I Wish I Was Normal

For the last few months I haven't written a blog. It's not that I haven't tried to write one, I've tried many times. I've sat down at my computer and tried to type out what I was feeling, but I've never gotten past the first paragraph. A short recap of the last few months includes falling off the wagon, getting back on it, and falling off again.  Being an addict is really hard. I could sit here and try to come up with a more eloquent way of putting that, but “hard” feels like the most appropriate word. When you're an addict even the smallest battles feel like giant mountains that you have to traverse without a safety net. One of the worst things about being an addict is the constant isolation. Sure members of OA have meetings and support groups and sponsors to pick you up in your lowest moments, but being an addict, your lowest moments aren’t just the ones when you want to eat food it's all the other moments of the day. It's getting sad for no reason at 2 o'clock in the morning. It's feeling different, feeling estranged from the rest of the world.  Sometimes you just want to feel normal.

For instance, this weekend I had the pleasure of attending a Wedding of a friend I’ve known since High School.  I say pleasure, but I really should say horror.  It was a wonderful ceremony and I’m told there was quite a beautiful reception afterwards.  I say I was told, because I wasn’t there.  I was already making my two hour trek home.  I was at the reception for upwards of five minutes but then I started shaking, lost my nerve, and sat in my car for twenty minutes before driving home.  I wish I wasn’t this person.  It seems that somewhere along the line, I never learned how to socially interact with people.  I never learned how to have the “Pottery Barn” discussion.  The meaningless conversation that it seems most couples have managed to perfect.  You know what I mean, the random talk about dinnerware or window blinds.  Something seemingly innocuous that makes the time go faster between where you are and what you need to be doing later.  You don’t remember those conversations afterwards, but you remember how pleasant the other couple was and you leave with a tiny jolt of happiness.  I don’t know how to have those conversations and the mere fact that I call them “conversations” might be part of the problem.   I know that so many people suffer from some kind of social anxiety but for someone who teaches Professional Speech for a living this is more than just a casual problem.  

Before I continue, I don’t want to get into a semantics debate about the word “normal”.  Yes, I understand that no one is truly normal, but I don’t think anyone is confused by my meaning.  And I also know that the bulk of people who know me would say that I am extremely personable, if not occasionally too personable.  It's true that there are certain groups of people and certain situations that let my guard down.  I joke all the time that I have very little shame, which is regularly true, but when it comes to anything “real” like the birth of a child or a date or a wedding my inner inability to even speak rises to the forefront.  I become scared, clammy, and lost.  

I'm extremely jealous of my friends who have mastered these skills.  I’m jealous of the married couple who work typical hours and typical jobs while raising their two daughters and get in arguments over the PTA and mortgages.  On more than one occasion, I’ve been caught saying “I wish we could switch places,” and them replying without any hesitancy, “yes.”  Maybe this isn’t really a desire to be normal or something to do with addiction, but rather the paradox of the grass always being greener.  Everyone in one way or another is envious of what other people have.  The rich person will sit and ponder what it must be like to be poor without the responsibility of their job while the poor person worries about paying that mortgage and wishes to be rich.  But here is the part where the addiction kicks in.  

It’s not that I’m any more or less socially anxious than a lot of my friends, but rather that because of my addiction I wallow in it.  A problematic social interaction can live with me for weeks or just five hours, those five hours being the ones between lunch and dinner. The hours where the addiction really rests.  I’ve had a lot of people ask me about my progress and most of them comment on how hard it must be for me to work out all that time.  What they don’t see is that those three hours a day are the best three hours.  The problem comes with the other twenty-one hours.  The twenty-one hours when an anxiety attack outside of a wedding reception can make you just want to eat a pizza to numb the pain.  And why was this particular wedding reception so terrifying.  Was it watching all the happy couples hold each other closer as the bride and groom gave their vows?  Was it the little ring bearer nearly tripping over his giant shoes walking down the aisles which made even the most cynical audience member ooo and awe?  Was it sitting alone in a giant crowd of people?  Or was it simply walking into a ballroom, feeling scared, and turning around to a giant table of cupcakes and smelling the sugar from twenty feet away?  It could’ve been any one of these things and it wasn’t anyone’s fault.  

Some days I just wish I could be normal

But I’m not.  

198 days down. 

The Ten Year Reunion Syndrome

I haven’t written in the last few months for a variety of reasons.  I could give you some long drawn out excuse.  Maybe it was work got harder and longer, I started writing other things, or I just got busy.  I think the truth lies somewhere in between all of those answers and this one: I didn’t want to.  Honesty is a very fickle thing.  Sometimes we yearn to live our lives like open books and other times like a closed off attic, but it becomes increasingly harder to live like the latter after you’ve accomplished the former.  Some things are just difficult to talk about, not necessarily because you don’t want to, but more so because it takes a lot of energy to explain something simple.  Within that energy process it can become difficult to distinguish between what you think is true and what is actually true.  It’s like our minds trick us into believing something.  We believe we’re happy, when we’re not.  We see despair during accomplishment.  We fight battles that have already been won.  I think that best describes my past four and a half months.

I say four and a half months because that’s how long I’ve been on program.  There have been multiple slip ups and set backs, but I have yet to fall off the wagon; perhaps just watched the wagon tip over while I grabbed at the sides.  In the course of the 135 days, I’ve lost and sustained the loss of 40 lbs (52 overall), which might seem like a major accomplishment, but it doesn’t feel like it and there I go again with my mind seeing despair during accomplishment.  In the last month and a half my weight loss has stalled.  I haven’t gained any back, but I’ve also failed to lose very much.  This might seem like a minor setback, but it feels like a major one.  I haven’t managed to follow my trainer’s plan entirely and I’ve fallen back into old habits.  Can you teach an old dog new habits?  Am I an old dog?  I think some of these thoughts come from something I am calling, “The Ten Year Reunion Syndrome,” or TYRS for short.

TYRS can affect people at their 20th class reunion and at their 5th (If you have one), but I think it’s most dangerous at the tenth.  Your tenth is special, because it’s usually the first (and sometimes the last) time you’ll see the people you grew up with.  It’s the time when you prove to everyone who and what you’ve become.  I think the operative word in that statement is “prove,” because that’s what it feels like.  It feels like you have to measure up to some non-descriptive, unknown, accomplishment-driven version of yourself.  You have to prove that your life has mattered.

I’m sure, if you hadn’t guessed already, it might be a little obvious that I wasn’t the Homecoming King in High School.  I wasn’t hated, but I did suffer my fair share of bullying.  I did get slugged in the jaw in the middle of the lunch room freshman year and I did do theatre, which made me “gay”.  I was self conscious about my size and I never managed to fit in with any one crowd.  I loved sports, but couldn’t play them very well.  I loved theatre, but there were peers with more talent.  They could sing better, act better, and they most certainly looked better.  There were plenty of other things that made my high school years a living Hell, but that’s for another time.  In terms of social hierarchy, I fit somewhere in the lower middle class.  I wasn’t an outcast, but I was at best the fifth wheel.

With this in mind, I’ve had dreams of showing up at my class reunions.  I remember one from high school about my 25th high school reunion.  I’d show up in an Escalade.  My beautiful Amazonian wife (I’m tall, it made since for my fictional wife to be tall) and I would casually stroll into the event hall.  I would be a three-term Congressman from a place like Virginia or North Carolina.  We’d have a splendid time, most people wanting to know about my job and others gawking at my wife.  Then, a helicopter would fly over and land nearby.  Multiple Secret Service agents would come into the event hall looking for me, because I was being asked to be on the ticket in the upcoming election cycle.  We would leave and all of my classmates would stare in awe.  No joke, this was something I actually dreamed up.  Also I’d walk in slow motion into the hall and the song Cochise by Audioslave would play.

That was my dream.  For my ten year reunion, I’d even be okay with my reality...as of last year.  If my ten year reunion happened last year, I could’ve said, “I’m a Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University with an MFA in Theatre Pedagogy and I’m on my way towards a doctorate.  I’m currently a professional dramaturg (At this point I would have to describe what a dramaturg does), I direct 4-5 shows a year, and I managed to turn a former career in politics into a career in professional academia.”  They’d ask about my personal life and I would reply, “I’ve got a few people I’m interested in, but right now I just have to focus on my career, so I can afford my studio apartment.”  I could’ve said that.  Now I can’t.

“Hi, I’m Grant.  I have no job.  I have an MFA in a subject that I don’t know if I want to keep doing, I live in my father’s basement, most days I wear sweatpants.  I’m single and alone and I don’t know what I’ll be doing in the future.   I decided to take a year off to focus on my health, but for the last month and a half my weight loss has stalled.”  See what I mean when I wrote that it feels like a major setback.  It’s the problem with TYRS.  It’s a syndrome that can affect us even when it isn’t settled around a reunion.  I’m headed back to my alma mater for the first time since I left and I feel like I have to prove that taking a year off was a good thing.  It’s hard to do that when you feel like you’re slipping away and lost in your own thoughts and despair.

That’s TYRS.  It makes us want to prove everything.  But the truth is that we can’t live life trying to prove our worth to other people.  We have to live life trying to prove something to ourselves and be proud of that journey.  Today, I talked to a former student whose play I’m about to direct.  I said something to him that I didn’t even realize until after I said it.  I said, “Your show will be the first full length play that I will direct clean and abstinent.”  It will be the first time in my life that I haven’t had to worry about food as a means to get through the day.  Perhaps that’ll have to do for now.

As always, I hope you are happy and healthy.  And may God bless your serenity if you choose to ask for it.  

Who Am I: In Search of Identity

The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time Demetrius Phalereus for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their places, in so much that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.  ~Plutarch, Theseus

Who am I?  This is the age-old question, the one philosophers melt wax and poets write manuscripts over.  Only the question of “Why am I here,” trumps its importance.  We ask this question daily and continue to do so up until our dying breath.  Sometimes we think we’ve found the answer and feel content, but then we learn something about ourselves and begin to ask the question all over again.  Some of us have the ability to live in blissful ignorance, never bothering to ask the question once they’ve found a suitable answer.  I used to think that the people in this position are using their ignorance as a vice, but nowadays perhaps it is a virtue.  To know one’s place and to feel content with one’s own position is becoming more and more a rarity.  Maybe it should be heralded rather than fussed over.  Maybe it’s okay to just live rather than worry about why we live and who we are in the process of that living.  Maybe that’s not ignorance at all, it’s just living without definitions.  Good or bad, it is of little consequence for me.  I’m an artist and being content with my own self-identity was never in my cards.

…But what if it could be?

Who am I?  Starting from age three, I was a paleontologist, a firefighter, a spy, and a baseball player.  Most people would say, “no, those are careers, not who you are,” but for me I was defined by where I thought I needed to go.  Once I decided on being an actor, that was it, my whole world revolved around defining myself as an actor.  Then I turned ten and my world got turned upside down.  I went from 75 lbs to 122 lbs and my addiction began.  My mother became an alcoholic and my adulthood began.  I went to middle school and my bullying began.  Soon enough there were more labels to define myself than could fit on one person.  I was no longer the kid who was going to be an actor.  I became the kid who was a lost, depressed, suicidal loner who dreamt of being an actor.  On top of that I was an addict, but I had no idea.  My world became so caught up in my loneliness and depression and pessimism to even see a brighter tomorrow.  When I went to college, I tried to be a list of different things.  I was the funny guy (not all that funny) and I was the quiet guy (still am in many ways) and I was the outgoing socialist (It was SDS, we fought the power and knew true strife all from the comforts of our private university).  For a while I tried to be the partier, the guy everyone could count on for booze.  Sophomore year that led me to binge drinking and doing a fair share of other recreational activities.  All of this was in search of that question, “Who am I?”  I won’t make you read my life story nor do I want to write it, but instead I’ll summarize the rest.  Whether it was theatre or my political career or coaching or living in the back of a truck, I kept on searching and kept on coming up empty.  

Then I went to VCU and in the course of three years and one remarkable thesis, I found myself.  I dealt with complex issues that I never even dreamed that I had.  In totality, I wrote three hundred or so pages of my thesis and there wasn’t a single word that mentioned my size or my weight, yet somehow after writing and performing it I came to the conclusion that I was an addict.  Admitting it was more than just a phase, I went to my first OA meeting a week after my show closed.  I was finally beginning to be free.  I set a course for myself and casted off.  When I moved back to Iowa, I remember saying, “I might be back in the same place, but I’m not lost anymore.”  

…I’m lost again.  Only this time I have a map.  

Plutarch writes of the classic paradox that if we remove every piece of something and replace it with new and improved versions of those same pieces, does the original something remain the same or is it no longer the same thing.  As I wrote before, at the end of this phase of the addiction process (the process never ends) I will be in a completely different mindset. look very differently, feel differently, see differently (trust me, without sugar, you see colors much brighter and bolder).  In essence, I will be a completely different person.  This isn’t to say that I’ll go from looking like me to looking like Jon Hamm.  And I’m sure that many of you would say, “yes, you’ll look different, but you’ll still be the same old you,” but that actually isn’t true.  For the entirety of my adult life I have never been the best version of myself so I have no idea what that person looks like.  

This post doesn’t have some grand epiphany or some great end note rather its just something that I think about a lot.  I have a shit ton of time on my hands and when I’m not trying to do something creative or working out or eating, this is the number one thing on my mind, “who am I and who am I going to be?”  This terrifies me and yet it shouldn’t.  This unknown person is who I’ve always wanted to be.  I am finally getting the chance to answer again the question only to be of sound mind and body when I do so.  As I near the PhD application deadlines, these thoughts get worse and worse wondering if any of this, wondering if anything is really what I want.  The hardest part of asking, “Who am I” is figuring out the answer.  Right now I don’t know.

…One day at a time…

PS. One thing I am sure of about myself is that I love commas and I usually put them in the wrong places.  

Scared Out of My Mind

“The most important things are the hardest to say.  They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them — words shrink things that seemed limitless.”  ~Stephen King

This week I had written a different post that detailed the beginnings of my addiction.  I thought starting at the beginning and working up to the present would be a beneficial story, but today I just wasn't feeling it.  For me, my food addiction has represented a large wall, a buffer between how you feel and what you feel.  When your senses are dulled it's easy to overcome a sad feeling (for me at least) because you don’t have to deal with it in the same way as a healthy person.  Once that buffer comes down, those emotions, those things you thought you had fixed come rushing back like a dam bursting open.  Perhaps this is why I've been so emotional in the past few weeks.  It’s a new feeling for me and I really don’t like it.  I’m scared out of my mind.  

As the Stephen King quote reminds us, some things are diminished when they are said aloud or written on paper.  The emotional state that represents shock, for instance, must be felt to be understood and when describing that feeling all words pale in comparison to how you felt.  The same can be said for how I feel today.  The common colloquial “scared out of my mind,” is used in many ways today that don’t represent what it actually means.  So I can only ask you to trust me and believe me when I say that I am truly scared out of my mind.  This is by far the scariest thing I have ever done.  

Today my trainer told me half the things I’ve been eating are going away and that she wants to know via text/call how I feel and what I’m eating.  She’s a great trainer, but right now I’m super pissed off.  However, I’ve known myself long enough to acknowledge that if I’m pissed it usually means I’m just terrified and I’m masking it with anger.  There’s a reason why these two specific things are so terrifying and I will attempt to describe them to you.  Some of my thoughts may sound confusing, but that’s just because you will read them using logic.  You can’t use logic when you’re an addict.  

Step One:  We admitted we were powerless over compulsive eating — that our lives had become unmanageable.

Step Two:  Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

Step Three:  Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him.  

No matter what other people will say, for me, the hardest part of OA/AA/NA are the first three steps.  For starters, I am as far from religious without being atheist that a person can be, therefore how can I give my life over to something I don’t even believe in?  (In a later post I will talk about how I’m overcoming the whole “God” part of this, which ironically, in finding a substitute, I accidentally found faith).  Secondly, words like “powerless” and “sanity” and “turn our will and our lives over” are absolutely terrifying.  How in the world can I fix my disease by admitting defeat?  

I won’t ever fix my disease.  Accepting and fighting an addiction is like trying to get over losing a loved one; the pain will get better but it will never actually go away.  For every minute of every day for the rest of my life I will be an addict.  I can only hope that by working my program and staying true to my new self that every minute will be as a recovering addict.  That predicament alone is scary.  To think that as an addict the only true cure to my disease is death.  Really scary stuff.    

Logically I can sit alone in a room and know that I am strong enough to overcome sugar.  Hell, it’s just sugar.  It’s not like I’m fighting some rogue nation with a pair of pliers and a stick of juicy fruit.  However, the same logic that tells me I am strong enough to overcome this illness was also the same logic that I used when I ate entire pizzas and had no idea I had even ordered them.  It was the same logic that said if I eat eight Krispy Kremes tonight and save the other four until tomorrow it’s actually healthy.  And then the same logic that when I ate ten said it seems wasteful to just leave the last two all alone.  I need to recycle the box.  

My trainer wants me to cut out half the food I’m eating and text/call her about everything I’m eating.

 Here is what my logical brain hears:  This is too much and I can’t do this.  You’re telling me that I’ve already cut out everything I love eating, now I can’t even eat what I like.  I’m a failure and I can’t do this.  It’s like I’m a runner and you’re cutting off my legs and then telling me to run.  Fuck, now I have to call her about my food.  This sounds like a sponsor.  It’s getting all too real.  There’s no way I can fix my life in six months.  Now I can’t get my PhD.  I’m stuck in Iowa, I miss my friends, and my job, and my life.  I now have to fix every facet of my life…this very minute.  My future is knocking at the door telling me it’s over.  Why do I keep going?

That’s how I feel.  It’s how I have felt for the past two weeks (I’m two weeks clean today).  Some of you would read this and say he’s spiraling (true) and he’s not thinking logically, but the problem is that I am thinking logically.  I am thinking the way my brain has always worked.  For me, this is logic.  I build one conclusion on top of another conclusion.  My brain is diseased and is far from being sexy.  

This is the true nature of what I’m dealing with.  It’s not that I have to overcome an addiction to sugar or to certain foods or to food in general.  That is only one small facet of what I’m going through.  I have to change the way I eat, sleep, drink, read, go about doing work, go about teaching.  I have to change my entire thought process and my entire world that I’ve lived in for twenty-seven years.  If I am successful, the next time many of you see me, I won’t have just lost weight, but I will be a completely new person.  It is such an immense task and I am scared out of my mind.  

There is hope and I will end on this.  Since starting back up in recovery, I have been diligently doing my program but as they say in OA, I haven’t been working it.  One of the mottos of OA/AA/NA is “one day at a time.”  So I will try that.  I will work my steps, my program, and continue one step and one day at a time.  The future holds much to be scared of, but I don’t live in the future.  I live today.  Today, I am abstinent.  Breathe.  

Hello My Name is Grant and I am an Addict

In my opinion, the greatest asset a person can have is a sexy brain. Sure good looks and an athletic build help, but a brain that can create, build, and imagine will easily compensate for any other believed deficiency.  The problem is that in order to achieve a sexy brain most of us need to achieve good looks and/or an athletic build, but it isn’t for any superficial reason.  It’s because in order to have a sexy brain, you need to have a healthy brain.  And I don’t.  

I grew up in a very smart world.  All immediate family and most extended family members are college educated with a litter of Masters and PhDs to go around.  Most of us are what the culture would classify as “smart,” but some of us, speaking specifically for myself, took a long time to realize it.  For me, it wasn’t until the second year of my MFA that I first had a moment of clarity.  I was the Teaching Assistant for a Shakespearean Acting class and starting talking about Romeo & Juliet.  I forget specifically what was said, but I know that I walked away from the day smiling and knowing that whatever I had said had been pretty smart.  I finally became self-aware that I was much smarter than the shadow I had cast for myself in the background of much smarter people, some in my own family.  This identity shift was wonderful, but also hurtful because it brought about a much larger problem.  Once I became self-aware I also recognized something I had let crawl into the corner and turn into a monster.  I had a problem and it wasn’t going away without a lot of work.  

My name is Grant and I am a compulsive eater.  When I first said these words out loud they seemed foreign like oranges growing in cornfields or carrots hanging from trees.  I had always been overweight and extremely self-conscious about my size, but never had realized that perhaps it wasn’t just an eating unhealthy problem, but rather a serious lingering illness.  

The first time I said those words was over two years ago and although writing about them and saying them out loud is no less scary than it was before, they are not foreign to me.  I am an addict.  I do need help.  And currently I am in the process of getting some.  

Today marks my seventh day of recovery.  This is not my first attempt to change my life, but I believe it will be my last.  For the first time I am devoted to my program, my trainers, my food plans, my family, my support system, and most importantly to myself.  This will be a very difficult road.  It will be a journey that lasts the rest of my life, but in fighting this disease today, I am tying to add years, maybe even decades onto that journey.  

As I go through this journey I decided to start this blog.  This is one of the scariest things I have ever attempted to do.  Many people who go through addictions are able to find comfort in the fact that the programs they are part of are entirely anonymous.  Using anonymity would be easier for me, frankly it would be much easier, but as a career I have chosen the life of a storyteller and in being a storyteller I believe it is my duty to tell this story.  Through the course of this blog I will be as emotionally naked as I can be.  I will share my frustrations, desires, hopes, dreams, setbacks, and fears.  I am doing so in the hopes that anyone who reads this and thinks that they too might be suffering from my disease that my story can provide some awareness, hope, and maybe even some avenues for help.  

One caveat to my story is that it is my story and my story alone.  As a member of an anonymous organization, I take other’s anonymity incredibly seriously and will never divulge any information that pertains to their lives or to anything from any of my meetings.  Rather I would hope that if you want to hear more stories like mine that you find an AA, NA, or OA meeting near you and attend it.  

My dream is to have a sexy brain.  One that works on all levels, that functions succinctly, and exercises its ability to create and build and dream whenever and wherever possible.  In order to do so I need to help rid it of the disease that infects it.  That is why that I am proud to say, “My name is Grant and I am an addict.”  This is my recovery.