GAD

 Generalized Anxiety Disorder:  Chronic, exaggerated worry about everyday issues.

Causes and Factors: "While the exact cause is unknown, they likely stem from a mix of genetics, environmental stress, and brain chemistry.  Factors include family history, traumatic experiences, and chronic illness."

I have GAD written down on my medical chart.  I have been diagnosed with this and it is a real thing and not something I've just made up like almost everything else in my life.  When I try to explain to non-GAD people what it means, exactly, I say: "I used to be nervous about everything and anything, and I still have a tendency to trend into disaster."  There's nothing logical about it.  I have been able to manage it via a combination of therapy, light medication, and thousands of hours of exercise and meditation.  It's still fire but it's in the fireplace most of the time.

Anxiety:  (From the American Psychological Association)  An emotion characterized by apprehension and somatic symptoms of tension in which an individual anticipates impending disaster, catastrophe, or misfortune.

Disaster!  Catastrophe!!  My car is in the repair shop!  It will never be the same and it will become a lemon and I'm fucked!

Wait, wait . . . my car is in an accredited repair shop full of highly trained, professional mechanics who deal with damage far, far worse than this and they are working on non-mechanical, purely cosmetic damage and everything is going to be just fine.

Pick one of those and tell me which is more pleasant.

I try to remember that anxiety is a normal, omnipresent human emotion that prepares us for the unknown.  We all have it.  We're all going to have it forever and ever and ever.  I will eternally remember the psychologist who looked at me and said: "What is the anxiety trying to tell you?  What is the message?"  I was so busy trying to avoid it or change it into something pleasant or bury it under a soporific that I never learned the skills to manage it.  Quit trying to run away!  Look for the lesson and learn something for once in your stupid life!

Let's say for example that I'm not getting any hot water in my house.  I go outside and see that there's water leaking out of the heater.  I do not touch the heater because it has hot, scalding, pressurized water in it and there is no good outcome on God's green earth that can come from me having anything whatever to do with the appliance.  I don't even like looking at it.  It could explode, dousing me with scalding water and don't tell me this is unlikely because I have a mole on the inside feeding me confidential information.  So I called an HVAC guy and set up an appointment.  I have the money to fix or even replace the entire thing.  Not having anything but warm water for a few hours is not the end of the world.  Yet . . .  I feel some anxiety.  This is NORMAL anxiety.  I'm okay with this anxiety.  My problem is that if I'm not vigilant I can find myself drifting into the milieu of impending disaster.  There is no impending disaster!  Go take a walk, you idiot, and all will be well! 

More Aspects of Weirdo Humanity

 In my Quiet Time I ask for help from outside my self in directing my thinking, especially asking that it be divorced from self-pity, dishonest, or self-seeking motives.  I'm not positive what that means exactly, or how it applies to me.  Certainly, I'm self-seeking.  THAT one I get.  I'm a self-seeking guided missile.  A self-seeking bulldozer.  I don't think I'm all that dishonest; at least that I know of.  Sure, I lie all the time but is that what the Big Book is really talking about?  Some lying to make myself look better in the eyes of my fellows or to hide up some shitty, underhanded behavior  that might make me look better seems perfectly reasonable to me.  Everybody does that, right?  But the suggestion that makes me pause is the reminder to avoid self-pity whenever possible.  I really, seriously don't think that I fall into that trap too often.

So here's some stuff . . .  

I called a friend in The Program and didn't get a return call.

I sent a long, clever, relatable text to a new person in The Fellowship with whom I have a strong relationship.  Crickets.

I sent a note out to a friend about a topic that I really thought about and heard an entire chorus of different crickets.

The car repair is taking longer than I had hoped.  Not longer that I expected but longer than I had hoped.

None of this stuff is important.  None of this stuff is out of the ordinary.  But it has sort of bugged  me, you know?  The sane part of my brain is saying: "Chill out." and the insane part, the huge, massive insane part, is shrieking: "The world is ending!!"

Humans Are Weirdos

Being a human can be such a weird experience.  Sometimes it makes sense and sometimes it veers off into the illogical.  I guess that's why it's so much fun and simultaneously so annoying.  I have a few things to take care of in the next ten days, some of it routine - like exercise and meetings - and some of it unique - SuperK needs a ride to a medical appointment, a play is on the books, picking up our damaged car - but nothing out of the ordinary and certainly nothing alarming or overly stressful but I woke up this morning with all of this stuff all jumbled up in my head - how to configure my schedule to make it work to my liking.  If I swim this day then I can go to the meeting that day but if I wait a day then my swim day will fall on the dentist day . . . you get it - useless, frustrating, circular thinking.  Whatever happens, however things shake out, it's not even remotely important in the long run.  I sat on the edge of the bed in my jam-jams for the longest time juggling the different options in my head.  That was only frustrating so I pulled out my paper calendar and tried to make sense of the options looking at something more carnal than brain waves.  That was also fucking useless so I grabbed my journal and made a series of flow charts trying to sort out the options.  I felt like an insane person.  Not scary, permanently insane but definitely having some type of dissociative mental break.  It looked like I was putting together an engineering chart to set up a nuclear reactor.  There was a tiny voice in my frontal cortex - the part of the brain responsible for reasoning and other highly developed functions - chirping that this was a waste of my time but the animal, prehistoric, automatic part of my brain was in full control.  My brain was engaged doing something that T. Rex was capable of doing.

Yeah, I am not allowed to pilot a motor vehicle today.

And why, today, did my brain veer off into these tangents?  The great mystery of life.

A Vision For Me

One of the passages that is often read at the conclusion is called A Vision For You.  This passage is found in The Big Book during a primer on how to do the Fourth Step which would indicate that good stuff starts to happen very early in the process.  Here's the version found in the Plain Language Big Book: "All sorts of amazing things began to happen for us.  We felt a new sense of purpose.  Everything we needed came to us, so long as we continued to trust in our Higher Power.  We became less interested in ourselves.  We stopped worrying about our little plans and schemes.  Instead, we were interested in seeing how we could contribute to life and how we could help other people.  We felt a new kind of power flow in.  We enjoyed peace of mind, and we discovered we could face life successfully.  As we became aware of God's presence in our lives, we stopped feeling afraid of both the present and the future.  We felt like we had been reborn."

I like the implication that if I quit trying so hard to run the world that I begin to know how to behave, whether to act or to wait patiently, and that this ability just begins to manifest itself.  It isn't something that I have to strain for, pushing and pulling until I'm red in the face.  I find myself thinking: "Oh.  This is what I have to do."  or "Oh.  I don't know what the fuck I'm supposed to do about this or that right now so maybe I should take a shower and not worry about it" certain in the knowledge that I'll find the answer eventually.

I like the implication that I'm going to STOP THINKING ABOUT MYSELF ALL OF THE TIME!  I used to think about myself all the time; then I started forcing myself to think about other people, gritting my teeth and resentful as hell but doing it anywhere, mostly to escape the wrath of my sponsor; and now I find myself genuinely, truly, naturally thinking about others, no shit, I'm not making this up.  Not all the time but it now comes a lot more naturally.

I like the implication that peace of mind is not some bullshit concept felt in some bullshit text somewhere, that I can look forward to a life where I'm not regretting what I've done or fearing what is going to come next.  And that I have a real purpose in life, that I'm not simply a useless eater taking up valuable space on the planet.

Balance

Balance: Mental steadiness or emotional stability; habit of calm behavior, judgement, etc.; inner harmony between mind, body, and soul, which allows individuals to navigate life's challenges with peace, stability, and a connection to a higher purpose or God.

I ponder frequently the concept of balance.  I try to find the Middle Passage, the Middle Way.  This all comes back to the awareness that I am more comfortable by constitution and habit to seek out the extremes of everything and when I'm in Extreme Mode I'm a highly unpredictable person.  Full acceleration or take a nap.  

In Buddhist practice the Middle Way refers to a spiritual practice that steers clear of both extreme asceticism and sensual indulgence.

Here's one of the promises found in the 12&12 that we can expect if we faithfully practice prayer and meditation.

"One of its first fruits is emotional balance."

Here are some snippets of phrases: Can we stay sober and keep emotional balance?  Throw us off balance.  Put us off balance.  Still far off balance.  Keep in emotional balance.  We will surely keep our balance.

We're thrown, tossed, knocked, shoved off balance until we get some balance and then we get to keep that balance.  See how that works?  No?  I don't get it.  Nobody does.  Don't think about it too deeply.  You  know what it feels like to whipsaw between extremes.  Now you're going to find out how peaceful it is to sit quietly in between those extremes.  It can be a little boring sometimes but it is . . .  peaceful, quiet, peaceful.

Math 101

More from the Plain Language Big Book . . .  And I'd like to repeat myself and reaffirm that I am really enjoying this version of our literature.  I do not find it alarming or heretical in any way.  It has been fun imagining how a big group of alcoholics must have behaved when trying to modernize some of the 100 year old language in our literature.  I bet there were some bruised feelings and offended sensibilities.  I am one of those odd ducks who loves change and newness and adventure but it still drives me crazy.  This quote is from the start of How It Works which many of us have heard hundreds and even thousands of times.  The Steps follow this introductory section and I assure you that not one word has been changed there.

"Alcoholism is a confusing and powerful condition that is unlike anything else in the world  Alcohol is extremely complicated, tricky, and difficult.  Without help, beating alcoholism is too much for one person to handle."

Now compare this to the text as it was originally written: "Remember that we deal with alcohol - cunning, baffling, powerful!  Without help it is too much for us."

Nothing alarming there that I can see.  

Here's something for the math freaks reading . . . 

A rough calculation for me is that I've attended somewhere between 7,000 and 8,000 meetings in my life.  I'm a bit of a liar so let's go with 7,000 and that may even be a lie but humor me, anyway.  I've listened to the opening passage of How It Works 7,000 times.  I'm not saying I've paid attention to the reading of the opening passage 7,000 times but my ass has been in the seat while it has been read.  Let's say it takes five minutes to read this passage plus the 12 Traditions.  7,000 X 5 = 35,000 minutes.  At 60 minutes to the hour that works out to just under 600 hours.  To that I must say: "Are you fucking kidding me?"  If I spent a 40 hour A.A. work week just listening to How It Works being read it would take me 15 weeks of doing nothing but listening to someone reading How It Works.  

That's hilarious and very weird.  Four months of my life sitting and listening to this simple passage.  I'm looking for a glyph of a human head exploding.  

But consider the life that A.A. has given me!  When I was being flushed down the Toilet of Despair at the end of my drinking I would have jumped at the chance to trade four months of my time to get the life I have today. 

Someday I'll try to figure out how many weeks of my life I spent drooling on my couch, drunk and stoned, watching a TV program that I wouldn't recall the next day. THAT would put that 4 months in perspective. 

Wait . . . it gets worse . . . or it gets better . . . uh . . . it . . .  well, some more math!

7,000 meetings X 2 hours/meeting = 14,000 hours.  14,000/40 = 350 40 hour work weeks.  350/52 = 6.7 years.

This is probably an underestimate when you add up all the time I've spent listening to other alcoholics drone on and on about the uninteresting, mundane, trivial minutia of their unimportant lives.  That has to be several weeks just there!

And how many hours other alcoholics have spent listening to me drone on and on a bout all the interesting, exceptional, uber-important minutia of my life!

One Red Cent

In one of my meditation books the theme this morning was the assurance that when I've learned to be happy with myself, inside, then I will be much, much happier with the outside world.  I've learned that the stuff outside of me is not the stuff that's going to make me happy, deep down inside, for when I attach my happiness to that outside stuff then I make my happiness contingent on that stuff and that stuff is going to let me down, eventually.  Don't get me wrong  - there's nothing the matter with stuff.  I have a shit-ton of stuff and I enjoy a lot of it but I know that the enjoyment is contingent on my peace of mind.  Lotsa miserable rich people out there.

When I was getting sober in Indianapolis one of my first sponsors was a successful stock broker who drove a big, white Cadillac and he had a wife and kids and a nice house in a nice suburb.  He was a kind, kind, spiritual man with a big heart and he was also pretty blunt dealing with new twerps like me.  I would hear him talk about how important it was to improve myself from within, that the outside stuff was only window dressing that would never make me deeply happy and I was occasionally tempted to say: "Yeah, well, why don't you give me your car then, you sanctimonious prick."  Luckily, I was too afraid of him at the time to say such a thing but, on second hand, I bet he would have responded with a big belly laugh.  The shit we learn . . . .

Update: I sent a message to Detox Girl yesterday and did not hear back.  Obviously, I have not seen her at a meeting and she's been out of the hospital for a week.  While this is sad and does not make me happy I'm not surprised and I'm not upset.  Remember the Coke machine analogy vis-a-vis Seinfeld?  Most of us can't just walk up and tip it over - we have to get it rocking back and forth a few times and then it goes over.  Maybe she stays sober forever; maybe this is an important but not final step in her journey into sobriety; and maybe she never gets it.  None of that is any of my business.  I helped for my sake.  I gave without any expectation of return.  And for a couple of weeks I was in touch with the young woman who jumped in and did a lot of the shitty, hard work with Detox Girl.  I tapped on my phone from the comfort of my meditation chair and I spent a few hours in the ER.  Maybe the blessing for me was getting to know my friend better?  Maybe the blessing was listening to the insight of SuperK when we got out of the hospital as she shattered - no, not shattered, tempered - my Savior Complex when she observed that Detox Girl seemed to be kind of blase about her hospital experience.  

All good stuff.  All stuff I need to grow.  Stuff that means something and didn't cost me one red cent.