I Guess it's Time to Start Talking

So I've been nominated to chair my favorite meeting here in Chicago - starting tomorrow. I have to admit - when I was picked to do this, my first thought was that I really didn't want to. I've never really gotten comfortable in the program in Chicago. I just don't feel that comfortable talking or sharing. I do it very infrequently. People know very little about me - they know that I moved on my 4 month anniversary and survived breast cancer. People tell me I should be talking, sharing my story, but I just show up and sit there quietly. Well, not anymore.

Anyway, to chair this meeting, I have to pick readings and then give a lead on them. The day after I was picked to do this, a friend called and asked me to speak at the really big open meeting in my home town. Again, I didn't want to do this either. Me, speak in front of 250 people? Anyone who knows me knows this is a virtual impossibility. But, it isn't until mid March - so for now, I'll just worry about tomorrow. Below I've pasted the readings that I have selected for tomorrow. The theme of the meeting is change.

“I have more peace and contentment. Life has fallen into place. The pieces of the jigsaw puzzle have found their correct position. Life is whole, all of one piece. I am not cast hither and yon on every wind of circumstance or fancy. I am no longer a dry leaf cast up and away by the breeze. I have found my place of rest, my place where I belong. I am content. I do not vainly wish for things I cannot have. I have the “serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Have I found contentment in A.A.?"

October 31, Twenty-Four Hours A Day

“If you can take your troubles as they come, if you can maintain your calm and composure amid pressing duties and unending engagements, if you can rise above the distressing and disturbing circumstances in which you are set down, you have discovered a priceless secret of daily living. Even if you are forced to go through life weighed down by some inescapable misfortune or handicap and yet live each day as it comes with poise and peace of mind, you have succeeded where most people have failed. You have wrought a greater achievement than a person who rules a nation. Have I achieved poise and peace of mind?”

June 27, Twenty-Four Hours A Day

“[Fifth,] I have learned to live one day at a time. I have finally realized the great fact that all I have is now. This sweeps away all vain regret and makes my thoughts of the future free of fear. Now is mine. I can do what I want with it. I own it, for better or worse. What I do now, in this present moment, is what makes up my life. My whole life is only a succession of nows. I will take this moment, which has been given to me by the grace of God, and I will do something with it. What I do with each now will make or break me. Am I living in the now?”

October 25, Twenty-Four Hours A Day

“Our job is to be ready and willing for these experiences, find incentive in the examples of fellow members who are living the AA program, be open-minded in our endeavor to understand God and realize that it is not made up of one big accomplishment but gained bit by bit, and remember our inspiration will be influenced by our attitude and action.”

From The Little Red Book, Step 3, page 42.

The Most Liberating Thing Yet (Actually, No One is Looking At You)

Sorry I haven't posted in a while. I know people have been checking and I have just been really underwater at work and really consumed by anxiety lately.

Anyway, I thought it was liberating to say that I survived breast cancer, or to say that I am an alcoholic - and it was - it is liberating to simply be who you are. I have found out - through a lot of trying to be someone else - anyone else - anything else - something other than I am, that I feel the best when I am simply myself. I remember having the thought, right before I stopped drinking - if I could just be someone else, everything would be okay.

So, since June 14th of last year, when my hair started coming out from the first round of chemo drugs, I've been covering up my head. I felt like I had to, to spare me the strange looks and to spare myself from having to explain. No one knew that the hair that I was wearing wasn't my hair. Even the people who knew I had breast cancer didn't realize it. Despite feeling like I had to cover my head up, lots of people saw me anyway - at work, at home etc. In public though, and to AA meetings, I never went with my head uncovered.

My hair started growing around October 15th and I have continued to cover it all this time - just waiting for it to get long enough. It is now almost two inches long. I finally decided, last Saturday, that it was time to unveil my head and go out in public with my hair short. I have never had short hair and was extremely self-conscious about this. I've walked into a couple of meetings this week - to every one's surprise since no one knew - and I have gotten more compliments on my hair in two days than in my entire life. And it turns out, for all of the people who don't know me - they don't even know, or realize, or care. All this time I've been trying to spare myself from people looking at me funny, when actually, no one is looking at me at all.

It's hard to describe why, but leaving the house like this was the most liberating thing that I have done yet. More liberating than telling the truth about who I am. And I might even keep my hair short!

Brought to Tears by the Unlikeliest of People

My group had a holiday lunch on Friday - a little late for the holidays but it was hard coordinating every ones schedules. I work with an odd group of people. We are varied in terms of our temperaments and our work styles. A few are really laid back and calm, a few are tense and high energy. A few rarely show up. My secretary likes to drop f-bombs left and right. I asked her to do something the other day and she told me I was ruining her whole fucking day because she had to stop working on her crossword puzzle. Anyway, it is an odd group, but it works well for some reason. There is an underlying and unspoken cohesiveness and everyone is extremely understanding when it comes to personal issues/family/health etc. The mentality is different where I work than it seems to be at a lot of large law firms. It has more of a small firm feel even though it is one of the largest firms in the world.

Anyway, I worked there for 3 weeks when I found out I had breast cancer. Imagine the stress of having to tell people you didn't even know what you were about to go through and then to have to go through it basically in front of them. And I work with a lot of men. I spend more time at work than I do at home probably. I spend more time with these people than I do with anyone else. I don't know what I was expecting, but everything that has happened with respect to my job and the people I work with has far exceeded any expectations I might have had. This group of people has continually amazed me. I guess I knew that no one was going to treat me terribly because of this, but I can imagine a place where people would make this difficult, or at the very least, not easy. Not this group. They were incredible. Incredibly understanding, supportive and compassionate. All things I have experienced very little in my life - both growing up and in my more intimate relationships with people. I didn't really understand much about what it meant to be compassionate or supportive. Where I once felt jaded and bitter about the way people act and treat each other - I have renewed hope and I have been touched very deeply by this group of people.

The head of my group can be pretty intimidating. He is pretty hands off when it comes to managing all of us. We just come and go as we please basically, keep our own schedules and get our work done. Sometimes I can go days or even a week without seeing him or saying hello to him. He is extremely intelligent, incredibly sharp and a very good lawyer. I wonder a lot what they think of me there - what the partners say about the associates - what they say about everything I have gone through. Every once in a while he sends out an email to the group, expressing his thanks for all that we do but very seldom, does he tell you himself. My review was good and he wrote a lot of amazing things on it about me and he said in one of his emails that I have repeatedly amazed him and that he didn't know where I got my incredible strength from.

At the group lunch he gave a toast and said a lot of nice things about some of us and the things we went through last year and looking to the future. When he got to me, he could barely get the words out. To my complete surprise, he was completely choked up. It brought him to tears, which brought me to tears and I felt the unspoken but incredible connectedness. I had no idea anyone I worked with was so emotionally affected by anything I went through. I had no idea that these people who knew so little about me could care so much. I assumed they were only observing from a distance and on a lot of days, as I worked no matter what, billed a lot of hours, got everything done on time etc., I thought perhaps they might have forgotten what was constantly and unavoidably on my mind. But that wasn't the case. They were all right there with me the entire time. Some of them prayed for me, they all rooted for me, they all supported me.

And the Good Things Just Keep Coming

I saw my medical oncologist today - for the first time since September. Of course my doctors all talk to each other - but I hadn't actually talked to her. She told me that I should be excited - the fact that the chemo got rid of the cancer completely is incredibly good news - the best result you can ever hope to get and the best odds you can ever have. She said there is strong long term data on women who have a "complete response," she said the chances that I am "cured" are much higher than if the chemo had left some cancer behind and that the recurrence/spread rate is significatly lower for women who respond the way that I did. She said it is more likely to come back somewhere else rather than as breast cancer - but that my lymph nodes were clear so it isn't very likely. She said that the odds are OVERWHELMINGLY in my favor, that she would be very very surprised if I ever had cancer again.

Waiting For the Other Shoe to Drop

Lately I have felt a lot of peace and serenity, my mind has been quiet and I've been enjoying the little things in every day. I have serenity, the serenity that I hear so many people talk about, but it is pierced by waves of anxiety, in which I have to remind myself that I am okay, everything is okay, everything will be okay. There is an ebb and flow to this. And then I wonder if the fact that everything is actually okay - isn't exactly the problem.

The past several days I have had more anxiety than serenity and I immediately question where my faith is at, because people always say that your level of fear is proportional to your level faith. I find the anxiety almost unbearable. It feels intolerable. Things are going really well - I got a raise at work and was bumped up a class year at my firm, I'm healthy, I'm happy, I am financially secure, I have no complaints, nothing I want to change, nothing I can't handle, what the hell is the problem? I am overwhelmed by the thought that if everything is this okay right now, something must be about to happen. I am waiting, I am ready for it, I'm even looking for it. And while I am looking for it and anticipating it, I am trying desperately to alleviate it.

What is most amazing is that I used to live my entire life under this kind of stress and anxiety - I just didn't know that what I felt was not normal. I didn't know what it felt like not to have an undercurrent of turmoil running through your life and bubbling up into everything. I think I felt this way, literally, since I can remember. It wasn't until I got sober and stayed that way for a while that I felt what I imagine most other people feel. I felt it in a really physical way - the stress go out of my life and my body. But when I no longer have anything significant to worry about, I start to worry about things like how much I'm eating and whether I might lose my job. Sometimes I become obsessed with these things. When I become obsessed and my anxiety level goes up, my OCD kicks in. This is something I don't really talk much about - I have a lot of shame around it, in much the same way I have shame around be an alcoholic.

People often say they are obsessive compulsive - but I actually am, in the clinical sense. What I mean by that is the fact that OCD is characterized by irrational thought and behavior patterns. It isn't simply that I check the stove 5 times before I leave the house to make sure that it's off, even though I know it's off because I haven't used it in days and I also checked it yesterday - it is the fact that I check the stove 5 times because if I don't, I might find out I have cancer again, or I might lose my job today. When I was a kid, I was plagued constantly by a feeling that something bad was about to happen - so I would do whatever I needed to do to alleviate it. Sometimes it was washing my hands until they were bloody, sometimes it was checking the lock on the back door and the downstairs windows before bed, sometimes it was not eating certain foods, not wearing certain clothes, my favorite was probably unplugging the toaster and coffee pot every night.

I realize now that none of this is surprising. I grew up in utter chaos and dysfunction, with an actively alcoholic mother and a father who I think meant well, but didn't know how to show it or what to do. I think we were all sort of at a loss the entire time we lived in that house together. The OCD was nothing more than a way to feel like I excercised some control over the uncontrollable. As if unplugging the toaster can prevent my brother from dying in an accident. Much of my irrational thinking as a kid had to do with something happening to my brother - God help me if I had been left in that house alone.

I don't know if anyone ever really knew this about me, certainly no one ever tried to help me. I have never taken any medication for anxiety and I have never felt like it impaired my ability to live. I learned, as a really little kid, how to control it. It creeps into my life, even now, but I know how to talk myself out of it. I know that if I can't eat dessert because my brother might die tomorrow if I do, I have to eat the dessert to prove to myself that nothing will happen. Every once in a while, when I feel as crazy as I have these past few days - I just give into it. I don't eat the dessert, I check the iron - that I haven't used in weeks. My coffee pot is unplugged today.

No Action Equals Action

"This is a program of action." "The hardest action you will ever take is to simply do nothing when you want to do everything."

I went to an amazing AA meeting this morning. It was the Sunday morning gratitude meeting at the Lincoln Park Alano Club. I love talking about gratitude - probably because I had so little of it when I showed up to AA. I laugh in my head when people come up to me after a meeting to talk to me about gratitude - commenting on how much of it I have - I think, if only you knew the way I used be! More and more people are telling me that I need to talk - that I need to tell my story to help other people. Anyway, this meeting is more like the meetings I am used to at home - the table meetings - where the topics are more broad and there is less structure to the flow of the meeting and somewhat less predictability. You get more variety I think in terms of the comments. Anyway, the topic evolved into "doing the next right thing." Doing the right thing, even when you don't want to, even when the pay off is bad or there is no pay off, doing the right thing anyway even when the pay off of doing what you want to do is so much greater. Doing the right thing for the sake of doing the right thing. I wish I always did the right thing, instead of doing what I want to do, but I don't.

I spend too much time in my own head. My relationships with people unfold there - in my mind - without the participation of the other person sometimes. Occasionally I have thought - wow, I feel really sorry for all the people who live in my head and don't even know it. How difficult it must be for them to carry on their end of a relationship there. I've realized how much of the chaos in my life is of my own making - and that at least half of it is in my mind. If I could just shut my head up - things would improve. It all originates there in my head, as I scheme and plan and try to get what I want - or what I think I want - only to find out that I don't want it once I get it. The biggest part of this problem with my own head, is the inability to not act on the things that are going on in there. That's why part of Joanne's comment stuck in my mind - it is hard - it is incredibly hard to do nothing when you so desperately want to do something. The hardest thing is to just sit there and be.

I am really intent on changing my behavior though because I have become so painfully aware of the ways in which my own behavior has harmed me. I repeatedly do things that hurt me, knowing that it hurts, and knowing that it is familiar, I just keep doing it. I keep doing it, somehow expecting different results, and the result is always the same. I am trying to get to myself to try something different here, which in my case, means doing nothing and simply being. That is the key to changing my relationships. The more meetings I go to, the quieter my head is, and the longer I stay sober, the more I appreciate the quiet. I appreciate the peace and serenity that I feel, when I work for it, and slowly but surely the frantic, racing mind, the imaginary chaos - it is becomming more and more uncomfortable where I used to seek it out. I still don't always do the right thing, but I am trying. I know that the only way to change what goes on in my head is to change my behavior - change your behavior and your thinking will follow - you have to act your way into right thinking. I love the AA slogans!

Now Comes the Hard Part

My brother has written some phenomenal blog posts lately so I have linked to them for anyone who is reading this who does not already check my brother's blog. Fragile Moments and In Its Weakest Sense. I share the sentiment though our lives are very different and we are in very different places. His words bring up more emotion than I know what to do with. The thing about being sober for me that I find most overwhelming is the ability to feel the things that he writes about. Before I might have understood them, on an intellectual level, yet the meaning is lost when you can't actually feel it. It is really with a deep sense of sadness that I am writing tonight. Reality hits me in waves that almost knock me over. It never eases in slowly. My brother leaves the U.S. today and I am surprised by just how sad this makes me. After all these months and everything I have been through - a new job, getting married, surviving breast cancer, ending my relationship - all experiences shared virtually entirely via instant message, it was more than a little comforting to be in the same place for a while.

The hard part was not surviving cancer - it wasn't the process that was difficult or all of the things that were done to my body. It wasn't my hair falling out, or being tired, or my skin being burned or losing feeling in my feet. The hard part is living in the emotional aftermath and this is hard even though the prognosis is good and the damage to my body, with my fertility hopefully in tact, is minimal. It is also with tremendous fear that I am writing. Like the rest of the emotion, it is overwhelming at times and subsists despite my best efforts at at burying it and avoiding it. I miss my brother, who is my family, more than ever now. At a time when I feel closer to him than I ever have, and I have considered us to be close all of our adult lives, I feel the tremendous distance between us and it saddens me that we don't have the ability to share more moments in person right now. These are the most significant times of our lives, they are the most meaningful times, they are the most real to me. They hold the most significance because I can appreciate them where so many other moments were lost. They should be savored and they should be shared, not across distances and via email. Our lives become busier and we move in different directions, farther apart and we meet in the middle less and less frequently. It worries me for the future.

The reality that plagues me is knowing that my time may really be limited and that I won't know it until it is virtually too late. I have heard from other people who have survived similar life threatening illnesses who face the possibility of recurrence, and recurrence often means death, that no matter how good the outlook is, this feeling is inescapable. It runs beneath and intertwines itself - it tangles itself up with everything. They say it is like walking around with a hatchet hanging above your head and you don't know whether or when it is going drop. As time passes the hatchet gets higher and higher but it never goes away. It always hangs above your head. You see it in the background of your experiences, in the photographs in your minds eye. It gives you gratitude and an ability to appreciate life yet everything seems somehow tainted with desperation and urgency.

I do feel a definite sense of urgency in the need I feel to change the way I live my life. I cling to the time I just spent with my brother as if they are the last moments that I will have with them, knowing too well how life can change in a split second. I am overwhelmed constantly by a feeling that I simply don't have time. I don't have any more time to waste and I don't know how much time I have to share either. Trey - I love you and Rachel and Ellis. Thank you for all of your support over the years. If it weren't for you, I would not have survived our childhood. I'm so grateful that I got to spend some time with you over the holidays. I miss you guys more than I realized.