Comfy Slippers

    I've been thinking a lot lately of an often referenced quote as I approach my goal of giving up alcohol for a year, "Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore" (Andre Gide). When I think of this quote as it applies to my life today, I find myself asking, "What is my shore?" and "What are the new oceans for me?" 

    I can't think of the quote without thinking of comfy slippers. They go hand in hand. For me anyway. I gave up wearing my comfy slippers last year when I made the decision, on July 30th, to give up wine for a year. At the time, I wasn't aware that I'd actually have to yank off my slippers and go barefoot for the duration of my "experiment". I think I thought I'd just make one change in my life, but be able to basically keep the rest of my life as it was, and keep wearing my slippers. I was mistaken.

    As the year has progressed, I've come to see how my slippers are basically the shore I had to leave in order to do what I needed to do. They are my coziness and my predictability, my routine comforts. They are the known, the tried-and-true. They are the ways I have dealt with discomfort, sadness, irritation, anger, and all the other yucky stuff that life sometimes brings. They are a light and breezy glass of white wine, or a smooth and soothing red. They followed me into many a lounge booth and hugged my feet at family gatherings and other outings, always comfortable, and always familiar. They were on my feet a long time. 

    And the new oceans, what of those? They are me, floating on a raft in the middle of the unfamiliar, alone and wondering, "What in the hell have I done?!" They are me leaving behind those things that I was able to hang onto. They are the place with no handles. In fact, in order to survive here, I've had to release quite a few attachments, both literally and figuratively. But as chaotic as things have sometimes been in the middle of this new ocean, there has also been at times a rich calmness and depth of experience that was often lacking when I was a slipper wearer. As scary as it feels to have not much to hang onto, it also feels liberating. There is an authenticity in being in these waters that I didn't feel enough while at shore. 

    It's not that complicated to understand though really. Anytime you leave the shore and venture into the ocean is to go into the unknown (unless you're a sailor or a captain of a well-traveled ship of course!). You do this when you decide to make major changes in your life. And any time you do this is to catapult yourself into the chaos of the unknown, so this act requires courage, on many levels. But the first act of courage, as Gide said, is to "lose sight of the shore", and I think he was right about that.

ANXIETY

"Anxiety- got me on the run/Anxiety- yeah, I just need someone/ Anxiety- can't get nothin' done/ Anxiety- spoils all the fun" - Pat Benatar, Anxiety (Get Nervous).

    Ever since I can remember (a long time surprisingly), I've walked alongside of anxiety. I haven't called it anxiety forever, because way back when, it wasn't commonly called that. There were other names or other ways of talking about people who were frequently anxious. For example, I grew up being told I was a "worrier" and that I "worry too much". And nobody was wrong about either of those things. I was a worrier, worrying about multiple topics at a dizzying speed, from a very early age.     

    I still sometimes have flashbacks to 6, or 8 or 11 year old me, laying in bed, trying to fall asleep but not being able to before navigating a series of troubling thoughts. The thoughts ranged from banal topics like, "Oh no, my library book is overdue, am I going to get in big trouble for that?" to not-so-banal topics like "What happens when we die? Do we just stop existing forever? And how long is forever?" Looking back now, I am amazed that the child me was even able to sleep at all after playing some of the more  harrowing scripts in my little mind. 

    The anxiety didn't leave me once I hit adolescence either of course. No, it stayed with me, tagging along as I navigated teen friendships and intimate relationships, and school pressures, and my changing body. It hung around, whispering in my ear all of the things that could go wrong, or that were already wrong with me, or with my life. Its favorite thing to whisper was "What if...". Those 2 words would then be followed by other words, words that were capable of instantly breaking my spirit. "What if he doesn't like me back?" "What if they don't include me?" "What if I fail the math test?" "What if they think I'm ugly, or fat, or boring, or not cool?" Anxiety was constantly by my side, but hardly my friend.

    By early adulthood, anxiety was so much a part of me that I often struggled to know who I was apart from it. Around that time, a new companion, depression, crept into my life and set up camp. The two of them showed no mercy, bombarding me with awful thoughts and feelings on a regular basis. I started devouring self-help books in a frantic attempt to fend them off. I figured I was doing it all wrong, that I should be doing something to help myself, that the problems were all mine, that I had created them and so I could fix them. And sometimes this worked. Sometimes, my anxious and depressed companions would fade into the background. But this was always temporary- a few days, weeks or rarely, months- and they would always return, grabbing both of my hands with a vengeance. It didn't matter where I lived, they followed me. For years, my adulthood was spent moving or traveling to different places, or changing apartments in an attempt to "start over", in the hope that the old me, the worrier and depressed me would disappear. 

    In my late 30s, and with the help of a therapist, I began to see that the depression that had brought me to the therapist in the first place was really just exhaustion from being anxious all the time. My mind and heart had finally surrendered and a strange hopelessness and fatigue with life set in. I understood that the anxiety had become stronger than I was, knocking me over more days than not. But I also understood that I was letting this happen. I was letting it define and defeat me. We began to talk in therapy about recognizing the anxiety but knowing that it didn't have to incapacitate me. I started reading about "Acceptance and Commitment Therapy", and I started to look at my anxious sidekick differently. I also started to understand that the anxiety was never going to leave my side as long as I lived, and so I was going to have to learn how to deal with it.This was a big revelation for me, and a turning point. In retrospect, however, although I began to understand all of this, it would take over another 10 years for me to live this truth fully. 

    One of the ways I had dealt with the anxiety, since the age of 18 really, was with alcohol. I never used alcohol regularly, as in, never daily, but I did use it most times when socializing. In my 40s, newly split from my partner and raising my son alone half the time, I socialized more, therefore drank more. I started to have a new routine of sometimes stopping by the liquor store on the way home from a lounge visit with friends to buy a bottle of wine just to keep the buzz going. I would then suck back a few more glasses while phoning people; this meant I wasn't drinking alone. The alcohol was the one thing that could quiet the anxiety beast at my side. The anxious thoughts would diminish and a calm would overtake me; it didn't matter that it was an artificial calm. It worked and that's all that mattered. The problem is it worked to induce a calm state but there were just too many negative consequences for me to choose that as my main coping mechanism. So I decided to quit.

    These days, my main way to cope is to meditate, bombard myself with uplifting self-talk when I need it, and to exercise. As corny as it may sound, I hold hands with my anxiety more often than not now. I meet her where she needs to be met, let her have her say, but then I do my own thing. I understand her fears, her vulnerabilities, her raw, sore spots. I'm okay that she walks alongside me. But she isn't me. She never was, even though sometimes I struggled to see that. I now know that there is a me apart from the anxiety, a bigger me, a healthier me, a wiser one. And I can sometimes even look at the anxiety now as my companion, rather than my enemy. In the spirit of observation and compassion that meditation has taught me, I can say, "Oh there you are again. What is it you would like to say to me today?" I can listen, but not be defeated by it. We just walk together, side by side, my anxiety and I.

    

    

    

Licorice

    A little over a month ago, I had to do one of the hardest things I've had to do in this life. I had to put our lovely dog down. It wasn't a surprise. I had known it was coming because two months before, I had taken her to the vet for an ultrasound to see what all the mystery had been that was causing her troubles and I saw the huge mass in her chest cavity staring at us from the screen. "How long does she have?" I asked, surprisingly matter-of-fact. "A few months," he answered. His assistant then asked me if she could give my dog a few treats and then said, "Enjoy every moment you have with her". I nodded, started to tear up and wandered bleary-eyed out the door, stopping to pay at the desk on the way out. I remember looking at a young couple waiting with their puppy, and looking down at my own dog's face, now thoroughly sprinkled with grey, and thinking it really wasn't that long ago that she was an adorable pup herself. 

    But it was that long ago, almost 11 years ago, to be exact. She had grown up and gone through all of her changes with me; I was by her side through it all. When she came into my life, it was at the request of my ex, who suddenly, around Christmas time that year, decided we should get a puppy. I was on the fence, leaning more towards the "No!" side, but I ended up caving. My ex was persistent, and part of me had fluffy dog fantasies that won in the end. So we picked her up from the Humane Society... well, my ex picked her. She was the puppy he wanted, barking frantically at us from her cage as we looked at her. The barking of course hadn't escaped my notice. "That one? Really?" I said. "She's pretty loud". A few minutes later, we were in a room, just the three of us (my ex, me, our 6 year old son), and a young woman brought her to meet us. I remember feeling reluctant, as she wasn't the one I would have picked, but there she was nudging her face against my legs, there she was nestling her small 3-month old body against mine. I was the first one she chose, as soon as she entered the room.

    Fast-forward almost 11 years later and I was still the one. My ex became my ex not quite a year after we got Licorice, and a year after that, in a new relationship, he informed me that the dog could no longer go to his house anymore. We had an agreement that the dog would follow the kid, but the new love interest's disdain for dog hair meant that I was now a full-time dog owner. Countless conversations in cozy lounge booths with friends followed wherein they would all shout out vicious insults about my ex, indignant that he had left the responsibility of the dog to me. I lapped all of that up of course, because I was angry, resentful, bitter and felt trapped. My ex suggested at one point that we get rid of the dog because "neither of us wants her". He was kind of forgetting the seven year old who had furiously attached himself to the animal in a way that only "only children" do. 

    I obviously didn't get rid of the dog. I couldn't do that to my son. But I remember realizing the definition of the word sacrifice, as if for the first time; everything about the dog seemed a sacrifice to me. She came to represent all that I had to give up. When I looked at her, it was through the eyes of entrapment. I'd sometimes go into mini rages as I observed myself, yet again picking up dog poo in the backyard, yet again vacuuming up endless dog hair, yet again grabbing her leash to take her for a walk, motivated by guilt alone. In those first few years after our split, the resentment filled me too frequently.

    But then, things changed. One day, after a particularly tiring day at work, I pulled up to the back of the house, turned off the ignition and just sat in the car for a few minutes, thinking of all of the chores I still had ahead of me that day. One of my obligations was to take the dog for a walk. I started to feel the irritation squirming and growing inside me, started to play the same over-worn script in my head (the "poor-me" one), but suddenly, a thought popped into my brain, "You need to be a stoic about this. This is your life. Accept it, deal with it, and stop complaining". Later that night, I did my usual and looked up the definition of stoic online, and found one that summed it up nicely: a person who can endure pain or hardship without showing their feelings or complaining. I knew then that I had to set that task for myself. I owed it to the dog, I owed it to my son, and I owed it to myself. So I did.

    After I made that decision, life with Licorice (or our "Black Beauty" as I sometimes called her) was a lovely, fulfilling adventure. I no longer bemoaned all the things I had to do in order to have a dog. I welcomed them... for the most part. I no longer let resentment overtake me, no longer let my mind tell stories that made me a victim in the long-running drama that was my life. I saw Licorice for what she really was-- a sweet, beautiful, loving family pet-- and I owned her finally, fully and completely.

    When the diagnosis of cancer happened, the first thing I had to do was tell my 16 year old son. I picked him up from school, pulled over to the side of the road and told him the bad news. We spent the next 24 hours crying together and deciding what we were going to do. Both vets that were involved at the time told me that there was a strong possibility that the tumor in her chest would rupture at some point, leaving her in "severe respiratory distress". We didn't know if we should risk that, so we thought of putting her down within the next few days, even though she seemed, outwardly, mostly like her usual self, just an older version. But then we just couldn't do it. 

    We got two more months with our black beauty, and we savored our time with her. The last day of her life, I took a few selfies of the three of us before we went to the vet's, realizing regretfully that I had never taken pictures of the three of us in the past nine years, pictures of our little family that could sit on the bookshelf in the living room, and show everyone what we meant to each other.

    When it was time to put her down, my son and I were together with her in a quiet room, plowing through a box of kleenex together. The clinic was empty that night as we were the last clients of the day. I held Licorice's head in my lap and her heavily sedated body offered no resistance. I kept looking at my son who couldn't speak, crying softly beside me. My heart ached for his suffering. Because he couldn't speak, I spoke for the both of us, "We love you Licorice. We love you, black beauty. We'll miss you sweetheart". When she had the final injection and her body jerked suddenly a few seconds later (the vet had told us that would happen), I felt her spirit leave, and in that moment, my tears fell harder. In that moment, I understood fully what I was losing.

    Watching our pet die was one of the most painful things I have experienced, but there was a strange beauty in it too. I remember thinking as I was going through it all, holding her body in the room, "I am doing all of this right now and am completely in the moment. I am present, fully aware, conscious. And I will stay present afterwards because I'm not going to have a glass of wine to numb the pain". I realized that I was feeling excruciatingly painful feelings, but I was still okay, that I would be okay. I realized that my son was feeling the same feelings, but that he would be okay too. I realized that I was role-modeling for my son how to deal with suffering. And that is a beauty all its own.