OIvercoming Addiction & Regaining Health

"Revolution doesn't have to do with smashing something, it has to do with bringing something forth. If you spend all your time thinking about that which you are attacking, then you are negatively bound to it. You have to find the zeal in yourself and bring that out."
Joseph Campbell, Man and Myth, "The Necessity of Rites"

I think the basic "key" is taking things one step at a time. It has been very important for me to set easily attainable goals and to achieve them one by one. When I was 37, I weighed 182lbs. I was in poor health and drinking heavily. I can't really say exactly what caused me to want to make a change, except that I was not what I had ever imagined myself being. I had been considered "gifted" in school, and had always been told, "You can do whatever you want!"

This was not it.

I started off, not by trying to quit drinking, but just by trying to improve my health. I began walking for 10 minutes a day without fail. Within a couple of months I had lost 15lbs. I decided to quit eating French fries. I didn't care much for them anyway, and so giving them up wasn't a big deal. I lost another 15lbs or so over the next couple of months.

I reduced my drinking from wine with lunch, martinis before dinner, wine with dinner, brandy before bed, to just wine, then just wine with dinner, then no wine, over the next year. (It was really not as neat and tidy a process as it sounds!) At the same time I increased exercise; however, I did not increase it dramatically. I just committed to doing something every day, not to 30 minutes of aerobics 3X a week! I walked with my dogs, I did 15 minute yoga tapes or light workouts. I used Angela Lansbury's "Positive Moves" tape more than anything else because it is so positive and so comforting. Over the last five years I've increased the intensity of that particular tape to suit my improving strength and ability, but it is also a workout that can be done at a very easy and relaxing pace. And I've worked my way up to Cindy Crawford's workouts (very challenging!)

I actually quit drinking on my 39th birthday. I have been sober for 5 years. After I had been sober for about 6 months, I began to increase the intensity of my workouts, doing a lot more weight training. I took a correspondence course to become a personal trainer, but haven't really done anything with it other than to help myself. It's funny that the times I have been asked to help someone else get in shape, they reject what I have to say. They don't want to hear that they should just change one little thing at a time and not expect too much of themselves. They want to go from fat to fit overnight, and that just doesn't happen!

Since I began improving my health 6 years ago, I have gone from 182lbs to 115lbs (which was really too thin. I have been at 125 for the last year or so and am keeping up a schedule of maintenance workouts now.) I have gone from being drunk every day for 19 years to being sober every day for 4 1/2 years. Those kinds of changes can't happen overnight.

What is most amazing is that the body and mind continue to heal and grow. I am really only now realizing what I got from drinking. There were a lot of things layered over the basic reason. Drinking made me more bold socially. In many ways it made me more "successful" because it enabled me to settle for the "success" that comes from "filling in the blanks and matching the multiple choice" even when the real answers are a lot more complicated. Drinking kept me from remembering. Or more, it kept me from seeing my memories for what they were. It has just been in the last few months that I have had the experience of being suddenly stopped, arrested, by a memory as clear as a picture, and thinking, "How awful that was! I never realized how awful that was!"

I guess I should backtrack a bit to explain that. My parents were each very brilliant, but not accomplished. My father was an abusive alcoholic misanthrope. My mother was an extremely sad person with very low self-esteem and a great fear of abandonment. The things that went on in my house that were my life that set me apart from other people, were so astounding. It's only now, after several years of sobriety, that I can see that time for what it was. I've heard that adult children of alcoholics all say this, that we are amazed when we meet in groups and find out someone else lived that way too.

Changing a lifestyle is more than just improving diet and exercise. I haven't watched television in 5 or 6 years. I was raised by the television, and I can tell you, it can seriously skew a person's outlook. Life is much more peaceful without that hectic pace and that smart-alecky-who-cares-about-the-consequences way of communicating. Television is so absorbing and can seem so important. It gives such false intimacy. I know much more about Rob and Laura Petrie than I do about my parents! I knew more about Michael and Hope's marriage than I did about my own. And if they hadn't been there, mightn't my own life have been better?

Now I choose movies to watch or exercise videos or documentaries, and I find that I don't really have much time for television. I think it's good to choose what we ingest mentally, visually, and spiritually as well as physically.

I took up drawing. I had not drawn since childhood and have never had any training, so it's certainly nothing to rave about! I enjoy it. I listened to a fascinating Catholic priest on the classical station (Monsignor Don Fischer) on Sunday mornings for several months. I drew while I listened. It was a very therapeutic experience. I'm not able to get that station on the radio anymore (well, I do but it's really close on the dial to a new Hispanic station, and it's kind of disconcerting listening to a priest accompanied by a Mariachi band!) so I don't do that now. I filled one sketchpad, so I guess it was time to stop.

I write a bit of poetry.

I listen to music again now. (Classical, jazz, Native American, Billy Joel) I hadn't for 8 years because I was married to a deaf man and somehow it just didn't seem right! It makes such a difference)

I wildscape my yard (much to the hostile chagrin of my neighbors!)

Finally, I have come to realize and accept that my best working hours are between 12 noon and midnight. I need several hours to read and organize my thoughts in the morning and to get my house in order. Without that time, I feel out-of-sorts all day and am not very productive, so those are the only hours I am willing to work! Fortunately my job can accommodate me.

February 24, 2007
"Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them."
Albert Einstein

I wrote the above about 6 years ago. In the time since, my dogs and a dear friend have all crossed over the Rainbow Bridge, taking my youthful enthusiasm with them. At almost 50, I am a different person than I was then and not at all the person I expected to be.

It is amazing how we can go through life building and collecting and becoming, only to look in the mirror one day and see a stranger and wonder why we bothered. Of course, there are more good friends and reasons for being, but it is a different world - both my internal world and our shared post 9/11 world.

I have gained back about 40 pounds of my lost weight. 20 when I just got tired of exercising (and my dogs got too old to exercise with me) and another 20 suddenly and inexplicably at 49. So, I am not (at this point in time) 113 pounds of solid muscle. I maintain at around 150. I am healthy, and I walk my (new and bizarre) dog every day. My best working hours are now 8 or 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. I am working at home and hope I will always be able to.

I have just finished reading "Memoirs of a Geish", an excellent book about a life lived within a construct of tradition. Here are 2 thoughts I have carried away with me:

"If you keep your destiny in mind, every moment in life becomes an opportunity for moving closer to it."

"A mind troubled by doubt cannot focus on victory."

I used to think that my destiny was to overcome my past and live free of it. Now I know that this is not possible. My destiny is to choose to rise above it again and again. And so, each moment that I can choose a good friend, each moment that I can chart my course, each choice of activity, each choice of nourishment, has the potential to move me closer to my destiny, closer to victory.

Commitment is a choice we make again and again.

"Earth teach me to forget myself as melted snow forgets its life. Earth teach me resignation as the leaves which die in the fall. Earth teach me courage as the tree which stands all alone. Earth teach me regeneration as the seed which rises in the spring."
William Alexander