Melancholy
I’m not yet fully recovered from the depression I wrote about a couple of weeks back. I thought I was—during the Toronto trip, and even since then, a bit earlier in the week—but it appears that is not the case.
A couple of things happened recently that tilted the scale back a bit. First the easy stuff.
Last night I got my four-year coin at the meeting of my AA home group. Anniversaries are a mixed bag for many of us. It is for me. See, along with the good feelings and congratulations are the memories. They don’t go away. And good thing too because if I ever forget, I’m in deep trouble.
True, as of this writing I’m 1,468 days from my last drunk and from the last time I sucked on the glass dick. But I’ll never be more than an arm’s length from the next. As good as life gets, that’s always there.
Last night was also the last meeting at that particular location. The going rate for renting a church basement for an AA meeting is $15. For the past, oh eight months or so, we have not collected enough to cover that, let alone expenses for things like coffee, anniversary coins and so on.
The general fund has been covering the shortfall but we’re getting dangerously close to having tap the “prudent reserve”—what you and I might call the emergency money.
In April I started looking for new, less expensive locations. About the same time the Gay Alliance of the Genesee Valley moved their offices out of their community center. There were too many people in too small a space, and they had only one room for community groups to meet.
Starting next week, our little rag-tag band of drunks and druggies will meet above ground in comfy chairs at the GAGV Community Center for less than 20% of what we were paying the Methodists for their basement full of folding plastic chairs.
It’s a great move for the group and already it looks like we’ll have some new members. At tonight’s meeting a few guys I’ve never met took one of the flyers I’d brought along.
Still, alcoholics and addicts, as a rule, don’t like change. We like predictability and change makes things unpredictable. It’s unsettling.
There’s already enough unsettling change and unpredictablity in my life at the moment, thankyouverymuch.
This whole thing with moving out on my own, growing the business and everything, while certainly a personal triumph and filled with opportunity, is also filled with new problems I haven’t faced.
Even simple stuff like monthly bills is new and different. Managing money—whether it’s in figures containing commas or remembering to have enough quarters for the laundry—is something I’ve not had to do for years.
Keeping a calendar has been a lifelong diffuculty, and it doesn’t seem any easier lately. I went for years with maybe one or two markings a month on my calendar. For the past four months, occasionally there’s a day without something, but not very often. Most days have several items.
I feel enslaved by time obligations to others when I cannot predict if I’ll even be able to get out of bed in the morning—something that’s been difficult on several mornings during the past few weeks.
Managing simultaneous demands by multiple clients is rapidly becoming tiresome. And for some oddball reason, I can’t stop the clients from coming. I already have three web projects backed up—four if you count a redesign I’d like to do for a client, oh, and five if you count my desire to move another client to an online registration and payment for their course catalog—and before I left for Toronto, out of the blue another new client calls me.
If that wasn’t enough, I came back from what was supposed to be a get-away-from-it-all time in Toronto with one new hosting client and and other strong potential one. They may both develop into something more too. I can’t seem to go anywhere to do anything without attracting new clients.
I know, I know I should be grateful for problems such as these. I am. No one ever said that living sober was without problems. I’m cool with that. But they’re still problems I have to learn how to manage—a much higher quality of problem that I had a few years ago, but problems nonetheless.
Finally, there’s a problem familiar to long-time readers.
Jeffrey.
(Note to a mutual friend: This and more is in the letter I sent him today so there’s no need to become upset that I’ve written this when you print and mail it to him.)
See, for the past four years I’ve seen my relationship with him fairly clearly. And I’ve never seen anything that gave me the remotest indication that he would change from the way I’ve always known him.
Sure I’ve had hopes, but more along the lines of of the way kids hope for things from Santa Claus. I’ve come to accept—and even became comfortable with—the recognition that he would cycle between prison and jails separated by brief stints outside consuming copious amounts of drugs and alcohol.
Not that I think its the best way to live, but if that’s his choice, I have to be cool with it. Especially since he seems finally to accept and be cool with the choices I have made with my life.
It doesn’t change the way I feel towards him, but I’ve been able to change my behaviour towards him and I’ve learned to love him from a safe distance. Occasionally, I even let him think he’s manipulated me into something I would have done anyway, just to maintain the status quo. Still, I’ve learned to how and when to say no and how to keep myself safe. Prison bars and walls are not enough to keep yourself safe from your own feelings and from yourself.
All this has been predicated on one assumption—that he would remain unchanged by this current prison bid. That was true for the first half of it. This despite many noises to the contrary, including those on his web site. Then, over the past couple of months, things began to change.
I began to see in him the signs and stages of early recovery. I’ve seen enough people in recovery—and allegedly in recovery—to know when it’s real and when it’s fake. I’ve never seen anything but the fake kind with Jeffrey until recently.
The shifts and changes have been subtle, the kind you’d notice only if you’re intimately familiar with both recovery and with the person and if you’re not in frequent contact with them. They’d get lost in the noise of daily contact.
This has, as the saying goes, rocked my world. I wonder if I’m seeing what I want to see rather than what’s really there. I’m wondering if it’s too soon to hope that that the seeds of recovery are finally sprouting. It’s too easy to get so far along and then either fall or run back. I’ve seen that a lot too.
But if it’s for real, and if it continues, it changes the entire foundation of our relationship. I’m used to dealing with an active alcoholic and addict. I’m used to dealing with a con artist. Shit, I can see his cons coming even before he knows he’s formulating them.
Suddenly, he’s no longer predictable. And alcoholics and addicts don’t like unpredictability. It’s unsettling.
I’m feeling unsettled.
On the one hand, I cannot overstate the joy and gratitude I feel that he finally seems to “get” it—that he’s figured out what it is to “work” a program and how to do it, rather than simply recite one or to fake his way through it—play the role—in order to get a certificate or to get out of some kind of trouble, or to gain sympathy.
On the other hand, I’m insulating myself just in case I’m reading it wrong or if his acting has gotten really, really, good—good enough to fool even me.
I’m out of hands, so I guess, on one foot, I’m delighted by the prospect of developing a new, healthy relationship between two new and healthy people. It’s been rather one-sided for a good long time.
And on the other foot, I’m terrified that a healthy Jeffrey will no longer have a need or a desire for me—or that I will be one of the people he must change in order to progress. (Recovery Rule #1: Change people, places and things.)
Talk about a mixed grill
Back in rehab, they played this film for us that was supposed to prepare us for how people close to us may react as we go through the changes of recovery. I suddenly find myself in that film, but not as the addict, as one of the people reacting to a recovering addict.
Whoa! There wasn’t an intermission or even a costume change for this new scene.
Suddenly, I don’t just see it as an intellectual exercise. I didn’t have anyone close to me—either proximally or emotionally—when I went through those stages and so I didn’t have to deal with any of it. It was, at the time, purely a theoretical thing.
Now, I feel, I know in my bones, why sometimes people sabotage the recovery of their addict. It forces you to change when all along it was your addict you expected had the entire burden of change.
The music has changed and you can no longer dance the familiar dance.
Sabotaging the addict’s recovery puts things back the way they “belong”, to the way we’re used to dealing our addict. It may not be right and it may be painful, but at least you know what you’re dealing with.
I hope I have enough integrity and personal skills to not let that happen.
What brought this into focus for me was the birthday card he sent me. He makes greeting cards for other inmates and he sends a few himself. I always get one for holidays and my birthday. Nice as they are, they seem obligatory. That’s not a shot. It’s no different than the way most of us send most of our greeting cards. Certainly no different than the way I send them. Even to Jeffrey.
His cards are usually drawn or painted. He can turn them out fairly quickly. Nicely done too. The product of artistic skill.
This one is completely different. This card is large and thick. It barely fit in a large manila envelope. And it’s a 3-D, pop-up, festival of origami. Origami? I didn’t know he could make a paper airplane!
There are four (count ‘em!) different pop-ups in this card. A layer cake of pop-ups. Fans, trees, birds, leaves, flowers and butterflies spring up out of the thing when opened, along with a hand-cut billboard of letters spelling out Happy Birthday.
It’s an engineering marvel.
This wasn’t a quick couple hours of work. It’s so finished that there had to be several drafts and prototypes. He had to work weeks on this. In fact, now that I think about it, he told me he started work on it in the middle of last month and told me to expect something different. (I figured it was a not so subtle reminder that his birthday comes before mine.)
I took the card to work yesterday to show one of the clerks. She teaches origami and paper crafts. I’ve been amazed by some of her stuff.
She was amazed and fascinated by this birthday card. I could see her reverse-engineering the whole thing. The rest of the staff were boggled by it. Shit, patrons came from across the room to see what the fuss was all about. Kids, adults too, squealed with delight and looked at me with envy.
This is far too elaborate and far too time-consuming to be part of a con. And no-one has ever put this much time and effort into something for me. Do you know how special this makes me feel?
And despite that rehab film assuring us that the ways people may react to our recovery was within the bounds of normalcy, I feel guilty for feeling the things I described above.
And hence, my melancholia.
