Belay is off...

Rock climbing safety is all about communication with your partner. There are the basic commands, “Belay on?” “Belay is on.” “Climbing.” “Climb on.” “Belay off?” “Belay is off.” And before these commands, you always check your tie-in with your partner. While it may be tempting to shortcut checking your knots and the basic commands, especially with a partner you’ve climbed with before, that is not advisable…these are disciplines that keep both climber and belayer safe. These are disciplines that instill trust in one another and climbing with a partner is all about trust. I used to love climbing, which is surprising because I fall, a lot. The falling never bothered me because I always trusted my belayer to catch me and he always did.

That said, I’m seriously thinking about getting rid of my climbing gear. These days I’m gravitating more toward surfing, running and snowboarding, all solitary sports. The first time I took my board out on the lake by myself, part of the rush was that I was out on the water, alone. When I run, it’s just me and my thoughts, I don’t run with partners and I rarely participate in the exercise of nodding at fellow runners, or walkers or cyclists that I pass. And snowboarding, much like surfing, can be done alone. Climbing isn’t a solo sport, you need a partner and I’ve given up on partners of any sort. Partners require people and I’m learning (albeit it painfully slowly) that people can’t be trusted. A few entries ago I wrote about my trust never being breached when trust chose me…I was wrong. In the last week, my trust has been ripped to shreds. In the last week I’ve come to realize that someone I thought I could trust, someone I shared my deepest, darkest self with, was not at all the person I thought he was. It’s my fault, really, I shouldn’t have trusted, I should have known better. I should have kept myself locked away in my safe little world. I won’t make that mistake again. Lately I’ve been ruminating about the fact that I will no doubt spend the rest of my life alone and I’m hoping the rumination is part of the process of acceptance because I don’t have any desire to meet anyone new, ever again. Again, people just can’t be trusted and while I may be slow in learning this lesson, this time it’s been painful enough that I won’t forget it. It’s been painful enough that I never, ever, ever want to hurt like this again and I will do anything to make sure I don’t. I have enough friends that I’ve managed to keep at arm’s length, I don’t need any more. And I will never again let anyone get closer than arm’s length.

So I’ll stick to solitary sports, I will close myself off from the people I share this world with. I won’t rely on someone else at the end of the rope to catch me when I fall because no one can be trusted. My climbing gear has been pulled out and is ready to be disposed of and I will be glad to see it go. “Belay is off,” there is no one at the other end of the rope to trust anymore.

God stole all the trash cans…

So this is how my day started: I woke up with a lack-of-sleep-too-many-waffle-fries-last-night headache, an hour after I usually get my workout in. Today was supposed to be a rest day, so I brushed my teeth, decided I didn’t care what my hair looked like, pulled on my workout clothes, grabbed my iPhone and hit the street for a three mile walk. While I was walking, I became aware that I not only had the previously mentioned headache, I was also feeling a little crabby…OK, a lot crabby. The women’s AA meeting I attend is on Saturday mornings so by the time I hit the half way point, I had come to the decision to skip my meeting and just sit on my deck being crabby and smoking all day (don’t try to understand me, I sure as hell don’t). At about the two mile mark, I got a text from a friend that I met at my Thursday night meeting. All it said was “off to get my caffeine fix...” but that’s all it needed to say. There’s a saying in AA that goes “Whenever anyone, anywhere reaches out for help, I want the hand of AA to be there, and for that I am responsible.” “off to get my caffeine fix…” was the hand of AA reaching out to me so I took that hand and went to my meeting, even though I was crabby and would have much rather been smoking on my deck.

At my meeting, a woman came in a little late and barely 24 hours sober. As she told her story, I became acutely aware that I was exactly where I was supposed to be. After the meeting, I approached her and asked her how she was doing. She burst into tears so I hugged her and told her she was in the right place. We sat and talked for awhile and while I won’t go into the details of her story, she said something that brought tears to my eyes. She too had been the victim of sexual assault but unlike me, she was victimized by a family member. As she told me about the last time she saw this man, she said she reacted by asking him what had happened to him in his past, how had he been abused that made him think what he had done to her was ok. It humbled me to sit with this newcomer. She has a strength and grace that I can only aspire to. “Who hurt you?” That’s what she asked him. She didn’t say it with anger, she didn’t say it with rage, she said it with a sincere desire to understand what had happened to her. She went on to say “nobody that hasn’t been deeply wounded thinks behaving that way is ok, so he had to been hurt like he hurt me. He’s a victim too.” He’s a victim too, the humanity in that sentence gave me pause. She went on to tell me she realized the moment she said that to him that he wasn’t ever going to change, that he would go on thinking what he had done was ok and that she would do everything in her power to make sure he never saw her children, but that she needed to forgive him for her own peace of mind. Wow, that’s the only word that comes to mind as I have been thinking about this today. I have a degree in English so I should be able to come up with a better word than “wow” but that’s the only thing that comes to mind. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to the place where I’m ready to forgive the man who raped me, but this newcomer made me realize that I probably need to be open to that possibility.

So here’s where God stole all the trash cans. When she was sharing her story, she said the reason she was at the meeting was that she had been trying to get sober and had told her husband she was going to a meeting Thursday night. She got as far as the parking lot but freaked out and couldn’t bring herself to go inside. Instead, she drove to the liquor store, bought a bottle of wine, went to a park where she usually drank alone, and downed it. When she got out of her car to throw the bottle away so her husband wouldn’t find it, the garbage can that was usually there was gone. She said “it was like God stole the garbage can.” She took that as a sign that she couldn’t hide from the fact that she was an alcoholic anymore and went home and told her husband that she had been lying about being sober the last month and that’s how she ended up at my meeting this morning. There are signs all around us, everyday that point us in the right direction, if we’re open them. God stole her trash can and got her to the meeting this morning and the hand of AA reached out to me and got me to the meeting so I could then reach out the hand of AA to someone else. Maybe wow is the perfect word after all.

To nice…hmmmm…..

Earlier this week I woke up with an amazingly wicked headache. Drama does not do good things for me. I had a fight with STBEH the night before that got UGLY. We’re talking the kind of ugly that makes me look like I fit right into this ‘hood. I like to be able to sleep at night so I try to conduct myself in a way that’s conducive to that. I’m a ruminator. If I behave in a way that is contrary to who I am at my core, I lose sleep over it. I’ve been told I’m being too nice as I’m going through this divorce process (I’ve also been told that the gloves are off and this is the UFC, but boxing ain’t my style so I’m rejecting that reality and substituting my own) and maybe that’s true, but it’s me. Don’t get me wrong, I can go from zero to bitch at a speed that could break the laws of physics but just because I can, doesn’t mean I should.

So what to do…go against who I am and lose sleep, or dig in, tough it out and work through this process in a way that honors the 16 years I’ve known this man, even though they weren’t all good. Zero to bitch would definitely be easier, but digging in would be more productive at the end of the day (besides, digging in is more my style anyway). Now, how to do that without losing my serenity…hmmm…as with most things in life, that’s gonna be easier said than done. Since my best thinking usually gets me into trouble, I decided to ask Therapist Chick about this today during our session. She validated that the knock-down-drag-out fight style of divorce is the easy way out and the honorable style of divorce is the tough, but doable option. She also reminded me that harder still is the honorable/knock-down-drag-out hybrid style that you get when one person has thrown down the gloves and the other still wants to choose honor. Finally, she gave me marching orders to get us back on the honorable track, but if I thought it was going to be that easy, I was wrong…

As she always does, Therapist Chick challenged me to think about why I went from zero to bitch so quickly earlier this week. The answer wasn’t rocket science, I don’t trust. I haven’t been able to willingly trust anyone for the last 22 years. I don’t choose to give my trust because my rapist was someone I knew. There have been less than a handful of men that I’ve been able to trust implicitly in that time and when that trust has come, it has chosen me, not the other way around. I simply can’t explain why I’ve trusted these men, but I don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about it either, the fact is when that trust has chosen me, it hasn’t let me down…my trust has not been breached. Unfortunately, STBEH isn’t one of those men. I also don’t spend a lot of time thinking about if I’ll ever be at a point where I can choose to trust, I’m putting that one in the hands of the universe…like I said, my best thinking usually gets me into trouble.

So am I too nice, I don’t think so because what we’re working on here is the honorable style of divorce. What we’re working on here is a better life for each of us and our son. What we’re working on here is ending things in a way we can both be proud of. So, I guess that 75 lb body bag he gave me for Christmas a couple of years ago will have to stay in the garage. Oh well, I don’t have anywhere to hang it anyway…

I’m not the guy carrying the bumper…

Last week, I was sitting on my deck smoking when one of my neighbors stumbled into the parking lot carrying his car bumper. He had no car, just the bumper. This seemed odd (ok, well more entertaining than odd, don’t judge) so I lit up another cigarette and watched him, in his drunken swagger as he went from garage door to garage door, trying to figure out which one was his. Finally, he hit the jackpot. He went inside, shut the door and I didn’t see him again, until this morning. I had just come back from the first walk I’ve taken without pain since sustaining an overuse injury (if tomorrow's the same, I get to start running again Monday-yea me!)and had spent last night with friends having the time of my life so I was in a pretty FANTASTIC mood. Meditating on how nice it was that I had a great time last night and didn’t have to worry about what I had said or done, or that there would be photographic evidence of some epicly regretful decision, I was again sitting on my deck smoking (yeah, yeah, I know, running and smoking don’t mix, cut me some slack, if I give up all my vices at once I’m pretty sure my head will explode) when Mr Bumper drove up in a car that was, surprise-surprise, missing a bumper, had the left rear corner panel smashed in, and had been marked for the impound lot. He had less trouble this morning finding his garage, opened it, put the bumper in the back seat and drove away.

When I moved out last winter, I’d never lived alone so the idea scared the shit out of me. I only looked at one apartment before I signed a lease. My strategy was simple, move into the same apartment complex my parents had lived in briefly in the 90’s when they were between the home they had just sold and the new home they were building. I knew the complex, it was familiar and that was comforting as I stepped out onto this new ledge. I had actually slept on my parents loveseat in that apartment for a about two weeks because I’d been tossed out on my ass on Thanksgiving and had nowhere else to go (again, another story for another time, and that one’s a doozy so don’t miss it). Everything seemed normal here for the first couple of months but then the snow thawed, peopled opened their windows and sliding glass doors and I realized that I had actually moved into what I can only describe as one of Dante’s seven circles of Hell (and yes, like with gregarious, I’m hoping this is the first reference to Dante you’ve read in a blog). You see, Mr Bumper isn’t an anomaly here. Two flights down, I have neighbors that apparently smoke dope for a living so at least once a week I wake up in the middle of the night with the munchies, have no idea why, and my apartment smells like cannabis central (sidebar, spellcheck will automatically add to n’s to cannabis if you only spell it with one…feel free to use that piece of trivia in the future if you’d like, I’m a giver), I’ve had to close my windows and turn on the air conditioning on a couple of occasions to block out the sound of drunks puking in the dumpster outside so my 11-year-old doesn’t have to hear that fantastic sound, and don’t even get me started on the toothless guy at the pool that thought “hey sweet thing, where you live at” was a good opening line.

Anyway, I’ve been feeling increasingly frustrated with the neighborhood lately until I saw Mr Bumper this morning and a light bulb came on for me. I’m getting the rare opportunity to see what an alternative existence would be like for me if I continued to drink, kind of like my own It’s a Wonderful Life, only without the gym floor that opens up into a pool and the snow. As long as I stay sober, I don’t have to be the guy carrying the bumper. No matter what challenges I face right now as I figure out this whole creating-a-single-life deal, I can rest in the knowledge that I know what I did last night, I can be there for friends (another sidebar, as I’m writing this, I just got off the phone with a friend whose daughter had some tough questions for him about his ex and her new “friend” so I told him the bumper story and hopefully it gave him a moment of levity in an otherwise difficult situation), and I can look in the mirror each day and at the very least say “I’m not the guy carrying the bumper.”

6 months, woo hoo...

I got my 6 month medallion last night at my AA meeting. It’s customary to say a little bit about how you stayed sober so here’s what I said to the best of my recollection…

6 months, woo hoo (insert sarcasm here). I have more of these than probably should be allowed but you guys kept telling me to come back so I did. I started drinking again about 5 years ago and because I lived with a recovering alcoholic, I knew the ground rules, “if you’re going to drink, fine, but don’t come home drunk or you’re outta here.” I was able to follow those rules so I thought I had this thing under control. When I moved out in December, there was no accountability, no rules and I found myself alone in my apartment, drunk almost every night. I call myself an anti-social drinker because I drink alone. I’m the kind of drunk that cries and says stupid shit like “why doesn’t anyone love me” and “I just want to be loved.” Know what happens to a woman in a bar that’s that kind of drunk? All the losers that want to “help” her out with her low self esteem issues line up. No thank you. Six months ago yesterday, I was drunk in my apartment alone talking to a friend on the phone. He began to call me on my shit and, well, I don’t like that so I told him I was hanging up. His response to that was “let me say one last thing before you do…Michele, you don’t have to lose it all this time.” My response was “thanks” and a dial tone (although I’m pretty sure that’s not accurate because he was on his cell and those don’t have dial tones. It would be nice if they did so you don’t spend time talking to no one when a call is dropped but I digress). “You don’t have to lose it all this time” was my moment of clarity and I properly thanked him for it by promptly deciding I’d never talk to him again. The next day, I called a friend of my mine in the program and said I needed help. The advice I got was, go to women’s meetings for a while. The answer to my “why on earth would I do that?!” was this…”You like the boy/girl mixer meetings because boys think you’re cute and don’t make you do any work. Women don’t think you’re cute and it’s about f**king time you did some work.” I followed that advice so here I am. For the first time, I have a sponsor I actually call and I’m working the steps…

What I didn’t say was that I called my friend back a couple of days later and thanked him for calling me on my shit rather than running away. Yesterday I got a text from him that said in part “I am happy to have been there for you and will always be there. You are such a special and unique person. The world is a better place with you in it.” The fact that someone can see good in me still amazes me, but thanks to the gift of sobriety, I GET the chance to work on that.

True Athletes….

The first time I heard the mantra “true athletes bear excruciating pain,” I was in labor. It was four-something in the morning, there was a raging blizzard happening outside the delivery room window, I had refused any pain meds, the contractions were one on top of another, and our son was making his world debut…eight weeks early. At some point, hunched over the edge of the bed, Jim whispered “true athletes bear excruciating pain.” With a fleet of nurses and two doctors for each of us standing by, the room wasn’t filled with the usual excitement that you see in movies like 9 Months or Father of the Bride Part 2. There simply wasn’t time to slow my pace so none of us knew how this was going to turn out. Why four doctors? Because it was determined early on that the OB resident and the pediatrics resident might need back up in this situation so the seasoned veterans were summoned from their beds in the middle of the night (did I mention the blizzard?) to take over in the event things went terribly wrong. At 6:14 AM, our son was born. All I really remember from the moment he was born was that they took him away without letting me see him, he didn’t cry at first, and when he finally did cry, the whole room erupted in applause. That is one cool birth story if you ask me and I handled it like I handle most of the challenges in my life, I pushed down and emotions I was feeling, dug deep, and did what I needed to do.

It has occurred to me lately, as I’ve been plagued with overuse injuries this summer, perhaps I take that mantra too far. Patellofemoral pain when I decided to run 12 miles within a 36 hour period in June, a sprained ankle in July because I kept running for days after the pain started…all the while saying to myself, true athletes bear excruciating pain. I’ve always known this about myself, I’ve always pushed myself physically beyond what’s probably reasonable so this Oprahesque Ah-ha moment isn’t really about what will no doubt go down in the books as the Injurious Summer of 2010. This Ah-ha moment is about how, while I battle through physical pain, I run away from confronting emotional pain as fast as I possibly can.

The second I see trouble on horizon, I bail. If I think you’re going to hurt me, all you will see is my back as I run away. And we’re not just talking a break or a cooling off period, we’re talking a clean burn. I rip up pictures, I throw away cards and letters, I delete numbers from my phone, I delete emails, I even cut out others that could remind me of you. I’m constantly on the run, looking for a fresh start. Until very recently, I thought this strategy was working for me. But Saturday I found myself battling epic hell-hath-no-fury-like-a-woman-scorned anger that I took out on a friend I’m having a difficult time with right now. After I sent an admittedly, ill-advised good-bye-you’ll-be-sorry-you-schmuck email, I had that Oprahesque Ah-ha moment…my anger wasn’t about my friend, it was about the collapse of my marriage. Shortly after that catharsis, I had an Oprahesque Ah-ha-ha moment (I blame therapy)as it dawned on me that this is precisely why people shouldn’t run from relationship to relationship…or at least I shouldn’t. If I were to jump into another relationship right now, that poor bastard would be the lucky recipient of all the unresolved feelings I’ve kept at bay while I’ve been logging hours on the treadmill…gentlemen, don’t all rush me at once.

So where does this leave me? I guess it leaves me with the knowledge that when I have to, I have the skills to push emotion aside, dig deep and get the job done. It also leaves me with the knowledge that sometimes I need to take that mantra to a new level and stop running from the people closest to me simply because I don’t want to deal with the pain that can come along with any relationship. I have the time to slow my pace. True athletes…finish it for me people…