I’ve found over the years that whenever I made New Year’s Resolutions, I found myself equally addicted and in the same place mentally as the year before–though my body had aged a year. Since recovery, I’ve found that this one day should not be held above any other as a day to make substantial changes to my life. The simplest and most substantial change I can make, which takes splitting one second at any point during any day during any week during any month during any year, is to stop and get grateful for what is present in my life today, what I surrendered to get done today, and what addicted thoughts and behaviors have been taken away over time which are reflected in today’s recovered thoughts and behaviors. I once resolved to change; today I am resolute that change is part of life, and I want to embrace change more often than not.

      Before I go on, I’d like to offer hope for anyone who decides to trip over this blog and question whether 12-Stepping is right for them. Part of the Holiday Eating Season’s devastating consequences is that all of us compulsive addicts are affected by the stress of the season. ‘Tis the season to act out our addictions because of the excruciating vulnerability. Imperfect holidays (which we possibly promised ourselves wouldn’t happen this season) and the stress leading up to them can completely drain us into turning toward our tried-and-untrue methods from the past, just to get away from the constant white-noise anxiety which comes from the holidays. So, if someone woke up at rock bottom today, felt completely empty as a human being, and decided they can’t live like this any more? There is no cure. There is, however, a solution. That solution has promises which actually do come true, and which are seen in the rooms every day. You just gotta walk into one. One hour in the grand scheme of things. A twenty-fourth of a day, 1/164 of a week, 1/8766 of a year (or 1/8790 of a leap year, like 2012). That is nothing compared to the time we spend in addiction when there is no recovery in our lives.
     
      The Promises of AA (aka The Ninth Step Promises)
     
If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are half way through. We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness. We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace. No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others. That feeling of uselessness and self pity will disappear. We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows. Self-seeking will slip away. Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change. Fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us. We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us. We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.

Are these extravagant promises? We think not. They are being fulfilled among us—sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. They will always materialize if we work for them.
     
      The SLAA Signs of Recovery
     
1. We seek to develop a daily relationship with a Higher Power, knowing that we are not alone in our efforts to heal ourselves from our addiction.
2. We are willing to be vulnerable because the capacity to trust has been restored to us by our faith in a Higher Power.
3. We surrender, one day at a time, our whole life strategy of, and our obsession with the pursuit of romantic and sexual intrigue and emotional dependency.
4. We learn to avoid situations that may put us at risk physically, morally, psychologically or spiritually.
5. We learn to accept and love ourselves, to take responsibility for our own lives, and to take care of our own needs before involving ourselves with others.
6. We become willing to ask for help, allowing ourselves to be vulnerable and learning to trust and accept others.
7. We allow ourselves to work through the pain of our low self-esteem and our fears of abandonment and responsibility. We learn to feel comfortable in solitude.
8. We begin to accept our imperfections and mistakes as part of being human, healing our shame and perfectionism while working on our character defects.
9. We begin to substitute honesty for self-destructive ways of expressing emotions and feelings.
10. We become honest in expressing who we are, developing true intimacy in our relationships with ourselves and others.
11. We learn to value sex as a by-product of sharing, commitment, trust and cooperation in a partnership.
12. We are restored to sanity, on a daily basis, by participating in the process of recovery.
     
      When I first started program and came across The Ninth Step Promises, I didn’t believe it. I mean, look at them! That’s a pretty damned desirable life, right there. However, they’re not kidding when they say it happens. Even before I reached the Ninth Step, even as I worked Step Four for the first time, it was happening. The recovery I have has changed how I approach life completely. I see and experience the world with two minds, with two sets of reality-views. And, whenever I take the time to split those seconds and act instead of react? I have the freedom to choose honesty over manipulation, openness over secret-keeping, and willingness over non-acceptance. Every time I choose recovery, I receive peace. I walk into the next moment unburdened, because there’s nothing to hide, to carry, to fight. Is it easy? Not at all. Though progress will never earn the goal of perfection, the desire for perfection does leave us. Practice leads to the promises being fulfilled in our lives every day–simply because we choose honesty, openness, and willingness to practice reality-sense instead of deception, all-or-nothing judgmentalism, and recalcitrance to practice self-delusion. Think about it this way–if I don’t even pick up a manipulation or a deception to carry it today, how can it burden me tomorrow? If I am reassured I told the truth to the best of my abilities and acted upon that truth, then I don’t need others’ shoulda-woulda-coulda opinions to guide me. Their opinions are from their experiences, and since they haven’t lived inside my head since I was born? They can’t even begin to know what really is best for me.
      So, when people think I’m a cultist? That’s them making an all-or-nothing judgment about program, supplementing their arguments with the tumultuous history of the first generation of addicts who struggled all their lives to maintain recovery. We are all in recovery; we are never ultimately recovered. However, as we practice recovery, we are set at crossroads. Some challenge us so much that we turn toward our addictions; some trigger the courage-building we started on the day we walked into the rooms.
     
      So, what am I grateful for? Well, my first gratitude is that I was given the gift of a substantial weight loss in OA which has been maintained by a power greater than myself (ie. the reality of eating mostly sensibly for two years and the real effect on a human body). I remind myself aloud, especially in meeting, that my weight loss was a gift given. I did not do it. How do I know? Because when I was trying to do it for decades, I couldn’t. I worked with punitive one-size-fits-all diets built by others. My food plan is personalized to me, just as every food plan should be personalized and tweaked for every individual in program. You’re welcome to ask about my food plan, though I will always give the caveat that it’s how I did it. A food plan is as personal as one’s favorite color, one’s favorite experience, one’s favorite hobbies. Those things may be shared with many others, but the combination of energy we put into each of them is unique to the Universe. Many people may love green, may have gone to Paris, France, for the first time on a birthday, may enjoy beading and crochet and music and four-wheeling up to little towns nestled in winter-snowy evergreen-thick mountains. However, their favorite green may be more blue or yellow, they may have gone to France at fifteen instead of thirty-two, and they may have a different tree-surrounded paradise they travel to. Our experiences make up our lives; the energy behind them may connect us, but the individualization is what makes our life’s addition to this Universe something so special. The chance against each of us not only being here but being us-as-we-are is astronomical. It took a miraculous synchronicity to make a viable pregnancy which resulted in a human being who was brought into the world to be challenged by it. Even as we slog along every mind-numbing day back-and-forth to mind-numbing work, we are still that miraculous event. Waking up in the morning is a miracle, itself. The billions of cells which make up the human vessel we journey in didn’t decide to stage a coup and separate overnight. The things we take for granted are all miracles, are all things which are worth a moment of gratitude.
      I have big gratitudes and tiny ones even just from 2011. Big gratitudes include the gift of spending 2011 at a consistent weight, the gift of being granted a second year of OA abstinence (and the resulting brass coin), the gift of reaching my first year of attendance in SLAA. Even the seemingly bad had wonderful lessons. This year, I had a day in serenity on Easter, being surrounded by both religious and deeply faithful people; at dawn on Easter Monday, I was up considering if I wanted to return to the church of my youth. I had a moment of enlightenment that morning; I am not meant for a religion-based community. It was a lesson which received deep grief, because I wanted to be part of something like that. Well, I am an agnostic. There is something I do not understand and cannot explain about it, but I don’t need to. It’s not my place to define it, just connect to it. I sense the authenticity when I pray and meditate; I am given opportunities–some almost imperceptible and some dramatically huge–upon which to choose recovered behavior or addicted behavior.
      Do I think religion is a crock any more (and yes, I did on-and-off for a long, long time)? Nope. Some people thrive in the community and find intimate one-on-one relationships with a Higher Power through them. That is something I am grateful for–the many paths to reach that profound place where we feel part of the Universe instead of separate from it. When I’m in my own head, I miss opportunities. I am blind and deaf and numb to everything, and that potential energy is made kinetic by creating a complete sensory blackout to what is happening all around me. Complete sensory blackout to life is like choosing a life of emptiness, of disconnection, of simply living as a prisoner of the void within.
      Little gratitudes include waking up with my spouse beside me, a place to live, food to eat, money to pay bills. Even smaller ones are opening doors for people, saying hello or smiling to people I pass by when I’m out and about, and the hummingbird feeder which has brought a half-dozen hummingbirds to live in the tree just beyond my patio. They buzz the feeder daily, each with their amazing patterns. I’ve seen them perch instead of just hover a moment before zooming off. I’ve heard their many different calls, and the whizzing zoom like mini jets flying around makes me smile. They’re amazing little creatures which make me smile, and this holiday season, I got to enjoy the iridescent ruby-hooded and emerald-winged males flit in the sun to the feeder–not six feet from where I write my WordPress entries. And I have just noticed I need to refill the feeder, so I can see them today, as I’ve seen them daily since October. They’re so tiny, so merry, so pretty. And I watch them with a peaceful smile, feeling connected to the beauty that is all around me in the natural world–simply by their daily presence in my life.
      I feel gratitude for what I’ve learned that cannot be seen or touched. Awareness is something that appears so small on the outset. And I am aware that things which would have left me completely devastated are now opportunities to practice acceptance. Time is becoming relative to me; yesterday and tomorrow are memories and fantasies; today is the only real moment. Living one day at a time (and yes, I do have to remind myself when I begin to work myself up into a state on non-acceptance) makes life easier. I can remind myself I just have to start something, put energy into it. This helped when I decided to crochet hats and scarves for people in 2011–starting in May. I made nearly 100 crocheted items over those seven months, and I got off my behind around Thanksgiving to donate to the homeless just over thirty matched hat-scarf sets and a half-dozen crocheted hats (Oh! A male hummingbird just came by, with its red throat and hood and bright green back and wings . . . and now it’s gone). The pattern is called The Boyfriend Hat, though mine was a crocheted version of a ribbed hat with a turned-up brim for warming ears. When I started, I crocheted beanies and cloches, and the first ones I gave away met with disappoval. As in, I was led to the homeless services area by my well-intentioned supervisor when I volunteered at Saint Vincent de Paul, was pointed to a couple to give them away, went through the excruciating interaction, and was rejected. That sucked. She tried to get me to give them to someone else, and I said no. So, I dropped them off and committed to find a better pattern, which I tripped over when I hit a bargain bin at a megachain bookstore. The Cozy Crochet Kit by Melissa Leapman has a pattern called Boyfriend’s Hat, and I use it constantly. It used to take two days to make one, but now I can whip an adult’s hat together in two hours or a kid’s hat together in one. It’s also on Page 109 of Cozy Crochet by Ms. Leapman, which is apparently more affordable than trying to get the boxed kit. Both appear out-of-print, so I am grateful I had a synchronicity moment which eventually allowed me to give warmth at the holidays this year to people who needed it. Of course, for Ravelry.com members? Here is Melissa Leapman’s Boyfriend’s Hat, as well. It’s a great crochet pattern, really, really simple (just half-double crochets and a little bit of stitching), and it makes a very, very warm hat. Definitely a wonderful gift to give away.
      That, I think, is my deepest gratitude: I am encouraged by the Universe to extend myself to people. Sadly, it’s also my greatest challenge, because trusting people have the best intentions toward me has left me enmeshed regularly. This is also where I appreciate the gift of recovery: I am learning to look within for my answers instead of seeking external people, places, and situations to “fix me”. Whenever I feel the beginning of anxiety, I accept it’s time to start talking truthfully until what I’m trying to hide gets exposed. I set it down and stop carrying it like I once did on my body. I was asked at my last OA meeting if I’ve taken the time to lift and carry the weight I lost. I would have to walk around with a hundred-and-ten pounds, probably having to do it in a ruggedized backpack to keep it from falling apart. A hundred-and-ten pounds, which I carried for years–give or take fifty pounds. That’s amazing to think, that I wore my addiction in such a concrete manner. And, like I prayed I could when I was in addiction, I can put it down this time. I can split one second and put down that extra weight. I can split the next second and simply walk away from that excess weight.
      Just like I can with addicted thoughts, with lies, with the desire to hide from the world instead of go out into it and seek my authenticity through trial-and-success. Yup, even failures are successes, because I can learn by the unpleasant feelings I have been gifted with (anger, fear, sadness) that I don’t want to have that in my life. I actually feel the weight, the ache, the burn of carrying something no one can see or sense. In one split second, I can choose to practice being a recovered person instead of an addict, and I can use the energy I put into the addiction for a greater life of freedom from food and toxic love addiction.
     
      And I am deeply grateful that recovery is even part of reality at all. Deeply grateful and deeply humbled by the commitment to Bill W., a man who died before I was in full-blown addiction, to help himself and a group of people through a simple program which pulls drowning people from a sea of self-delusion and lifts them into the boat of a fully-lived life.
     
      My name is Jess, and I am a food binge-arexic, toxic love addict, and real love avoidant. 2012 is a good year so far. It doesn’t matter what happens over the next 365 days (seeing as 2012 is a leap year). It matters that, just for today, I am putting the energy of humble gratitude into the world. Tomorrow is tomorrow, and it gets to stay there until I arrive at January 2, 2012. It’s not my business to try and wrangle control over something that doesn’t actually exist yet. So, today? I am going to be grateful for what has been put into my life today, what has been taken from my life today, and what has been left behind today.
      Just for today.

      I rarely blog-whore, but I intuitively clicked on one of those “Exciting WordPress Articles You Ought to Read” on the welcome page a few days ago. It inspired me enough to send it out to a friend who’s actively changing her life. And, for me, it’s gotten me thinking a lot about when I chose a vibrant future over rehashing the past and hoping for a rescue.

      The post, Five Ways to Find Your Future, is amazingly insightful in its very simple (but none too easy!) truths about living today with a mind toward a different tomorrow. The author, Dan Rockwell, goes by the handle Leadership Freak for his WordPress blog, which has quick, 300-word-or-less entries about realism-based life skills in the land of delusion. This entry made me think, and I appreciate the bluntness of the article. Clarity in abrupt doses is often our best teacher, yanking us around.
      So, if you read the article, it talks about how we often try to create a future from the past. That’s just, it’s the antithesis of creating a future, if you think about it. I mean, we are consistently being pulled into the future (because the people, time, places, energy, and whatnot change) yet we still put the same energy into our life and seem to rehash the same old dramas–but with new twists. The one thing we aren’t doing is actually halting the manifestation of the same-old, same-old. Those ruts we get into–when life seems to blaze by without us noticing and when the days bleed into each other–seem to leave us hoping for an external power to jolt us into a better tomorrow with the desperation of, well, addicts. Of course, not an HP, though. That would mean we were powerless over an unmanageable life and that we could not control life, itself. After all, an addict is the center of everyone’s Universe–according to the addict.
      Well, according to me, anyway. Though I suspect if I polled people in program, those who were honest, open, and willing would admit the same.
      Dan Rockwell begins with caveats of living in the past. One can’t create a new future persevering at tried-and-untrue methodology. Talking about yesterday isn’t acting on tomorrow–it’s trying to rehash yesterday with a load of wishful thinking to try and make it not have happened. “Glory days” cheat us from a future of miracles–his italicized warning, “Memories without dreams are anchors,” can be understood in so many ways, but its warning is the same: Living in yesterday without that energy of hope (dreams) will drag you down, stop you from living a full life. Face forward, not backward; yesterday is filled with lessons. Choices which evolved us once should encourage us to remember the lesson that we tried something new and our life went in a new direction; choices which held us back should encourage us to remember the lesson that we chose to say no to an opportunity and our life went in its predictable spiral downward yet forward. Whether we made our first five-course French dinner for a friend we still talk to or burned our hands on the stove, those are simply teaching moments. Saying yes to discomfort in order to embrace life; rejecting the desire to keep doing the same thing and exhausting one’s self by trying harder to do the same thing.
      Then, we get five recommendations to finding our futures, now that we’ve accepted that living in yesterday (which doesn’t exist except in our minds) is futile. Defining ourselves by yesterday is dangerous–our past accomplishments will limit our future accomplishments. I think I understand this: If I choose to define myself by yesterday as “The best I can do,” then I’m locked into a right/wrong battle, judging my abilities, making assumptions about what skills I possess (instead of experimenting to find what else I can do wholly unrelated to those past skills). That is a future-killer right there, looking over our shoulders for rules to guide us into tomorrow. If we don’t walk into a lamp post or brick wall? That is just sheer luck.
      I love this one, so I hope Mr. Rockwell will forgive me quoting it: “Your future is about people not projects or accomplishments.” Wow. This deserves getting repeated, simply because it’s so intensely core to program:
     
      Your future is about people not projects or accomplishments.
     
      If you follow the spiritual concepts of our souls being sourced from a single pure energy, we are meant to unite. The illusion of separateness is just that, generated by body and brain. It’s why we seek clarity of mind in OA through a food plan which removes our poisonous triggers (and often “white foods”, which many people find cause serious problems with irritability and mental chaos). So, to make people our focus is to connect as equals, to practice humility and service. To better the world by connecting the individuals within it through honesty, vulnerability, and love.
      So, part of our future is making connections with people who can use energy to create futures–just like we can. Uniting with others empowers us; fighting others weakens us. Vulnerability toward people, however, can be excruciating. Projects and accomplishments are measurable and logical. People aren’t, and their actions and imperfections can devastate us. Well, they can if we give authority over our lives to them and make them our Higher Powers. Of course, if we make them a magically empowered deity through our delusional thinking about them as a savior entity? We’re doing a spiritual being having human experiences a disservice by saying, “I worship you, so you have to be perfect–by my definition of perfect.“
      There’s no win-win in a relationship like that. It’s all lose-lose: Two people get enmeshed as all-or-nothing thinking exhausts then drowns them. It’s an insidious battle for control, in that the object of deification (magical thinking) is hemmed in by our perceptions of what a deity should be. When we’re dissatisfied with that person, they have our worship withdrawn and we are resentful of their natural evolution and their inability to be our definition of perfect. It’s like the French Apache–a dance of absolute abuse in the name of passion. And we dare call it love.
      The next recommendation is to spread our social circles and network. This is beyond logical. I mean, how are we supposed to even know about opportunities if we’re not out there around people who find opportunities and realize we’re the right person for it? He recommends we get into groups where people are succeeding where we want to succeed.
      This, for me, is best managed in strong OA and SLAA meetings–which I am preparing to surrender to going to more and different ones. I had my strongest recovery attending 2 OA meetings and my one SLAA meeting weekly. Three 12-Step meetings where I feel I’m with people committed to recovery–including newcomers–makes a difference. I’ve been to OA bitch sessions, where people despair because the diet isn’t working. Well, it’s not a diet to me. It’s a miracle which is supported by the people who have experience, strength, and hope–newcomers and old timers alike. As long as we have something to share and are mindful that we are all in the same addicted boat, we all can recover. Our stories may be different, but we are united in one truth: Tradition Three, which states that the only requirement for membership to a 12-Step group is the desire to stop the compulsive acting-out of the addiction.
      Recovery still is changing my life, and going into the rooms keeps me on that path of success–because of the people who show up and share their experience, strength, and hope with honesty, openness, and willingness.
      Take small steps to overcome fear. This, for me, has been rejecting procrastination and acting today instead of pushing up to the deadline and rushing it all. It’s a character defect which is hard to turn around sometimes, yet it is a blessing. Why a blessing? It’s a red flag that I’m acting in addiction, not recovery. To shift gears into recovery? All I have to do is take a small action, accepting I can’t do it all in one day. Often, surrendering to that small action can energize me to complete it. Otherwise, I have put in motion a new energy in the world. I am facing forward, looking for opportunities to keep the momentum going. Surrendering to courage by accepting the willpower sourced from a power greater than myself is the result of overcoming the paralyzing fear. If I practice courage, then courage becomes my today–just like practicing a healthy and reasonable food plan has brought me to the longest period ever at a non-yo-yoing weight. Five pounds up or down over a month isn’t an issue, because it doesn’t really affect my current (Year-old! Glee!) wardrobe. If I’m shifting between sizes aggressively? Something’s up, and I’m actively choosing yesterday’s addicted messages about anorexia and binge eating being how I can maintain a “healthy” body. That’s insanity, bouncing up and down the scale like that. Take the steps, not the elevator, in all things. After all, small steps make for long journeys filled with amazing experiences we don’t miss when we’re trying to fast-track to our goals.
      I like his next recommendation, to build the future alongside the “old present”. Change isn’t abrupt. When I started my abstinence on October 14, 2009, I wanted to be thin on October 15, 2009. My weight, however, drifted down as I changed how I dealt with food and made food choices which encouraged a healthier lifestyle. Ten months later, I was at a normal BMI. Twelve months later, I was at goal weight. Fifteen months later, I was at the midpoint for what I consider to be my current weight. While I’ve had a quick stint down to 152 (which was my rock bottom on the anorexia, where I feared and longed to reach “underweight”) that made me change my food plan, the monthly weigh-ins held to a consistent 10-lb. range with a 158-lb. base. For a year. While my holiday food choices have been a little more holiday-themed (okay, more sweets), I haven’t been straining last year’s clothes. Therefore, I’ve had a year living at the weight my HP placed me. How does this relate? I changed how I ate, and now I think that way. I actually cannot binge, and I am very aware when I get hungry and know I need to eat pronto to avoid anorexia. I have a minimum and a maximum of reasonable calories over a broad-ranged food plan. I seek out whole grains more often (well, not so much recently, but getting back to post-holiday eating is something I look forward to), and I definitely work to get fruit and vegetables in daily. I sometimes would spend days looking askance at fruits and veg before meandering to sweet-salty-fatty when I was in active addiction. While it was a process as I changed (the struggles are recorded here) from preferring a sweet-salt-fat diet to a healthy one with whole grains, vegetables, and fruit? I have changed. My future was a preference for food that makes my body feel healthy and my brain feel clear. It took time, but a lifestyle of nutritional eating, overall, is preferable. Consider this: I never ate oatmeal once-upon-a-time. Hated the stuff, even drowned in hundreds of calories of fat and sugar and milk. I could eat a half-dozen pieces of cinnamon toast, loaded down with butter and cinnamon sugar without blinking an eye and often went back for more; that’s how I ate–three-to-five thousand of calories of starch-fat-and-sweet. Today, my favorite breakfast is oatmeal with salt, an eighth-cup of dried fruit (generally raisins, but cranberries, dates, and other dried fruit works), and an eighth-cup of nuts. I traded 3,000 calories for less than 350, and I feel sated and physically well all morning. I also eat my salads with salt and pepper, now–evolving from a five-hundred calorie dousing of creamy dressing to non-fat cottage cheese and pepper sauce (or Nopalitos, yum!) to salt and pepper. If I ate salads, which I didn’t. Usually, it was french fries with that dressing to dip in. And yes . . . today the idea of creamy dressing makes me queasy. Adding french fries to it? Well, it triggers the anorexia because of the intense nausea that puts me off the idea of eating; therefore, I’m moving on to the point. Growing a new life takes time, and small changes do end up making big differences.
      Well, now that we’re finding our future, it deserves a bit of stability. Just like having a keel on a sailboat stabilizes the forward motion, having what we know to return to stabilizes our forward motion. Shocks to systems can get us running back to what doesn’t work just to feel safe; easing into it can make for a brighter future.
     
      He then goes on to give some of the greatest working advice to keep that forward motion stable. It’s all about simplicity, about keeping a handful of guiding ideals to keep us acting toward that new lifestyle. Being in program, I’m fortunate that I’ve already got not only my three, but a handly slogan meme to remember it by–HOW. If I filter my actions through Honesty, Openness, and Willingness? I am moving toward an authentic life. I choose honesty because secrets stress me out and I act out in order to numb out from the grating agitation. Openness is also vulnerability. It’s the choice to trust people while understanding they are also spiritual beings having human experiences. Humility is a side effect of this, ever reminding me that we are all evolving together, even if our individual experiences are different. Mistakes and failures are only lessons–they don’t define us. Being open to making mistakes and failing allows me to change direction with a positive attitude and deep gratitude. Willingness is about saying yes to the nuances of life. Opportunities arise all of the time; being willing to explore where I have not personally gone before allows me to grow in ways I never imagined. A willingness to surrender to reality (my Higher Power) means I can assess whether or not it’s a construct in my head or something that is happening with my input. Willingness is the essence of that “Leap of Faith” we take to even enter a room for the first time. Willingness is returning to a meeting or finding a new one which fits us better. Willingness is accepting we are evolving, part of the life process, and we should live as living people looking forward to the opportunities to grow instead of hiding within and making up stories based on the illusions we know don’t work.
     
      He then goes on to ask questions of us, to challenge us to tell the truth about who we are and how we can start, today, to create a different tomorrow. Each of our choices has an effect on the world. Every. Last. One. If we stay in, someone who may benefit from our presence out in the world won’t get it. We won’t make connections to people who need us as they begin their trek into a new life. From giving a hug to a suffering newcomer to sharing our experience, strength, and hope in a room, we can affect the world. We can create win-win situations, be grateful for our lives (even the seemingly bad!), and appreciate that we woke up this morning to a brand new day of practicing a recovered life.
      Lastly, Dan Rockwell reminds us that we don’t get an easy journey into this. We addicts know the blame game all too well: This is the foundation of Step Four. It’s easy to blame others for our choices. Owning our part in our pasts allows us to create a future of authenticity and acceptance. No one chooses for us, ever. We may align with a person in order to deceive ourselves into thinking they’re calling the shots, but the act of choosing to find a person to blame if things go bad is a conscious choice we make. Taking responsibility for every action we make is a powerful choice. After all, we have arrived at rock bottom because no one else but we can save ourselves from ourselves.
     
      My name is Jess, and I am a food binge-arexic, toxic love addict, and real love avoidant. I have less than ten minutes to 2012, and I am feeling hopeful and grateful. I was abstinent today (even though I had a few challenges which I turned over to HP because I certainly couldn’t muster the willpower to do it!), and I was affectionate and appreciative of my family today, and I was active today in my recovery. Will I make New Year’s resolutions as the minutes tick away? Nope.
      I’m getting my New Year’s Gratitides together, so I can walk into 2012 with my head high and a smile on my face, knowing that I was given the gift of the miracle of recovery and all of the extras that go along with it.
     
      HAPPY NEW YEAR 2012!

      I was trying to figure out what was stopping me from doing my Fourth Step inventory, despite logically knowing that it’s foolish to stop (Addictive Thinking Red Flag!). I find there is a disconnect between knowing and Knowing. One is the mind; the other, the heart and soul.

      I come up with a load of excuses and questions all based on fear. What if I arrive at Step Twelve, and I don’t get that spiritual awakening? What if it doesn’t work for me? What if someone sees what I wrote and reads it? What if people find out my secrets and hate me for it all? Do I really, really want this, or am I just trundling along with a cult mentality? Is the Twelve-Step program a cult? Will my life be dull if I give up the excitement (Addictive Thinking Red Flag)? What if I don’t do a thorough inventory because I forgot a lot of what hurt the most?
      I can manufacture a good lot of drama based on over-thinking the process. Drama, for me, is the stuff that I create in my life that builds tension (non-acceptance of people, places, and situations), and that tension is a drug. That tension can drive me to wander a kitchen or a junk food aisle in a grocery store, longing for the days when I could get high from eating. That tension can drive me to wander malls and consider going out to bars, longing for the days when I could get high from manipulating a person (generally a man) into a toxic interaction. That friction, like a grinding buzz or the white-noise irritating static of a radio station just out of range, is the drug. I am keyed up, worked up, hypersensitive. It’s a fake sense of feeling alive, simply because I feel raw–like scrubbing my mind and body with steel wool until my brain is inundated with destructive emotional messages and my body is raw from the incessant ache. It’s not the same as being honest, vulnerable, and strong; it’s being exhausted, susceptible, and weak. There’s a wide gap between sapping the walls of a fortress castle and opening the door in order to welcome travelers. One is aggressive and demands someone lose; the other, inviting and encourages a mutually beneficial resolution.
      To those questions which stop me, I have answers. I’ve studied the Twelve Steps and have experienced the freedom of spirit when I am honest. Doing the steps a Spring Cleaning of the body, mind, and soul. Living in honesty is vulnerability; living a life which one would not be ashamed to have published on the front page of a celebrity magazine or a major metropolitan newspaper is vulnerability through honesty. If I have nothing to hide, I am both open and strong. To live a life of clarity is to live in the most organic honesty possible. Without carrying the weight of deception and all of the necessary accoutrements to hide said deception, there is no exhaustion because one is traveling like a Jainist monk or nun–with the clothes on one’s back and the bowl for receiving and giving of what is needed to survive and thrive. The journey, not the protection of what one possesses, becomes the focus of life. Instead of worrying about the safety of my person, I can observe then carry and share the experience, strength, and hope which is all around us every day. Clarity is honesty; if I eat honestly, I have the mental clarity to expose then accept reality as it is. I can think in terms of recovery instead of addiction. I end the performance as a character onstage for all to be entertained by and go out into the world as the person beneath the mask. How can there not be a spiritual enlightenment if I drop all of those secrets and lies–the things which wear me down and keep my focus away from experiencing the wide and wonderful world and all of its miracles? Can’t really focus on the awe of a spectacular vista if I am focused on setting up the tent and camping stove and the mini-television, and on cleaning my tech fabric so I look good while traveling, and on whatever distractions I bring with me on my journey. Traveling light is enlightenment; traveling without the deception that I need to protect that which I cannot own (the “can’t take it with you” non-ownership theory, where what you truly own goes with you after you die). To set down the mental constructs I place between me and life as a spiritual being is spiritual enlightenment. If I’m not weighing my spirit down with physical-world stuff or mental-world rules and admonishments and anxieties, my spirit is free to roam as an observer of things farther than just beyond my physical reach. I hope this made sense–that dumping the heavy pack of what I perceive is important (in order to reach my destination in comfort and style) is the act of lightening my load enough to start appreciating the beauty all around me instead of the aches and pains of stressing my mind and body. That begins with honesty; the honesty creates vulnerability and strength and potentially even purpose.
      I do have to trust that the program works if I work it, and sometimes it takes stopping to look at how far I’ve come at this point. I have recovery embedded in me. Does this mean I won’t relapse? Nope, but it does mean I’m aware that I have a choice. There was no relapse before Overeaters Anonymous because there was no recovery. Every solution I had available to me was addiction-based and external. I had diets, anorexia, manic exercise–all things which I knew the rules to even as I knew they could cause damage to me. One size fits all solutions which can get support from those who’ve acted them out and who are still miserable because they’re in a war of powerlessness and misery. Sure, the high may look fantastic when one can only think in addiction, but the pain is the same: I am my body, I tell the world through my action and attitude, and your approval of my body is the only purpose I have.
      Isn’t that depressing? I mean, it kind-of sets one up for a state of longing, to be something more than something that changes and ends and will never have the approval of everyone in the whole world (because aesthetic appreciation is arbitrary). However, there is a seed of hope within that sad message. There is longing for something more. That’s the soul standing up to be counted. It cannot be seen, smelled, tasted, heard, or touched. But it can be felt when it moves. Oh, yeah. It definitely can be felt. I felt my soul enough that I was willing to “just try” Overeaters Anonymous. Nothing more. Sit in one room for one hour out of my already-miserable life. I’d done it week after week over whole semesters in school. Committing one measly hour wasn’t so bad.
      That hour changed my life completely. I still am awed that I have maintained (for over a year!) what five years ago was an impossible dream. I mean, it was so impossible, when I broke 200 lbs. and kept going down, I couldn’t believe it. It kicked on the addict need not to lose that precious thing I thought I owned (and I started half-abstinence, half-dieting), but the recovery I had already gained reminded me that the abstinence is a gift. Every time I get cocky, I remember that the abstinence and weight loss is a gift. I could not do it for decades. OA is not a diet program, because I did and failed a lot of diets (and didn’t even start many, many more)! When I surrendered to wanting to be healthy instead of thin, the miracles and magic began. And I am still awed to disbelief that I carried a hundred more pounds than I do now. That those hundred pounds have been lifted from me for over a year. My body was enlightened, relieved of that force pulling me down hard into submission to the addiction–like an abused pack mule burdened by far more weight than it can carry. Dying faster because I was burning out fast, carrying suffering in the form of physical and mental burdens.
      As for seeing what I wrote, that’s part of Steps Eight and Nine. My resentments generally have retributions, and I was part of the problem. What I wrote will see the light of day in Step Five, as I speak what I wrote to an empathetic soul who’s trodden the path I walked. Admitting it to HP is the prayer of speaking it aloud or in my mind, thinking upon it all and knowing I want change through the fearless honesty. The rest is organizing it into a neat list of amends, and I have a lot to make–even if I have no idea where to find the people I need to make amends to. I have apologized many times over yet did not change my behavior to a recovered one. Well, that’s part of making amends: I commit to recovery completely, day by day, understanding that as long as I am growing as a person and splitting my seconds to choose honesty instead of lies? I am living on the path of recovery. The thoughts and beliefs became action and habit simply by walking those paths in my mind until they were well-worn (as explained by the Mahatma Gandhi quote I put up yesterday) into habits which became my addiction. Recovery is creating new paths of acting on life in honesty rather than reacting to it then trying to cover it up, as the OA Invitation to You tells us, opening me up to a new way of life. A simply honest life, an organic way of living. If I am honest, I have nothing to hide because I refuse to hide anything any more. Without the need to hide secrets on my person (generally in my very active mind), I live a life of clarity simply by default.
      Now, I have to admit that 12-Step programs can become a cult if I turn them into a cult. If I pray to the religion of 12-Stepping and work to impress the people in program, I am following a religion of my own devising with zealotry. Zealotry is filled with judgment, filled with all-or-nothing thinking, filled with guilt and shame and dishonesty and manipulation. I may say it’s honesty, but it’s not. After all, as a cult zealot, it would be my job to force my will on others. That goes against the whole point of program. It’s rejecting Step One outright, saying that I am not powerless (to the point that my way is the only way, and that I have authority because I know the One, True Path). In that self-deluded state, I lie to myself that I can manage my life and others’ lives. That’s not honesty, and there is no spiritual enlightenment to be found. I not only take on the burden of trying to force my will on others (rejecting the potential for serenity), I am certainly not focused on that which I can change–myself. So, while it can become cultish when people act like chained abstinence means something (the longest abstinence is twenty-four hours; we’re all in the same day of abstinence–from the newcomer to the fifty-year program veteran), as long as we hold onto humility and actually live in this twenty-four hours? We can use the fellowship of program to grow as individuals. I am no better and no worse than any person in program, because I am an addict just like every person in program. None of us is ever completely recovered. We are always recovering, which means we are all connected by Tradition Three–in or our of the rooms. Any person wanting to stop compulsive addictive behavior is considered a member. Every group is open to them. Well, every group is supposed to be open, if the group is not exclusive. Yes, there are closed meetings, but I think a strong closed meeting is just one which welcomes those people who are looking for a solution to addiction–as opposed to being open to people who are not addicted. Likewise, putting rules down on lengths of abstinence required for sharing is cultish, because it does put some people into authority over others. We are a fellowship of equals in just-for-today humility. If my experience, strength, and hope has more value than a newcomer’s to a group, I do not belong there. Newcomers keep the reason I am in program at all fresh and green. If I forget why I am in program, relapse is one unsplit second away. Some of the greatest shares of experience, strength, and hope come from the people who have surrendered to an intuitive message from their Higher Powers–even if they have no name for what guided them into the rooms. Can recovery be found outside 12-Step rooms? Yes! 12-Step Recovery is just one of many ways people can recover, not the only way. It’s just what I chose, one of many options, including inpatient therapy, one-on-one therapy, led group therapy, and even one of several recovery programs available which are group-led (including religious ones). Just like we are all individuals, so are our paths to the same end goal: Recovery from the obsession with being soulless bodies and brains.
      I suppose I still struggle with Step One a lot of the time, because I try to force logical control of my life and the lives of others (advice-giving, judgmentalism, distraction from working on my own addictions). It doesn’t work for me; recovery in 12-Step programs does. While certain groups and I have dissonance (I put my personality over program principles in those groups), it doesn’t mean the group is wrong. People find recovery where they find it, and I am not the arbiter of right or wrong recovery for anyone but me.
      So, when I think about manufactured drama and organic gratitude, it comes down to manipulation and honesty. The addiction is about trying to manipulate things into place for a life I don’t particularly want in order to feed the thrill of drama; recovery is about accepting things as they are for a life of serenity which I do want in order to find peace and authenticity. So, why am I fighting even getting past Step Zero?
      The addiction. But I keep having moments of serenity, times of understanding that I want the peace instead of the drama. I just get frustrated that I think I want the drama. It’s exciting, thrilling, and it carries with it the promise of “Happily Ever After” instead of a real life. You know, the life that comes in romantic comedies and romance novels? The adversity earning love and an easy life is pretty compelling. However, it isn’t real. Sure, the stories are part of reality, but there’s something missing in those stories. They’re as tempting as a self-service dessert buffet for 500 would be to a sugar junkie. But romance is just romance. It’s the art of self-dosing by using emotions to create the high out of whipping up intensity. Intensity, however, burns hot and goes out fast after consuming everything to ash. To try to re-create that blaze again is hard; to try to maintain it for life is impossible. I mean, we barely survive that intensity every time we jump into the bonfire. Each time we survive, we lie to ourselves that we’re immortal. So, we do it again, ignoring the damage we’re taking on the way. We’re sustaining damage, too, as well as leaving a wake of destruction around us. Why opt for that life?
      Because somewhere, the lie that intensity and extreme living means we’re living life to its fullest. That external recognition that we’re out there living on the edge, daring death to come at us, is a heady drug. We’re playing chicken with inevitability. Despite this raw excitement, we’re not fully alive–and we feel the emptiness within.
      A whole person is one who is alive in the quiet as well as the excitement. Drama does happen in recovery. Life has ups, downs, veers, power-slides, and even leaps of faith. Why ignore the small miracles and only focus on the big payoffs? A microloan can change a life as easily as a government bailout. Why ignore the local acts only for the global ones?
      I think of how a box of love letters, while small and seemingly unimportant, can be more priceless than a billboard or a Times Square marquee. A short shock of enormous magnitude is merely a short shock; an enduring shower of small blessings changes us slowly and with a depth of endurance which is unmatched. A burst of “perfection” is intense, but it isn’t the progress of a life well-lived. A life where, even when it was at its smallest, we didn’t succumb to boredom waiting for the next explosive event. We celebrate with gratitude even the small miracle that we woke up this morning with one more opportunity to grow and evolve.
      The oddest and most frustrating thing is that I am still buying the lie that I won’t like who I am once I’m done changing. Problem One: Recovery is about acceptance; if I’m judging myself as unlikeable, I am still in addiction. Problem Two: Recovery is about honesty; if I have to be dishonest about who I am in order to achieve that perfect and perfectly likable person, I’m in addiction. Problem Three: Recovery is about living an authentic life; if I am not aligning myself to who I really am (which is easy to tell because I will be feeling intense non-acceptance of people, places, and situations), I am in addiction.
      In other words, there is no way in reality I can hate who I become if I am actually recovering. Why? Because I will be working from that source which is honestly me. This, then, comes down to the one nagging question: Will I gain others’ approval if I am authentic?
      And the answer is that it won’t matter. I will be who I am, and it’s not my business to try to force others to approve of me. As long as I live in that peace that I am working from a place of True Self, it won’t matter. I’ll be in serenity, I’ll be grateful, and I’ll be making progress without the explosions and fireworks of a drama-driven and exhausting life of non-acceptance.
     
      My name is Jess, and I am a food binge-arexic, toxic love addict (ahoy, romantic obsession!), and real love anorectic. Authenticity is wholeness–mind, body, soul. That’s a pretty amazing gift to receive through program, one which makes the promises which are a pipe dream goal a reality. And acceptance of reality–not judging it as good or bad but accepting that it is simply reality–is sanity.

      Yesterday, I spent most of the day in nature, enjoying the beauty of the northern parts of Arizona. It’s not all desert and Phoenix (and Tucson); the mountains are quite lovely–as anyone who’s driven Interstate 40 instead of Interstate 10 through Arizona can attest.

      We went up north, not quite as far as Sedona. As we left the big city filled with malls and stress, it was like the hatred of the holidays just melted. I felt serene on the country roads–dirt, of course. At the end of the road was a paradise of kindness, where people were happy to wave in passing on the dirt track up to a little town nestled in firs and pines. Real people, good people, people whose lives are shaped by living in a patch of paradise far away from a place thick with commercialism and the overstimulation that comes with commercialism.
      Descending into metro Phoenix was like putting on a hair shirt. The journey which had melted the stress away layered it all back on as I returned to the constant barrage of cars and consumerism. The day before Christmas, and people were out and about, buying last-minute gifts which have already been opened and which will probably be returned in the coming weeks.
      I felt serenity at altitude; I felt the addiction come back in force when I returned here. This place, which inspired a person last week to decide it was worth jumping into freeway traffic from an overpass (I still have no idea if the person actually jumped, or if their desperation to stop being invisible in a sea of people was alleviated with the closure of a major freeway system), returned me deep into the addiction. I felt that shaky ground beneath my feet, that thin crust upon which I tread while walking between sanity and insanity.
      And I broke.
      That sucked, by the way. That evening, back “safe” at home, I got all over my spouse because I wanted to have more presents. I. Kid. You. Not. I didn’t know what presents I wanted, but they would have had to be many and perfect and represent the consumerism that I really do not want to even be a part of. I complained about a gift which I had asked for, which my spouse and child had hunted for. I ended up with an email from Amazon.com for that gift. Acceptance was not part of the equation as it had been the rest of the day in paradise. Acceptance had gone out the window and into the night sky, lost among people flying in to spend Christmas with family.
      What couldn’t I accept?
      Well, I was frustrated that what I wanted, a scent from a bath shop which (for the second time in my life) was discontinued for whatever corporate reason. That pissed me off, because I knew the end was near last year. The end arrived between December 2010 and December 2011, and what was left was sitting in a warehouse somewhere–going bad. So, I realized I had to go out and get a new scent, which was acceptance-rejection number one.
      Acceptance rejection number two had to do with the reality-check that the really interesting hoodie I had gotten up in that little general store up in paradise shouldn’t have been wrapped so I could open it as my “Night-Before” gift. I wanted presents en masse. I mean, it was that toddler, “All the prezzies! Mine! Mine! Mine!” reaction. I was not in my right mind; I was powerless over the price-tag approval message (“One’s worth is equal to the value of what was purchased, and the less money spent on me, the less loved I am”–yeah, that is as nutty as it sounds, but it’s one of my learned coping mechanisms to gauge if I’m approved-of or not). Then? Oh, then, the martyr kicked in.
      So, the little brat wanted all of the presents and the martyr said I was being a little brat for wanting any presents (because the holiday season is about the joy of giving, right?). So, powerless over the unmanageable battle between aspects of the same damned addiction, I threw down.
      I said I didn’t want what was given, and my recovered self–which I imagined was sitting at the side with a hose, ready to keep the snarling “all” and the clawing “nothing” at bay if they decided to attack my abstinence–was waiting it out. The words came out (“I didn’t want this! This is an awful gift!” or something to that effect) of the tantrum-addict, and the martyr-addict swooped in with guilt immediately. Shame, guilt, self-loathing. Oh, I was a mess. Yet, in that complete chaos, I saw forty years of holiday Hell finally be exposed in complete VistaVision and TechniColor clarity.
      I was pretty vain, let me tell you. I thought I’d gotten more control over my addiction because I didn’t have too angry a holiday season this time around. I could tally more calmness (um, that wasn’t calmness, it was active social avoidance!) and less tantrums from Thanksgiving to Christmas. And I took credit, apparently, for the serenity I received as a gift up in the beauty of nature. I thought I missed the bullet this year, that I could get through without being an unappreciative brat before turning on myself viciously with shame and guilt for being said unappreciative brat. Recovery stepped in for most of the season, not me. I didn’t have the usual the vitriol meant to hurt someone who went out of their way to make me happy, but it flared up really hugely last night. Once I’d reacted in a way that required amends, I started talking with brutal honesty.
      I wasn’t going to let myself get away with an “I don’t know,” this time. Not when I’d fallen down the hole into the addiction and slammed into that rocky bottom waiting below. Honest about my feelings, honest about the irrationality, honest about the battling duality. As I poured out the truth, recovery took hold. And I saw it for what it is, and I realized the decades of holiday loathing were unwrapped before me. And I was then, and I am now, grateful.
      This doesn’t mean the martyr and perfectionist are taking the day off. However, I see them and accept this is part of the holiday season in addiction. I can work with this over the next year, surrendering to gratitude and acceptance with the commitment of a person who, as Step Zero tells us, “[has] decided [she wants] what we have and [is] willing to go to any length to get it[.]” (Big Book, page 58). I want sanity during the next holiday season. I am willing to go to any length, including completing Step Four so I can move on to Steps Five through Twelve. I want the spiritual awakening that comes from faith in program, in a Higher Power, in the people who are recovering alongside me all around the world. Some must have figured out how to get through the holiday season mostly unscathed–if not completely unscathed. Well, at least not have a temper tantrum like a child instead of being grateful that I am not alone and I am in recovery.
      The serenity of paradise is not external; I can access that beauty and learn not to grieve being in a metro area–longing to return to the quiet of paradise. The reality is that the peace came from within as I connected to the wonder of the beauty of nature and my Higher Power through that. The wonder is here, too, even if I get fretful about the hunger to chase down external sources of that serenity (can’t be done–serenity, like change, comes from within). I carried my connection to my Higher Power with me into that little town, became vulnerable, and I was received well. I didn’t fear being criticized for appreciating what those who had retreated to paradise had learned. Being able to relate to their life choice to leave the chaos and enter quiet made it easier to be vulnerable. I carried that with me, too, the desire to have my opinion be supported by other people. Being polite was appreciated instead of disdained or outright ignored.
      As I journey through life, I carry both addiction and recovery within me, now. I can’t go back to that time of only-addiction (smattered with moments of enlightenment, few and far between but always longed for). The journey begins within. It is enacted by the body and brain through this world. Outside of me is not something I can or should try to manipulate into my curious and vacillating definition of “right” and “perfection”. Outside of me is like space outside of Earth–I can’t change any of it, nor is it helpful at all to. The Universe is balanced with me in it, not balanced because I am controlling it. I am a part of a living system in a Solar System which miraculously has allowed complex life to exist on its third planet. I can look up and see the Universe and wonder at it; I can look around and see the life all around me and wonder at it. I can enjoy the beauty in all things–yes, even in the metropolitan area which is a hotbed of first world problems–and I can appreciate the gift that I woke up this morning and have breathed in and out all morning at this point and partway into the afternoon.
      I am here; I am alive; I am able to experience life; I am able to contribute out of that gratitude. The addiction and its armoring of me is stopping me from realizing these truths consistently, and I am ready to let it wane as recovery waxes in my life. Will I ever be relieved of the addiction? No. But I can learn to accept it as a gift, something which allows me to sit in a room this afternoon and be thankful for what has been given, what has been taken away, and what has been left behind.
     
      My name is Jess. I am a food binge-arexic, toxic love addict, and real love avoidant. The toxic love addiction is about looking outside of me; the real love avoidance is about turning away from looking within (out of fear). Recovery is the gift of shifting the polarity of this life-approach. And, as I have seen in the people working recovery in meetings, serenity comes from turning away from looking without and embracing looking within. The food is simply a reflection of this; surrendering my food plan to a power greater than myself and trusting the intuitive messages about what is the right amount and what my body wants as fuel (as opposed to what my addiction thinks will Magic-Pill cure the anxiety I feel when I choose not to accept a person, place, or situation) is practice for surrendering my toxic love addiction to a power greater than myself and trusting the messages about what is love and what my soul needs as fuel.

      Silence.

      I was sitting outside, realizing that I really don’t find actual silence in a metropolitan area. The sounds of traffic–both land and sky–are constant. It’s a reminder people are about all of the time, everywhere.
      Yet I suppose I still can reach within and find the silence there. It is hard, sometimes, because I don’t particularly like being left alone with my thoughts. Much of the time, they’re a continuation of the messages I learned long ago. My mind has no particular kindness for me, and my emotions run wild when I get exhausted by the barrage of negativity I can’t get away from unless I’m within a world of my own making.
      It plays out for me like a film, people moving and talking in the dense imagination that feels more like real memories than the ones I lived. I believe that real life cannot have a happy ending, so I write happiness for the fictional characters which populate the fictional world even as I challenge the characters to grow. How strange that I am happy to challenge them, and I write them to meet the challenges (or run from them and face powerful consequences). The lessons that grow them, that drive the story along, are often lessons of my own life. Some, I have already learned; others, I need to learn. The writing is cathartic in some cases, giving me the freedom to learn at the edge of possibility. And since it’s not me (yet it is me, because I have to write their enlightenment and create best-case-possible scenarios to get my happy endings), I can write with abandon.
      Unfortunately, it is an anorectic behavior. Like a diet can be anorexia disguised as an attempt to become healthy, changing how I think through noveling can be isolation disguised as an attempt to become mentally recovered. So, I ask myself, “Which is more beneficial–to write and isolate or to fret around people?” I have no answer to it. I expect neither is better. Once I am gifted with an alternative, I’ll use it. That’s probably the worst of progressing through recovery: Sometimes, I haven’t got a recovered answer to a life question. All I have is the addict coping mechanism to turn toward. Do I chose to get to the edge of despair by rejecting the coping mechanism entirely, or do I choose to self-soothe just-long-enough and practice the addiction still more?
      Well, I’m not perfect, so I don’t work a perfect program. However, I know that as I learn more, I will have more options to choose from. My only hope is that I choose quality over convenience.
      A friend used this metaphor, which I think relates to what I’m dealing with in recovery. I have a bird in-hand right now. It’s a good bird, and it’s pretty tame. However, I want a bird which can talk, and this isn’t a talking breed. No matter how much I want this bird to talk, that won’t happen. I have a choice: I keep this bird and accept that I won’t have a talking bird, or I release this bird and seek a talking breed. That requires a lot of trust to leave the safety of settling for something I don’t want yet keep because it’s something. Even if I have nothing or end up with nothing, letting go of what holds me back is a risk which opens me up to greater things. Who knows? I mean, I may not really want a talking breed; I may want a hunting bird, yet I don’t realize I want it until I have it for a while. So it goes with the gifts from my Higher Power–I may not get precisely what I want, but I get what I need. I may not think I need it. I may be convinced that what I want is what I need. However, when I enter a situation where what I need is right where I need it when I need it? I get humbly thankful pretty damned quick.
      So, back to the silence in-between. I don’t really talk to HP any more because I don’t know how to. When I talked to HP, it was more like asking a Magic 8-Ball for advice or going to sit with Santa Claus. I’m talking and not listening, trying to force my answer as the only possible answer. However, I know I can turn toward the Eleventh Step Prayer, to ask for knowledge and the energy to work in concert with the Universe (surrender) instead of struggle to dominate it (unmanageability and non-acceptance). It’s weird that, spiritually, Newton’s Laws of Motion seem to work pretty well in terms of cooperating with the Universe. To recap:
     
I. Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it.
     
      We keep going on with our addictions, seeking out partners to rationalize them, until we’re hit with our first taste of enlightenment–our personal “Rock Bottom”. This comes from the Universe, a cosmic slap upside the head that we can’t go on living that way.
     
      II. The relationship between an object’s mass m, its acceleration a, and the applied force F is F = ma. Acceleration and force are vectors (as indicated by their symbols being displayed in slant bold font); in this law the direction of the force vector is the same as the direction of the acceleration vector.
     
      Addiction requires more effort to reach the numb or the high to get away from our problems. We are that mass in motion, a being of the physical outside of the spiritual. Using physical force (instead of spiritual power), we apply more and more force (addict substance) to achieve the same results. The action creates acceleration into the addiction. And, as we accelerate into the addiction, we require more substance (force) to achieve the same high. Substance quantity = addict x accelerating deterioration.
     

III. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
     
      This is when recovery arrives, and we realize that by acting on the Universe with generosity, we receive its gifts. For example, if we try to force our will on the Universe, we find ourselves powerless (others forcing their wills on us). If we try to control the Universe, we find our lives unmanageable (others trying to control us). If we surrender, the Universe surrenders. If we take, the Universe takes. If we give, the Universe gives.
      Addiction is us taking and losing power in equal measure; recovery is giving and gaining the power of the Universe, of a Higher Power.
     
      Well, it may be a stretch, but it seems to work for me. Maybe it’ll work for others, too. No idea.
      Right now, I am in a place where I know that I know enough to know how little I actually know. In other words, I have enough recovery that I am aware that I will never be able to rationalize why it works. There’s a certain point where I simply have to rest in the quiet and trust in something I will never understand logically. I guess that’s the essence of faith.
     
      So, I get to enter the silence in-between. Stilling my thoughts is hard, because I want so much to avoid getting into the quiet and have my mind throw every unpleasantness at me–doubt, fear, shame, guilt, to name a few. I don’t want to hear it, so I work to stay out of the silence. This, I suppose, is one of those simple-but-not-easy situations. The work, however, is worth the effort. The more I enter the silent space and practice reminding myself that those messages are not truth and not real, the easier it will become to ignore them. They will quiet if I’m not pulled out of the silence by those harsh criticisms which bring up painful emotions. And I’m not supposed to miraculously be a Lama overnight. This takes the same time and effort I took to enter into the addiction. As Mahatma Gandhi stated:

“Your beliefs become your thoughts,
Your thoughts become your words,
Your words become your actions,
Your actions become your habits,
Your habits become your values,
Your values become your destiny.”
     
      Well, in an addict’s corollary, it follows that:

Your beliefs become your thoughts,
Your thoughts become your words,
Your words become your actions,
Your actions become your habits,
Your habits become your addiction,
Your addiction becomes your executioner.
     
      Not one of us started life as an addict. We formed beliefs, thoughts, created messages, reacted based on those messages, the reactions became habitual through practice, and the practice of habits made us unable to live without them. In addiction, however, we are on a path to impact with a brick wall of reality. We may not think we’re gonna hit, but something will give. What gives is what we’ve damaged for so long–our brains and bodies.
      Personally, I’d rather have a destiny of life than a slow march to death because I want what I want when I want it.
     
      I’m not sure what the purpose of this entry was. It just needed to be written, I guess.
     
      My name is Jess, and I am a food binge-arexic, toxic love addict, and real love avoidant. I’m dancing around truths that are deeply embedded within. I hope tomorrow’s journey into the beautiful natural landscape will shake it loose. I really do. I hate the times when I have a slow-burning malaise and can’t really even identify what’s making me at intense dis-ease. There’s no cure, no magic pill to make it go away. That’s what the addiction lied to me about–the food would make me feel better or the approval of others would make me feel loved (without having to commit to loving the other person, for fear of being hurt).
      Well, here’s to the subtle synchronicities the Universe offers us. I hope I am gifted with the awareness to sense their impending arrival, so I can get in the way in order to experience an unique and amazing life experience. May I be granted the humility to be grateful for even the smallest miracles I experience every day, and may I be given the strength to progress and learn every day.

      Despite having the gift of abstinence given to me by my Higher Power this whole time, I have been a messy eater in denial of eating under my own will-powerlessness recently. I’ve eaten a lot of sugar recently. While it’s within my plan, and while I am eating it in small servings through the day, I am eating those servings with behaviors I connect with compulsivity.

      I eat out of measuring spoons and cups. I do this standing in the kitchen. I don’t eat off of plates, and I certainly don’t take the time to eat at the dining table.
      I do weigh, measure, and estimate. I use calorie-count serving size information from online. I even turn away from some foods, and my core trigger foods are still being kept away from. I can walk away from eating when I’m not hungry. It’s when I’m hungry that I start seeking convenience to cut the hunger. The duality of it is that I have to eat enough to stop being hungry then eat more to feel full instead of “not-hungry”. The binge-arexia works like that: I have a careful balance between not eating so much that I am lethargic and in stomach pain and eating more than being lethargic by just barely relieving hunger pangs.
      The worst of it is the slide into emotional eating. It’s little things at little times, half-worked awarenesses which exhaust me because they cut so close to the core of the fear, shame, anger, grief, and resentment I can muster. I don’t want to enter that darkness within because I fear it will be lonely.
      And this comes right down to the core of the issue: I lost faith in my Higher Power and potentially in program. Now, my recovered self is saying it’s okay because all I have to do is pick it back up again. It’s traveling beside me, weightless yet ready to pick up my burdens. But I have rolled all the way back to Step Zero without noticing. The irony is that I know and feel my Higher Power with me when I feel that distress, and I see the gifts I am being given. I am still abstinent, despite the relapse behaviors which tell me very, very clearly I am taking back on that powerlessness and am choosing–yes, actively choosing!–a life of unmanageability. I’m pulling the stitches of a worked program, undoing what was done. Yet the gifts of recovery are not leaving me, which I consider a great blessing. They’re not being taken away whatsoever. I can turn to what I was given in recovery so far at any time, and I am remembering what I learned, which is easing me out of addiction slowly but surely.
      Well, the lessons this time around are pretty good, so I’m going to enumerate them here, in hopes that perhaps others will benefit from the gifts of awareness I received at meetings over the last two years:
     
      Refined sugar is poisonous to me.
     
      This is probably one of the easiest to see, because I still have fresh in my head both the insanity of having a befogged mind and the sanity of having intense clarity. The physical reaction to eating things with refined sugar (and some starches) is unmistakeable. I am irritable, and I feel completely out-of-sorts physically. I actually feel like I have a low-grade flu when I eat refined sugar. I know how clear my mind is and how strong my body feels when I eat fresh (often raw) foods and whole grains. This small gift of awareness allows me the ability of self-gauging my physical and mental wellness: Healthy versus Sick. It only takes a few days to undo the damage and return clarity, just like it tends to take a few days to do the damage and return insanity.
      So, it’s time to return to my triggers list and add to it. What’s strange is that natural sweeteners (honey, molasses, rice syrup, agave, and even maple syrup) and natural low-calorie sweeteners (Stevia) don’t do this in “reasonable” servings. But refined sugar gives me trouble from teaspoon one, though it’s just a twinge of trouble at that level. Now, I was given the gift of hating corn syrup through recovery and abstinence, because I can taste the complexity in it (as opposed to just “too sweet!”). I just don’t like the taste of corn syrup, so I reject certain foods at first bite. It was easier when corn was subsidized, so everything processed had corn syrup in it. I’m returning to processed foods because beet sugars and other sweeteners are replacing the corn syrup which was in everything. However, I may be able to start tasting the refining process in sugar and reject it, too.
      Honestly, though, convenience foods just don’t sate me like unrefined foods do. They’re not hearty and they just seem to encourage me to eat more even as I don’t want to eat. Plus, I just feel off when I do it. Something in convenience foods poisons me, so avoiding it whenever possible is a sanity-encouraging choice. Will I cut them all out? No. If I do, there is no way I can make abstinence on such a restrictive diet. However, recognizing what makes me feel mentally and physically irritable (even as I feel sluggish, a bizarre combination of reactions) is definitely a positive. If I want to feel strong and healthy, I know what to choose. It takes more time, but it’s worth it.
     
      My food plan is self-care at its core.
     
      I have stated here, before, that I have a balanced diet based on the USDA food pyramid. I have minimums and maximums. The initial plan was based off of being willing to sit with myself and stop lying about how I ate, and I had no floor. When I lost enough weight so that I was aggressively undereating (which was within my food plan as it was back then) to lose weight and be “a winner” who received approval from other OAers. I wanted to be crowned Miss OA, getting my standing ovation and crown and sceptre for losing over 100 lbs. in program. So focused on the goal of receiving approval and adoration, I longed to lose more–125, then 150 lbs. Yes, I do say that I lost more, but I can show here that I lost over 100 lbs. based on the weigh-ins I had from about two weeks into abstinence. In June of 2009, I was either 283 or 293 lbs.; I can’t recall which of those numbers was in the tens place. All I remember was thinking, “I am going to break 300 lbs. again, and I am going to die.” I knew I was going to die because I can’t figure out the perfect diet to lose the weight. I longed for a magic pill to relieve me of something that is part of me and will be part of me for life. I didn’t want to do the footwork (and sometimes I still don’t, which is why I’m here re-aligning my food plan today and am committing to eating better today than I did yesterday).
      Anyway, in July of 2010, I realized when I ate perhaps 500 calories over a day and had little problem with it (well, I felt delusionally powerful and “in control”), yet I was so physically weak I couldn’t function at my best mentally and physically? There was a serious problem with not eating enough to sustain me. So, in came the floor, and I’ve lived between those for over a year, now.
      My reward for surrendering to eating enough yet not too much is staying within a ten-pound range for a year. So, while I was watching my food plan, I was missing the actions surrounding it. I mean, in the last month I have turned to very small amounts of sugar to try and get that mind-altering sugar rush to avoid uncomfortable feelings. When I do, I don’t even get to ride the self-delusion it’s working. It doesn’t taste good (I really don’t like super-sweet things. My addict-self thinks I should, because sweets are a cultural fix for women–sold as a temporary vacation from the stresses of normal life), and it leaves me lower than before I ate it. The reality is that I’m not getting a damned thing from it except mild nausea from bite one. I have been lying to myself (which was that slow slide into full-blown relapse), even as I knew the truth. My recovering self wordlessly let me know it wasn’t working, and my addict self nattered and nagged and rationalized and made promises and just exhausted me. In essence, my authentic (recovering) self was getting shouted down my the racing thoughts of the addiction–which has the voice. Knowing better and thinking worse. That pretty much describes how living in that duality is.
      So, I said no to the exhaustion. I’m taking the time to self-care with my food. More whole grains, like I was doing as I neared year one of abstinence. Fresh fruit instead of processed or dried fruit. Vegetables with no sauces–just spices to flavor it when I want extra flavor. Naturally raised meat and vegetarian proteins. One percent milk instead of milk products like cheese. No extra butter. No extra sugar. And, well, dark chocolate (and dark milk chocolate) when I want a little–which I don’t have any more because I have to go out of my way to get slavery-free, organic, and fair-trade chocolate. I had it rarely, but now I have it nearly never because I go out of my way, now, to eat responsibly as a human being. It’s not about just getting the food in, it’s about considering what’s important to me as a spiritual being having human experiences and choosing based on that.
      When I eat with social responsibility and physical wellness, I gain the mental clarity necessary to do the footwork. Therefore, my food plan is self-care, and accepting the gift of abstinence is accepting that gift of self-care from a Higher Power.
     
      My Higher Power is reality.
     
      I have had trouble with this because I started caging my Higher Power and lost it in the process. I’ve wanted the reassurance there is something more than this. I want to be a spiritual being so much, to be more than the sum of my parts. It’s illogical, yet I also know we live in a world without easy answers. Many are simple, but many just are not known. That’s part of reality.
      Reality includes atheism, agnosticism, and religion. All of them are part of reality, which I can see by driving down the road at any time. I put rules on it and started doubting it. I wanted a discrete Higher Power I could talk to like a pal and listen for its voice–the voice of G-d. I wanted to be special, a dieting saint. I am special, just like every human being alive today. I see the world from a localized pinpoint in the Universe, and everything beyond my senses doesn’t just stop because I can’t bring in data from my five physical senses about it. When it’s night where I am, it’s daytime somewhere else in the world. I mean, right now Australia is having summer solstice. Their days are long and it’s hot down there. But I’ve never been to Australia, so it’s outside of my localized perspective. However, I get to remember the baffling line (for a Northern Hemisphere citizen) from Muriel’s Wedding to remind myself that the way the world tilts on its axis and moves around the sun affects the seasons differently on the same planet we all experience. They talk about being a December bride in the movie, and I’m baffled by it until I remember that it’s like someone I know here talking about being a June bride. Late spring and summer time is wedding season in European cultures. Australia’s summer starts in December. Then I consider that they’re having heat waves as we’re getting the cold weather which goes with the whole sweaters and snow-frosted evergreens image of Christmas time. Of the creamy-spicy-sweet-n-starchy comfort-food season. They’re wearing flip-flops and shorts while we’re bundled up playing in the snow.
      That reality-sense can be jarring when I’m living in self-delusion of addiction. What I experience isn’t the whole picture. That’s the charm of reality. Everything that is possible is part of reality. That includes everything every religion has said about life and death and post-life wrap-ups (from spiritual homes to reincarnation to nothingness, aka Nirvana). That includes serenity, sanity, and love. That includes addiction and recovery, too. So, I have intense faith in reality, even if I can’t logically figure out how to talk and listen to reality with my localized and logical brain.
      I’ve decided to take Step Eleven to heart to handle this. Step Eleven in OA states: Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out. Praying for knowledge beyond what I can sense with my physical form and for clarity in order to go beyond what my logical (yet very limited) brain can muster allows me to enter a state of mindfulness. I choose actively to withdraw from the center of the Universe (where all people, places, things, and situations had better’d revolve around me or I will get a resentful and non-accepting attitude problem awfully fast) and enter my logical place in it. Once I am settled where I belong, then I enter the silence and make that connection through meditation. The meditation builds the connection because I am focused on experiencing the world beyond my form. And when I do that? I am energized. I abandon the lies I tell myself about the weight of the Universe being on my shoulders; I don’t have to micromanage it to make the Universe work. It did a fine job before 1969 and it will do a bang-up job when the spark of life exits this physical form. When I suddenly free up even just that energy I used to fritter away fretting and controlling and moving and adjusting and getting resentful? I have a ton of it. I mean, the workout one gets carrying the Universe when one ordains one’s self as an all-powerful deity has to leave one stronger–even if one does shove it temporarily off onto other people (my toxic love addiction’s savior obsession) or onto food (my binge-arexia’s obsession with numbing out or getting manically sugar-high).
      Actually, that above was a tease to prove a point. A solid, stable, and open connection to reality (which most of us can agree is the definition of sanity, right?) puts me into place to pay more attention to what’s happening around me instead of scheme and plan in my own head and completely miss both the obvious and the subtle. Open to the obvious and the subtle, I can sense more and use that expanded knowledge to grow. To make progress instead of obsess over a perfection which will never come–perfection being arbitrary and all.
     
      Today is the day I have to work with.
     
      I still love that AA saying that the world’s record for sobriety is 24 hours. It reminds me that today is the day I am living. Tomorrow’s abstinence isn’t important, nor is yesterday’s. Today is what has value, and putting anything off does not honor that connection to reality. I’m not expected to do everything in a day. I mean, if one is Judeo-Christian, even the all-powerful G-d took seven days to create everything. How completely self-delusional must one be to try to outdo the Judeo-Christian Creator of the Universe? So, it’s about redirecting energy. And the redirection I need to take is to get some Fourth Step Inventory done every day until I’m ready to do my second Fifth Step with my new dual-program sponsor. If it takes a year, it does. If it takes more, it does. Progress, not perfection.
     
      Well, there’s some truth-purging. I have been making myself sick with secrets and sweets. It can be very tough to deal with the emotions the holidays kick up every year. I mean, I recently heard one of our major freeways is closed because of a person who decided to jump from an overpass this morning. I don’t have to live in that despair, though I intimately know it. But taking a shortcut exit from life when I clearly have stuff to do is pointless. I have service to perform by living in recovery to the best of my ability. And the first place is to eat well and eat sanely, so I can feel well and think sanely.
      Yes, I am considering adding a Twelfth-Step Within meeting which addresses relapse because I’ve struggled with getting very, very close. My Higher Power has pulled me from the edge by reminding me that food isn’t the answer or the solution to my exhaustion with being powerless over an unmanageable life, and I am humbly grateful that my HP didn’t let me leap. I got to the edge, but I never was allowed to go over. And now that I’ve picked up program again, I see how cunning, baffling, powerful, and persistent my addiction is. I went from a habit to an addiction, and it’s not letting go because it vines throughout this existence in this body. It’s the brain and body working in concert to use coping mechanisms instead of authenticity to try to manage life. Well, life manages itself. I’m part of life, not life itself. I am equally important as every person here on Earth–whether or not I will ever know the individuals personally. There are people being born and dying every day who will never know I existed, just as I don’t know them. They, like I, have families and friends and joys and sadnesses. They experience life just like I do because that is part of how life as a human being goes. But I can be mindful they’re out there, have faith they exist. And I can make an effort to step out of my first world problems and into a life as a whole and real person.
     
      My name is Jess, and I am a food binge-arexic, a toxic love addict, and a real love avoidant. This entry wasn’t pleasant, but I feel purged. Sure, I may get feelings of shame and I will worry that other people will think I broke abstinence. However, this food plan I have is one meant to help me grow through being challenged. As long as I surrender before I under-eat or overeat, and as long as I reconsider the trigger foods which belong outside of my food plan and consider adding trigger behaviors (which I am going to pray and meditate over during the next week and add around the beginning of the year)? I am abstinent today. And today is what matters.

      I have had the fortune of being connected up with both an incredible metropolitan library system and the streaming Netflix service. I’ve seen one of the films I’m going to talk about yet have not seen the other yet. However, it is queued up. Both films deal with individuals breaking the chain and becoming gentle souls: People who live authentically, who have somehow released the anger, shame, and pain which many of us embraced and made into a life which brought us to the rooms as a solution.

      The first documentary (both are documentaries) is Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap Box, which came out in 2007. The soap bottles, which has a very busy-looking label, are absolutely covered in his vigilant spiritual beliefs. The business is a business for people by people. It’s one of those businesses which really is a recession-buster. They respect the earth by using natural ingredients and the 99% by taking care of their American employees and use fair-trade sources.
      Emanuel Bronner, however, lived life differently than his son, Ralph, does now. To both men, humanity has a moral responsibility to care for others. Where Emanuel Bronner spoke vigorously and tried to change things on a macro-level with a dominant and dynamic personality, Ralph is a gentle soul who moves through the world living the message. Emanuel Bronner tried to be the master gardener of the world, trying to change the whole of the landscape at one go. He spent his life thinking of all people instead of moving through the world touching individual lives to manifest change. Ralph Bronner takes care of people one-on-one. He moves soul-to-soul like a butterfly in a garden. While I am not going to deny that Ralph Bronner seems somewhat strange, he is anything but flighty. He just doesn’t conform to what society pressures us into believing: Force through power is the only way to create change. He uses a quiet strength, a power of moving through the world person-by-person and using that power to change lives en masse by changing the individual’s perception of what human beings can achieve. Those people are changed through that interaction, and their interactions with others are changed by it.
      He is authentic in his gentle nature, despite suffering neglect as his own father tried to spread the same message with a completely different take on life. Force versus power; grandiosity and delusion versus humility and truth. Though both are strange individuals to people immersed in modern culture, I found that Emanuel Bronner made me uncomfortable because of the pressure to listen to things which did not ring true–despite his personal thought it was. Ralph Bronner lives a life of truth and love. He exposes the truth in his one-man show about his father, and he markets that by giving away the soap and by talking to (and hugging) individuals. Ralph Bronner is an individual who makes connections with other individuals. It seems strange because we are a culture of distance and power vampirism. If a person gets close, it is threatening. We mistrust it because there is a price for that intimacy. It’s more of an exchange of goods and services. However, a person getting close to give without the desire to receive in return intellectually triggers that sense of danger while the soul longs to make the connection. Ralph Bronner is out in the world making those soul connections, which probably baffles people who expect a “power bill” from him. His humility and sense of deep honesty to make those connections give him a gentle soul–one which thrives through service (as opposed to intellectual subjugation to perceived truth) of humanity.
      Definitely a movie to watch, to see two men spreading the same message of spiritual humility through soap-making–one just approached it as a self-proclaimed prophet, and the other lives it.
      The other movie is about a horse whisperer, Buck. I was intrigued by it when I saw it in my Netflix offerings, but I really had not gotten the intense desire to see it until I saw the trailer at the beginning of Cave of Forgotten Dreams DVD I borrowed from the library (which I am listening to/watching as I write this). As the trailer progressed, I became more and more sure I wanted to see this documentary, which I plan to queue up this morning just after I’m done with Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Buck Brannaman, a man who does not break horses but relates to them through compassion, is a good man who lives humility and truth–just like Ralph Bronner. I think it is probably easier for people to be more comfortable with him because he exposes the truth through his interactions with horses.
      I grew up around horses, though I didn’t personally own or raise one. Horses, however, were part of my youth (riding school which had horse care as part of the education, going to a dude ranch in the Shasta Mountain region when I was young, birthday party horseback trips out of the local university). Horses have intense personalities which reflect how they’re treated. Looking into a horse’s eyes, one can see a reflection of the horse’s personality: skittish and fearful, loving and wanting to be loved, vain and pampered. Horse owners, or the ones I have known, will talk about their horse’s intellect and personality. They can become anthropomorphized pretty easily, I believe, because they have a quality which touches that intense quiet honesty deep within us. We can’t use words to get in the way of the spiritual communication between us.
      Horse Whisperers don’t speak horse as much as listen with their hearts. The magical change works with people, too, but only if we’re ready to have our secrets dropped into our laps. That’s apparently one of Buck’s skills–using the horse as a mirror of its owner to expose the owner’s qualities regarding the horse. In other words, as I said, the horse whispers the truth of its human-horse relationship to him through its behavior and attitude and nature. He listens and translates the unspoken to people who don’t want those secrets revealed. However, he seems to treat people with the same gentility as he does the horses. The potential connection of honesty between horse-and-owner, of abandoning the master-and-beast-of-burden relationship for one of symbiosis, does grow souls. My spouse owned horses in his teens, and the two horses he talked about with affection and love were friends. They were intensely loyal, performing to a level of greatness that was encouraged by his intense loyalty to them. I’m looking forward to seeing the documentary, Buck, because I have a deep feeling that I will gain something ineffable from seeing it. That part about the horses being the mirrors to an individual’s soul is both inspiring and terrifying in that our secrets are exposed to people like him. The greatest kindness is that people who can see beyond the masks to our true faces know the fragility of the individual’s connection to the deepest self. They approach people with intense gentility. The soul wants to thrive; it wants to be part of the whole, it wants to be treated with honesty because it trusts unerringly. The only hope I suppose I can offer is that, in love addiction, people can’t get down to that place. Love does not hurt, period. Obsession, attachment, and avoidance hurt. Just because our culture has decided to call that “love” does not make it so. That’s why I appreciate those people who have gone before and blazed the trails and created opportunities to recover from the lessons we learned as beings of love when we were kids. Those addicted coping mechanisms we in program threw up to armour ourselves from the self-deceptions people told us (especially that we were inferior because we were smaller and were still developing our physical and mental selves–a lie spread generation-to-generation which has never been truth and never will be at a soul-level) served us. Yes, some people passed by it through their own trials and spiritual awakening which brought them to their own truths, but we still can reach past our coping mechanisms to our souls.
      So, now that I’ve started Buck, I’m going to watch it and do some serenity work. The threats I faced and built up coping mechanisms to defend against as a child–because I accepted as truth what was taught me because I, like all of us, began this incarnation as a trusting soul in a vessel. Like a horse, I was broken. I lived in fear and was kept disciplined with a whip of shame. But I always tested my boundaries, kicked up drama and dust, and I put as much between me and the world as possible to keep people at a distance.
      I have an intense sense of relief that it’s a dance between me and others who are like me. While I do wear my toxic love addiction more openly than I’d like to admit to myself, I know it’s a flag to others who are seeking to have an approval transaction–an unwilling exchange of energy akin to mutual power vampirism. We drain each other then part, exhausted. This isn’t love, and I know it isn’t. Food was the padding beneath this armor; I told myself a passel of lies: “Men don’t like fat women, so I’m gonna be fat” (which objectifies everyone involved, making us vessels instead of spiritual beings traveling in those vessels of human form), “Since the ‘truism’ is that brownies stay on my thighs forever and since I experienced that men leave after demolishing my self-esteem, I’m gonna trust the ‘love’ inherent in food–ignoring the health risks.” So many little lies I told myself always left me miserable with “I don’t know why I do this!” I did know. The knowing, however, was resting in the silence I rarely allow myself. I fear knowing myself sometimes, and coming away with nothing or worse–a person I hate.
      The irony is that the inherent hatred of that is my ineffable part telling me who I am. For example, I find a deep sense of inner peace creating and giving away my creations. I want nothing in return. Well, okay, I do want one thing–I want the person to accept the gift given in love. If they don’t, I still retreat to that addicted message that I am not worthy, that I am inferior. Well, I’m not. None of us is. That’s just the other person’s mental messages telling them things which I cannot hear or know because I have not experienced their lives as them. I never will. It’s not personal. It never is personal. To become vulnerable to accept a gift is part of recovery for me. Rejecting the martyrdom–to give and give and give expecting a greater reward for draining myself of the power I am desperate to hold onto–is hard work. It’s the essence of the anorexia, to starve myself even as I am at a banquet of opportunities to make real spiritual connections. If one person rejects what I made, then perhaps what I made isn’t actually for them. It’s an opportunity to wander the world and find the person who will accept that loving gift. It’s a great opportunity to get acceptance practice in.
      Well, I’m going to close this out because I’m rambling. I have a lot to say, though the words are getting in the way and are meandering around without any direction. Well, when they’re ready to roll out, they will.
     
      My name is Jess, and I am a food binge-arexic and toxic love binger and real love anorexic. I appreciate the awareness that I’m being given without a demand to grow immediately with it. It’s an evolutionary process of discipline and love. I am not the exclusive beneficiary of it nor am I excluded from it. This is for us all–part of the gift of being an integral part of a changing world and Universe.