August 15, 2003

• It could have been worse.

  
  

  What, she asks rhetorically, could have been worse?

  
  

  Oh, just about anything and everything could have been worse than it was, as is easy to see if one has an imagination like mine, but I was thinking specifically of the past few months, my wild and crazy summer here.

  
  

  If you’ve just come in on the story or need a little refresher, it started May 23.  Things could have been a whole lot worse if I had listened to my ego and indulged my fears that day.  Instead, I paid attention to Spirit and acted from love.  It wasn’t selfless love, not by any stretch of the imagination.  Sure, I went out of my way, but did so with an attitude of enlightened self-interest.  The challenge I faced was to help my mate pull himself up without letting myself get dragged down.  Thus far, we are successful.

  
  

  If I hadn’t responded to the voice in the back of my mind that day, he might have died.  People do die of alcohol poisoning… I don’t know any statistics on that, but I suppose that given the ubiquity of the poison, its addictive and highly toxic nature, it might happen every day somewhere on this planet.  The likelihood of its happening to him that time was significant.  He believes he would have died if I had not intervened.  I’ll take his word on that.  If anyone should know, he’s the one.

  
  

  His dying then would have been one way things could have gone worse than they have.  I might not have realized it, though.  The years of living with his NPD, chronic relapsing binge alcoholism, other drug abuse and general insanity, had practically convinced me that I would be better off with him out of my life even if that meant letting him drink himself to death.  The way things have worked out now, though, I have gained more here than just the sweet honeymoon we had never had before.

  
  

  His radical turnaround, “closing the back door” on his addictions and actively working at recovery from a personality disorder few people ever try to transcend, didn’t just turn our marriage from hell into one made in heaven for me.  It did that and much more.  My own choices have furthered the process I started last Halloween when I kicked sugar, my first and hardest-to-kick drug of choice.

  
  

  Whether one considers coffee a food or caffeine a drug, I’m still using that one.  I still have the jalapeño habit, and whether the peppers are a food or the capsaicin is a drug is another matter for debate.  My health care provider tells me that both caffeine and capsaicin are in the pharmacopoeia as treatments for asthma, so I’m not surprised that my lungs feel as if they’re on fire every time I try to kick that dual coffee-and-nachos habit of mine.  I continue to self-medicate.  Other than that, I’m drug-free, clean and serene, for 84 days now, and being addicted to coffee and jalapeños is something sure to get me a few laughs every time I share about it in NA meetings.

  
  

  I know that this could have been a lot worse, because worse is what it was before, when I was a daily dope smoker.  It’s not that the weed was ever an addiction for me.  I’d do without it for days, weeks, or months at a time without any withdrawal symptoms and no significant cravings.  But in my social circle here it is ubiquitous and until Greyfox decided to quit, my own reasons for not smoking hadn’t been strong enough motivators for me to turn it down.  The munchies made it hard to stick to my healthy sugar-free diet.  The smoky haze around my brain made everything harder, from balancing my checkbook to deciphering the tech manuals for my new camera.  I don’t really know why I didn’t get it together sooner.  God, how I love being clear-headed!  I never knew there could be such euphoria in just being straight, unhindered by chemical imbalances dragging me down.

  
  

  So, yes, that’s another way things could have been worse.  There have also been several points along the way where things could have taken a turn for the worse, but I managed to steer clear of the hazards.  That highway metaphor seems fitting here, since the highway has been my home all summer, with my honey and all my new friends in those therapeutic groups are miles and miles away from home.  Coming back from town Wednesday this week, I crested a hill and rounded a bend, headed down toward a bridge.  There on the bridge in the oncoming lane was a big, slow RV.  Passing it, taking up the rest of the bridge–MY lane–was a big double-trailer rig, one of those highway haulers that keep things moving between the port of Anchorage and Fairbanks and the rest of the interior.

  
  

  We all worked together:  I hit my brakes and eased onto the shoulder.  The driver of the RV slowed his forward progress, and the trucker breezed on around and skimmed past me.  I breathed a sigh of relief and shook my head at him as he went by.  Professional drivers are supposed to know better than that.  Yeah, I understand that time is money to them and it’s hell getting stuck behind one of those RVs.  They are the bane of the road here in summertime and I pass them every time it’s safe to do so.  But the double yellow line is there for a reason, and I was just a wee girl on my daddy’s lap behind the wheel when he taught me not to pass on hills or curves.

  
  

  That’s one kind of close call I’ve avoided this summer, and that wasn’t the only traffic hazard, either… just the latest memorable one.  Another sort of hazard I’ve managed to avoid is the temptation to stretch myself too thin.  It was getting close there for a while.  I’m still not getting enough sleep, really, but I can fix that easily enough and intend to move in that direction soon. 

  
  

  I have also had to turn down some requests for help even though it was tempting to try and juggle a few more service jobs.  All I really needed to do to convince me that I should refuse was to look around at some of those who had been sucked into that grind.  That life is not for me.  I’ll do what I can, within reason.  I sat in temporarily on one fruitless weekly gig for a month and then withdrew.  There was one other to which I committed myself until September or October, and that I can handle.  After snow flies, I don’t expect to be driving to town three times a week any more.

  
  

  I also don’t expect to hibernate and isolate myself again this winter as I’ve done before.  That’s another way things are better than they might have been.  It might be better still if those support groups and new friends were a bit closer to home.  On the other hand, I wouldn’t want to live any closer to town, so I suppose the situation as it is is okay.  Could be worse….

  
  

  

  • 7:35 pm
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