Sunday, July 31, 2005

What she really said was:

"And what it all boils down to, my friends/Is that no one's really got it figured out just yet..."

...which is a little more accurate.

"And what it all boils down to, my friends/Is that everything's gonna be fine fine fine..." -Alanis Morrissette

I broke various speed laws to get to my meeting this morning. And I was rewarded with a talk, and a fellowship, that reminded me of the precious gifts I have, and the gifts I can receive, if I keep showing up...and when someone uttered the phrase, "emotional sobriety" in their poignant, effective share, I came home, Googled it, and found this:

The Next Frontier: Emotional Sobriety
by Bill Wilson


Copyright © AA Grapevine, Inc, January 1958

I think that many oldsters who have put our AA "booze cure" to severe but successful tests still find they often lack emotional sobriety. Perhaps they will be the spearhead for the next major development in AA—the development of much more real maturity and balance (which is to say, humility) in our relations with ourselves, with our fellows, and with God.

Those adolescent urges that so many of us have for top approval, perfect security, and perfect romance—urges quite appropriate to age seventeen—prove to be an impossible way of life when we are at age forty-seven or fifty-seven.

Since AA began, I've taken immense wallops in all these areas because of my failure to grow up, emotionally and spiritually. My God, how painful it is to keep demanding the impossible, and how very painful to discover finally, that all along we have had the cart before the horse! Then comes the final agony of seeing how awfully wrong we have been, but still finding ourselves unable to get off the emotional merry-go-round.

How to translate a right mental conviction into a right emotional result, and so into easy, happy, and good living—well, that's not only the neurotic's problem, it's the problem of life itself for all of us who have got to the point of real willingness to hew to right principles in all our affairs.

Even then, as we hew away, peace and joy may still elude us. That's the place so many of us AA oldsters have come to. And it's a hell of a spot, literally. How shall our unconscious—from which so many of our fears, compulsions and phony aspirations still stream—be brought into line with what we actually believe, know and want! How to convince our dumb, raging and hidden "Mr. Hyde" becomes our main task.

I've recently come to believe that this can be achieved. I believe so because I begin to see many benighted ones—folks like you and me—commencing to get results. Last autumn [several years back - ed.] depression, having no really rational cause at all, almost took me to the cleaners. I began to be scared that I was in for another long chronic spell. Considering the grief I've had with depressions, it wasn't a bright prospect.

I kept asking myself, "Why can't the Twelve Steps work to release depression?" By the hour, I stared at the St. Francis Prayer..."It's better to comfort than to be the comforted." Here was the formula, all right. But why didn't it work?

Suddenly I realized what the matter was. My basic flaw had always been dependence - almost absolute dependence - on people or circumstances to supply me with prestige, security, and the like. Failing to get these things according to my perfectionist dreams and specifications, I had fought for them. And when defeat came, so did my depression.

There wasn't a chance of making the outgoing love of St. Francis a workable and joyous way of life until these fatal and almost absolute dependencies were cut away.

Because I had over the years undergone a little spiritual development, the absolute quality of these frightful dependencies had never before been so starkly revealed. Reinforced by what Grace I could secure in prayer, I found I had to exert every ounce of will and action to cut off these faulty emotional dependencies upon people, upon AA, indeed, upon any set of circumstances whatsoever.

Then only could I be free to love as Francis had. Emotional and instinctual satisfactions, I saw, were really the extra dividends of having love, offering love, and expressing a love appropriate to each relation of life.

Plainly, I could not avail myself of God's love until I was able to offer it back to Him by loving others as He would have me. And I couldn't possibly do that so long as I was victimized by false dependencies.

For my dependency meant demand—a demand for the possession and control of the people and the conditions surrounding me.

While those words "absolute demand" may look like a gimmick, they were the ones that helped to trigger my release into my present degree of stability and quietness of mind, qualities which I am now trying to consolidate by offering love to others regardless of the return to me.

This seems to be the primary healing circuit: an outgoing love of God's creation and His people, by means of which we avail ourselves of His love for us. It is most clear that the current can't flow until our paralyzing dependencies are broken, and broken at depth. Only then can we possibly have a glimmer of what adult love really is.

Spiritual calculus, you say? Not a bit of it. Watch any AA of six months working with a new Twelfth Step case. If the case says "To the devil with you," the Twelfth Stepper only smiles and turns to another case. He doesn't feel frustrated or rejected. If his next case responds, and in turn starts to give love and attention to other alcoholics, yet gives none back to him, the sponsor is happy about it anyway. He still doesn't feel rejected; instead he rejoices that his one-time prospect is sober and happy. And if his next following case turns out in later time to be his best friend (or romance) then the sponsor is most joyful. But he well knows that his happiness is a by-product—the extra dividend of giving without any demand for a return.

The really stabilizing thing for him was having and offering love to that strange drunk on his doorstep. That was Francis at work, powerful and practical, minus dependency and minus demand.

In the first six months of my own sobriety, I worked hard with many alcoholics. Not a one responded. Yet this work kept me sober. It wasn't a question of those alcoholics giving me anything. My stability came out of trying to give, not out of demanding that I receive.

Thus I think it can work out with emotional sobriety. If we examine every disturbance we have, great or small, we will find at the root of it some unhealthy dependency and its consequent unhealthy demand. Let us, with God's help, continually surrender these hobbling demands. Then we can be set free to live and love; we may then be able to Twelfth Step ourselves and others into emotional sobriety.

Of course I haven't offered you a really new idea—only a gimmick that has started to unhook several of my own "hexes" at depth. Nowadays my brain no longer races compulsively in either elation, grandiosity or depression. I have been given a quiet place in bright sunshine.

Saturday, July 30, 2005

Now would be a good time to celebrate my breasts.

The head of the UCLA Revlon Breast Center, who has cared for my breasts for the past 5 or 6 years yesterday pronounced them healthy and beautiful.

Would that we were talking about an intelligent, handsome, witty, sexy, warm, available man instead of a petite Chinese woman.

Sunday, July 17, 2005

And happy birthday, Linda...

...glad I know where YOU are!

Happy birthday, Dad...

...wherever you are.

"Believe it or not, I can actually draw." -Jean-Michel Basquiat

I went to the MOCA opening tonight. Was also invited to a business acquaintance's party in Santa Monica, but got so caught up in the scene downtown, I never found myself on the 10 West.

It was a cool party, absolutely the place to be...Grandmaster Flash was the DJ, it was loud and crowded and a great mix of artists, patrons, hipsters, poseurs...and people like me, who really just wanted to see the work.

His paintings are complex, funny and sad. I stood in front of several of his pieces and laughed at his celebration of irony, then welled up in the face of his apparent despair. He loved jazz and Mark Twain. He looked forward to making films that portrayed African Americans as "regular people," not thieves and druggies. When asked what he'd do if he knew he only had 24 hours to live, he took a very long beat...then said he'd hang with his mother and his girlfriend. He was 28 when he died of an accidental drug overdose. We always say it's such a waste for an artist to die so young...but does that diminish the rich body of work he's left behind?

I ran into well-known LA painter acquaintance Joshua, who told me he'd gone to a Basquiat opening in 1983; we stood in front of one of the paintings Joshua had viewed while the artist was in the room. I observed Basquiat's regular use of halos, and wondered if he'd been seeing angels, or was just looking for them -- a thought that appealed to Joshua.

The line for the women's rest room was predictably long, and the men's line was non-existent; a common phenomenon. I stood with several women at the end of our line, one of whom had asked her boyfriend to scope out the men's room scene on her behalf. I suggested that it wouldn't matter if enough of us stormed the place. "A takeover?" asked the 20-something woman, just as her boyfriend emerged and advised us that he didn't think the men would mind. So, five of us strode past the manned urinals, and waited patiently for the stalls to empty. Mine was offered to me by a guy who said to all of us, "I not only put the seat down, I wiped it off, too! Chivalry is NOT dead!" And another cool guy said, "I love seeing all these pairs of high heels in the men's room stalls! Very sexy!"

I was just about to leave the gallery when a man with shoulder-length wild hair and shocking blue eyes approached me and said with an ivory smile, "You look so beautiful in all that blue, just beautiful, especially with your red hair." I'm always touched when a man goes out of his way with a sincere compliment. I wondered how many other men thought the same thing but chose not to say anything? Men really should speak up about such things. When it's a genuine offering, it makes women feel so good.

Saturday, July 09, 2005

"You think not telling is the same as not lying, don't you?" -Jack White

The new White Stripes CD is as as stripped down and raw as any musical thing I've responded to lately. Pick it up and prepare to be exposed.

It's a perfect addition to my current life soundtrack, as I'm as stripped down and raw as I've been in a long time. Making daily critical discoveries about myself, what I want to change, what I want to keep, how I want to live. A new recognition of the source material which feeds my psychological makeup. Acknowledging those aspects which can and must change in order for me to reach the next level of peace with myself. Re-embracing those crucial things I'd eschewed in the interest of accommodating the comfort of others. Remembering my purpose and my passion, and allowing nothing/no one to inhibit my progress.

This is the work at hand, the ongoing process, and I am doing my best to travel the higher road, finding a way to take uncomfortable steps with as much grace as I can.

And sometimes I just break down and weep myself inside out.

You, too, Jack?

Saturday, July 02, 2005

Atkins, schmatkins: I'm looking simply fabulous after two weeks on The Diet of Despair

That's right, I've lost 10 pounds in 2 weeks...I'm slipping out of my size 8 jeans and slinking into the 6's. 2 more weeks of abject sadness, and I'll be that Size 4 men can't seem to resist!

I'm getting there. Now, tell me where "there" is, again?

"Like I've said before, I love reading the journals of great novelists, because they've got these huge intimidating bodies of work and yet they virtually ALL spent incredible amounts of time procrastinating, indulging in their addictions, obsessing about destructive love affairs, panicking about money, and beating themselves up about all of it." - Longtime family friend, fine writer and avid fellow blogger, Amba (Quick! Go savor her at http://ambivablog.typepad.com/)

Friday, July 01, 2005

The Disease of Perfection

The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.

-William Butler Yeats