Glad It Is Not Me

L and M both relapsed on Sunday.  L went from being the happiest I have ever seen her on Thursday while swimming to a screaming harridan babbling nonsense on her 40^th birthday.  M is in jail.

I was sort of surprised to hear from M.  I figured she had given up on trying to automagically get sober while not doing the work and that I would not hear from her again.  I was likely the only person she knew that would take her collect call from King County jail.

L would have had 3 months on Friday.  Her life was really coming together for her.  She got her first denture fitting today.  She has been meeting with her sponsor every Wednesday for two months.  Her bedroom is decorated in a really cute flowery homey way.  We are a lot alike in some ways.  Projecting my perceptions onto her situation Lds the thought that she got overwhelmed by too much goodness self-destructing as a dysfunctional survival mechanism while waiting for the other shoe to drop.   I have certainly done that many many times in my life.

She walked off screaming in the pool parking lot.  It is a lot like watching my mother—only without the alcohol.  I felt a detached sadness for her lack of communication skills at 40.  Life has got to be tough (and scary) when all you can do is scream at those closest to you and then run away when frustrated by your own self-destructive behavior.

Rigorous AA practice would have me give up on them and move on to helping someone else.  M might get the humility she needs while in jail.  She has ginormous problems with fear masquerading as pride that prevent her from getting help from others.

There is a good chance of my disliking change (and shyness/fear of strangers) is causing me to tolerate more than I should while helping them.  On the other hand, if it was easy helping people get sober, our overcrowded prisons would be empty.  I don’t know.  I do know that trying to help them is keeping me sober with the best sobriety I have ever had.  Taking L to the clinic and a meeting every day ensures that I get to plenty of meetings.

If helping them felt too much like enabling, I would quit in a heartbeat.  As it is, I am done giving them a ride home after a bender.   They found their way out there.  They can find their way home if they want to.

My day went well.  Gave L a ride to the clinic and then her first preliminary denture casting, followed by a good meeting and a 70 minute swim with some conversation with others.  I do a sort of sideways rolling bellyflop (sideflop?) to get into the pool from my chair.  It is fun.  My facial expression while swimming is typically an ear-to-ear grin.  It is my blissful time.

Offered to take L out for a birthday event of her choice, she refused to participate.  Offered to take her on a birthday outing of my design.   We got started and she called me “controlling”.  That was a short-lived outing.  Several hours later, she was willing to stop isolating in her room and get out, albeit with a dour disposition.   She got a pair of pants at the Bell Square thrift store and some underwear at Penny’s.  By the time we finished shopping, we were so late that the mall closed and we had to walk all the way around the outside perimeter of the mall to get back to the car.

Practicing gratitude, mindfulness and loving compassion in these (and all my) relationships has greatly improved the quality of my mental health and life.

Writing this specifically about others is skirting close to TMI on the web—especially about 12-step program people.  Using “L” and “M” is at least slightly more than token anonymity.  For those that don’t know me, “Wheels4me” is reasonably anonymous.   I wrote/write with this level of detail for me to practice overcoming my natural tendency towards my own lies of omission (“everything’s fine”).

I have a lot to be grateful for today.  I am sober, serene, exercised, kind, loving, supportive, helpful to the less fortunate and blessed with a bird’s eye view of the painful negative consequences of relapse behavior.  Helping L is the best thing I have ever done in my life for another person.  Statistically she won’t stay sober;  there is a much better chance that I will for having tried to help her.