Emotion to Action

I mentioned in a previous post that my therapist and counsellor said that I live from the neck up, meaning that I suppress emotion, I think everything through and don't act on feeling.

I used to wear the fact that I live my life with as little emotion as possible as a badge of honor. Acting on emotion or feelings typically leads to regrettable mistakes when you get caught up in the moment. Stripping yourself of emotion and looking at everything objectively with no internal bias allows you to see the world for what it really is, and lets you make what we perceive as the right choices for the greater good.

But over the past few months I've come to realize that living without emotion is not really living at all. Being human is all about making those mistakes, having wants and needs, and expressing the emotions to others.  Memories that matter are created only from emotion, and are recalled with the same emotions. Genuine friendships and relationships spawn and are maintained with emotion and die off without them.

Also, I think for me, emotion is tied to action.  In my current frenzy of emotion, brokenness and desperation I find I've been a beacon of productivity. I'm no repair-man, but I managed to fix our broken down dishwasher. I did some maintenance on my car. I've started working out again. I took the kids on a day-long trip to the zoo. I repaired some light fixtures in our kitchen, cleaning them along the way. I have contacted and met with friends I have not seen in a long time. I attribute my action to the emotions I'm feeling, but also to the sobriety with intention that I have been working on.

Addiction is a funny thing.  It allows a person to easily suppress any negative emotions that come their way. I mean, the six basic emotions are anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise.  Of the six, only one (arguably two) could be regarded as positive. Most of us would prefer not to deal with the rest.  Addictions allow us to escape from those emotions by immediately giving us what we want or crave. While I agree with that, it has always been difficult for me to attribute my lack of emotion to my addiction.  The reason for that is I only relapse once every few months... surely to live as robotically as I do now it would require daily maintenance, right?

Perhaps the difference this time is I refuse to fall back into relapse.  I don't have my addiction as a safety net for my emotions, and I put my heart on the line with everything I do now.  Of course, my wife pursuing a divorce also helps get the floodgate of emotions out, but that's the easy and unsustainable reason to live a life more emotional.

In the meantime, I feel like I need to clean up this basement I'll be living in these next few weeks.

Trusting Charles Blondin

There's an old story about a real person named Charles Blondin that gets retold so much that it has turned somewhat into a legend. Most of what is told on the internet about him is probably not true anymore, but even so, one particular story about him will serve as a daily reminder of how I am to carry out my life moving forward.

Charles Blondin with his balancing pole

In 1859 Charles Blondin is known as the first person to ever tightrope across the Niagara Falls Gorge. He crossed the falls on tightrope multiple times, and each time he did it in crazier ways than the last.  The variety of ways he crossed included: being blindfolded, while in a sack, on stilts, while cooking an omelet, and while trundling a wheelbarrow.

The wheelbarrow run of his gets a lot of attention, because there is a story that is told (usually by Christian groups) that goes like this:

After Charles Blondin had pushed the wheelbarrow across Niagara Falls Gorge while being blindfolded, he asked for some audience participation.  Charles had already crossed the gorge multiple times with ease, proved he could do it, and nobody in the audience had any doubt that he could perform any feat. 

Charles asked the audience, "Do you believe I can carry a person across the gorge in the wheelbarrow?"  Everybody shouted that yes, they believed!

Charles then asked, "Great! Then who's going to get in the wheelbarrow?"

Christians love to compare the story above to what faith really is like.  Believing in God or a higher power is easy, especially when you've seen or heard about what they can do.  But putting all your faith and trust in something is entirely different and much more difficult.

However, a man in my recovery group flipped it around for me - and it killed me inside when he told me his perspective as an addict.

He said that we were, in fact, Charles Blondin.  Some days we think we have sobriety. We are cured from the disease and have practiced sobriety and the 12 steps so much we think we could probably cruise through life without worry.  However, every single day we ask our wife, our kids, and all those we care about to trust us and to get into the wheelbarrow.  We tell them that we are safe, and that we would never hurt them.  We tell them, "Trust me, because I have the addiction under control, and I won't fall off."  In the meantime, they are nervous.  They believe in our intentions. They have seen the change in us. But to get in the wheelbarrow means risking their lives when failure is a simple mis-step away.

As a fragile addict, I don't want to have anybody in that wheelbarrow. I don't want to hurt my family. I don't feel like I can be trusted.  However, the hope is that there will come a day when somebody has seen the change in me, sees me as somebody safe and as somebody that can be trusted.  More importantly, the hope is that there will be a day that I can trust myself to have somebody in the wheelbarrow and that we could one day do something amazing together.

But for now the wheelbarrow is, and remains, empty.

Back to Work

Today is my first day back at work since the holidays began. I work from home as an IT consultant, which provides many opportunities for me to slack off, get distracted or in some cases let my addictions take over me.  I get my work done for the most part, and I still can prove valuable to my company, which is based 2 time zones away.

I don't slip up as much as I did in the past. But I slip up enough that it is still a very real problem, and enough that the addiction keeps a grip on me.  A few weeks ago I might have given myself a few pats on the back on how well I've managed my addiction given my circumstances, but now in a time of clarity I can see that it is just as bad as ever.

I can't ever remember having panic or anxiety attacks like I had this morning. Work was a whirlwind of activity, with emails, phone calls and tasks that needed to be done just to catch up. On top of that, my soul wanted to multi-task to figure out how I can save my marriage. However, it wasn't the usual type of multi-tasking, where you switch from one mindset to another rapidly.  It was as if my heart was thinking about the wife, divorce and addiction, while my brain tried its best to disconnect from all that and work on the tasks at hand.  It felt heavy on my body. I couldn't juggle it.

My heart doesn't usually do any thinking for me. It usually just sits there beating away, moving blood from one part of my body to the other. At least that's what I think hearts are supposed to do. I never listen to it, and it never bothers me.  My counsellor and therapist says that I live my life from the neck up, as if I were one of the preserved celebrity heads from Futurama.  It's true - I do, and I suppose I'll talk more about that in another post.

But today my heart was loud. It talked and it shouted. It shouted good things and bad things, but mostly bad.  Everything it said was nonsense and made sense at the same time. I couldn't do work at all. It was overwhelming and by 9:30 in the morning I broke down. I tried to reach out to a friend, but they were unavailable.

So I searched on Google and found some anxiety exercises that helped. And they helped. They were dumb, but they helped.

The rest of the day I worked as best I could.  My mind frequently wandered to compel me to act out in my addiction.  Attempts at meditation would turn into mini fantasy sessions. The urge to act out and indulge my addiction hasn't been this strong in a long time. I realize I've been white knuckling resisting the whole thing for hours now, and I'm exhausted.  I tried exercising, reading one of my 12 step books, and reaching out to as many people as I could who would listen - and I still find myself stuck in this room where the walls are closing in compelling me to give everything up.  So I'm writing this journal now while I'm on the clock at work to see if that helps.

I don't know if I'll be able to maintain sobriety with all this going on. Funny, you'd think sobriety would be easier when in a panic and with my motivation at an all time high. But sometimes I think when you're motivated and focused on the goal, you have a clearer picture of what mountains you have to climb - and you start to realize how big those mountains really are. You see the snow and ice, the crevices, the rocks, the hazards, and all the risks... so even if you're motivated, the option to give up seems so much easier and you might even convince yourself that it's the more logical path.

I know this addiction will never leave me. I know that every day fighting the addiction will seem like I'm Sisyphus rolling a large boulder up a hill only to have it roll down again and I'll have to start over again.  And again. And again. I know that it won't even be worth it if my goal is to have my wife and family back, because it won't happen.  The scary thing is that I know these things, but I don't know what the goal is for me other than sobriety itself.  The future is completely shrouded for me and the only thing I want right now I can't have.

It Starts With an Ending

Last night, on December 28, 2019, my wife of 13 years said that we were getting a divorce.

Even though I half expected it, I'm still reeling. It's something I never thought would happen in my life and the words that were spoken I never thought would come out of somebody I still love so dearly.  We have two young children, ages 3 and 5, and their lives will be turned upside-down in the near future. It's the most gut-wrenching feeling knowing that their lives won't turn out the way either of us had planned, and at such an early age.

I bear all responsibility for the upcoming ending of our marriage.  I have an unspoken addiction that has consumed my life, my thoughts, my emotions, my mind and my soul.  My wife has known about the addiction for some time, and even though I have had periods of sobriety in the past, my failures have caused a complete and irreparable destruction of any trust that my wife has had, and could ever have with me.

I'm currently grieving. I've never known how. Waves of emotion hit me when I look at the faces of my children, or when I feel how cold my wife has become.  I can look at an old toy we had bought for the kids and remember when my wife and I had picked it out... and I cry. I haven't cried in a long time. 7 years give or take.

I thought I had time to fix things.  I thought I would have one more night I could sleep in the same bed as my wife.

I hate my addiction. It's a disease that has ruined my life, and I know no matter how long I'm sober it will always be a part of me.

My hope is that by chronicling how my life is falling apart that I could help others avoid the same mistakes I have made. It will also help me practice something that I now realize is a weakness of mine: Telling the truth.