This morning I awoke dreaming of a blackbird whose wing was broken. I always loved the song by the Beatles and identified with the bird of sunken eyes and broken wing. My first year of college at University of Texas at Austin, it was cold and I was walking thru campus and one of the landscape trees caught my attention: it was exactly half dead. One half was alive and the other was dead branches. The sight of it stopped me in my tracks and I gazed at that tree for several long moments...I identified with the blighted tree. The avatar for this blog is a Blessed Virgin Mary called The Madonna of the Dry Tree. I was so happy when I found that she existed. Any Divine Mother of mine has to be barren and without fruit or child. [I dont' know why but I am having problems putting paragraphs in so I will use a different strategy]********************************************************************************************************************************************
I haven't wanted to start Step One this time, because it is almost impossible, a kind of death, that I should accept the reality of my life. "We admitted we were powerless over alcohol-- that our lives had become unmanageable." My life is not really unmanageable so much as I don't have a life. My plan was to work the Twelve Steps over my self-diagnosed Borderline Personality Disorder and the emotional wreckage that has kept me from thriving or forming lasting intimate relationships of any kind. Here is my Step One admitting what I feel is the total failure of my life, the sterility of it. The problem with spiritual or religious communities is they judge members. AA and NA are not supposed to judge but they do. I guess it is inevitable and I am guilty of my share of it. After many years in the Program and one's life is still barren, members will often assume that it is lack of diligence or application on the part of the member. There is a usually unspoken condemnation that this member did not do the work or follow the directions or else somehow they would have found success. This is the exact same attitude found in churches and I am alienated from religious fellowship as well and for the same reason but mostly because I cannot accept that these days churches are acting as very efficient engines of fascism. ***************************************************************************************************************************************************************
But I am not a "works" believer. I am a "grace" believer. Even in my earliest sobriety I knew that I could not take any credit for stopping drinking. I knew I was incapable of good in and of myself. I knew that only God could have empowered me to change. The legacy of a horrendous childhood is common. It does not necessarily prevent survivors from succeeding. However, it seems to always affect the personal relationships of survivors. I will tell you who I am jealous of. I am jealous of Harry Nilsson. After derailing his own career through personal character flaws but still managing to accomplish a great deal and finding huge success; when he was on the far end of a life of excessive consumption of alcohol and drugs; when he was still traumatized by the legacy of a father who abandoned him, he met a lovely young woman many years his junior, in an ice cream parlor and she loved him and raised his children until he died. He hadn't gotten sober. In fact, if there was any conversion, it was the love they shared which made it possible. I am jealous that he did find love in the end, because one of the things I must ACCEPT is, that love will never happen for me before it is my time to pass to the next life. So I am pissed off that even for an outrageous drunk like Harry Nilsson, a codependent relationship can actually work out and be good, when that never was true for me. Plus, he partied with the Beatles, how cool is that?! ****************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
I know this is never gonna happen for me. I have "hit bottom" with intimate relationships and don't even really think about trying again with anyone. I still work to make and keep and grow friendships. I would be happy to form closer friendships or to channel my very garden-variety "angst" into some creative outlet. So even though I am not REALLY ready to ACCEPT the things in my life I cannot change, I am making the first step an inventory of what I will ultimately be accepting in the end. Depression is anger turned inwards and even though I don't view myself as a victim, I am angry. **************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
So this is my effort, my due diligence, attempting to work the Steps again with the only sponsor I've been able to find to work with me in several years.***********************************************************************************************************************************************************************
Professionally, the most I have accomplished is entry level retail and I am already somewhat on thin ice at my new job at a grocery store, because of being surly or not pleasant enough at times when I have been overwhelmed. These customers are very entitled in their own way and very dependent, the cashiers do a lot of actual figuring and calculation to give customers coupons and discounts when their phone apps aren't working, and the store is always very busy (which is a good thing). I have since learned the culture at my new store and am doing much better but am so discouraged to be really unfit for any professional career, despite longterm sobriety and every advantage growing up economically and educationally. It is one thing to think a career was always possible. It is entirely another thing to face the fact that my limitations are so serious that retail is probably the best I can ever do. I had the opportunity to apply for a position as a peer drug addiction counselor at a local non-profit and at first it sounded like a good thing. I wanted to get the training there even if I didn't stay long term. But this is El Paso and a very small community. There are not many places to work in the recovery field. And I realized that I was not prepared to accept the lack of professionalism and the dysfunction that is bound to be present to some degree in a non-profit. At my job interview I waited over an hour to speak to someone. I was told I would be notified by a certain time. As the days passed I just got more and more angry: unconsciously I knew I was kidding myself. Not about the job, which I had good reason to believe I was going to be offered, but about my fantasy of what it would really be like. After I didn't hear anything by the time indicated, and after I was told when following up I would be contacted "after a meeting" and still wasn't, I blew it off because I just cannot tolerate not having communication and the ability to trust that an org is going to do what it says it is going to do. I realized after all that a small retail job with little responsibility is in reality what I want. However, there is a lot of shame and guilt that I carry over my low-achievement and lack of any self-development professionally. ***************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
Personally, my last intimate relationship (it was really a "non-relationship"), was my "bottom" (as in, hitting bottom). I was the most in love I have ever been, and he was the most unavailable of all the dysfunctional men I have ever tried to be with. It was so bad he didn't even want to do anything socially with me at all. When my parents finally passed away and I inherited some resources I moved to El Paso, where I now live, in order to semi-retire and try to make a little life. Romantic love is simply not an option for me. The best I can hope for is a friend who could possibly care for me on a deeper level. *****************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
In terms of recovery, I am somewhat detached from my original AA Club here, which I used to really love. I have clashed with some members over politics and in general find a lot of dysfunction and toxic "poisonalities" there and I dont' believe in "hanging out" at the AA Club anymore. I already put in my time there. I am going to usually a couple of meetings a week (more as the work schedule allows) but I can tell I have a "rep" over what and how I share in meetings. I am viewed as negative and as carrying the mess instead of the message (not always, but consistently). I am sure I am guilty of this to some extent but it is once again a situation of being judged/rejected by a group or community I once felt totally a part of. ************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
Spiritually, my relationship with God is about as distant as it has been in many years. I moved to El Paso from Houston and found a place which was very inexpensive and it seemed like a good place to be, it had a garden where I could landscape and the landlady, while flaky seemed like a genuinely nice person with spiritual values. The entire situation became a nightmare. She was very negligent and it triggered my "mommy issues" and caused me to criticize her which she didn't like at all. I stopped doing that and things were working out better. Then she moved in a man who was a sick broken down addict who was supposed to do some work for her in the apartment while he lived there. He turned out to be psychotic, chose me as the object of his delusions, and proceeded to terroize me and I ended up having to move entirely. She still refuses to evict him. I spent almost two weeks at a motel with my cat. The worst part was not understanding WHY? I had been hopeful that I could build a nice quiet little life here with a few friends and some meaningful engagement in the community. This harassment situation really undermined my basic trust and thrust me into a black hole of fear and despair. We are trained to think that good results come out of right action and bad results come out of negative or destructive action but as we have all witnessed in life, that concept is a crock of bullshit. Innocent people are persecuted all the time and you cannot tell me they ever did anyting to "deserve" it. In this case I too was "innocent"- I had nothing to do with the psycho. He merely wanted me gone and drove me away. And I just couldn't accept that it was even happening. So if trust is based on positive outcomes, my trust in God right now is at an all time low. Cognitively of course I know that God is all good, all the time and worthy of my absolute adoration regardless of events here on Earth...but humanly speaking, when the worst happens and things just don't seem to get better no matter what one does, it is easy to feel cursed. *************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
Please don't think I am feeling sorry for myself. I read news articles constantly and have read a lot of history and have obsessed over atrocity and deranged human behaviour all my life. I KNOW how bad it can be. Ask Kiki Camarena. And the atrocities have never stopped. I know that I am blessed and fortunate to be in my position relative to the great vulnerability and suffering of most of the world's population. I am aware of it on a daily basis. However, my grief is real and earned. I have never gotten the only one thing I have ever really cared about in life, and that is, a partner to love and to be loved by in a long-term, healthy relationship. I know now it is never going to happen. And it isn't just the lack of a partner. There is no family either, and there is less and less of a recovery family for me, and there are few friends, despite all my efforts to change, heal, and grow over the past 18 years of sobriety and truly, even in my addiction, I had always kept pushing to move forward. This is after all, a part of growing old even without a history of emotional dysfunction. My pattern is to go around seeking from people who cannot give to me, and that applies to romantic partners, bosses, teachers, doctors, friends, sponsors, and pretty much everyone in life. Because I have been largely unsuccessful in experiencing love, affirmation, and nurture, the net result is a frustration compounded by each rejection through a lifetime. Identifying the pattern never resolved it. Now my task is to be IN ACCEPTANCE of all of it, which feels like death and total and complete loss of hope. One of my favorite writers is the eminent existential psychotherapist Irvin D. Yalom. He worked with a lot of older people and people who were facing death. He really understood what he called the "loss of specialness" that happens to people when they experience chronic illness, terminal illness, violent crime, or other disasters they have not ostensibly brought on themselves, or even just when they age. It is the feeling that, 'I am not beloved as I thought I was. I am not special. I too can be a victime of random violence that I never thought would happen to me'. There is nothing to do about it but accept it and try to keep growing. But that is where I stand on Step One: with broken wing, knowing that I am not "special" or unique; hoping either for a decent last few years of my life in which I can be of some use before decripitude sets in, or that God will let me move on to the next realm sooner rather than later. This is not drama, it is the reality of millions of people...*****************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
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