April 21, 2005

• Bullshit, etc.

  I am in the fourth day of a “fibro-flare”, an exacerbation of the
  ME/CFIDS “worse” than I’ve had for at least a couple of years. 
  That’s “worse” in the sense of a larger number of symptoms all at once,
  a greater degree of severity for some of them, and a few new things I
  hadn’t experienced before such as one eye sticking shut when I blink
  and some strange sensorimotor anomalies. 

  It has become challenging to keep myself entertained and
  pacified.  My mind wants to be up and doing but my body isn’t
  cooperating.  I have been abstaining from my PlayStation addiction
  and choose to keep it that way.  That’s one form of entertainment
  I wish to consider unavailable, verboten and taboo — much too habit
  forming and time consuming.  TV is unavailable, because I chose
  not to replace the antenna when it fell, another of those choices
  motivated by a deep-seated desire not to relapse into an old addictive
  pattern.

  I resorted to NPR when the computer and both PS2s went down this
  winter, and for a while had become a news junkie in active addiction
  again.  I had been getting sorta weary of the news of the world
  when all the electrical outlets in the front room went dead as I
  switched on the radio.  Maybe that was a sign from my Higher
  Power.  Anyhow, I think I’d prefer at this time to keep the
  silence in here, so I ran an extension cord over to my clock and
  reading lamp, but haven’t tried to plug in the radio. 

  That means, essentially, I’ve been listening to my own internal
  dialogue today.  When I, myself, and the rest of the committee got
  tired of admonishing each other about the futility and
  counterproductivity of self-pity, I decided to get up and bake a batch
  of muffins.  Unfortunately, such strenuous and coordinated
  physical activity is beyond my capacity at this time.  After I’d
  fumbled around and banged a few body parts on architectural features, I
  plopped my butt back down.  Maybe I’ll clean up my mess later, or
  maybe it will still be there when Doug wakes up and he’ll make a swipe
  at cleaning it up.

  For now, finger work on a keyboard is strenuous enough.  I played
  solitaire for a while, until I grew weary of listening to the griping
  and moaning inside my head and decided to dump it all here.  You
  might as well go read someone else’s blog now.  I’m just venting,
  not trying to inform or entertain you.

  I have an NA “birthday” coming up next month.  Part of me is
  hoping that nobody pulls the standard trick of asking me how I stayed
  clean for two years.  Another impish part of me really wishes that
  someone would provide me such an opening, but if they did I’d then have
  to decide whether to be honest and cause general shock and
  consternation in the group, or to be evasive.  One thing for sure,
  I’m not going to be dishonest and claim that the program kept me clean.

  The program didn’t get me clean in the first place.  The twelve
  generic steps had been instrumental in one aspect of my spiritual quest
  while I was in prison 34 years ago.  The exercise of making a
  moral inventory and seeking to make amends for harm I had done did
  assist me in building some self-esteem.  However, even more than
  that exercise, the confrontative Reality Attack Therapy group I
  attended three years later gave me the tools that allowed me to become
  someone I considered worthy of sufficient self-respect to stop
  poisoning myself. 

  That’s the truth, but it’s not something any NA
  true believer will want to hear, and if there are any newcomers present
  my telling that story would impel at least one or two of the true
  believers to contradict me and run their tapes about getting a sponsor,
  working the steps, etc. and so forth so that I can’t corrupt the
  newcomers.  That’s the sort of reaction I get each time I reveal
  that I’ve never had a “real” sponsor.  God has been my only
  sponsor and guide through the steps.  In the minds of the True
  Believers that’s “self-sponsorship” and it “doesn’t work.”  Te-hee.

  On my second NA birthday next month, I will have been clean from hard
  IV drugs for 35 1/2 years.  I detoxed in jail and during my
  vulnerable period after I got out of jail I didn’t have access to the
  hard drugs.  Instead, I switched to other substances, most of them
  legal.  The most destructive and hardest to kick of those was
  sugar.  The 12 steps didn’t get me off sugar, even though I did
  spend some time in online rooms with other sugar junkies in Food
  Addicts Anonymous.

  It was orthomolecular medicine that got me off sugar.  My NA group
  isn’t going to want to hear any of that.  Sugar is something that
  group of “people with the disease of addiction who must abstain from
  all drugs,”  supplies free of charge in unlimited doses at
  all meetings along with caffeine, and even if anyone there were
  inclined to admit that sugar is a drug, there’s still that dogma about
  how medicine fails us.

  Superficially, it may seem I’m qualified for NA because at the time I
  started going there I also quit smoking weed.  However, I hadn’t
  been addicted to it.  My last addictive use of a substance before
  I started going to NA was sugar, which I kicked over six months before
  I went there.   I wasn’t using caffeine addictively when I
  started attending AA and NA two years ago, but within a month or two, I
  was.  The smell of coffee brewing in those rooms was too hard to
  resist.  I have fought it, kicked it again once briefly, and then
  relapsed again.  Excuse me, I’m going for another cup of coffee
  right now….

  …

  I started going to NA because I can’t afford group therapy and I know I
  need it.  I shamelessly use that support group to vent my
  frustrations, get warm fuzzies from fellowship with dope fiends who
  understand me, and to listen to priceless life stories I’d never hear
  elsewhere (certainly not in AA).  The money it costs Greyfox and
  me is affordable, and we can put it on our credit cards when we go
  through the grocery checkout.  Ironically, we’ve chosen to make
  the Narcotics Anonymous group’s drugs our seventh tradition
  contributions.  I ended up volunteering to monitor and maintain
  the coffee, sugar, creamer, dish detergent, paper towels and other
  supplies, and it was easier to just buy it all ourselves than try to
  keep track of the receipts and get reimbursed.

  I still don’t know what I’m going to say if someone asks me how I
  stayed clean for two years.  I’m sorta leaning toward saying
  something to the effect that two years wasn’t all that hard, in the
  light of the 33 or so years that went before it.  I’ve got a month
  to think about it.  Ughhh, that is not a happy thought.  I
  think I’ll take the rest of my coffee over, crawl into bed, read a book
  and take my mind off it.   For just a moment there, the
  thought crossed my mind that I could side-step the whole issue and
  maybe even get some work done around here if I had some crank… but
  that’s ridiculous.

  PS
  Lupa was confused about my “clean” time.  I left the following in
  her guestbook, then decided to copy it here for anyone else I might
  have bewildered:

  I’ll try to clarify my “clean” time for you, but can’t guarantee it
  won’t just make you more confused.  One of the points I was trying
  to make there is that my two-year 12-step “birthday” is
  meaningless.  The only thing it really means is that I started
  attending AA and NA meetings two years ago.

  I quit using “hard” IV drugs in 1969, when I went to jail.  That
  doesn’t necessarily mean, as you inferred, “illegal” drugs.  Some
  of the IV (intravenously injected) drugs were pharmaceuticals, some
  were street drugs, and I continued after that to use illegal pills and
  smoke weed.  In 1969, what I quit was needles and injected
  amphetamines and barbiturates.

  Except for sugar, chocolate and caffeine, that was my last addictive
  drug use.  By that, I mean it was the last time I used any but
  those three drugs (and hot peppers) in an addictive pattern — the last time I was
  actively addicted to any of the drugs that most NA members consider
  “drugs” (although the basic text defines drug as any mind altering mood
  changing substance).  I have never tried heroin.  My only use
  of cocaine was a couple of tries, two separate occasions in the
  mid-1970s when someone offered me a line.  What it did to my
  heartbeat — made it pause and then race to catch up — scared me off.

  In 1969 I also stopped using alcohol, but on two occasions about a year
  apart, with my boyfriend Stony (1971-’72), I got drunk. One time after
  I met Greyfox, I got drunk with him and rather than just throw out nearly a whole
  bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin (I’m a cheap drunk, 2 or 3 drinks is all it takes) after that one-night drunk, I finished it
  off over the course of a week along with a half case of root
  beer.  Therefore, my AA sobriety date is
  December, 1992, even though I had never been to an AA meeting until May 23,
  2003 and had about 20 sober years between those two drunks and that week of
  controlled drinking.  AA defines “alcoholic” as someone unable to
  control drinking, so I don’t qualify, technically.

  Are you following me so far?    1969 for the needles; 1992
  for the booze.  After around six months of weekly group therapy
  sessions in the winter of 1973, I never used any “drug” addictively
  again.  I was taught to control any “drug” cravings with
  chocolate, sugar and caffeine.  This is something AA and NA say is
  impossible for alcoholics and addicts (respectively) to do.  But
  that’s beside the point, isn’t it?

  My caffeine addiction has been on again, off again for thirty-some
  years, more off than on until I started going to AA and NA. 

  I am also now actively addicted to capsaicin, the hot stuff in peppers,
  which triggers the release of endorphins in the brain, but virtually no
  one in 12-step organizations considers that an addiction and my health
  care provider considers it good for me because it suppresses the asthma
  and increases my resting metabolic rate, helping to keep my weight down.

  On October 31, 2002, I quit sugar, chocolate, wheat and some other
  allergic/addictive foods.  You asked how, didn’t you?  That
  story is HERE.
  

  • 11:59 pm
  • 16 Comments