Having a Skull on Your Desk Is Good for You

I’ve been speaking on and off again recently to someone very new to recovery–only days in, barely weeks. She is angry, beyond angry, and cynical and frustrated and resentful and…well, you get the point. Mostly, I think she’s looking for someone/something to blame and looking even harder for a way out. In short, it’s like looking in a mirror.

I don’t have to dig very far in my past to find the Me who was a walking defense mechanism. I don’t even have to look that far into my psychology to find these feelings, simmering like a black hot spring under the good earth I’ve been planting over top. I don’t count it as humility to be able to recognize these things in myself. It’s just a measure of my grasp on an unpleasant reality. On the one hand, I like to think I’ve traveled very far past the days when I lived as one, gigantic red nerve just waiting to cry or lash out. On the other, I live in the knowledge that, in some ways, it would take very little to get back there. One drink, of course.

I don’t believe in a “cure” for alcoholism, simply because I have not found a cure for stress or bad days or accidents or despair. As the phraseology goes: treatements, but no cure. Spending time, even very little time, with someone just days or weeks into her or his recovery is one form of treatment that is almost universally acknowledged among recovering addicts. When I ventured back into recovery circles in 2010, I didn’t realize I was a walking, talking memento mori–but that is probably the newcomer’s most important function in recovery circles. The newly recovering addict is a skull on the desk, the painting of the skeleton, the “remembrance of death.”

Hundreds of years ago, the pious kept these objects in full sight–particularly in their private rooms–to remind them of the inevitability, the closeness of death. In my twenties, I couldn’t quite wrap my brain around this medieval/Renaissance habit of scholars and theologians. At best, it seemed like a quaint, foreign custom. At worst, fetishistic. I identified more easily with Hamlet, whose reaction to a skull is just a commonsensical freak out, followed by a little ego trip and nausea. Skulls belong in graves, not on top of the furniture.

Raised a good protestant, I still don’t quite get the power of the fully physical representation of Our Last End. (Southern Baptism will teach anyone that the scariest place to be is your own head. No need to decorate the lobby with Halloween enthusiasms.) Now that I am some years (and many close calls) nearer to my own death, it’s somewhat easier to understand the practice. I also understand the memento in its complexity a little better: these were not blunt objects designed to conjure simply the last gasp and the shroud, but were to remind the owner too that we can hasten death; we can live in it. For the medieval miind (and those religious folks who essentially keep the medieval world alive today), sin is a form of death. John Milton went so far to allegorize Sin as the daughter of Satan and Death as their incestuous offspring. (Paradise Lost gets serious kink points for this one in my opinion.) To live in sin is to live in death. For anyone coming out of addiction, it is easy enough to acknowledge that there are ways of living that more closely resemble death than life, ways of being that bring on a wish for death rather than survival.

At the very beginning of my recovery, I was encouraged to write a list of all the things my drinking had done that had led to suffering for me and other people. I realized quickly that this could be a very short list (“It destroyed everything”) or a very long one (if I decided to name all the things my addiction ruined). What one winds up with will hardly be comprehensive–because addiction’s losses are hardly comprehensible–but effective, just as the scholar did not have to look at every skull in the world to know he’d die eventually. One was plenty. I was told to look at this list any time I felt like drinking or any time it occurred to me that I wasn’t “really” an alcoholic.

I never look at this list, by the way. I just know it’s there, just as the scholar knew the skull was there without having to look at it, perhaps having even forgotten it a little. These mementos of my addiction–whether represented in my own hand in a journal or freshly from the experience of someone new to sobriety–will occasionally catch me off-guard, however. Listening to them, I am emotionally transported to the pain and rawness of addiction and the hard scrabble work of early weeks in recovery. I do not want to go back there, but it is good to go back there. It is psychologically good, if a little painful, and warns me against complacency. It’s also less conspicuous than keeping a skull on my desk, which would be weird and I think, somehow, less effective, though I don’t ever rule anything out.

Valuing Time

At work recently I have learned the hard way (how else?) that if I don’t value my time, no one else will.  It’s a weakness of most egocentrics to believe that everyone is aware of how much time we’re spending doing what and how much spending the Time doing the What “costs” us–in terms of emotional energy, hours or days spent away from loved ones, etc.  The truth is very simple.  Most people are too busy spending their Time on their multitudinous Whats to care about our time.  Moreover, anyone benefiting from our time (employers, needy friends, volunteer organizations) will be more than happy to take as much of our time as they need without the slightest compunction.

Here is how I managed to arrive at this underwhelming conclusion:  My boss called me into her office for a chat.  She’d already called me in two hours early that day to fill a staff shortage.  I was pretty tired by the time this invitation rolled around.  She said she’d noticed that I seemed “Frustrated.  More frustrated than usual.”  Believing these were the opening bars in the symphony of How Can We Help?, I admitted that I had indeed been feeling frustrated–“Overworked and little undervalued” was a phrase that came most readily.  We’re woefully understaffed, and I’ve been doing at least two people’s jobs at once.  It’s not getting any better, and management’s promises for genuine relief come in drips or not at all.  At the office, this is one of the more expected daily headlines.

To my astonishment, my boss counter-intuitively suggested that my real problem was that I wasn’t managing the meager staff I had very well and that management needed me to be doing something else in addition to what I’d been doing (or something like this).  In other words, the key to my happiness lay in working harder.

I stared open-mouthed at her, as she nodded grimly, and nodded myself (astonished), and left.

After a day of meditating on this drive-by shooting, I decided I was glad it had happened.  Very glad, in fact–though my boss herself could not have been more supremely wrong than a tobacco executive at a Lung Cancer Society meeting.  I know I don’t have the staff to do the work, no matter how cannily they’re managed.  And I know I can’t do two jobs at once, no matter how gifted my multitasking.  But, in the end, what I knew I could do and needed to do was to listen, actually listen, to what was being communicated to me–not said, but communicated.

My boss was actually saying, “We don’t feel like dealing with this reality.  We’ve decided that if you’re having a problem, it’s your problem.  And nothing that happens will stop us from asking more of you.”  After sifting through the subtext, this is the sum of the conversation, and thank goodness for my recovery, because I actually have a response to this Machiavellian trap that doesn’t involve crawling under the bed with a pint of Smirnoff.

Say it with me:  BOUNDARIES.  (Feels good, doesn’t it?)

I wound up composing a short, but very clear, memo to my superiors about this brief meeting–stating the way I understood their expectations and the way I was prepared to meet their expectations.  I also outlined the things I would NOT do meet them.  It felt unfathomably good to put these boundaries in place and know my employers themselves had given me the bricks to erect them.  Of course, boundaries are about US, and they don’t have to be stated.  My unspoken boundary now is, “Call all you like, but don’t count on my dropping everything to come.”  My litmus test is more complicated than this, but I feel good about giving myself permission to value the work I do and the time I spend doing it.

I’m not a list-maker.  I’m not a do-er of things just to say I have done them.  These are not really the ways I make my time “count.”  I think, however, that I’m developing the understanding that my time is valuable only when I take responsibility for it, when I make conscious, deliberate choices about how to use it, and when I judge its use through the lens of statement #8:  “The most important part of life is emotional and spiritual growth.  Daily I put my life in order, knowing which are the priorities.”

The Season of Want. Part Duh.

‘Tis the season… AGAIN.  My expectations of the holidays this year were really high. (Uh oh.)  I confess that I  gazed with longing at the Christmas crud stashed in our garage when I was doing some summer cleaning in June.  Not even kidding.  Visions of sugar plums?  You betcha.

But, it’s all come to a flaming, fizzling heap:  picture Clark Griswold’s immolated Christmas tree, only not so funny.  My alcoholic brother–who says he’s not an alcoholic–has been drying out at our mother’s since September like a fig that got left out of the pudding.  After a year and half of his erratic behavior (note the euphemism), my partner and I let him know that, without his acknowledgment of the disease and an effort to be honest about what it’s doing to him and to our family, we just can’t move forward with a relationship.  Now, dear ma-mah has determined that it’s not really his alcoholism that’s causing all his problems (it’s his Type 1 diabetes, says she), and all this squabbling between siblings is BEYOND inconvenient at the holidays.  The villain in this piece is me, by the way.

In addition to playing Grinch in the extended family’s Christmas pageant, I get to play Bob Cratchit at home with partner and kids.  A contract I’d been depending on to pay for Christmas didn’t come through, and now there is LITERALLY no money for presents.  Maybe less like Mr. Cratchit, then, and more like the aforementioned Mr. Griswold.  Oh if ONLY I had a redneck cousin Eddie who could kidnap the nefarious spoiler of my generous plans to lavish gifts upon my family!

 

Leave it to this ungrateful alcoholic to think she’s the only girl in Santa’s lap.

It’s my expectations, of course, ruining the season.  Not my mother or brother or even the faceless bureaucrat who canceled my contract work.  The problems I have today would seem unfathomably simple to the woman who started this blog two years ago.  It is as if, now that I have a tiny bit of sobriety under my belt, I feel I’m “entitled” to expectations–that all that stuff about not having any, or having very few, is for people who don’t have anything at all (like I was, two years ago). But now, look at me!  Good job, repaired relationships, a foundation in recovery…. Surely an expectation or three at CHRISTMAS is acceptable?  It’s Christmas for Christ’s sake!

As it turns out… this not having expectations thing applies to me too.  And the rule doesn’t take a holiday break.  So, the only thing left to do is the NEXT RIGHT THING.

And here are a few of Next Right Things…. (You can sing it…)

1.  Be grateful for my ridiculously blessed first world problems.

2.  Remember that my best memories of the holidays were squinting at the tree and waking up cold in the morning and playing croquet in the snow–not of the presents or the perfect dinner or even the fact that everyone got along.

3.  Stick out an olive branch to my brother.  Apparently, he went to a meeting.  It’s not up to me to judge what that means, but it is up to me to say that if he’s willing, lines of communication are open.

4.  Go help my aunt, who lost her husband last month, clean out her house.  Now that the contract is in the waste can, I have TIME to do more of the next right things… write cards…spend more time with my partner and kids.  Sometimes I hide behind work.  Maybe the universe is trying to tell me something.

The moral of this Christmas play?

Expectatiions.  Duh.