So How Am I Anyway?

 I sense from swan's recent post that it might be good were I to somehow describe who and how I have come to be, and feel, these days.  swan is feeling quite pleased with the recovery and increased happiness that has evolved since our huge crises and upheavals that we lived through the end of 2010 and into 2011.

First of all it is good to see how happy swan is these days.  Her health, her excitement as she begins her new school year, and her relief and invigoration at having passed through a period when  the potential for all of us to lose each other was both real and probable is truly gratifying.  She is so good and has risked and cared so much.  It is great to see her feeling rewarded by our present reality.  It is wonderful too to see her fulfillment as she moves into her new and expanded teaching role.

I am generally much better than I was.  I revel in my health, even as I struggle to get past the effects of my recent knee replacement.  This one is taking longer and proving more difficult than my first knee replacement in 2005.  I had expected to be further than I am by this time, but am working really diligently three times a week in my PT and have generally pushed harder in my own personal exercise and  rehabilitation efforts than most might (sometimes to my detriment).  I am confident that in a few weeks this will fade as me knee becomes much better than it has been for years and I am able to return to exercise walking and bicycling.  I miss terrifically my now 10 week hiatus from sincere cardio conditioning and its physical and emotional benefits.

But when swan wants to know how I am, she already knows all these things. So that is not what she is seeking information about.  She wants to know "How I Am" as a more in depth probative question.

I am better.  I am so much better than I was two years ago now mourning the loss of my career and my father and my freedom to be who I was or had been until then.  I am today sober 589 days and I feel great.  I rarely mourn the absence of alcohol in my life....in fact my imagining of feeling its effects now seems really unpleasant.  I enjoy remembering the many good times I had drinking and telling drinking stories but do not want to return to how punishing medically and economically my drinking became or to the way my behaviors when I drank effected our family. So that is all good....or mostly.

I am better too by far since I no longer have to attend AA meetings, or rehab. aftercare meetings, or probation meetings, or wonder when there would come a knock at the door to take me to prison.  The court's lack of direct and immediate participation in my life permits me more of a suspension of fear that they might come for me anytime than I have lived with since our troubles.  I also now live knowing with that ostensibly well-meaning but malevolent police and court folks may come for me at any time regardless of my behavior, and that I may be hauled off to prison from sleep on my couch if I become deeply upset and need help.  So I am in many ways much better and in others still terrified and hurt.

I am better in that I only wake up "in jail"  in my sleep maybe once or twice a month as opposed to once or twice a night.  I no longer have daily rage fantasies of getting weapons and killing as many police as I can.  I no longer wake up each day wishing I and not lived through the night.  I am glad to be alive again.  I trust my family does not want to have me imprisoned again and I hope that I will either never get to a point where they will want to do that to me again, or that if I get there I will be able to hide what I am feeling so that they will not.

I have trouble respecting myself or imagining my having much value.  I no longer have a role in which I give much to anyone.....I do make most of our shopping happen and keep our condos free of trash, and try to help make sure we all get health care we need, get our cars maintained, and help get   t and swan to work.  I still don't deal well with the reality that I am a criminal who has been jailed twice by my family.  Either that was excessive which is a reality I don't know how to cope with, or it was necessary and appropriate which leaves me feeling worthless.......subhuman.  I led social movements, and made successful businesses of them so that they helped sustain communities.  Now I am a criminal......a criminal who is sober.  I was a man who was drunk.  I have to revel in my sobriety which is healthy for me and joyous for everyone else, whether those close or more distant from me..

I have a whole list of friends from "before" who have contacted me wanting to know how I am.  After "all this" happened I dropped out of sight.  I imagine calling one of them back and keep putting it off and days become weeks, then months, then years.  I feel such shame.  I  am so humiliated and I don't want to face anyone who knew me.  Others simply ended ever relating to me, even if they reached out to t or swan.

So I am healthy and much happier than I have been anytime since October 2010.  I am living and sober (which seems so silly to me to be the focus of a life...........but in that it cost all this it must be worth it somehow........it just seems empty as a life's purpose............the purpose of my life now is to not drink, and then all will be good.)  My feelings of love for swan and t have crescendoed back to levels rivaling or maybe in some ways exceeding before.  I am so grateful to them for caring for me this summer......especially the first two weeks when I was in real agony (this really was a tough knee replacement) and I was truly incapacitated with pain medication.  And I just feel such a life bond with them I cannot imagine life without them.  I enjoy many little things now .....baseball......watching politics(now that I am sidelined from participating in them), reading, movies.  

My sexuality has rebounded greatly in terms of my SM and in general.  My "Dominance" ( a term which seems pretty ludicrous to apply to me these days) comes through in that the control needs of my personality are still what they always have been, and I think signs of that being restored are comforting to all three of us.  

So I am so much happier than I have been...........and really am glad to be alive again.  I wish there was a way to convey how relieved and actually "good" I feel compared to where I have been.  I realize that this likely comes off as morose and depressed, but label it as you might, it is how I am now.  

My immediate present is fine.  My internal monologue is still about woundedness, shame, and fear.

I am genuinely thrilled to see swan so happy.  I think t is still recovering (if there is such a thing as recovery for what was such a loss for her) from her mom's death, but she is better daily.  My joy in them and for them is very real.  I really am better and am sorry if my still struggling is a source of disappointment, that I am not as joyous in the present as others.

Tom