What’s the secret, crazy?
I’ve been fortunate in the past few weeks to spend a lot of time with my best girl friends all over the country. A well-timed layoff left me with two weeks between jobs and a little extra cash, so I decided to trek to New York City to visit my friend Amy, then head down to Austin, TX, to see my friend Rachel. And then there were the usual brunches, dinners and wine binges in San Francisco with local gal pals as well.
As tends to happen when my friends and I get together and talk and drink wine and catch up, a lot of the conversations head into the territory of life examination, personal growth, personal struggles, and relationships. All the talking has got me thinking about all the little pieces of my crazy that are scattered, here and there, in my friends’ crazies. Like pebbles on some dysfunctional beach, I can gather my own challenges and traumas in bits and pieces from all of them.
For example, Amy and I are both completely disillusioned with men. Anne and I have really loud, voracious inner critics that enjoy, as Anne is wont to say “gnawing on the bones of our carcasses” (great image, that). Rachel and I both had to be emotional caretakers for our mothers at a very young age. Shelby and I both have historical tendencies to date alcoholics, and be attracted to wildly dishonest and dishonorable men.
It makes me think about the old adage that we are most attracted to people who have wounds similar to our own.
This has proven, in my life, to be disastrous when it comes to romantic love, but on the flip side of that coin, it is really inspiring when it comes wrapped up in the love I share with my friends. It’s comforting to know that I am not alone in my struggles and to have people who really understand what I am going through cheer me on in the little victories I enjoy from time to time. It’s rewarding to be able to tell a friend that I understand how she feels about something hard in her life, and really mean it. It’s a relief to be able to laugh at my bad habits with someone who has the same bad habits.
I mean, we’re all of us human beings crazy in one way or another, and I feel pretty lucky that my crazy has, at least partly, brought me together with these amazing women. Of course, we have lots of non-crazy things in common too. We’re food and wine lovers, we like to travel, we love sarcasm, and books, and John Stewart, and dirty jokes. And these things also provide entertainment and comfort in their turn. But sometimes there really is nothing like a little psychological solidarity to provide fuel for living that examined life. And for that, my crazy would like to heartily thank their crazies, and let them know the door to my padded room is always open.
Insecurity Blanket
I can still remember the moment I realized that there was a reason behind what had seemed to be the random, confusing, and ultimately self destructive behavior in my life.
I was sitting with Dr. S, a marriage and family counselor and the first therapist I had ever spoken to in my (then) thirty years on the planet. It takes a lot to get a stubborn Midwesterner who prides herself on self-sufficiency to go talk to a therapist. I had come to a place where I was absolutely lost as to what I needed to do to get myself out of the very deep hole I was in. My marriage had turned into a twisted path of emotional torment, my job had me breaking down daily, and, most torturous of all, I wasn’t sleeping. Even Ambien wasn’t sending me off to the Land of Nod. I was so stressed I was getting out of bed and throwing up first thing in the mornings. I knew I was at a breaking point, and I didn’t want to break. The desire not to break is what prompted me, finally, to pick up the phone one dark day and start interviewing local therapists. After a few phone consultations I found Dr. S. “You’re stuck,” she suggested. “You need some help getting un-stuck.” I was in her office the following week.
When I walked into her office I knew that I didn’t want to break, and I knew that my husband was drinking again after years of being clean and sober via AA. These were the two things I wanted to discuss. It didn’t take very long for Dr. S. to gently point out that maybe, just maybe, my stress and his drinking were a teeny bit related. And maybe this wasn’t an isolated incident but more of a “big picture” kind of thing. Then she introduced me to the greatly maligned and culturally misused idea of co-dependency. In my case, the clinical kind, where a person has a condition that draws them to addicts like moths to a flame, and has them spending all their time and energy on the addict and none on themself. Forgetting to take care of yourself, and the avalanche of denial and excuses produced for the addict, tends to snowball on people until they get to a breaking point, at which point they either get help, start using alcohol and drugs heavily themselves, or start feeling suicidal.
I doubt I could accurately describe the profound relief that came with being able to put a label on what was going on inside of me, and knowing that other people had felt the same way I did, and knowing that it was possible to come out of this darkness to a much brighter place. I started to read books about behavior patterns, and how they start, and how tenacious they are. I worked with Dr. S. on learning to love myself more, and learning to recognize the mean inner critic whose ideas are somewhat less than constructive, to put it mildly. During the time I was seeing Dr. S. a lot of things happened- I found out that my husband was indulging in more than just drink, and left him to build whatever life he thought he could have with the other woman he’d been seeing for eight months behind my back. I moved from the suburbs that I hated back to the city I loved. I found new joy in my relationships with friends, I found my yoga practice, and I journeyed to hell and back more than once while recovering from both my divorce and decades of hiding from myself and hating myself. After a year and half I felt ready to stop seeing Dr. S. and go out into this crazy world on my own, armed with the mental tools I had sweated and cried and laughed and poured my heart and soul into making. I felt ready, and I was.
But damn, let me tell you, those patterns are a BITCH.
Just for example, over the course of a year of my treatment with Dr. S., a time when I was plumbing the depths of my co-dependant soul, I was dating a guy with a major pot addiction, and I didn’t really think to talk to her about it until we had almost broken up. Also, it didn’t occur to me for a really long time that she might be interested in the fact that my brother has a drinking problem, and my parents rally around him to help him drink (and also to deny that there is a problem). Oh, and that raging alcoholic I moved to San Francisco with a decade prior and dated for two and half years until I found out he had cheated on me? Could he be relevant? Hmmm…maybe….
And then just last week I was at a party and a close friend of mine drank too much and got sick. Sure enough, I slipped straight into caretaker mode, orbiting around him, trying to figure out what he needed and how to make it better. I brought him home to sleep on my couch, watched over him the next morning, and even helped him convince himself and a lot of other people that it hadn’t just been the alcohol that made him so sick. There had to have been other factors involved. Really. There did.
And here’s the fun part- while I realized deep down inside what was really going on, I had myself all wrapped up in that comfy denial and it took a tough conversation with a good friend who is even more stubborn than I am to force me to admit what part of my psychology had taken over that night. Did I mention this was just last week?
The thing is, even when we come to place where we’re more aware of the patterns and cycles that dictate our behavior, they continue to happen. My crazy will always want to play nice with the crazy of those who are in the grips of chemical dependency, not realizing that this is a game no one will win. Every time I am attracted to a man, I will have to evaluate his lifestyle and make sure I am not attracted to him because of our respective psychoses (or, at least, not those respective psychoses). And when I find myself in a close relationship of any kind with an addict (and I will) I need to watch my ass. Because for some diabolical reason, these patterns, destructive though they are, are really comforting. Even the worst lifelong habits have the appeal of familiarity. I mean, way back when, this behavior I struggle with in my adult life helped me survive my childhood.
This co-dependency of mine is an insecurity blanket. Yes, it feeds on the dark part of my soul, but it’s so soft and colorful and pretty!
I had another conversation with another friend last week, after finally admitting to myself that I had gone way off into “addict caretaker” mode yet again in my life. She said, “So you have patterns in your life. Well, guess what, we all do. And if you can see them happening you’re more than half way there.” I know she is right, this kind friend of mine, and I wake up every day grateful for the fact that I have learned to have a more forthright relationship with myself. I am incredibly fortunate to be able to see my life in a more honest and healthy manner, and I am blessed with amazing friends who help me on that path, and, most importantly, remind me to forgive myself for being a flawed human being. As another friend likes to say “If you were perfect, you’d be really boring.”
Maybe someday I’ll be able to throw that insecurity blanket in the fire and burn it up, or put it in the trash and watch the garbage truck roll down the street for good. Until then I will try to remember that sometimes it’s not comfortable, but it is infinitely better to be left shivering and exposed in a certain kind of chill than wrapped in that warm and ancient seduction.
Ex-Bombs: The Shelling Continues
It seems that there is a trend in my life lately of dealing with the ex-husband stuff and the ex-boyfriend stuff all on the same day. Apparently, the universe will not have me do one without the other, and I am not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, there is the “roll my eyes toward the heavens, oh please this is too much” kind of long-suffering feeling similar to the impression one often gets from early Renaissance paintings of Jesus. On the other hand, as my dear friend Anne pointed out during a phone conversation last night: “Hey, at least you’re getting it all out of the way in one day.”
The day was yesterday. I was eating a salad for lunch with a co-worker at this little bamboo garden near our office when I got this feeling. I am not a surfer, but I have heard tell that when you’re in the ocean waiting for a wave and there is a shark around, you get this kind of primordial sense of lurking predatory evil. I had a similar sense, but rather than “sharkiness” it was “ex-husband-ness” and sure enough, my instincts did not fail. Within moments I saw Mike get in line at the salad place, about thirty feet to my right. And with him was Alison, of course.
Let me take a moment to interject a couple of fun facts about the situation with Mike and Alison:
– Mike had a passionate long-distance relationship (Bay Area to Pittsburgh) with Alison, a woman 20 years his junior, for eight of the nine months of our marriage. (I found out about it and left him as quickly as humanly possible- more than just the months and months and months of cheating, that kind of double life is just plain psycho.)
– Mike moved Alison from Pittsburgh to San Francisco about two weeks before he got hard, cold, busted by his then wife ( yours truly). He got her a job at the small company where he worked. After a while, they both got jobs at another small company, which has an unfortunate geographic proximity to my office building.
– Mike and Alison got married the weekend of June 6th. His third marriage and, I assume, for her, her first. Sad for her. (Kinda.)
So yesterday’s sighting was not just your basic traumatic run in with the ex-husband and the girl he cheated on you with and lead a double life with for almost your entire short-lived marriage. It was also my first sighting of the (strangles on words) newlyweds. This was a little challenging for me, as you might imagine. (Incidentally, the co-worker I was with is not someone I am close to and she had no idea what was going on along the periphery of our chat about 401K plans and her kids’ private school. I was swallowing a lot more than butter lettuce for a couple of minutes there.)
I watched Mike and Alison out of the corner of my eye, trying to decide what to do if they remained in such close proximity to me. The temptation to run away and hide battled with the temptation to walk up to them and ask Mike about the alimony he still owes me. I was moving toward embracing that second idea when I saw him notice me sitting there, out of the corner of my eye. He noticed me and then he froze. I blinked, and in that moment, Mike and Alison vanished into thin air, and I realized something extremely empowering. He is afraid to face me. I felt this surge of personal power around the whole situation that I have never felt before, and I can tell you for certain that next time I get sharked by those two in my work ‘hood, I will not even consider avoiding them. They can and should avoid me. This was an amazing thing to realize, but the whole thing left me more than a bit shaken. Glad it happened, really glad it’s over.
So there was that. And then there was yoga class.
Normally yoga class is where I go to preserve my sanity. Indeed, that was my intention last night. I was driving to class; my regular, weekly Wednesday night yoga class on Stanyan Street, a class which my ex-boyfriend NEVER goes to. And I got a text from him letting me know that he and his new girlfriend (who is in town from LA for a couple of weeks) were going to be at class that night. Just a heads up, he said. Well, I beg to differ. A heads up usually actually gives someone time to do something different in a given situation. For me, the heads up only gave me the option of skipping yoga (which did not seem like much of an option) or going to yoga class and practicing with them and meeting the new girlfriend, which is something I wasn’t planning to do unless they, like, got married or something. Which did not seem like much of an option. In the end, I sucked it up and went to the class. It was rough.
I spent 90 minutes practicing like a crazy person to take my mind off the fact that this brand new love of his life was a mere 15 feet away from me, and to keep myself from blatantly checking her out and torturing myself with the ridiculous yet inevitable “who’s cuter” question. On the up side, I launched my body into some arm balances that usually make me quake with trepidation. On the down side, I wanted to cry most of the time.
In the end, though, it was fine. Hard, but fine. I mean, if you have to be in that situation, it’s a good thing to be doing yoga at the same time. And she seems like a nice girl, and I feel for her, because she probably has no idea what she’s in for. And my ex was radiating some very weird, uncomfortable energy, which reminded me all over again how good it is that he and I are just friends these days. (And though she is indeed cute, I have to say, I think I win…)
At this point, I would like to let the universe know that I think I get it. I am better off without my ex-husband, of this there is no smidgen of doubt. He fears me, and rightfully so, for the way he treated me was atrocious, and who wants to face up to that? He will live in a hell of his own making until he gets better. I’ll even throw in that I hope he gets better, I really do. I am better off not dating my ex-boyfriend, and part of letting go is accepting that the other party can and will move on. I fully expect to date someone else some day so why would his case be any different? I’ll even throw in that I wish them the best. I would like to see him be happy, and she seems like a good enough sort. OK?
Universe, I guess it’s your call (it always is) but here’s hoping we can get down to a disarmament pact posthaste. Have your people call my people. I’ll set it all up, you just have to be there, and sign the agreement. Thanks.
Flood
Last Friday, my sister and I spent hours mesmerized by footage on CNN that showed our home city in Iowa being decimated by the worst flooding it has ever known. The streets of downtown Cedar Rapids were under something like 15 feet of water. Traffic lights appeared to be floating on top of it. Movie Theater marquees were drowning in it. Cars and trucks were spinning around with metric tons of other debris and thousands of people were evacuated and subsequently lost their homes. It was all over the national news, and of course, being that the disaster happened in Iowa, the news editors featured only the most fat and backwards people they could possibly find.
Faded prison tattoos competed with farmer tans and beer bellies in newspaper photos of shirtless men with mullets rowing their canoes down the street. A morbidly obese woman with about eight grubby children was interviewed on CNN for a full minute. And, my personal favorite, the New York Times, bastion of unbiased journalism, made sure to mention that Leroy Shitkicker down on 19th Ave. had to pay his neighbor $10 to rescue him in a canoe. I am really glad that their readership now has such a true picture of the people I grew up with.
Let’s NOT mention the thousands of volunteers, many of whom had already lost their homes and businesses, sandbagging other peoples’ homes and businesses round the clock to try and save their neighbors from the fate they themselves had suffered. Let’s NOT mention that the evacuation was so well organized and the people so attentive to instructions that casualties are still only in the single digits after almost a week. Let’s definitely not mention the countless folks who went without showers, laundry, cell phones or excess drinking water for days to make sure those who were worse off than they were would have what they needed. Let’s not mention people like my Mom, who used her public relations budget at Barnes and Noble (she is a CRM at their Cedar Rapids store) to buy children’s books and puzzle magazines to take to all the shelters around town so people would have something to distract them from the loss of everything they have. No, let’s not mention that stuff. I know what we should write about! Did you hear about that dude who had to pay his neighbor $10 to rescue him? Those Iowans are sooooo backward….
Sadly, I am quite accustomed to my home state getting bashed, poked fun of, disregarded and otherwise marginalized. Usually by people who couldn’t find it on a map if it was the last round of “I Want to be a Millionaire” and they were up to the Grand Prize. (And their Lifelines probably couldn’t find it on a map either.) Iowa, like every other place, has its shortcomings, and if people want to bust its balls I guess that’s their business. I mean, obviously, I left for a reason. There isn’t a lot to do there. There are not enough different skin colors and there isn’t a whole lot of religious tolerance. There are billboards about Jesus and people picket the abortion clinics and it’s not that easy to get a good vegetarian meal. These things are true. But what is also true is that Iowans are some of the most pragmatic, big-hearted, neighborly people in the world, and if there is any group of people who can survive a disaster like this with grace and aplomb, it’s them. As much as my heart hurts for all the destruction and loss in a place that is as much a part of me as San Francisco will ever be, I know in the end it’s going to be OK for Iowa. And I hope that the media pays attention to what happens now, when the people bond together and work hard and steady and strong and rebuild everything they’ve lost. Maybe then people will start to get a true picture of that backwards place that is so easy to make fun of.
Bad Habit
I was at the chiropractor the other day, and he was doing his usual, wiggling my hip bones around in their sockets to see how my crooked pelvis was straightening out. It seems I am making good progress, and my next big challenge is re-training my muscle memory so I can support and stregthen my newly shifted skeleton. Oh, and I have to stop crossing my legs. It’s really bad for me, as it stretches out the connector muscles inside the hips. Even crossing them at the ankle is something I need to avoid. “No problem there!” I thought as I walked out of the office, “If it’s bad for my hips, I just won’t cross them.”
Thus began the epic struggle of my week. Apparently, I actually cross my legs all the time. Like, almost every minute of the day. And furthermore, it’s really comfortable. And I don’t like having them uncrossed. And I hate having to think about it and correct myself. (Cue violins here.)
It got me thinking about bad habits, and how they tend to become our comfort zone, even though, in the grand scheme of things, they cause so much discomfort, physically, cosmically and otherwise.
I was sitting at a wine bar last night with some of my best girlfriends. (Yes, my legs were crossed, it was Saturday night dammit, a girl has to get a break sometime…). We were talking about men, which tends to happen when you and three of your single friends start getting into the wine. Specifically, we were talking about this hot Spanish guy who works at the bar, and his bad habit of seducing women even though he has a girlfriend. He has a technique (that some of us know from personal experience), of drawing a girl into a long, personal conversation, complete with romantic flourishes about his life and family in Spain, his desire to have babies soon, and how much he loves San Francisco. He flirts, he winks, he stands really close to you. Then he lets it drop, oh-so-casually, that he has a girlfriend, and then he keeps right on trucking. A friend of a friend apparently followed it through to the end, girlfriend be damned, and had a long, hot make-out session with him after hours at the bar recently. We figure this is his game every night that he works. And I guess that mentioning the girlfriend in conversation feels like absolution to him.
I am not leveling judgment at the waiter, but his bad habit brings to mind another bad habit that’s all around us. This is the habit of being afraid to be alone, and staying in relationships that are often themsleves bad habits, just for the sake of “being with someone”.
I spent the afternoon yesterday at a BBQ hosted by a couple I know who are engaged. Their engagement came right on the heels of a furious break-up, the kind where harsh words are not only said but circulated via email to all the friends of the injured party. The kind that involves throwing things at each other during fights and saying the stuff that you know will hurt the other person the absolute worst, because you know them and their insecurities so well. The kind where everyone gets dragged in by the sheer force of the toxicity and the drama. The kind where everyone is really glad that the two split up, because they weren’t good for each other on a really fundamental “goes way back to childhood and involves buttons that would take years of therapy to remove” kind of way. A big part of their trouble comes from his bad habit of drinking like all the alcohol on earth is going to evaporate tomorrow. And her bad habit of thinking she can control and/or fix his bad habit. It’s a cycle I am intimately familiar with in my own life, and I was especially glad when she moved out and started to move on. Then, I stopped hearing from her for a while. Then she was moving back into the apartment. Then, a month or two after that, she told me they were getting married.
I was not alone in being completely and utterly chagrined by this news. No one was enthusiastic, which hurt her feelings I think, but then I think she also must have had pretty realistic expectations about how her friends and family would react to the news. She didn’t tell her parents for months. I had to keep the news quiet myself because some of our mutual friends had to be told in a special way – i.e. a public place where they couldn’t make a total scene. It was hard, but in the end I decided to be supportive of her decision, becuase she is an adult woman who makes her own choices and is walking her own path. It’s hard becuase I know that the driving force behind all of it is a desperate, clawing fear telling my friend that if she lets this one get away, she will be all alone, and how horrible, and what if she never finds THE ONE, and gets to have a house and kids and a car in the garage and a dog in the yard. She knows that this fear is a big part of her decision to get married. We’ve talked about it, probably at a wine bar over a glass of red. She knows, but she’s letting that fear build her life for her.
I am not enlightened enough to be free from making fear-based decisions myself, of course, but marrying someone, or even dating someone just for the sake of not being alone just seems crazy to me. Especially if they aren’t good for you, or if the relationship is destructive. Society likes to tell us that we have to couple up to be in our power, that we need another person to complete us, that life, for a woman, is not full unless you find a man to share it with. Don’t get me wrong, I believe love is the most important force in the human experience, and can be a beautiful and enriching thing shared between two people. It’s just, why do we have to take love and put it in a box, and trap it in all these ideas of what it has to mean? Where does that leave us when it comes to loving ourselves? Why do we let fear come in and take over something with so much awesome potential?
Now that’s a bad habit. And it’s one that I am determined not to have in my life. Perhaps every time I grudgingly uncross my legs, I will also remind myself that I am, that we all are, perfectly whole and filled with love all by ourselves.
Bombs and Innuendos 