The Berklee School of Music Singer/Songwriter, part 7

*Breathe*

You know you aren't in a good relationship when, the second you get home and away from it, you do a little dance, make a little love to yourself, get down, jump up, heel click, sigh relieved and wax poetic to your room ("Oh, my sweet, sweet room"). Then, you pet your sweet little kitties and say, "I'm free you guys! Freeeee aaaat laaaast!" before singing a montage of Queen's I Want to Break Free, Tom Petty's Free Fallin' and George Michael's Freedom (the choruses, at least). Finally, you sit down at your beloved old desk in your favorite comfy chair with a cup of iced coffee that you thank God isn't expired (because you've been away so long that everthing else in your fridge is) and you do that thing that has never failed you: write.



Watching Californication, writing, watching Breaking Bad, and getting a bit of reinforcement from a couple of concerned third parties have all helped me with my latest monumental turnaround. After swearing off men and starting this blog last November to help me stay on track, I strayed - far - off course...and became engaged. And I completely believed, at the time, that I was doing myself a favor. Not that there's anything wrong with being engaged - if you're mentally/emotionally healthy and find a mentally/emotionally healthy mate, with whom patience, soundness of mind and mutual understanding/love grant you a relationship that enhances both of your individual, stable lives - by all means, unite! But, if you're a total sicko in need of a lot of help, and you latch onto another total sicko in need of even more help and who latches back onto you even harder resulting in the exponential waning of your individuality, self-respect, stability, and sanity, holy shit - peel off before you leeches reduce eachother to unrecognizable, unconscious fragments of your former selves, and get some fucking help, mutha fucka.

Check.

Now, back to the giving of "props":

"Californication" is the bizzomb. I simply can't stop raving about it, as you know. It shows, for me, an all-too-relatable character fucking up his life: Hank Moody (David Duchovny). Hank gets involved with every woman who'll have him instead of spending quality time with his dauther, Becca. But, he is an accomplished writer, making bank off these sexcapades (oh, I wish!). And yet, despite his sexual meanderings and over-indulgence with various mind-altering substances, I clearly see him as a better father than I mother, and, certainly, a better (or at least financially-compensated and well-read) writer. It's enough to bring tears to my eyes and make me question everything in my life (as I'm wont to do anyway, but I appreciate the extra nudge).

I don't know if God really exists - I choose affirmatively, but, I don't know who God really is. But, if "Writing" were God, somehow, I'd thank the hell out of It, because It just saved my little ass once again. Writing has helped me to see everything in black and white - literally (tom-tom high-hat). It's much more difficult to delude myself or play pretend when I can actually see the insanity on the page.

My former situation with my (very soon to be ex-) fiancé is in fact just as bad, if not worse, as anything I've gotten myself into since my (first) marriage. It's a downright dirty mess. I'm finally starting the "outline" for my memoir because I think there's at least one woman out there who's doing the same shit I have and needs to read my story as a reflection, and hopefully it'll give her the motivation to turn her life around (girl power!). But even more importantly, right now, I need it to help me, too; I need to rub my face right deep down into all of that nasty ass laundry of mine (literally, again - tom-tom high hat). I don't want to forget what it smells like, and at the same time, I want to stop living in it. So, memoir, come to my (and others') rescue! (It is exciting - I all ready have outlined up through chapter 9! And this is just the beginning...tee hee.)

Speaking of rescue...Californication isn't the only show that has given me a tinge of leave-his-ass inspiration. It's ironic - I stopped watching TV shows when I left my husband in 2011 except for any time I've had a boyfriend since (because whoever it is gets me to watch them, too...and one of said shows, in turn, inspires me to leave his ass). So far, Jason's had me watch the whole series of The Big Bang Theory, a few seasons of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Californication, and we're all caught up on Hannibal. All enjoyable to me, I can't lie (The Big Bang Theory is what inspired me to propose and accept Jason for his Sheldon-like self, interestingly). But Jason had also been wanting me to see Breaking Bad for the longest time. Yesterday I used the excuse of being too busy to watch it, and I was - I was creating a photobook on Blurb.com for a photography client. But more accurately, the "punk" in me didn't want to see Breaking Bad, at all, because everyone in the whole damn world raves about it.

But I guess if "everybody" agrees on something, maybe that something kinda-sorta has a chance of being true. Jason put on the first episode of Breaking Bad on Netflix, just to spite me, and...shit, I couldn't look away for even a moment! Whatever I was doing completely ceased to exist. I then insisted we watch the next episode, and the next, and the next, until finally I had to ask him to turn it off so I could finish my project and get it to my client at 3 am, and he did. But I had to watch more today. And the first thing I'm going to do when I'm done posting here is, I'm gonna watch it some more. That's right, baby...2 am? Psh - I had iced coffee.

But, so how did Breaking Bad change my life, you might ask? Well, it prompted me to ask of myself, what would I do if I was told I only had a few months to live? Would I be living my life the way I am now? The answer to the first question is a hell of a lot more complicated than the answer to the second, which is an easy Hell No!!!

Watching Breaking Bad, and, reading real people's experiences with cancer, makes one, naturally, consider her own mortality. I also thought about death a lot when my friend Margo killed herself last year. And who do you think the first person who comes to my mind when I think of death is?

One of the last things my son said to me this past weekend was, "Mom, Daddy loves me more than you do, because he takes more responsibility for me." Yikes. I have to admit, I've been so caught up in my latest addictive relationship that I hardly noticed the impact it was having on my son as usual. It sucks - I was the one who had it all together when his dad and I were still together, but now, I'm the fuck-up. The truth hurts when it looks you in the eyes with tears in its and says you don't love it. You're too busy looking away.

Well, along with my son's truth, here's some more truth from which I couldn't look away:

And that's not even half of it. Not even a quarter. When I had said that Jason was "cleaning his room" obsessively, in one of my last posts, it's because he was throwing piles of crap onto his bed and floor, bringing crap in from outside of his room to add to the piles. His internal chaos was externalized. Ceasing to see his psychiatrist and going off his 8+ medications for his bipolar, OCD, anxiety, and sleep disorders and just smoking weed as a replacement made for a horrible thing to witness.

I knew from the beginning that he was "crazy". He told me so. But did I really believe him, or understand what he meant? Not really. I thought, "Well hey, I'm crazy - great, two peas in a pod." No - he's a different kind of crazy. Diagnosed. My therapist thought I might have a general anxiety disorder, but other than that, I (at the time, at least seemed to) have a pretty sane head on my shoulders. Jason, though...I saw many signs of instability - 25, living with his parents, everything in his room had to be in its own little place (and I mean everything - until the psychotic break), only part-time temp jobs, and a giant drawer full of prescription bottles, some that he no longer even needed but kept around "just in case". Then he decided, "You know what? My psychiatrist is expensive. I'm not going to see him any more. And I'm not gonna take my meds any more either. Yeah, I'm just gonna smoke weed. That makes me feel pretty good." But his version of feeling good included staying up for a week with only short naps; snapping at his parents, brother, sister, and me and saying such horrible things that made everyone either cry, scream or run out of the house; speaking so erratically and quickly that at times nobody could understand him; stretching for two days straight (that was weird); and prompting his mother and I to want to call 9-1-1 and be taken by ambulance to Aurora, a mental hospital where she put him a few years ago (but he appeared to stabilize the other day, so, we didn't have to...but I fled, and his mom is still on edge).

Despite knowing his history, I still decided to go into a relationship with him. And not just any relationship - 5 months in, I asked him to marry me. Why? I don't know. I guess, once again, I got caught up in my most averse addiction: Jason "loves" me.  "Love" = my Achilles' heel. At least, it was my Achilles' heel, until I cut my heel on the sharp razor blade of reality (yes, there were a couple razor blades in those piles...but no, I only stuck myself with a thumbtack...there were like 70 of those). Part of me still feels like I should stay with him, that I do love him. But, his insanity drove me insane, and I'm all ready insane enough as it is without him making it worse. And I've done the research on love (thank you don Miguel Ruiz), and I know what it's supposed to look and feel like. So I told him today before I left: "If you really do love me, you'll let me go." It sounds cliché on the radio, but I meant it. And...finally...he did.

Okay, I just gotta do this again:

*Breathe*

Ah, better. Never before this very moment have I so appreciated solitude. God, don't ever let me forget it this time.

This morning, again inspired by my favorite writing prof, I sketched a rough draft of my memoir cover. (And Rocco, don't worry, if they ever make my memoir into a movie starring Elisha Cuthbert, I won't let them put her on the cover, no matter how much they want to pay me...or wait...shit...let me sit on that.) Ugh, I'm a horrendous artist. But, I woke up with this morning with this image in my head, and I just had to get it on paper, however poorly rendered. In case you can't tell what it is, it's a bride falling away from her husband and child off a precipice into a throng of men (I only drew 16, but there should be 30):

I'll do much better on it next time, lol. And I don't know why all the guys are wearing Heisenberg hats. But that reminds me - time for more Breaking Bad.

The Berklee School of Music Singer/Songwriter, part 2

Well, shoot, now that I've started writing again, all of a sudden I have more to say.

After spending all day at Starbucks writing my post yesterday, I drove down to pick up my son from his dad's house. He fell asleep on the way back up to where I was headed for church choir rehearsal. I had over an hour before rehearsal would start, so I went over to my now-boyfriend's house for a quick kiss. I had spent the night there the night before so I'd all ready seen him in the morning, but, I wanted to see him again.

[The interaction between us that morning had both depressed me (as things tend to do lately) but also provided me with a revelation (as things tend to do often).]

That morning I received a call from a bill collector that got me out of my boyfriend's bed. Jason (not his real name, as usual) and I had just woken up, and I had all ready begun to express some dissatisfaction with certain aspects of my life. He shushed me and said, "We've only been awake for what, 20 minutes, and this all ready? Come on."

He doesn't want to hear about such things. I'm not sure if it has to do with him being 25 and living with his parents and being totally spoiled, with people taking care of him hand and foot and therefore him having no concept of what it means to nurture someone else, but, that's what I'm going with.

He complained when I got off the phone with the bill collector - I had answered and calmly set up a payment, which he didn't understand. "You should have asked them, 'What the hell are you doing, calling someone at 8 in the frickin' morning?' Geez!" I started to explain that I had previously scheduled that call, but he wasn't interested in hearing me speak. He interrupts me routinely, implying that he feels that his words have more value than mine. It's a trend I've noticed over the past few days since we became "boyfriend and girlfriend". I'm much quicker to pick up on these sorts of things now that I'm in recovery and am being "restored to sanity" one day at a time (some days are saner than others, for sure).

I meditated in the shower so that I could get my mind off what I perceived as his immaturity and how invalidated I felt. Or, rather, what I mean to say is I meditated to accept his perceived immaturity and to observe my feelings and figure out what to do with them other than what I would have done in the past (scream, kick, yell, punch walls, drink, use drugs, etc).

[Also worth mentioning is the fact that he takes medications for bipolar, anxiety and sleep disorders...so...his demeanor is probably a combination of the aforementioned living-with-his-parents-at-that-age and these latter conditions. But...nature, nurture, tomayto, tomahto...all that is really beside the point.]

If I don't kick and scream when I don't get my way, how do I make myself feel better when I feel "wronged" by someone?

I kill my ego. Doesn't sound like it'd feel good, but actually, it does.

And here's how I do it: First, I meditate, bringing myself wholly "present", taking my mind off the other person and focusing it on me (my body), my feelings (not my thoughts), and what's in front of me (literally: shampoo...soap...hot water...shower curtain...etc), and then, after becoming aware of my self and what is real (tangible corporeality) as opposed to what is not real (thought perceptions)...all that's left is really all there "is".

And then...I enter another realm. Y'all ready? That's right -- I pray.

Okay, this is where the atheist goes, "Aww, man, another crackpot." Or, "That is all so effing kooky, and way too complicated." But my mind is a complicated thing, and it gets me into trouble, time and time again. So what I do here is actually simple. And I need to simplify things so that I don't have to feel insane all the time (because, as of right now, I don't have meds to regulate whatever happens up there...but hell, maybe I don't need 'em, any way. Let's see...).

One prayer I use is called "The Serenity Prayer". It goes like this: "God, grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference." One thing I've learned by now, although I have to remind myself every day, is that I can't change anyone else. And that is for damn sure. The only person I can change is me...but I can change me. (Though, still, not without some outside help.)

Then the next one: "God, I offer myself to Thee, to build with me and to do with me as Thou wilt. Relieve me of the bondage of self, that I may better do Thy will. Take away my difficulties, that victory over them may bear witness to those I would help of Thy Power, Thy Love, and Thy Way of Life. May I do Thy Will, always." I was an atheist for the first 28 years of my life, and I have to say, I much prefer spirituality these days. When I let go of everything and just trust it to be part of some Master Plan that I have nothing to do with, I get to experience a sort of simple, effortless peace and freedom...even joy.

Here's another prayer that I recite from memory, after the other two: "My Creator, I am now willing that You should have all of me, good and bad. I pray that You now remove from me every single defect of character that stands in the way of my usefulness to You and to my fellows. Grant me strength, as I go from here, to do Your bidding." I take a look at what "defects of character" are driving me and making me "useless" (sitting in resentment and self-pity makes me "useless"; helping others makes me "useful"). These "defects" usually include selfishness, self-centeredness, dishonesty (most often I'm dishonest with myself), and fear. Doing God's Will, as opposed to mine, for me, means asking God to remove these "defects" and replace them with positive, useful attributes, like love, patience, tolerance, kindness, honesty and selflessness. Because, believe it or not, that makes me feel better than resenting someone for how they're treating me.

For the record, alcoholics like me actually can't afford resentments. Resentment is what leads many a recovering alcoholic to relapse. "Poor me, poor me, pour me another drink," the saying goes. During my interaction with Jason yesterday morning, I actually thought about how nice it would be to just "check out". I thought about smoking weed and how nice it would be to be high. I thought about drinking and how nice it would be to be drunk. After my nearly two years clean and sober, that is a very dangerous place for my mind to go; absolutely, under no circumstances, can I pick up a drug or a drink, or my life will be over.

And, so, here's the final prayer, the Mack Daddy of them all: "Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace! That where there is hatred, I may bring love. That where there is wrong, I may bring the spirit of forgiveness. That where there is discord, I may bring harmony. That where there is error, I may bring truth. That where there is doubt, I may bring faith. That where there is despair, I may bring hope. That where there are shadows, I may bring light. That where there is sadness, I may bring joy. Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort, than to be comforted. To understand, than to be understood. To love, than to be loved. For it is by self-forgetting that one finds. It is by forgiving that one is forgiven. It is by dying that one awakens to Eternal Life."

Amen!

(I do need help remembering this one, though. HWDEDDS CUL SFD...lemme try that.)

After I meditate and pray, I do, at least temporarily, forget about whatever it is that someone did that bothered me. It's a lot of work, but it's a small price to pay to get out of a living hell.

I came up with another way to help me deal with Jason for when I'm around him, because I can't easily do all that meditating and praying when I'm actually around him - that'll take some practice. So before I left the bathroom and went back to his vicinity, I said to myself, "Okay, Adora: any time you're with Jason, shut your mouth other than to laugh at his jokes, to console him, to kiss him, to sing to him, or to suck his dick."

Fuck, I know. It sounds horrible, doesn't it? And my perception could be entirely wrong. But I'm gonna re-mind myself of the phrase my cousin coined when I left my husband to "be with" a co-worker, 2 1/2 years ago: "Enjoy your boy toy." Right now, maybe that's Jason's place in my world. And I really do feel, based on how he "treats" me, that the above five verbs about sum up the place I have in his. I'm not going to try to "get anything" from him other than what he's willing or able to offer (and my prayers do help me with that.) He's not a stepdad to my son (my son's dad is in his life, and okay, so I'll be doing it on my own when he's in my custody...fine). He's not a financial provider (I'm going to school and trying to finish so I can work full-time with a degree...so...I don't get a man to "take care of me"...fine). He's not a spiritual guru (he's an ego-driven, science-loving atheist...fine, I love science, too; ego, not as much, but whatever). He's a musician, and we have fun making music together. He makes jokes, and we have fun laughing together. He's sexy, and we have fun being physically intimate. And he's leaving for the Berklee School of Music in Boston for two years in July, although he'll be coming home for vacations...so the fun'll be over in six months save for intermittently thereafter...if we're even still involved with each other at that point. 

Boy Toy. Fun. Fine.

So, I went over to his house again before choir rehearsal for a kiss, since my son was asleep, and because I do like affection. I came up with another mantra on the way, where I reminded myself: "Save your crazy." In other words, I'll "save my crazy" for, or only talk about my feelings when I'm talking to sponsors, friends, my therapist, people in recovery meetings, or save them for when I write. But presenting them to Jason may not give me a favorable result; I've all ready found him to be a black hole. "Don't go to an auto mechanic for heart surgery," a saying goes. 

So Jason is, to me: "laughter, affection, and music". When I went back over there, instead of talking to him about my feelings, because experience has taught me that I can get nothing out of that other than frustration, I decided this time to just listen to him, laugh at his jokes while sprinkling in some of my own to make him laugh, show him affection, and nurture him. And it all worked out just fine. I didn't lose one ounce of serenity because of my acceptance and decision to just "give".

[And no, he won't read this. I'm hoping he ends up proving me wrong eventually, really. But we'll see.]

Then, I left, and I drove to the foster care facility where I picked up my 16 year-old sponsee Kassandra. She's recovering from alcohol and drug addiction, and I'm working her through the 12 steps. I also hired her to babysit my four year-old son for me during my choir rehearsal last night. I enjoy spending time with and being of service to her, whenever I can, and she enjoys getting out of the foster care facility any chance she gets (it's not a "home" with a family...it houses a large number of "former delinquents" without a home...and the place more resembles an apartment complex with a big office building in the middle than it does a house). Kassandra's doing a lot better now that she's not living in a motel room with her heroin-adddicted dad and now that she's not ending up in juvie over and over (she's been twice). Now, she's going to an adult school for her GED, she's involved in club volleyball, she volunteers at a mental health facility, and she gives me one more reason to stay sober and knock my own bullshit off. I want to be a positive example for someone.

Choir rehearsal was good. I enjoyed watching my director intently as I led the Soprano section. He's so good at letting us know when to be loud, when to be soft, when to cut off, when to come in, with his hands, arms, and face. I think I want to go on for a Master's Degree in Choral Conducting after I get my Bachelor's Degree in Music. I'll be done with my BA in a few semesters; I'm going half-time. Actually, when I woke up here at 4:53 am and decided I needed to write some more (I love it when my addictive nature latches onto writing as opposed to other things), this idea was the first thing that came to my mind.

I dropped Kassandra back off at "home" and drove my boy and I home, where we commenced to build a castle out of giant legos and had the bad guys tear it down and then the good guys beat up the bad guys for tearing it down. Then he asked to watch Max Steel on Netflix, so I set that up for him while he ate dinner, and I took some time to read don Miguel Ruiz' The Mastery of Love. I hadn't read anything for weeks (I was too busy obsessing about Jason and trying to get him to be my boyfriend), so it was nice to get out of my head some more. I picked it up while thinking about the last prayer that I'd quoted above, otherwise known as the St. Francis Prayer (or the 11th Step Prayer), thinking, "Hmm, maybe this book will teach me how to love." It was a Christmas gift from a girlfriend of mine in recovery, but I hadn't opened it up yet. And I only got through about ten pages before my son needed me again, but I read some things that I really appreciated. I have to open myself up to solutions from outside of myself as much as I possibly can. It's just the only way for me to go on.

Before I got to writing here this morning, I had also begun to read again one of my ol' writing professors' blogs. Whenever I go on a reading spree, I try to make sure his work gets in there somewhere. I'll be forever indebted to him for his inspiration; I always learn something from him, even though it's been, say, nearly ten years since I've taken the two classes I took from him (a literature class focusing on autobiography and a beginning creative writing class). Right now he's having to undergo chemotherapy; he's about done with it, and it's working, so I'm glad about that. But gosh, it's amazing to read his work, not just because as a professor of creative writing, he writes extremely well, but also because when I read his work, I always gain some new perspective on my own life situation.

One of the things he wrote about in his last post is the value he has found in community, as people gather to help one another in a common purpose. We don't have to do this thing alone. And that reminds me why I'm of service to those less fortunate - because nothing that I'm going through is really that bad. Other people have it plenty worse.

I need the death of the self (or ego) that St. Francis (attributedly) talks about. For example, I also help a crippled woman named Melia who's in her fifties and can't go anywhere without someone's help. I give her rides and bring her things and spend time with her, just because it gets me out of myself. She calls me every day, in a lot of pain both physically and emotionally. I can't do anything to alleviate her physical suffering, but it makes me feel good to make her laugh or to help her through her own resentments and self-pity (which are probably more founded than mine, though no more or less detrimental to one's well being).

Today I'm giving Melia a ride to the doctor at 2:30. Before that I'll be taking care of my son and reaching out to some people on the phone, to see how they're doing.

I'm gonna try to just be okay today, whatever it takes.