Sober Half My Life - The Aftermath

I've discovered, after getting such really great feedback - from people who I'd least expected, and some who were there to see the ugly bits, that I'm even further grateful for the path I've traveled.

Stuff like this gives me the continued courage in the times I don't always have it, to keep being the me I was meant and sent here to be.

Networked Blogs is the bestest thing - a great tool for my blog.   But whaddahappenz is, people see my post on my Facebook page, and they post there and not here on my blog, but the comments have been so beautiful, I've gotta repost.

Here's a couple of the comments:

"Just got through reading your blog...it literally brought tears to my eyes... I absolutely love healing in all of its aspects--the rock bottom of it, the courage to ask for help, the tenacity to fight for yourself and the determination to change how you view yourself, others and the world...I love it!...and you, having accepted the challenge and followed your truth, have made the world a better place. I'm grateful for you, Joni McClain, and the work you've done and the healing energy you've put forth in the world that we ALL benefit from..." 

and...


"Joni - I hear ya. My whole childhood was about drinking. Not me, but I was empathic enough that it might as well had been. The bad parts got way blown out of proportion. The good parts were all....under water and hard to see. Still they were what got us through in the end. My mom would have been sober 30 or 40 years by now.

So, it's good to stay awake to the edge....and very good to keep doing good anyway. We're all the better for it. Thank you."

I didn't post the comments above just to brag.  Although I admit that they make me feel good.

There are great losses both chosen and not, that shape and define where I am today.  When I look at the places in life where I can't seem to fit the all puzzle pieces where I think they should belong, it helps to know that just continuing to seek, evolve and learn is enough. Not only that - it's enough AND it apparently can help someone else. Even when we don't know we've helped them.

I feel very human and I can see all my own shortcomings.  There have been many days when it's taken every thing I've had in me to feel worthy enough to get out of bed.

In my life I have only been doing what I thought were the right things to do to make myself better. I just have a dogged commitment to evolving, and up until not so long ago, I was often motivated by feeling there was something wrong with me rather than acknowledging that I am okay the way I am. The natural course of life includes a desire to simply grow.

 This landmark sober birthday has been so humbling!  And I'm growing to accept about myself a quote that I carried with me the first three years of sobriety:

To laugh often and love much:
To win respect of intelligent people
And the affection of children;
To earn the approbation of honest critics
And endure the betrayal of false friends;
To appreciate beauty;
To find the best in others;
To give one's self;
To leave the world a little better,
Whether by a healthy child,
A garden patch,
Or redeemed social condition;
To have played and laughed with enthusiasm
And sung with exultation;
To know even one life has breathed easier
Because you have lived...
This is to have succeeded.

~Ralph Waldo Emerson

I suppose it really is an act of love for others to care for yourself. 

Sober Half My Life...

Yesterday, I began my day at 7am, wide awake and wishing I could sleep, but as "good chaplains" (and of course I want to be one) are wont to do, I figured I must be awake in order to journal or meditate or ponder this milestone of an occasion.  So that's what I did. 

On Facebook, I posted yesterday morning:

"Sober half my life today."

And I am, and here I am.

40 comments and over 85 likes later I realized this really is a milestone.  I reviewed my thoughts.  I realized that as I had approached the ages of 30 and 40 my life had not flashed before my eyes as this sober birthday has over the last 48 hours.

How did I come from being a cocky little snob (that's what I hear!) of a deejay in a lesbian bar to being a chaplain/educator/actor/photographer. (I should probably focus on one thing, ya think?)

Half. My. Life. 

Half my life...?????????? 
 
I will share a little of my story.  Because I can, and because it's my birthday, and it's my blog after all.

I won't regale you with drinking stories - honestly, my long time friends remember them better than me.  I'll start with sobering up. 

I was standing in Charlie's one night - back then it was Uncle Charlie's.  It had to be a Monday night, because back then, all the bars in town were dark on Monday except Charlie's, so that's where those of us who worked in bars would go on Monday.   I recall very vividly, leaning over the bar and saying something to the bartender.  I don't recall what.  What I remember was what I thought afterward: "you sound like your mother, you need to stop drinking," and in that moment, like a scene shot in a movie, everything moved in slow motion for a minute.  I picked up my drink and turned around from the bar, I looked up at a neon sign with a clock on it.  Someone tall walked past it, darkening it from my view briefly and then I noticed the time.  Then things sped up again, I took a gulp off my drink, likely a brandy and soda (ick!)  and proceeded to make my way through the crowd. But the moment resonated, and my sobriety began.  


First I stopped drinking.  I kept smoking pot like a chimney.  I enjoyed a prescription drug or two in the form of Vicodin and Valium.  I remember consistently going from stoned to more stoned as the day would progress, then I'd wake up and do it again.  I remember begging my girlfriend at the time that she had to bring me some Valium home or I'd go crazy and how I had turned into someone who was - well - not in control of herself, at all.

I observed this time in my life, as if I were the person who had decided that night at Charlie's, to get sober.  I watched myself behave in these ways as if I were an outsider in my own life and had no control at all over what was unfolding in my life, my thoughts, my behaviors and my heart.


There was a night when I found out my girlfriend at the time had been cheating. I went ahead and had a drink or two, to go with the pot and downers, slammed a few glasses and a bottle of champagne we were saving for our anniversary in a satisfying way on the kitchen floor, and marched out the door straight to the bar where we both worked to kick some ass. Her alleged new affair partner was there. My own friends, who worked in that bar (lovingly) escorted me out of the bar that night - which was a good thing, because I couldn't have kicked anyone's ass at the time if I'd had help.


Eventually, I moved out.  Yes, she was cheating.  I vowed never to do that to anyone, or to stick around if it happened to me, again. 

One morning upon awakening after having "gone home to mother" I remember feeling utterly pathetically miserable. I'd been fired from a couple of jobs (not the ones at bars, of course) I was at home with my mother, I hadn't gone to college and this relationship had gone to hell and that was the LAST thing I wanted. 

I am so grateful to say - I began to consider what it was about me that was the matter.  No one else was around when I made messes or felt this way.  Every where I went, there I was. 

For the next five years I worked on being sober, working the 12 steps, immersing myself in learning about Self and relating and relationship.  I had been before, and have continued to be, a life long student of my own evolution.  The first two or three years were cloudy and blurry and fuzzy.  I didn't feel like I belonged anywhere but I kept going where it felt safest - AA meetings, and my friend's Francine and Lew's Women's and Men's Clubs.


It was a lot of serious intense work for a couple of years, but put simply, it's is how I began trudging the road to happy destiny twenty four years ago.  

The early years, when big hair helped to keep one sober.

Nothing in my life has compared to that "walk across the desert," in those first few years. Except, er, uhm, ... the last couple of years, which have been a walk across a desert in a different way, but a walk all the same.  The first walk was about learning what was wrong with me.  Let's just say, at that time, if I hadn't sobered up, everything bad about me would have just been worse, and what was bad was already bad enough.  My second visit through the desert has been about letting go of what I thought was wrong with me, and creating a new story, one experience at a time.  I suppose long term sobriety helps to change one's perspective in that way. 

A new friend said to me recently "Damn, 24 years sober.  I know how much that changes how we walk in the world.  I know... we process it in 3D.  It is never really about them because we know some amount is ALWAYS about us."  

This is the gift that sobriety gave me.  Sobriety has also helped me, in the last few years, to know what's mine and what's not.


This friend also asked me, "what is the most important thing you have learned in sobriety?"  I didn't think I'd have a drop dead single statement answer, but I do.


"Life happens, you can lean into it, or not."  And the more I lean into it, the more at peace I am.  And no matter whether we think life happens through us, to us, or for us, it happens.  We can lean into it and accept it... or not.


This is also a pretty damned effective spiritual principle.


So! As I have posted on this blog before - "God long ago drew a circle in the sand in the spot where you are now standing.  You were never not coming here." (Rumi)  Here I am.  And so many things and people have gotten me here.  There are so many people who have had a significant impact on my journey - I love them all.

Lately they are these:

The beloved boys whose lives have become a part of mine by choice.  If I have had a positive impact by even a half degree on the trajectory in their lives, I hope eventually, that it steers them 90 degrees in a good direction.

The woman I first married.  The love we have for one another transcends form, and she is a beloved sister - who, even though at one time appeared to have ruined my life ;-)  has come in the last year or two, to save it a few times as well.

The dear, dear friend whose loving friendship saw me through to enjoy life when I thought the woman mentioned above had ruined it.  ;-)


My sweet angel friend Faith, who understands and accepts me exactly the way I am, and has helped me to accept myself.


My family, who for whatever crazy reason, believe in their little baby sister. And my father's side of the family, who have welcomed me back into their lives with such generosity and love.  They really have helped me to know I only have to be me to be loved.

The best coach a woman could have had - who is so much of an angel she carries the surname; and who took one of the most painful and insecure concepts I had about myself and turned it into the finest of my gifts.


The chaplains who have walked with me on this journey, and the MasterMind partners I've had both new and old.


A very special woman who might have no idea that she was a solid rock, protector, and profound comfort to me  when I was the most vulnerable I'd ever felt in my life - and who believed in my feelings when I didn't think anyone else did...

I'm grateful.


And yeah, yeah, yeah... I could go on and on and on and on...

As I embark on being sober LONGER than I'd been using, I am profoundly moved, and despite the long, long, post, I have no words to describe the grace I feel for simply being able to be me, and that God would want me to do nothing more than just that.

Because everyone should have a crazy bad picture of themselves at the gym, right?

It's been two years of mostly sharing quotes here - I'll share the three that have a living breathing effect in my life:

Your task is not to seek for love

but merely to seek and find

all the barriers within yourself

that you have built against it.

~Rumi

Have patience with everything 

that remains unsolved in your heart. 

Try to love the questions themselves, 

like locked rooms 

and like books written in a foreign language. 

 Do not now look for the answers. 

They cannot now be given to you 

because you could not live them. 

It is a question of experiencing everything. 

At present you need to live the question. 

Perhaps you will gradually, 

without even noticing it,

find yourself experiencing the answer, 

some distant day.

~Rainer Maria Rilke

“Imagine yourself as a living house. 

God comes in to rebuild that house. 

At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. 

He is getting the drains right 

and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; 

you knew that those jobs needed doing 

and so you are not surprised. 

But presently 

He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably 

and does not seem to make any sense. 

What on earth is He up to? 

The explanation is that He is building 

quite a different house from the one you thought of 

- throwing out a new wing here, 

putting on an extra floor there, 

running up towers, 

making courtyards. 

You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: 

but He is building a palace. 

He intends to come and live in it Himself.” 

~C.S. Lewis

And as for yesterday?  

It was amazing, moving, profound.  

And I didn't spend it with anyone 

other than myself, 

and my God.

If that's not how it should be,

it's certainly the way it is.

:-)

C'est moi, photo © Brenda Ladd Photo for Curve Magazine, due on newsstands in December

Thanks on Thanksgiving...

 Surprise!  A blog post on Thanksgiving about gratitude.  How original!  But how could I not post on perhaps the most important principle of good living on the day we celebrate it?  The noun that has such impact, elevates our mood, changes our lives?  

It has been a VERY long time since I've had the typical "Ohmigod I have to spend the holidays with my dysfunctional family" experience.  This is not to say my family, or any other families I have been a part of in my past, were not dysfunctional in their own special ways - no, that's not it.  It's that I have really, really, really, loved this special, (generally) no pressure, food tastes good, let's just hang out and have a good time holiday.  

As for my family, it's as if, some years ago, at least in my experience, we'd had enough tragic shit to be done with our smaller grievances.  Death, divorce.  These are dramatic things, but they don't have to become a drama.  My father died at the age of 42.  I was ten.  My oldest brother died when he was 45, I was 32.  My mother died, not unexpectedly, at 72, I was 42, and two weeks later, my nephew of 26 died.  Last year, my sister's husband died unexpectedly and quickly and he was just over 60.  That's a lot. And I'm not even mentioning the painful divorces, separations, job losses and general changes we've gone through.

Some families, go entire generations without such dramatic things happening.  And I'm not talking about "drama" that dysfunction creates.  I'm talking about the "in life, that's just how it is and some things are dramatic," kind of drama.


And my family isn't the only family to experience such things, of course!  I am deeply privileged and humbled through the work I do as a chaplain to hear the inner workings and pain that others experience from time to time as well.  In recent months I've sat, listened to and prayed with people who have experienced deaths, addiction, divorce, loss of children, loss of homes and pets through the fires that broke out in September, and various and sundry other circumstances.  

Last night, at the service at my church, I heard story after story of how grateful people were in the face of  their circumstances, including foreclosures and even cancer for some.   



So here's the deal:  I am not soliciting sympathy nor am I trying to bring anyone down today.


I simply mention these tough things because I want to illustrate the resiliency of human nature on this day, and give thanks for it.  

It's beautiful and absolutely right to give thanks for our experiences when we see the external result of "B" occurring because "A" happened.

It's totally appropriate and we should absolutely be grateful when things appear to be positive!

It's another thing entirely to be grateful when external circumstances aren't meeting our expectations.

This is where gratitude really has impact.  To be grateful for sound faith and a resilient nature.  To be grateful for the strength and grace that gets us through hard times.  To be grateful for the people that come to us as angels for a moment or a decade, to teach us about ourselves and get us through rough times.  To be grateful for peace when understanding doesn't come.  To be grateful for patience and divine order when life isn't moving and results aren't coming at a pace we'd like.


This is the kind of unshakeable gratitude that doesn't depend on external circumstances.  The kind of love that doesn't require the presence of a particular kind of relationship or family or set of friends.  Because external circumstances good or bad, always have a way of changing, don't they? 


Nevertheless, I am grateful for things both external and internal in my life.  The roof over my head; the puppy at my feet as I write this; the glorious family I have that, in the face of all its tragedy, continues to move in the energy of love; my father's side of my family and their renewed presence in my life and how loving they are; new friends and old ones; being able to serve others; my profoundly beautiful spiritual home; my body that gets me places,  gives me information and looks pretty good despite my occasional abuse of it; all the feelings, good and bad, that inform me of what's going on and what to do about it; my intuition; my talent - and that I can use it in exchange for currency that pays the bills; my faith in the goodness of life and others, sometimes even when I can't see it; and I am grateful for every mess in my life that brought me the wisdom I can use to grow myself and help others.


Most of all, I'm grateful that grace means there is nothing I have to do or have to be, to just "be" worthy.  That I am here is enough.

And it is enough that you are here, too.


Happy Thanksgiving.

Facebook Part I

I was just chatting with a friend this weekend about Facebook, and a status update I had posted last week. 

Here's the post: "Please copy and paste this as your status, even for just a minute, if you know someone who is alive today because you can't afford a hit man."  In no time I had twenty-five likes and 16 comments!  What is that?  I admit - my posts usually come from this blog, are quirky, spiritual, or grateful.  Like me.  (Right.  Whatever.) Prize for best response came from Constance Parten, who simply said, "Wine. Out m'nose."  And by the way, I would not have reconnected with Constance Parten without Facebook, and without that connection, wouldn't be featured next month in Curve Magazine and blogging for them online.  So Facebook has some very clear networking advantages.  Plus just plain reconnecting with Constance, which would have been enough.  ;-)

But here's the first thing (second thing comes in part two): What's with the TWENTY-FIVE likes on a "hit man" status update?  A gratitude update might garner two or three likes on my page.  I hope it's the humor with which I intended the post more than the sentiment that garnered the likes.

Even so, doesn't the human condition, from time to time, lead us down a shadowy path that a status update like that can provide us release from?  Doesn't such humor come from the recognition that we have been hurt, and in our belief that we have been threatened, bring us relief?  I paused for a long time before posting that status update, but the humorist in me won.  The realist in me beat out the voices that would otherwise condemn me - especially as a chaplain for such a non-spiritual approach. Right?

But is it "un-spiritual" to acknowledge feelings, especially the release of them through humor, even as "dark" as the hit man fun?  On this I say no.  And, since there were no specific names mentioned, and I didn't pay a hit man, nor would I ever, I can safely say, no harm done.  But I have met a few people who would land on either side of the spectrum regarding the idea.  Some who have really have considered - and even tried to go through with - this idea, and others who would chastise me at best, or condemn me at worst, for posting it in the first place.

The critical voices I've internalized from the past, as have we all, sit on my shoulder when I think bad thoughts about another.  At one time in my life, and I'm sure in the lives of all of us, those voices were useful in reminding us to be "nice" - parents, old loves, society, religion.  There's a bully or two who could use these voices for self-discipline.  But what good do such voices do when all they are useful for in the present is judging ourselves for having less than positive feelings about others?  We just do have these feelings and thoughts, from time to time.

People will go to great lengths to avoid their "unpleasant" feelings - as if feelings are good or bad in the first place.  They all originate as sensations in the body that we assign opinions to and then take action on or not.  Some people might hire hit men to express their pain, and others might flit from relationship to relationship no matter how long they last, in order to avoid having to relate to their own selves for any length of time. I've been one of those people who avoid their feelings. 

One thing is surely guaranteed when we avoid our feelings and don't look at ourselves.  Our "bad" feelings wind up running us if we don't attend to them lovingly.  Guaranteed.

Wow.  Did I digress from my Facebook topic?  Sorta.

Facebook is a great way to share a little ordinary spirituality in the connection of so many, and the lifting up of spirits through humor, insight, and shared feelings.  If we choose to use it that way.  Facebook is now woven into the fabric of our lives.  There's no denying that. For some it is a way to blow off steam with a status update like the one I posted, and gives us a chance to release a little something through humor.  Or, just plain be fun or funny. Never mind the passive aggressive or sometimes out right total aggressiveness that sometimes occurs on Facebook, that's a different story. And I'm certainly not referring to any of my friends on Facebook when I point this out.  

But in other ways, Facebook plays on a sense of confidence, self esteem,  and elicits compassion when those things are best experienced with others personally, or from within ourselves exclusively.  I've been thinking a lot on this lately too, and this is where I think Facebook is like eating candy, when we should be getting good emotional nutrients from real life instead.

I'll get to that later this week.

And yes, I use Facebook to network this blog.  Oh, the irony.

Kennedy Assassination

It's November 22, 2011. I know. That's simple enough. It's the 48th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination today. 

I was not old enough to share a specific memory today of that day in 1963.

The best I can do is say I've played a role in a show, the first act of which was set on November 22, 1963. Set in a high school gym, the character I played has this line after hearing the "president has been shot: "The president of the student council has been shot?" 

In fact, I've played two roles in this play, at different times, of course, but I digress.

What I'm trying to say is this: The Kennedy assassination is my generation's 9/11.  Or, at least that's what Marianne Williamson said, and I agree.  So, for whatever reason, not just this year, but every year, I remember this day with some sadness.  Perhaps the sadness of a generation. 

Yeah, I've been sad today.  Not entirely about Kennedy to be sure.  Nevertheless, November 22 has always seemed to be significant to me.

I don't have my own story to share of the day, like these people do, but it's a loss I carry in my molecules, I think, and no one of my generation, I believe, escapes that.  Come to think about it, I haven't talked too much with people I know about this - but it is clearly and obviously a collective experience.

There's that "we're all one" in the airy fair love way, but honestly, sometimes that experience is easier to imagine in the collective consciousness and immediacy of loss and uncertainty.  

I have a friend who I admire greatly for the way she can fully feel her feelings, no matter what they are.  She reminds me when I feel grief that "you have to feel that stuff all the way.  You really don't know exactly what you are working through when you grieve."  

So on November 22, in my experience of sadness, I really could be releasing the loss of an entire generation.  In my teeny own way, that is. What did you do today?

A human being is a part of the whole, 

called by us "Universe," 

a part limited in time and space. 

He experiences himself, 

his thoughts and feelings 

as something separated

from the rest 

- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. 

This delusion is a kind of prison for us,

restricting us to our personal desires 

and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. 

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison 

by widening our circle of compassion 

to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. 

Nobody is able to achieve this completely, 

but the striving for such achievement 

is in itself 

a part of the liberation 

and a foundation for inner security.

~Albert Einstein

Know Thyself

The more I know myself,

the less I am affected

by others' opinions of me.

Delight and Danger

There is a delight and danger in opening to Spirit, 

for we may be transformed 

and never able to be quite the way we were before. 

Such life-changing possibilities 

will require us to surrender 

to whatever God has to reveal, 

for it seems to me that the surrender of willfulness

is intimately involved in openness. 

But let us think of what lies ahead for us

in openness to Spirit: 

God’s wonderful surprises, most certainly, 

and Ernest Holmes puts it this way when he simply says, 

“When you are free from the negation of emotional conflict, 

the mind becomes a clear, pure channel 

through which God’s Wisdom flows, 

and there is created for you the good you desire.” 

In our openness lies the invitation to Good. 

The footsteps toward it are ours. 

~From “Total Openness to Good” 

by Rev. Dr. Margaret Stortz, 

Science of Mind 11/11.

What Are You Hiding?

To embrace our shadow
and derail the possibility
of the Shadow Effect taking us down,
we must open up to a greater truth
about our humanness
and what lurks beneath the surface
of the person
we believe ourselves to be.
What part of yourself are you hiding?
~Debbie Ford

In Love

I am in Love with Love

and Love is in Love with me.

My body is in Love with the soul

and the soul is in Love with my body.

I opened my arms to Love

and Love embraced me like a lover.

~Rumi

One Crazy Thing

What one crazy thing

would you do

if nothing was holding you back?

Yeah.  You.

(Just asking)

Genius

Everyone is a genius.

But if you judge a fish

by it's ability to climb a tree,

it will live it's whole life

believing it is stupid.

~Einstein

You're Ready

When the opportunity to let someone in

is more important

than the fear of shutting them out

then "you're ready."

you have the right and power 

to define the kinds of things 

you’re available to experience.

Love and Be Loved

Your security is guaranteed 

through the sharing

of your love.

The peace and safety for which you yearn 

is not a matter of food, clothing, and shelter. 

It is a matter of love. 

Love and be loved, 

and all else will be added

unto you.

The world will perform its magic 

when you step into yours. 

That is the promise of God, 

and it will be kept.

~Neale Donald Walsh

Laughing At the Word Two

Only

 That Illumined

One

 Who keeps

Seducing the formless into form

 Had the charm to win my

Heart.

 Only a Perfect One

 Who is always

Laughing at the word

Two

 Can make you know

 Of

 Love. 

~Hafiz