It Won't Always Be This Way

I'm writing this essay on the seven year anniversary of completing the alcohol treatment program at Schick Shadel Hospital . During this weekend each year, I take some time away to celebrate my life, to be still, to mark the things for which I'm grateful, to touch base with the foundation of my belief. This year, I'm also writing as the tax season begins its short slide into the urgency of single-focus effort right up until 5:00 pm on April 15th.

And this “new” circumstance has shed a whole different light on my experience with alcohol addiction. I put quotation marks around the adjective “new” because although I've never before worked as a licensed tax preparer, I have faced the urgency of single-focus effort before. In fact, the most harsh of such experiences precipitated my commitment to the Schick Shadel program.

In 2000, I was very happily staying at home, mothering my beautiful little girls, restoring a 100 year old farmhouse, diligently working through the advanced Institute for Children's Literature writing program, and making a warm welcome home for my hard-working man. Then one day, someone I considered a close friend started talking to me about a service that was missing from their climbing business, exploring whether I may be interested in building a company to fulfill that service. I do so love a challenge.

Within a few hectic months, I moved from attachment parenting to kissing my little ones good night after they were already asleep and kissing them goodbye before they woke up in the morning . Seventeen hours a day. Seven days a week. But, I told myself, it wouldn't last forever. Just six months and then I could back away. Just six months and I had promised so many people that I could make this business happen that I just couldn't fail. I had to do whatever it took. Three months in and our partner quit. I kept working. I had to succeed at the task. I went to work every day feeling like I was full of broken glass. But I was ready to do whatever it took. I started having a beer for breakfast. And so on. And so on.

We sold the set up and equipment the next Spring for a sweet little profit and I tried to go back to my life the way it had been. Beer for breakfast though wasn't something my body could get over.

And it wasn't just the physical, brain chemical addiction. When I was working from that single-focus crisis point, my foundation was fear. I think it's that way in any crisis whether we fear the loss of health, of a loved one, of our home, of financial security. Basically, I become motivated by the fear of failure - failure to keep my promise, keep my health, keep my security. “I'll do anything” becomes “I'll give anything”. By the time the task is achieved, and there's no more need for the insane effort and sacrifice, sometimes, there's nothing left of the life you had before you shifted into crisis mode. Worse, sometimes there's no self left but the one who already gave everything in the urgent single-focus effort of not failing to complete the task.

Huh --- a scene from the Tom Hanks movie “Cast Away” just flashed in my mind. At the very end of the dramatic story, he delivers the package to a remote ranch in Texas. Then he sits at the crossroads. Without direction. He had survived and, against truly impossible odds, returned to his old life. But it wasn't there for him anymore.

It can happen without alcohol, without addictions of any kind. It can happen anytime I get so focused on not failing the goal that I forget myself. When I take so many steps down the “I'll do whatever it takes” road that the only motivation I can remember for continuing the task is the fear of not completing it.

Maybe that's why I spend this weekend away every year. Away from all the tasks, all the goals, all the things that must be done for someone else. I fence off a time and space where I'm surrounded by what really matters to me. Where I touch base with mySelf. I breathe in. I breathe out. And I breathe in again.

This year, I'll be making cottonwood balm and several healing tinctures, planting basil, thyme, rosemary, and poppies to grow in my office, repairing my NordicTrack, setting up a sewing table and long delayed projects, feeling the sun (and snow and wind and rain and the big ol' moon) on my skin, and letting my heart fill up with my lovely big girls and my hard-working man.

I am so lucky to have them. I am so lucky to have my life.