Tag: addiction

sober lifestyle

Competence

jenwielgusjournalism

Maybe it was too soon. Maybe I didn’t have enough time in sobriety and real therapy — as in, the kind where you’re not sitting there in a fog of denial, willfully spewing lies — before I decided to go back to school to become an addictions therapist.

Or, maybe I hadn’t “worked a program” hard enough in the time I did have, and I had no business thinking I could act like a normal person — much less a competent professional — while starting from scratch in an emotional occupation and getting a bottom-rung job in a high-stress setting.

These thoughts occurred to me this week as I entered my ninth month as a rookie drug and alcohol counselor, feeling out of my depth with no life raft in sight.

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sober lifestyle

Remembrance

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Denial, with all its cold, numb detachment, naturally came first — and it hung around for weeks.

While I intellectually understood that my great aunt had passed away in the wee hours of July 21, and we’d all more or less braced ourselves for that awful news since she entered hospice care, getting the call from 800 miles away seemed to trigger an old protective reflex: The truth can’t hurt me if I refuse to let it sink in!

(That’s, like, the primary coping tool for addicts, who learn to perform all sorts of complicated mental/verbal gymnastics to avoid acknowledging the obvious fact that their drug/alcohol problem is THE thing that’s driving them to destruction.)

Distance had shielded me from reality, as it pertains to my family, for my entire adult life. Moving away from my childhood home in my early 20s allowed me to keep my Aunt Mickey, my parents, all my caregivers and role models, cemented in my head as they were in my youth.

Auntie Mick (front and center, holding me), whooping it up in the whirlpool at my grandparents’ farm with my dad (back left), mom, little sister, and Grandpa Perz. 😢
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Influence

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My Aunt Mickey wasn’t one to sugarcoat her strong opinions, no matter who she was talking to, and this was her take on my latest blog post: “It just went on and on and on!” 😳 So, when I sat down to write her a letter of appreciation (see above), I tried to keep myself in check.

(Gotta say, it’s a really bad sign for long-form writers when even 90-year-old family members who ate up everything you created since your keyboard was a crayon suddenly throw up a “TLDR” in response to your work…😑)

Aunt Mickey has always been one of my biggest supporters, and given her declining health, I had an inkling that our most recent trip home to Chicago might be the last time I saw her in person.

She was, true to form, treating us to Cubs tickets — in a luxury suite — on our second day in town, and I was pretty sure that would be the last time my entire family convened at Wrigley Field. So, I spent 15 minutes the morning of the game banging out a little recap of her influence on my life.

When I saw a chance to deliver this message, with Aunt Mickey seated in our box at the stadium, staring quietly at the tarped (but still beautiful) diamond through a sheet of summer rain, I plopped down next to her and read it aloud. Really loud. Had to make sure she heard! 🗣️👂🏻

That was July 2. She passed away in the hospital on July 21 and will be buried in her family’s plot this coming Thursday.

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sober lifestyle

Home

jenwielgusjournalism

Being back in the land of my childhood has always felt a little strange, ever since I packed up the little green Saturn passed down from my dad and moved across the country for my first post-college journalism job in the spring of 2000.

This is what happens to all adults, right? The whole “you can’t go home again” thing? Your idea of a sacred place, and the people in it, seems to stay stuck in time, clouded by a mist of nostalgia, and it never quite matches the reality of your experience as you continue to grow, change, evolve.

This is not a bad thing, though it drudges up some difficult emotions. Growth and change are supposed to happen. Life is evolution, whether we like it or not. There are seasons we weather, lessons we learn, stuff we lose, other stuff we gain, and our perspective shifts based on what we’ve seen/heard/done on our journey after we “launch.”

Reconciling the past and present in your head and heart is never easy. Try doing it as a 45-year-old recovering alcoholic and graduate student. 😳

“Home” is an entirely different, bittersweet Bizarro World for me, now that I’m experiencing it at four years sober.

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Surrender

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Are you gonna wait for a sign, your miracle?
Stand up and fight!

This is it…Make no mistake where you are
This is it…Your back’s to the corner
This is it…Don’t be a fool anymore
This is it…The waiting is over

Kenny Loggins, “This Is It”

I’m one of those people who really hears lyrics when I listen to music. I think it goes with the territory of being a Highly Sensitive Person. And like most aspects of the HSP experience in a TMI world, this “gift” often seems like a curse/weakness/sick joke.

Once you find deep personal meaning in a piece of art — whether you were looking for it or not — it has a way of hitting you hard in the feels whenever you encounter it. That gets dangerous when the art is readily accessible on any random day of the week via satellite radio. I mean, you’re rarely prepared to weather a visceral attack of emotion on your way to work or school, and ill-equipped to explain to your spouse why you’re performing household chores with tears streaming down your face.

So it went this past weekend, when I decided to get in the spirit of Father’s Day by tuning in to Amazon’s “Yacht Rock” station. This is akin to raiding my dad’s old tape drawer and spinning the soundtrack of my childhood, the strains of “Sailing,” “Africa,” “Steal Away,” “What a Fool Believes,” “Love Will Conquer All,” and basically the entire Kenny Loggins discography tapping into my tenderest places, where I typically dare not go because I can’t afford to break down.

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Alienation

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My little sister and I were commiserating on the phone last week about our shared propensity for people-pleasing. Well, actually, she was telling me how much she admires my ability to set boundaries around my time, space and energy. And listening to her, I was realizing how far I’ve come in recovery.

“Sometimes, I’m sitting in a meeting that’s running overtime, and I’ve had to pee for an hour, but I’m too scared to just leave because that’s seen as rude,” my sister said. “And then I think, ‘Jen would have been gone 20 minutes ago…’”

Damn straight, sis! We haven’t lived in the same state since the spring of 2000, when she was 12, but my rep in the family as an anxious-avoidant introvert whose signature move is the “Irish goodbye” has been firmly established over the past 20+ years. I was a black sheep long before I admitted to being an alcoholic.

“Growing up” for me has been a tug of war between a little kid who craves others’ approval and an adult woman giving herself permission to do what she’s gotta do. Being stone-cold sober in a booze-soaked world for nearly four full years has forced me to make peace with making waves.

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Validation

jenwielgusjournalism
Source: @dinosaurcouch, another highly recommended follow on the ‘gram

I saved this cute comic to include in an activity packet for the weekly counseling group I run at work. It’s supposed to be a self-esteem group, and as someone who spent 40+ years looking for worthiness in good grades, academic awards, athletic victories, praise from authority figures, attention from dudes, social media “likes,” blog comments and, ultimately, liquor bottles, I could think of no more relevant discussion topic for one of our hour-long sessions than “External vs. Internal Validation.”

But then I found myself Googling “how to do internal validation” and realized I had zero information to impart, let alone strategies and solutions to share, on that subject.

The part of the brain that sends organic approval signals might’ve been missing in me at birth, and I just recently started trying to investigate its absence. So while I could hold a three-day seminar on the dangers of seeking external validation (PM me if interested 😉), when it comes to “WTF do we do about it?” I’d just be standing at the front of the room, stiffly reading off a print-out from Psychology Today.

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sober lifestyle

Awareness

jenwielgusjournalism
One of my new favorite follows on Instagram. Check him out at @corymuscara.

Since starting my job as an addictions counselor in late January, I’ve devoured several books on the opiate epidemic, from “Dreamland” to “Dopesick” to “Empire of Pain,” and everything I’ve read, combined with everything I’ve seen, has expanded and enhanced my self-awareness. I keep having the same thought:

I’m so lucky I never had abundant access to pills.

I’m lucky the oral surgeon I ran to in a crisis, 7 or 8 years back, prescribed only enough Percocet to get me through a weekend until he could yank my radioactive cracked tooth the following Monday.

The pain from that f*cker had been blowing up my head for days, but the effect of the opiates instantly blew my mind. I will never forget the incredible numbness that overtook my body when I swallowed that first little white disc; it was like someone tripped my “OFF” switch, without sapping my energy, and activated some kind of secret superpower while ensconcing me inside an impenetrable shield. I felt indestructible, like I could run through walls and leap tall buildings…or leave the house and talk to people without anxiety, fear, or shame! 😮

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