Create a Breakthrough

Mostly, I think, the trouble with creating a breakthrough is that the breaking has to happen in your own mind, and it’s hard to take a wrecking ball to our own mental constructs.

The trick that seems to be working is rigorous honesty. But sometimes it’s hard to tell yourself the truth. Sometimes you can’t even tell if you’re telling the truth. Talking about true things in front of other people seems to be making a difference. I can feel how hard it is to know what’s true when I’m trying to say true things in front of people.

The other thing is that sometimes you want one kind of breakthrough, and that’s just not the breakthrough you’re going to get.

I wanted 2009 to be the year of creating a breakthrough with diet and fitness and finding love, and now I find the breakthrough is dealing with the fact that I’m kind of a mess and not ready for all the things I want to be ready for. So the breakthrough is maybe just going to be becoming more aware of the work I have cut out for me.

I think that I’m accomplishing this goal, one way or the other. Things are changing this year.

• My head hurts.
• I have gained 10 lbs since that bout of health-enthusiasm last April and now when I grasp my upper arms with my hands, my hands get disgusted and send telepathic messages to my brain involving images of whales and walruses.
• How can you have integrity; how can you be integrated; when each part of your body wants to secede from the other parts. We are in this together, body parts! JEEZ!
• I ate a peanut butter sandwich for dinner tonight
  Again.
• I want to believe that I am on a path that goes forward
  but feel like I keep passing the same landmarks and signs.
  I don’t know what to make of this. It’s worrisome.
• People say, you are an apple, you can be the best apple you can be, but you cannot be an orange. I don’t think I’m an apple at all. Or an orange, either. I don’t know what they’re talking about.
• ugh.
• Drug store reading glasses aren’t cutting it anymore.
• It’s hot and humid and the air conditioner is too heavy to bring upstairs!
• I don’t love this cat. This cat lives with me and makes tyrannical demands – that I leave the bedroom door open at all times, that I get out of the tub to let him into the bathroom so that he can sniff the water and meow at me, that I let him sleep with me, on me, all 20 lbs of him. I can barely tolerate him some days. I feel guilty and wonder whether someone else might be able to love this cat. He is so human. Humans don’t make good pets.
• $37 in checking. No more money for Peter. Paul is looking at me like maybe he knows. My heart breaks into an uncomfortable gallop when I think about it. My stomach and tongue feel thick.
• There’s this job for which I might make the case that I’m qualified, but I’ll have to bend a lot of truths to make that case and if I get the job I’ll be terrified. This goes to the question of whether I’m an apple or an orange or a quince, and whether I’m too too worm-riddled to show up on time wearing clean clothes on a regular basis. Apples and oranges make it look like it’s easy. Why is it not easy for me??
• I left a long message on my psychiatrist’s voicemail Friday night. It’s bad news when you’re so lonely you drunk dial your psychiatrist’s office. He left two messages this morning, talking about how I should call him and could ask the receptionist to interrupt him. I think he was checking to see if I was still alive. This was sort of gratifying – to think he cared.
• I feel sick
  and tired.
• I’m sick and tired.
• Funny how those two feelings, when you feel them together, actually mean a third kind of feeling.
• God I hate working. I’m lazy!
• Happily, brother finally cleaned the kitchen today. I’ve been on a silent strike. I left his girlfriend’s half-empty water bottle on the table since two weeks ago, and it nearly killed me but I also left the tomato slices on the cutting board, where he left them after making a sandwich a couple days ago. And all the dishes from his various bowls of cereal and mac and cheese. The pot and the strainer. All of it.
• I hate Chuck. He’s a jackhole. That’s all I’ll say about that matter. I just needed to get it off my chest.
• It just occurred to me today about how my mother always says “you’re your father’s daughter” and my father always said “you’re your mother’s daughter.” Since they both bore a lot of resentments toward one another, this made me feel pretty unanimously rejected. No one wanted to claim responsibility for this work of terrorism! No wonder I’m so screwed up. It’s clearly all their faults.
• Blaming other people for your problems is FUN, And EASY!!
• Sometimes I wish I were jewish. They have all the good slang for complaining about welt-schmerz. Oy gewalt. (what does gewalt mean? it sounds great. It sound like JUST how I feel.)
• Yesterday, I’ll just end with this. Yesterday, I figured out god. I figured out GOD! ME! I figured out that thing that everyone’s been talking about since people have been people, and I figured out that it really does exist, and I proved it and I figured out even the biological mechanisms by which we can objectively say we experience god. So my mother called as I was pacing around the room excitedly, and I thought, I’ll tell her. She’s really brilliant. She’ll be thrilled and give me good feedback. Instead, she said she’d figured GOD out 20 years ago and clearly I never listened to her and anyway I hadn’t even gotten the solution right. Then she hung up on me to talk to the electrician and when she called back she changed the subject and started talking about bird migration in England. So I said, mom, aren’t you interested in hearing the rest of my big idea about discovering and identifying GOD? Oh, yeah, sure. She said. Sure, did you have something else to say about it?

So, that’s it for today. I’m turning it over, as they say. I accept the universe exactly as it is. I accept myself. I accept the English birds and my walrus arms and the 37 dollars in the bank and my mom and my dad. I accept that Chuck is a jackhole and there’s nothing I can do about it and there’s no sense in getting huffy. I accept that this cat and I have thrown our lots in together and we must abide the chances with those with whom we have cast in our lots. Me and my body parts are in it together, and me and this cat, like it or not, with our 37 dollars and wads and wads of fur. It’s not that bad. I accept it.

my new psychiatrist. LOVE LOVE LOVE! ! !

He is wonderful.

He is OLD and little and sheepish and small voiced and meek. He has a funny little upturned smile like a drawing of a smile and upturned crescent eyes like a drawing of happy eyes, and spittle collects sometimes in one corner or the other of his mouth, and he sometimes eats during a session. He is hilarious and easy not to take too seriously. And yet he is fucking smart as shit and lovely and compassionate and I fucking love him.

SIGH. Thanks great universe. THANKS.

I feel I’m on the right track here, with a good helper. I need lots of helpers. He’s a good one.

Today we talked about me and alcoholism and how I’m now NOT (woopsie daisies. I meant to write not... ) an alcoholic but I like the 12 steps and I think I need a community and I think I need some spiritual help and he was ALL FOR IT. And we talked about how I am an addict in a lot of different ways, how I do a lot of things additively, and sometimes it’s one thing and sometimes it’s another, and how I’m smart about it so I find ways to avoid being a clear cut obvious case – a drug addict or an alcoholic… but that I do a lot of things and whether or not I’m “REALLY” an alcoholic isn’t the right question. The right question is, all of my behaviors, collectively, the ones I know I do too much of… they are all anesthesia.

ANESTHESIA.

ANESTHESIA.

And the reality is, I’ve been trying to anesthetize myself all my life in a lot of different ways and it doesn’t MATTER what ways they are. The thing is to look for the use of anesthesia – whatever it is, look at THAT. And sometimes it’s compulsive internet searching and sometimes it’s compulsive eating or compulsive TV watching or video game playing or things that everyone does.

So, Ahhhh. I feel so much better now. I feel validated. I am a general addict sort. I don’t need to definitely be one specific kind of thing. I may not be specifically an alcoholic, but that doesn’t mean AA isn’t good for me. He said a lot of people could really use the 12 steps in their lives, because it’s essentially a community focused on physical health, mutual support, and spiritual growth, so I can just go and see if I like it and that’s good.

So. I am an addict in my nature and the thing to look at is the seeking of anesthesia.

He says, also, that I’m addicted to my infatuation with.. something. I missed it because I was interrupting him, because I thought I knew what he was going to say, but when I heard him say “infatuation” I thought, ohh, what an interesting word. I AM! I AM addicted to my infatuation… with certain luminous things, like potential and fantasies about the future.

No more anesthetic. I told him I got all this, and was trying. But it’s hard.

He said something quite beautiful when we were discussing how I feel I need some spiritual core. He said, well, you can feel your spirit washed away, sometimes, overwhelmed and washed away, if you try to fix too much and look at too much all at once. We need to turn the heat up a bit, yes, but also turn it down a bit.

This was upon my telling him that since stopping drinking and stopping eating carbs and trying very hard to avoid doing things like sitting in front of the computer reading recipe blogs all day… suddenly I find myself weeping every time I hear a pin drop.

You can feel your spirit washed away.

I had an image of Alice in the pool of tears, then. And I was so happy he’d used this phrase because it felt like good synchronicity.

I’m grateful. So grateful he gets the whole spiritual core part of it.

I still have to relate this other thing, this other great thing. From last friday.

But right now I’m headed off to the inaugural meeting of a brand new Artist’s Way meetup starting in Cambridge.

Morning pages! Writing! Creativity! Collages! Artist dates! I hope it’s good and will be one more battering ram working toward creating the breakthrough.

This idea of creating a breakthrough has been after me lately. Jiminy Cricket here has been tugging at my lapels about it for a week or more.

Create a breakthrough. create a breakthrough.

Some other things – flashes – spring up in front of me. A guy in the subway playing guitar makes me feel happy and grateful. I start noticing the writing books on my shelves again. I come across unusual old writings.

Somehow, I really think the universe is after me to break on through, and yet, intermittent flashes of YES come among desperate, densely cloudy what the fuck now drills.

Last Friday night I went to an AA meeting. Mostly out of curiosity. I don’t really think I have this problem – and yet I find myself really drawn to the 12 steps. I sort of think I need them for everything. I mean, this whole idea of having a soul sickness, needing a spiritual path, needing a community, in order to become a whole and healthy person – fuck, who DOESN’T need that? I need that.

Anyway, I figured I have done enough problem drinking in my life that I’m not a complete fraud sneaking into this meeting.

I went to the meeting and everyone was friendly and I was invited to have dinner with some very cool young women afterward, who all gave me their phone numbers. I thought, this is the nicest anyone has been to me in ages! I had a lovely dinner with them, despite the fact that we all drank water and iced tea and whatnot, and on the way home bought myself a bottle of Chardonnay and had big plans of running a bath and reading the new yorker and drinking. It was pretty much shaping up to be one of the best Friday nights in recent memory.

I wrestled, I’ll say, a little in my mind with this question of drinking and not drinking.

Here’s the logic: If you are an alcoholic then you must stop drinking completely, because it is a progressive and fatal disease and the longer you keep drinking the worse you’ll become and the harder it will be to stop. How do you know you’re an alcoholic? If you say, I AM NOT an alcoholic, and further I DON’T WANT to stop drinking and DON’T NEED TO and FUCK THAT’S REALLY AN EXTREME THING TO ASK. Having this reaction myself (to the psychiatrist’s suggestion) I wondered at myself. BUT, I also wondered, well, wouldn’t anyone have that reaction if they in fact WERE NOT alcoholics? If in fact I am an alcoholic, i’m just a wee baby one – with a greater than average affection for drinking, but no signs of its progressing beyond being just that.

Anyway, as I was driving home I thought, what about NOT drinking? How about just NOT drink? I hated that idea and went ahead and bought my wine and went home. Whereupon, I sank into my tub with my bottle of wine and instead brought with me as fascinating reading material: The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous (with lots of adorable 1940’s language and stories about men who kind of remind me of that old Jack Lemon movie – the days of wine and roses).

Anyway, I happened to have been carting this book around for a number of years I guess, because I opened it and found folded inside a couple of sheets of loose-leaf paper with my handwriting all over.

... “Look how time passes. Jan 24, 2004. Every time I write a date I feel it. I feel how I am locked in stasis. I feel that I am the same person who wrote Jan 24, 1998. Jan 24, 1987. And always usually followed by big plans. _By this time next year I will be different. Life will be different. So now, step 1, for me, is about quitting that cheerful pep-rally.”

I wanted to finish this post tonight, but I made my brother promise to take my computer away at 12:30 and lo, he’s holding me to it. Okay, more tomorrow.