Fat doesn’t look nice. It looks blubbery and wrong, like I’ve been blown up with an air pump, like I could be a fine human being except for this one thing that is so glaringly obviously wrong with me.
It’s like having a huge scar right across my face that tells the world I’ve been hurt and I’m just too traumatized to do anything about it. Or too lazy. Or too stupid. Being fat means I’m lazy and stupid, because I’m doing nothing to fix the problem.
I am fat because I am lazy, stupid, doing nothing to fix the problem, and apparently I don’t even care enough about my fatness to make it stop. To DIET. If I am not constantly dieting to make sure I’m not fat, I will just get fatter and fatter and fatter.
This is evidenced by every single time I’ve ever NOT dieted, I’ve gotten fatter. Including with intuitive eating. I’ve gained so much weight, I have to buy 2XL clothes.
I want to believe in this thing, and I appreciate being able to live life without food being at its center. But being fat means I am broken. I am not fixable. I am permanently and forever unattractive, overloaded with extra flab, and shaped like the Pillsbury dough boy.
Being fat means if I return to China, they will laugh and point and say “happy Buddha!” Because nobody in China is fat, and all the Americans are. Being fat means that I fit in with all the stupid Americans who weren’t able to stop themselves from being fat.
It means that I am incapable of controlling myself when I eat.
It means that I am forever traumatized by my mother saying I’m eating too many croutons on my salad, my bowl of cereal is too big, I should eat green beans instead of candy bars, carrots instead of cookies.
It means that I can’t think for myself; I can’t take care of myself. It means I will always be fat, and I will always be broken. It means that my body isn’t under my control. It means that I am out of control.
Being fat means I am lazy, stupid, unattractive, out of control, traumatized and broken – and everyone who sees me knows that, just by looking at me. Because I’m fat.
Fat is the creepy guy who lives in my closet and comes out in the mornings to follow me around and whisper: You can’t control yourself. You’re flabby and ugly and stupid. You were never beautiful and you’ll never be beautiful. Nobody likes you. Nobody wants to be like you. And everybody knows you’re disgusting inside, too.
It was just a matter of time. This time, his name was Alex. And he was trying to protect a woman from being slaughtered the way Renee Good was slaughtered. He stepped in front of her, tried to rescue her. ICE threw them both on the ground and maced them, incapacitating them. But that wasn’t enough.
They shot him 10 times while he lay there, defenseless.
Seventeen days between murders? That sounds about right. In fact, I’m surprised there haven’t been more in that time frame. The only progress that was made on Renee Good’s murder in that time is that the FBI agent who was investigating the case was forced to resign.
So nobody is investigating the case. These are “federal workers” who won’t be held accountable for their actions.
I want to go to Minnesota. I want to walk around in Minneapolis until someone kills me. That’s how I feel. I don’t want to be another victim of this administration but I don’t want to live through this any more. And a tiny part of me thinks that if I am murdered, too, then some of my friends will wake up.
I don’t want to die. I just want my friends – and their friends – and the whole midwest – to wake up. I want to shake them and shake them and say CAN’T YOU SEE THAT THIS IS HAPPENING RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOUR EYES?! until they finally wipe the sleep away and say, wow, Kirsten, I didn’t believe you before but now I do.
Now I see that the person leading this country has used fear and hate to propel this country into a civil war so that no one even trusts their own family members. Now I see that the leader of our country is using us as patsies so that he can become a dictator and line his own pockets with gold. Now I see that this insanity could have been easily stopped if someone – anyone – had stood up to him, sent him to jail where he has belonged since before he was ever elected the first time. Now I see that he’s been lying to us all along about absolutely everything, and lying more when he uses CAPITAL LETTERS in his insane texts to leaders of other countries and to white supremacists and to whomever is still reading whatever he writes. Now I see that there is unnecessary bloodshed on the streets and more to come.
I want to shake them and shake them until they know all this.
But they won’t. It’s like the whole country has been drugged. Like they just can’t see what’s going on, they don’t recognize the glaring lies, they don’t know that they are blinded by faith in a leader who isn’t doing anything that he says he’s doing. He is doing whatever he wants for himself and then he is lying to the public, the media, the country’s leaders, his own family. He lies and lies and lies and people believe him. Nobody stands up to him because they’re afraid that if they do, he’ll hurt their families. It’s like our country’s being run by the Mafia.
Only the Mafia is something I saw in movies and nowhere else when I was growing up.
This shit is everywhere.
I cannot help but think about all the white men in this country who are not anti-Trump. I didn’t marry one. I wasn’t raised by one. And most of my dearest friends are so anti-Trump that it oozes from their pores.
But then there’s my next door neighbor, who became my next door neighbor even after I wouldn’t sign a petition attempting to block low-income elderly from moving into a new development at the end of our street. “It’ll lower our housing values!” he shrieked.
“Where will the low-income elderly people live?” I asked.
“Anywhere but my street!” he said.
Then I think about the high school football player – who I know from high school – who said he is just “so sick of being blamed for things just because of the way I look.” He is a sturdy, heterosexual white man with white-blond hair.
I wanted to say: “What are you being blamed for?” But honestly, he wouldn’t have known the answer.
I think about the pussy-grabbing comment Trump made a decade ago; I believed then that nobody would vote for a man so lewd and disgusting. And now I know that, in actuality, many people would vote for a man so lewd and disgusting because they are lewd and disgusting, too.
I can remember standing in an airport and seeing that he was convicted of SO. MANY. FELONIES. I’d just gotten off a long plane ride and was thrilled to learn that justice FINALLY was served!
But no, that was just a blip in the man’s radar. Felonies? What felonies? He went on to not only win the presidency but commit felonies every single day with not a single soul standing in his way. Billions of dollars are being funneled into his pocket even as he changes his focus every thirty seconds and gives the finger to anyone who criticizes him. He defecates on the protesters and people … laugh?
I would not be surprised if the man defecated in public, in real life, on a senator’s face. I could see the senator now, struggling not to eat any of the man’s shit, while smiling and saying, “Good one, Mister President.”
I mean, isn’t that what they’re doing every single day anyway?
Today he’s complaining that he hasn’t been given a Nobel Peace Prize – again – because that’s what he thinks he deserves. He’s constantly repeating that he’s singlehandedly stopped 8 wars – then stomping his feet and whimpering because nobody gave him a prize for doing such an amazing thing.
So … what eight wars did he stop? He keeps saying it as though it’s a fact, as though it is reality. He’s said “eight wars” so many times, I can’t help but wonder: why isn’t anyone asking WHICH eight wars? Personally I was unaware that eight wars were raging in the past year. Or perhaps he’s including his utterly useless first four years. Maybe he’s got an itemized list in his head of the eight wars he’s supposedly “stopped.”
I, for one, would really like to know which wars were stopped. I really want to know! I am all for world peace, and I have seen the exact opposite of world peace pouring from the wreckage of the White House and into the streets of Minneapolis and beyond.
And yet, it is not just Trump saying that’s he’s stopped eight wars. Somewhere in the congressional hallways, someone has got to be agreeing with him. Others must be kissing his ass to such a degree that they, too, believe that eight wars have been stopped by this holier-than-thou mistake-of-a-man.
Repeatedly, I fall back to the knowledge that Adolf Hitler died on the last day of April, 1945. Donald Trump was born on June 14, 1946. I know nothing about the afterlife, nor does anyone else who is currently alive. But who am I to say that reincarnation doesn’t exist?
And apparently it takes exactly one year, one month, and 14 days.
I moved away 30 years ago.
I left behind friends and family and I went on to a place that became my new home. I became a mother and a wife, created my own family, surrounded myself with new friends. I had to learn to deal with a lot of people, much more aggressive driving, and accents from virtually every country on the planet.
I chose to live here not because it was my favorite place in the world. In fact, I was just stopping here on my way to a beach, somewhere warm and sunny. I didn’t even know that wherever I landed, I would stay.
I’d read, long ago, that someday white people would be the minority in the United States. I looked around me then and found it hard to believe that it would be possible. Then I moved here and my very white kids were the minority in their schools. I could hardly believe it when, one day, I looked around and thought: Huh. They really are the minority.
But they weren’t the minority in every school.
Back in my old hometown, life went on as usual. The same people lived in the same houses and all the families knew all the other families and the neighbors knew their neighbors because everyone had lived in the same town for the entirety of time.
There were no jobs in my hometown, so it didn’t attract anyone from outside. Few people moved into Pittsburgh. People who needed to work and couldn’t make do with what little was available … those people moved away.
So all the people in my hometown, and all the people in the tiny towns in Indiana and Iowa and Alabama, all those people just stuck around where they were, living the lives they always lived. They didn’t get to know any new people. Their kids went to school with all the other white kids and a handful of other ethnicities and their lily white hallways stayed pretty much the same.
Nobody moved, so nobody saw how things are different elsewhere.
In the places where things are different, where not everyone looks the same and not everyone acts the same and cultures are all stirred together in one giant pot, there is acceptance of the differences between people. There is a ton of acceptance, because there is nothing else in the world that can happen when your child comes home and says they’re new best friend is the most wonderful person in the world and you don’t find out for a month that the new best friend’s parents actually speak a different language in their home.
As a parent, you don’t say, “You can’t hang out with your new best friend anymore because they don’t speak English.” Because who cares if they don’t speak English? The new friend is a friend and there are loads of new friends to be found. And we find them here, everywhere, because friends are constantly moving in and moving out and moving around and exploring new places and discovering new things and sharing when they return, or sending emails when they don’t return, about how awesome it is in places where everyone just accepts everyone else for who they are and what they do and nobody questions what the other person looks like.
Sometimes, after 30 years of living here, I have to think, “Oh right, English isn’t their first language.” Or I have to recall, “Oh right, she’s probably been discriminated against because of the color of her skin.” Then I have to think: “What color is her skin again?” Because I’ve forgotten. Because what I know is the soul of the person, my friend, not that my friend is different than me. I see only the similarities.
But when I go back to my hometown, all of my white family and friends are still pointing out the differences. They’re angry because they have this phantom vision of what’s going on in the world. They believe:
The immigrants are taking jobs from the white people.
The government money that could have been given to me during my time of need was instead given to someone who snuck into this country illegally.
Working hard has gotten me nowhere, in a town where no new jobs ever open, and all I see are other people who feel exactly the same way as I do – so the government must be to blame.
People are trying to take from me all the things I have rightfully earned by working in a factory, or at a farm, or in a store, or as a truck driver, a teacher, a waiter. I’m going to lose everything because the immigrants are taking it all.
Yet the immigrants are just … different. And they don’t live anywhere near the people who work in the factory, or at the farm, or in the restaurant. The immigrants are mostly shoved into poverty stricken neighborhoods where they are desperately trying to feed their families and keep them sheltered and give them a chance at a life.
Many of the immigrants I know came into this country legally and learned how to speak English fluently and then, after much studying and hard work, took a test to become a U.S. citizen – and passed. They embody everything that is beautiful about the United States of America: they knew they were welcome here and that if they worked hard, they could be part of this welcoming community we call a country.
But the fear of the unknown has overwhelmed the places where nothing has changed. Whites are desperately afraid that somehow they will lose themselves if they are not the majority. They have the most increasingly irrational fears as they age that the world is spinning out of their control and that they will somehow, as simpleton white folk, lose all their rights if others are allowed to have rights, too.
The men, especially, seem to be terrified that the women will no longer nightly make their dinners, that their children will become transgendered and/or homosexual, and that the government will somehow destroy any modicum of dignity they found in being straight, white and male by funding solar energy.
It’s completely and utterly out of control.
And also, I get it. Nobody wants to lose what they believe is rightfully theirs.
But those of us who are here and who have had to deal with the extreme inconvenience of having to notice that the signs on the subway are sometimes only in Spanish … well, we haven’t lost anything. We’ve been living this way for decades and we have lost exactly none of our dignity. And we are living right here. We are living right in the heart of the city where a man with thick a African accent converses with a woman with a thick German accents over some Pho or curry or tabbouleh. We are living right in the midst of a city where lesbians have wandered arm in arm past a transgendered man who nobody even knows was once a woman, and our children have seen it. And they haven’t even noticed.
We have not only lost nothing; we have gained everything. We have gained the ability to see what life is like when accepting one another for what’s on the inside. We have discovered the beauty of brown and white eggs in the same basket. We know that living this way is not a contagion or a disease, that it won’t rob us of our souls to be near it, that we won’t lose our jobs or our government funding because we’re giving to people who came from somewhere else.
We have gained everything.
And nobody who has never moved has gained anything except fear.
And because there is no logic to counteract fear, those who care more about themselves and their hard-earned money than they do about anyone outside of their circle … those people are going to continue to lose their dignity without even knowing that it’s happening.
Because they’ve chosen to stay in a cocoon, they will never know that their fear has rendered them incapable of seeing the truth. They will continue to believe the lies.
And they will fight hard to hang onto those lies, even as the lies disintegrate in front of their faces.
And apparently, I will just continue to watch that happen because nobody will believe me that these are lies, that it’s all fear, that the raging and ranting and screaming and fighting and shooting are just expressions of that fear.
It’s all fear.
And my fear is that we will completely destroy ourselves – our inner souls – because of that fear, the one that’s being constantly stoked by the current administration.
We. Will. Destroy. Ourselves.
Why do I have to be here and watch this happen? What can I do to make it stop?
I am powerless. I will pray.
I knew that many of my former friends wouldn’t “like” a political post on my page. I understood it when I posted previously and those posts went unliked until I finally took them down. I watched people I once loved and adored rail against me, stunned that I would find the U.S.’s new narcissistic leader to be … unappealing. And, stunned in return, I wondered how I could ever have loved or respected those people.
Yet this time, I couldn’t take down the post just because it went unliked. I recognized something this time that I hadn’t recognized before. I thought: this matters. This matters. This matters. This matters. This is not something that I can “take down.” It’s not going to go away. Renee Good is dead; she’s not coming back. Her dogs and her children will wonder forever why their family was shattered.
I use her name because I know there will be others, and my post is not dated. I know there will be others.
But tonight I have a new former friend. This time it’s a man with whom I felt a kindred connection, not in life but on Facebook. I’d believed he was a like-minded soul, who wanted peace above all else – who loved animals and nature, who loved people and wanted nothing more than to be loved himself as he gave and gave to the world around him.
I’m not sure where I got this impression. Perhaps I just misread all the posts where he talked about the glory of the natural world.
Tonight, I see for the first time what drives this man. Like those around him, he believes he hasn’t gotten enough because he hasn’t gotten enough. Tonight he said he’d like to “see” his supposed white privilege, the thing with which he was born and raised. He has seen “no freebies,” he said. He’d worked hard his entire life, he said, and even when he was on unemployment he wasn’t eligible for food stamps.
Huh?
So what he said was … he has worked hard and hasn’t made a lot of money. When he couldn’t work, for whatever reason, he didn’t get anything from the government. And because of that, he can’t imagine how or why he was seen as “privileged.”
In other words, he wanted more money than he got by being the manager of a grocery store and a bus driver. I’m pretty sure most people would be happy to have jobs like that, would be able to make do, and people who are NOT WHITE would be doubly thrilled. But the term “white privilege” has nothing to do with work. It has everything to do with perception, with the opportunities white people get that are not offered or even available, ever, to people who are not white.
But he has lived in Pittsburgh his entire life. He has lived in a predominantly white neighborhood, watched as the steel mills closed, and been confused as to why the only “opportunities” that came his way were the ones he got. He had a college degree, dammit, why didn’t he get more?
You know why he didn’t get more? Because he stayed in Pittsburgh. He stayed in a predominantly white neighborhood where the cost of living is low and his commensurate salary was disappointing. He didn’t get what he wanted because he didn’t want to leave his little cocoon.
I know because I had trouble finding a job there, too. When no one ever leaves, when no one is willing to go where the jobs are, then nothing changes there. There is no growth. There is no melting pot of people, ethnicities, races, nationalities in a place like that. There is no way for anyone who never leaves to understand what it’s like to step out of a comfort zone and dive right into the fire.
I didn’t want to go, either. I did it because I wanted more for myself. I left Pittsburgh and moved to Washington, D.C. where salaries loomed large and opportunities were abundant. They still are.
But I had to learn to live with people who didn’t look like me, who came from different cultural backgrounds, who had thick accents and dark hair and sometimes smelled strange to me. I had to get used to that, get to know people who were different, send my kids to schools where whites were the minority, learn to live in a place where the term “cutting edge” wasn’t just a pipe-dream.
White people here see what it’s like when racism takes a back seat to progress.
White people in Pittsburgh are sitting around waiting for justice, wondering what’s all this talk about “privilege” as they are living and breathing it every, single day.
Travel further west into Indiana and it gets even deeper.
Today I leave my friend behind in Pittsburgh, knowing that it doesn’t matter – will never matter – that we once cared about the same things. Today, I say goodbye to someone I trusted because I realize that he’s not open to new ideas, and that he’s just as blind as the rest of the whites in the midwest.
It’s just so fucking sad, watching them all go while watching the country burn, and knowing that they are all just too stupid to put out their tiny little ignorant fires.
Last night, in the midst of being unable to sleep thinking, What can I do? What can I do? What can I do?
The questions keep me awake: What can I do? How can I help save the world? Save the country at least? Save one person, maybe, from being shot? I have no answers to these questions. At first, I was flailing, asking everyone who seemed to know things: Robert Reich, Heather Cox Richardson, my friend George. Everyone just kept saying: FIGHT! Call your representatives!
But I live in Maryland. My representatives are already doing what I want them to do. They are scrambling like heck to save democracy – well, Democracy, with a capital D. They are doing everything in their powers to help, and they are really the only people who can help. They are, unfortunately, doing it by the book. They’re following the law, which takes too long, which can’t keep up. They’re asking the courts for help with every issue while our country’s dictator is stomping through the jungle crushing trees, screaming about the blood of an Englishman.
So I put up a post on Facebook. Somehow I expected at least one person from Ohio to say, “No, this isn’t what I wanted. You were right.” But nobody stepped forward, except those who didn’t vote for the orange idiot. They are all wondering what to do, too.
So my post on Facebook was an attempt to do something. I have friends who will post anything, all the time, about politics – which is impossible to follow. I stick to the facts, and occasionally like those posts that they put on Facebook. Because it’s something I can do.
Then, just last night I realized: Facebook doesn’t matter. What I read doesn’t matter. What I learn doesn’t matter. None of it matters if I don’t take some kind of action.
And I thought, then, what kind of action can I take, a lowly stay-at-home old lady, to change the world? I am still reeling from Renee Good’s execution by a guy who didn’t like her, didn’t like women, didn’t like lesbians, didn’t like being made a fool so much that he had to shoot her rather than do his job.
I think about the dog in the backseat, the one that could have been my dog. My dog, Loki, would have been barking, afraid, knowing that there was a problem. My dog would have been shot right along with me. Chia would have been cowering in the backseat, afraid to move. Then she would have been traumatized for life by losing her beloved best friends, the only two creatures she’d ever been able to trust.
What kind of action can I take? I can write about this. I can write and keep this blog going and if nobody ever reads it, that’s okay with me. Because writing is healing for me. And maybe in the writing I will come up with some ideas that will help. Maybe writing will keep me from losing my mind, and maybe it will connect me with other like-minded individuals who are willing to go out in their cars with their dogs and get shot if it means helping to save the world.
I don’t need to follow a word count. I don’t need to write every day. I don’t need to let anyone know that I am publishing this blog again because really, nobody cares what I think. Only I care – and I need to do something. This is all I know how to do.
For now, that’s all I know.
Today marks 33 years since I took my last drink – and three years since I started blogging about it. A lot has happened in those 33 years.
I left Pittsburgh. I couldn’t find a teaching job in Pittsburgh schools, so I started a television career at ABC/Kane in Washington, D.C. With 14 months sober, I moved in with my parents who eventually, gently, forced me to find my own place before I turned 30.
As I tried to maneuver in the corporate world while my entire psyche just wanted to be barefoot in the woods, I started dating a man who made me laugh, sometimes in a deep way that also made me think. Bill was whip-smart and unbearably kind and already a wonderful father to little Chris.
After I convinced Bill to marry me, we had our ceremony under a tree, with a picnic. We rode off into the sunset on his beautiful (“Jap-shit“) motorcycle, which momentarily transformed me into a fairytale princess.
In marriage, I discovered no bluebirds making our dinner. I had geriatric pregnancies resulting in two beautiful boys, now beautiful men. The joys of sober parenting are indescribable. Bill balances my extremes and our family is imperfectly perfect.
For decades, my parents have been my best friends. I play softball with the dad I tried to fist-fight in a parking lot. I have book club with the mom whose high school reunion I ruined. We talk constantly. I love them infinitely.
I have deep, lasting friendships with people who enhance my life even after Empty Nest Syndrome hit hard.
I made a life for myself in Maryland, though I spend hours planning trips to anywhere-but-here. I don’t always take the trips but I enjoy the planning. I spend a lot of time preparing, trying to control uncontrollable outcomes, being reminded that I have zero authority.
I worry and whine unnecessarily about small things; I step up for big problems.
I have Complex PTSD which generally means that when I am reminded of certain experiences – many of which were detailed in this blog – I dissociate. I shut down; I feel nothing. It is a learned behavior that I’ve used to ward off pain, but it also temporarily blocks my capacity for joy.
Dissociation does what alcohol used to do, but without the notoriously obscene consequences. I dissociated during my promiscuity; now I know that every unwanted sexual encounter was a separate trauma.
I’ve recently started C-PTSD therapy, mostly because living in a constant state of catastrophic fear isn’t as peaceful as I’d like it to be. I am seeking healthy ways to cope; I’m never too old for continued personal growth.
In fact, it’s my life’s goal to keep improving myself.
I have an autoimmune disease that destroyed my thyroid, likely due to the excess of beer, cereal, pasta and peanut butter sandwiches I consumed while others were learning to cook. As a result, my internal organs become ridiculously inflamed whenever I eat wheat. If I want to live, I can’t eat gluten. So I don’t.
I immediately quit smoking cigarettes when I learned I was pregnant with my first child. I don’t take pills, even aspirin. I gave up caffeine after one adrenaline-induced heart palpitation. I drink a ton of bottled water and green smoothies.
I’m curious. I recycle obsessively.
I am probably neurodivergent.
Since getting sober, my life is sometimes predictable, sometimes boring, often wildly serene. Life is always an adventure when looking through an adventurer’s lens.
Sobriety saved my life, gifted truth, and nurtures my soul. I brazenly no longer seek more than that.
Once I realized that I would never beat alcohol, I had to learn to live without it. Since I’d already tried doing things my way – which never worked – I started doing what AA suggested.
This was different than just listening to AA stories. This meant I had to be honest about how I really felt. I had do things that made me uncomfortable. I had to learn how to live in a world where I did not fit instead of trying to isolate behind a mask.
In other words, I had to get a whole new life.
The first thing I needed to know is that being popular is overrated. Ever since Mindy Ford sent me a really mean Valentine in the fourth grade, I spent a great deal of time trying to force people to like me. So when my first AA sponsor didn’t understand my quirks in 1992, it devastated me.
But I learned to talk to people in AA about my devastation, and I learned to listen to what other people said. Not everyone understands me. Not everyone cares to live by The Golden Rule, which has been my beacon on my sobriety journey.
But “not everyone” is different than “no one.”
This means I am not actually alone. I’d so wanted everyone to like me that I’d been willing to decapitate myself if it meant fitting in. I’d wanted to be liked more than I’d wanted to be myself.
Being me is both easier and harder than pretending to be someone who can fit in everywhere.
And it can be hard to figure out who likes me for who I really am. I’m quiet; sometimes people literally can’t hear me. My jokes are bone dry and often go right over people’s heads.
It also took time to recognize that I was (key word: was) smart, attractive and funny – in a certain, non-traditional way. I’m not nearly as repulsive as I’d imagined.
Still, it was unexpectedly challenging to learn how to live life. I wanted to follow my dreams and passions. I didn’t know how to choose a bar of soap or maintain a car. I didn’t know the necessary etiquette for office banter, parties, weddings, or funerals.
Life is hard. And I wanted to live, rather than just survive.
In other words, I needed to decide what was important to me, what mattered most in life, and then figure out how to make those things happen. I didn’t need to just find a man and settle down. I needed to find me and do things.
This is how I started discovering what I call “signs from God.” If I listed all the things I labeled “signs,” no one would believe in them. But after the shooting star in England, I knew signs existed; I just had to pray – then watch and listen. I found my answers in books, in meetings, on the radio, in the sky, on highways, in forests – virtually everywhere.
I still do. Lest anyone think I am insane, I keep them to myself mostly. But I use signs to make decisions and I pray every day. I still don’t appreciate religion or church; I am not even wild about the term “higher power.”
But believing sincerely helps.
To me, God doesn’t fit into a box, just like I don’t fit into a box. God is a profound human concept. Mine takes care of everyone. And that works for me.
I am still a work in progress. But after all this time, being me without alcohol or drugs feels okay. Often I feel loved.
David moved in with me after rehab. He introduced me to flaming hot potato chips and in return I helped him buy presents for his children, and I helped him get a job. He worked from (my) home telemarketing – for three days. Then he quit his job and left, calling me a couple of weeks later.
“I’m thinking about drinking again,” David said.
“I can’t stop you,” I said. And that was the end of our relationship.
I quickly found John, a bipolar guy who asked me to marry him so that I could sign him out of the insane asylum whenever he was committed. When he was, I bailed.
I jumped from John to …. Well, I jumped and jumped. As predicted in rehab, focusing on men kept me from focusing on myself. This “problem” went on until one night, sometime in 1995, when I literally cried during sex because I didn’t know how to say no.
That experience led me to a realization: There is no knight on a white horse who can save me.
I was raised on Disney. I’d been completely blind to this obvious fact.
I’d always needed to focus on myself, and I spent the first years of sobriety struggling through absurd (but sober!) relationships and wondering what was wrong with me.
In spite of years of AA meetings and getting to know a few people, I still didn’t know what the heck I was doing. I didn’t understand that I didn’t have to quit forever; I only had to quit for one day. When I realized that, things got easier.
I also learned H.A.L.T. – Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired – for craving management. Amazingly, I have never once wanted to drink when I wasn’t hungry, angry, lonely or tired. Never, in 33 years.
A rehab nurse told a story about addict mentality.
“Addiction is like being in a boxing ring with Mike Tyson,” she said. “You’re prepared to fight. You’ve trained; you’re ready! Then you’re knocked out in one punch. So you pull yourself up and decide you’re going to try harder. You train harder. Then you get back in the ring with Mike Tyson. And he still knocks you out in one punch.”
The rehab patients laughed. Mike Tyson was in his heyday as a world champion boxer so we all knew we’d be knocked out.
“So you try harder. You get a trainer. You train for weeks. You get really pumped. When you’re finally ready you get back into the ring. Maybe you throw a few punches. Then … Boom! You get knocked out in one punch.”
After that rehab, I was at a meeting sitting with my head in my hands, depressed, confused, unsure. I had no idea how AA was supposed to work for me.
Eyes closed, I saw a vision of a Mack truck – its giant front grill right next to my face, the monstrous truck looming over my 5-foot-4 frame.
That’s when I realized: I haven’t been fighting Mike Tyson. I’ve been fighting a Mack truck!
I saw my tiny self, uselessly punching the front bumper. I will never, ever win against a Mack truck.
Every time I’d ever picked up a drink, I’d lost control over what happened next. Outcomes were never based on what I wanted. Drinking meant I couldn’t choose anything in my life beyond obtaining and consuming another mood-altering substance.
And right then and there: I surrendered. I decided to do things differently. I gave up on trying to do everything my way and started listening to suggestions in AA.
That Mack truck vision changed my life.
I was talking to a nurse at the front desk when my parents walked in.
My mom said, “I’m here to see Kirsten Moore.” She sounded so concerned.
“She’s right here,” said the nurse, waving her arm.
I hadn’t yet showered. My hair looked like I’d stuck my finger in an electric socket. I was still wearing Marvin’s sweatshirt, week-old underwear, and leather boots without socks.
My mom turned away from the nurse and looked directly at me, then turned back to the nurse. “Where is she?”
“Mum!” I said loudly. “I’m right here!”
Hearing my voice, my mom looked at me again. “Oh, Kirsten!” she said. I was a grubby, dead-eyed daughter, an unfathomable version Mom hadn’t seen in years.
She literally had not recognized me.
My parents drove all the way from Maryland to bring me clothes.
Then they drove to Chautauqua where the Clinton-Gore campaign was holding a planned rally.
When my parents visited me again, we didn’t talk about relapse or rehab. We talked about Hillary Clinton who, they said, shone brighter than the rest.
When my parents left town, I cried.
During my 14-day stay, I connected with the other addicts to rebel against hospital rules, which included being forced to smoke infrequently – and outside. We failed in attempts to retrieve our cigarettes from behind the nurses’ desk.
We also weren’t allowed to have caffeinated coffee. For my 28th birthday, a bunch of us got up at 4 a.m. to steal coffee from the staff lounge. I’ve never been a coffee drinker but the thrill of stealing caffeinated beverages was a major adrenaline rush.
“Happy birthday!” We clicked “cheers” with our hot paper cups.
Later that day, we went to an outside AA meeting. Someone asked if anyone was celebrating a birthday. I raised my hand.
The whole room laughed. It was my birthday but, in Erie, “birthday” meant “sobriety anniversary.” Wearing my hospital bracelet meant it was unlikely that I was celebrating anything … yet.
Other days we learned line dances. The Electric Slide is still my favorite, having benefited me for 33 years even though my dancing is slightly less bouncy in the 21st century.
Another day, a woman visited the rehab to tell her story of addiction. We all sat around a table listening intently. I stared longingly into her eyes, amazed at how the bright blue literally sparkled.
Afterward I asked her breathlessly: “How did you get your eyes to sparkle? My eyes are just dead. I want them to sparkle like yours!”
The woman laughed. “If you stay sober and go to meetings, your eyes can sparkle, too. It just takes some time.”
Okay, I thought. Finally I wanted something from sobriety. I wanted my eyes to look alive.
At my exit interview, the doctors said: “What do you think your biggest problem is going to be after you get out?”
“Men!” I said, without hesitation. “I always have problems with men.”
“We think you’re right,” said my therapist. Around the room, all the heads nodded.
After 14 days, I graduated without a nickel to my name. David, who’d left rehab two days before me, picked me up in his boat-sized car.
But neither of us had money for gas. Instead we drove to his sister’s empty trailer and had sex.
Weeks earlier, my parents had mailed me a birthday card with a fifty-dollar bill inside. I asked Louise to open the card; she wired me my birthday money so I could buy enough gas to get home.
David drove me to Pittsburgh … and stayed.
We were right about the men.
