The Doors of Perception

Ruined:  The state of being a ruin, destroyed or decayed.

I enjoyed the topic of today's meeting: "What brought you through The Doors and into The Rooms?"

Did you know that The Doors got their name from Aldous Huxley's "The Doors of Perception" detailing his experiences when he was experimenting with mescaline?  True story, unless I'm making it up.

Anyway, the secretary called on a few of the old-timers to share and they used words like "ruined" and "broken."  I still take some mild offense at being coined "insane" and "sick" even though I'm both and in spades.  

I like to hear the evolution of alcoholics who are drinking when the alcohol and drugs are still working.  Let's face it: if you're an alcoholic then alcohol fills that gaping, hungry hole right in the center of your being.  Until it doesn't and eventually it won't.  At the beginning the alcohol provides relief for a significant amount of time.  I was sober and full of fear and remorse; I drank and the alcohol hit me like a sledgehammer, melting away my worries; and then I drank too much and suffered the consequences.  When I was young my constitution allowed me to bull through the pain in a somewhat functional way.

But the sweet spot of relief between the fear and the consequences, the spot when the alcohol was working like a well-oiled machine, got shorter and shorter, the constitution began to weaken under the relentless attack of the alcohol, until it spot vanished like a soap bubble, with a tiny pop.  We call this "the jumping off point."  The alcohol has quit working.  We can't imagine life with or without alcohol.

This is a bad point.

Patient Waiting

Patient:  content to wait if necessary; not losing one's temper while waiting; longminded; not bothered with having to wait; not unwilling to wait.

There is a whole shitload of "waits" in that definition.

Throughout the condo selling process I have supplemented my regular writing - my "Can you believe how bad I have it?" writing - with a daily log of my thinking, fears, projections of likely and/or preferred outcomes, my desires, etc.  It's kind of a running commentary of insanity in action.

It has been a blast reading it from time to time to check my progress in dealing with life.  It's amazing to see how much divergence there is between what I think will happen and what actually happens.  The results are totally all over the place.  Sometimes I get exactly what I want and this works out well and sometimes I get exactly what I want and it blows up in my face.  I have to watch what I pray for because I have no idea what's best for me.  Other times I'm thwarted and stymied and frustrated and then I see that it was all for the beat.  I didn't get what I wanted because it wasn't the best thing for me.

"Thank god I didn't get that," I say, relieved.  It's only in retrospect that I can see what I wanted wasn't even in my best interests.

It's not unusual for me to see how my thinking evolves when I'm not in such a hurry to get what I think I need.  I'm impatient for everything to work out how I want it to work out when I want it to work out, but if I wait solutions present themselves.  Good solutions, not the crap I come up with.  In reality all I can do is move forward, trying to do god's will to the best of my ability, staying the course when things seem right and changing tack when they don't.  There's a lot of patient waiting required.

Not my strong suit.

Dark Meanings

When I'm not working my spiritual program of recovery I fall under the laughable illusion that people are thinking about me.  This is not the case.  Nobody is thinking about me.  I loved the fact that a lot of people didn't know that I was gone for 5 months this winter.

"Oh, you were gone?" they said.  Lots of them said this - not a few.  Lots.

It's not always even a case of working a program or not - sometimes life is stressful and it's silly to imagine otherwise.  But when I'm feeling the stress I can hallucinate up some wild stuff.  I can read dark meanings into everything.  

It Takes What It Takes

I believe that the war I've been having with myself is over.  The Great Stevie Seaweed vs. Steven Weedsofthesea has come to an end.  Millions were killed and maimed, countryside was laid to waste, cities ground into dust - all within the Seaweed brain.  We've gone from fury to anger to annoyance to self-righteous indignation to calm acceptance in only a matter of 4 or 5 days.  While this doesn't seem too impressive it is better than the amount of time it used to take which was forever.

I had some good conversations with old friends about the specifics of my cartoonishly bad treatment at the hands of a cruel and unjust world.  Some advice that comes up over and over is to try to take the long view.

"How important is this?" I'm asked.  
"Pretty fucking important," I reply.
"Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?" they say.
I've never understood that question.  I want to be right AND happy.  I want them both.  I want it all.

It took this amount of time to straighten out my thinking.  It took what it took.

Stressors

Stress:  The internal distribution of force per unit area (pressure) within a body reacting to applied forces which causes strain or deformation.

What?

Stress:  Emotional pressure suffered by a human being or other animal.

Oh.

As I've been wallowing slowly through this whole process I've had to remind myself that I'm still a human animal - I'm near godlike status to be sure - and I'm still subject to human animal responses.  I can get better at managing my outsized, oversized, over-exaggerated reactions to stressors but I can't make them go away.  I'm still a human dude despite all of the buzz to the contrary.

Seaweed!  Seaweed!  Seaweed!

I believe that I still have every single defect that I had when I started my recovery; it's just that they're mostly often caged up.  There's no lock on the cage - there's no door on the cage - there's no bars on the cage - really, it's more like a piece of cardboard lying on the ground, so the defects can definitely get out and rumble around if they want.

Strife and Contention

Struggle:  Strife; contention; great effort.

The topic this morning was about The Process of getting sober.  How it comes - the answers, serenity, sobriety, acceptance - when we quit our struggling, our ceaseless, ceaseless struggling.
I ponder again The Inspection Report.  This struggle has affected my ego AND my wallet so it was bound to provoke an outsized reaction.  I've learned so little but one less that has stuck is that "This, too, shall pass."  I need to soldier on from time to time.

On Day One my response was along the lines of "Over my dead body" or perhaps "Go $#!! yourself."  I kept my mouth shut as I have been taught to do and went to bed, secure in the knowledge that any action I took would have made things worse.

On Day Two, somewhat calmer if by "calmer" you mean "not in a murderous rage."  I was still unwilling to cede an inch but I wasn't bent out of all recognizable shape by the situation.  My attitude was still basically pretty shitty - it's just that I didn't feel so vindictive about it.  I still planned on taking these $#!! the $#!! out but I with a kind smile on my face.  Working my program on Day Two yielded the reminder that "we cease fighting everyone and everything."  I appreciated the wisdom but firmly ignored its application in my life.

The problem with all of this is that I end up hurting myself.  My ego blinds me to my own best interests because it's so unwilling to be taken advantage of in the sex, money, and power department.  I know this logically but I still can't get past it all of the time emotionally.  I'm an emotional suicide bomber.  I'll blow myself up if I take you out, too.

So on Day Three I still felt some angst but was open to compromise   I thought maybe I could split the expenses with these $#!!s I began to see that even if I get stuck with the whole expense that it's going to be in my best interests in the long run.

Knowing I needed to soldier on in my Program work I heard the following: "We quit struggling and we relax and take it easy.  We're surprised at how the right answers come."  I decided to investigate exactly how much this was going to cost me.  I probably should have done this before losing my shit at being screwed out of a huge amount of money.  If I'm going to object passionately to some outrageous bill the least I could do is put an actual number on it by talking to some . . . you know . . . experts in the field rather than hallucinating up some wild crap.  I took some action.  Thinking was taking me where it usually takes me: Down the Worm Hole.

Of course I found that I had grievously overestimated the cost.

Imagine that.

The Infuriation

Infuriate:  To make furious or mad with anger; to enrage.

The inspection report came back and The Inspector found some problems that Need To Be Fixed!  Right Away!!  Or Else!!!  This was not a surprise but it still managed to infuriate me.  I was all teed up to be infuriated anyway and the infuriation was instant and covered many levels and degrees of nuance.  I was infuriated in ways that I expected and in some that came as a bit of a surprise.  The intensity of the infuriation always surprises me even though I have a long history of being infuriated.  Today I explored infuriation in depth, in tone, and in timbre.

Luckily The Report came back late on a Saturday which annoyed me in its own right.  Any action items that need to be addressed will require outside expertise, people who won't be available until the work week begins, providing me with plenty of stewing-in-my-own-juices time, should I decide to make good use of this time which I almost certainly will.  I'm not going to waste a good opportunity to be angry.  Such opportunities are precious and deserve to be suckled.

The things that The Inspector wants addressed were news to me and the things I was sure he'd address were left unspoken   So much for projecting how to respond to things that ended up requiring no response.  Another example of an excellent use of my time handling future events that don't come to pass.  This is why I try not to live in the future.  I suck at it.

When I'm jazzed up I've learned to keep my fricking mouth shut.  Angry action is bad action which leads to poor results.  I did speak frankly with my real estate agent to get the stuff off of my chest with someone who's on my side - she's a friend - and was amazed and amused at how insane the stuff sounded coming out of my mouth.  I'm glad I didn't have the chance to speak them to others.  The stuff sounded terrible and ridiculous and infantile.   

I find that a lot of things resolve themselves all by themselves, without my meddling and fiddling around with them.  Things fall into place, solutions present themselves, intuitive thoughts bubble to the surface.

"We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us."