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.