they spoke a couple of decades ago, or it just sounds made-up. One of the worst reads in this regard is Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club (some great poetic writing all the same) in which the historical detail is just wrong. The dates, the locales, the pop-culture are skewed.

I was thinking last night that the second year of sobriety is all about just getting on with living sober. The pink cloud has faded away and there is the same old reality and the same person full of those familiar character defects. In my case I don’t have meetings, but I do have the literature and online forums and the blogging community. Sobriety is slowly becoming a mindful habit, the way drinking every day was a mindless habit. You just keep doing it and following the Steps, watching out for the old resentments and reactivity and the recurrent selfishness. There is no quick-fix stuff, that was what the numbing effect of alcohol delivered and we all know what hppened after that! There is no completing the Steps and forgetting about them because just understanding the process of the Steps is lifelong and involves constant corrective action and involvement in service. I may not be able to talk to sponsees face-to-face or afford the phone calls but I can write encouraging emails. I can show others that to just keep trudging along is possible. Once I wouldn’t have believed it possible to stay away from drink for 48 hours at a stretch. And the very ordinariness of a sober life is something good and to be cherished.

The self uncovered

Lively sharing at a meeting last night in Hereford — strange to be there in the evening, the warmth of the day glowing in the skies and quiet city streets. I think of Hereford as a town but it is a cathedral city.

 

Shared a little myself, caught up in the excitement and vitality of the meeting but afterwards, driving home, wondered if I had shared from a deep and sincere enough place within. I struggle to find language for what is going on in me as the months pass, finding myself in steady recovery and living in Britain.

 

I feel I have somehow lost a vital connection to place through leaving Africa — I hunger after scenes of dust and heat and empty spaces, far horizons. The sounds of the Nguni languages, the smiles and laughter. People here don’t laugh or sing enough.  But I am also getting used to living without the hypervigilance and fear I lived with in South Africa, especially in the cities. The absence of danger makes me almost giddy at moments.

 

My life is in hiatus. I need steadier work so as to feel anchored and secure. The deep insecurity stretches back much further than my present situation. For years I lived without family or any sense of belonging, lost and distraught, adrift in a dark strange universe. Now I am finding a place for myself but losing a place and a relationship that meant so much to me. Loss of place means loss of identity for me. And I lack a regular and sustaining spiritual practice. That will take time because I cannot borrow faith any longer, need something authentic in which I can trust.

 

Now I am going to go out for a brisk walk as the sun burns off the valley mist. Time to embrace the day and get those legs moving –

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.

The agony and the boredom [and the stray pleasures] of writing

A watched pot never boils. A journal subscribed to never arrives.

 

My partner decided to subscribe to the London Review of Books. He doesn’t know it well. I read it avidly online, especially if there is anything written by Iain Sinclair, Hilary Mantel or James Wood (pf whom more later). All of last week I waited for the Royal Mail postman to drive up in the red van with insignia and deliver the latest issue. It didn’t arrive. It may not arrive until we have made a great deal of fuss. I still watch for the postman though because I have a naive and childlike notion of postmen being reliable and likeable men in quaint uniforms. ‘Postman Pat/Postman Pat!/Postman Pat and his black-and-white cat!’ That kind of thing.

 

The Private Eye has not arrived either but it is the London Review of Books that I long for. I may have to go out and buy a copy, prompted by the funniest quote I have read in years from the LA Times:

 

‘But there is vast anecdotal evidence of subscribers to the New Yorker and the London Review of Books reading Wood’s essays huddled in entryways, coats and keys and umbrellas still in their hands. He has earned a rare and awesome cultural authority.’

 

That’s me! Well, no, it isn’t. I couldn’t finish reading Wood on Rivka Galchen in the New Yorker online. Vast anecdotal evidence? Hilarious. And now he is writing on Aleksander Hemon’s fictional lives and I have to work out how to roast a Barbary duck breast for supper and can’t manage both Wood and duck. Too mentally exhausting. But I do like to read the London Review of Books and wish it would arruve.

 

For one thing it would mean that I could stop trying to write fiction and just read about fiction for a day or two. The odd thing is that I enjoy writing. I blog and post and do emails and work out features articles without too much distress or procrastination. But fiction is my own personal demon. If what I wrote was no good, I could cheerfully think, ‘That’s that!’ and move on to nonfiction and write  that. But some lines and paragraphs are tantalisingly satisfactory. So I persist.

 

The low-level depression is still there but shifted or displaced a little by a lively phone conversation with a new friend from the rooms. And an exchange of emails witha nother transatlantic friend from the fellowship. And a slice or two of locally cured ham, mild but spicy, lashed with Dijon and piled on buttered bread.

 

Another friend, a blogger,  wrote and said.’Are you lonely, sweet thing?’ And instantly Sweet Thing was less lonely. The human community’s collective miracle, that we need one another.

 

But now I must be thankful I have not read James Wood on the Making of Fiction — so intimidating! — and can get back to a short story that began as a novel and may end as an epigram.

 

Wondering too why somebody who typed in ‘sexual life’ on Google arrived at my blog. Technorati seems puzzled too. It isn’t that my sex life is not hot (she said coyly) but I don’t think it is anybody’s business but mine. The mysteries of blog-conspiring in the Aquarian Age of the Internet…

Sun shining through rain

Woke up this morning and saw that the sun was shining through the falling rain, long silvery pencil strokes of rain and the sun bright as a coin. A gleaming wet morning in the hills.

 

Last night to a meeting in the town, upstairs with the lattice windows open because the study room gets musty. A newcomer, disruptive and clueless (as we all were once), so we talked about the primary purpose, ‘to stay sober and help other alcoholics achieve sobriety’. The importance of simply sharing truthfully and in depth what it has been like for us. No catch-phrases, no melodrama, no self-centred drunkalogues. The interface of a meeting, narratives of powerlessness and recovery. That is how we encourage one another, by staying sober and showing that it is possible. That addiction is not the last word.

 

And it was a light-hearted time, eating chocolate biscuits, sprawling on the sofas and stretched out in armchairs, laughing at our own worst times and ongoing foibles, the evening sunshine coming in low in panels of brightness. Talking about how we reached for, grabbed at sobriety like a drowning man clutching his lifejacket, when we realised we did not have to drink any longer. That it would be possible to live without anaesthetics or sedatives or avoidance. We couldn’t do it alone but together anything was possible.

 

‘I had this fantasy,’ said B. ‘Myself crawling into a badgers’ den with a large bottle full of gin. Why gin? I hated the stuff. But there I would be, curled up at the bottom of this hole in the ground, all safe and alone with my bottle. Able to just die in peace. Poor fucking badgers, but I didn’t care about them. I wanted to get down into the heart of darkness, me, my self-pity and the gin.’

 

Today I sit here looking out on what we as children called a ‘monkey’s wedding’, the sun and rain all mixed up together, hot and wet and full of contradiction, light gleaming through rain, the trees shining and green in the garden and out there on the hill. Feeling grateful for the power of community and witness and authenticity. There are difficult days and ups and downs and moments of terror and uncertainty, but there is no longer the horror of a living death, drinking every day and lost in alcoholism, a stranger and menace to myself and others. Instead I am able to sit and watch the rain and think about encouraging others, learning from others, growing into an undreamt of life full of being human.

 

Now I must go down and have yoghurt, pale Welsh honey and muesli in a small green bowl before geting ready to leave for Heresford. My hair wet and dripping, barefoot, relaxed and alive. Ready for whatever this new day has to offer. Determined that I shall never again let the deeper things escape.

Dawn on Monday morning

The sun breaking through clouds and mist burning off Cusop Hill, visible from my study window. Went down stairs to make coffee and found that the wind and rain have torn the petals off one of the bright orange lilies blooming in a glazed pot. Tomato plants threatening collapse. Blackbirds and house martins in the garden, hopping across the grass.

 

Staying in the day with gratitude and sober resolve. Yesterday wasn’t easy, a difficult conversation with Ula back in South Africa, felt selfish and heartless for not being able to provide all the definite decisions she wanted to hear. But I am not going to lie and both and she and myself will have to live with that.

 

Very enjoyable breakfast yesterday, talking about liberation theology and Hans Kung’s vision of the church with Paul. I have more reservations about the Catholic church being willing to transform itself than I used to have, but I love the idealism of those who want to see meaningful change and trust in the movement of the Holy Spirit. And while I don’t talk much about God because my own inauthenticity gets in the way, I like hearing someone share from a very committed and sincere place.

 

Last night we watched a documentary film on vipassana practice being introduced into one of India’s largest prisons. Doing Time, Doing Vipassana was the title. For all my doubts about this being less effectual than some good old solid social transformation and prison reform — change the material conditions and the heart will follow — the descriptions of the calming of the mind and gentle observation of thought processes was very encouraging. I recall the retreats I have done in past years and how that breathwork and meditation enabled me to reflect on some of my more distracted and painful mental habits. The rehearsing of what I would say to others, distrust of the spontaneous, the recoil from aversion, the scattered thoughts all at odds with one another. An inability to stay in the moment and be present to my reality. An inability to watch without comment, to observe without reactivity.

 

Perhaps I can join with others here and do some sitting practice. As well as getting some exercise. I should get out and walk at least once a day, along by the river or up one of the hills.

 

One day at a time. This is a difficult and uncertain time, filled with wonderful new discoveries and love, but scary and oddly futureless unless I can get permission to stay in Britain. The writing is the most frustrating aspect of my life  from day to day and there I must simply persist. Every worthwhile activity begins with breaking stones. It isn’t the writing itself that causes such distress but the expectations I bring to the writing.

 

The sun is giving up the battle and the sky over Cusop Hill is low and grey. Birds loud and seemingly in competition. All day I shall work, sitting here at my desk and scribbling away or sitting at my desk unable to write a word, and then it will be time for an early supper and a meeting. At some point I must plant new herbs and rocket, perhaps put in a shrub or two if we can get to a nursery.

 

Focus and persistence, that kind of a day. Learning to trust the process. Learning to be in a relationship with no guarantees. learning to live with another and share, give of myself. Learning to ask for what I need. And simply putting one foot in front of another. To be there for others, to work hard, to live an ordinary life that is open to mystery. Myself as part of the whole.

Blue-eyed Sunday

Friends round to supper last night and we all sat out in the back garden after dusk and listened to the owl calling from an old massive oak across Church Street. Glimpse of an eagle swiftly flying across the treeline, pinioned against the green and dark silver light.

Thinking hard this morning about what else I can do to ground myself in the program, in the lifegiving Steps and community.

And thinking too about changes afoot inthe worldwide mental health community. At last. Serious reviews of Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness by Christopher Lane (Yale University Press)

Lane comments: ‘In my mother’s generation, shy people were seen as introverted and perhaps a bit awkward, but never mentally ill. Adults admired their bashfulness, associated it with bookishness, reserve, and a yen for solitude. But shyness isn’t just shyness any more. It is a disease. It has a variety of over-wrought names, including “social anxiety” and “avoidant personality disorder”, afflictions said to trouble millions’.

Lane’s research shows how the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) has been transformed from the thin handbook it was up until the 1980s into the hefty tome it is today, with hundreds of new, poorly specified and poorly researched syndromes being added annually.

Both books by Lane and Horowitz/Wakefield have become overnight successes following the recent UK report claiming that Prozac, taken by 40-million worldwide, is inefficacious except in severe cases. No better than a placebo.

The report breaks new ground because independent scientists have obtained for the first time what they believe is a full set of trial data for four antidepressants. They requested the full data under freedom of information rules from the Food and Drug Administration, which licenses medicines in the US and requires all data when it makes a decision.

Very thought-provoking. We need deeper and richer understandings, as many of us have known for some time.

And shyness is a rare gift still.