Pleasure

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On the way to the running path early Saturday morning, with dawn breaking in brilliant pinks and purples and Road Trip Radio pumping Kenny Loggins through my car speakers — the song was “Danger Zone,” which in hindsight is so appropriate — I drove by a place from my sordid past. My brain did a quick calculation: It’s been six years. And out of my mouth shot a short prayer: THANK YOU SO MUCH!

There have been so many topics on my mind lately that I started and stopped writing several different blog posts over the past month. Finally, I just decided to focus on how I really feel at this moment in time. Which is…well, grateful, yes, of course. But overall, just very pleased. And to channel the sentiment in Dr. Doyle’s lovely Instagram post, this good feeling comes without any real “worthiness” qualifications, or reasons why.

I mean, it’s awesome that fall is nearing and for the first time in three years, I don’t have to go back to school. It’s equally awesome that Fall 2024 finds me working in private practice, the job I dreamed of when I decided to enroll at DelVal, study counseling psychology, earn my Masters and become a therapist who helps people with substance use and eating disorders.

Can you frickin’ believe it, y’all? I actually am that.

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If you know me, you know that autumn is my favorite season, and for this, I can make a very strong case. It’s cooling off where I live, and there’s been a heavenly break in the humidity, which means that even with the ornery hips and hamstrings of a mid-40s perimenopausal woman with a sedentary job, I feel like a million bucks running along the Delaware Canal — for about 30-40 minutes, at which point I guess gravity sets in or the caffeine wears off and my body wakes up to its middle-aged softness and out-of-whack alignment and probably (I don’t weigh myself) the excess girth it’s been toting for 3-4 miles.

You know what? That’s fine. Running still brings me immense pleasure.

So does listening to music while I’m running. I swear it’s one of those “God shots” they talk about in AA that I randomly stumbled upon the 80s movie playlist on Amazon. It — and I say this only because I’ve been assigned a few teen-aged clients who are unimpressed by my extensive Gen-X vocab, so I’m trying my best to act less out of touch — slaps. 😝

Cringe! 😬

Are the kids even saying any of that anymore? 🤦🏼‍♀️ Forget what I said earlier; doing this job means never not having to go “back to school.” (Remind me to call my nieces for a language lesson…)

Anyway, the music…this is an arena where I can be gleefully, unapologetically OLD! 🤘🏻

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It probably goes without saying that Kenny Loggins features prominently on this playlist, though the track of his that packs the most punch for me when I’m running is not from “Top Gun” or “Footloose,” but (apparently) from that “Over the Top” arm-wrestling movie starring Sylvester Stallone. I’ve never seen it, but it sounds incredibly cheesy, even for that era — and that actor. Not that I’m in a position to judge cheesiness. Hell, I can’t listen to pretty much any Loggins song without getting choked up, and when “Meet Me Halfway” comes on while I’m cruising along the canal path looking out past the trees at the sunrise over the Delaware? 😭

🎶 Meet me halfway…across the sky…out where the world belongs to only you and I.

Meet me halfway…across the sky…make this a new beginning of another life. 🎶

Music has always hit me hard in the feels, ever since I was a little 20th century tyke taping tunes off the radio on my Panasonic boom box. My sensitive temperament made listening to music a highly moving experience that, in my emotional immaturity, I sometimes found hard to handle.

I remember struggling to choke back sobs one time when my mom was playing the “Les Miserables” soundtrack in our minivan on a family road trip; I was having such an intense reaction to what I heard that I was sure they’d all think I was crazy if I let my true feelings show.

(In my defense, those songs might be some of the saddest ever written. “I Dreamed a Dream”? Yikes! I mean, sure, it offers some valuable life lessons now that I look back as an adult, but little girls should be able to figure out for themselves how life will kill their dreams, it shouldn’t be forced on them at 9 years old when they’re still asking Santa Claus for American Girl doll clothes for Christmas!)

Some kids are born with the inability to hear lyrics; just ask my husband. But I was not so lucky. And for the first few years after I quit drinking, I completely avoided music, purely as self-protection. I felt so raw and vulnerable without alcohol that I couldn’t bear to open myself up and expose my tenderest places to the deep meaning and soul-stirring beauty I’d always found in art.

That’s what makes this era of my life so pleasurable, I think. I can really appreciate life’s little moments and simple pleasures because I finally have the guts to push through its pain. I finally put in the work, through a 12-step program and therapy and getting involved in the recovery and psychology communities and “being useful” to others in my new career. Over time, I strengthened my emotional muscles and restored a natural sense of balance to my body that it hasn’t felt, probably since I was 9, clutching my Samantha doll and crying myself to sleep thinking about poor Eponine. LOL! J/K. 😂

Seriously, one of the greatest pleasures of sober life is just getting into my cozy bed, clear-headed, and knowing that whatever cringe-worthy moments from the day happen to flash through my mind, they’re not that big a deal — and they’re nothing compared to how things used to be six years ago! I came by all of it honestly, the “good” and the “bad,” and whatever is possible to do better, tomorrow’s another day to try.

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It’s touchy, as an addict, to talk about pleasure, given that the unmitigated pursuit of it will run your life off the rails, get you stuck in a ditch, and in that ditch, you could potentially die. There is danger in habitually trying to run away from pain, and I think the key to breaking that cycle is changing what is inside you, as opposed to outside.

I say that as someone who could NOT wait to start the new season by filling her house with literally the entire Yankee Candle fall collection and can NOT resist clicking on every autumn-themed ad the Instagram algorithm throws at her — Hunter boots, Coldwater Creek, J.Jill, Ann Taylor…shit, you guys, it knows I’m old! 🫣

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Life is good today, even with the “change of life” madness going on between my new job and my aging body and (sigh) dying reproductive system. I feel like it’s a sign of major progress that I can say, “life is good,” while acknowledging it is far from perfect.

That is the sacred “middle way” they talk about in Buddhism, in which the most basic fundamental truth one has to accept is that life is suffering. The second is that it’s possible to participate joyfully in that suffering. While this might seem like it came outta left field, it’s a very applicable principle in recovery and, I think, for all human life.

I am still, and will always be, in recovery as long as I am alive, which means I’ll never “arrive” in some kind of pleasure-filled, easy-living promised land. It’s like Pema Chödrön writes: “The spiritual path is not about heaven or finally getting to place that’s really swell.” She’s really my only exposure to Buddhist philosophy — well, her and Gloria Trillo on “The Sopranos” 🤣 — but I discovered her work before I even thought about getting sober, so I feel like she kind of helped wake me up, gently, to a deep existential truth I didn’t want to confront.

Now, thank the universe, I can say that I made it through the “danger zone” (😉) of addiction to “the new beginning of another life” (😉😉). Quitting drinking forced me to grapple with the impossibility of “the dream I dreamed” (😉😉😉) and to grieve its death. The idea that I could build myself a safe little “castle on a cloud” (OK, I’ll stop now…) and live there forever, free of suffering, was a natural, understandable coping strategy for a sensitive soul in a sharp-edged world — but it was childish. And at some point, no matter how much real life scares us, we have to grow up if we want to experience all it has to offer.

It took a while for me to see the benefits of that real-life experience, not gonna lie. And that, I understand now, is because they are small and subtle, and they start within. They appear only when you start looking at the world through different eyes — and, I guess, hearing it with different ears. Or maybe it’s that you finally find the courage to tear down the protective walls of your self-made prison, open up your soul and free your spirit, so you can let in beauty and joy even with the risk that it could, sometimes, break you down.

Well, I feel like it’s been kinda painful sitting here trying to write about pleasure, and that might actually prove the point! I’m going to go enjoy some seasonal creature comforts in what’s still left of Sunday, and the summertime. My house might smell like a cozy log cabin, but it’s “mojito” weather on the back deck, and I don’t have any place to be or homework to do.

As far as I’m concerned, this is living the dream, right here and now!