Mirrors

“Mirrors”

“The only service a friend can really render is to keep up your courage by holding up to you a mirror in which you can see a noble image of yourself.”
    George Bernard Shaw

I have people in my life who do this for me now.  Well, they hold up a mirror anyway, it doesn’t always show a noble image of myself, but it reflects back what I need to see at that moment that I am not capable of seeing without help.

Emotions are funny things.  Webster’s defines emotion as: “a conscious mental reaction (such as anger or fear) subjectively experienced as strong feeling usually directed toward a specific object and typically accompanied by physiological and behavioral changes in the body.”  www.merriam-webster.com

That’s pretty strong stuff.  When emotions come up it is hard to be logical.  For most people it isn’t easy to simply shut them down and I happen to be “blessed” with the capacity to get readily in touch with my emotions at any given time and can also experience a vast array of them on any given day.  I am not saying that I am not capable of being logical.  I am also not saying that I am not capable of controlling myself, I am but it has taken me a long time to get to a point where I can recognize that I am being influenced by emotion and that I need to take a step back.

Over the past few years in recovery I have done a lot of work on myself.  A lot of self-reflection and self-evaluation.  I have looked at myself very closely and I have come to accept myself completely.  I still have bad days when I doubt myself and am not as self-confident as I would like, but I look back at how I used to view myself and know I see a different person now.  The warts-and-all version of myself is not as warty as I once thought and I have a lot more to offer than I ever gave myself credit for before.

That being said, I am still much better at being logical about other people and their struggles should they ask my opinion.  I can be logical with patients and sponsees and friends and see a clear path forward for them if they ask for my help.  I can offer assistance or an ear or advice should the moment call for it without getting my feelings too entangled when it is someone else I am thinking about.  I can hold up a mirror for them with love and tolerance and show them either their most noble selves or perhaps their not-so-noble selves if need be.

But, when it comes to myself and how I am interacting with others in my own personal life; well I don’t always have a clear picture.  I have come to realize that I need people in my life who will dare to do the same for me.  It is easier to hold up the mirror for a friend who is feeling down on themselves and remind them how great they are or can be.  The hard work comes in holding up the mirror when you need to show a friend they are getting it wrong and perhaps aren’t being the best version of themselves.  It is a fine line they walk because it has to come from a place of love, not a place a judgment. 

These are the friends I cherish most.  They are the brave ones.  The friends that I sometimes hang up the phone frustrated with. The friends I know in my heart are right and come to thank the next day, are the ones I need in my life because they reflect back to me who I am at that moment.  Find those people in your own life.  Find the ones who will hold you accountable and are doing so only because they want to see you rise.

I have to keep in sight who I really am at all times or I risk going back to that dark place of lying to myself and everyone else.  It is a place I never want to visit again, where I nearly lost who I am and everything I care most about.

If They Only Knew

 

“If They Only Knew”

 

            I am exhausted by myself right now.

            I am all over the place and I have been for a few weeks now.  My mind is racing and I can’t get my emotions in check.  All I know to do is keep moving.  All I know to do is keep calling my sponsor, reaching out to people, talking, praying, doing service, asking if I can help others, throwing myself into school and trying the best I can not to sit still for too long.  And no, I don’t want to drink, but I know that if I don’t keep doing what I am doing to keep my racing thoughts and feelings under control then I risk getting to the point where I might.

            I was talking to Frank the other day about a compliment that one of my patients paid me after a session and he in turn paid me a compliment by essentially saying that people seem to want what I have.  I laughed.  I laughed because right now I am a mess and Frank knows it and the people I am really close to know it.  My sentiment to Frank at that point of the phone call was a basic “if they only knew.”  Frank asked me why I don’t write about that now, and let them know, while I’m in it rather than when I am on the other side of it and have some seemingly wise observation to make.  I thought about that and I thought, why don’t I?  Why don’t I share it now while it is raw and messy and while I don’t look like I have it all figured out and while I don’t have the answers…

            I love the fall.  It is my favorite season and always has been.  But with the fall comes a great sadness.  Liam was born in the fall.  He was born October 20^th, 2003 and he would have been 14 next Friday.  Now normally October is hard, but this year I am not doing well.  I am grieving him in a way I did much closer to his death.  The reason for this is due to an article from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia that I read recently.

            I get these articles from CHOP from time-to-time about success stories and the like but I rarely read them.  This one caught my eye because it mentioned both Liam’s heart defect and his subsequent lung condition in the title.  I began to read the story that was eerily like Liam’s story.  It was the story of a baby boy born with transposition of the greater arteries who successfully came through open-heart surgery at four days old only to have difficulty weaning off oxygen.  It was then discovered that he had pulmonary hypertension and in order to treat it he had a broviac line inserted just under his chest so that a pump could administer life-saving drugs throughout his system constantly.  His parents were trained by a pharmacist on how to operate the pump and administer the drugs.  Up until this point the story of this baby and Liam’s story were basically identical.  The baby boy went home but had to come back to CHOP regularly and when he was two they had to remove the broviac line because of complications and a newly developed oral medication was tried and it worked for several years until he started to have some difficulties at which point he was put on another new medication which has been working well for him.  This boy is now 12-years-old.  He is relatively healthy and apparently enjoys outdoor activities with his family, his favorite being fishing.

            I have read and re-read this article.  The first time I read it I could not breathe.  Then I couldn’t see through a veil of tears.  The tears are because the story is exactly the same up until the point where Liam died when he was 68 days old.  He died before he reached an age when we might have tried one of those new oral medications.  We didn’t know soon enough and we missed the window.  We missed the window by what looks like 18 months to 2 years and we would have had a 14-year-old this year.  There are other aspects to this story that I have to explore further with CHOP and with the help of Frank that my mind can’t even grasp.

            I am a mess this October because I had previously been at a point in my grief where I had reached a level of quiet acceptance over the fact that there had been no real hope and no real treatment for pulmonary hypertension.  I had reached a point of dignified calm, a kind of peace where I knew that October brings on a mild pall but not so much that I could not still enjoy the mums and crisp air.  But this October I am all over the place again.  When I sit still, I am in tears.  I am in tears because I, on the one hand I am thrilled that there is a 12-year-old boy who is living and enjoying life and fishing with his family, but reeling because our son can’t also be here doing whatever would have made him happy too, and the fact that I don’t know what would have made him happy sends me spinning off into the stratosphere of the “whys” and “what ifs” that I haven’t visited and tortured myself with for years.

            I’m a mess and I keep moving at the moment because when I have quiet moments these days my arms ache.  They ache because I should know what he feels like to hug him.  I should know what he looks like today.  I should know how tall he is and what size pants I need to get for him because he has outgrown his clothes yet again.  I should know his favorite meal and be able to enjoy making it for him.  I should know his favorite color and be intervening when he fights with Dermot and Wren.  I should know what worries him and know how to tease him and be frustrated with him when he rolls his eye at me.  I should be listening to how his day went and taking him to the movies and holding him accountable for things.  I should know if he is a jock, or an artist or a free-spirit.  I should know the sound of his laugh…  I should know my son and I don’t.  I don’t know him and Frank doesn’t know him and Dermot doesn’t and Wren doesn’t and we never will and it is wholly unfair and the most unnatural thing I will ever experience.

            Then there is that phrase… ‘there isn’t a day that goes by…’  I have come to realize that prior to reading this article, I had reached a point where there are days that go where I don’t think about my baby.  The fact that he is no longer top-of-mind makes me hate myself on some level.  It just feels like the ultimate maternal betrayal and I can’t reconcile myself with that.  I also know that I am being awfully hard on myself and the psychologist in me has all kinds of logical retorts but none of that combats the roiling emotions I feel.

            This October it feels a bit like I am breaking in half all over again.  It isn’t as oceanic as the pain I felt when I held him in my arms at the end by any means, but it hurts a great deal and I can’t get it out of my mind. 

So if I have in the past given the impression that I have this thing called life all figured out, I don’t.  Life still happens and I still have problems.  Things still come up that throw me off my game.  I still struggle and I still stumble.  I don’t have the perfect divorce either.  I have a pretty good one, but Frank and I have been butting heads more recently than we have in the recent past and maybe that has something to do with me being such a pulsing nerve-ending at the moment, I don’t know.  I don’t have perfect serenity in recovery.  I still get angry, I still make mistakes, I still have no filter, I still blurt things out, I still make mistakes, I still question myself and have abhorrent negative self-talk.  I can be spectacularly awkward and incredibly imperfect.  The difference today is that I have tools and a support network and I am using them all.  As long as I keep using them I will be alright. 

So if it useful to hear that I am less than poised and don’t have it all together, know that I, like everyone else, am perfectly flawed and beautifully human and we are, none of us, alone in that.

           

Listen

Listen

 

“Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.”
― Stephen R. Covey

 

I’m learning a lot in my work at the counseling center and in grad school.  One of the skills that is critical for therapists is the art of listening.  I did not have this skill before counseling, but ironically I didn’t start to hone it at the center, I started to hone it in recovery.

There is something to be said for sitting in meetings and listening to others who have gone before you and not speaking for a while.  In my home group we have a group conscience that states that if you haven’t done certain steps yet, then you can’t share at the meeting.  It is a humbling and sometimes frustrating experience to sit and listen for months while you plod your way through intense self-reflective work before you can share with the group, but there is a reason for it and that is how I learned to listen.

I don’t often talk about politics.  I don’t talk about politics because it has proven so weighted and triggering that nothing seems to get accomplished except heated arguments among my friends.  Maybe that makes me too sensitive and some will say it makes me weak but I have mostly chosen to have conversations with my friends face-to-face and listen.

I know for my part in November I was naïve.  I was shocked at the election and thought that more people would vote as I did and was dizzy at the result.  I found, to my surprise, that I knew a lot of people who did not vote as I did and was close to many of them.  There was a lot of angry rhetoric out there and still is and I have mostly stood back and surveyed the landscape wondering how I can help bridge the gap in some small way.  I want to understand more than anything else because half the country felt disenfranchised before the election and now the other half does so at some point it seems we have to stop railing at each other and start trying to understand where we see eye-to-eye and start building from there.

A friend of mine was venting to me the other day that he was frustrated with two of his friends because they did not vote as he did and he was getting ready to shut them off altogether because of it.  He said that when they spoke of politics it got very heated and he would bring up points he felt were un-refutable and they would always have a counter-argument which seemed to infuriate him.  I asked him if he ever really listened to them.  He somewhat angrily asked me what I meant by that.  I said, “Well, when you are having these debates with them are you really listening to them or are you actually thinking in your head of what you want to say in response to prove your own point?”  He proclaimed that of course he was listening but I had my doubts because he had cut me off twice in the course of my own sentence.

I have had some incredible conversations with friends over the past several months who I honestly thought I would not agree with on anything political, only to find we have more common ground than not.  I made a decision going into those conversations that I was going to be open-minded and listen without judgement or pre-formulated responses and I was lucky enough that they have done the same.  Respect-filled, perspective-shifting talks ensued and though we certainly haven’t solved the world’s problems, we have moved inches towards a greater understanding on some small level.

Imagine of Washington D.C. tried doing that today.  Imagine if we all tried doing that today.