Regret and redemption

The weeks are flying past. This particular week wasn't distinguished in any way except that I've had quite a few bad lung days. It rained for a couple of days and that moist air is the worst weather for my lungs. When the rain stopped we were treated to an incredible heat wave: on Friday I drove home from work in my lovely air-conditioned car, and when I got off the freeway at about 5:45 I noticed that the outside temperature was 91 degrees. Ouch! The heat dried things out and left me with dry mucous in my chest and my sinuses. My nose has taken to bleeding daily, and occasionally I'll blow a chunk of dryish, bloody snot out of it, after which my sinuses feel clearer and I can breathe better for awhile. Excuse the crudity. But that dry mucous won't come out of my chest. It rattles around in there and won't budge. I've been jumping on my trampoline the last two days and my ankle has been fine while my lungs have not. I keep feeling lightheaded and I don't have much stamina.

I thought I'd get the side effects out of the way first, since they're sort of what this blog is supposed to be about, but they aren't what has been occupying me for the last week. Lately I've been consumed with regret over the past, which is very unlike me. I've always maintained that regret is a waste of time, which of course it is. What about the past can I change? Nothing. So what's the point of wishing it was different? All it does is rob me of the present, as I waste my time mooning over what might have been. I fully believe all of that, yet in the last week I've spent much of my time going over the past and wishing, futilely, that I hadn't wasted my life. I started using at fourteen and didn't get clean until I was 33, apart from a three-year hiatus in my mid-twenties, and during those nineteen years I jacked around, getting loaded, not working, not doing anything worthwhile. I went to college and came within three classes of my BA before I dropped out to pursue my addiction full-time. I spent most of my time and energy hiding from life and seeking out oblivion in one form or another, and now I look back at that and think, "What a fucking waste. Why did I not know what was important?" I even came up with a fantastic scenario of what my life would have looked like had I been able to oversee my own upbringing, had I been there to give myself encouragement and to teach me the joys of delayed gratification and the value of working toward something I want. I have experienced the most intense longing I've ever felt to go back and do it over, like a video game, taking with me what I've learned this time.

Possibly because of that, all week there has been something simmering under the surface which I think is starting to come up now. The other day I found myself arguing with myself about something and I suddenly recognized that I was inhabited by two different people. I recognized two distinct voices in my mind, and this set something in motion which yesterday's entry in Just For Today, about the fluidity of truth, kicked up a notch. It came bursting out of me at the meeting last night in an incoherent stream of consciousness which helped me to see where I'm headed. I think. When I opened my mouth to share I identified, as usual, and said, "I think I have something to say." I apologized in advance if I was incomprehensible, but I was literally thinking out loud, exploring new territory with my voice instead of my pen. What I'm coming to see is that I'm not one person but many, that I am a collection of selves and I have many distinct voices within me, not just two. I've always thought that I was working toward integration, that by working the steps and examining myself I would attain unity of self, if that phrase is possible. But it hasn't worked that way. Working the steps has allowed me to see that I am composed of many selves, and to be okay with that.

I've always been rigid. Too rigid. I've always wanted things to mean one thing and one thing only, for good and all. I want to pin things down and file them away because that makes me feel more secure. I desire an ordered universe, so I put the universe in order all by myself. I'm coming to see, though, that by working the steps I have developed enough faith and self-assurance that I can relax my paralyzing grip on continuity. Life is fluid. The truth is fluid. I am fluid. Flux is the only constant, and what was true yesterday may not be true today. All of my life I've been almost pathological about consistency. I carry around a mostly-unconscious assumption that I have a consistent core, an unchanging self which is expressed by my personality, and so if I deviate from the way I've always seen myself, I feel I'm being untrue to my essential self. But now I'm not sure there's an essential self to betray.

What if, when I disentangle all of the myriad strands of personality which make up what I think of as my self, I find that those strands are all there is, that there is no core? The thought is terrifying, but why should it be? What has my personality got to do with my essential being? I will shed both my body and my personality when I die, and my being will return to its ground, which, of course, it never really left. The person I think of as "I" is not a person at all but a complex of personae, some of which are at odds with others.

There's some sort of connection between that train of thought and the illumination I received this morning as I jumped on my trampoline, but I can't find it at the moment. As I jumped, my mind flitted from one idea to another, as it tends to do, and before too long it arrived at step eight ("We made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all."). When I told my sponsor, after I presented my writing on step seven, that I have no one to put on my eighth step list this time, she insisted that I work it anyway, on myself, which annoyed me no end. It seemed like a waste of time to me, and I have an entrenched opinion that we shouldn't put ourselves on our eighth step list. Steps eight and nine are about other people. I make amends to myself by working all of the steps. I agreed to do it, however, because Kim is my sponsor and I take her direction, although I wasn't in any hurry to begin it.

So, anyway, as I jumped I thought about step eight and about what I might be making amends to myself for, and suddenly the light dawned. Illumination came flooding in. All of this grieving I've been doing lately, this regret I've been feeling so acutely over all the missed opportunities and all the years I wasted chasing after oblivion, it's all part of the process. I think I've arrived at step eight at last. I needed to go through that all-consuming anger at my parents, to purge myself of it and forgive them before I could get down to the slow-burning anger I felt toward myself, to the self-blame which lay at the back of what I shoved off onto my parents. My job now is to forgive myself for having wasted my life. If I don't, I will waste what time I've got left nursing this useless regret and not allowing myself to move forward.

I'm not dead yet. There's still hope. There are some things I can't do; some doors have closed for good. But there's no reason in the world why I can't oversee my own upbringing now, starting today, and give myself the good foundation for adulthood that I need and deserve. I may not be nineteen anymore, but the world is still my oyster.