Tag: acceptance

Resignation Masquerading as Acceptance

And acceptance is the answer to all my problems today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing, or situation—some fact of my life—unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing, or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment. … Until I could accept my alcoholism, I could not stay sober; unless I accept life completely on life’s terms, I cannot be happy.

— page 417, Alcoholics Anonymous

I’ve been thinking about the difference between resignation and acceptance lately as a result of my therapy and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ve let resignation masquerade as acceptance in my life for too long.

For years, I believed that I’d accepted my birth father’s suicide when, in reality, I’d resigned myself to the facts. While I knew in my heart that he had suffered from severe depression, that he’d been mentally ill, and that this was the root cause of his suicide, I still felt betrayed and abandoned. I wanted things to have been different. I didn’t, and may not ever, understand why he’d ended his own life.

I didn’t even know that his death had been a suicide until I was in the fourth grade, about nine or ten. I’d been told that there had been something wrong with his brain. I thought of it like a disease, like cancer.

Losing a loved one to suicide often leaves the family with a sense of survivor’s guilt. Sometimes it manifests as the sense that they should have done more to save their relative. Sometimes it comes up as a sense that they don’t deserve to be alive, that it should have been them instead of the person who is gone.

At the tender age of five I didn’t recognize these things in myself. Nor did I recognize them when I learned the facts behind his death. Until that point I blamed the doctors for not doing enough to save his life and I remember suddenly realizing that it had not be negligence on the part of the doctors.

I don’t remember if I blamed myself, or wished that it had been me instead of him. What I do remember is that I suddenly worried that he hadn’t loved me enough to stay — that maybe I had been the reason that he took his own life. Or maybe it was my brother or my mother, or all of us. In a word, I felt confused and abandoned — left behind.

I don’t know if I ever expressed these feelings. Probably not. I held them deep inside and I was angry. And I’ve remained angry for 43 years.

And this anger was only compounded when my step father, who I call my father, died suddenly when I was 29. It was a chilling blow. He and I were very close and I had many plans for us as Dad moved into his later stages of life. I imagined us hunting and fishing together. I imagined him bouncing my unborn son on his knee. I imagined him taking my son to the firehouse and letting him sit behind the wheel of the engines. None of those things happened. They couldn’t because he was gone. I resigned myself to theses facts as well.

Resignation may be a form of acceptance, but if so, resignation holds a grudge and includes a resentment. Resignation holds on, and wishes for things to be different. Resignation breeds anger and provides no relief.

Over my many years I have often said, “I have accepted this, but I can’t let go,” or “I don’t know how to let go of this,” — I have come to understand that this is the fundamental difference between resignation and acceptance. When I can’t let something go, I have resigned myself to it rather than accepted it.

And that underlying anger has often spilt over into other parts of my life. I’ve long had a history of explosive anger, fits of rage even. Only recently have I come to understand that my anger is not the same as other people’s anger. It comes on quickly and my blood boils in split second.

It is not something I am proud of and it is something that I am working on. I’ve been working on it for a long time actually. But just as I often said that I couldn’t let go, I’ve frequently said, “I don’t know how to control this anger.” Sure, I have cognitively known about many tools to cool the flames, but in the instant I frequently fail to access those tools.

Often the event that has set me off has not been that big of a deal — the trigger has very little or even nothing at all to do with my anger. And the anger has been disproportionate to the trigger.

Knowing the underlying roots of this anger is helpful. Knowing that I’ve been clinging to anger deeply rooted in childhood trauma helps me to recognize more quickly that the overwhelming emotions I am feeling in the moment have little to do with the actual moment.

I’ve come to believe that the key to ending this cycle lies in the full acceptance of my fathers’ deaths. And I am not sure exactly what that looks like, but I know it will be more peaceful, and more serene than how I’ve “accepted” things in the past.

Recently, I received some unwelcome news. News that will fundamentally impact our family and will require some changes in our lives. Nothing that is earth shattering, nothing life threatening, and in some ways fully anticipated — but still news that is not easy to accept.

And yet, upon receiving the news, digesting it, and forming the very beginning of a plan, I have felt relaxed with the news. I’m not angry about it. While unwelcome, it had brought a certain sense of relief. It has already changed me and my responses to situations which used to baffle me. I’m less angry and can deal with certain difficulties with greater calm and ease.

That is what acceptance looks like.

Posted on by damien 0

Calm Acceptance, Averted Disaster, Fretboard Fluency

I am grateful for the thirty minutes I got to spend in the phone with my friend yesterday before his surgery. It was good to hear his voice, registering the calm acceptance of the situation in his voice, and to be able to offer him support.

I am grateful to have received the news that my friend’s surgery went well. I tried not to worry all day yesterday but my life experience sets me up to anticipate disaster. Disaster averted.

I am grateful for my guitar lesson last night over Zoom. Within the first few minutes I was laughing and enjoying myself. My teacher is really accomplished and willing to work with me on any style. I am starting to see things on the guitar that I never understood before — the interrelationships between chords and scales as well as different chord shapes. Lots to unlock on the fretboard.

Posted on by damien 3

Leaving New York

We came here knowing that this trip would be different but it was more challenging than we expected. Prior to heading to NY for a week in the Catskills, all three of us had gotten COVID tests in order to conform with the current NY state guidelines. These guidelines stipulated that we could come to the state provided that we’d had a negative COVID test within three days of arrival and we would agreed to quarantine for three days upon arrival. We would be released from quarantine after getting another COVID test with negative results on the fourth day. In theory this sounded feasible. In practice we faced many hurdles.

Since the rates of infection have been rising around the country the strain on the labs is starting to show. Each of us got tested on the Wednesday before our trip. My son had it easiest because we were able to get an appointment for his test. We got his results within 24 hours of his testing. My wife and I were unable to get appointments which meant that we had to go to free testing being offered by the county board of health. This was a minor inconvenience but it was manageable. After waiting outside in the wind for an hour and forty five minutes, I’d been swabbed and was told I’d have my results in three to five days, despite it being a 24 hour rapid test. My wife and I went to different testing locations due to our respective work obligations. She was also told three to five days.

We were really on the fence about whether we should go or not, in part due to the unknown test results and in part because we knew that things were going to be different when we got to NY. I went to bed Friday night believing we were not going to go. Saturday morning though, we had a change of heart and decided to go with the agreement that we could shorten our stay if we decided to or needed to.

New York required us to register online upon arrival and I was relieved that the form did not ask for me to upload documentation confirming my negative test result. I got my results after registering with the state, however my wife did not get hers until today (Tuesday — and nearly 7 days after her test!).

I have been receiving text messages daily (several a day) asking if I have any symptoms and instructing me to get a COVID test if my status changes. Nothing onerous, but mildly inconvenient since it’s hit or miss whether the system seems to get my responses and asks the same question multiple times a day.

We did our part and quarantined as much as we could, only going out to pick up food and to go for walks by ourselves. This was largely what our existence has been at home as well in recent weeks. None of us are leaving the house for work or school at this point. The only contact we make with others is at the grocery store. So, I don’t feel guilty about the few minor contacts we made given that two of us were confirmed negative and we were pretty certain that the third was as well.

Prior to coming to NY, I’d looked online to see about getting the follow up tests once we’d been in the state for the required time. I found a few options, but these options were far from plentiful. I accepted that this would be the case since we were going to the mountains — it made sense that there might not be a COVID test unit on every corner, but it did seem a bit sparse.

What I hadn’t counted on, and in retrospect should have expected, was that getting the follow up test would be a giant pain in the ass. None of the places I’d identified would let you make an appointment until the day of the appointment at 12:01 AM online. They wouldn’t make appointments over the phone and only did same day appointments in person. The slots filled up quickly, we were told. Beyond that, most of the places were prioritizing people with symptoms for the rapid tests and requiring asymptomatic cases take the tests that take longer to get results. And as in Maryland, even the rapid tests were not coming back rapidly.

It quickly became apparent that we might not even get our results back before it was time for us to leave with the Thanksgiving holiday in the mix. So, we decided that we should just make our way home. We were facing as much as a week of not really being able to go out and do anything while in NY.

I had hoped that we would be able to see my wife’s family at least, but they were not too keen on getting together even with the knowledge that we’d all been tested and were negative. I can’t blame them. New York was the epicenter last spring and her mom and dads are in their seventies and eighties. It makes sense to take strong precautions. We did see them for about an hour, outside, with masks.

This is not the way I would have liked things to go on this trip. I would have liked to spend more time in the mountains. I would have liked to have visited the shops of New Paltz and Woodstock. I would have liked to have Thanksgiving dinner with our family. I would have liked to for things to be normal.

But things aren’t normal. We are in the midst of a pandemic, cases are surging in the United States and around the world, and while there is hope on the horizon with promising vaccines and a President Elect who believes in facts, trusts science and takes the pandemic seriously, we aren’t going to see the end of this for some time.

So we are headed down the NY Throughway on our way home, where we won’t be subject to a strict quarantine but we’ll be sticking close to the house anyway. I’ll cook something for Thanksgiving, though it may not be turkey with all the trimmings.

I am reminded of page 417 in the Big Book:

And acceptance is the answer to all my problems today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing, or situation—some fact of my life—unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing, or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment…Until I could accept my alcoholism, I could not stay sober; unless I accept life completely on life’s terms, I cannot be happy. I need to concentrate not so much on what needs to be changed in the world as on what needs to be changed in me and in my attitudes.

Posted on by damien 2

How Empathy and Compassion Helped Me Heal

Have you ever been afraid for your life? Not just scared, but really concerned that you just might die — right here, right now.

I have.

It was a late summer evening and I was 15 years old. School had already started but the sun was still high enough in the sky that we could go out after eating dinner and cruise around town on our bikes — we ate early, 5:30 every day. My brother and I had ridden into town on our freestyle box bikes and met up with our friend Matt to go to Sheetz — Central PA and North Western MD’s incarnation of a 7-Eleven, except they didn’t have Slurpies.

We got some junk food and as we were leaving Andy and his crew walked in. He said something rude to me and I ignored it. Andy was my bully. Andy was 17 and huge. I knew to let his comments roll off my back like water off a duck’s ass. The three of us sat in the curb and indulged in our candy before starting to ride up the road. Before leaving we talked to a man and his wife (perhaps girlfriend) about how nice the night was. No more than ten minutes had passed.

We’d gotten about 200 yards from the Sheetz when Andy and his crew pulled up beside us in their dark green muscle car — maybe a Chevy Nova, or an old Pontiac, I don’t know for sure — and Andy leaned out from the drivers seat and screamed something at me. He was slurring his words. Clearly intoxicated. Slamming down the accelerator, he sped off. I thought it was over. I was wrong.

Somewhere he had turned around and came by to talk more shit to me. I was scared. He had a car and I had a bike. The three of us decided to book it and cut through the school to try to find safety. I thought that by doing this we’d effectively cut him off the chase. It hadn’t occurred to me that he might not need a road to drive on.

With Andy and his crew in hot pursuit, I peddled as fast as I could and made a beeline for a tree-line where there was a fence that he couldn’t get through in his car. But I also had to ditch my bike. There was a cut-down corn field on the other side of the fence and just beyond that field was Main Street, where Matt lived. It was perhaps 75 to 100 yards to safety. I made it about fifty before I felt Andy’s massive left had grab my shirt collar and flip me around so that his right fist had a clear shot at my jaw.

Matt had made it to his house and I watched him scale the privacy fence to get to safety. My brother was being held back by Andy’s crew and he was younger and smaller than me. We wouldn’t have had much of a chance against the four older boys.

Andy beat the shit out of me.

I was smaller, lighter, and unable to gather my wits to punch back. All I could do was shield my head as best I could. I remember, after a solid hook to the face, the ground rippling beneath me, thinking, “I’m gonna die,” as he pulled me up for another swing.

When I was sure that I was going to die, I heard the man from Sheetz shouting, “Hey, let that boy go.” I never got his a name but that man may have saved my life.

For many, many years, I held an angry grudge against my assailant. I’d wanted him to serve time. He didn’t, despite being a repeat offender and was my first introduction to the failures of our criminal justice system.

I sometimes thought about how I might get revenge. Either beat him or better yet, catch him in a crime and get him licked up. I wanted him to get hurt. I wanted to hurt him. I thought that if I could get even, I would feel better.

Every now and then, I would Google his name and once found a reference to him being in prison.

“Good,” I thought.

But it wasn’t good. Neither revenge and retribution, nor Andy’s poor choices and his incarceration would actually fix things. Nothing would fix things from that day. I’ll always have been brutally beaten. And I’ll always remember it. All that changed was knowing that he’d served some time. The anger didn’t go away.

As I’ve grown in my recovery, and as I’ve worked through my past traumas, I’ve learned that the way to heal from them is to find compassion for myself and for other. I’ve learned that forgiving others releases me of the burden of carrying the grudge.

When my son was attacked, I worked hard to find compassion for his assailant. I knew that there had to be something deeply wrong in his life that would lead him to attack a younger boy. I was right about that. I learned about some of his troubles in the court room.

Today when I think of Andy, I wonder what hurt him. I wonder what was so broken and wrong in his world that drove him to bully me. We knew his family. They were nice folks. His brothers and sisters were kind to me. I don’t have the answer. I probably never will.

What I do know, is that when I dug deep and cultivated empathy for Andy, I was able to forgive Andy for beating me up. I was able forgive myself for being weak and failing to fight back. And I was able to let it go.

Posted on by damien 8

Thoughts on Understanding vs. Empathy and National Healing

I’ve been thinking a lot about empathy lately, in part because the tone of our nation borders on uncivil at best and out right bellicose at worst. Indeed, the tone of the nation is not uniform. There are pockets of civility, at the individual level, but by and large, the tone of our national conversation rears its ugly head by envisioning anyone who does not think or act in the manner that we do as the enemy.

I am guilty. I am quite conscious that I have painted people who think differently than me as the enemy. I’m working to change that, and that’s where empathy comes in.

While I’m rabidly agnostic, I have always loved the Prayer of Saint Francis and was delighted to find that it was beloved by the 12 Step community as “the eleventh step prayer.” I love the dichotomies that it sets up, each line setting the intention to chose the high road.

Grant that I a may not so much seek…to be understood as to understand.

These lines set the intention of placing others before ourselves. They set the intention of working to understand others before insisting that they understand us. They ask us to drop the insistence that our world view is the correct worldview.

I’ve long known that we can’t fix problems if we don’t understand them. I’ve also known in my heart that we take the time to understand others points of view then we may see how similar we are rather than how different we are. Understanding others has long been an intellectual construct rather than en emotional construct. For many years I have thought this is enough.

And yet, I have come to believe that merely understanding rather than being understood is not enough. Understanding implies knowledge — facts, figures, even opinions — but it does not imply feelings. To truly understand someone, we must understand their feelings. To make progress we must empathize with others.

We must be in a position to take on their feelings, not necessarily own the feelings, but to feel those feelings ourselves. The oft repeated 12 Step anecdote “I never felt like people got me until I came to the rooms” has its roots in a common suffering, addiction to alcohol or another substance, but really, what it’s all about is empathy. We feel this way because empathy runs deep in the 12 Step fellowships.

It’s easy to empathize with someone when we share a common problem or common suffering, it’s not so easy to empathize when our lived experience is not shared. And yet, that’s what we need right now in our country. We need more empathy.

Over the summer, I spent some time at the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia. Deep in the heart of coal country. The Greenbriar is owned by West Virginia’s governor, Jim Justice. Mr. Justice supports Coal. He supports President Trump. He and I are unlikely to agree on much politically.

My son, upon learning this, asked me why we would spend our money at a place where the owner didn’t believe in supporting renewable energy. Where the owner, had made money on dirty fossil fuel. In my son’s eyes, fossil fuel is the old way (I agree with him on this) and it is also evil (I do not agree with him on this).

My son exclaimed, “Dad, we can’t support someone who makes his money off of an evil fuel like coal!”

It was a teachable moment. I talked to him about the fact that people need to make a living. That people need to put food on their table. That while Jim Justice may have made a lot of money in a lot of ways that might sit well with my personal politics, he was also employing a large number of people in the middle of nowhere in West Virginia who needed to feed themselves and their families.

I talked with my son about how we need to empathize with people who may need to make hard choices about their employment. I talked with him about coal miners who had for centuries gone into the mines, risking their lives, so that their kids could eat. I asked him, “who are we to judge that decision?”

So, today, as the nation awaits the final results of the 2020 election, I’m thinking a lot about empathy. Many people are stunned that President Trump held on to the margins that he did. It’s the tightest election in memory. People are asking a lot of deep soul searching questions:

How can people support this man who is openly racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic? Are people really okay with a grifter and criminal running the country? Why don’t the republicans wake up and see that the emperor has no clothes? Is this really who we are as Americans?

I’ve asked myself these questions over and over again for the past four years. I haven’t come up with good answers to them. I have many friends who support Trump, and I know that they are good people. They would give me the shirt off their back. They have given me places to sleep when I was without a place to call my own.

Increasingly, I’m questioning the questions. I’m not sure these are the right questions. I think the question we need to be asking is more along the lines of this:

What is it people who support President Trump are truly concerned about? What drives otherwise wonderful people to support someone who has so many obvious character flaws? What feelings are driving these decisions? Are we hurting? Why are we hurting? How can we help to address those feelings in a meaningful way?

When we seek to see the humanity of our fellow beings, then and only then can we seek to understand rather than to be understood, and develop a meaningful sense of empathy for them. And out of that sense of empathy, we may be able to forge a path forward towards national healing.

Posted on by damien 0

1827 — Five Years, One Day at a Time

One thousand, eight hundred, twenty-seven days without a drink — one day at a time. But who’s counting?

Well, I am.

Five years is a long-ass time without taking a drink, considering that I drank daily for seven years, and at least weekly for 25 years, leading up to September 23, 2015.

It has been a rough road, especially in the first year and in the last two years. The first year was, well, the first year. I spent months walking around in a fog. I sometimes forgot what I was saying mid-sentence. I craved booze, especially in the first six months. Everything was a trigger. Having a good day, I wanted to drink. Having a bad day, I wanted to drink. The weather was cold, the weather was warm…you get the picture.

The last two years have included family and societal trauma. I went through some things that no parent should ever go through. I watched my son suffer and he showed me what resilience looks like. I’ve been living in the same pandemic as you are and 2020 has been a shit-show with one hit after another. But I’ve always held on to hope and faith that things will get better. And I’ve stayed sober through it all.

These last five years have also been a time of self reflection, rediscovery, growth, and joy. I uncovered the root of my addiction. I discovered that I could let go of the God of my childhood and embrace an understanding of the universe that made room for the mystery without subscribing to a particular dogma. I began running at the young age of 45.

I am grateful that I am now living a life that I couldn’t have imagined back in 2015. I am safe, secure in who I am, have a loving family and a wide circle of friends. I’ve traveled and enjoyed making new friends. I’ve been a better dad and a better husband. I have truly discovered a new freedom and a new happiness. I don’t regret my past; I can look at it honestly and openly. I’ve found peace and I know that my experience can help others. I do not fear people or economic insecurity. My whole outlook on life has changed. These are only a few of the AA Promises, and I am here to tell you that they do come true.

I couldn’t have gotten here without help and hope. Hope and faith that things would be better. Nietzsche wrote, “He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.” I came into the rooms with only a grain of a mustard seed of hope but I had a why. My reason to live was for my son and may family, quite simply, I wasn’t ready to die and I knew that dying was on the agenda.

I often think about the darkness and despair that I felt as I walked into that 6:00 AM meeting in 2015. I think about the newcomer, and all those out there who are struggling, often in silence — our stories may be different, but we have a kinship of common suffering. We also have a kinship of a common solution.

And so I want to leave you with this as I celebrate my fifth anniversary of choosing to live —

If you are struggling,
If your world feels dark and lonely,
If you look in the mirror and hate the person you see there,
If you can’t imagine living without alcohol or drugs,
If you can’t imagine another day of drinking or using,
If you know that you’re killing yourself with your addiction,
Know that this is how I felt,
Know that others have been right where you are,
Know that you are not alone,
Know that there are ways out,
Know that people want to help,
Know that they can help,
Know that you can accept their help,
Know that you are worthy,
Know that you can overcome this,
Know that you can not only make it, but thrive.

It all starts by surrendering, accepting the fact that you can’t continue to live like you have been, and asking for help.

Posted on by damien 17

Grateful for Technology

Since March, I haven’t been to an in person 12 Step meeting. I’ve been to meetings, just not in person. And really, at this point even as we’ve had in person meetings open back up and some have gone to a hybrid mode (in person and zoom at the same time), I have no intention of going back for the foreseeable future. Not because I don’t need meetings, I do, but because I am not quite ready to go sit in a room with other people in recovery who may or may not be taking this pandemic seriously.

On a relatively frequent basis, the topic of how bad Zoom meetings are comes up.

“They aren’t the same.”

“I don’t feel like I get much out of them.”

“I miss actual contact. Physical hugs.”

I get it. Zoom meetings are not the same as in person meetings.

I’ve spent the past 23 years either directly building the internet, or helping people build the internet. I remember in the late nineties when a friend of mine asked me, “Do you ever think we’ll see video delivered over the internet?” I answered no, that it was too slow. And in 1996, it was. A 33.6 Kbps connection was blazing fast for a home user. I had no idea what I’d see over the next 10 years.

Broadband exploded in the early 2000’s and people started having fast connections at home. Technology improved exponentially and as connections got faster, we started streaming music and video over the internet. In 2007, the iPhone was introduced and the world was revolutionized. Suddenly we had portable screens with us at all hours of the day. Phone plans changed from talk time minutes to megabytes and gigabytes of data per month. In 2011, FaceTime made it’s debut.

And for all of that, I was still using conference calls for most of my business as late as 2017. In fact, it wasn’t until I joined my current company that I started to use video conferencing regularly. That was in 2017.

So, lets put some perspective on this whole Zoom thing in the pandemic. We are blessed, absolutely blessed, to have Zoom in this pandemic. As I said, I’ve been in the industry for 23 years and I only started using video conferencing from my home a few years ago.

While we may not have flying cars, this is some real George Jetson shit. If this pandemic had happened only a few short years ago, we would be in quite a pickle. We wouldn’t be getting on Zoom calls to complain about how they are not the same as in person meetings.

Look, I hate Zoom at this point. I use it all damn day for my job. I haven’t been to see a customer since March 12th and I don’t expect to make an in person sales call for the rest of 2020. The last thing I want to do in the evening is get on a Zoom call.

But when I said I wanted to get sober, I was asked if I was willing to to go any length to get there. So, I get on the calls.

Are they perfect? Not in the least. But I’ll take them over sitting around in a room with people who, lets face it, don’t always have the best track records with personal hygiene and health.

I recognize that I am privileged. I recognize that there are people who need in person meetings because they don’t have access to technology.

I am grateful for the technology and for my privilege. I think those of us in recovery who have these privileges, owe it to ourselves and to those less fortunate to be grateful rather than to bitch and moan about how the meetings aren’t as fulfilling.

Posted on by damien 2

Strengthening Our Hearts

Of all the muscles in the body, the heart is probably the most essential. In conjunction with the diaphragm, the heart works to delivering oxygen and nutrients to every other system in the body by pumping blood 24 hours a day.

One of the many signals the universe sent telling me it was time to make a change in my life, time to quit drinking, was on a weekend that should have been enjoyable but was pure misery. In 2015, I’d been riding in an organized metric century bike ride benefiting the MS Society since 2010 for five years. The first ride in 2010 was a two day ride in July. I was new to cycling and out of shape and it was ridiculously hot and humid. We were staying in the dorms at a local university and several people spent the night heaving in the bathroom after the first day of riding. I vowed to get better and started training.

Over the next few year’s my riding improved despite heavier and heavier drinking, but when I look at my annual miles I can see that things started to go south in 2013. I dropped from well over 1500 miles a year to a few hundred. When we stared the 60 mile ride in August of 2015, I may have had 100 miles under my belt for the season. We planned to ride the metric century in the first day and ride another 40 on Sunday.

On Saturday, I suffered. I a struggled mightily and barely finished the first ride. Wiped out I went to bed early and woke the next day knowing I would never be able to ride another 5 miles let alone 40. I drive home defeated and dejected.

I hadn’t trained because I was no longer in the game. My game was drinking and I was a professional at it. I was no longer a cyclist. It took me another month to gain the courage to address my alcoholism.

When I first quit drinking I tried to address everything at once. I figured that if I was making one life change, making several at once was a good idea. I tried to address my drinking, eating, and exercise habits all at once and quickly became overwhelmed. Luckily, I had the sense to let go and focus on the problem that was most urgent, my drinking.

In the spring of 2018, I went on a trip back to Penn State for the first time and was inspired by a fraternity brother who had lost over 50 pounds who ran a 5K that I walked. It was time to start addressing my exercise habits.

At the age of 45, I decided that I was going to become a runner. The only problem was that I hated running and I was convinced that my knees couldn’t take it. I started out slow, using the C25K app, and icing my knees after every run. The first run/walk had me do 8 reps of 60 seconds of running, followed by 90 seconds of walking. Those 60 seconds were awful. But gradually, I got better and I was able to run for longer periods of time. Gradually, I was strengthening my heart.

Two years on, and I’m still running. I’m in the best shape I’ve ever been in. Never before in my entire life have I had this kind of aerobic base. And I’m seeing results. I’m down 4 inches in my waist and my face is visibly thinner. But what’s really been impressive to me is how much better I am at cycling. I’m setting PRs again on my rides, for the first time since 2013.

The other day, as I was running I was thinking about how I’ve strengthened my heart through running and it occurred to me that I’ve strengthened my emotional heart in my recovery. We all have two hearts, the physical one that pumps our blood as well as our emotional heart. The heart is the life force of our existence, physically and emotionally.

Over the past four years and nine months, I’ve learned a lot about my emotional heart. I’ve learned that it was suppressed by my addiction. I’ve learned that addiction numbs not just the negative feelings, but all our feelings. In the early days of sobriety, when I was beginning to feel my feelings again, it was often painful. It felt like walking through the world without my skin. The highs were high, the lows were low, and everything felt overwhelming.

Just as with running, over time I strengthened my emotional heart by working with the 12 steps and in therapy. And my emotions became less difficult and more manageable. Just as with running, it’s been a slow and at times painful process, but I’m also seeing results.

I’ve become more tolerant and more mindful of my reactions to situations. I notice how my body responds to things that once spurred an immediate negative reaction from me. Often there is a bodily sensation that precedes the emotion. And when I recognize that sensation, I know what is about to happen and can (sometimes) short circuit the reaction and respond rather than react. It is definitely a work in progress.

By getting honest and sharing my struggles in my recovery, I learned the miracle of vulnerability. I’ve learned how to have my feelings again, how to respond rather than to react, how to sit with pain and how to forgive. In these ways, I have strengthened my emotional heart, and built a more resilient emotional base.

Posted on by damien 7

Skiing with the Scouts

A mounting sense of dread came over me as the weekend approached and I came to terms with the facts. I’d be driving four hours each way to a scout trip where the main activity would be skiing or snowboarding. I’d be giving up control of my weekend for the sake of my son and that of the troop.

Meals would be planned, and I wasn’t the planner. Sleeping arrangements would be first come, first served. I would not be the only one snoring in the bunkhouse. There would be communal bathrooms. The key to scouting is to keep the kids fully engaged, which meant that there would be very little downtime. And with 21 kids on the trip, it was going to be loud. I knew all of this when I’d signed up, but I had still volunteered to be a chaperone because I knew that if I didn’t, it was unlikely that my son would agree to go on the trip, and I wanted him to go on the trip.

It had been a while since he’d been on a Scout trip and his enthusiasm was waning. Over the weekend, I told another parent and a leader “Scouts teaches many meaningful life lessons to boys, not the least of which is that meetings suck but are required for successful outcomes.” My boy had only been to scout meetings and service hours since September. Not surprisingly, he was beginning to hate Scouts and frequently refused to go to the weekly meetings in January and February.

And then there was the the inherent risk of the main activity. No, not the risk of serious bodily injury. While there is risk associated with snow sports, that was not my main concern. My son wants to be an instant expert at everything that he tries and frequently when he isn’t an instant expert, he grows frustrated, talks negatively about himself, and gives up. I’ve witnessed this many times before and I knew that the probability of the weekend ending this way was statistically high.

Two weeks ago, in an effort to head this off, we’d gone on a snowboarding trip over Presidents’ Day weekend. I knew that the weekend would be busy on the slopes and so I’d done all the right things. I’d booked private lessons and paid for rentals and lift tickets in advance. When we arrived at the resort Friday night we’d picked up our rental equipment the night before our first day so as to avoid the clusterfuck that would certainly be the rental lines in the morning.

I had gone into that weekend with high hopes that we’d both learn enough to enjoy a few runs down an easy trail on the mountain. I’d envisioned myself snapping selfies of the two of us on the chair lift, and gently carving down the hill together. A real 2020 Norman Rockwell father and son kind of weekend. It was a shit show.

When it became clear to the instructor that my son needed more help than me, he directed his attention to my son. I was grateful for that. Hugo worked diligently with Mr. Grey for nearly 90 minutes. And at the end, Mr. Grey still could not get up on the board on his own, let alone slide down the bunny slope. I suggested that we take a break and get some lunch. That’s when I discovered that my wallet was missing. (After much panic on my part, my wife found it at the lost and found, complete with all my credit cards and money.)

After lunch I worked with my son for a while, but when he was getting frustrated enough that he was yelling at me, and I was starting to yell back at him on the side of the slope, we called it quits. I can’t recall if we’d even tried on day two or not. I think we did, but I have blocked it from my memory.

Expectations can be a killer for a guy like me. When my expectations were not met, I found myself wanting to go down to the lodge bar and order a bucket of bourbon. I’ve found that when I give those cravings space to exist, and then voice them, they go away, which is what I did that afternoon.

So, I had been ruminating on the events of Presidents Day going into this past weekend. And I was expecting disaster.

Mr. Grey and I had separate lessons. About mid way through my lesson, he showed up in tears on the side of the hill. There was no doubt about it, my lesson was over. And I was okay with that. I’d already fallen on my tailbone and I was beginning to doubt whether I really wanted to learn to snowboard or not, considering that I knew I could ski.

Over a Cherry Coke and a Kit Kat bar, we discussed whether or not to try more boarding or to get skis. Mr. Grey said he wanted to try skis. So we went back to the rental shop and traded in our boards for skis and went outside just in time for a leader to tell us that it was time to meet as a troop for lunch.

While at lunch, I discussed the situation with the leader who had organized the trip, who was also an avid skier. Brian agreed to try to teach Mr. Grey to ski and spent about 45 minutes with him before Mr. Grey threw in the towel. It was 1:30 on Saturday. We had the rest of the afternoon and the evening to fill and I was worried.

I fully expected my son to say that he wanted to go home, which would have been impossible because we had another scout in our car and there was no other car with space for him to ride home. I also fully expected that my son was going to demand that I stay by his side for the rest of the day. In an instant I saw not one but two ski trips gone south.

Mercifully, before I could get caught up in my own head, some of the scouts my son’s age were also tired of skiing and he synced up with them to go tubing and to play video games for the rest of the afternoon.

I went skiing.

I hadn’t been skiing in 17 years, but it came back like riding a bike. I spent the rest of the afternoon enjoying the slopes with a few other adults from the troop. We had dinner (taco salad which was surprisingly good) and went back out under the lights. I hadn’t skied at night since grade school, but it was fantastic. I skied until 8:30 when I was tired and cold. I called it a night after the fastest run down one of the steepest slopes and returned to the cabin.

The next morning, after breakfast, we skied for another two hours and then drove the four long hours home. I arrived home around 5:30 and my son told me that he was bummed that the weekend was over. He said he didn’t want to go to school. I told him that I didn’t want to go to work either.

While we were on the first trip, Mr. Grey asked me, “Dad, why did you stop doing all the cool things you do?” I asked him what he meant. “Well, you played guitar and stoped. You skied and stopped. You were an artist, and you stopped drawing.” I looked at him and said, “Well, sometimes when someone starts drinking, they stop doing all the cool things they used to do. But, I’m picking up those old things again now that I’m not drinking.”

There is a part of me that gets a bit regretful about that. But I do not regret my past. I’m just grateful to be able to do these things again. And as I reflect on this past weekend, I’m overwhelmed by my good fortune. We only have a short time on this stone hurling through space and we might as well make the best of that time.

Posted on by damien 3