As Willing to Listen as the Dying Can Be.

"...as willing to listen as the dying can be..."

That, I have not yet been. But I've been undergoing a sort of spiritual shift this week and it's definitely for the better.

Letting go, letting go, letting go. I have so much fear. But Narc is not in my life anymore. And I will be okay, no matter how many times fleeting and frightened thoughts tell me otherwise.

Last night, a lot of people didn't show up for group. It ended up being only me, Meema and another woman. (Our counselor is a woman as well). At first I thought it was going to be an awful group. I normally don't like being with all women. But after the first ten minutes, something started to happen. I started to feel more comfortable talking about relationships and sexual issues and I started to talk. I really started to talk. It was an amazing relief. I felt like I had so many realizations-- awakenings that are still clinging to my spirit even though I can no longer quite articulate them as ideas. I have a lot of work to do, though, in terms of coming to accept my purpose-- to live my life, and not to exist for another person. It's so simple, yet so mind blowing to me.

I went to a really good meeting yesterday too. It was kind of random. I just picked an afternoon meeting close to my school One of the things I am coming to love most about AA is how absolute strangers can perfectly express ungraspable feelings that I've had all my life... feelings that I've never heard another friend express... feelings that I never dreamed another human being felt. And yet, nearly all of us have felt those things. It's giving me the gift of language. I'm more able to say what it is... that gnawing, that loneliness, that absolute disconnect that is not quite depression nor anxiety, but that I've been suffering from my entire life. Disconnect. I still feel it, although it's getting better.

And my sponsor yelled at me on Tuesday night. She told me that it was unacceptable that I didn't go to meetings on Saturday and Sunday and that I didn't call her. She said that I have to do that bare minimum or she can't work with me... She can't help me.

"You have to get it," she said. "And if I can't communicate it to you, maybe someone else can."

(Well, she didn't really "yell" at me. She was nice about it. But I felt so awful, it felt like getting yelled at.)

I'm working on my first step with her this week. So I have been reading the Twelve and Twelve and am starting to see what she is saying. Am I "as willing to listen as the dying can be?" "We stand ready to do anything which will lift the merciless obsession from us," it says. But my fear is powerful. So fucking powerful.

Anyway, I did a lot of writing today... a lot of remembering. She asked me to remember how my life had become "unmanageable." So I wrote and wrote... I wrote a list of 15. I think I'll share it here. Why not? It's my reality. And I'm tired of being afraid of who I am... Yes, I'm afraid what you all will think of me, readers. But I am afraid of myself. And I don't want to be. I want to accept myself. I want to accept what I feel, who I am and what I've done. I don't want to need Narc. I want to have myself.

So, I present... the unmanageable mess of my life while drinking:

1.) 1998-1999: (Character) I became a liar, started cutting classes, juggling things to "get by;" I began making up stories to my friends and lying to my family more and more frequently which filled me with shame and made me feel alone. I was arrested for possession (of cocaine) in 1998 which "exposed me" to my family and the shame that came with that is a poison inside of me that I still haven't managed to expel.

2.) 1998-1999: (Safety/Self-Esteem) I began to experience blackouts and I started "acting out," frequently crying, publicly self-cutting, revealing much too much of myself and telling all my depression and my problems to strangers (cab drivers, bartenders, etc.) who would then often try to take advantage of me sexually. I had only hazy memories of this in the morning, which caused me to feel anxious, ashamed, guilty and like a bad person with so many secrets that I could never let anyone know the "real me." I began to feel even more "unlovable" than I had before. I convinced myself that most men could only want me for sex.

3.) 1998-1999: (Relationships) I had a destructive relationship with my 60-something-year-old choir director (who bought me drinks all the time) and I embarrassed myself in front of the other members of the choir, losing friends and ultimately suffered a huge loss in self-esteem.

4.) 2000-2001: (Relationships) I drank and drugged and became sexually promiscuous during times when I had (temporarily) broken up with my boyfriend and this created secrets and lies between us when we got back together and again brought shame and loneliness to me. I also felt that because he didn't drink and I did (and couldn't stop) that I was a bad person--dirty or slutty and somehow undeserving of his "goodness."

5.) 2000-2001: (Work/Character) I got drunk at an end of the year party at the high school where I taught and after the party, I went into a liquor store and bought alcohol for some (underage) graduating high school seniors who had been my students. The next year, three of my former students came to a birthday party at my house and I smoked weed in front of them. In my mind, this behavior is maybe the worst thing that I have ever done. I can't explain how much this violates my every value and I can't believe that alcohol brought me there and that I still kept on drinking.

6.) 2002-2003: (Relationships) When I broke up with B, my drinking led to extremely dramatic scenes, suicide threats, hysterics, self-mutilation and all sorts of other emotional threats in an attempt to make him feel guilty for having hurt me and to hold on to the relationship. These scenes were not new, but rather, drinking often led me to create such "drama" throughout our relationship.

7.) 2002-2003: (Daily Routine) I started drinking at home alone and started depending on alcohol to be able to sleep. After B and I broke up, I was afraid and I didn't believe that I could sleep alone. My drinking became more regular and more normalized and sleep without "passing out" seemed like a trial.

8.) 2004-2006: (Relationships) I entered into an emotionally (and borderline physically) abusive relationship with Narc which offered no emotional fulfillment, but even so, I would continue to accept whatever was dished out, hoping only for the sense of connection I felt while drinking with him. I became obsessed with him and I felt worse and worse all the while, but I felt as if I were trapped-- caught in a never ending destructive cycle of "eternal recurrence."

9.) 2004-2006: (Money/Daily Routine) My drinking led to the heavy use of cocaine in the summer of 2004 (and more moderate use thereafter). The cocaine use and the increased drinking led me to spend all of my money, using up all of my student loans and ignoring household bills which led to a constant state of debt for the next two years (My phone was frequently shut off, my electricity was nearly shut off, I accumulated credit card debt etc.). I needed to be bailed out by my mom multiple times. I failed to hold up my end of my financial agreements with my mother and couldn't get myself to get a job in the summer of 2004, 2005 or 2006. I still feel guilt and shame about this. More than anything, I don't want to be a burden to my mother.

10.) 2004-2006: (Safety) I began to bring strange men back to my house to drink or do drugs with me and I put myself in danger all the time. This got to the point where I was physically assaulted in my apartment once, date raped once, and one time awoke to find a used condom on the floor even though I didn't remember having sex with anyone. I was also frequently drunk and alone at various bars or on the street in the middle of the night, talking to strangers. One time I woke up on the street corner in Tribeca where I had passed out. I was mugged twice (once in 1999, once in 2004) and would sometimes receive strange phone calls from shady people I don't remember giving my number to.

11.) 2004-2006: (Daily Routine) My house fell into complete disarray. At times I didn't have working light bulbs, wouldn't bother to replace them, instead living in the dark; I would run out of toilet paper and never replace it; I wore dirty laundry, wouldn't change the cat litter and never took out the garbage.

12.) 2004-2006: (Safety) My blackouts and passing out became worse and worse. My neighbors reported having to drag me into my apartment from the hallway of the building. I would wake up with strange things in my pockets (matchbooks, books, a police badge, men's clothing, written notes, etc.), with strange outgoing or incoming calls on my phone, strange clothing (on or off my body) and in strange places (in and out of my apartment). Men (like Narc or the Stallion) would tell me that I said or did certain things and I was never sure whether or not to believe them or whether they were trying to manipulate me and make me believe things that were not true. The blackouts became so regular that I devised a complex system to deal with them, writing myself notes, sending myself text messages while drinking and even calling my home phone from my cell phone (while drunk) to report what was happening.

13.) 2004-2006: (School/Hobbies) I stopped prioritizing school, haphazardly doing my readings and accumulating five incompletes. I never really chose an advisor, I stopped going to intellectual history seminars, I was unable to register for new classes in the spring of '06 and I let myself "disappear" from the department. This was horrible for my self-esteem and I felt my peers "passing me by." I also stopped drawing and painting and my singing (my greatest joy!) began to deteriorate. I had to have my tonsils out (from cocaine use), was wasting money on singing lessons that I would show up for dreadfully hung-over, and I eventually stopped taking lessons all together, instead spending all of my money on alcohol, or being too drunk or hung- over to make it to my lesson.

14.) 2004-2006: (Work) My drinking made me a lazy teacher. In the fall of 2004, I wrote most of my lectures while drunk or drinking and had to deal with the sloppy handwriting and often ill prepared notes in the classroom the next day. Also, throughout this period, I almost always showed up for class hung-over and sometimes even still drunk from the night before. A handful of times I had to call in and cancel class because I was coming down off something or because I stayed up so l knew I couldn't sober up in time. While I'm lucky that no one ever found out about this and I had no "official" consequences, I carry a deep shame about my behavior and again have suffered a lowering of my self-esteem.

15.) 2005-2006: (Health) My drinking led to an utter disregard for my health. I regained the 50 pounds I had lost in 2004, and put on an additional 14. I completely stopped taking my insulin medication, I ended up with HPV (with pre-cancerous cervical changes) and had to have several procedures, ignoring instructions not to have sex in the weeks to follow, and I ended up having unprotected sex with led to a pregnancy and abortion (which I also did not follow up properly). Later, I found out that I had also done damage to my liver based on blood tests taken from the Fall of 2004 to the present. Also, I frequently woke up with mysterious bruises. Some of them I didn't worry about (on my legs or on my stomach or my arms), but others were a cause for greater concern--on my face or on my neck. I knew that these things were sexually related, but because of the blackouts, I had no way of knowing what had happened to me.

So, that's it...

I REALLY, REALLY want to be free.
I REALLY, REALLY want to get well.

I think (I think!) that I'm beginning to become "as willing to listen as the dying can be."

-h-