Birthdays and gratitude

I'm feeling a bit dull because I'm nearing the end of a four-day weekend during which I did not much of anything. Whenever I have any significant time off I'm always tempted to spend it staring into space, to make it last longer, although usually my desire to go out and run around is stronger than my urge to savor the time, and my weekends fly past at top speed. This weekend, though, I've had my biennial cold, which forced me to spend a good deal of time at home, resting. It was a pretty wimpy cold, but for some reason it's made me really tired. It hovered all day on Thursday and then descended in earnest on Friday, but even at full force it wasn't anything to write home about. My head was congested and I blew my nose fairly often, but that was all, except for the aches and the fatigue. A head cold always seems to turn me into a ravenous pig, so I dragged myself to the grocery store on Friday morning, in my pajamas, and stocked up on food. Pretty much all I did on Friday, apart from the trip to the store, was lie around, doze and eat. By yesterday I'd stopped blowing my nose much at all, but I was still tired. I managed to jump on my trampoline and clean my house, but that was it until I went to the meeting last night, and today hasn't been much better. My weekly trip to the laundromat wiped me out.

I'm now thinking wistfully of bedtime, which is a mere six or so hours away. I know better than to go to bed earlier than my usual time; whenever I try it, I wake up at some unearthly hour, like four, and can't get back to sleep. And with all the extra sleep I've had this weekend, probably I'll have some trouble getting to sleep even at the usual hour. But I'm sleepy, and my bones ache, so I may not be able to resist climbing into my cozy bed with its clean sheets, just for an hour or so, even at the risk of dealing a fatal blow to the plan of going to sleep at the usual hour. Maybe if I put a movie in the DVD player I'll be able to keep my eyes open.

So, the first hurdle in the course which makes up what we call the holidays has been surmounted, without much difficulty on my part. I make holidays easy for myself by simply opting not to participate in anything I don't feel like doing. Like, for instance, spending Thanksgiving with my family. Don't get me wrong; I love my family, but I find them exhausting en masse. Besides, we're all so scattered now that it would take a miracle of planning to get us all together for one holiday. It was different when my mom was alive, but now it all just seems like more trouble than it's worth to get together. So I spent Thanksgiving with the people I think of as my real family: members of Narcotics Anonymous. We have a tradition, those of us with no family in town, of meeting up at the Tee Off restaurant in the afternoon and celebrating the holiday together. If it was up to me, I would not choose the Tee Off, being as it's overpriced and the food isn't very good, but the tradition began before I moved to SB and nobody asked for my input. So I show up every year and keep my mouth shut about the bad food. It's not about the food, anyway. It's about showing appreciation for the people who help to keep me clean year after year. This year was very enjoyable, even though the party was rather small -- or perhaps because the party was rather small. I had a chance to talk to my friend Kelly at length, which I rarely get to do, and I also got to listen to her talk horses with Sue. I love listening to people talk about their favorite subjects. It was a lovely, stress-free way to spend Thanksgiving, and afterwards Kelly and I went to the women's meeting, which rounded out the day nicely.

My eleven-year clean-time anniversary is coming up soon. It's next Saturday, in fact, which seems unbelievable. Where did this year go? I think I'm still stuck back in August someplace. And I'm not the only one. Last night when I asked Rhonda to bring a cake to next week's meeting, she and several people sitting with her said, essentially, "What, already?" It seems not very long ago that I was taking my cake for ten years. Perhaps because of that, I haven't thought much about my birthday this year, which is a big change from the fanfare I gave it last year. But ten years is a big deal, somehow. I was so excited to be entering into the double digits that I just couldn't contain myself. I expected that once I was on the other side of ten, everything would fall into place and make sense, and I'd learn the secret handshake and be given the keys to the forbidden cupboard. But nothing like that happened. It was just another day clean. I'm only half-joking about that, and it isn't really true that nothing happened. I expected transformation and have had a transformative year, but though it may partly have to do with length of clean-time, I'm sure most of it is because I've worked a lot of steps, throughout my recovery but particularly in the last few years.

Even after nearly six years in Santa Barbara, I'm still not quite comfortable with the idea of celebrating a birthday rather than an anniversary. In Minneapolis, where I got clean, you don't go to a meeting to "take a cake" like you do here, where they sing Happy Birthday and you blow out your candles before speechifying for five minutes or so. Out there, you take a medallion, and it's all very dignified and decorous, with no off-key warbling or singed eyebrows. The thing I like the most about the way they do it in Minneapolis, though, is that someone presents you with your medallion. Here, someone gives you your cake, which means they hold it up while you blow out the candles, but out there they take it one step further. You both stand up in the middle of the room and before you can express your gratitude for another year clean, your presenter, who is usually your sponsor, makes a little speech about you. It's hard to take, all those nice things people say. When I took my one-year medallion and my sponsor stood in front of me and told me what she saw in me, I had a strong urge the whole time to turn around to see who she was talking to. I got a bit more comfortable with it over the years, but even at four years it was difficult. Still, I think it's a great tradition, and I loved presenting medallions to other people. I think it's good for us occasionally to hear how others perceive us, and I loved watching people go from polite disbelief to almost full acceptance over the course of a few years.

I'll finish up with a mention of Interferon and its effects and reverberations, shall I? I've been persuaded by several NA members not to shave my head just yet, but I don't know how much longer I can stand to deal with this mess that used to be hair. I keep saying that and I keep not shaving my head, but I know eventually I will grow tired of being driven to tears in front of the bathroom mirror every morning, while I attempt to put this limp, spongy stuff into some kind of order. It's only a matter of time.

I've discovered another odd side effect: the skin on my fingertips is thin and easily torn. I've noticed this for awhile but didn't connect it with the Interferon until someone I talked to at a meeting told me that he spent much of the last half of his year of treatment with Band-aids on most of his fingers. One nice thing about it is that my fingertips are extra sensitive, which makes feeling things like silk and cashmere and flower petals even more of a luxurious experience, but apart from that it's a pain in the ass. Like most people, I use my fingers a lot, and it's amazing how many formerly innocuous objects have become hazardous. I get paper cuts galore, and when I helped out my friend at her garage sale a couple of weeks ago I ended up with raw and bleeding fingers. The cuts I sustained that day only finished healing a few days ago. I even had to go buy some Neosporin and swathe the cuts with Band-aids because I kept re-opening them.

Ah, well, I'm still grateful that my Interferon experience isn't worse. I've been thinking a lot about that lately and feeling surges of gratitude about it. It could be so much worse. I'll put up with thin hair and nails and skin and be thankful for the absence of nausea and vomiting and chills, not to mention blood transfusions or shots to boost my immune system.