Sometimes blogging is such a challenge to me. Robin and Linnie tagged me–which just makes me glow, for I love feeling part of bloggersphere.  The problem is, I’m not quite sure what this means. Since sobriety means honesty, I thought the best thing to do would be to admit my ignorance and say (loudly and clearly): HELP!

Happy Monday, everyone.

I was driving back from going out on a story, tired of listening to my book on tape, in the mood for a little vintage rock and roll, punching the radio dials–and, suddenly, there were the Animals singing “We Gotta Get Out of this Place.”

I was right back in 1965, dancing my toes off a huge college parties, arms waving over my head, singing along. Beside me is Tom Spear–a friend of my eventual first husband’s–tall, dark, handsome, drunk out of his mind, singing “we gotta get out of this place” with the fervor of a true believer.

Tom was the only one among us who got out-of-it drunk on a regular basis. He also made horrible anti-gay slurs–said really vicious things about same-sexers–even though in every other area, he exhibited great kindness and empathy.

Ten years later, he was dead. After finally coming out of the closet, he blew his brains out–getting out of what I guess had been a truly hellish place at last.

I think about Tom every time I hear that song. I also think about him whenever I smacked with the realization of how hard society makes it for most of us to be who we are.

To me, sobriety has brought that particular hard time to an end. I’ve gradually passed through self-acceptance into self-comfort. I actually like me–and like most everyone else, as well. That doesn’t mean that both myself and other folks don’t annoy the spit out of me with great regularity, but it does mean I remain fond of us both anyway.

How I wish it had been easier for Tom Spear to be who he was. And I wish those of us who called ourselves his friends had known how to make our shared place one that he hadn’t felt such need to get out of.

You know, it struck me while e-mailing a friend that once I stop talking about whatever’s going on in my professional life, I have very little new to report. I could get by with cutting and pasting a pre-written paragraph that goes something like “Charlie and I are both fine, our Head Cat (who has feline HIV and so is in precarious health) is taking a nap in the sun, our other cat is causing trouble, the gardens are doing well, and I plan to eat three square meals, work out, and, if I’m lucky, take a nap.” And how interesting is that?

I had much more to report when I was still drinking and using–all sorts of interpersonal struggles, financial disasters, abandoned projects, damage done and received, hurt feelings, imagined slights, and so on and on and on.

I like being boring a lot better–I’m grateful for the opportunity to experience life without melodrama.  Even though my friends probably do find my e-mails a bit boring sometimes.

It’s a little after 8 in the morning, and I’ve just put the final tweaks on an NPR story. It’s a wonderful feeling to work and work, push and push, and then–poof!–the story’s done and there it is. I like working in intense bursts that actually end with a real sense of completion.

At home my desk sits directly in front of a window that looks out to mountains over our back gardens. The early daffodils in those gardens are just beginning to pop open, the day lilies have begun to peak out of the ground, the lawn is greening, there’s a blue bird perched on the fence. Behind everything sits Little North Mountain, a low ridge that runs for miles along one side of the Shenandoah Valley. Today it is decked with cloud shadows.

Even though its a bit cold and windy, I’d like nothing better than to get outside today. Those back gardens need attention! Charlie and I let our flowers go to seed in the fall so the birds will have extra winter food, but it’s now time to clear them out. There’s early weeding to be done and beds that could use a good aerating with a garden fork.

Before I got sober, I used to put tremendous pressure on myself to get everything done as soon as it needed doing. Before I got sober, I would have gone to work more aware of what I wasn’t going to get done today, then anticipatory of what I was going to  get done. Such silliness. It’s Thursday, I’ve a new story to start, and the gardens aren’t going anywhere. Flowers grew for millions of years perfectly well without my assistance.

And you know, if I let those weeds grow for another couple of days, they’ll be all that much easier to grab hold of. Every thing has its season; every day has its tasks. And I had to become a substance abuser in order to be able to accept the simple, simple truth of this. I can’t control a lot about the way my days are, but I sure can control the amount of fun I have–and the amount of satisfaction I get–through living them.

Charlie, my husband and most tremendous pal, says there is no such thing as an inanimate object–that every blasted one of the “machines” in this sweet old world are periodically out to get us!

No, he’s not paranoid, just experienced. And this weekend, when my computer failed to save a whole afternoon’s worth of sound editing and script writing, I was ready to agree with him.

This is what happened. I’m on deadline on a national story, so I make myself keep slogging Friday afternoon when I am dog-tired. I save the files, slap them on my zip-drive, take them home to finish up, and Saturday morning they are just not there! Worse–when I drove into town to check–it wasn’t on my work computer either.

If I weren’t a committed sober person, I would have lost the whole weekend to unproductive frustration, and so ended up at work this morning seriously behind on my story. As a committed sober person, however, I took a deep breath and went to work rewriting, reediting, re-everything. No, I did not do it with joy in my heart, but neither did I do it harboring rage there, either.

I could feel myself using the program. I swear, being a sober drunk and recovering pill-popper has had so many advantages–at least in my experience. I’ve learned not to be so reactive to life’s little punches in the gut–even when those machines just might be out to get me!

Okay, I got really steamed at work a couple of days ago. It was a bad day in the office all around for all of us–which I should add is highly unusual.

So, in time-honored sober-person fashion, I took myself to a meeting right after work.  What was unusual for me–in fact I can’t remember ever doing (unless called upon to do it) in 17 years of sobriety–was that I brought up a topic. I sat there and splatted out a bunch of words about how frustrated I was with my colleagues and how awful and un-sober that frustration made me feel. And I asked the group for help in dealing with my frustration.

And I got help. Of course, some of what people said was not particularly useful in my case (for example, the suggestion that I speak up about what was bothering me, and speaking up about anything has never been my problem). But then I also all kinds of really neat advice, ranging from the practical (put the initials of the person annoying you on a post-it note, slip it in your shoe, and stomp on it), to a reminder that I was essentially letting annoyance with my colleagues function as my Higher Power. And–perhaps most useful of all–I felt this blast of empathy, understanding, support and down-right affection from everyone in that meeting.

Good grief, Charlie Brown–I felt so much better as I drove home. I’ve been thinking about that meeting a lot since then, how I’d been sober 17 years, and had never asked a meeting to focus on my problems. And it was not because I’m shy, believe me. It’ was because I still maintaina real macho attitude toward life that tells me to handle everything I possibly can on my own. How dumb is that, I ask you?

Sobriety is never static, never done. It will not, believe me, be 17 years before I bring up another topic!