The Hand You've Been Dealt June 30, 2016

Tomorrow three years will have passed since I retired from UCSF, and perhaps it is a good time to pause and reflect on this period.  First, though, a little catching up is necessary since I haven’t written since February.  

By mid-January of 2016, I felt that I could no longer continue to run my life the way I have been since I retired.  This wasn’t really a plan or a problem of my own making, it was just the way I responded to the challenge of loving and attempting to help a daughter whose life had become derailed by drugs.   After witnessing her cycles of rehab, relapse, disappearance, and trauma, I was utterly exhausted.  In those 20 months, I had slept through the night only twice.  Otherwise, I woke up each night in a panic attack, heart racing, mind in agony, and then awoke again in the morning with terrifying thoughts born from this tragedy:  Is she sober?  Has she fallen in with some creepy guy?  Has she disappeared?  Is she still alive?  I found myself in a pit of despair and anxiety and was heading toward a complete collapse.

To those of you who might be reading this blog in hopes of some insight into retirement, my posts during this time period may not be what you were expecting or hoping for.  That makes two of us.  My life, which was supposed to be a template for the joyful struggle of establishing a “brand new me”, instead turned into a struggle, full stop.

And yet, as I have indeed changed the way I live my life, I realize that perhaps I have done something more powerful than even I was hoping for.  Let me explain.

By the third week of January, I had enrolled in four classes – two at College of Marin and two at California College of the Arts.  I belonged to two singing groups.  And I got sick with something that wasn’t terrible, but was painful and left me with the inability to eat very much.  All this on top of no sleep and nightmares.

As it happened, a few weeks before Christmas, I went to visit a friend from chorus who does grief counseling, and she said, “I know you’ll think this is hokey, but think about doing the 12 Steps.”  She was referring, of course, to the 12 Steps of the Alcoholics Anonymous program, which are also used for recovery of relatives of alcoholics (and addicts) in their own recovery from this disease. 

She was right, though hokey may not have been exactly the word that described my feeling about it.  Some of the 12 Steps involved taking a deep inventory of the wrongs you have done and then make amends to those you have harmed.  What?  Why do I need to do that?  I wasn’t the one who got us into this mess, so why do I have to make amends?  I haven’t done anything wrong!

But wait, I thought, what does it matter if this isn’t my “fault”?  The point is that I am in this quicksand of despair that is powerfully sucking me down and suffocating me.  I may not have made this mess, but only I can pull myself back out.  And with that, I realized that I would need to do everything I could to question my own choices.  I realized that I indeed I had a choice!  What a concept.

Since I was already behind in schoolwork and singing because of my illness, I decided in late January to drop three of the classes and one of the two music groups.  Then I committed myself to waking up each morning to meditate, followed by writing in my journal, followed by reading something inspirational.  Next, I decided to go on an anti-anxiety medication to simply start getting some sleep again, so that I could establish a good cushion for all the work I needed to do.  I already had established a relationship with a therapist to help get through this painful period.  And then, there was Alanon.

I tried to get a bit more understanding about this 12-step business, and I found a Buddhist perspective on the 12 Steps on the San Francisco Zen Center website.  I was blown away by their interpretation and analysis.  It made actual sense.  Step 1: have come to believe that your life is unmanageable.  Check.  Step 3: have made a decision to turn your life over to God as you know him.  Well, for me, the God part wasn’t the point, but that word "decision" was terrifying.  You mean to say, I will make a decision to let go of my old ways, when perhaps what I really want to do is to nurse my old grudge, to continue to feel sorry for myself, and to remain paralyzed with fear about something that may or may not ever happen?  And once I realized that through my resistance I was choosing to hang onto all that crap, and that another approach might be possible, I came to appreciate that I had already made the decision to let go. 

I was quite skeptical, despite my friend’s encouragement, but I then met a man who told me (without my even bringing up my daughter at all) that his partner’s son was a heroin addict and that he had spent a year and a half going to a particular Alanon meeting in San Francisco.  He said it was transformational, so much so that he actually came to believe that everyone should go to Alanon.

This got my attention.  In truth, when Annie first was in rehab, the advice given to me was that I should go to six different Alanon meetings before deciding whether it was for me.  Which I promptly and obediently did, but none of them seemed like a good fit.  So I asked someone else who seemed to know a lot about recovery for a suggestion, and she told me to go to a Saturday morning meeting designed specifically for parents of addicts. 

The “penny dropped”.  These were my people.  The room held 200 grieving parents who had been through everything I had been through, sometimes more than I had been asked to handle, including death of their child.  Here was understanding.  Here was advice.  Here was encouragement.  Here was love.  I have gone every Saturday since then, and I can certainly feel profound change in my attitude, in my resilience, and in my overall ability to once more enjoy life.