Terrible Things Are Going to Happen . . . To YOU!

The good news about sobriety is that you get to feel everything again but the bad news is that you get to feel everything again.

I have been struck recently by how many people seem to express some frustration at feeling upset and anxious during this apprehensive time fraught with anxious disquietude.  (Ed. Note: I wanted to see how many synonyms for anxiety I could cram into one sentence).  They seem to feel that they should be handling the pandemic better if by "better" you mean "perfectly."  

"I'm not doing a very good job of staying in the moment, in not projecting gloom and doom," they moan.

Yes, well, One Day at a Time is a brilliant, wonderful concept that can be extraordinarily hard to put into action.  I can't always simply hew to the concept by force of will.  No shit, one day at a time, mister.  If I wake up and the rear tire on my car is flat the easiest thing would be to pick my car up and carry it to the gas station to save myself the service charge.  t

Anxiety!  I have been struck in the middle of my back by this high, hard fastball many times in my sobriety - so many times you'd think I would see it coming and hit the dirt face-first - but I'm frozen in place.  I don't even move.  I just stand there, transfixed, and watch the ball sizzle right into my backside.  Why I hang onto this belief that I am above normal human emotion is a puzzle I have never been able to completely solve.  I'm better at not letting negative thoughts run rampant but I'm not cured.

This is as it should be.  Progress, not perfection.  Shoot for a perfect ideal and accept the fact that you will fall short.

I was sober about ten years when 9/11 happened.  I had recently started my own business - straight commission selling quite expensive monitoring systems into heavy manufacturing facilities.  The economy freaked out and so did I.  SuperK wasn't working and we had no other source of income.  One of my friends in The Program tapped me on the forehead after listening to me speculate on Impending Doom in a meeting and said: "Look - all of us have our emotions close to the surface right now."  I calmed down.  It give me the permission to be upset about something that was pretty upsetting

It's not all about my alcoholism.  Sometimes it's about my normal reaction to abnormal events.  I handle things - I don't surmount them.

In the course of one year my mother, my father, and my AA sponsor of 25 years - a second father to me - all died.  I was OK until I wasn't and when I wasn't the wheels came off emotionally.  I saw a psychologist for awhile - I'm a big, big fan of making use of all of the outside professionals and resources available to us - and was constantly struck by how often she said things like: "Yeah, that makes sense to me" or "I bet you're still upset about that."  She never brushed off my feelings as abnormal or inappropriate.  She validated them as human.

I got through 9/11 and the deaths and I'll get through this virus scare, too.  So will you.