The Colors of Your Recovery will Change

Stages of Recovery Quilt by Miriam J.

         When I celebrated my fifth year of recovery my friend Miriam made a quilted wall hanging for me to mark that significant anniversary. Miriam was ahead of me in recovery and she had then celebrated her 10th anniversary. Quilting was one of the passions that she’d reclaimed thanks to recovery and she was –much to her own surprise—very good.

         The quilt panel that she made for me she called “Stages of Recovery.” It is a vertical panel that links four quilted squares on a deep burgundy background. The panels represent four stages of recovery and they begin at the top with a distinct checkerboard of black and white panels. This top square, Miriam told me, represents the very start of recovery and the black and white necessity of not using your addictive substance. The stark contrast is about following the rules and doing what you are told. The black and white color scheme is clearly, “On/Off” and “Good/Bad”.

         The panel just below that is another square with a strong black base with side columns of pure white but with a deep pink band across the top that dips down to touch the back squares. “This is your pink cloud phase,” Miriam said. “This is where you are so happy to be in recovery; things are starting to get better; you see the gifts of the program and you just want more.”

         I do remember that time of my recovery well. I talked about recovery to everyone. I carried recovery books and Alanon pamphlets home to Pittsburgh with me for the holidays.  Yeah, now I know this is not a table topic for Thanksgiving. But then...  This is the time when some of us begin to proselytize. We are so proud of ourselves  and we can’t understand why everyone isn’t following our lead and joining a Twelve-Step program. Life is going to be great from now on, right? Alas.

         The next square down on my “stages” quilt is a square that includes neat rectangles made of black and white and pink prints. It’s pretty but not regimented like the stark black and white square at the top. This third square has something new: Now there are also deep gray squares scattered among the printed ones and a solid charcoal gray square at the very center.

Yes, this represents the gray of recovery and how the gray of life arrives.

But the bottom –and last quilt square-- is the shocker. The bottom piece is made up of many small squares seemingly tossed at random. Some are the now familiar black and white and pink ones and there’s even some gray, but mixed in are more squares of candy red, bright blue, acid green, deep purple, tangerine orange and a dull mustard yellow. There is no order in this “stage”. This square is totally messy but it is deeply and happily colorful.

For years I disliked that last square. The other sections with their deliberate and limited palates were graphic and sharp—and orderly-- but this last square with its messy mix of too many colors always bothered me. But that bottom square—the “messy but colorful” part of recovery --is what “Out of the Woods” is all about. Messy progress. Happiness. No perfection.

What we know now is that as women in recovery we need each of these stages and we need them in that order. When we are new we need to submit to and embrace strict rule following. “Don’t use-no matter what.” “If your ass falls off pick it up and take it to a meeting.”

 Then, as recovery starts to “take” we are embraced in and humored through our “pink clouds” but they too run their course. The gray enters our recovery and we find that it’s a time when the right sponsor and good recovery friends matter a lot. Discernment is a skill we have to develop in these gray years. Our recovery becomes our own; we make choices based on recovery principles but our choices may not look like someone else’s.

Then, if we keep coming and we keep growing, our lives become more colorful and yes, even messy. This is when we have to figure out what our recovery will be like for the long haul. This may also be the time when newcomers or people in the “black and white” stages will question or challenge our commitment.  They might say things like, “If you don’t go to three meetings a week you are going to slip.”

Those in their own “pink cloud” stage will wonder at our suffering or our struggles. “She must not be working a good program if she is sad.” Or,  “She just needs to practice the Third Step and everything will turn out fine.” They will want to believe that if they get their recovery “just right”—kind of like Goldilocks—then they will be spared the realities of human life that everyone experiences as we age.

Finally, in that colorful and messy stage, we will have fewer “shoulds.” We might have a sponsor or just a couple of great recovering women friends. We might leave the marriage that in early recovery we worked so hard to save. Or we might have a baby --with or without a partner. We might leave our law practice to be an artist while our best friend gives up her successful pottery business to go to nursing school. There are no right answers, plenty of confusion and lots of new problems for sure but all of that is built on a strong base of deep recovery.

Any Amount and Any Time

Sometimes the little things turn out to be the big things. We know this about relationships. That remark on the first date. The joke made about the ex. The comment about a former boss. Later, we look back and sigh; we know that we knew. The little things were all there.

I have been writing for many years. Fiction, nonfiction, columns, essays and now two and a half books. Even I am surprised. I did all this writing with a big and busy day job, with a sad divorce, then a happy new marriage, several step kids and even cancer—his, mine and ours. And I kept on writing.

Recently my new book, “Out of the Woods”, was launched and I’ve been asked, “How did you do this with your job and travel and school and taking care of John? And I had to think about it for a minute. How did I do all that? It turns out that I did it in little bits and by writing “any amount” and anytime.

Yes, I have fantasized about a life of just writing. Once I took off two years to “just write” and it turned out that I didn’t like it much. I missed the “water-cooler” aspect of work. I discovered that I needed the socialization of a workplace—the problems and the people and the gossip. I write a lot about human beings and workplaces are full of them.

So I had to learn some tricks. My favorite writing tool came from my yoga teacher in Baltimore. When I would try a pose she would gently coax, “Can you stretch any amount more?” or “Can you hold it any amount longer?” Any amount. Just a little bit. Just a tad longer, higher, deeper, more. No giant commitments. No unreachable promises like: “I will write two hours each day.” Nope—just “any amount”. It turns out that writing is kind of like yoga and I could write “any amount” every day and it added up.

Something else that makes writing in a busy life possible: index cards. I take notes on index cards all the time. At work, at dinner, at church, in a cab. Index cards look so official that no one seems to notice or mind. And I'm writing.

I did learn not to write while I drive. I tried but it’s too scary. But another little tool helps me: I love my small tape recorder. Nope, not my phone. I know it can record but the phone reminds me of obligations. My little recorder is only for writing. And it reinforces that I can write anywhere.

For a long time I tried to only write at my desk, or only on retreat or only… Well, forget only. Writers write. I can write anywhere. It may not be brilliant but I capture ideas and write them down. Later, at my desk, I can make them prettier. Yeah, pretty does matter.

It turns out that writing is a lot like 12-step recovery: I do it one day at a time, in tiny bites and I do it everywhere in all of my life.

This Mary Month of May

I grew up in a Protestant family. My brothers and I went to Sunday school, got confirmed, and later married in the same Methodist Church on Pittsburgh’s Northside. Overall, it was a good experience. But I always envied Catholic girls, especially in May.

Our working class neighborhood was a mixture of Protestant and Catholic families. Kids were divided by schools: Spring Hill Public or Saint Ambrose Catholic. But it was a close neighborhood and we all played together after school. We were in and out of each others houses often, and one mother could stand in for another when it came to discipline or first aid. The differences were few but the Catholic girls seemed to have something special.

It was in second grade that my feelings of envy emerged. My Catholic friends were having their First Holy Communion. My friends got to wear poofy white dresses and headbands with flowers and little veils. They were given medals with pictures of saints, rosaries and most intriguing, scapulars.

A scapular is two small patches of cloth with holy pictures on them, connected by a loop of string.  My girl friends told me that it protected them from evil and all manner of bad things, and it was a sin, they told me, to take it off.  The idea of a passionate commitment to something, even a string with holy pictures, was very appealing.

Catholicism offered my friends other comforts. As a kid I would have liked a patron saint or a guardian angel, but the Methodist church didn’t offer any of those. Instead we were counseled, in an ecumenically respectful way, that all that stuff was Catholic and kind of magical. Now, this was at the same age that I was fascinated with writing in code, creating invisible ink, becoming a blood sister, playing with the Ouija board and making up secret societies. I was made myth and magic out of anything I could get my hands and mind around.

The best thing, though, that Catholic girls got was Mary. She was presented as motherhood and sweetness, but Catholic girls got a very clear message that there was a woman in heaven, that somebody understood the female side of things.

For Protestant girls, Mary shows up once a year-- at Christmas --to give birth. She might get dragged out again on Good Friday—but only in the background. No role model, no intercessor, no friend. My Catholic pals had statues of Mary. Some had the plastic glow-in-the-dark kind, and the older girls had painted plaster Marys, dressed in blue robes with big doe eyes like my Barbie. And Mary was always standing on a snake. I certainly did not understand the symbolism, but I knew at ten that this 12 inch woman had some power you could not buy for Barbie.

Best of all, my friends had May altars. A May altar was basically a table with an old lace tablecloth thrown over it. They put their Mary statues on it with flowers and candles that they were allowed to light when they said their prayers.  It still strikes me how feminine those altars were. The Catholic girls had total permission to identify with the feminine in spiritual matters. But no one gave little Protestant girls such romantic, mysterious things to do or own.

This carried over into all of a Catholic girl’s life. Mary got prayers, devotions, pilgrimages and even architectural consideration: there is a Marian shrine in every Catholic Church. Talk about having a room of one’s own. Mary’s presence meant that the Catholic Church included at least one woman at a high level. In her assumption into heaven, Mary had broken Christianity’s glass ceiling.

We pretty much get the shape of our beliefs early on, and what Catholic girls got was a She and a Her, someone like them, to pray to. And they got all those accessories: medals, scapulars, rosaries, ruffled altar skirts and little white prayer books. Protestant girls got black leatherette New Testaments, Jesus stories, but nothing that said, “We’re glad you’re a girl.”

Of course, later, Catholic girls ran into the birth control problem and the wall that said, “You can’t be a priest”. But what I saw my childhood Catholic friends get was faith in their girlhood and an image of feminine power. That’s not such a bad way to start out.

The Soundtrack of Your Recovery

Many people in long recovery use music as a tool. It is part of our stress management, our spiritual practice and as inspiration to the ways we want to live in the world. But it’s not a tool that we talk about much in meetings.

This week I have been blasting the soundtrack to the film, “Oh Brother Where Art Thou”—the depression era award-winning movie by the Coen Brothers starring George Clooney and John Goodman. I’ve been signing along and belting the songs even though I truly have no singing voice. The poignancy of the roots music cracks me open, helps me to cry and some of the songs become recovery anthems.

Today I kept hitting the repeat button to hear “Keep on the Sunny Side” by The Whites, and “In the Highways” performed by the young Peasall Sisters.

Perhaps my all time favorite “recovery inspiration” music is the sound track to the Broadway show, “Les Miserables.” My personal anthem is the barricades song and in the privacy of my car I make up new lyrics for “Will you join us” and “We will not be slaves again.”

You can find recovery music everywhere. It is whatever resonates with that better part of you and the part that aspires to helping you live the principles of the program.

My friend “T” keeps one of her car radio buttons set to a Christian radio station. Her personal faith and theology is not that conservative but she likes the uplift she gets from the Christian songs and she says that she can make those lyrics into prayers on her way to work.

So please share: What is your “non-conference-approved” recovery music? Is it Broadway? Tupac? Top 40? Or Country?

Here is some inspiration:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpDbvlAI_A0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sy1eOLEiyFY

Amor Fati--or Life on Life's Terms

In the recent bestseller, “Life After Life” written by Kate Atkinson, I learned this beautiful term, “Amor Fati”—which is Latin for accepting or loving your fate.

The concept comes from Marcus Aurelius who wrote an ancient guide for how to conduct one’s life and how to develop as a person. His work was very important to the German philosopher, Frederick Nietzsche who, in his book, Ecce Homo, wrote:

"My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendacity in the face of what is necessary—but love it."

Doesn’t that seem terribly familiar? It is so close to our twelve-step ideas of “ceasing to fight everything and everyone”, and “not regretting the past.”

Amor fati means acceptance. Whatever happens to you, embrace it, the good and the bad equally. We accept life on life’s terms. Amor fati: that might just be worthy of a tattoo.

The Art of Real Happiness

In the 1950’s and through the 1970’s, Reverend Norman Vincent Peale was a best-selling author while serving as the renowned minister at The Marble Colligate Church in Manhattan.

His books and radio talks inspired millions of people. He started a clinic at Marble Collegiate with psychiatrist Smiley Blanton where they developed a form of religious-psychological therapy, which was radically new and a bit controversial at the time. (Interestingly, today the fields of psychology and psychiatry are returning to practices that directly include the spiritual and religious beliefs of clients.)

Peale’s work was inspirational and like his peer, Dale Carnegie, he helped millions of Americans understand their feelings, beliefs and behaviors, and to learn new methods of communication and personal change.

One of Peale’s most popular books was, “The Art of Real Happiness” which became a hand-to-hand classic within the Alcoholics Anonymous community. And it’s no surprise as Peale’s message was close in tone and meaning to the messages and practices of AA: Surrender, Acceptance, Living One Day at a Time and committing to a regular faith life and habit.

In a used bookstore a month ago I found a first-edition copy of “The Art of Real Happiness” and marveled at my good luck. Then marveled further to see that in 1950 Peale had included a chapter called, “A Solution for Problem Drinking” where he details some of the psychological aspects at the root of problem drinking, naming resentment as a big one. And then he gives—in caring detail—an outline of how AA works—with the example of a businessman who has fallen far, and another showing a woman who is also struggling with drink.

This powerful chapter also tells the story of AA’s start and the importance of having a spiritual experience.

I love knowing that this classic piece of 1950’s self-help literature was also admired and shared by our earlier AA family members, and to know that we are also part of the Norman Vincent Peale lineage as well.