Perception, fulfillment, and safety - an un-funny blog post.

For years I thought my emotions were destroying me. During the drinking years, the constant flow of loneliness, despair and frustration wore me down slowly and persistently like a stream over rocks. Like a stream, my emotions always felt cold and inhospitable. As excruciating and piercing as they were, that unwavering trickle of pain was often the only thing that reminded me that I was still alive and human. During the brief periods (hours, maybe days) when I didn’t feel like total shit, I usually felt nothing at all – unless you consider drunk to be a feeling. 

The release from alcoholism bestowed upon me longer periods of non-shitty feelings and a renewed and overpowering optimism that life could be good. When I was younger, I would go hiking with my dad in the summers. I didn’t love hiking then, but I love that I hiked with him now. In the middle of the Olympic National Park or the Central Cascades we would wind around remote trails, and far out in the distance – miles off the trails – I would spy large meadows and wide-open spaces that looked like something from a Bob Ross painting. Happiness was out there, and if I were willing to walk through wilderness, I could find it. That sentiment returned when I stopped drinking. Happiness seemed possible, confidence seemed available, and tranquility seemed visible.

Very quickly in recovery, I began to notice the intense levels of fear and anxiety that seemed to be baseline emotions for me. I would find an emotional connection, a new job, or some financial security, and immediately react with self-preservation. Anything positive was as unreliable as the fabled Scottish town of Brigadoon – here today, but vanishing by night, and not returning for 100 years. I would clutch and cling with ferocity to whatever I thought was delivering me from misery until I smothered the experience with my own desperation. Life was better than when I was drunk and high on the daily, but it had a narrative arc that was impossible to sustain.

Two years ago, I began therapy and started examining myself more rigorously than I had in the three years of previous sobriety. Early on in therapy, I told my therapist that I often thought of myself as a pile of raked leaves – beholden to any breeze, and blown wherever the emotional winds wanted. I thought of myself as besieged by the world’s negative experiences. I recall sitting in an al anon meeting years earlier and describing the recent loss of a girlfriend (who left me for heroin) and the death of a friend (who died from a heroin overdose). “I feel cheated, I feel so fucking cheated out of love and friendship.” That sense of being cheated, or abandoned, or misunderstood, or fucked over persisted for a long time into therapy.

As therapy went on, I explored my emotions to a greater depth. I hung the “emotion wheel” on my refrigerator, and bought a stack of cards with emotions listed on them. I didn’t notice for several months that nowhere on the wheel or in the cards were cheated, abandoned, misunderstood or “fucked over.” In Marshall B. Rosenberg’s excellent book Nonviolent Communication, he draws attention to these specific words and argues that they aren’t emotions at all. Rather, they are interpretations of how others are treating us. I didn’t feel abandoned so much as I thought people were abandoning me. If I were being cheated, it was because I had seated at myself at a card table with cheaters. The deep irony of being born into a white upper-middle class family and feeling “fucked over” settled in. Life had certainly been unfair in many times, in many ways, but I can’t sit around waiting for life to become fair. I don’t recall anyone telling me it was fair in the first place.

This began my new fascination with perception. Smarter people than I have spent entire lifetimes writing and pondering perception. Major pillars of philosophy and psychology center on the role of perception. Trite Facebook newsfeed sayings treat us to single-serving tea bag musings about how “our perception is our reality.” As frustratingly reductionist as those multicolored images are, they are also true. How I choose to view my life, is how I choose to feel about my life. To view it as challenging, unfair, or cold is to feel challenged, cheated, or unfulfilled.

My favorite scene in the movie in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas has Hunter S. Thompson and his attorney Oscar Acosta seated at a bar high out of their minds, when Acosta slovenly slurs to Thompson, “I think I’m getting The Fear.” Lately I’ve been waking up with the fear. I’ve had a year with much joy, but also struggle and sadness. There’s been loss (suicides, job opportunities, relationships, financial strain), and it’s been scary. My dreams at a night are an endless parade of visitations by my dead friends and vanished lovers; usually I’m drunk in my dreams. I usually wake in the morning with a start and clutch my blanket wondering how much of it is real. Fortunately that fades quickly and by the time my feet hit the wood floor, I’m restored to optimism.

This morning I stumbled around in disappointment over some of my recent losses for longer than usual. I methodically made my coffee in the glass pour-over carafe I love, and did a few dishes (a chore I somewhat enjoy doing early in the morning). I set my mind to feeling better, grabbed a first cup of my favorite coffee (Love Buzz, an Equal Exchange medium-roast), set Pandora to my favorite morning station (playing only piano solos) and settled into my chair with a view. As I sipped and sampled from my coffee and recovery books, and looked at Lake Union and Magnolia with streaks of blue between layers of clouds, I heard my favorite song by pianist Brian Crain. A trudging melody, “A Glimmer in Her Eyes,” progresses through beautiful key changes. At times sad, and at others hopeful and content, it is always pretty. It is a song without words that is any story I want it to be. I sipped my coffee again and glanced at the deck of emotion cards sitting to my right. The top card is “fulfilled – satisfied, self-actualized, at peace.” All the loss and disappointment reveals to me that I am mature enough to handle it, and that the gains in my life have been a result of tremendous hard work, self-sacrifice and incredible intelligence. I have withstood withering storms, and emerged with new character and knowledge. Happiness is still elusive, but safety is not. I no longer feel cheated, I feel accomplished, worthy, and grateful. Thank you for reading this.

Has it been that long?!? I seriously haven't blogged here in a year?

What follows is a "self-reflection" paper that I wrote upon completing my first quarter of graduate school at the University of Washington. I had significant difficulty writing a paper for this class, Social Work for Social Justice, earlier in the quarter. The earlier paper ended up being a 15 page examination of my cultural identity. This paper represents my unfinished thoughts on privilege, oppression, my recovery from addiction as it relates to my own mental health and learning disabilities and my concurrent experience living as a member of several dominant groups.

 

The final stretch of my first quarter in graduate school looks similar to the way it began, with a ferry ride and a bus trip. Our four class sessions in Social Work 504, Social Work for Social Justice, are seven-hour marathons of tears, inner-struggle and overcoming our own limitations. For me, the quarter is defined by my own search for an identity in the multicultural landscape that I never considered myself a part of. Of all the privileges I live with, the one that I’ve made the most of is the ability to remain invisible as a white male.

            From the first day of class, I know that I want to feel like an integral part of my 30 student Master of Social Work cohort. No more, no less than a member of the group. Not the leader, nor the servant. As the title suggests, the class has been driven by our collective desire to make justice out of a country that capitalizes on oppression at every opportunity. When the quarter begins, nobody except for myself makes me feel unwelcome in the group. In a familiar pattern, I start off what is shaping up to be the most important time in my life by discounting my own narrative and assuming I have nothing of value to contribute to conversations about oppression and the thousand “-ism’s” that comprise white male dominance.

            Little do I know, this final day will be very different.

            My fellow student Julie and I commute together. Eight ferry trips have given us a chance to see where we differ and where we unite. A CPS worker and Chemical Dependency Clinician, we sometimes align on issues, but frequently disagree passionately. That’s easy to understand when you consider that I spend my week trying to help addicts shake off their heroin habit and she spends hers advocating for the children they’ve neglected for years. We are often at odds, but I grow to appreciate her dedication and I learn a lot from our conversations. On this final day of quarter one of eleven, we make our way to the King County Metro Bus Tunnel in Pioneer Square, Seattle and board the local for the twenty-minute bus ride to the University of Washington. We choose seats that sit high against the walls facing each other in the middle of the bus. We talk about our challenges with the homework and the assigned readings.

            Somewhere past the Convention Center, outside of the bus tunnel, somebody else gets on the bus. The bus is sparsely occupied with maybe 20 passengers. A tall African-American man boards. He looks unclean, sick and probably drunk. He makes a lot of noise as he walked down the bus aisle and as he gets to the middle of the bus where Julie and I sit on opposite sides he looks towards the back.

            “I’ll probably get killed if I go back there.”

            “No,” exclaims Julie, “no one would hurt you back there!”

            “Well, I’ll just sit here then. By Nicole Kidman.”

            “Ha Ha! Nicole Kidman has blonde hair,” says Julie, easing the tension.

The man is big and he has very rough hands. Puss oozes from his eye like conjunctivitis. He smells awful and he keeps looking at me. He sits next to me, with my backpack between us. He makes delusional conversation, which is hard to recall. “I just got back from Iraq, I killed so many people there. I have a 1939 Indian motorcycle too. These white bitches,” he says with a wave of his hand, “they just don’t get it.” He reaches out with a calloused hand that looks swollen from neuropathy and infection and grabs my left shoulder and grips it very tightly. I feel scared.

*          *          *

“Sometimes I feel like liquid,” I tell my counselor. It is midway through my first quarter in graduate school. We sit in his Greenlake office for a biweekly counseling session. “Like you could pour me out of one glass and into another. Like I could be poured all over a table. When I think of my childhood, I think of a pile of leaves. Just waiting for someone to come along and do something with it. Waiting for the wind to blow it over and scatter them all over the yard again.” We’ve been working on establishing my values for weeks. I’ve been examining my life, trying to find a sense of importance. This therapy has been a perfect accompaniment to my start in graduate school, and my class on social justice, in particular. I spill my guts to my therapist. I talk about my long-standing codependence and reliance on women to form my identity, my history of being bullied in high school. We touch on a particularly traumatic series of events when a large, brown skinned kid pushed me around. I express to him that for the first time in my life I am proud of my accomplishments. I have a job in community mental health, which I love. I worked hard for acceptance into the UW and am earning good grades. When I speak about these things I use the word “passionate.” I’ve never described my life like that before.

At the end of the session, I stand up to leave and he says with energy and conviction, “you’re not the leaves, man. You’re the tree.”

*          *          *

The man on the bus has left us alone for the time being. Every passenger on the bus is watching him. He has moved to the front of the bus and taken an aisle seat next to a small-framed girl in her early-twenties. The large man boxes her into her window seat. He turns towards her and begins stroking her face and hair. She nervously looks over her shoulders while pulling her hair into a ponytail and draping it over the shoulder on his opposite side. I catch a look in her eye and she is terrified.

I contemplate asking her if she wants help, but within seconds I’ve decided not to bother asking. No other thoughts or fears enter my mind.

“Sir, I don’t think you should touch her.”

“Yes, thank you” she says, nervously. His attention has now come back to me. He takes a few steps back and grabs my backpack.

“I forgot my backpack!”

I believe in distributive justice, but not at this second, my laptop is in that bag and I need it. I clutch the bag closer and tell him loudly “sir, do not touch me or my things.” I look across the aisle at Julie and that’s when he hits me. I catch the back of his hand in my mouth. It hurts. “Sir, do not hit me again!” I stand up and take a step back. Two large men get between us as the bus pulls over. The driver opens the doors and I step off and out of the man’s sight. The man is screaming that he wants to kill me, that I took his bag. After he runs up and down the bus trying to find me, he finally steps off the front and I step on the back. The driver closes the doors and we are on our way, he stands on the sidewalk yelling. After calming down, I exit the bus in the University District and the young girl thanks me.

I feel like a tree.

This quarter has been about deciding what I am all about. It has been a process of trimming the fat from my belief system and determining, once and for all, what I am and am not willing to accept. It has been about recognizing my privilege, and learning that I can use that privilege for good (and understanding that that is a privilege too). I’ve learned to allow only enough guilt in my life to be a motivating factor. After the bus incident, another student who usually rides to school with us named Haywood, large and black like the man that hit me, says “man, of all the days for me not to be on the bus with you!”

“I’m okay. I feel safe right now. I needed to have that experience. What if the cops came and nobody was willing to be a witness? Between the homeless black guy, and me, who do you think the cops would listen to? If you had been involved, people might have just seen two black guys fighting on the bus. Thank you, I’m glad we’re friends. But it feels good to stand up for something on my own.” In this way, I am reminded of Peggy McIntosh who wrote in Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, “I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.” (McIntosh, 1989) I don’t want to be a hero, but it feels good to do the right thing.

Unpacking this experience has caused me to think about the consequences of doing what’s right. I feel sturdy and strong. I feel like I have overcome something within myself, but I have a fat lip and a sore jaw too. My sponsor, a Licensed Social Worker, says to me, “don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you stood up for yourself, but now you know that standing up for yourself can get your ass kicked too.” He’s right, and I decide that the only way I can go forward in social work is if I’m willing to take a literal and figurative beating from time-to-time. As our readings artfully point out, fighting oppression as a white person isn’t just about bringing the oppressed into agreement with my values. It’s about surrendering some of my own power and dominance and not complaining about it or making a big show of it.

The thing I am most grateful for is the privilege of having a place like the School of Social Work to contextualize my experiences. I am humbled by the opportunity to process our individual experiences with privilege and oppression with a compassionate and intelligent group of people. I sense that the country would be a different place if everyone had a group of people who were willing to listen to their anger and frustration.

After the grand jury decision not to indict Darren Wilson, many of my white friends mocked the rioting that occurred around the country. I didn’t participate in any rioting so I will not encourage the lawlessness in others, but I reminded my friends that admonished the violence that for me, avoiding violence is as easy as turning off the television. Many people would need to flee their homes and communities to avoid violence. Safety is a privilege, and a great beginning in cultural humility is a willingness to listen to anger and frustration, regardless of how it is expressed. Lucky me, for having that place today.

When the Going Gets Weird, The Weird Turn Pro

To be successful in sobriety you need to abandon some obvious bad habits, foster some new, healthy ones and maintain some existing, important ones. For instance, I needed to stop visiting the bar even though I wasn't drinking there, I needed to improve my diet and find sober evening activities to occupy my time, and I needed to rekindle my old hobbies like writing, reading and hiking. I was full of irrational fears when I got sober (still am, sometimes) and one of those (ridiculous and trivial) fears was that I would never enjoy the music that I used to listen to while drinking or the writings of Hunter S. Thompson again. Fortunately, I'm retarded. Both of those things remain favorite past times of mine.

I have taken a lot of inspiration from Hunter S. Thompson. In my teens I admired the Johnny Depp version of him for his drug habits, but I grew to appreciate the real talent and insightful writings of the guy as I got older. I love reading his letters. I find him thoughtful, poignant, honest and exceedingly funny. In sobriety, I began to call my home The Unicorn Ranch which is a mocking nod to Charlie Sheen and an honest homage to Dr. Thompson. Sheen because he named his Beverly Hills (or Malibu or wherever the fuck) home The Sober Valley Lodge when he was drinking tiger blood all over TMZ three years ago, Dr. Thompson because he lived for decades in Aspen, Colorado on a property he called The Owl Ranch. He reportedly had gongs hanging around the canyon walls and he would step outside and shoot them with his .44 magnum. Man, I love this guy.

I also read once that he was obsessed with breakfast. I'll let him explain this for you:

           "I like to eat breakfast alone, and almost never before noon; anybody with a terminally jangled lifestyle needs at least one psychic anchor every twenty-four hours, and mine is breakfast. In Hong Kong, Dallas, or at home—and regardless of whether or not I have been to bed—breakfast is a personal ritual that can only be properly observed alone, and in a spirit of genuine excess. The food factor should always be massive: four Bloody Marys, two grapefruits, a pot of coffee, Rangoon crêpes, a half-pound of either sausage, bacon, or corned-beef hash with diced chilies, a Spanish omelette or eggs Benedict, a quart of milk, a chopped lemon for random seasoning, and something like a slice of key lime pie, two margaritas and six lines of the best cocaine for dessert…Right, and there should also be two or three newspapers, all mail and messages, a telephone, a notebook for planning the next twenty-four hours, and at least one source of good music…all of which should be dealt with outside, in the warmth of a hot sun, and preferably stone naked."

Awesome. Just, awesome.

One of the new habits I've developed has been a consistent morning routine. It has none of the panache, drugs or booze that Thompson's had, but all of the psychic anchor qualities in a life that frequently borders on unhinged and unexplained. I almost always devote a good hour to waking up slowly. On days when I need to leave the house by 6:30 AM, I wake at 5 just so that I may have a solid hour to absorb my ritual. A French press of coffee, the morning news, a solid breakfast with some protein, 5 or 10 minutes of quiet thinking and two very important books. The books I look at are both recovery focused "daily readers". By this I mean there is a different entry for each day of the year. There are exactly 366 entries (one for leap year) and they often feel so incredibly timely in their subject matter. 

Having a morning routine that I stick to fairly obediently helps me stay grounded and present. It helps me remember to live life one day at a time and stay out of the past and future. By waking up and planning my day, I acknowledge that this day is all I am promised and I commit to making the most of it. By noon I might have abandoned those plans and be squarely stuck on some problem from eight years ago or panicking and fretting about an imagined decision I'm certain I'll need to face in 8 months, but at least I make a morning pledge to try and stay in the present. 

This post comes about on the second to the last day of the year when I read one of the more powerful entries in one of my books.  I'll summarize the entry:
           
           "The unpleasant things other people say or do have no power to destroy my peace of mind or ruin my day unless I permit it. Do I allow myself to respond to the words of a sick person as if they were the truth? ... There is so much to appreciate in this life. I won't waste another moment feeling sorry for myself."

It takes 364 days to reach that entry. At the end of the year you can look back on all the good and bad, tell the bad to slip away and focus on the good. No matter how much bad might outweigh the good, you can focus on the good and make that the estimation of your year. Lucky for me, it's been an awesome year. Easily the best ever. The triumphs dwarf the tribulations and the mere thought of the people I've met and things I learned bring an earnest and honest smile to my face. 

I'll look forward to 2014 and every morning I'll plan on living life to it's fullest. Outside, in the warmth of a hot sun, preferably stone naked.

"...the greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not on our circumstances."
       -Martha Washington

I don't know much about perfection, but I know it ain't you.

"Perfection" is not a word I would use to describe any aspects of my personality or life a few years ago. "Haphazard," "fraudulent," or "stolen" would be more appropriate words for describing my possessions or general state. What I have grown to realize, however, is that perfection-ism is far different than perfection itself. Perfectionism is an obsession with perfection. You can look it up if you don't believe me. Actually, would you look it up for me? I'm dreadfully tired and dictionary.com feels like it's miles away from this blog right now.

Perfectionism did and does describe my past and present mental fixations. Although I would measure the results of my alcoholic efforts as a solid C average, I was never satisfied with anything in my life that wasn't of the highest quality. Please note the distinction. I did not demand perfection from anything that I produced, I demanded perfection from you and all that the world brought into my life. And you let me down. Oh, boy... you let me down.

I believe it is likely part of the male condition to obsess over the idea that somewhere out there exists the perfect mate, the perfect job, the perfect porno flick, the perfect cup of coffee. We are so obsessed with the notion that something better is sitting on a bar stool down the street that we keep walking out on a good thing and we've shot to hell all chances at happiness with the perfectly good circumstances that are already in our life. For me, this obsession certainly manifested itself most devastatingly in the form of alcoholism. I kept looking for happiness at the bottom of the next pint of beer, and I just kept ordering another until I was drunker than drunk. But for other men who aren't alcoholics, they simply abandon partners and jobs at the first sign of weight gain or the first suggestion that they won't get the promotion they want. I did that too, but because I'm an alcoholic I also got drunk and shouted things like "you'll never find another guy like me!" To which she would reply, "God, I hope not."

The notion that I should not accept imperfection in my circumstances was killing me. I was satisfied with jobs for about two weeks. I'm fond of saying that "I've never met a restaurant I couldn't run better myself" although my titles have never included the words "supervisor, director or manager." My titles have included "probationary, trainee and inmate," so that should tell you something about what I was bringing to the table. Nevertheless, in the face of my own blistering half-effort, I insisted that somewhere out there (probably at that quaint little bar across town) existed a job where I would always be managed appropriately, fall in love with the girl of my dreams and make lots of money (probably get tipped with a winning lottery ticket or something).

One of the most interesting things I've learned in sobriety is that no one person can be all things to me. There does not exist a person who will never frustrate me, never be cross with me or never make a mistake.
The same can be said for a job. No job can give me every feeling of worthiness, financial security and creative license that I wish it would. So the secret to solving this is to have a multifaceted life.

About a year ago I started down a path to a new career. The path has been winding and the progress is slower than I would like. I intend to end up a social worker doing incredibly important work that will pay me an enormous sum and impress you so much that you'll name a formidable landmark after me. While my goals are certainly worthy and I love having ambition, I've had to practice patience and allow myself to make some mistakes along the way. I've been anxious to start an internship, find a second job and begin a slow departure from the restaurant industry and move into a career that I can picture myself doing at the age of 60. In the meantime, I have occasionally found myself feeling restless and antsy. But the anxiety subsided when I realized that I didn't need a job to make me feel worthy and useful. I could feel worthy and useful by being worthy and useful. This is what I mean by having a multifaceted life.

I have found refuge in things like volunteer work, attending 12-step fellowships and helping others, and my schoolwork. I realized that although I would like to find work as a social worker (and deep down I know I will, eventually), I can be perfectly satisfied with my life exactly the way it is. I make a great living working only 25 hours a week. With the remainder of my week I can find opportunities to fulfill the need I have for feeling useful and helpful.

I take the same approach to relationships. I have been blessed with an extraordinary family and a loving girlfriend. But when they fall short of what I think I need in my life, I don't have to look far to find that other aspects of my life are supplying me with a dose of love and support. When I stop demanding that one person, one job or one meal be perfect, then other people, hobbies and bowls of ice cream come along and deliver the goods. When we accept imperfection in ourselves and others, we open ourselves up to the possibility of greatness in friends and opportunities that we have been taking for granted.

All of this comes on the heels of the most special work Christmas party I've ever attended. It felt so warm, familiar and downright loving that it feels cheap to refer to it as "work" Christmas party. The fantastic restaurant that I am so privileged to call my place of employment threw a smashing little dinner for us tonight. My gracious girlfriend came and sat down with nearly the entire staff and we ate an amazing meal with the owners. We had a "secret Santa" exchange and the gifts that were given were remarkably thoughtful. It's not as if I hadn't realized it before, but I remembered how lucky I am. I see that I have more love in my life than I knew.

Is this the "spirit of Christmas" or did I just eat too much turkey? Either way, I like it and I'm going to sleep good tonight.

In Which I Ruminate About The Significance of My Pathetic Handwriting...

I have a homework assignment due on Tuesday, so naturally I'm here wasting an hour on my blog. One of the greatest things happening in my life (aside from maintaining the looks of a 25 year old while actually well into my 30's) is enrollment in school and pursuing acceptance into a graduate program at a top-tier university.

On Saturday, I had the good fortune of sitting in on a graduate class at the University of Washington. The title of the class was "Social Work Practice With Chemically Dependent Adults." While I have a passing knowledge of social work, I have an intimate one of chemical dependence and a vague familiarity with adulthood. I know a few adults and I have seen many of them on television. Occasionally, when I go someplace like a bank, I am treated as an adult until the teller accesses my account and sees my purchase history on my debit card. ("This guy went to the same grocery store three times yesterday?") I'm always afraid that they'll recognize the frequent $2.99 purchases at Safeway as my regular pints of Ben & Jerry's and I'll be laughed out of the bank and banished to the check cashing/payday loan industry. But I digress...

I often found that my chemical dependence stood between me and adulthood, but introduced me to many social workers, so this class seemed right up my alley! I have been a student at the local community college for almost a year and have achieved better grades every quarter than I ever earned in high school or during my undergraduate studies. Nevertheless, as I plodded into the Saturday morning class, an old familiar song started playing in my mind. "You're not good enough. This is a joke. You're a joke. You'll never get into this school. These are serious students and you're not one of them." This is the way I talked myself out of every good opportunity I had back in the drinking years.

It's cruel. It hurts. And I do it to myself. To my memory, nobody has ever said these things to me, but I have consistently said them to myself for as long as I can remember. Truthfully, I struggled with school from kindergarten through high school. Assignments went uncompleted. When I did complete them I sometimes chose not to turn them in. I cheated. I cut corners and skipped class. I was not a good student. I barely graduated high school. In fact, and I hope this won't disqualify me for holding public office one day, but I wouldn't have graduated if I hadn't cheated on a major paper during my senior year. *gulp* I can't believe I'm admitting this on the forever internet where everyone can read it (this blog has about 3 readers.)

I've reached a confidence in my life that, combined with a faith that my higher power and the universe will protect me from harm, allows me to explore in-depth and admit to God, myself and others, things that I used to try to keep hidden from all of the above. That means that I have begun examining the things that I formerly thought could hurt me. Over the past year, I have developed a strong faith in a higher power which I choose to call "god". This faith informs my trust that I cannot be hurt by finding out the truth about me.

For several years I took important documents like past due bills, court summons or treatment assessments and stuffed them into the top drawer of my desk. The idea was that I would come back to them "someday" and deal with them. Well, in a way I did.

Eventually, I forgot all about the nature of that drawers contents and decided to clean it out. 18 months into sobriety, I began literally cleaning house and came upon the drawer. I felt so completely protected from what I found that I read every page before burning it in the wood stove. All of the bills were either settled or so old that they will soon be off my credit report. The treatment assessments and police incident reports were nothing more than clarifying records of faded memories that I've discussed ad nauseum with sponsors and counselors. It was like snooping through some other drunk idiots desk. I felt detached. I felt well and healed.

Since that day, I've slowly begun thinking about another fact of Kevin Toth that is profoundly relevant to my academic pursuits. That is the fact of my learning disability.

Last night, after attending the graduate class, while working in the restaurant, I had the distinct pleasure of waiting on my middle school art teacher. Her name is Lara Jones and she's an absolutely wonderful person. I love art. I'm fucking terrible at it too. My paintings look like something my four-year-old nephew would probably mock. If he had a refrigerator of his own he would probably hang up my paintings and think "man, that Uncle Kevin makes some pretty sad paintings. I hope he's good at sports or something. Actually, he sucks at sports. Good thing he's so darn cute." Still, I love to paint my terrifically terrible paintings. At certain points in life I've made lots of them. All of this occurred to me as I wrote down my email address for my former teacher. I wrote it down in my familiar, sloppy, labored handwriting with a mixture of upper and lowercase lettering so that it read "KEVINtoth@gMAIL.com".

I am a dysgraphic. Nobody seems to know what that means, so I'll explain it to you (no need to thank me). In layman's terms I have what you would call "fucking ugly" handwriting. Not only does my handwriting look like it was written by a trained seal with thumbs, it is astonishingly painful for me to write. I get immense cramps in my fingers. My wrist tightens. The sentences stray from the lines and the lower and upper cases mix inappropriately. My penmanship would look more fitting if it were written in crayon and had a few letters backwards like a child's.

In this moment last night, something clicked. This is why my paintings and drawings are so endearingly pathetic. People tend to look at my artwork and react with an "Ah, look! Kevin did some doodles!" as if I'm a puppy who just took an adorable shit on a shag carpet.

I spent decades denying that anything was wrong. I hated the term learning disabled. I never truly felt "dumb", but I thought I might actually be dumb. I feared I would find out the truth that I was. So I took the results of the two learning/neuro-psychological examinations I underwent (at age 12 and 16) and stuffed the manila folder into another drawer of the desk and pretended it didn't exist. Until tonight.

I took 30 minutes to thumb through the reports and saw that these professionals who assessed me twenty years did an amazing job. They got it exactly right. They tested with astounding accuracy my strengths and weaknesses. It is uncanny to read such a vivid, fair and downright correct portrayal of my 12 and 16 year old intellect and academic ability. I just wish they had paid more attention to my looks. They really failed to capture my charm.

But my responses to their testing seem the most illuminating. I was "satisfied" with my B-/C+ grades and felt those were "good". I didn't trust the praise the testers gave me when I scored highly on something. I thought they were lying to me about my high IQ and superior ability to express myself verbally. I now understand that my strength to communicate verbally is a compensation for my early childhood struggle with handwriting. Just like my devilish looks are a compensation for my devilish soul and complete lack of morals. (Just kidding, I have morals. I just choose to ignore them.) What the professionals couldn't quite predict when they tested me in the early 90's, is how much help a computer is to me. As I am frequently told (and thank you very much) is how clear my voice is in this blog. Typing is, in fact, quite easy for me. It seems to be an equalizer for my dysgraphia. I love to write- just not with a pen and paper.

I am really glad that my parents held onto this paperwork and handed it over to me when I got sober. I'm also glad I waited a while to read it. Today I view self-knowledge as liberating and helpful. I'm glad to know more about myself and it feels good to understand my struggles and to see what makes me exceptional. It's nice to know who I actually am. I am not dumb. I am not lazy. I am just as good as every other student in that fucking grad school class. And when I don't get accepted on my first application (and I won't), it won't be because I'm not smart enough. It will because I'm not ready to be accepted yet. But if I apply again, and when I'm accepted, I have as much chance at success as all the other WASP-y, rich kid do-gooders that apply for a master of social work program. In the meantime, I'll be at home finger painting and writing blogs when I should be doing homework. Okay, maybe I am a little bit lazy. But I'm also charming as hell.

I love you. Thanks for reading my blog.

My stupid, boring and glum (happy and incredible) life...that I love.

I'm really quite busy these days. Work, school, graduate school applications, recovery stuff- plus I'm a vigilante at night. The days our just packed. I have about 4 important things I should be working on right now, so naturally I'm not doing any of them and am instead here at The Most Important Blog on the Internet. I left the restaurant bizarrely early this evening to go grocery shopping. 7 PM is the best time to go to the grocery store. It's all guys like me with a get-me-the-fuck-outta-here mentality. We arrive. We shop. We leave. We ask no questions, self check out is fine. No sir, I will not be needing help out.

Glancing into my shopping bag (reusable) I chuckled at the contents. Bread, milk, cream, sugar. Jesus. Where's the beer? The cigarettes? The Tylenol PM? The only thing that could have made that bag more plain would be a bottle of vanilla. Shit, I really did need vanilla for these cookies I'm baking. Christ, I'm baking fucking cookies at 9 PM again.

I must admit, when I got sober I thought that life was going to be pretty monotonous. This is not an uncommon fear for alcoholics. AA's Big Book addresses it with this question "Am I to be consigned to a life which is stupid, boring and glum?" Fortunately, the answer for me is "sort of, yes."

Well, not really. No, not quite at all actually. But there was a point in my life only a couple of years before sobriety when the life I lead today sounded dreadful. For a decade I defined happiness by how many bartenders knew my name. I gauged my success in life by how easily I could score dope and at what price. I prided myself on having the best connections (bouncers, cab drivers, waitresses). I did dangerous, dangerous things and I loved it. Life was chaotic and unpredictable. I remember waking up in a recording studio (no, I was not in a band) with a microphone in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other. For a few years this was really fun.

By the time I reached my late twenties, something had changed. First of all, some of my peers began to drift away to better, more stable lifestyles. People began focusing on careers, getting married, having babies... It all sounded like hell to me, but I noticed that my priorities seemed very different from theirs. The next thing that happened was that my tolerance to drugs and alcohol changed severely. I was able to ingest about the same amount, but blackouts became a frequent problem. By the end of my drinking I was blacking out almost every time I drank. But even scarier, I was blacking out after only a couple of drinks. I would have two beers and two shots and not remember the next six beers and six shots. Whatever happened in those remaining hours was a mystery.

Every morning I had to become a private investigator of my own fucked up life. I would wake up and frantically dig through my pockets to see how much money I'd spent, find receipts to see where I'd been, read text messages for a clue about who I was with.

Several times in the winter when it's dark all the time, I would drink from 3-5 and pass out for a few hours, wake up at 8 and have no idea if it was morning or night until I turned on the television to find the news or Jeopardy.

Aside from the daily drinking mayhem, there were my ongoing employment problems and my depressing financial saga. I will write an entire 30 blog posts on how obnoxious I was to the opposite sex and what a liability I had grown to be for my friends. Life had become very tedious.

Before I got sober, I made a few last-ditch efforts to make drinking work for me. I moved back to my hometown which is 30 minutes away from Seattle and pristine and peaceful. Then, after a year, I moved further into the woods where I intended to drink heavily out of the auspices of anyone that might still care about me.

Nothing in life goes according to my plans. About two weeks after moving into my little house in the woods I nearly totaled my car. God had a brilliant idea for me. The car high-centered on it's way into a ditch at a high-speed. I was arrested for DUI (again), but the car didn't get a scratch. When I got out of jail I got the car outfitted with a breathalyzer and drove my ass to about 500 AA meetings in a year. My daily routine changed drastically.

I've never been happier.

So I'm grateful for some normalcy in my life today. But really, life is rarely boring. I have an exciting life. I am a college student (again), I work in a beautiful restaurant with talented people, I date an amazing girl and have a wonderful family. I read lots of books, see lots of movies and eat lots of cookies. When I wake up in the morning I feel rested, healthy and hopeful. And I remember where every dollar got spent the night before. Usually on ice cream and pizza.

Thanks for reading my blog. I love you.

A..N..XI....E......T..Y....

I've heard it said that in sobriety we have lots of small problems, but when we're drinking we really only have one, major problem- that we can't seem to stop drinking or getting high. I perceived my life to be really quite routine or boring when I was a drunk. I knew that I was a little behind the curve in the career, relationship and social aptitude departments, but I thought my plentiful problems of not paying bills on time, losing jobs, threats of eviction and the occasional arrest or emergency room visit were fairly normal and mundane.

Being addicted to a depressant like alcohol (of which I drank daily and heavily for ten years) did wonders for my fear-riddled life. Like I said, at the time my lifestyle seemed boring, repetitive and not in any way unusual, dangerous or abnormal. I basically went from one mini-crises to the next. There was always a utility about to be shut of- I frequently went weeks without phone service, a boss that was mad at me, a girl that was mad at me, a wound that wouldn't heal, a cold that I couldn't shake, a shake that I couldn't steady, weight that I was losing, money that I owed a bartender or a dealer... Life was never very simple. Booze helped.

For a long time, when I drank, I felt sublime. The problems seemed manageable if I thought about them at all. Drinking calmed my nerves and physically stopped the shaking and quieted my growling stomach. When it stopped working, I drank for a few more years trying to get that fix back. Eventually the whole thing went to shit and something stopped me from drinking any more.

It was then that I realized I was a scared, helpless little motherfucker. In my first 90 days of sobriety I probably had 400 panic attacks. I now understand that I had been experiencing severe anxiety for several years and I was self-medicating with booze and drugs. Depressants like alcohol, benzodiazepines (Xanax, Clonopin, Valium), and opiates treat anxiety very well, but when your body detoxifies, the anxiety returns like a pack of hungry coyotes that chase you around your living room and gnaw out your guts.

To be clear, I had a lot to be fearful of. First of all, I had some fairly serious legal trouble that was threatening to put me in jail for a little while and essentially make me unable to hold a job, pay my rent or bills. There was also the whole "accepting I'm an alcoholic" thing and figuring out what the fuck to do about that. Then I had to face up to the fact that I owed a shitload of money to banks and lenders. I had to acknowledge that things weren't going quite as well as I was leading people to believe. I was an anxious, anxious dude.

Many alcoholics identify "resentment" as the number one engine in their drinking airplane. For me, fear and anxiety were the culprits. I had a wide assortment of fears, but frequently the smallest ones were the most detrimental. For instance, I was afraid of my mailbox. In this day and age, we seldom get good news in the mailbox. For me, it was a box of doom and misery. Because I lived in an apartment building, the tiny mailbox necessitated that I empty it at least bi-monthly. I would pull out a stack of mail that was entirely collection agencies or overdue bills (you really only need to worry when they send the bill in a yellow, pink or blue envelope- then they mean business). I wouldn't even sort through it. I would just take it upstairs with the intention of dealing with it when I got my next tax return- seriously, that was always my plan. I would walk into my studio apartment and plop it down on the previous stack until it was about 8 inches high and it would spill off the shelf onto the floor in the middle of the night, reminding me that I was a delinquent, sad sack of incompetence. In the middle of the night I would hear this "sssshhhhhhh......kerplash!" and I would know the bill pile was all over the floor again. The next morning, I would scoop them up, stuff them into a drawer and wait for the tax return. When I got my refund I would sometimes actually pay off a bill or two, but usually I drank a lot of it away.

Anyways, back to the present. The bills get paid on time these days and I haven't seen a yellow envelope in quite a many months. Once, when I was a few months sober and still pretty broke, I thought that my phone was shut off when I was a few days late on my bill. It turns out that nobody had called or texted me for a few days- which is also pathetic, but less pathetic than getting your phone turned off. But in spite of this renewed responsibility I still suffer from anxiety attacks.

They come from the weirdest things. A couple of months ago I was driving home from a place I'm not familiar with and my GPS failed to give me a direction. The feeling of an anxiety attack crept up quickly. For me, it's a feeling that starts in my heart with a skipped heartbeat. My heart seems to stop for a second, then my stomach tightens and I feel a little nauseous, my heart speeds up and beats irregularly, my shoulders tighten and my mind races. Sometimes these attacks go on for days and days. It's misery.

But I've learned to look for the fear behind the anxiety and find out what it is that's feeding the sense of impending doom. I'm not afraid of mailboxes anymore because I know that I can handle any bills that come my way, and what I can't handle I know my higher power can.

When I sat down to write this, I intended to get into a discussion of the dangers of treating anxiety with prescription medication, but I already wrote that research paper last July. Also, the burger I took out of the freezer has thawed out and I'm hungry. Good night.

THE END