Big Bad News, Big Life Questions

Common to codependents is a nagging sense of emptiness when relationships end, and a lingering inability to make decisions for one's own life without an impending crisis. Though hyper-reliable when the chips are down, we tend to falter when left to our own devices. Recently I have been grappling with this reality in a very visceral way. I make bargains with myself at work: if you make it through one more hour, all the way til 5:30pm, you are allowed to have your meltdown when you get home. Between crying in front of the television with a giant bowl of nostalgic popcorn and reading dog-earred romance novels, I have successfully put off writing my next blog post, which was going to be about a persistent pattern triangles in my life (more to come). That train of thought was largely derailed by the recent Boston Marathon tragedy.

I am not the only one jolted into looking at the bigger picture. As the media sings its September 11th song of tit-for-tat and eye-for-an-eye, I wonder like so many compassionate spiritual seekers what can I do about a culture of violence and the perpetuation of nonsense. I came upon this haunting quote, from a newsletter for a local yoga and chant festival that usually features beatific women in white singing. Its message of connecting with the chaos rather than pushing it away really touched me. All the smaller questions about codependency and recovery seemed rather self-centered in the face of all this uproar.

What can I do about this? Not just the tragedy in the news, but that feeling that my life is an old movie reel about to disintegrate as the grasping and illusions drop away and I struggle with a deep crisis of meaning . I am coming once again upon the 6-or-7 year itch. Almost six years working for the same company. In the bad-but-consistent days in the 90's and pre-bailout 2000's, I could count on getting laid off before the end of five years–shuffled off by an ungrateful corporation with a few weeks severance package and a brief stint with their career counselor.

In the past, the career counselor would suggest some pie-in-the-sky drastic change and I would promptly ignore them, chosing instead to frantically race around simultaneously sending out resumes and obsessing about the future of my relationship. Avoiding these questions, I relocated to the North Shore to be with my partner and traded one soul-less corporate master for another simply based on its location at the exact mid-point between my temporary digs in Londonderry, NH and my eventual destination of Rockport, MA.

I am still at that company, putting up with the hour-long commute in order to make a Boston salary without facing Boston traffic. I am hardly well-off but too comfortable to seriously consider quitting my job and going back to school. Yet find myself asking myself the questions I started asking, and consequently panicked over, when I was sixteen, twenty, and thirty-two years old. Some judge in my head insists I should know by now, but I am still floundering. What is my life path? What is my unique gift to the world? Now that I am in my forties, with no desire for the family track in my future, how do I navigate the years that (barring some disaster) stretch out ahead of me? How do I make meaning on my own terms, how do I contribute to the next generation?

In the old paradigm it was relatively easy to roll with the punches, but now the punches are coming from the inside as something long dormant wakes up kicking. Any experience of ending—a divorce or breakup, a layoff, a geographical shift—has long been a source of anxiety and imbalance. Despite difficulties at work last year due to my bout with mental illness, I got a fair and honest performance review and even a modest raise. I was waiting for the axe to fall, and when it didn't, that ragged, skin-crawling sensation that my desires had grown too fast and too big for my current circumstances began to set in. I wonder again about the big picture-- my job, my career choices, my plans in the world. I've grieved a major relationship, I've faced a serious mental health diagnosis. I've deliberately spent all of my ill-got gains from my retirement funds—earned from the corrupt banks and insurance companies I worked for in the 90's -on personal growth workshops and now I am deep in a roiling froth of mounting debt and unanswered questions. As an empath, I can feel the burning of the world. Perhaps not in the global sense—I've always been profoundly allergic to politics--still it manifests in the desire to reach out to strangers, or at least respond when they reach out to me. This may in fact be an evolution out of codependency—helping others with the hidden need to prove my own value—into helping others from a self-directed and compassionate place.

When I attended a “mini” HAI workshop this weekend, I got the chance to be a beacon of strength for a struggling, expanding soul new to the workshop experience. Despite my shaky sense of self, I confidently and clearly shared my “experience, strength and hope,” as we say in the Twelve Step fellowships. I listened without judgment, without offering direct advice, simply expressing what I had learned in my growth explorations, and what was working for me in my life. Agitated by hunger, having rushed off to the workshop with only coffee and a handful of trail mix in my belly, I felt oddly grounded in that sense of purpose. I invited this individual out for greasy Greek food in a nearby Mom-and-Pop deli, and I spent the next hour and a half after the two-hour workshop listening to his story.

There is something powerful in reinforcing my commitment to my own path by describing the changes that I have wrought with the assistance of the strong, empowering communities I have been lucky to discover. Could this, I thought, with a burgeoning heaviness in my gut that might have been more than just filo dough and feta cheese, be my True Path? As if in answer I sent my first-ever post to the Emotions Anonymous email loop and the group moderator immediately asked my permission to use it in the monthly newsletter. Could that be the Universe validating this direction-- that someone besides me could benefit from my words? I have been tortured and tormented by my words and my thoughts for so long, freezing and releasing them in poetry and fiction, that I never thought that anything I said could help someone.

Yet I find that when I think of the big picture, how I would want to spend my time if I did not have to worry about financial fears, it would be in a path of “helping people.” In this violently evolving world I no longer want to waste myself in something that doesn't feed me spiritually or make the world a better place. I have no idea how to begin, except with those people in my immediate circles and those met by circumstance or synchronicity. When I fantasize about my ideal career I know I would like to become some kind of facilitator, using my words not for poetry or stories, but as agent of change by acting as witness to powerful expressions of growth, allowing others to find their own self-guided trail and compassionate path.

It seems fitting that I saw this sign at Halibut Point State Park in Rockport.



For the past three-and-a-half years I have been on a self-guided trail. Now I am in the center of the labyrinth, moving out of myself and back into the world. As the quotation on the plaque sent to me by one of my dearest friends for Christmas last year says: “She wasn't where she had been, she wasn't where she was going, but she was on her way.” I may not know the exact direction or even really have a map, but it helps to give myself permission to think about those career questions that annoyed and frustrated me years ago, the ones that begin, “If you had a million dollars, what would you do with your life?” I know that the frustration and irritation is part of the process of letting go of my self-defeating attitudes and behaviors and embracing the uncertainly and possibility of the future.




a

Relationships and Recovery

I have said before that the underlying theme of this blog is relationships—how to navigate the needs of others and explore the various shades of intimacy without being overwhelmed. This includes the journey of recovering from codependency.

There is strange power in anniversaries. It's been ten years since that fateful April Fool's Day when I left my first husband. Is that why I felt a vague sense of agitation, a cosmic restlessness, a difficulty focusing, a shaking sense of something missed, something missing? Was it the holiday malaise, even though Easter has never been a particularly nostalgic holiday. Pictures of cupcakes sent over cellphone from my sister. Memories of storybook artists shared with those who were inspired. Creepy vintage costumes at brunch--ravaged rabbit with matted fur and one dim right eye. It does not surprise me that I was derailed from my intention to work on this post this weekend, even though I deliberately stayed home when friends asked me to go out. I did spend some time by the ocean, walking over the varicolored stones of Cressy Beach. I wanted to find a heart-shaped stone for a friend, and for the first time in a long time I couldn't find the right stone. I did find a beautiful heart, a great green monster about ten pounds, but it was way too big to take home.

Is codependent just another word for a heart that is too big?

In my struggle to define myself, I have run into this word again and again. I have been told by some friends that I am not codependent-- I'm too fiercely independent, too active with personal growth work, for that. Yet years after the end of my marriage to an alcoholic, I became engaged to another codependent, and I began a long slow slide backslide. Before I moved away to be with my boyfriend on the North Shore, I found in Worcester a thriving CODA (Codependent's Anonymous) group. In the Worcester group I had found a wonderful community of tight-knit folk committed to recovery and who had created powerful bonds not confined to meetings. Our group had a standing date at a nearby Friendly's right after the meeting. Though I lost touch with them after my ocean-ward migration, I always remembered that time as a positive growing experience. Recently, I tried another CODA group in Newburyport, but I was chastised for my attempts to bond by sharing my own reactions to the stories and shares. I was told that was “crosstalk”-- which literally means providing unwanted advice or solutions to problems—though my reactions were not verbal at all—nods, meaningful laughter, affirmation of shared experience. I felt deprived by that group leader of the right to have my own experience, which is is very much a part of the lack of self-definition that is codependency. So I left the buttoned-up group with their frozen feelings and numb expressions, and found a more lively fellowship in Emotions Anonymous


I do find it difficult to talk about relationships with these recovery groups, either the positive or the negative aspects. Especially since I abandoned my one attempt at conscious monogamy and came out as polyamorous. Ironically, the more I explore this aspect of myself, the more I realize that I have always had multiple relationships, even when I only had one boyfriend. In fact, were it not for my intimate network of friends, my support system of Shakti sisters—women poets and writers, co-creators and positive conspirators-- my relationship of seven years would never have come into full blossom. Apparently, it takes a village to create a romance, or at least to allow me to brave the initial waves of terror that come with getting close. After that experience, I've come to realize that what it takes to create a healthy romantic relationship is a commitment to each other's mutual growth, even when that growth is difficult and painful. It means an agreement to make time for each other, put each other first, and share meaningful time together (not just vege out in front of the televison). It means accepting responsibility for our own emotional reactions, not projecting them on our partners. It means communication and keeping the lines open. The polyamorists seem to have dealing with jealousy figured out, but there are so many other potential relationship pitfalls, even between two reasonably stable people who are not addicted to any substances.

I am finding that the more personalities you combine the more the potential for exponential growth, and the more the potential for overwhelm and disconnection from self-hood. So now my question is not how to save one floundering relationship, as was my focus for many years, but how to balance the many loves in my life with my own journey as an artist and a healer, a magick worker and a person in recovery from codependency and emotional struggles? How do I take on all this spiritual work and keeping my head together and attending to the minute details of practical living? How do I piece together the many separate shining fragments in the mosaic of my relationships—each beautiful and fascinating in itself—into a coherent constellation of tribe? And how do I find both tribe-time and “me” time?

I suppose the simple answer is creating and maintaining boundaries. As crazy as it can make me, perhaps I need to spend a weekend with my phone turned off, logged off Facebook, without novels, Netflix, television or other distractions, trying to practice mindfulness and sit with silence.

One aspect of that silence could be filled with meditation. When people ask me if I meditate, I tell them about walking on the rocks at Cressy Beach. So many shifting shapes and bright colors. I am taken in by the “rip-rap” of things, the sense of a vast presence, bigger than every one and every thing that describes and defines me. When I first began The Artist's Way, I saw the rocks on that beach as individual planets, perfect works of art, and I felt the deep belief that nothing I could create could be so fine and singular in purpose. I was rejuvenated, awakened and awed-- my rigid perfectionism was for a moment no longer in my way. Art is true co-creation with God, or so boasted Julia Cameron. And in that moment, those moments, I was willing to agree with her grandiose vision. I was willing to let go and let God/Goddess, I was willing to give myself up to the flow.

And that is what recovery is all about.