Last night's dream: I was cooking dinner for my family. The chicken was browning and crisping up remarkably well and quickly. I turn my back for one second and when I return to my task, Edwin has taken chicken out of the pot, placed a piece here and there, eaten a piece. I flip out. I use the F-word. I grab a cigarette and storm out. I don't apologize.
Instead of smoking, I find myself at a gym full of skilled, young, work-out aficionados. I stay for hours. When I realize I really must leave, I wake up.
The exercise and stretching in my dream was fabulous. It felt so good just to do it. There was no concern about my size, how long it would take to lose the weight, or any of that crap that keeps me from doing anything. It just felt good for the sake of doing it. That's something I want to experience today. Moving my body for the sake of moving. Feeling my muscles and my jiggling flesh and enjoying all of it. Stare up into the impossibly blue sky, chase my daughter around a field, listen to the laughter of the beautiful children in my life. This is the best way to spend a Tuesday on vacation.
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I still can't believe that Lindsey is dead. I knew she would die young. I just hoped it would be asthma, getting sick, lingering for awhile so it would be easier on me, us. Suicide is well, harder to accept. Tho I think I have accepted it. She was very ill, apparently. I didn't really know her heart. Sometimes for fleeting seconds I realize that as I got healthy, we drifted further apart. The thought occurs to me that I could feel guilty for leaving her behind, but of course that is unbelievably stupid. My health benefits my innocents, my kids, and nothing is more important than that. The fact is, Lindsey used language like can't when we talked about sobriety. She knew she had addiction and dependency problems, but she refused to consider life without substances. This may be impossible for some people to understand, but not me. I get it.
In early sobriety, besides the fear of coming out sober, I worried that life would not be worth living if I couldn't say yes to everything. The thought that I would be sober while everyone else partook made me afraid. I thought I would lose my friends, I would lose myself. That was a totally valid fear, it turns out. I did lose friends as drinking buddies. I did lose friends as people I would seek out to party with and then subsequently had to sheepishly seek out and apologize to at a later date. I lost girl's weekends that were booze-soaked and anxiety-ridden. I lost the the feeling that I was a bit of a creep for pursuing friendships with people based on their lack of boundaries or willingness to not judge me rather than on genuine feelings of affection.
Lindsey must have feared this. People went on and on about how funny and sweet and charming she was, but a lot of that was a mask, it wasn't real. She got so much positive feedback for playing a role, that she didn't really know who she was. She got all of those damn tattoos when she was fucked up, then she had to be what people saw. Don't get me wrong, she wasn't a total phony, but from my perspective she was scared and lost and unsure of herself.
I hope I am not projecting, but this is how I felt about my own issues. I would also play a role: funny, carefree, whatever I thought you wanted me to be. Until I had too much to drink, then the beast was in charge, and you never knew what you were going to get. Somehow, for way too long, I thought this was a better option than abstinence. Wow.
So I can't help wondering what life could have been like if Lindsey had chosen sobriety. If she had asked for help to attend a rehab instead of hiding behind mental illness. Not to say that she wasn't ill, she obviously was, but she was never going to get better if she didn't attend to the 70 ton elephant in the room: drug addiction. But she could be different things to different people and keep her secrets. And we are only as sick as our secrets, remember? And the bitch had a lot of secrets. I didn't know all of them and nobody did. I wanted to be accepting and non-judgmental, but she knew I couldn't accept certain behaviors, especially after I got sober. So she became something else and ran off with someone and her final act was a *fuck you* to everyone who ever cared about her, because how dare you tell her you are fucking your life up!
I had been through this so many times before, but I don't have to go through this ever again. I don't have to worry about finding out something terrible has happened because the last terrible thing has happened and can't re-happen. It's done. I can't re-discover that Ed or Lindsey is dead at their own selfish and deluded hand. I can't realize that my love for someone would never be more powerful than their love of their own illness. Because what is addiction than a love affair with death? With sort of self-inflicted Munchhausen's syndrome? You pretend that life is grand while you poison yourself over and over again, then you wonder why you can never quite get your shit together. You spend 25% of your life sick and hungover and you sincerely and stupidly wonder aloud why you can't achieve your dreams. Stupid.
It's stupid. So yeah, I am going to let myself be a little angry. Angry at all of the fear and shame that keeps people from just saying, "I'm sober. I have a problem with alcohol and now my life is so much better." I didn't know I would feel this good when I quit, but now that I feel this amazing it seems so utterly ridiculous to pretend, to lie, to cheat myself and those I love of the best A-version of me there is.
I love you, Linds and I always will, but I am going to do what you could not. I'm going to live honestly, I am going to love myself in the truest ways, I am going to take care of my body and by extension my mind. I am going to love Jesus, and not in the hypocritical and nauseating way of the mega-church, but in the genuine and soul-affirming way of our grandmothers. I will carry you with me always, but it will be to do what you couldn't do: live.
