My Brain Anonymous

10th Stepping In It

2012-02-05T00:14:00.001-08:00

10th step is hard.

I mean, it's way easier than 4th-9th steps, but that realization that you've been wrong about something and knowing that you can't put off or get out of apologizing and/or making amends... That is hard and it is scary. You get that sinking sick feeling in your stomach, your embarrassed, there is shame, there is that instinctive fear of seeming weak.

Would you rather be right or would you rather be happy?

It is in a way, however, comforting. It's a relief to be able to just say "I was wrong." It saves the trouble of creating and holding on to justifications. It takes a lot of energy to keep yourself convinced that you're right, or even that you're wrong but someone else is wronger, or that even though you're wrong, it is understandable and therefore you shouldn't need to apologize.

Even greater is the relief that comes with apologizing. Yes, it is scary to look someone in the eyes and to bring up a thing that they may not even be thinking about, that they may have despaired of getting an apology for, or that they may not have expected any apology for at all... Or worse, they may have convinced themselves, or worse still, we may have convinced them that they were the ones in the wrong. Our instinct is to let it go, to take that opportunity for an out. They may not even feel an apology is necessary, so why must we unnecessarily put ourselves (and them, we may try to convince ourselves) through this drama?

But except in those rare cases where an attempt to apologize may truly cause real injury, growing a pair of ovaries and jumping in...

Because that is what it's like... Jumping into water that is below your body temperature.

Making an apology is not in itself a pleasant experience. It is a hurdle we must jump. But the breathing afterwards is so much easier, and your soul feels lighter.

This is why 10th step comes in order after 4-9... Not because you don't have to do it until you've completed 4-9 -- in fact, I'd argue that doing 10th step is integral to the early development of one's program -- but rather because once you've jumped the huge hurdle of steps 4-9, which is like a macro step 10, doing 10th steps is a comparatively easy maintenance procedure.

Funky Reality

2012-01-29T13:42:00.001-08:00

So here's the thing... I think I've decided that I have to come to terms with depression as a chronic disability sort of thing. There are some things that I think I'm supposed to be able to do that I can't... At least not reliably or consistently. Instead of beating myself up over this, I need to figure out how to live my life working around this reality rather than fighting it and myself all the time. I need to work within my limitations and stop hating myself for having them. Maybe someday I will have the ability and resources to manage my depression more effectively. For the meantime though, I can only expect what is reasonable from myself and my funky up and down life.

Oy.

2012-01-14T19:28:00.000-08:00

I'm in that place again.

Shit.

There's that voice. The voice that says I'm too tired to fight it, too tired to resist, it'd be easier to just lie down and take it, to let it beat me, to take me where it will, to die if that's what it wants. Too tired. Just so so tired.

But I'm still clear, I'm still rational, I know that I don't want that. Or at least, I don't want to want that. For now, I'm still upright. For now, I'm still holding. For now, I know that I can fight it if I stay willing.

Depression sucks. It just sucks. There's no two ways about it. It is the suckiest suck that ever sucked. Suckingly.

I went to my doctor the other day to get my prescription for the next three months of meds. He asked me if everything was okay, if we needed to adjust the dose. "There's room to go up if need be." I told him no, not yet. I'm so resentful already of having to take meds, I resisted going to my current dose for a long time. I don't want to have to increase the dose because that means that someday they're going to stop working altogether and then what am I going to do? I'm so scared of that happening.

I don't want to be doing this. I don't want to have to deal with this. This is a fucking disability that controls my life. But it's not even recognized as such so it's not even like I get the help that people with legitimate disabilities get. The meds make it possible, but not easy. I still have to fight every day, all the time. And if that stops working...

Breathe, G. Breathe. Bitterness isn't going to help. What will help is going to a meeting tomorrow. And not drinking tonight. I think maybe I've been turning in that direction a little too often lately.

Maybe tomorrow I'll write about some of the fears that have been keeping me awake at night.

Complacency

2012-01-11T18:06:00.001-08:00

I started writing this last night. I'd
just come from a meeting. Meetings are good. Interesting that I seem to keep forgetting that. Just like I forget everything else that's good for me. I want to be where I was about a year ago, when program was everything and everywhere and I was using the tools and reading the lit and I always knew what to do. Truth is, I still do. This program isn't complicated. It's just a lot easier in any given moment not to do it than to take responsibility for recovery.

I sometimes feel these days like I want to start my daycount over again. I'm not exactly sure why... Maybe I think that starting again somehow will get me newly motivated. The abstinence I've been maintaining for two years is not easy exactly, but it's easy to follow the letter of my plan while still not really working my program well at all.

I don't think the answer really is to start my count again... If it is though, it would be a new count of a new plan. Maybe I should talk to my sponsor about tuning up the plan.

Or maybe what I've got to do is just to get my ass in gear and work on doing my current plan better.

Complacency kills.

New Phone, New Year, New Beginnings

2012-01-09T18:19:00.001-08:00

I have a new phone. It is a smart phone. I fear that it may be smarter than I am... But I'm getting the hang of it.

So...been a long time hasn't it? In the meantime I've reached 2 years of abstinence. December 30 is my abstinence anniversary which is kinda nice cause it's kinda new years but not.

So what else is up in my life you may wonder. Or not cause, you know, I've been so absent and I don't exactly expect everyone to be waiting eagerly to hear of my adventures or lack thereof when I come back.

But um, well, you know, it's been kinda same old same old. Same old ups and downs, same old funks and miraculous recovery moments, same old slacking on my program. What gets really frustrating is really wishing you could say that this time it'll be different but knowing that it probably won't. I mean, let's face it... I'm the same person as I was last time I tried to make that change... You know, the one after the which everything will be different and I'll be more organized and more capable of dealing with various bumps in the road without falling apart. And the fact is, it never happens. It never gets magically better. I know I'm going to screw up again like I always do, I'm not going to start suddenly keeping a schedule and a calendar, I'm not suddenly going to be managing my time so much more effectively or keeping my stuff so much neater our exercising that much more. Some such situation may take for a little while, but it's all going to fall apart again in relatively short order. I'm going to conscientiously call my sponsor and my fellows with some regularity, work on my steps, keep my room clean, and then another funk will come along and it'll all fall apart again.

Lets find something positive in this, shall we?

The thing that I like about my abstinence anniversary not being on new years but being close is that it reminds me of what this is not. This is not a new years resolution. This is not a promise that I make to myself or to anybody else.

This interruption is to mention that this swype keyboard thing is a little hard to get used to but ultimately is pretty cool, especially on a bumpy train ride.

New beginnings are happening all the time. Any given moment can be a new beginning. It's not significant days that give rise to significant events, it is the other way around. The danger in putting too much weight on significant dates is that they so easily become something that must be lived up to, a promise you must keep, a debt you must pay. Ultimately, you are setting yourself up for failure, making promises that your will cannot keep, writing checks that your ego cannot cash.

So yeah, you know what? I'm going to make the same mistakes again, fall into the same traps, screw up in the same ways, and that's okay. It has to be, because we can only afford to expect the possible from ourselves, and were it not okay to screw up, there would be no reason to start anything new or try to improve anything ever.

Given that two years ago I would gave had trouble imagining that I would be able to go for two years eating three meals every day without binging or purging or starving myself, without punishing myself with food, I'd have to concede after all that there really is hope for change... I've just got to make sure not to turn that hope into a ridiculous standard to which I pressure myself to live up, because then I'm just setting myself up to fail.

School "Feh"s

2011-11-04T12:18:00.000-07:00

I'm here. I exist. Really.

I made a promise to a certain Charlie that I would write something here by last night. Well, I failed to live up to that promise. And I keep feeling the strongest urge to say "I'm sorry! I'm a horrible person! I deserve to be shot! Please, take vengeance on me!" But you know what? I don't have to do that. Because Charlie understands. It doesn't mean that it's a great thing that I didn't do what I said I'd do when I said I'd do it, and I'm going to try to do better next time, but I don't have to beat myself up for it. If no one else is beating me up, I don't have to do it for them.

I've been having a bit of a rough time in school lately. I'm learning without a chevruta... which is defined in the glossary over to the right if you scroll down. Jewish study is traditionally done in pairs. That is the way I learned to learn, and it is difficult to learn classical Jewish texts alone. Remember, several different languages at once. It's easy to lose track of stuff if you dont have someone to bounce off of. The thing is, I'm good at this stuff. I really am. But I've been struggling and falling behind and losing focus and it's not a fun place to be. Things just happened to fall out such that I ended up without a chevruta, and that is nobody's fault... but it leaves me in the kind of sucky position of feeling like the stupid one in the class and wondering what the hell I've been thinking with this idea that this is what I want to do with my life.

Ugh, I think I'm going to have to leave this unfinished because I've got to get ready for Shabbat... but know that I am not leaving on a down note because that is where I am... I'm feeling actually pretty darn good about things. I have, potentially, a plan. Like a real plan, a good plan, a plan that might actually move my life forward in significantly happy ways. I'll write about that after Shabbat.

Everyone have a great weekend, and a special thank you to Charlie for the love and support. *hugs*

The Thing About Meds

2011-08-31T16:30:00.000-07:00

As I recently mentioned on Twitter, I hate being dependent on medication. Like, really. I mean, I'm grateful for meds. They allow me to, you know, stay alive by not killing myself. Which is also why I hate them. Because without them I lose my ability to function. I dislike always needing something that I can't just improvise. I dislike having to remember to get them, having to remember to bring them if I'm staying somewhere, having to count out as many as I need, and that feeling of inadequacy and failure when I forget, miscalculate, get lazy...

I run out. Inevitably I run out. Cause I forget, I get lazy, I run out of money, whatever. This time I just didn't bring enough to mom's, where I'm staying taking care of the cats. I didn't want to go back home to get them, even though it's just a few stops away on the train. Just another thing to do, another place to go, another something else that I just don't want to deal with right now... so I put it off. And for a day I'm ok. Then I'm, what, busy? Distracted? Lazy? And I put it off another day. By that time, I'm in withdrawal, and then there's a reason I don't want to go. Cause I'm anxious and jittery and now dealing with that one more something really does feel like too much. At that point, I'm waking up at 10:30, getting out of bed at 11:30, eating breakfast at 11:45, taking a shower at 1 pm, getting dressed at 2:30... this is what my life is like when I'm off my meds... *if* I'm feeling super motivated.

I went home today. I got my meds. I went to the post office and picked up a package. I went to the bank and got some coins counted, and took out rent money. Went back home and paid my rent. Then came back to mom's. And it felt emotionally like I ran a marathon.

So... I have to be vigilant about my meds. And I hate that.

I keep having nightmares about being back in school, sometimes it's high school, sometimes college, sometimes rabbinical school. The nightmare is that I wake up from a depressive stupor one day and realize that I haven't been to one of my classes in months, don't even remember what room it's in. No clue what to tell the teacher, or how I'm going to deal with it, how I'm gonna graduate. It's horrible because it's a nightmare that isn't imaginary. It's what my entire academic career has felt like. Even when I did go to all of my classes, I often wasn't there. I would sleep through them, either literally or figuratively. It's a horrible feeling. I don't want to do that again.

Well Hello Charlie, It's So Nice To Be Back Home Where I Belong...

2011-08-16T15:22:00.000-07:00

Oh hey, look! I'm alive!

I wanna thank Charlie for reminding me why I created this space, and why I need to visit more often.

So where am I? I am still abstinent, but I must tell on myself that I've not been great at using the tools lately. I've been shirking on the meetings front, I've not been praying or meditating, my 4th step has been on hold for months, and I'm just generally being lax about program.

It makes sense, you know? I was so so SO all about Program for the first year and a bit... it was way more present in my mind that my life depends on this. Recovery was EVERYTHING to me and occupied a significant part of my mind and life at every moment. And that was good... that is what it is supposed to be. Now that it's been a year and seven-and-a-half months, I dunno, it's just kind of slipped to the back of my mind.

And predictably, my anxiety has been on the rise, I've been having fatigue and focus issues, and fell into what I had to admit was a real depressive episode last month. And what have I been doing about it? Being mad at myself for letting myself fall back into that place. Is that useful G? Is that helpful?

NOOOOOOOOOO IT IS NOT!

*sigh*

On the plus side though, I've been working a couple of part-time research assistant jobs so I've survived the summer financially (i.e. I've been able to pay rent, utilities, and not starve) and even had enough to spend on some bookshelves... that is, $25 at Ikea, $10 on Craigslist and $10 at a local discount store. This is exciting you see because I have a LOT of books, and I have a TINY room. Bookshelves means I actually have space to arrange, organize, look at and see my library, which is an immense comfort to me. I grew up in a house with shelves of books in every room. I spend my life surrounded by books. Books are knowledge and potential knowledge. Books are one of the most significant ways in which I connect with my religion and my God. Knowing where my books are, that they are there, that I can reach over and pull out a volume of Talmud or commentary on the Bible or the question of evil or The Moosewood Cookbook or a Neal Stephenson novel... it helps me feel grounded and located. It helps me feel like I have a home, a place, a space that is mine. I am a type of bird that lines her nest with books.

And after what happened with my mother's place, it feels good to feel at home.

Ok, what is my plan of action? After I post this, I will go eat dinner. After that, I will meditate for 15 minutes. After that, I will scan some papers that need to be scanned. After that, I will work on my 4th step. And after that, I will call my sponsor.

Ok... GO!

The Smell Of The Room

2011-04-21T15:46:00.000-07:00

It was getting later. I needed a bathroom. I was supposed to meet my grandmother at my father’s house for dinner in just over an hour, about the time it would take to get there from where I was. I looked around. Could I wait? If I jumped on the train now I would make it to Dad’s, but the ride would be miserable. Cross the street one way, on the corner was the train I needed to get to Dad’s. Cross the other, and there was a Catholic church. It was a church I knew, with a room I knew. In that room I knew was a safe, clean bathroom. I knew also that people often came in quietly off the street to use it, and quietly left again. Yet, though I’d never been conscious of any judgement or resentment of the folks who came through the room, disappeared into the back, reemerged, and went straight out again, I was embarrassed to be one of those people. Nevertheless, you gotta do what you gotta do.

I came to the stairs leading down to the room. Sitting on the ledge at the top of the stairs there sat a couple of people chatting.

“You looking for a meeting, honey?” the woman asked me when she saw me hesitate.

I hesitated only a moment more before replying “Actually... well, I am in a fellowship, but I really was just hoping to use the bathroom.”

“Oh, go right ahead!” she said sweetly. “Just go right in and go to the right, all the way in the back.” She needn’t have instructed me, I knew the way well enough. But I thanked her with genuine gratitude for the permission I felt had just been bestowed upon me. I quietly opened the door, ducked into the room with an apologetic smile, and walked quickly to the back.

I hadn’t been in that room for quite a while. I was no longer in school in that neighborhood, and that particular meeting wasn’t so convenient. This wasn’t my fellowship’s meeting on which I’d just intruded, but this room housed meetings of various fellowships morning till night every day, so I knew it would be open, full of sick, suffering, accepting, recovering people among whom I would be safe.

And the second I opened the door, I felt enveloped by that safety. They say that smell is the sense most connected to memory. The room, one of my first rooms, smelled like home. It smelled like recovery and fellowship. The strangers in that room were my people. I didn’t stay for their shares, didn’t know about what they were sharing, but I knew what they were saying. I could smell what they were saying. And it smelled good.

As I left the room, I passed the woman sitting on the ledge again, talking to her friend. She smiled as I passed and I paused.

“You know, I haven’t been in that room in a long time... the smell of it is so comforting!” She smiled a little wider. “Oh, good!” she exclaimed. And I knew she knew what I was talking about.

In Between

2011-04-05T20:24:00.000-07:00

Feeling melancholy today. I'm not liking this. I've been generally low energy for a while now, having trouble concentrating, getting frequent headaches and stomach issues. I know it does no good to freak out about these things, but when the physical symptoms of depression start to creep back in and persist, accompanied by a feeling on ennui and melancholy... well, I'm a little scared. Trying to stay positive, but the last bout of depression could have killed me... which means, so could the next one. I don't want the next one to come.

I've been feeling a bunch of gender angst lately, in multiple senses. It started... well, it started, like, when I was five, but more recently it has been stirred up by... oh God, it feels like too much to even start writing about...

There was the religious/frum/orthodox queer shabbaton at which we were told that since the focus was on gay issues, gender issues couldn't be talked about because it would take away from the main goal. Then there was the women's queer shabbaton, where I felt so out of place. And then there was the guy who asked me out, then made me uncomfortable by being kind of stalker-ish online, and when I cancelled the date and told him why when he asked, told me that I was not allowed to feel uncomfortable with anyone because I was going to be a rabbi.

You don't tell a woman that she is not allowed to feel uncomfortable. Especially with a guy. Especially with a guy who is trying to date her.

Today was Rosh Chodesh, the first day of the new month. In honor of the day, and in memory of her grandmother, a woman in my yeshiva, an older woman, taught us some Chassidut and Kabbalah about the month. This woman has some very fixed ideas about gender. She is breaking with the tradition in which she was raised in that she is woman-positive, but she is still very set in her ideas that women are a certain way and men are a certain way.

When she has, in the past, said things to me that imply assumptions about the inherent natures of men and women, i.e. gender-essentialist statements, I have tried to explain to her, gently, matter-of-factly, without hostility, that I don't buy into gender essentialism... that I don't believe that men and women necessarily have different traits hard-wired into their identities, that while we are socialized in certain ways by our society/ies that are difficult or impossible to escape, nevertheless we don't all fit the strict gender binary models assumed by certain segments of our culture/s. She didn't seem to understand these things, and even if she did, she didn't agree with my view. Which I can be ok with... she is of a different generation and grew up with a different cultural backdrop from mine, and I do not expect to change her mind about things that are, for her, basic assumptions about humanity.

This does not change the fact that, when I hear such assumptions put forth as truth, especially as religious truth, it upsets me on a deep and visceral level. I do love Kabbalah... but the reason I am ok with the gendered language of Kabbalah is because my Kabbalah teacher in Jerusalem made clear from the get-go that it was not really about women and men, masculine and feminine... it was about complimentary concepts which come together to make up a balanced personality, world, universe, God. Male and Female together, intertwined, mixed, united, made into one. What could possibly be more queer? This is how I feel about my own gender-identity, and have since an early age. It is something that I have only recently begun to talk about, to give a name to. There is nothing that I can do about this woman's worldview, and that is ok. But I have to acknowledge the affect that it has on me sitting in a shiur, a lesson, in which she is teaching some very lovely and interesting things, and intermittently sprinkling in statements about "women by nature" that make me feel like I am a non-existent and wrong category of human.

I am a woman. I present as a woman. I don't, I can't, pass as a boy. But as I mentioned in the last post, when I was at the height of my illness, I didn't go to the dresses to dress my new body after losing all that weight... I went for boy's clothes. When I dream, I usually don't dream myself as a girl. I usually don't dream myself as a boy either... just as me. Default human. And in my subconscious mind, that default category of human tends to feel more masculine than feminine. I don't know if that is something about me, or if it is simply (Hah! Simple!) internalized misogyny...

What I know is that I've never felt that I related to women as well as to men. I've always had more male friends than female friends since 6th grade when the boys stopped saying "ew, girls." I feel much more myself when I incorporate masculine elements into my style of dress. In religious settings where there is a mechitza, a partition between a men's side and a women's side, I always feel like I've been placed on the wrong side of it. At a religious wedding, I look longingly at the men dancing, and lament the fact that I don't have the strength or stamina to join in with them, even were I permitted to do so... I simply don't have the muscle or lung power. I've always wanted to know what it feels like to have a flat chest. I've always wished I had muscled arms. When I look at different styles of what people are wearing... the hipsters, the skaters, the party kids... I'm looking at the guys. I'm looking for those style elements to incorporate into my own. It takes me a minute to remember that there are girls in these categories too... and their side simply doesn't interest me.

For a long time I've had this word bouncing around my head, but have been afraid to say it out loud. Because I present as a woman. Because I usually don't bother trying to fight it, trying to pass. Because my gender angst is just another in-between category for G. to put herself into and cause trouble for herself.

But I think maybe it's time to say it.

Genderqueer.

It applies.

Haze and Anger

2011-03-29T19:16:00.000-07:00

Sunday my sponsor qualified at the meeting I co-chaired for the past three months. When my sponsor qualifies, it always puts me in mind of exactly why I asked him to sponsor me… because he has been where I've been, and he has what I want.

He talked Sunday about the haze. Anyone who has a restrictive-type eating disorder knows the haze. It's that fog that comes over you when you starve yourself. That floating woozy not-quite-there feeling. It does different things for different people. For my sponsor, it was about consistency. It didn't feel good, but at least he knew what it felt like, and he could control it… he didn't have to feel anything else.

For me, it was penance. I remember skipping breakfast, not bothering with or "forgetting" to eat lunch, and this on top of depression, I always felt like shit. I fell asleep in my classes. I never had energy, except the occasional manic burst that sometimes comes with starvation. I always tell people that the bulimia started my freshman year of college, because that was the first time I purged… but it started long before that. For years before that, maybe since the age of 12 or 13, I'd starved myself at school, only to lose control and binge when I got home.

But the starving, as much as it sucked, it sucked for a purpose. I was fasting. Every day I was fasting, repenting, punishing myself. Every day was Yom Kippur because every day I required absolution for some inexplicable evil that was within me. It had to be… I tried so so hard to be good. I cannot say this emphatically enough to adequately express just how desperately I wanted to be and tried to be good. I tried to be the most *good* person I knew… but I was always in trouble. My grades were never good enough. I kept saying the wrong thing without understanding why it was wrong, why it merited punishment. And I was always being interrogated, yelled at, and hit at home. I couldn't seem ever to be good enough.

And so I didn't eat. Because I was bad. Because I didn't deserve food. Because I was fat. Because I already took up too much room in the world. But when the food was there in front of me, I couldn't stop myself. I'd have a cracker with cheddar cheese after school, reasoning, I'd eaten nothing all day, surely it couldn't hurt to have a small snack. And before I realized it, the whole block of cheddar and a whole sleeve of crackers was gone. There was no such thing as one cookie. No such thing as one pretzel. And I'd get in trouble for eating all of the cheese and all of the crackers. I'd get yelled at, sometimes hit. If I didn't finish my dinner when I was little I'd routinely get hit, and by the time I was 12 I couldn't help taking seconds and thirds at dinner when the food was all there arrayed in front of me, everyone eating so much so fast, terrified that, once I started eating, that the ravenous hunger that was triggered by that first bite, would never be sated. And it never was, until long after dinner was over, and the food had a chance to settle. And then I was full to the point of discomfort, and deeply deeply ashamed.

My weight fluctuated throughout junior high and high school, but I was always fat. Looking back, I wasn't. Not at all. I was maybe somewhat over the standard idea of "ideal weight" for a 5'4" woman, but I was nowhere near obese. Still, I was never one of the skinny girls, and the skinny girls, it seemed, were the "normal-looking" girls… certainly all of the "pretty girls" were skinny at the very least. They actually looked cute in their gym shorts and tee shirts. I was mortified having to wear shorts in front of these classmates I barely knew and was convinced hated me anyway. All of my friends dressed in black and were older than I was and rejected societal standards of beauty as far as we were concerned, but still openly lusted after the skinny girls. We girls in the group… we weren't girls. We were people. Girls were for lusting. We were for friendship. We were real… girls were not real, but still worthy of that different type of attention that had nothing to do with intelligence or common interest.

But when I starved myself… well, I got a little bit of attention. Oh, I didn't advertise it. It would have been foolish to do so… after all, I was still fat. People who starve themselves aren't fat. But if anyone said something about breakfast or lunch, I wasn't above mentioning casually that I'd not bothered. Or say something about how long it had been since the last time I ate. Once my family began to fall apart in earnest and the family meal was no longer an inevitability in the evening, I was able to go longer and longer stretches without food. And sometimes, every once in a while, someone would pay attention to that, and say something that made me feel acknowledged. Someone was noticing that I was accomplishing something difficult, that I was enduring something painful, even if they didn't understand why… even if I didn't understand why. It didn't matter. I was strong. I was tough. But in that fragile, injured bird sort of way that made the goths sexy, or at least attention-worthy to one another.

Sunday night, I thought about how angry I've been over the past few weeks. I've recently been reminded just how much the gender shit at the bulimia are related… how I'd always felt that being girly or feminine was a weakness, a liability, made me less human, and how I wished I could have a body that would allow me to pass as a boy, or at least allow me to wear boys clothes without looking like a fat girl trying to look ugly. Girls who are boys are sexy. Fat girls who dress in men's clothes are just ugly fat girls who don't know how to dress. My grandmother asked me last week at Aunt Marion's funeral if I'd lost weight. I took a breath and neutrally told her "I don't know… I don't weigh myself," hoping against hope that she'd take the hint. Of course she didn't. "Well, you certainly look like it. You look positively skinny, which is always a good thing to hear." I took a breath and smiled. I could not, I would not say "Thank you." Not out of resentment mind you, but because I know that I cannot fall into the trap of rewarding myself for weight loss by accepting "compliments" on it. To do so is dangerous to me, and my abstinence and my health, physical and mental, have to always be my top priorities. And while it probably shouldn't, while I should be trying to let it slide, and not let it get to me, such comments release this flood of anger in me… anger not at the person making the comment, but at the entire societal paradigm that lies under and behind the comment… not only in terms of weight obsession, but all of the gender and sexuality stuff that is behind it. All of the confusion about whether or not I was supposed to be a girl, and if I was, was it a bad thing… did I want to be a girl, and if I didn't was it because of a genderqueer nature I possess, or is it internalized misogyny? About my value as a woman being tied to how I looked, and my value as a person being tied to how little I acted or looked like a girl, how weight loss for me, though typically a womanly obsession, actually denotes more of an ability to present as masculine…

And ultimately, anger at the fact that I could not SAY any of these things. I had to just smile and let it go, let it lie, let the lies continue to live.

I'm so much more AWAKE now. I can no longer tolerate missing meals. I can no longer escape into that haze. Now that I've seen what it means to have a brain that works, if I start to feel it shutting down, feel my body and brain losing steam from hunger, I freak a bit. I know I need to eat something. And that is a good thing. And the anger? Well… it's not perfect… but it comes of, and fuels, wakefulness. It may ultimately be that it is something I will need to get past. But for the meantime, I see it as evidence of recovery.

Numbers

2011-03-15T13:58:00.000-07:00

I have been abstinent from disordered eating 440 days.

On my food plan, I eat 3 meals every day.

These are the only numbers with which I am supposed to concern myself.

But, as the HaDag Nachash song says, “גם אמי כמו כל היהודים, עסוק במספרים” “I’m like every Jew... obsessed with numbers.”

I have no idea what I weigh right now.

I imagine I weigh 150 lbs.

I fear I weigh 170 lbs.

I want to weigh less than 130 lbs.

When I was a kid, mom bought be a book called “eating pretty” that said that “the healthy weight” for a woman of my height, 5’4” was 130 lbs. I’ve been haunted by that number ever since.

My lowest I remember seeing my adult weight was 132 lbs.

The highest I remember seeing my weight is 185 lbs.

At least 1 time every day I think about purging.

At least 1 time every day I overcome that urge.

I am 29 years old.

I have at least 4 years left of rabbinical school.

It will be at least a year and a half before I am allowed to resume rabbinical school... if I am allowed to resume at all.

I will be no younger than 34 before I am done with school... probably older.

These are the numbers that I am not supposed to think about. These are the numbers that haunt me.

This Is True

2011-02-24T19:07:00.000-08:00

I have a friend on Twitter who is deep in the disease and just coming back to attempting recovery after a period of having given up. She's still very convinced of what she thinks she knows. She reminded me of how I felt when I was deep in the disease. This is taken from/inspired by a series of Tweets tonight in response to her, edited, and elaborated:

I remember when purging felt like control. Eating was loss of control, and purging was regaining that control. Undoing the binge. The purging wasn't the problem, the purging was the solution. When I purged, I was being good, even though I knew it was sick behavior.

And then it wasn't just about undoing a binge. Eating at all became a crime, and purging was exoneration. I hated throwing up, and it was a fitting punishment to make myself throw up after daring to eat. I thought for a long time that if I could control the eating, the purging would stop. Eating is the problem, purging is the solution... it is a bad solution, but it is better than eating, or allowing the food, once eaten, to remain. If I want to stop purging, I have to control the eating.

It took me a long time to realize that that was diseased thinking. And yes, I gained a lot of weight when I finally forced myself to stop.

This was not included in the tweets: My all-time high weight came after I stopped purging. I know, that's scary. I'm almost reluctant to mention it because it might scare someone away from stopping their purging behavior. But this was my experience, and it was part of my road to recovery. My true bottom with the disease was not my physical bottom, was not when I was purging three times a day. It was when I could no longer live with hating myself. Part of that was the fact that, after I stopped purging and started gaining weight, I gave up. I'd come so much closer, I thought, to having the kind of body I wanted... not close enough, not by a long shot, but closer than I'd ever been... but I was killing myself, and it was hurting others, and I couldn't do it anymore. It wasn't going to work... nothing was ever going to work.

This part was included in the tweets: And then I found OA, and I found abstinence. I learned to let go, to not have to always be right, to not argue with people's experience. I learned to stop saying "yes, but" or "well, that doesn't apply to me." I learned that, as special as I am, I am not unique. I am too smart for this, I used to think. Smarter than all of these people. And it was probably true... I have a genius IQ level. But this isn't about intelligence. It isn't about reasoning or thinking your way out of it. We can't "figure this out" and cure ourselves.

This is my experience. This is what I've lived and continue to live with. I am 29 years old and I have 60 weeks of recovery. I still want to purge. I still want to binge. I still want to punish myself sometimes. I still have trouble being happy with my body. But I don't do these things... any of them. Because if I have a problem and I eat over it, I have two problems. If I purge, I have three problems.

This is true.

The Dress

2011-02-19T19:20:00.000-08:00

Today I came out to someone at my synagogue. Not as gay(ish) but as bulimic.

It came up in conversation because she commented on the dress I was wearing. It is a dress I've owned probably since I was 15 or so. It is big and flowy, what is known as a "broomstick dress" or a "crinkle dress." It has recently re-entered my wardrobe after a long period of absence.

I put this dress on for the first time in quite a while, since before the physical disease really started to destroy me, before I started losing weight. It was a dress that I'd never really liked the look of except for the pattern and the color... black with purple flowers densely printed all over. I had it and wore it because it fit. It would always fit. No matter how fat I was, this dress would fit me. And it would hang over my fat body and hide it well enough that I didn't need to suck in and hold myself uncomfortably to prevent popping a button or tearing something as was often the case when I wore dresses since nothing ever fit me for very long unless it was big and not very pretty.

A few weeks ago I wore this dress to a shabbat dinner at a friend's house. I got a lot of compliments on it. When I got back home I stood in front of a mirror and looked at myself. I was wearing a long sweater over it that flattered my figure. I took the sweater off and looked at myself. I turned this way and that way. I was amazed.

I was amazed because I was beautiful. I was positively stunning.

It's not that I'm skinny. I'm not and I never will be. I've mostly accepted that (you know... except when I haven't. I stil have bad days, and that's allowed). But the dress hung on my body so nicely. The tie in the back brought it in just enough to show my curves... my beautifully dangerous curves... without feeling restrictive, and without my having to suck in.

The difference isn't, I don't think, that I've lost weight. I have no idea what I weigh right now, and when I look in a mirror, I sincerely cannot tell. The major difference is so much more miraculous.

I'm standing up straight.

I used to think that there was something seriously wrong with my back because I seemed to have this hump in my upper back right under my neck. People would always tell me to stand up straight and I would say "I can't." I wasn't lying... I really couldn't. But it was only partially physical. I couldn't stand up straight because I had slouched and hunched my shoulders for so long because I was ashamed and wanted to hide. When I tried to stand up straight, it hurt. It hurt physically because my muscles were not used to it, and my muscles were not used to it because I didn't want to be seen. I would let my hair fall in front of my face, wear huge tee shirts, a big black trenchcoat and a backpack full of books into which I could escape whenever I found a corner in which I could hide. I would walk the hallways of my school or anywhere else I happened to be with my head down, pulled into myself avoiding eye contact.

I still don't like my body a lot of the time. I have an eating disorder, and I'm not skinny. Even if I was skinny, I'd be dissatisfied with my body, and I'm not skinny. It is hard for me to look at myself sometimes, but I force myself. I force myself to look at myself, and I force myself to find what is beautiful about my body. I figured this out shortly after I figured out how to stop hating myself.

The key, I found, to not hating myself was to treat myself the way I treated other people, the way I treated people I liked, especially, people with whom I wanted to be friends. I realized at some point that when I look at other people, especially other women, I look at their bodies and I think about what is beautiful about them. This used to be in comparison to my own body, which I found disgusting. Now I look at my own body and I tell myself that I am looking at a beautiful, strong, curvy woman. What I've learned is that, when I like myself, I want to stand up straight. I want to make eye contact. I want to hold myself well, hold my head high, hold my back straight, and be present with myself.

When my friend at synagogue complimented me on my dress, I looked down at it and smiled. I told her, this dress has been with me through many years and many sizes. It has hung on me in different ways at different times. And then the conversation turned to weight and I "came out," and it was fine.

The dress has been with me for many years but it has never before been beautiful. I've never been complimented on it before.

The difference is that now I've decided that I'm beautiful. And what I've learned is that the second you decide you are beautiful, you are.

To Rebbe Or Not To Rebbe

2011-02-18T00:19:00.000-08:00

Ok, I'm frustrated.

Part of what I'm frustrated about is that there's so much that I'm frustrated about that I don't know where to start writing about it, and I really really want to write here.

This is not negatively affecting my life in any significant way. I'm fine. I'm just frustrated.

I don't know if I'll be returning to Rabbinical school. I don't know if I will have a choice in the matter. I don't know what I will do if I can't go back. I know that I will NOT kill myself, and I will NOT use it as an excuse to throw away my abstinence. Whatever happens, God knows best. The folks in admissions may not, but God does.

There's this big question in my mind about the principle behind what I do... obviously the most important thing is the learning, not the piece of paper that a school gives me... not even the recognition of the rabbis who head the school and confer the religious acknowledgement (S'micha) that would make me a rabbi in the eyes of (our understanding of) the Law/Tradition. The question is, though, do these things matter at all in the face of learning? If I can get comparable or even better learning in places other than The Rabbinical School, does it pay to go back simply because it is the only institution committed, in theory at least, to the sort of Traditional Judaism by which I hold, and will still give a queer woman s'micha? I know plenty of people who do fine eschewing titles and lables and pieces of paper and have authority by virtue of the fact that they are recognized by colleagues and students as being learned and authoritative. The fact is, I've got quite a bit of good learning under my belt, and I already serve, in an informal way, as a religious and spiritual counselor, advisor, and teacher to many people. I cannot count the times people have said to me "You're my rabbi already, G."

Down that road, however, lies an arrogance, an immodesty, a lack of humility, which I don't think is proper for me to engage. At the same time though, isn't there a lack of humility and immodesty simply in the pursuit of acknowledgement by an establishment as a figure of authority? Being a "Rabbi" gains me little other than a possible increase of earning power. It doesn't make me magically able to do anything I couldn't do before, except being recognized by the state as clergy for purposes of marriage... but religiously, I can perform a wedding. I can and have officiated at a funeral. I can teach. I can participate in conversions. I can counsel. I can write. I can preach. I can lead prayer. I can study. I can do the things that I can do because I have learned enough to be able to do them. And the things which I haven't learned, well, I continue to learn more and more every day, and God-willing will continue to do so all my days, whether I "officially" become a rabbi or not.

What is my purpose? What am I supposed to be doing? How can I best be of service? I know that this is what I am supposed to be doing, learning, teaching, preaching... but does God want me to pursue the title? Or as Rabbi Shemaya says in Pirkei Avot, אהוב את המלאכה, ושנוא את הרבנות Love the work and despise the position (The word is Rabbanut... the same word for the authority establishment of the Rabbinate)... is it that I am supposed to continue to engage in the learning, but to do so quietly, seeking no position, doing only the work which I am called to do?

In the real world, earning power is important, and being a "credentialed rabbi" helps with that. Does faith mean setting that aside and considering the metaphorical lilies of the parabolical field?

Anxiety, Kisses, Crushes, Shabbos!

2011-02-04T11:54:00.000-08:00

I'm tired of looking at that entry. But I never feel like I have the time to write here. That's never, of course, really true... but there's always something else that is higher priority that I SHOULD be busy with, even if I'm not, and I can't write here before I do THAT, right?

Ha.

Other thing is a lot of the things I'd write about here, I'm writing about for other things. I really want to write about the Shabbaton I was at most recently... but... wow, there's just so much, and it is something that I'm working on with other people, assessing some of the things that went on there and how we should proceed in the future with this very new organization that organized the Shabbaton...

It was wonderful. It was the first major event of this very new very experimental organization that will be very important, and I am just so happy to have been, and to be, a part of it. And now, I need to be a troublemaker about the things that were problematic, because things never improve if we don't talk about flaws. We learn that in 4th step, yes?

What else?

Oh yeah... a girl kissed me there. It was nice. And... of course, I'm a little freaked out because I don't know what to do with that.

Also there's a guy at my synagogue who might be trying to date me. Hard to tell. Also hard to tell how I feel about him.

Also I have a crush that I'm not supposed to have and am trying so hard to pretend it's not, and failing. Grrr...

My sponsor tells me it's ok to have crushes on people, and that it's not something that we can really help, I just have to keep my actions in check. And keep a leash on the fantasies.

Oh, but it's so hard not to imagine... what? To imagine... would you believe what I'm imagining mostly is sitting and talking? This is what I'd really like with/from this person... just to be able to sit and talk with them. All the time. To laugh with them, see them smile, spend time together, hug... those are the fantasies I have when I crush.

Part of why I'm a little freaked by the girl kissing me (though it's been over a year since anyone kissed me, and I've gotta say it was REALLY nice...) is because I've been focusing so strongly on seeking validation only from myself and God. Of course I still seek external validation, it's impossible not to. But it's a new thing for me to not be looking for someone to like me, or wishing someone would like me. I've been in very few relationships, but I've always, since I was 17, wished I were in one, wished someone wanted me. I don't know if I'm capable of having a healthy relationship right now. I don't know if my seeking, being in, getting into, any sort of romantic entanglement would, could, be separated from the desperation for validation.

Some people have binge foods... if they eat one bite, they will not be able to stop themselves. I fear that my codependency is the same... that if I get a taste of a relationship, the desperation will return.

Better I should have been a nun. I'm only slightly joking when I tell people "I'm in a monogamous relationship with The Kadosh Baruch Hu."

Anyway, that's it for now. I'll try to update again soon. Thanks for listening. Gut Shabbes!

Intervention

2011-01-26T19:04:00.000-08:00

“How’s my parenting? If I am abusing or endangering my child, call 1-800-555-YELL”

If only. If only you could pull over a parent and ask to see their parenting license and registration. If only there were clear guidelines for what to do when you find yourself face-to-face with the ugly countenance of a parent out of control.

It is extremely bad form to criticize another’s parenting. Bad enough when it comes from another parent, but from a single adult with no children, it is simply inappropriate. You’ve never been where that parent has been, you don’t know the dynamic between that parent and that child. I understand that, I really do. I’m a keen observer of different parenting styles as well as of the criticisms to which every parent is subjected by those observing. Everyone’s got an answer, everyone’s got a better idea. It would be disingenuous of me to say that I never have the thought that “If Yossi’s mom would just try doing X with him...” but I have the humility to recognize that the best I can do with that idea is to try to remember it for when I, one day God willing, have children of my own, and it’s my turn to make all the mistakes and ruin my kid’s life.

There are certain situations, however, certain behaviors that are unacceptable, inappropriate, and merit intervention. Unfortunately we have no clearly defined course of appropriate action when we witness such behavior. I understand that there may be some room for discussion about the place of corporal punishment in parenting, but striking a child with an object in public is always unquestionably inappropriate.

This is what I witnessed yesterday morning. A child in a stroller, a plastic rain cover pulled down, and an angry mother screaming “What did I tell you? Stop it!” and repeatedly striking the child, hard, through the plastic with an umbrella.

There was a man pushing the stroller. He appeared completely passive.

I could not bear this in silence. I stopped and called after the woman “HEY! You do NOT strike your child with an umbrella!” It was the only think I could think to say.

She whirled around on me, a quarter of a block away. “You try having children!” she screamed.

“I WAS one!” I yelled back. “I was beaten!” And that was all I could do. I continued on my way to my Yeshiva, knowing that this was going to affect my whole day. I took deep breaths and resolved not to cry until I reached an empty room. A woman who works on another floor of the building in which my Yeshiva is housed came into the elevator just after me. “Are you okay?” she asked, touching my arm. I let out a breath shakily, forcing it into a nervous chuckle. “Yeah, I’m okay. Just a little shaky. I’m gonna go upstairs and cry a bit.” I smiled and wished her a nice day as I got off the elevator, mentally noting that she had skipped her floor to ride up with me.

When I got to school I went into an empty classroom, sat down, took a deep breath, put my face into my hands and let my body do what it needed to do. My body needed to cry.

One of the administrators, a friend, came into the room, She’d heard me sobbing. She asked if I was okay, and I told her I was. I told her what had happened and that I was just taking a few minutes to cry it out. She told me that she’d actually been planning to find me to ask if I had any breathing exercises or relaxation techniques for dealing with stress, but obviously I was dealing with my own stress right now, so...

And there it was. The opportunity to get out of my own head. To take and interest in someone else, and to let my experience benefit others. I sat with her and I talked to her about my meditation technique, how I calm my body and my mind, bring myself into the present moment, center and ground myself and remind myself that I am ok.

And this is the miracle of Program. It’s not the food. It’s the coping. It’s the living. It’s the fact that the situations that used to baffle me... well, they still baffle me, but I know that in every moment, no matter what, God is taking care of me, in bringing me to a place where I know how to take care of myself, and even others a little bit.

That’s my gratitude for right now.

L'esprit D'escalier Becomes a Poltergeist

2011-01-19T19:17:00.000-08:00

Ya know, sometimes the arguments I have in my head with people who aren't there are so elaborate, I wonder why I'm not writing screenplays.

One of the great comforts I've found in recovery is that I am not the only one who does this. It is common apparently among addicts. I don't know if normal people do it... what I do know is that it is that it is not something that I, as a person in recovery, can indulge. It's also nearly as hard to stop as a binge or a cycle of purging, and definitely harder to prevent.

I do this when I feel I've been wronged, or slighted, or insulted. I do it when I know I'm right, and I know someone else thinks I'm wrong. I do it when I feel inadequate or ashamed of what someone else thinks of me, or when I feel I should have said or done something differently than I did. I do it preemptively, anticipating what I think someone will or would say against me. I do it as pure fantasy, arguing with people I've not met, people I never will meet.

There are so many things wrong with this behavior I'm not sure where to start...

1. Mind reading. I have no idea what is in someone else's head.
2. Needing to be right(eous). I need to cultivate humility.
3. Fantasizing. Stay in the here and now, deal with what's actually in the room.
4. Obsessing. Thinking in circles gets me precisely nowhere.
5. Seeking outside validation - even within the confines of my own mind. I need seek approval only from HP.

It can feel like an intellectual exercise, and sometimes I can turn such internal dialogues into a constructive piece of writing. But more often than not, it is an unhealthy indulgence, especially if it follows a real life interaction in which I felt put down or inadequate in some way. It's l'esprit d'escalier run amok. I need to remember, when I catch myself in such a fantasy argument, to stop, breathe, laugh at myself, and pray for serenity.

A Queer Weekend

2011-01-12T09:12:00.000-08:00

So now the question is, how do I write about this?

I arrived around 3:45 Friday afternoon. Shabbat was coming in fast, and I wasn't going to have time to decompress from the bus ride before we all lit candles together and started davenning. I wasn't going to have time to take a shower, change my clothes, take deep breaths, do the things I like to do to prepare myself for Shabbat. I found my friend D and he showed me where my room was. I dumped my stuff, pulled out what I would need for the evening's prayer service, and followed D to the Big Room where most of our communal activities would take place.

Z saw me come into the room. He came over to me and gave me a hug much bigger than his stature (he's about my height), gently took my hand and led me to the side of the room by a big window. He put his hands on my shoulders and looked into my eyes. I did the same.

"Let's take a breath together, okay?"

This is how the queer shabbaton started for me. I knew then that everything would be ok.

How do I write about this?

This particular shabbaton is one which takes place every year. It is intentionally small and intimate, and is intended as both a retreat like the other retreats, but also as a sort of town hall for the organization. It is also heavily male in attendance. This is not by design and Z and other organizers have been trying to work on bringing in more women. Z and D did some personal recruiting of women they really wanted at the shabbaton, and I was recruited by both of them. Z made a special exception for me and brought the price of the retreat down below the minimum so that I could make it work. He would not take no for an answer. For this I am extremely grateful.

How do I write about this?

There was a hot tub and a sauna. We had a conversation after dinner about how to maximize enjoyment of these spaces while ensuring that everyone felt safe and comfortable. In the end, we determined that there should be separate hour-long chunks of time in each space for men and women, and an hour in the middle as mixed time. Clothing optional.

That night, one other woman and I ventured out in the snow toward the sauna. It was women's time first. Of the 6 women in attendance, only C and I were taking advantage of this time, I think in part just to take our place in women's space. There had been men saying that "If the women don't want to use the sauna, can't the men just have it all three hours?" The women were hesitant about the sauna, yes. And we were vastly outnumbered, yes. But I for one was not going to feel pressured to yield my space and time to men, especially not in this environment. I've done enough of that.

C and I disrobed in the dark unheated anteroom, feeling for hooks on which to hang our clothes. We grabbed towels from the piles and covered ourselves. Opening the door to the sauna, we found it dimly lit by tea lights, heated by a wood stove in the middle, all fired up for us. It was an octagonal wooden room with benches all around. C and I sat by the ends of the benches on either side of the door, across from each other. We talked. We talked about being bisexual in a homosexual-heavy grouping... the "silent 'B' in GLBT." We talked about our childhoods, about our parents, what had brought us each to where we are now, about our religious journeys. At one point C took the towel off of her body and hung it around her neck. She later told me that she'd not even been conscious of doing so, she was just responding to the heat, and was surprised when she realized she was now sitting uncovered and nude... but was comfortable with that. I remained covered.

We were there for two hours. No men came for mixed sauna time.

The following night, the times were reversed. Women got the hot tub in the first hour while men got the sauna. Wearing a towel in a hot tub isn't really an option, and I didn't have a bathing suit. I was feeling much more loose and comfortable by this time, so along with two other women, C who is about my age, and P who is in her 60s, I set aside the towel and got into the hot tub. We were joined by two other women a short time later, and finally by the last.

It occurs to me to mention that the last woman to enter the hot tub, S, strikes me as the most confident and self-assured, and also the most visibly physically "fit"of all the women present... and she was the only one who opted for clothing. She came in wearing shorts and a sports bra.

In the hot tub, the six of us talked. We talked about labels, about words like bisexual, queer, gay, lesbian, dyke, we talked about our bodies, how we feel about them, how we were feeling in that moment. We talked about the sexuality of nudity versus clothing, especially tight or revealing clothing. We talked about being in the presence of men and feeling vulnerable. We talked about the pressure to be sexual and whether or not identity is determined by whom you are fucking or trying to fuck, or in a relationship with. We talked about the queer identity politics of not being in or seeking a relationship, or sex. And then the women-only hour was up, and C and I decided to venture out again to the sauna. This time for the mixed-gender hour.

When we opened the door to the sauna, it was a very different scene from what we'd found the previous night. The walls were lined, it seemed, with naked men of all sizes and ages. One of them, R, had pants on. He had mentioned at the beginning of the retreat that he was not going to be nude at any point during this retreat out of respect for his husband who was not present. He had talked, however, about how affirming it had been for him at a previous men's retreat, in a mikveh ritual, to stand nude in the company of other nude men. R is transexual. Standing as a man with other men had been a very powerful experience for him.

C and I hung out with the guys for an hour. There was a lot of silliness, joking and playful flirting, singing of showtunes and muppets songs. After an hour most of the men left, but a few, including R, asked us permission to stay behind with us. We agreed and continued a more intimate mixed-gender setting. And we talked. We talked about gender dynamics and chivalry, about body image among men and among women, about the 12-steps and about Judaism and about Christianity, about relationships and partners, about the organization, the weekend, meditation, prayer, about being queer in various ways. We were there together for over an hour more. And when we'd had enough of the heat of the sauna, we continued the conversation back at the hot tub.

There was so so much more to the weekend than what I've talked about here, but these experiences were especially significant to me. They raise questions for me of modesty as a religious principle, but for right now, I'm not so worried about that. In my life I've never been in a space of communal nudity, not even among women. I've always been the one who goes into a bathroom stall to change. I've never been in a communal shower. I have always had so much shame about my body I can't even stand to sleep naked. This weekend shattered a barrier. I was there, present, whole self, exposed, bringing my entire being to these experiences, sharing with these people. And I felt safe. And I felt accepted and loved.

I had gone to M, the director of the organization on Friday night, who had shared that he was an AlAnon. I asked if perhaps we could have a meeting, even if it was just the two of us. He said that he'd been thinking the same thing, and was going to go to Z and ask to find a place in the schedule and on the premises for 12-steppers to meet Saturday afternoon. A location was secured, an announcement made. Five people showed up for our meeting. Approximately 20% of the entire group in attendance. They each, at some point, asked me if I'd been the one who requested the meeting. I said that I had brought it up with M, but he'd already been thinking about it, so it wasn't really my doing... nonetheless, they all thanked me.

In so many ways I think I was meant to be there.

If It Stings, It's Important.

2011-01-06T18:29:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago I went to talk to the dean of my school. I figured it was time to have the conversation. The semester is over, and it's time to start thinking about next year... about going back to school.

Six months free of depression, a semester of obstacles overcome with little or no drama, with no disruption of my studies, testimony from my teachers and classmates with whom I shared my struggles that, had I said nothing, they'd never have known from my attitude, carriage, or performance in class, that I had any issues with mental or emotional health. I'm ready, I thought. I have the tools, I'm working my Program, I'm ready for anything. And Rabbi TheDean will surely see that, and we can start talking about the process of my re-enrolling in the Rabbinical program.

Things did not go exactly as I'd imagined or hoped they would.

Rabbi TheDean was happy to see me, was happy that I was doing so well, was happy that I was happy and successful in my studies. He was also concerned that I wanted to come back to school so soon.

So soon? A whole year away did not seem like an insignificant amount of time to me. My plan had always been to take a year and then come back... had I been impatient, I'd have looked to take off only a semester, but a whole year, two whole semesters and two whole summers separating me from the crisis that prompted this step back seemed like a whole lot of time to me.

But I took deep breaths. I acknowledged to myself that what he said stung, that it made me afraid, made me feel defensive, and that meant probably that I had to take a step back and examine these feelings before saying anything in response, and to make sure I was listening to what he was saying, and not to my fears.

I told myself to remember what I'd put him through last year. This man was one of the first responders to a suicidal crisis at the end of last year. He was genuinely afraid for me. I have to understand and honor that, and recognize that his skepticism has nothing to do with where I am now, given that he only spoke with me for a few minutes and did acknowledge that I seem one thousand percent better than the last time he was me 7 months ago... but that when one is witness to the sort of breakdown I had last year, and to which I subjected him, it is fair to expect some hesitancy in trusting that six months later such a person can say conclusively that they have put it behind them.

Also, he reminded me several times that he was not a metal health expert, and that he was not going to be the sole determiner of whether or not I'm ready to come back.

The other difficult idea I had to confront was the possibility that there may be some merit to what he was saying. It took a lot of effort, but I told myself to have some humility about this, to remember that Rabbi TheDean is one of my teachers and Rabbis, and that the idea that I might benefit from taking some more time is a perspective that I'd not even considered considering... and maybe it was time to examine that possibility. God's plan doesn't always conform to the one we have set for ourselves... maybe Rabbi TheDean's voice is an expression of God's will for me, even if only in the sense that it is time for me to look all the possibilities in the face without fear, and be sure that I know why I am doing what I am.

Going into my fourth step, it is time for some serious deep and honest examination. Time to set aside fear and insecurity and to pray for humility, for guidance, and for the willingness to listen.

Passing, Not Pushing, It On

2011-01-04T16:57:00.000-08:00

Last night a friend from Yeshiva emailed me. I met her in Jerusalem and spent a year studying in the same Beit Midrash, sharing Shabbatot and holidays, and sharing our struggles with food. She was anorexic, I was bulimic.

The email I received last night was the longest I'd ever seen from her. She is a very timid and shy person, and it was only after a great deal of sharing on my part that she felt comfortable revealing details of her own story to me. She acknowledged first that sending this email was terrifying. She then acknowledged that, yes, she had an eating disorder... She had it still, had had it since the age of 18 or perhaps younger, and that it was not going away, and that she needed help.

She had been asked recently if she had a support network to help her deal with this, and upon reflection she realized that I was it.

She lives a continent away.

I'd been reaching out to her on occasion over the past year, asking how she was, trading religious and spiritual insights with her, and telling her how much Overeaters Anonymous was helping me. A little over a week ago I messaged her to tell her of my one year of abstinence. She was amazed and happy for me that I had been free of bulimic behaviors, but the thing that seemed to impress her more ( and certainly the element of all this by which I am the most astounded) is that I've been free of depression since June. Over the year that we knew each other in Jerusalem, she had seen some of my really awful low points.

This email was, in truth, one I'd been hoping for for a while. My friend clearly needed help and was unwilling and/or afraid to seek it. What's more, she seemed convinced that there was no help available to her, despite what I'd told her about OA.

Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion... I have trouble with this idea sometimes. I know that the main point of this Tradition is to not get drawn into or distracted by competitive promotional practices, to not have spokespeople, things like that. But I wonder sometimes how it applies in my personal life and interactions. I'm a big cheerleader for OA and for 12-step programs in general... Because I know they work. They work miracles. I worry sometimes though, that my cheerleading might fall into the category of promotion... That is, I worry sometimes that I push too hard for Program. I argue pretty passionately sometimes about its effectiveness, especially with skeptics and detractors, people who have heard that it is a Christian program, people who insist that because they don't believe in God it cannot work for them, and big time with people who refuse to even consider the possible value in admitting and accepting powerlessness. It worries me for a few reasons... For one, I sense in myself an amount of insecurity and defensiveness when confronting a non-believer about Program. It's almost as though I feel that if they're rejecting Program, they are rejecting me... That's not precisely accurate, no... They're not rejecting me, but they are rejecting my explanation of my recovery, or perhaps even rejecting the suggestion that I have found recovery. More importantly, I feel as though I'm being judged for buying into this thing in which they don't believe. Like when atheists rail against religion as a refuge of the ignorant and weak. There are times when I want to scream out my IQ at people, as though it meant something. I want to say "look, it is very unlikely that I am not smarter than you are, so maybe you should have some humility and consider that maybe, just maybe, this one here with the IQ well into genius range has got something right!"

*deep breath*

My issues with "intelligence" merit an entry of their own.

I responded to my friend's email telling her first that I was so proud of her for having the courage to even write it, let alone send it. I told her also that I was honored that she trusted me enough to send it my way, and that I would strive to always be there for her in any way I could.

I then referred her, again, to OA. I assured her that it was free, safe, confidential, and appropriate for people with any sort of eating issues. I told her that she was welcome to ask me any questions she might have about the Program or what goes on in meetings.

I've not yet heard back from her about whether or not she is willing to take the step of going to a meeting. It is so difficult sometimes to let go and accept that you cannot take steps for someone else, nor can you give anyone willingness.

It is not my place or my job to convince anyone of anything about OA or 12-step. The only responsibility I have is to live my Program as best I can, to reach out to those in need, to model recovery in my own life and actions, and to leave the rest up to God. I'm responsible for my own recovery, and my friend is ultimately responsible for hers.

A New Year, A New Day.

2011-01-03T20:00:00.000-08:00

As is to be expected at the beginning of a new year, people are thinking about resolutions, looking ahead and setting goals for themselves in the coming year... And lets be honest about this... Most of these resolutions will fall by the wayside before too terribly long. I'm not being a pessimist or trying to discourage anyone, but we all know how it goes the vast majority of the rime for the vast majority of people. A lot of it has to do with people setting unrealistic goals. I think a lot of it too has to do with the fact that New Year's is a one-off. It's an arbitrary marker of time with very little surrounding it... No structure of preparation, very little ritual, and what ritualistic customs we've adopted in our culture surrounding this new year marker has little to do with anything but the very moment of transition. In fact, a lot of it seems to be so geared toward living only in the moment that it's not uncommon to not remember afterwards.
It's a fantastic thing to have a moment marking a transition, a moment at which to be able to declare your slate clean. I think that is something that we all need, and need often. Perhaps every day, in fact, at least to an extent.

I got abstinent from bulimia on December 30th 2009. I started last year abstinent. It was the start of a long, difficult, harrowing journey. I had no idea what I was in for. It came quite close to killing me in the middle of this last year. At the end of the day on December 29th, I started a new year abstinent, and free of depression. And then it was New Year's eve. Another day on the journey.

In my religion we have a New Year process, with preparations beginning a month in advance. We begin the final month of the year by ending our morning prayers with the blowing of the shofar, the ram's horn, a wake up call to all of us to prepare ourselves to stand before God, the community, and ourselves. It is a call to God to remember compassion for us, God's imperfect children who struggle every day to survive with our bodies and souls intact. We end our morning and evening prayers with a special psalm, praising God for never abandoning us, asking that we be allowed one thing, to find shelter in God's house all the days of our lives.

During this time, we go out of our way to seek out those whom we have harmed and ask their forgiveness, because sins between each of us and our fellow human cannot be atoned for by going to God alone.

In the last week before the new year, we begin our morning prayers each day with penitential prayers. We reflect upon our imperfections, our flaws, our mistakes, and we humbly ask that God continue to love us anyway, for God created us as flawed imperfect beings. We remember also that we live among other flawed, imperfect people, people created that way by the same God Who created us.

On the day of the New Year (a day so great it lasts two days) we both remember and rejoice. We reflect and we celebrate. We are commanded not to weep on this day, but to pray together, eat sweet foods together, and to be together as friends, families, communities. For all of this rejoicing though, it is not a party. It is a solemn religious holy day. An 10 days later is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement when we stand before God in judgement, repent, pray to be shown God's face of mercy, and at the end, accept that it is over, you've done your best and it is in God's hands from here on in. Your slate is clean, and you start your new year fresh, knowing that you will sin again, but hoping to avoid some of the mistakes of the past year, and committed to doing your best, as best you can.

Is it a perfect formula? No. Of course not. Plenty of people go through the ritualistic elements of the New Year cycle by rote, and as with all things, it's entirely possible to "do it right" and still miss the point. But the structure is there to tell us that transitions, changes, don't happen overnight. They take work and preparation. You don't suddenly turn over a new leaf just because you've turned over a leaf of the calendar. You could, certainly. Miracles happen. But usually miracles are preceded by a great deal of legwork.

My new year of abstinence started the evening of December 29th. On the evening of December 31, it was Shabbat. I saw a friend I hadn't seen in a year and a half. She brought me to a dinner where I met some wonderful new people. We had a lovely Shabbat meal and talked into the night. At midnight we went up on the roof and watched fireworks. The things that were special about that night could have happened on any Shabbat. Except the fireworks, those were exceptional. But it felt like a powerful message to me. Today is special because it is today. Like every day. That day was extra special because it was Shabbat. Like every Shabbat.

On the one hand, New Year's is just another day.

On the other hand... It's Another Day.

Every day is a blessing. Every day is new. Be new every day and your years will be awesome.

Just Another Face

2011-01-02T20:09:00.000-08:00

I went to a meeting this afternoon that I haven't been to in months. I went because I was to meet my sponsor there to go out after and talk about step four...

Oh yes... I finished Step 3.

Oh yes... I was abstinent 1 year at the end of the day on December 29th.

I went to the meeting and upon walking in, the person who was acting as chair (the scheduled chair didn't show... life happens) saw me, recognized me, and asked me to qualify.

I'd been planning on just sitting and listening this day, but God had other plans for me. Which is cool. Good. Awesome. Because a lot of people said they got a lot out of my qualification, and it was a good reminder of the need to do service.

There was a celebrity in the meeting this afternoon.

Now, I'm a sophisticated cosmopolitan type from a big city. I don't freak when I see celebrities. I've seen enough of them in passing in my life that I can just think to myself "Huh... that's kinda cool." I know that people, even very famous people, are just people.

This was my first time encountering a celebrity in a meeting though. And it added a new dimension to the experience...

The experience of what?

If I wanted to tell someone that I saw (insert name) today, I could. I could say "Hey, guess who I saw today?" as long as I said nothing about where I saw them. And that would be normal. But I didn't see (full name of celebrity), I saw (first name of celebrity), a person who, apparently, struggles with an eating disorder. This person listened to my qualification with interest. This person raised a hand to share toward the end, but didn't get a chance to because we ran out of time. This person volunteered at the end to read The Promises. This person put their first name and phone number in the We Care book.

This is an anonymous compulsive eater, an addict with an illness, just like the rest of us.

It's hard to see someone you recognize from mass media and to set that fact aside. I recognize this person because of their job. This person can have no anonymity because their face is in our living rooms. A member of my family has a celebrity crush on this person. But in the rooms, this person, like the rest of us, has Trust. Humility. Anonymity. We are all each others' protectors. It works because we all need it, and we all buy into it. It is my job, my responsibility, to protect this person, and it is this person's job and responsibility to protect me.

Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all of these traditions, ever reminding us to place principles before personalities. It's good to be reminded once in a while of just how much can be at stake for a person, to remember what an awesome responsibility we each have to each other... and then to carry that with us in all our affairs and dealings with other human beings, in and out of the rooms.

Crappy Ending, New Beginning

2010-12-27T17:41:00.000-08:00

I've been absent for a bit. A lot has happened.

Mom threw me out.

I'm fine. I'm great, actually. I was miserable for 3 days, which I think is appropriate, and then I was up and moving, and found a place to live. I'm amazed that I was able to do this without falling into a depression.

3 days feeling sad and discombobulated after being thrown out of your home is, I think, ok to not count as depression.

Mom threw me out because she was drunk. And she had a fight with me... mostly in her mind. And now she's messaging me on Facebook and emailing me as though nothing happened. Cause that's how my mom works.

I'm mostly calm about this. I'm still angry and upset to a certain degree, but mostly I'm just focusing on my life, not hers. She's an alcoholic. She is sick. I can't do anything about that. I didn't cause it, I can't control it, and I can't cure it. And if it was going to come, it came at the right time. I wouldn't have been strong enough to deal with this 6 months ago. This was a test that I passed with flying frikkin colors.

I've been in my new place for a week and a day now. I'm happy here. This is a new beginning. I'm good.

My Miracle

2010-12-23T20:48:00.001-08:00

The real change came in June. I remember exactly the moment. It was a little past 11:30 at night, and I was feeling lonely. I was sitting in my room and this feeling of profound solitude swept over me. This was not uncommon. In fact, it was something I experienced more days than not, especially at night. Even though it was not as though there were anywhere I particularly wanted to go or anyone I particularly wanted to see or be with, even though there was no reason for me to seek company at that hour, I was overwhelmed by a sense that no one in the world loved me.

Something spoke in my mind then. A rational voice piped up and brought me to reality. “What is really going on here?” it said. “This whole month you’ve had people taking care of you, people concerned for your safety and wellbeing, gathering around you, protecting you, sometimes from yourself. You’ve had so much love and compassion shed upon you and here you are thinking that nobody loves you. It is obviously not true and you know that it’s not true. So what is it that I’m really feeling?”

I wouldn’t even have been able to ask myself that question at any time before that point. I didn’t know how to recognize when a feeling was false, a lie, a trick, cover for something else. That I’d been traumatized and that many of my feelings were reactions to triggers, invoking old feelings, that I understood. I never knew how to go deeper though, to ask myself not about the past, but about the present: about where I am right now.

I sat on my bed in my room and it took only a moment for me to arrive at an answer once I had recognized the question. Why did I feel lonely? Why did I feel like nobody loved me? Because I was sitting with someone who hated me. What’s more, I’d been sitting with that person my whole life. When you have to sit twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, every second of your life, even on Shabbos, with someone who despises you, it is easy to feel profoundly unloved, even when surrounded by evidence to the contrary.

No amount of love shown by others can counteract the effects of self-hatred. That is, until you make a choice. It was a choice that I’d never realized that I had until that moment, when suddenly it seemed so obvious.

It seemed sudden, yes, but in reality this moment had six months of hard work behind it...work that, less than a month before this night I’d feared was all for nothing. I’d been attending 12-step meetings for an eating disorder since December. I’d been working with a sponsor and regulating my eating, so I was no longer abusing myself with food, punishing or rewarding or numbing myself with either excess consumption or starvation. For five months I’d eaten three meals every day, no bingeing, no purging, no restricting. As I stripped away this coping mechanism, I found myself falling deeper and deeper into depression.

It was when I failed out of rabbinical school that I hit my bottom, as we call it in 12-step culture. I was devastated. My only dream since I was 15 years old was to attend Rabbinical School, and I'd failed at the only thing I could imagine I was supposed to be doing with my life. I was, at that time, pessimistic about my prospects for recovery, and seriously doubting whether or not my life could have value or meaning if I was unable to finish this semester successfully and continue in the program the next year. I’d been living my whole life in survival mode, with no hope of doing any better than simply praying that this day wouldn't be the day I decided I could no longer cope. If I couldn’t make it as I was, and if I couldn’t change, there was no point in living.

Fortunately, I had the presence of mind to reach out for help, and even more fortunately, there were people in my life who reached back. Four amazing Rabbis all caught me in different ways as I fell, and though the pain I was in felt unbearable, they, along with a number of friends, and my 12-step fellowship, gave me strength to hang on, at least a little bit longer. At least until June.

Don't quit 5 minutes before the miracle happens, they always say -- and there is was, suddenly, right in front of me. So simple, so logical. So many people cared for me, this I’d seen in action. So many people thought that I was worth being around. So many people would say of me to other people, “This is someone you should know. This is someone special.” Yet this person about whom all these people cared, and of whom so many thought so highly, was someone I barely knew, and someone I’d decided long ago was not worth liking. Would I ever judge any other person so harshly, so irrationally? This person was also the only person I had to be with every waking (and sleeping) hour of my life. In that moment I had a startling revelation: I have to be my own best friend, not because no one else will, but because I am the only one who will always be there. I’d better start getting to know myself, and liking myself.

In that moment, everything changed. This was my miracle...and it has proven to be one of many. One of the most important lessons I’ve learned in my 12-step program is that we can’t think ourselves into right actions, we have to act ourselves into right thinking. This is very much in accord with how I understand Jewish practice. This is the principle of na’aseh v’nishma. In that moment, I made a decision to change my actions toward myself. No more speaking negatively about myself. No more beating up on myself. No more blaming myself. No more pitying myself. Anything I would not do to someone I considered a friend, I was not to do to myself. I was going to start loving myself as I loved others, and forgiving myself for my imperfections and mistakes as God forgives me and every one of us. After all, who am I to say who is unworthy of love? Who am I to judge more harshly than God?

Since that night I’ve not had a depressive episode. I’ve been sad, I’ve been upset, I’ve had bad days. The difference is that now I have a powerful new tool for coping with emotional turbulence. I have a strong ally in myself, a constant companion, someone to lift me out of the darkness, to help me pray. I no longer stand between myself and God. The ironically self-important, egotistical demon of self-hatred has been purged and the whole world seems to sparkle with new light and hope. Some days are still gray, it is true. I’ve learned, however, that feelings -- real and important as they are -- are just feelings...and feelings pass. When the feeling passes, I will still be there, and so will I, and so will God. And between the three of us we can live through anything.

Depression Kills. But I'm Still Here.

2010-12-08T14:44:00.000-08:00

During the two years that I was in Jerusalem, I was in a choir.

Jerusalem was wonderful, but I had many very bad depressive periods while I was there. Sometimes it felt like the choir was the only thing that kept me from going over the edge. Singing is one of two things that make me really happy. The other is learning. Singing with other people, being in a group harmonizing, feeling my voice joining in sync with others, feeling the harmonic vibration of it in my chest and head... to me it feels like a very intimate experience. There is something very special to me about the people with whom I sing.

Yesterday, one of my friends from choir informed me that Netta, a soprano, committed suicide a few weeks ago. She'd suffered from depression for about 11 years, her parents said. Recently she was told that she had something that looked like a tumor in her brain. She didn't wait to find out if it was malignant, or operable. She decided not to stick around.

The reason my friend told me yesterday was because the day before she sent me a link to a video of us performing... it was my first performance with the choir, in fact. And after she sent it, she realized that both I and Netta were in the video. It's been a year and a half since I left Jerusalem, and she didn't remember until then that Netta and I had overlapped for a year.

It took a bit of flailing around to get a grip on what I was feeling and to figure out what I needed. I went into a empty classroom and made a program call first, talked to Charlie for a good long while. When I got off the phone with him, I sat down and thought about whether or not to daven. I felt sapped, like I didn't have the strength. I wanted to just sit in silence. Silence felt right.

לא המתים יהללו-יה ולא כל ירדי דומה

The dead do not praise God, nor those who descend into silence.

The psalmist equates silence with death. I sat and struggled with that for a while. I wanted to quiet my mind. I wanted to not move. I wanted to just sit. But it is not a viable option for me as an observant Jew to say "I don't want to daven" and therefore, not daven. It's not as though I never miss davenning, but to sit and consciously decide, I could daven now and I choose not to, because I feel sad... this is precisely why we have the concept of religious obligation, and prescribed rituals for times of crisis. I could be silent later. I needed to daven now.

I picked up a siddur and began to say the mincha amida. I started to shake, and I started to sob. I sobbed all the way through the amida. I finished with The Serenity Prayer, and closed the siddur. I stood for a moment quietly, and then went into a corner where I got on my knees and prayed.

Seven months ago, I was faced with a choice. I was confronted by the reality of my worst nightmare. It may seem trivial to others, but as I wrote at the time, failing out of rabbinical school actually felt like the worst thing possible. That I was supposed to be learning, that I was supposed to be a student, a teacher, a leader, a counselor, a preacher, a God-seeker, that I was supposed to be on the path to being a rabbi was the only thing I'd ever been really sure of. Even when I wasn't sure if I believed in a God with a voice, I knew that God was telling me to be a rabbi. From the age of 7 I'd been searching. At the age of 15, I heard a calling. Yes, a calling. It's not language that Jews use all that often, but that is how it has always felt to me.

When I failed, I'd failed at life. I'd failed God. I'd failed my purpose. There was nothing for me. I had no sense that there was any point in trying again. I had failed because I was sick. I was perfectly capable of all of the work, but since I'd stopped restricting and bingeing, I no longer had a way to cope with the depression. I had very little hope at that point that I would ever be better... better able to cope, better equipped to handle instability, better at relationships, better at getting out of bed in the morning. If I couldn't will myself through the depression, I would always fail. That was it. There was no point to my continued existence.

Again, it might sound petty to someone on the other side of my skull, but from in here, it was all consuming.

But in the midst of the chaos and the darkness that is the mind of a person who has lost the will to live, I heard a voice. Someone found me, and got through to me just in time. One of my teachers, truly an angel of the Lord, at least in the messenger sense, told me that there was hope, and because of who he was, and where he had been, I was able to believe him.

(Trust God to send an alcoholic rabbi just when you need them the most.)

And I made a choice. I decided to let go of my will, and to trust God.

And I'm sitting here typing this.

Netta reached a point of deep darkness, and she made a choice.

And Netta is gone.

I can't help but wonder what it is that pushes one way or the other. What is it that enables one person to see the possibility of hope and another to despair completely? It's not intelligence. It's not strength. Why was I able to make that choice? Why was it brought to me, right at that time? The one voice that could speak to me through the fog? Why didn't Netta have that voice? Or did she... and she was unable to hear it?

Depression is a chronic and fatal disease. This is how I look at it. Like bulimia, it is a condition that will always be present. At the moment it is, thankfully, miraculously, in remission. With God's help, it will stay in remission at least for enough of my life that it will not be this disease that kills me. But it is a disease that kills by taking away your vision, your reason, and turning your hand against yourself. Where does agency fit here?

The way I understand most modern authorities of my religion deal with the question of suicide is that, when someone who is depressed takes their own life, they are not responsible for that action since, by definition, they were mentally impaired. If your brain is telling you to take your own life, then your brain is, by definition, not functioning properly. But really, at what point does it come down to choice? Does the disease kill arbitrarily like other diseases, with no explanation for why this one lives and this one dies? Or did God swoop down and save me? Or did I save myself by opening my ears to God's voice?

Practically though, I know that focusing on these questions is not the right course of action. Netta died from one of the diseases that I have, and I didn't. All that really means is that I. Am. Alive. I am breathing. I am feeling. I am seeing. I am hearing. I am learning. I am recovering. I am happy. It takes a lot of work. And it is worth it. And I am going to keep working to stay here. I am alive because I accept the work, and because I feel gratitude... and if I have trouble feeling gratitude, I force myself, because it is medicine.

My current teacher, when I spoke to him of these things yesterday, told me that in the Talmud we learn out that the saving of a life pushes off all other commandments in importance from an analogy to the laws of returning lost objects. The point at which you no longer have to return an object to the person who lost it is the point at which the owner has ye'ush, despair of ever recovering said object.

אין יאוש בעולם כלל.

There is no place for despair in the world at all.

Intensity

2010-11-29T20:13:00.000-08:00

Sitting in The Apple Store getting my computer repaired. I have a little bit of time to wait, and a free internet connection and a pretty store computer in front of me, so I figure, why not write?

Now the question is, which of the many things I have in my brain should I write about?

How about intense emotions? I like that, I think I'll write about that.

I am someone who feels things very intensely. When I love, I really really love. When I hurt, I really really hurt. My joy is blindingly beautiful and my sorrow is terrifyingly dark. My loneliness is unfathomably deep. My friendships are... there isn't a word for how friendship feels to me.

This is a huge liability.

I don't want you to misunderstand... I am not bipolar. There is no mania in this equation. My depression is unipolar, major depression. But when I have good times, I drink the joy so deeply that everyone around me can see the glow of it.

For a long time I was terrified of medication because I was afraid it would dull me- dull my mind, my intellect, my personality... and I was afraid that it would dull my emotions, and not just the bad ones. It was a huge and terrifying question in my mind, and one which confounded many friends whose advice I solicited on the matter. Was it worth it to take the edge off the pain of the dark times, to feel a little less intensely the love and the joy of which I was capable? No one I knew seemed to understand the depth of emotion that I experienced, but many were astonished and astounded by it. It was, I was told, something that made me exceptional, special, maybe even more connected to the Divine than the average person. It was something to be cherished. And though I honestly feared for my life in the dark times of deep depression, I was even more afraid to lose that depth, that deep sense of connection. Appreciation of the beautiful, of the sublime. The capacity for genuine awe.

At the same time, I often felt that the very intensity of my emotions somehow blocked my full experience of them. When I came to love someone, whether in the capacity of friendship, romance, or something akin to family, I felt this desperate ache of impotence that I didn't really understand. I felt as though there were something I was supposed to be doing with this love. Making something. Expressing something. Showing something. Acting something out. And I couldn't. The love I felt was too big for my capabilities, for my body, for my mind, for my humanity. It was as though I wanted to make love to the whole world in abstract. Not sex, mind you. Not the act, the form, but the content.

I don't know if that makes sense. I don't care. Truth is not always sensical. Ask Whitman.

On the other end of the spectrum, when the dark got deep, that was when the need to act on it took hold and took form. Burning myself. Bingeing and purging. Starving. Drinking. In some ways it was to dull the pain, to distract from it. But in some ways, it made the pain manifest. When I burned myself and felt the physical pain, saw a mark on my skin, it was a fulfillment of sorts. It let the dark that was inside come screaming out. Same with purging. Get it out. Just get it out. And drinking... drinking allowed me to lose myself in the darkness, to loosen myself and give in to it. To just cry in oblivion.

In the end, I went on the meds. They didn't dull me as I'd feared... in fact, they didn't seem to do much of anything. They afforded some relief from depression for a time, and then stopped. Upped the dose, again, some relief, then stop. Add another medication. Same. More dosage adjustments. Same.

What changed?

I hit bottom.

I've written about hitting bottom before. About that weekend in May when everything looked so black and hopeless that I was ready to just stop existing. Nothing was ever going to be okay ever again.

Have you ever been in a situation where you knew you were going to die? Absolutely knew that in a minute you were going to be dispatched, shuffled off the mortal coil, shot, smashed, stabbed, maimed, decapitated, something... that it was going to end? Have you ever felt that fear? I'm sure many of you have. I have. When I was very young I was in a car that drove off the road and crashed down the side of a mountain. There was no reason any of us survived. As the car rolled and I could see and smell and feel tree branches spinning around us, outside the car and then inside the car when the windows went, I knew that I was going to die. When we landed and I was alive, I called out to my mother "Mom, is this real?" I asked because it was inconceivable to me that what had just happened was real and yet I was alive. It was either a dream, or I was dead. Mom confirmed that it was real, and I began to cry. I was seven.

I didn't want to kill myself, but I wanted it to stop. I didn't want to go through the process of dying, but I wanted to switch off. No restart, no dry boot, just shut down. The dark had gotten too deep... irredeemably deep. The intensity had finally hit a height I could not handle. I wanted to hurt myself again, but I couldn't. That would keep me here, keep me present, keep me living the experience of it. I didn't want to fulfill the pain anymore I wanted out of it. Out out out.

This was when I really discovered acceptance. I learned how to let go. I didn't know what letting go and accepting meant until I felt like I was ready to die. When you're ready to die, what is there left to be afraid of? If you're ready to die, then what is there left to hold on to? What is the point of holding on to what you think you know... about yourself, about the world, about anything. I'm dead, I don't know anything. I give up. No point thinking anything I can do, any fight I put up, any assertions I can make, anything that is me acting according to my plans, my will, my vision of anything, is going to have any effect on me. Done. Give up.

Give up.

Give up.

Let it go.

And it flowed. It flowed through me... all that darkness, all that pain, all that despair... it became liquid and washed itself through me, and... out of me.

I stopped trying to fight it, to fight the intensity, to act on it, to act at all. I let go. I accepted. I accepted the pain and let it do what it would... and it did. It hurt like hell... and then it passed.

I've since discovered that this works invariably when I can remember. Feelings are feelings, and feelings pass. Good and bad. I can feel the wonderful intense joy and love and gratitude and feel full to the brim of the beauty of the world and God in everyone... I can feel it and I can feel it better when I just let it flow, when I don't try to do anything with it.

What do I do?

I breathe. I relax. I think to myself "I am here, now. There is nowhere else and no-when else I can be right now but here and now. And that is good. Be here." I say the Serenity Prayer. I thank God for the gifts of help and guidance and love that God has been so generous with in my life, especially lately. I pray for God to stay with me, to keep me in the light and to guard me in the dark, and to help me to always remember God's presence. And I tell myself, anything can happen. And anything is okay. I can live through it. And if (God forbid) I can't, or don't, that's ok too. God is still with me.

This may all sound odd, or morbid. I'm not interested in talking about an afterlife... but acceptance, radical acceptance, really really turning my will and life over to a Higher Power, means accepting death. Not necessarily welcoming it, certainly not seeking it, but to a certain extent, accepting God's care means knowing that whatever comes, in life or in death, God's got me, and what is supposed to happen is what will happen.

When you can do that, the intensity loses its hold.

On My Knees

2010-11-27T22:21:00.000-08:00

Feeling lonely tonight. Gonna do midnight online meeting. Meanwhile, I can write.

Kneeling is not generally thought of as a Jewish posture of worship. Most of the time, when we show particular reverence in our prayers, for specifically important parts of the service, we stand. Sometimes we bend at the knees and bow from the waist at prescribed points in the liturgy. There is only place in the liturgy where we get on the floor, and that is during a specific prayer and only on Rosh Hashanah (New Year) and Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement). For that, we get down on our knees, and then prostrate ourselves, all the way down on the floor, spreading out hands and feet, space permitting. It used to be common practice to prostrate during a normal prayer service but sometime probably in the medieval era the practice was abolished because it became associated with Christian worship which we wished not to emulate.

In Program I often heard people talking about praying on their knees. Often as I looked at these people sharing in the rooms it was difficult for me to imagine them on their knees in prayer. It's not something I'm accustomed to seeing, first of all. I don't spend a whole lot of time in Churches. When I do see people kneeling in churches, it's within the confines of a pew, on a nice little thingamabob designed for kneeling comfortably on, very inconspicuous. But that's not what these people were talking about. They were talking about kneeling in prayer wherever they were... sometimes even on the sidewalk (though sometimes pretending to be going through their bag or something). It was difficult for me to imagine people, normal people, just getting down on the floor and praying like that.

I was trying to pray more. Outside of the structured liturgy. I wanted to be better at just praying when I wanted/needed to pray. It was something that I could do pretty easily as an add-on to the regular prayer service, but on its own, spontaneous prayer was hard. I was so used to structure in prayer, how do you just... pray?

I asked a friend of mine, a Jewish friend whose spiritual direction feels comfortable to me, if he ever knelt in prayer. He said he did. So I decided I could try it too. So one night, before bed, I got down on my knees next to my bed.

It was awkward at first. I didn't know how to hold myself, what to do. I shifted around a bit, experimented with my hands, clasped, folded, on the bed, on my lap, open upward... eventually I found the right posture, took a deep breath, relaxed my muscles as much as I could, trying to make myself feel physically open. "God, Av HaRachamim (Father of mercy), grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference," I began. And I prayed. And it was remarkably easy. It just came. My own words mixed with words of psalms without my consciously putting them together. I praised, I pleaded, I thanked and acknowledged... "Lord my God and God of my ancestors, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart always be acceptable to You, my Rock and my Redeemer."

It was awkward for me to get on my knees because it is something that is *not done* among my people, Jews of eastern European descent. But it is not forbidden, and it has solid scriptural and even Rabbinic basis. Once I was down there, once I got over the awkwardness, it made prayer so much easier. I was in prayer posture. You're not gonna get down there unless you're gonna get down to some praying.

I struggle with the awkwardness of it still... especially in places where I may be walked in on. In my school, for example. I routinely go into an empty classroom to pray the fixed liturgy at fixed times in fixed postures (standing or sitting), but enough people in the school pray regularly that it's not a big deal for someone to walk in on someone davenning. But if someone came into a room and saw me praying on my knees... well, there would be questions.

Not that it's really that big of a deal. If someone asked, I'd not be ashamed, I don't think, to tell them that, sometimes, after I finish the Amida, I get on my knees and say additional supplications, or sometimes between fixed prayer times I just want to have some God time, and I find that being on my knees is an effective way to get into the right mindset and attitude for encountering The Divine.

But it's not something that we're used to. It's a little odd. And it's a discovery for which I am very grateful.

Gratitude

2010-11-25T19:35:00.000-08:00

Today I saw a Tweet from Jim Gaffigan (A very talented comedian whose work I adore) that read as follows:

I’m thankful that we are only mandated to be thankful 1 day a year. Can you imagine being grateful year round?

Now, I'm fairly certain that Mr. Gaffigan was joking. I mean, he's a comedian. It's what he does. (Hey, you're a clown fish! Say something funny!) I know it was meant lightheartedly. I know that most people probably would have found it amusing.

It didn't register as at all funny when I read it.

Every night, Kendra reminds us on Twitter to think about what we're grateful for at the end of the day. I don't always check in with my gratefuls, but I know that it is something that I need desperately to remain mindful of. I need to keep my gratitudes in mind as much as possible throughout every day of my life. It is actually essential to my survival.

Once upon a time I told my friend Charlie that we in recovery are, in a sense, the lucky ones. How many "Normals" routinely make the effort to experience every minute of their lives and to be grateful for it? Our lives depend on it. Mindfulness of gratitude is such a foreign and even silly concept to so many of the people in our society. So many people can take so much for granted that a few of us can't.

I recently wrote to an email list that we as Jews have a unique insight into a certain kind of experience that others have to work hard to understand... the experience of living as a religious and cultural minority is a valuable one that can provide a great deal of perspective in relating to vulnerable people and populations. As queer Jews (it is an email list for religious or formerly religious queer Jews) we have even deeper insight, being a vulnerable minority within a vulnerable minority. It is not something that is always easy to live with but it is an experience that allows us to be of service in unique ways in this world.

Suffering and recovering from an illness such as bulimia, or compulsive eating, or alcoholism, or drug addiction, gives us a unique perspective. Every one of us is lucky and blessed every minute that we are alive. But we, who spend our lives constantly one drink, one bite, one pill away from relapse into a life-threatening illness, we are the ones who really have to look at that fact and take stock of it every day, and thank whatever Higher Power we believe in for every minute that we live in sanity, sobriety, and abstinence... for every minute that we live.

I love all of you.

Thanksgiving Stress

2010-11-24T20:41:00.000-08:00

Blogging from Grandma's.

It's not easy. Being here is not easy. It is scary. And what makes it harder is feeling like no one understands why it's scary, because the scary isn't logical. So if I try to talk about it, people try to reassure me with logic. Which is ridiculous.

I'm not blaming anyone for this. That would be equally ridiculous. It's nice that anyone tries to reassure me at all. The only thing that will fix this is me deciding to fix it. But I'm going to write through some of my feelings in the hopes of maybe making them clearer, if to no one else, at least to myself.

I am at my father's mother's house. This is a stressful place. Which doesn't mean it's not a wonderful and fun place full of happy memories, cause it absolutely is. I love my family. I have fun with them. Especially my siblings and cousins. I have a wonderful and very loving family.

But my grandmother, whom I love, can be very toxic and critical. Without meaning to, of course. She just has this way of exuding negativity even as she showers love on us. And she always always criticizes peoples food choices, but then offers more and more.

My family is crazy about food. My family is a gigantic bingeing machine. My family eats fast, and eats a lot. And there's always enough food to feed a medium-sized army. And always someone shrieking about how theres too much food. It is sort of expected that what you do in this family before a big eating holiday like Passover or 4th of July or Thanksgiving is to not eat all day until the seder, barbecue, or meal, and then you stuff yourself. I have done a lot of purging in this house.

My father used to abuse me. He used to abuse all three of us kids, and our mother. My father has not hit any of us in 12 and a half years. I know how long it's been because I was the last one of us that he hit, and I remember when it was. He's calmed down a lot. I didn't speak to him for three years and during that time, I worked out a lot of anger and I came to a place where I could stop waiting for him to make amends. I finally reached the point, sometime in the last year and a half, where I realized I was, at least for the most part, no longer afraid of him. But it is still scary for me to be in close proximity to him for several days at a time, especially out of town where I don't have the extra security of knowing I could just get up and walk out and go home. I redeemed a couple of savings bonds so I would have some cash so I could escape if I needed to... which I do not anticipate actually needing to do, but there have been too many times in the past when I couldn't, and it was not pretty. Having an escape route is an absolute necessity.

I don't want to wallow in negativity. I really don't. And I don't intend to. But, you know, I think that what I do want is to be able to acknowledge that, even if it is not strictly logical, I have a right to the fear. I don't know if I'm indulging in a victim complex, where I want someone to hold me and tell me that it's not my fault, it was done to me, it's ok that I'm damaged. It's ok that I have an eating disorder. It's ok that I have cinical depression (still haven't had a major episode since June!), that it's not my fault...

No. No, that's not what I want. I don't want my damage acknowledged. I don't want to be told that it's ok that I'm crazy. What I want is to be told that it DOES make sense and that I'm NOT crazy.

So often I felt like I was looked at as the crazy one because I didn't want to spend time with Dad. I was the crazy one because I thought that something should be done to stop it. I was crazy because I was unhappy and afraid. I was crazy because after he threw a terrifying and violent tantrum, I couldn't just continue on as though nothing happened. I was crazy because I would get scared when I felt tension building, because I knew what was coming next.

There is residual fear. And I am entitled to feel that. All I want is for someone to understand that, to acknowledge that, so I can let it go.

So here it is:

I am acknowledging that I feel residual fear from a lot of physical and emotional abuse in childhood and adolescence. I have some residual sense of resentment of the rest of my extended family for either not knowing or not interfering in what was going on. It is ok that I feel these things. My feelings are not something I choose. What I can choose is how I react, the attitude I choose to adopt. God understands why I am having the feelings that I am. God embraces and loves me anyway. God tells me that I am ok. And I tell myself that I am ok.

And I'm letting it go.

Now go to bed and rest, for the morning holds more wisdom than the evening.

Blessed are You, HASHEM, our God, KING of the universe, who casts the bonds of sleep upon my eyes and slumber upon my eyelids. May it be Your will, HASHEM, my God and the God of my ancestors, that You lay me down to sleep in peace and raise me upright in peace. May my ideas, bad dreams, and bad notions not confound me; may my offspring be perfect before You, and may You illuminate my eyes lest I die in sleep, Who illuminates the pupil of the eye. Blessed are You, Hashem, Who illuminates the entire world with His glory.

Meditation

2010-11-19T12:44:00.000-08:00

Today I will write about meditation.

I always had a sense that meditation was at its core a good thing, but all the types of people I knew who touted meditation seemed to be crunchy and flakey enough to have milk poured over them and be eaten for breakfast. If they were Jews, they were generally the sorts of Jews who didn't pray or practice Jewish law in the (relatively) traditional and conventional ways in which I was striving to. Not to cast judgment on such people and their practice, it was simply not something I wanted to emulate in my life.

I got over that a while ago, though. At some point I decided it was not useful to determine what I do or do not practice by what other people do or don't do with it. If I find value in some of the spiritual practices of people whose general practice I don't necessarily find appealing, there is no contradiction in learning from what speaks to me and leaving the rest. I decided that it would be a very good tool to use separate from and in conjunction with my prayer practice.

Problem is, it didn't seem to work. Sure it was nice to sit and try to relax and to remove external distractions, but I couldn't seem to quiet the internal distractions. My mind was just too loud, and the idea, I thought, was to clear one's mind as much as possible. Too many thoughts to contemplate, too many ideas, too many plans, too many voices, too many anxieties clamoring for attention, not letting me let go. Too many memories. Too much pain.

I'm not sure when it happened, but it couldn't have been too long ago. It happened gradually, with practice, as with all things. I think part of it grew out of the way I'd learned to try to hold myself when speaking with God. When I would sit, I would take the time to get into a position that felt comfortable, and in which I would feel comfortable for as long as possible without shifting. I wouldn't bother myself with how I "should" be sitting, strain to get into a lotus position if I wasn't particularly flexible that day, or even make myself sit on the floor. A chair would work just as well.

That was step one.

I'd relax myself as much as possible. This is something I took from my prayer practice. I discovered a while ago that entering into conversation with God feels more... More, when I make myself feel open physically. What does this mean? It means turning my hands outward or upward. It means un-tensing my shoulders. It means breathing freely. It means relaxing all of my muscles, and in a sense, making myself physically vulnerable. We tense up when we are nervous or scared or angry, when we are ready to fight or defend. If we approach God in a fighting or defensive stance, the only one who loses out is us. This is one of the things that I find really freeing about the idea of God... if you accept that there exists some force, some being, internal or external, something more powerful than your conscious willful self is, and if you accept that this being already knows everything about you- every hope, every fear, every joy, every sin, every secret, every love, every grudge, every memory, everything that you have ever been embarrassed or shamed about, everything that has ever moved you, whether you realize it all or not- then your defensive stance is just an act anyway. The only one it blocks is you yourself. If you can't lie to God, it gives you permission to start being honest with yourself.

There was evening and there was morning, step 2.

Focus on breathing. Not that breathing has to take on any specific rhythm or pace, not that you have to focus on controlling the breathing... focus on breathing is merely a tool. A tool for what? For having something to come back to. See, here's one of the things I always got caught up on... I was always so anxious about trying to clear my mind. But eventually I had to accept that it was virtually, if not entirely, impossible to clear my mind. I'd heard people say before to observe my thoughts and let them float away, but I couldn't figure out how to observe my thoughts without grabbing on to them and turning them over and contemplating them and working them. Secret is, I find, notice when you notice a thought, and make a decision in that moment to turn attention back to breathing. The freedom, I once heard, is not in clearing the mind, but in the ability to decide to turn back to the breath. It's a focal point, something that can be paid attention to without necessarily being contemplated.

Number three.

And this, this is the big one: Accept.

Huh?

Accept.

One more time?

Accept.

...

Accept what?

In this moment? Everything. Forget before, forget later, just for this moment, be in this moment. This is time you deliberately set aside, there's nothing you have to be doing right this minute and therefore nowhere you have to be and nothing you have to do. Accept that in this moment, you are here, and that is all that you know. Decide to believe that there is nowhere you would rather be than right here right now. Stop waiting. Stop counting. Stop anticipating. Accept this moment, and accept yourself and your position in this moment, Just For This Moment. If you feel discontented, what is it that you could possibly feel discontented about in this moment? Whatever it is, it is not here and now, it is something from before or something after. Just close your eyes, feel where you are, feel your hand on your knee, experience the sensation of being present, of the air touching your face, of the tiny movements your muscles make, your clothing against your skin and just be HERE. NOW.

Ultimately, this is the core of recovery. Acceptance, letting go of the idea that you are in control

I have to take a nap now before Shabbat. More on this later, probably.

My Recovery Is My Job

2010-11-17T09:42:00.000-08:00

So. Sososososo.

Confession. I've been slacking on my program.

I'm still abstinent... 322 days and counting. But I've not been going to meetings regularly, I've not been calling my sponsor, I've not been doing my stepwork.

I *have* however, been writing, reaching out to people via phone (and Twitter), keeping busy and being social, praying, and maintaining my abstinence. That's pretty good. But it's not enough.

I know it's not enough because I've been in a state of high anxiety for a few weeks now. I know it's not enough because I've been teetering on the edge of a depressive episode. I know it's not enough because I've been getting angry more and more often and easily.

Stop, G. Stop and look around. Quit blaming the world and society and other people for what you are feeling. They can still be wrong about a lot of things, and you can still fight for what is right, but just for right now, just for the sake of your own continued sanity and abstinence, look at what YOU are NOT doing right, and what you can do about it.

And see, the beautiful thing about this is that it is not self-blame. I can still be pleased that I've been doing the things that I have been doing well, and I can still love myself and encourage myself and tell myself that I'm doing great things and making amazing and miraculous progress.

BUT

That progress has to happen in the real world, and the real world is full of triggers and stupidity and people who don't understand. Why? Because that is the way the world is. And yes, we can all work to change that on a large scale and within a large time-framework, but for the day to day, for here and now, the world is not going to change just because I want it to, or even because I think I *need* it to. The only thing that I can- that I CAN- change, is my attitude and my actions.

This takes work. And it's hard. It's really really hard. No one said it was going to be easy. But it is paying off so. much. and so. obviously. I've got to remember to keep examining myself and my actions. I've got to remember to do my damn homework and call my damn sponsor and take care of myself FOR MYSELF and not wait for anyone else to do it.

Not cause no one else will, but just because it is *my job.*

Cheers!

May You Be Like Our Ancestors of Blessed Memory (Not!)

2010-11-14T21:32:00.000-08:00

I've been cranky over the past couple of days. So I'm gonna write.

I want to write about stuff that feels profound, about new insights on how I live my life and my philosophy and outlook and stuff, and I've got a bunch of ideas for posts like that floating around my head, but right now I don't seem to have the motivation.

I wanna write about how I feel cranky.

Sorry it's not profound. Sorry it's not uplifting. But you know... not every day can be amazing. As close as we can get sometimes to feeling that way, as easy as it sometimes feels to be just so incredibly grateful for life and friends and recovery that we are just overwhelmed with a feeling of joy and contentment...

and yes, I've been feeling that a lot over the past 5 months, thank God...

sometimes I'm just cranky. And being cranky, acknowledging that I'm cranky, talking about feeling cranky, is not the same as wallowing in the crankiness.

On Friday I felt really overwhelmed in the morning, like nothing was in my control. When I got to school, I sat down to learn, but then asked to borrow my teacher's office for a bit and sat and cried. No real reason. Just anxiety. The administrative assistant came in to check on me, and I smiled at her through the tears and told her I was just fine, nothing was really wrong, I just had to take some time to cry.

After that I was exhausted.

Something has happened to the way I think. My feminism is coming out really strongly now. It is demanding attention. It is making me angry about things that I would normally just kind of let slide. It's making me want to yell about how obviously the woman's experience is erased from the traditional reading of text, and even from "progressive" reading, when the woman's experience is defined by the man's, and how even women, whether they are content in traditional gendered roles (and no reason necessarily that they shouldn't be if that is their choice) or consider themselves egalitarian, define themselves in relation to men and the man's religious experience, and no one seems to notice. It wouldn't be such a big deal except that this is not reciprocated from the men's side.

I gave a d'var Torah about how Leah and Rachel seem to define themselves and their worth and their relationship to each other only in relation to the men in their lives. The response was to talk about Jacob and Laban. I pointed out that the point of my d'var Torah was to talk about the experience of Rachel and Leah and, gosh, isn't it fascinating that what we end up talking about is Jacob and Laban. The reaction was basically "...oh...Wow."

See how insidious it is?

This started with the second coming out. It started with the queer stuff. I started seeing again. And I don't know what to do with this, how to share it, how to pursue it and still be taken seriously. And I don't know how to continue to remember how to see, which I want desperately to hold on to, but to not drain myself with anger.

I've been joking that I'm realizing that I'm an angry feminist, but as a friend pointed out to me recently, anger doesn't really do anyone any good. It can be a good initial motivating factor in pursuing justice, but the anger itself cannot be held on to. It must be let go lest it distract from the goal and eat at your soul until you can no longer see the justice you are pursuing.

I'm tired of being the only one who notices identity erasure. I'm tired of pointing out an alternative reading and being argued against... not challenged, challenge is fine. But argued against, being told that the way a text speaks to me is just wrong, or not plausible because the p'shat, the simple "obvious" meaning of the text doesn't follow my reading, when in fact our rabbis have been interpreting text along much more far-fetched lines for centuries, and when, in fact, the p'shat really just reflects what is "simple" and "obvious" to those readers who had the power and authority to voice their opinions and have them recorded. To my mind, the simple and obvious reading of the text is that Leah was made to believe that the only way any man would marry her was to be tricked into it, and that she spent the rest of her life competing against her sister, who should have been her partner, her strength and her support, for the love of their husband, and for children. And to me, that is simply and obviously tragic, and something from which all women should learn... NOT to be like Rachel and Leah. There is great power in sisterhood and it is a great tragedy to let our societal obsession with pleasing men interfere with that bond, turn us into rivals, drive us to tear each other down and apart when we should be supporting and loving one another and standing up for ourselves and each other.

I feel alone in this.

So I'm cranky.

But I feel better having written about it.

I Win

2010-11-10T10:57:00.000-08:00

Hi peoples!

I'm sorry I haven't been around, I keep thinking of things I want to write about and intending to do so, but I've just been so exhausted. School is long and tiring, chorus on Mondays is late, I'd say I've been also going to meetings after school which would be true if I'd not been too occupied with other things after school to go to meetings... the upshot being the same, that I do stuff after school and am tired...

I'm not complaining. Things are great. I probably shouldn't feel the need to say that, to get defensive, but the thing is that I know plenty of people who have much much busier and more stressful lives than I do, and they still manage to, you know, do stuff. *shrug*

But... but but but... but I am me and not those people, I have my own unique challenges and I get tired and respond to tiredness in my own way and...

Hush G.

Today's my birthday.

I am 29 years old today and 45 weeks abstinent. That's 315 days.

I win.

:)

We Are Family... I've Got My Mishpachah With Me...

2010-10-31T20:46:00.000-07:00

This is my space for honesty and openness, for processing and emotions and fears. Right now I'm using it not to write an inspirational message, but because I need to write some of this out.

I want to talk about my sexuality, more specifically, my sexual orientation. I am bisexual. That is the most precise way to label me succinctly. It is not really very precise at all and might even be misleading, but real precision requires a 20-minute conversation and I'm starting to feel like I'm too old for that.

I have known that I was attracted to women since I was 18. I have known that I was attracted to men since I was 17. Before that I was frustratingly unaware of myself as a sexual being and was afraid that there was something very wrong with me.

This is not going to be the story of my sexual awakening. This is about here and now, with some background.

I didn't have shame about my orientation when it became apparent to me. I didn't have pride either... just anxiety. I was shy, I was awkward, I didn't know how to date or interact in social situations that weren't constructed, like work or school. For a long time it was just a fact about me... I like girls and boys... now what?

For a while I experimented with "queer culture" as I was introduced to it by some coworkers. Mostly it involved bars and karaoke, dancing and drinking, and occasionally making out with strangers. Get enough beer or whiskey or wine in me and, yes, even I will dance. This was also during the height of my illness so it was exciting to be thinner than I'd ever been and to be validated by having women want to put their hands on me. I enjoyed it. I really did.

But I never really fit. It wasn't making me happy. I never felt enough... never queer enough, old enough (back then), shameless enough, outgoing enough, confident enough, pretty enough, butch enough, femme enough... I always felt that I was the wrong shaped peg, that I was the little girl being dragged around and shown the ropes who is not really getting it yet.

And the real honest truth was that I wasn't sure I wanted to get it. I wanted to be a rabbi. This was still during the time when I would not have been allowed to be admitted to the rabbinical school because of my sexual orientation, so I suppose there might have been an element of defiance in seeking to belong to this world while the world I really wanted into still wouldn't have me. But the fact was that I was seeking a life of holiness, and this did not feel like it. I was not encountering people, souls this way, I was encountering bodies. I was encountering little more than the sexuality of the people I was surrounded by, and that did not feel right. I was in the wrong place.

When I went to Israel, I largely put the issue of my sexual orientation on the shelf. I was there for my Judaism. And... I started to think that maybe what I really wanted was a man anyway. That if my intended soul-mate turned out to be a woman I wouldn't fight it, but I was actively seeking a heterosexual relationship, to the extent that I was seeking. This was before I realized Just How Much damage I have with regards to men. This was before I realized that every man in my life was becoming my father, and how the shelter that I was seeking in the arms of men was not what I thought it was...

Here and now.

I am in this in-between time. I am actively seeking a relationship with myself, and with God. I am striving to finally meet myself, figure out who this G. person is. This weekend I spent at a community center with about a hundred queer Jews of all ages, genders, and orientations- sexual and Jewish. I went anticipating feeling again like I didn't really belong, my lack of pride-flag waving an affront and insult to the very notion of queer identity. I was afraid that it would be a bunch of guys looking to hook up with other guys and girls looking to hook up with other girls, that I would be asked to justify myself if I engaged in any conversation, about my Judaism, about my sexuality, about my relationship or attraction history. I expected to not fit, once again.

I was So. Incredibly. Wrong.

The weekend was fun and exciting. The people were open and loving and accepting. We sat together in classrooms and conference rooms, in chairs or in circles on the floor, and we studied Torah together. We shared our learning and we shared our experience. We talked about Jewish practice and queer identity and the problematics of the gender binary of Kabbalah and about reclaiming our place in the history, in the text, in the world of holiness that is the heritage of our people... Our heritage. We looked into each other's eyes and affirmed each other's vision of God. We encountered God in each other. And yes, after Shabbat ended and we bid her farewell with the braided candle, sweet wine, and fragrant spices of the Havdala ritual, we had a big queer dance party in a beit midrash. A 50-year-old little Jewish gay man took me by the hand and we danced swing to pulsing dance mix music. I danced myself sweaty and joyous with women and men in a circle, facing this person, then that, as we bounced and flailed and laughed, and when I ended up dancing alone next to people paired up, I closed my eyes and I danced with God.

This was holy.

And now it is over. And now... now I need to make a decision. No... no, the decision has been made for me. This cannot be on the shelf anymore. It all just felt too right. I felt at home. It felt real, it felt right. It didn't matter that I wasn't in, or seeking, a relationship. It didn't matter that I didn't look like a dyke. It didn't matter that I didn't have tattoos or piercings, or that other people did. I was in my space. I am queer. I am Jewish. I was recognized as family, and I was welcomed home.

Now... now I have to figure out what to do with this.

Distorted Body Image

2010-10-28T20:44:00.000-07:00

I've started to notice something about the way I look at my body.

It changes.

Like, drastically. Frighteningly.

I never noticed this before. I was never sane before. But you know how they say that people with eating disorders look in the mirror and see a distorted image of themselves? I always thought "yeah, well, that's not one of my symptoms. I know that when I look in the mirror what I see is just me, that's what I look like. And I'm fat." Fact is, I'm not skinny. I've got meat on my frame. I've got curves and rolls and bulges. I've got a good amount of fat in addition to muscle under my skin. So I knew I wasn't a skinny girl looking in the mirror and seeing a fat girl. I was a fat girl looking in the mirror and not liking what she saw.

And that is the distortion.

I was looking through some of my Facebook pictures last week. Usually when I do this, I linger on the pictures that were taken at my lowest (and sickest) weight, and rush past the ones in which you can see my stomach bulging, or a double chin, or anything else that I normally can't bear to look at... if this is what I look like when I'm "healthy" then why did I stop purging? It was the only time I ever felt like I was moving toward pretty...

This time was different though. I looked through the pictures and I realized that I didn't hate a single one of them. I didn't see a fat girl in an unflattering baggy tee shirt, I saw me, having fun with friends. I didn't see the double chin, I saw a smile full of joy. I saw what was in these pictures... me, and people who love me, and whom I love. And everything about how I saw my body changed. The picture didn't look different, I was looking differently. It was acceptance and love of myself, and the realization that, when I look at all kinds of differently shaped people in my life, they are all beautiful. And I don't even mean in the "we're all beautiful on the inside" way, I mean, I look at other people, people who are shaped like me even, or who are bigger, bulgier, bulkier, and I think they look just fine, if not better than just fine. It's only me that I see as unacceptably fat, as ugly and repulsive. And I simply don't have to.

The problem is, it doesn't just go away. I still look in the mirror, maybe half of all the days in the week, and see the fat girl who doesn't know how to dress herself. The other half of the time I look at myself and I'm happy with what I see. It's all tied in to how I'm feeling... if I'm feeling insecure or upset, I see fat G. If I'm feeling good, happy, clear-headed, brilliant, I like what I see when I see G.

The distortion is subtle. It's not what they describe when they say "eating disordered people see their bodies as different from what they really are." I don't know if that is true for anyone else, but for me, what it is is not that I see something different, it's that I'm looking for, and at, something different.

So my job now is to remember that, even on the days when I look in the mirror and see fat ugly G. it is an illusion. I am fine. I am more than fine, I am beautiful. The ugly is my imagination, and when that is what I see it means I need to pray or make a phone call or both.

Haha bulimia, you're LOSING! I'm catching on to your tricks! You think you're so smart, so cunning, baffling, powerful... well, you are, but I am also cunning, baffling, and powerful!

And on that note, I am SO going to sleep!

What's Wrong With Anger?

2010-10-25T14:53:00.000-07:00

I was over at Mr. Sponsorpants where he responded to a very good question he'd received via email. In the AA 12&12 we find this little gem:

"It is a spiritual axiom that every time we are disturbed,
no matter what the cause, there is something wrong with
us. If somebody hurts us and we are sore, we are in the
wrong also."

-- "Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions" (AA's 12&12) Step 10, pg. 90

When my Friend first lent me the OA12&12, it was just such a phrase that almost scared me away from the entire 12step idea. The thing that kept me around long enough was this friend's assurance, when I raised this fear in conversation with him, that we work the steps in order for a reason, and take, at any given moment, only what works for us and leave the rest until we are ready for it.

I am an adult survivor of child abuse. For a long time my anger was the only thing that kept me alive. I needed my anger to not dissolve into suicidal self-loathing. The idea of letting go of this anger was unthinkable and dangerous.

What I have come to realize in the 300 or so days since then is that, when we have the foundation of the Program in place, it becomes possible to loosen our grip on the wrongs done to us, to turn our focus away from them, and onto ourselves. Now this is NOT to say that we blame ourselves instead of others... that was precisely why I (legitimately) needed the anger for so long... because turning the blame on myself was what brought me to self-injury and bulimia and, yes, drinking. The anger was actually a step up from that. And this is why the language can be confusing... don't we need our anger?

The answer, I am finding is, no. When you have the solid ground of the Program under your feet, it becomes possible to let go of our focus on what was done to us... i.e. the thing we cannot change, the thing over which we have no power, no control, and to look at our reactions instead, the things which we can change, influence, direct, practice, work on. I am powerless over the past. I am powerless over what was done to me by my father. What I can do now is look at how I live my life day to day, look at how I let that past affect me. If I live my Program, I no longer need the anger to survive. What I need is to know that God is with me, that I have tools to get myself through a day, an hour, a minute, that I am a beloved child of God and an integral part of this universe, that I deserve to be loved. When I have the protection of God, I no longer need the petty protection of anger, whether that anger is justified or not. Anger is never necessary for the next right action... all that is necessary is knowing what is right.

Am I rid of my anger? Of course not. I suspect I never will be. It is a vision of perfection (Nirvana, maybe) which I suspect I will not reach in this lifetime. But it is that toward which we must always continue to strive. Our lives depend on it.

Trusting The Happy

2010-10-23T19:47:00.000-07:00

I am happy.

I am more than happy.

It is something that is... not sure how well I can articulate this...

It is almost frightening. No, it's more than almost frightening. It is terrifying. It is amazingly, wonderfully, awesomely frighteningly terrifying. The way I am feeling is like nothing I've ever felt before and it is very scary to feel something that you've never felt before... because you have no idea if this is how you are supposed to feel... if it is normal, if it is ok, if it will last, if it is something right, if it is something wrong...

What I am feeling is this: I feel content. I feel excited. I feel loved. I feel love. I feel love for every person, including myself. I feel hopeful. I feel like I am at the beginning of something huge and exciting. I feel capable. I feel trust. I feel like I can face anything. I feel like the things that I've learned in OA mean that I can live with and accept anything. I feel like I trust in God completely.

That is how I feel. I don't know if it is real. I don't know if it's ok. But this is what I'm doing: I'm not worrying about it. I'm not overanalyzing it. I'm not wallowing in the confusion. I'm remembering to focus on next right action. I am remembering to turn my will and my life over to God's care. I am trusting that, no matter what, whatever happens, whatever doesn't happen, if I do the legwork, if I stay vigilant, if I listen to and trust the voice of my Higher Power, if I listen to and trust my sponsor, if I reach out to fellows, help others, pray for the willingness and strength to walk with humility and to be of service in this world, to live with dignity, it will be as it it is meant to be.

And it starts with the food. It starts with the food because the food is the way in. I have a plan of eating. That is the foundation of everything. It is something that I can do. It is a decision that I can make every moment of every day, if I can do nothing else, I can choose to follow my plan of eating. The most important thing in my life every day, is maintaining my abstinence. If I eat three meals, don't binge, don't purge, and don't kill anybody, then I'm ok. It's enough. It's enough because if I follow my plan of eating, then I am feeding myself properly, properly enough to function, minimally sufficient for my brain and body to work. If I can do that, I can go from there. Until I do that, I can't go anywhere, or do anything, and expect it to work, expect myself to function.

When I begin to learn how to take care of myself very minimally, that is when I let God in. That is when I invite God to help me. And that is when God takes my hand, and everything starts to get better. And that takes trust.

I don't know. But I trust. And that makes all the difference.

The Past Comes Back To Remind Me

2010-10-19T19:54:00.000-07:00

This morning on my bookshelf I noticed an old notebook of mine. I can never resist looking in old notebooks. I opened it and flipped through the pages.

I saw something.

I closed the notebook and put it in my bag and left for school.

Today was a good day, though the insecurity monster threatened a few times. Today I did a lot of praying and made a bunch of program calls. I took deep breaths and drank lots of water and non-caffeinated tea, and took breaks when I needed to to pray in the stairwell.

This evening I had a meeting. Before the meeting, as I was putting my books in my bag to leave school, I noticed the notebook. I pulled it out and sat down. I opened it, and flipped to the something I saw this morning.

It was a detailed account of the day in May, 1998, when I was 16 and a half, and my father hit me for the last time. The last time he hit any of us. The night mom finally threw him out for good.

I was shocked at what I read. There was a lot I had forgotten... the big things were clear in my mind, but other details... things that my mom had said to me just before, what I'd been doing when he barged in, what I felt, what he was screaming when he started screaming... The physical aspects of what happened were described pretty much just as I remember them, but the emotional elements, the words said, the manipulation, the rationalizations and justifications... I remembered them as I read them, and I felt the wind knocked out of me at every memory reawakened.

And now, I am confused and afraid.

I have been living this new life for the past 5 months. I am 293 days abstinent. I have a consciousness of God in my life that I've never had before. I'm in a whole new school environment, new friends, new activities, new relationships with my parents... I feel very out of touch even with the me from May 2010. 5 months ago feels like a lifetime ago, a different era, a different person.

What happens when this new person encounters the painful past that kept the old person under the thumb of trauma and depression for over 20 years?

I have a new relationship with my father. I spent three years not speaking to him, coming to terms with the fact that I would never get from him what I thought I needed, and realizing finally that I didn't need it from him after all. I have forgiven the man who stands before me now... older, calmer, happier, a bit less crazy.

Now I have a new question:

Am I ready to confront and forgive the Man That Was?

And further:

Is 16-year-old G. healed from this trauma? Is she ready to be? Is she ready to forgive?

I didn't remember. I had forgotten details... things that some voice in my head says are important to remember, to hold on to. But... is it really so important to remember? It was critical back then... it was a thin thread of sanity to which I could cling. Write it down. Remember what happened. Remember what he said. What she said. Remember it, so you know you didn't make it up. Remember it so you can tell someone later and not confuse the details. Remember. REMEMBER EVERYTHING!

That voice is echoing softly in my mind now, and I'm not sure if it is a voice to be heeded or to take into my arms and soothe and comfort, and invite to recover with the rest of me. Would it have been better had I not remembered these things? Would it have been better to let the history, the truth, the reality, the testimony, fade away into the realm of things that may or may not have been?

I turn my will and my life over to God's care. I need no mooring other than to my faith. I am powerless over the past. I needn't be bogged down by the past, I needn't be defined by it.

But does that make it ok to forget it? Is that what God wants of me?

I am scared and confused.

I am spiritually dizzy.

Who am I?

Funeral

2010-10-18T20:20:00.000-07:00

I arrived at the funeral home at the appointed time. I began wandering around looking for the rabbi, and encountered instead the coffin being carted into the chapel. I was surprised at how un-creeped-out I was by this. My memories of being in close proximity to coffins are so uniformly unpleasant... I thought that there would be at least some discomfort. There wasn't.

I asked the man pushing the coffin if he knew where the rabbi was. He said he thought he was downstairs and went into the room where the daughter of the deceased was sitting with two neighbors. He asked the daughter if the rabbi had gone downstairs and she said she thought he had. "Is this the woman who is doing the graveside service?" I introduced myself. "It's so wonderful to meet you, I'm so happy to have a woman doing the service!" I took her hand and smiled. "It's my honor to be able to do this. I'm very sorry for your loss."

We found the rabbi, and he went over with me one more time what my role was, and details like the Hebrew name of the deceased, and then we proceeded to the chapel. The rabbi offered a lovely eulogy and I got to know a little bit about the woman who was, whose body lay before us. She had to go to work instead of finishing high school but was very intelligent. She was a Yiddish-speaker. She loved to travel, and had visited many countries. She always held her husband's hand on takeoff and landing. She loved classic TV. She raised a daughter. She lost a son. She was kind and fun-loving. She had endured a long illness and was now at rest. She was a person. Now she was gone. The world had been diminished by her loss as it had been enriched by her life. And now we say goodbye.

Few tears were shed in the chapel. This woman was loved, but it was clearly her time to go. Most of her family had predeceased her, and the only next of kin was the daughter who had cared for her until the end. Who had filled 10 notebooks with the details of her care and the people who had come into their lives in the last year of her mother's life, the last of which she was now filling with the details of the death burial and mourning process. "It's a wonderful archive to have," I'd told her when she had shown us the book in which she was scribbling the rabbi's instructions for the first 7 days of mourning and the 23 after that comprising the first 30 days.

We proceeded outside. I accompanied the coffin to the hearse and climbed into the passenger's seat. The driver, a large Sicilian man named Andrew slid into the driver's seat and we started the drive to the cemetery.

After a bit, Andrew broke the silence. "Fall is upon us," he remarked, reflecting on the colors of the trees. "Baruch HaShem," I said. Thank God. "Fall is my favorite season." I mentioned going apple picking with my father and the beauty of the foliage as we drove into the country. I told him about how we used to go apple picking when I was a child during the Jewish High-Holy-Days season, and gather corn stalks on the way home to cover our Sukkah. He talked about Christmas with his family. I talked about Christmas with my family. We talked about religious and cultural values.

I was very cognizant of the nature of our drive, our destination, and the one in the vehicle besides myself and Andrew. I was aware that light and distracting conversation was not appropriate. I tried to maintain a focus on the task at hand and to keep in mind how everything we discussed connected to questions of ultimate meaning, to family and religion and God and the importance of tradition. I mentally included our passenger in the conversation, imagining her there with us in more than just disanimated body. I imagined her there with us, with her earthly self and with us, the people who accompanied her to her resting place, and I imagined her behind us with her daughter to whom the responsibility of burial fell. As Andrew and I talked of our own parents and grandparents, of his children, of cousins and family gatherings, of Jews and Irish and Italians and Sicilians, I held her in my mind and addressed my speech and thoughts to her, sending her care and love, and thoughts of family bonds and her daughter's obvious love for her. "Be with your daughter right now," I thought to her. "We're here to take care of you, be with her."

We arrived at the cemetery and Andrew remarked on how busy it was, and how the folks directing traffic hurriedly and seemingly annoyed seemed to lack cognition of the fact that they were directing vehicles carrying the dead and people who were grieving. "Well, I imagine that after a while you get desensitized to it," I said. "Well," Andrew replied "if you're a true professional you don't get desensitized. You have to act the part."

We pulled up to the office/chapel building and Andrew got out of the hearse to check in and get directions to the burial site. I was left to stay with the body. In Judaism we do not leave the dead unattended. I sat in the passenger's side of the hearse, glancing back occasionally at the plain pine box behind me, consciously maintaining awareness of its contents. The body of the dead is a paradoxical thing for Jews. It is Av ha'Tum'ah, the greatest source of impurity, and it is also, in a sense, sacred and holy. Caring for the needs of the dead is one of the highest regarded commandments. We do not violate the trust of the dead. We do not desecrate a body, do not interfere with its natural state. We carefully and respectfully and in silence wash the body with water, after asking the deceased for forgiveness of anything that we might inadvertently do to offend their dignity. We sit with the body reciting psalms until the time for burial. In the presence of the dead, you do not make light. You do not treat a corpse as a "thing." You behave as though the person were still before you. It is even said that the soul of the deceased remains hovering over her body possibly in confusion until burial.

I sat with her in silence. I tried to communicate an awareness of her, of her life that was. I focused on being a calming presence of serenity, maintaining a connection to her and to the source of all life, holding forth for her my faith in the divine, the knowledge that she was, is, and will be cared for. I let her know that this was my first time and conveyed my plea that my inexperience not be an offense to her, thanking her for being a part of my learning, hoping that she'd have approved of my presence with her.

Andrew returned to the car and we drove to the site of the grave. It was right on the road. Andrew and I both got out of the car, and one of the men from the funeral home addressed me. "Rabbi, should the family come out of the car now or wait until the coffin is in the ground?" "They should come out," I said, trying to hide the acute awareness that I'd just been called Rabbi. "They should be present for this." The daughter and the two neighbors exited the car. The daughter looked at the grave and noted her father's headstone. "Oy, she's practically right on top of Papa!" she exclaimed, ambiguously. I took a chance and said what came to my mind to say. "I'm sure he doesn't mind. It's good that they're together." She agreed.

I recited the prescribed prayers in Hebrew and in English, speaking of God's righteousness and wisdom, singing the El Ma'ale Rachamim, God Full of Compassion, the prayer for the dead to be gathered under the protective wings of the divine presence and brought to The Garden of Eden to eternal rest. I told the daughter that, though we usually only say the Kaddish, the prayer said by mourners affirming God's sovereignty and righteousness, in the presence of a minyan, I thought it was important that she have the opportunity to say the words at the grave of her mother. Strictly, legally, this was not correct. But I used my judgement and asked God's forgiveness should this action for the sake of comforting the bereaved give offense. We said the words together, the daughter stumbling along with a transliteration.

"It is said," I told the daughter "that the greatest act of kindness that a person can do for someone, is to bury them. Because it is a kindness that can never be returned. So, if you're comfortable, I'd like to ask you to do this last kindness for your mother, and place the first shovelful of earth in the grave." The daughter took a shovel from the pile at the foot of the grave, and picked up some of the soil.

"Goodbye Mama,"she said. And she dropped the earth on the coffin where it made a hollow thump. And then she cried. She sobbed. "Oh, mama!" she cried, "Papa! Oh Aaron!" Her brother who was buried on the plot as well. She addressed each of her buried relatives by name through her tears. "I should put stones..." she said, picking up smooth, oblong stones from the pile of earth and placing them on the various headstones, an ancient Jewish custom.

I put my hand on her shoulder. "May the Lord comfort you among all the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem," I said to her. "Thank you," she said. "Thank you so much for this."

And it was over.

God Calls Me Again Into Service

2010-10-16T17:54:00.000-07:00

Today I read from the Torah and lead part of the prayer service at the synagogue where I went to Hebrew school as a child. After the service many congregants came to me to say how beautifully I chanted. Many asked if I was a Cantorial student. A few asked if I was dating anyone because they have a son or grandson or nephew whom they'd love me to meet.

The rabbi came over and asked me if I'd like some extra rabbinic experience. There is a funeral tomorrow morning at which he is officiating, but he has a previous obligation immediately afterwards and cannot conduct the graveside service. He asked me if I would do it.

Going Back For The Others

2010-10-12T20:54:00.000-07:00

I had a nightmare last night.

This is unfortunately not an uncommon occurrence for me these days. I often have very vivid and often disturbing if not frightening dreams. When I remember my dreams they are usually unpleasant to remember and leave me troubled about what's going on in my head.

Last night I dreamed about being put in a concentration camp somewhere in Pennsylvania. It had not yet gotten really bad because they were still trying to pretend like they weren't going to torture and kill us, but of course we all knew better. I was able to escape somehow and went home for a little bit, like maybe half a day, but then it was my responsibility to go back for the others. It wasn't something that I was being forced to do, nor was it something I wanted to do in order to be thought of as noble or anything like that... it was just my understanding that it was my responsibility. And I didn't know if I'd succeed, I didn't know if I'd escape again, if I'd make it out alive, if I'd actually save anyone. But I knew I had to go back. I knew it was my responsibility, whether I had help or not.

Last night before I went to bed, I was thinking about some of the people I know, both in real life and online, who are in something closely approximating the sort of hell I was in back in May and before. People stuck in their insistence that people, the world, God, are out to get them, have it in for them, that everything sucks and it's everyone else's fault, and there is nothing that they can do that will make anything better, or more livable. Or else they're fighting against themselves, insisting that the only thing that will ever "fix it" is if they win this shadow match against their will, fighting with nothing but... well, their will, unable to see past the part where fighting doesn't work. Or else they're just stuck in that deep dark place that has no explanation, where it looks like there's nothing to look forward to because it will clearly never get better, since it's never been better before.

I've been all of those places. Recently. And I mean, yes, the part where I've been depressed since I was maybe 7, and where the only "happy" I could conceive of was momentary reprieve from the misery that would always come back worse than before. And I mean, yes, the part where I'm trying so hard to do everything right and it really feels like the universe is just out to get me and to prevent me from advancing in any meaningful way. And I mean, yes, the part where I want to stop purging and so I tell myself over and over how disgusting it is and how stupid, and how it makes me miserable and exhausted and unable to function and and and... and then I do it again and hate myself because I cannot seem to win against myself...

The miracle happened for me in June. It clicked and it made sense. I'd been in Program 6 months already and I hit a bottom, and I gave up. I let go. I was ready to die so there was nothing else to do. And when it happened, when the switch just suddenly flipped, I was ecstatic, yes, but also a little indignant... because it was So. Very. Simple. Letting go. Turning it over. Listening to God. Letting go of my will and my arrogance, realizing that I had no ground on which to insist anything, and became open to being wrong, to being mistaken, to being humble, to being teachable.

I accepted. I accepted where I was, and decided that it must be where I am supposed to be, and the only question is, what do I take from this, and what next? I mustered my courage and changed the way I interacted with myself, realizing that I have always just stubbornly insisted that I was a fraud and unworthy of my own love and respect, and realizing that all I had to do was let go of that, and treat myself the way I would treat any other friend.

And from there, it all began to climb up and up and up until everything was beautiful.

I've been free of depression for 4 months now. That's huge. HUGE.

We work the steps in order for a reason... but we are also supposed to try to live all of the steps every day of our lives as much as we can, regardless of what step we are on. I'm on step three, and right now I'm trying really hard to live step twelve. It is my responsibility, whenever and however possible, to carry the message to the one who still suffers. I may not, ever, take my recovery, say thanks, and leave. Part of my recovery is always working to pass it on.

When someone you know, someone you love even, is stuck in a rut, a rut that looks a whole hell of a lot like a rut you were in not too long ago, you have to go to them and say "Look, I know how to get out of that rut. I was in that very similar rut over there..." but when all they can see is their own rut, and they can't even hear you, won't look over to where you're pointing to see where you've been, won't believe that you were ever in a rut that looked anything like their TOTALLY UNIQUE AND UNPRECEDENTED RUT THAT NO ONE CAN SAVE ME FROM...

What do you do?

Do you walk away?

Do you continue to try to convince them?

Do you walk silently alongside them as they trudge their rut, hoping that one day they'll look up and you'll have a window of opportunity to give a hand?

When does help give way to pity? To enabling? I used to eat pity with a spoon. It sustained me in my rut, in my pit, kept me on a starvation diet of what I thought was the closest thing I'd ever get to love, and it kept me down there just as surely as my dad kept me in debt to him by lending me money and charging me rent approximately in the amount of what I earned at my job.

I am afraid.

I'm afraid of doing or saying the wrong thing, or of failing to do or say the right thing. As much as I'm afraid of enabling, I'm at least as afraid of abandoning... because I know what it's like to feel abandoned, and it can bring someone to a very dangerous place mentally. I'm afraid of getting sucked into someone else's spiral and ending up back in that place I never want to return to...

But isn't it my responsibility to go back for the others?

Good Reminder

2010-10-10T19:17:00.001-07:00

I'm on Question 2 of Step 3 in the OA 12 Steps Workbook. This is the first question I feel I've had real trouble working on.

"What has my attitude been about food and eating?"

Um... baaad? Destructive? What do you want me to say?

I was reluctant. I didn't want to look back I wanted to look forward. My attitude is better now, why does it matter now, at this point, at step 3 already, what my attitude was before? It was wrong before, and now I'm in a better place and getting better all the time. How do I do this?

"Food must not be wasted, no matter what."

That was the first thing. First and foremost, always finish what's in front of you. That was so hard to let go. I still have trouble letting go of that. It feels so dangerous still to let anything, even the smallest little bit go to waste.

"Eat fast: you might get full before you can finish it all."

The inevitable corollary of the first thought. If you must finish everything, make sure you can finish everything. I quickly learned to eat fast. It's still hard. I'm still in the process of unlearning.

"Eat as much as you can: you don't know when the next time you eat will be. Don't bother trying to stop yourself from eating or taking seconds or thirds of something that is particularly delicious. You will lose that battle. If you overeat, the solution is to purge. Purging will help you remember not to overeat next time. Starving is noble. Eating is something to feel guilty about. Only eat when you can justify it. You justify eating by starving. It's unreasonable to expect to be able to not snack between meals. If dad's eating, I am allowed to eat too. If dad's not eating, I need to be careful of what he sees me eat or he will call me a pig. "Vomit before dishonor" is our motto on all-you-can-eat sushi night. Once I start eating I can't make myself stop. I could stop if I were a better person. Everything in my life would be better if I were thin. I will never be thin."

I went back into the mind of the bulimic, back into G. at 25, at 22, at 18, at 14, at 9... I'm looking at this and realizing that all of this seemed normal to me. Now it seems so foreign. This is a disease of forgetting.

Part of Recovery is sometimes about refusing to forget.

Praying On The Phone

2010-10-09T19:55:00.000-07:00

Last night was rough.

My mom was a little more drunk thank usual last night. She was slurring and repeating and incoherent, and I'm just gonna say it... it pissed me off.

Friday night is supposed to be special, sacred, holy. Friday night we have dinner together. We say the blessings, we wash hands ritually and we sit down for a sanctified celebratory meal in honor of Shabbat. When mom is drunk, she doesn't remember the blessings that she taught me when I was an infant. When mom is drunk, it becomes less likely that we will say the grace after the meal together, because she will fall asleep before we get there. When mom is drunk, we sit awkwardly mostly in silence, mom oblivious, her husband resigned, me angry.

Last night I ate quickly. When I finished, I wanted to eat more. I really really wanted to take seconds. It's within my bottom line to do so, seconds alone wouldn't put me back to day one, but it's against my rules. Why? Cause seconds leads to bingeing. A binge does put me back to day one. Seconds are not worth the risk, and no one who eats three reasonably sized meals a day needs to take seconds. I know enough to know that I can't eat extra food that I want but don't need. Same reason I don't snack. I knew all of this, and I really really wanted that extra piece of chicken. I sat there across from my drunk and mumbling mother, patiently explaining to myself in my mind all the reasons I might want to eat more and that none of them were good enough reasons to risk my abstinence.

I ate quickly. I didn't give myself time to feel full.
I want to eat so I don't have to pay attention to my mother.
I'm jealous. If she can numb out, why can't I?
I want to punish her. I want to relapse so I can tell her it's her fault.
I want to cure her. I want to relapse so I can tell her it's her fault and maybe she'll stop drinking.
I feel shitty and I want something to feel good Right Now.
I feel shitty and I want to make myself feel shitty about something else instead.

I excused myself and went to my room. I broke shabbat to make a phone call. I called a program friend and told him what was going on. He asked me if I wanted to pray. I hesitated at first... I'm not sure why. Maybe I was wavering in my faith. Maybe I wanted comfort from P because I didn't trust that I could get it from God. After all, P was right there on the phone. His voice was distinct and kind and comforting. Getting that from God was going to take some work on my part.

So I said yes.

"Ok, I'm getting on my knees..." he said. "ok, let's start with the Serenity Prayer." "Ok," I said. "How does it go, G?" I took a deep breath.

"God?"

And the tears started coming.

We said the Serenity Prayer together, and then P. prayed to God on my behalf as I listened, praying that God would be with me and give me the strength to keep doing the right thing, to get me through this, and be prayed to God to be with my mother through her illness and addiction, and to help me remember to take care of myself and to remember that it's all according to plan.

"You wanna freestyle a little?"

I hesitated. Again. Too much work.

"Come on, G. What do you want God to know?"

What came out of my mouth then was not what I "want God to know," but rather what I wanted God to know that I knew. I said back to God all of the answers that God has been giving me over the past few months. I told God that I know that this is not for me to understand, that this is something over which I have no control, that I am grateful for all of the gifts that I've received from God over the past few months, for the strength and support, and that I know that this is what Recovery is... life doesn't get better, we do. I need to remember, I said, because this is what I'm hearing from God, that I need be cognizant of my feelings, acknowledge them, and feel them, that I'm allowed to feel pain, I'm allowed to cry, but that no matter what happens, and anything can happen... to my body, to the people around me, to the people I love, to my environment... no matter what, God is still with me, and is still taking care of me, and all I have to do is turn my will and my life over to God's care.

"Amen."

All Doubts Removed

2010-10-05T18:50:00.000-07:00

If I had any doubts before that God has brought me to where I am today, they were removed in Oklahoma City. Had I not hit bottom in May, had I not been pulled out of my rabbinical school this year, had I not committed myself to my recovery and decided to pursue my learning in the meantime for no credit, I'd have been in Israel right now (if not dead) and I would not have been asked to come to Oklahoma City and I would not have been given the incredible gift of helping to bring four people into the covenant and holy congregation of Israel.

Two were a couple, one in his 70s, one in her 60s, who are very active participants in the synagogue community, and very keen on learning and increasing their knowledge and observance, and who will be marrying in a halachic wedding on their 18th secular wedding anniversary in December.

One is an octogenarian career crop duster who has been trying to convert for just about 20 years. He doesn’t see or hear well, he is in failing health, and was terrified that he would die before he was allowed to convert. He cried when we told him we’d unanimously agreed that he should proceed to the mikveh.

The last is a young man in his early thirties who began his learning on Aish.com and then called my friend Rabbi J and asked if she would please deprogram him. He is extremely eager and enthusiastic about his journey into Jewish observance. I felt compelled to caution him against being judgmental of other Jews who are less than perfect or still searching in their observance. I explained that Jewish observance is like a ladder, and we are all at different places on that ladder at different points in our lives for different reasons. Since no one is at the top, the goal is to always be ascending in holiness. I warned him to have some humility on that account, and he affirmed that he would work on that.

I’d been joking for the past couple of weeks that while in Oklahoma I was going to be “Making Jews.” I say such things because I think that it is important to have a sense of humor about things, especially religion. It is good grounding sometimes (maybe even often) to take some healthy pot-shots at oneself and the things one holds dear. But now I’m going to be serious:

I did not make any Jews. My friends, D and J (both rabbis) who served with me on the beit din (religious court comprised of three qualified judges) today did not make any Jews. The mohel (ritual circumciser) who performed the hatafat dam brit (ritual drop of blood taken when non-ritual circumcision is present), and the shomrim (watchers) who witnessed the immersions in the mikveh did not make any Jews. Rabbi J who spent the past year or so teaching and meeting with these four people regularly, did not make any Jews. Today, four Jews were brought into the covenant and holy congregation of Israel by The Kadosh Baruch Hu, HaShem the Holy One Blessed is God, and I was extremely blessed to have been a part of this holy process. I went into that space with no idea what I was going to ask these people when they sat before us, and as I listened to them speak, the words came to me out of nowhere. I knew what I needed these people to articulate to make sure we were all certain we knew what we were doing and where we were going and that this was the right thing. I prayed with all of my might that day, before we convened, that I should have the willingness to do God’s will, and not to be seduced by my own willfulness, and that I should have the humility to push my ego aside and listen to the voice and will of my God, and do what God asked of me. I prayed that afternoon that the four Jews whose births I witnessed that day should be guided by God in their paths to increased holiness and observance, that they should be a credit to the Jewish people, to our God, and that they should always strive to do God’s commandments and to be a source of light unto our people, the nations, and the world.

I felt like a holy vessel. I felt very very small. I feel immeasurably blessed.

If I had any doubts about what God wants me to do with my life, they were removed in Oklahoma City.

Baruch Hashem, amen, v’amen.

On The Way Home

2010-10-04T09:10:00.000-07:00

Wrote this at around 5:30 am.

****

Sitting in the Detroit metro airport which doesn't have free WiFi. I am being challenged, and I feel like I'm not doing a great job. I was so cheerful and accepting yesterday, riding this wave of spiritual euphoria. It continued into this morning when I got up at 3:45 am after a fitful 3 hour nap. I was cheerful and made it my business to try to put a smile on the face of anyone I encountered. I started to flag when I arrived at the concourse and the signs led me to a tram that was not in operation, and gave no indication of how to get where I was going. After having it explained to me, I hustled over to my gate and sat down, and texted my mother with my flight info. After a few minutes I noticed/realized that, by that time, boarding should have been well underway, and it wasn't.

I went to the desk and asked for help, and the woman at the desk typed in my itinerary to figure out what I was supposed to do. It was then that I noticed on the screen behind her a notice in tiny print that my flight was departing from another gate. Meanwhile she was saying "So you're planning on staying in Atlanta overnight and then heading [home]?" "What?? No!" I said. She told me they had my flights scheduled for two different days. I was starting to panic, but then she said, "Oh, no, my mistake, they've got it in there right." She continued typing and I stood there unsure whether to bolt for the new gate or wait for her to either confirm for me where I was supposed to go or give me another heart attack. "You didn't want a direct flight?" she asks me. I lost my cool there a little bit. "It wasn't my choice!" She looked a bit startled. I tried to calm down a bit." It wasn't my choice… I didn't book any of these flights myself, I just want to get to my plane because it is supposed to leave in 15 minutes!" She looked and said "Yes it is," as though she were noticing this fact for the first time. She continued typing and I took a breath. "I'm sorry… I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be snippy. I'm just getting a little nervous." She continued to type and didn't look at me. I felt really really bad then. I must acknowledge that I was frustrated with her and not just with the situation, and though I didn't succeed in seeing her in a positive light or judging her favorably in that moment. She was trying to help, and even if she wasn't doing the best job she could have (and never having done her job I have no way of knowing) I should have been kinder. I did apologize though, and I did mean it, and right now there is nothing more that I can do about it except try to learn and do better next time. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.

I got to my scheduled gate out of breath, put my boarding pass on the desk where two ladies were discussing a complication with a passenger, and said "Hi." "Hi," one of the ladies said, and continued talking to the other lady. After a moment I said "Um… excuse me…" the lady responded by saying "The flight to Atlanta is gone." Still out of breath, I started laughing or sobbing, or something in between. "You're going to miss your connection," said the other lady as she typed in my itinerary. "Oh my God, they've had me running all over this f…friggin' airport…" "We made several announcements about the gate change," said the first lady with what felt to me like a sort of indifferent rebuke in her voice. "I WASN'T…" I started… and then I shut my mouth and put my head down on the desk and took a few deep breaths. Calm down. Calm. Being angry won't help.

The other lady continued typing and told me that I was confirmed on a non-stop flight several hours later which would get me in to my home airport earlier than the previous itinerary would have. "Was I supposed to know about this?" I asked, truly bewildered, and remembering the lady at the original gate who had asked me about a non-stop flight… that was probably what she was referring to, and I felt bad again about snapping at her. She probably had no idea that I didn't know about this new nonstop flight. "I don't know, I don't know when or how or who booked it." Still typing. "So…um… non-stop flight? When? Where? How?" "Let me just see…" She continued typing and I smiled. "I guess what I should have said was 'Yes, a non-stop flight would be lovely, thank you.'" She and the other lady chuckled at that and I felt a little better. The woman who was typing went across the hall to where the boarding passes printed out ("Oh, THAT'S brilliant!" I said. "Yeah, I don't know who came up with that idea," she replied). The other lady asked me when I'd gotten in, and I briefly told her the story of Oklahoma City to Detroit, and the sitting helplessly just short of an occupied gate for 30 minutes while my connecting flight home sailed away. "So I'm not particularly happy with [commercial airline] at the moment... but it will pass." ...pause... "Though really," I continued, "I guess it's not [commercial airline]'s fault. It's the airport's fault." At this she smiled a little. She asked me where they'd put me up and I told her, noting that I'd gotten maybe one hour of sleep. She asked if the place was nice, and I told her that it was, and that they'd provided breakfast. "Oh really? That early?" I told her about the bagels, hard boiled eggs, cereal, juice etc. that they had laid out. "Oh that's good to know. Cause you know, we send passengers off to these hotels and we have no idea if we're sending them somewhere crappy." I smiled and told her it had been perfectly nice, which was true.

Anyway, so now I am sitting at a gate where I am on standby for a flight in an hour and 15 minutes, right across from the gate where I am confirmed for a flight an hour and a half after that. Either way I will still get home earlier than I would have on the 5:30 flight connecting in Atlanta. I feel like this was a test, and if I passed (and I'm not sure I did) it was only just barely. I need to work harder to keep holiness in every aspect of my life, in my attitude, in my speech, and in the way I relate to others even in exhausted frustration. The sage Shammai taught "Receive everyone with a cheerful face." Shammai is known in our tradition to have been an impatient man who didn't suffer fools easily. Perhaps this is why he taught this principle… even our greatest sages had what to work on to improve their own lives and attitudes.

God, keep my tongue from evil. Help me to walk in humility. I am grateful for the push from HaShem to work harder to maintain constant awareness of my actions and speech.

Turning Over My Will And My Life

2010-09-18T23:49:00.000-07:00

Thursday morning I woke up, put on my tallit and tefillin, and began saying my morning prayers.

At the end of the Amida, after the set of 19 fixed blessings, there is a space reserved for personal meditation, prayer, and supplication. This space has been filled with a standardized liturgy, the meditation that Mar Ben Rabina would recite at the end of his Amida. I suppose it has come to be such because of those who wanted to emulate the great scholar... I tend to use his words as a base text for the bare minimum of my concluding prayer, but I try to use that space as much as possible for genuine communication with The Kadosh Baruch Hu.

As I finished my Amida on Thursday, I took a deep breath, and let it go. I relaxed my neck and shoulders, as I always try to do when seeking audience with God. I began to pray my own words, to let my yearnings come to the fore of my mind and heart so that I could pour them out before my Rock and my Redeemer. Usually, a large part of this is praying that God remove from me all negative, unworthy, and uncharitable thoughts, help me to seek, know, and do Gods will, and not to be seduced my my own willfulness, to grant me the willingness to always seek to do the Next Right Action, to grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. On this day though, something more came up, came forward, came out:

"HaShem, my God, I trust You completely. I turn my will and my life over to Your care. Do with me and my life as You will."

I said these words and felt a tightening in my chest. I began to cry a little. I was afraid. I was nervous. I was exhilarated. I felt like I'd taken a leap off of a cliff.

Does God need my permission to do with my life as God wills or wishes to do? No, of course not. God will do what God will, God will show compassion and mercy to whom God will. God will stand by while God's beloved are tortured and martyred for nothing more than loving God's law and teaching God's Torah. The world moves, and things happen to us and sometimes they are wonderful and sometimes they are horrible. That is and always has been the way of the world, the way of existence, the fate of humanity. We live, we rejoice, we suffer, we die.

The difference, the variable, the only element over which we have any say, is in how we respond, how we react, externally and internally. Where do we see God in what happens to us, and what do we say to God in response? How do we think about where we are, what has become of us? This is where acceptance is such a huge and terrifying leap of faith.

I've done my share of yelling at God, both silently and out loud. I've spent much time thinking about the direction of my life, the path that it has taken and the things that I have experienced and endured, the good, the bad, the downright ugly. I put a lot of effort into seeing meaning in all of the elements of my life, and I thought for a long while that I was pretty darn good at it. Most of the things that I felt were valuable about the way I thought and the way I saw the world and related to and understood people were the direct or indirect result of hardship, pain, and tragedy in my life. I considered it a huge blessing that I could see that, which protected me from too much bitterness. Nevertheless, I would often turn to God and say "Look, I get it... I get that the stuff I went through made me who I am, and I get that Who I Am probably has a purpose to fulfill... but seriously God, did it have to be like that? I mean really, did it have to be just like that?" Could it have been another way? Did I really have to go through all of that crap?"

I come from a tradition that argues with God. And I think that there is a great deal of value in that. You have to know that authority can always always be questioned, that you can always call someone on their bullshit. I also come from a tradition with a long and varied history of indescribable suffering. It is so deeply embedded in our national psyche that... well... that a lot of things. That's another conversation. We have a thing about going like lambs to the slaughter... we don't like it. We have some bad baggage associated with that. We are a people that wants to fight, even if it only means that we will go down fighting. We as a people, especially since around 1939-1945, do not like to accept. Acceptance for us, historically, means death. We are tired of being martyrs.

But there are martyrs, and there are martyrs. We do not glorify martyrdom in my tradition. For us, martyrs are people who died senseless deaths in the "sanctification of God's name" whether that means that they died for actively refusing to deny God, or that they died simply because of their status as "Jew" according to their killers. Either way, there is no joy or exultation in this. There is weeping, there is shuddering, there is mourning. Martyrs are those of whom we say "For what? For what, God, have you brought this about?" A martyr is someone who accepts their fate and does not or cannot fight back. A martyr is helpless. A martyr is a victim.

Acceptance of the sort of which I'm thinking, however, is not victimhood. It is, in fact, the opposite. Does acceptance mean that you leave the world alone to be what it will be and do what it will do? That you adopt a laissez-faire attitude toward injustice? That you lie down and allow yourself to be walked upon, abused, kicked, slaughtered, and do nothing? No. Not at all. We do not ask for the serenity to accept the things that we CAN change. We ask every day for the COURAGE to CHANGE WHAT WE CAN. That is not helplessness. That is not martyrdom. That is not lying down and giving up.

Things happen in this world. Bad things. Cruel things. Unjust things. Horrible things. And we, the good of this world, the ones who try to bring light into the dark places, we fight. To whatever extent we can, we fight evil with good. Darkness with light. Hatred with love. Despair with service. And sometimes, we lose. And sometimes, even when we win, we are wounded. Sometimes we are left with deep scars, even crippling injuries, physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual. Sometimes we fall ill. Sometimes we lose things, people, places, chances. And this sucks. And this is unfair. And this is painful and traumatic and... and... and...

And when you have done all that you can, what do you do then?

"God, I turn my will and my life over to your care."

Trusting in God does not mean trusting that nothing bad will ever happen to you. That is a very low level of faith that is easily and inevitably shattered. Trusting in God means trusting that, even though bad things happen, that God still will love you and care for you... that even though the worst may happen to you in this world, your relationship with God rises above the troubles of this world. "Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me."

Does this mean I will never again complain about anything that happens in my life? Well, I know myself, so probably not. I am not, nor do I expect ever to be perfect. But I have made a commitment. I have committed to taking a step back, taking a breath, relaxing my neck and shoulders, opening my hands, and my heart, and believing that whatever is happening, whatever I or the world or those around me are going through, that the one constant is God... That, though God has given me survival instincts, and instilled in me the will and smarts to avoid pain, injury and death, nothing that can happen to me will be so bad that it will overshadow the love of God. That though I may be crippled, I always can walk in wholeness and peace with my creator and redeemer. Into His hand I entrust my spirit, when I lie down to sleep, and when I awake, and with my spirit, also my body.

God is with me. I shall not fear.

What I Said

2010-09-16T06:57:00.000-07:00

I'm gonna post the content of my dvar Torah with some edits for the sake of anonymity and clarity. You can judge its content for yourself... you may think it's dreck. I don't want to leave just that story about how wonderful people thought it was and leave you thinking either that it was wonderful when you wouldn't think so, or that I'm inflating my own ego by posting just about getting approval without having to show that for which I gained approval.

When Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai fled from the Romans, he and his son hid away in a cave. They were alone together in that cave for twelve years, studying Torah together, writing the Zohar, which we all know is a first century Israelite document written in 13th century Spain. But that's irrelevant.

...[hope for a laugh]...

After twelve years, the Roman governor died, and Bar Yochai's death sentence was rescinded.

He and his son emerged from the cave, and looked around them. They saw a man plowing his field, and planting. The two scholars looked on with horror, not comprehending how this man could waste his time working when there was Torah to be studied! Their disapproval was so scorching that everything they looked at burned up.

Then God spoke to the two, saying "Have you emerged only to bring destruction to my world? Go back into your cave!" So the two returned to the cave for another year. After the year had passed, they emerged once more. They saw a man hurrying along carrying two bundles of lovely sweet-smelling myrtle. Bar Yochai asked the man what their purpose was. He replied "In honor of the Holy Shabbat. One for Shamor, one for Zachor." Rabbi Shimon turned to his son and said, with joy, "See how beloved the Mitzvot (commandments) are to the Jewish people!"

[Synagogue President] asked me to talk a little bit about what it means to be a rabbinical student. It can often feel like being Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai. [Rabbinical School] with its basement Beit Midrash can sometimes feel like a cave, especially if you live in on-campus housing. It can be easy to forget, sometimes, that there is a world outside. We are simultaneously privileged, and at a disadvantage. We have the opportunity to devote our lives to the study of our religious tradition, its laws and rituals, texts, and history. Our concerns are often the concerns of the cave: Which sage held that Shema can be said all night, rather than up until midnight? What did Rambam [Maimonides] teach about the different forms of prostration? Do we agree more with [Right Wing Conservative Thinker] or with [Left Wing Conservative Thinker] on such and such? In which Masechet [Tractate of Talmud] is the story of Elisha ba'al knafayim [Talmudic Superhero Story]?

When we exit the cave, we are confronted with a very different set of concerns. Suddenly, we are asking ourselves "How will I integrate into a community where I can't eat in the homes of most of the members?" "Why don't these people know that 9:30 davenning is too late to fulfill the obligation of saying Shema?" "Are they going to think I'm sanctimonious if I go to wash my hands before motzei [blessing over bread]?" It can be very difficult and scary stepping outside and confronting a Movement, a community of lay people who spend their days not in a Beit Midrash, but rather plowing and sowing. It can make us feel alienated and alienating. We are in a position in which it is difficult not to feel judged, and also not to stand in judgement of those less knowledgeable, less observant, less active, less curious.

Unlike most of my classmates in the first year class, I have the advantage of having spent time in Jerusalem studying for two years at [My Yeshiva]. I remember coming home after my first year and feeling like my eyes would burn up anything I looked at. I'd grown up thinking I'd known something about Judaism, something about halachic observance, something about what the Conservative Movement was all about. When I started studying in earnest I found that I'd been profoundly mistaken, that my practice and education had excluded many elements that now seemed critical. Returning to the family and community from which I had come, it was painful to see how incomplete was the practice that I'd once thought of as very traditional. How could I live among people who didn't know very basic things, like that one is not only encouraged but *required* to daven three times every day? Who didn't seem to understand the concept of "obligation" in a religious context?

Returning to the Yeshiva with these questions swimming around my head, I agonized over how I would ever function as an observant Jew, let alone as a rabbi, if I couldn't relate to my community? That indeed I had no community? Starting early on, that second year was somewhat rocky for me. I wrestled many angels and demons during that time, I began to speak out loud to God, looking up at the night sky, asking "How? How am I supposed to do this?" During that time, I also experienced a degree of "ba'al teshuva* burnout." It got more and more difficult for me to show up so eagerly half an hour early every day to the Beit Midrash to study before davenning, or sometimes even to make it in time for davenning at all. I started missing services, going to bed instead of davenning ma'ariv, "forgetting" to put on my tefillin, being less strict about candle lighting, and hating myself for it.

I attended Yom Kippur services that year with [a certain congregation in Jerusalem] This particular davenning community is Modern Orthodox, and Kabbalistically inclined. They are known for their exceptionally long services with lots of singing and dancing. I was curious to see how they would observe this somber day.

The congregation lived up to its reputation. Davenning started at around 6 in the morning and went until more than an hour after the official end of the fast. And not only was there beautiful communal singing of piyyutim [liturgical poems] and harmonized davvening, but right in the middle of the service, when the niggunim [melodies] warranted it, folks sprang up from their chairs which they pushed aside, and began to dance. Dancing on Yom Kippur! I’d never seen such a thing in my life. I hesitated at first but eventually joined in eagerly. In the midst of the dancing, my external and internal inhibitions lowered by the fasting and by the piyyutim and the movement of the dance, the feeling of the two women’s hands I held in mine as we turned together in a circle, I felt tears running down my face.

Here I am, with a year and a bit of nothing but study under my belt. I know more than the average Conservative Jew can even imagine they DON'T know. I study all day every day, live in a community of observant Jews and I, because of my personal struggles, I am having trouble fulfilling basic commandments like putting on tefillin in the morning. How much more so should I not expect the folks from my shul, who have real jobs and real lives and families to concern themselves with details of observance to which they've never been exposed? They come to shul. They put on a tallit once a week. They sing the prayers enthusiastically even if they don't understand every word. How beloved is Judaism to the Jewish people that they cling to the practices that they learned from their parents, incomplete as they may be, or that they make the decision to step into a synagogue having come from a secular background, and decide to stay? How beautiful that even the completely unobservant still come together to honor their Judaism on Yom Kippur?

Reflecting on the Yom Kippur services to which most of us are accustomed… recitations of long lists of sins, many of which we cannot relate to on a personal level... why do we do this to ourselves? Literally beating our chests, fasting, weeping they say we’re supposed to do... This whole thing is a big downer. When was the last time you wept on Yom Kippur? Most of us are frankly not willing to go there. We go through the motions, some of us send out mass emails asking our friends vaguely to please forgive anything we might have done over the past year. We do it because that’s what we’re supposed to do, and besides, making amends sounds nice. We do the fasting because that’s what we’re supposed to do, and makes us feel righteous, even if we do it grudgingly. We recite these shopping lists of transgressions in a monotone, with a token tap of the right fist to the left side of the chest, because this is the dance we were taught as children. Maybe at some point we feel something, through the haze of fasting, or if we are confronted with an actual specific wrong we did to someone, we’re inspired momentarily to make resolutions for the coming year that we may or may not keep.

That year in Jerusalem changed all of that for me. I remembered that the first lesson I'd learned in the Beit Midrash of The Yeshiva was a lesson of humility. It was the realization of just how little I know, and how much I have to learn. That continues to be true, for each and every one of us at every stage of our lives and our learning. The time of repentance which brings us up to the climax of Yom Kippur, starting with the first of Elul [the Jewish month of repentance; the last month before Rosh Hashanah], stepping itself up tonight with the beginning of selichot, sounding itself loudly on Rosh Hashannah in case we haven't been paying attention… this is a time to look at ourselves and our world with humility. Atonement doesn't mean feeling bad about yourself, it doesn't mean indulging in self-loathing. It is taking a look at yourself and your imperfections, and seeing yourself through God's eyes… God who, for no reason other than God's eternal love for us, gives us every single year this day to be wiped clean of all of our sins. God created us as imperfect human beings and loves us that way. Therefore, each year, God forgives us our imperfect humanity. We must spend the time leading up to this amazing and awesome day forgiving ourselves and each other for our humanity, for that which we couldn't do, for that which we could have done better, and for that which we did in error, whether intentionally or not. It is about Seeing, Truly seeing ourselves in every one of us, thereby seeing God. Once you've done that, how can you help but dance?

I would like to challenge each of you this year to shift your perspective a little. Starting tonight. As we pray, I want you to try to let go. Let go of something that you think you know. About God, about Judaism, about someone else. Open yourself to the possibility of humility, of realizing how much you still haven't seen, how ignorant you are of the stories of others… try to make yourself teachable. And open yourself to letting in God's love.

So that you may release it back into the world.

*Ba'al Teshuva is an expression for someone who becomes religiously observant after having been non-observant, or someone who takes on a significantly more intensive or stringent level of observance than they had previously practiced.

Finishing the Story

2010-09-16T06:36:00.000-07:00

Ok, so I left off where I decided to speak about humility at the synagogue on the eve of the beginning of the penitential prayer period leading up to Rosh Hashanah. This happens at the end of Shabbat before Rosh Hashanah, so I spent that Saturday at the synagogue. It was 2 weeks after my initial visit.

Now, incidentally, the rabbi of this shul has a son. His son is married to a woman. This woman is the daughter of my teacher, the one who found me at 15 and talked theology with me. The first time I came to the shul, I'd hoped to get a moment to speak with the rabbi afterwards to let him know that we had that connection, but I didn't get the chance.

This time, at the end of morning services, the rabbi got up to make announcements, and announced the Selichot service that night. And he announced my part approximately as such:

"[G. Rabanon], a first-year rabbinical student at [school], and who is an alumna of our Talmud Torah [Hebrew school] will be giving a presentation on the topic of [some list of topics I told the president I'd try to incorporate]. Now, incidentally, I mentioned Miss [Rabanon]'s name to my son, and it turns out that she is known! She is a favorite student of [my teacher, the rabbi's son's father-in-law], the well-known professor of theology at [school] and he regards her as one of the up-and-coming great minds of the Conservative Movement! So it should be a real treat..."

I resisted the urge to sink down into my chair. Instead I laughed. I leaned over to the old couple sitting in front of me whom I'd befriended and whispered "No pressure, right?" They laughed and reassured me.

Humility. Humility. Humility. Not self-loathing, not lack of confidence, humility. For so much of my life, I thought that the only way to maintain humility was to hate myself, to think nothing of myself, to convince myself that I was stupid, untalented, incapable. I was so afraid of arrogance and haughtiness, and I knew that I had certain gifts (or curses, depending on... a lot of variables), I knew I had to somehow play them down. Disown them. Thing is, I couldn't play dumb... I just was not capable of that. So I just denied that there was anything special about me, or else I insisted that, yes, maybe I possessed a talent or a certain amount of intelligence, but it came nowhere near compensating for the myriad other flaws that I could rattle off, and it was my flaws that really defined me.

I now understand self-loathing to be, in fact, an expression of deep arrogance in and of itself, but we can talk about that later.

So after evening prayers that night, we went into the reception hall where there was a podium set up, and I was introduced by the president.

I made a few jokes in the beginning, laughed nervously a couple of times, tripped over some words. And then I found my pace. I tend to speak much too quickly, it is something that people always remark upon, especially when I do stand-up, or give speeches or divrei Torah (sermons or lessons). This time, I slowed down enough to both carefully read what I had written, and to look up at the congregation, catch someone's eye before continuing. At first it felt awkward, but then I noticed that the pace added a certain drama to the words. That drama, I thought, must be compelling. People really seemed to be listening. They looked interested. They were waiting to hear what I was going to say next. They were nodding in agreement, or raising eyebrows in surprise. It was... I was... I... I felt like it clicked. I felt like I was in my element. My father was there, and I wasn't trying to impress him, but I knew nevertheless that he would be impressed. And I knew that it was because I wasn't looking for approval. I was trying to carry God's message, and trusting that God would help it come across.

Afterwards I'd been asked to leave some time for questions and discussion. A gentleman raised his hand. He mentioned something partially related to that about which I had spoken, but then he went in an entirely different direction, turning to another member of the congregation and asking him, there in public, about something he had said in response to the synagogue's statement of its egalitarian status in the dayschool literature. I was puzzled at first. I was about to be crestfallen that, indeed, the congregation had not been listening at all, they just wanted to have their own conversation about synagogue issues that had nothing to do with anything I'd said.

But as the conversation continued (and it wasn't very long) I realized what was happening: they were responding not to what I'd said, but to who they perceived I was, and my presence there. This first person who had spoke was figuratively saying to this other fellow "Okay guy, so here we have a highly intelligent and insightful rabbinical student here, and she is a woman. She is an example of everything that is right and good about egalitarianism. She proves that we should be proud to be egalitarian. So why are you still pandering to the uneducated fools who think that this young woman should not be allowed to be a rabbi?"

After they'd had some back and forth I decided to put my two cents into the conversation. I explained how I understood the thinking of the segment of the population to which he was referring, and how our concept of Judaism and its possibilities is just entirely foreign and implausible. The important thing, I said, is to try to understand where they are coming from, not to be frustrated with them, and, while not apologizing for your own opinion, being patient and charitable enough to take their experience into account.

The conversation ended there, and people started to leave the room to go to the sanctuary for the service. I was immediately surrounded, almost entirely by women who wanted to talk to me about what I'd actually spoken on: humility, faith, joy in worship, and feeling loved by God. They were so glad I'd brought this message to their shul, and hoped I would come back to teach some more.

And I felt God smiling in approval.

And then my dad came over. He said "I'm going to tell you something because I know you will understand and appreciate what it means: Rabbi (L.) [my father's childhood rabbi] would have been impressed."

Rabbi L. was a great and revolutionary Jewish homileticist.

And I felt God wink.

;)

Quick Check-In

2010-09-15T04:41:00.000-07:00

Hey, I know I have a story to finish, but I've just started school and a new choir and between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur I've been mad busy.

Basic update:

School's good... think being around all women is really good for me right now
Choir is awesome! Never sung with such a mature and disciplined group before... this is how grownups sing, isn't it?
259 days abstinent today
Things continuing to be positive with dad
Things continuing to be positive with mom, organization is progressing nicely and space is rapidly being found
Still happy :)

More to come soon God-willing. I have tomorrow off so possibly there will be some time to write then.

The Past Comes Back To Embrace Me

2010-09-07T07:08:00.001-07:00

This past Shabbat the reason I stayed with my dad was that I'd been asked to speak at evening services Saturday night, when we began the penitential prayers before the new year, at a synagogue close to his house. My father still drives on Shabbat, but I do not. So he drove to our regular shul and I walked to the closer one.

I'd been called and asked to speak two weeks previous. I'd attended this synagogue the week I was staying with The Ward while dad was on vacation. I'd been greeted and welcomed especially warmly when I arrived... Not that I don't think anyone would have been greeted warmly, but this synagogue is really quite wanting in the area of young membership. This is a synagogue that was one of the great flourishing Conservative institutions of the area in the 1980s and '90s. Now the neighborhood is changing, the people who are moving in are either not Jewish or Orthodox, and the old guard Conservative population is aging.

That's why I was initially welcomed so warmly. It got warmer when I introduced myself to certain members of the synagogue community and they realized who I was. See, like I said this synagogue had been flourishing in the '80s when my family's synagogue had been struggling. While my parents much preferred the philosophy and attitude of the shul we attended every Shabbat and on holidays, there was no Hebrew school to speak of. This other synagogue, though much more right wing and less academic in its approach to religious instruction than my parents would have liked, it was the best afternoon and Sunday morning Conservative Hebrew school in town. So my siblings and I all attended this synagogue's Talmud Torah program from first grade through sixth.

Of course, when my sister reached sixth grade, as I understand it, it was "suggested" that she should perhaps not return the following year. I think the problem was that she was arguing against the teachers and students who said that all Arabs are evil. When I hit the same age, I began to argue with the students and teachers who insisted that women could not read from the Torah or be rabbis. Our rabbi back at our shul happened to be a woman. I don't think I had yet realized how unusual we were in that respect. We'd hired her as our rabbi when she had been newly ordained in only the second graduating class to include women from the Conservative Rabbinical school.

Back to the present day though. I was remembered by a number of members, including the co-president of the congregation, who were the parents of some of my classmates back in the day. They were so thrilled and impressed that I was now a rabbinical school, they informed the rabbi of my presence and of who I was, and he publicly welcomed me from the pulpit. Everyone wanted to talk to me and ask me questions after services. I was literally a celebrity, a success story from their community, the produce of their program gone mysteriously right. Someone they'd raised, of whom they could be proud.

When I'd told my father how excited they'd all been about me, his response was "even though they kicked you out?" I reminded him that they'd only had to kick my sister out- my brother and I were eager to get out when we were old enough to attend a more serious post-Bar/Bat Mitzvah program in another part of town. But the truth is, I didn't feel any bitterness, any desire to throw anything in their faces, like I might have a year ago or even less. I was happy to be there, and happy that I could boost the morale of the congregation. It was just nice to be welcomed and appreciated.

The next day I received an email from the other co-president of the synagogue. He had not been at services that Shabbat, but had apparently heard that I had been. This man happens to be the father of my best friend from high school, with whom I am no longer so close, but without animosity. He'd heard that I was a rabbinical student and so he asked me if I'd like to give a "presentation" at services Saturday night before Selichot. This is one of the things about being a rabbinical student... You're expected to be able to speak meaningfully about stuff, regardless of whether you're about to graduate, or if you've just started a week ago. Me, I've completed (unsuccessfully, but they don't have to know that) one year so clearly I already know, well, everything, right?

Well, the truth is, while I certainly don't know everything, I do know more than the average Conservative Jew even imagines that they *don't* know. And that is a position in which it can sometimes be very difficult to maintain a perspective of humility. And humility is what repentance and atonement are all about. Incidentally, also recovery. So I decided to speak about that.

More to follow.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Life As Literature

2010-09-05T00:15:00.001-07:00

I'm here at my dad's house. I've not stayed over at my dad's while he was here in over 4 years. I am sleeping upstairs in the space that was mine when I lived here while I was finishing college and working.

I went into the bathroom up here which I'd not been in in all this time. I looked into the bathroom mirror, into which I'd often examined my face, puffy and splotched purple after purging, tears running down my cheeks, nose sore and stuffed, brushing my teeth and splashing cold water to erase the evidence of what I'd run up here for after dinner...

I thought about all of this and I thought to myself "What am I supposed to feel?" This all makes for some very poignant story telling, maybe some good (or more likely, very bad) poetry... The connections, the memories, the images as they float through my head... They are literary. Poetic. Narrative. Midrashic.

I see connections, I see symbolism in everything. It's why therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists love me. All that stuff that they usually have to point out to people about how relationships and experiences in our lives echo those of our past... I get that and usually point it out to them before they even have a chance to catch their breath as I tell my story and stories.

But, my question tonight, what I'm wondering is, do I have to FEEL all of those stories all of the time, does being able to see the painful past represented in the present mean that I have to go deep into that past and re-experience it all the time? The feelings are real, but are they there because I choose to put them there? When I see a narrative connection, do I decide that I'm supposed to react to the past trauma?

Am I just a very good actress, putting on a very convincing and moving performance for myself?

Perhaps I should write more. Have the subjects of my writing feel what I think I'd maybe be supposed to feel, were my life a novel or a movie to be taken apart and examined for repeated themes and symbolism. Cause, you know, it makes good literature. Doesn't always make such a good life.

As for me right now, I'm doing fine. I'm full of good feelings. I think I'll just stay in that for a while.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

The Paradox of Powerlessness

2010-08-30T20:53:00.000-07:00

I talk to a lot of people about 12-step. Not that I go around yelling that I'm in OA, but I admit, I have some trouble containing my excitement about it sometimes. I'm always seeing where someone I know could benefit from the principles or literature of xA and I just want so badly to share. Of course, as the day 17 morning card of the Pocket Sponsor app says, for someone who has never experienced the results of working the 12 steps, no explanation is sufficient.

In other words... they're not gonna get it.

There are a lot of things that people will get hung up on when it comes to 12-step. The God thing is a big one for lots of people, the disease model, the idea that you have to commit to never doing certain things again... but I think it all comes back to one underlying sticking point, which is the very first step.

"No. No, that I cannot agree with. I refuse, I absolutely refuse to admit powerlessness."

It's so ironic, this whole powerlessness thing, right when you would think you need power the most. You need power to quit. Admitting powerlessness to the untrained ear sounds like giving up. In fact, it is just the opposite, ultimately. But initially, yes, in a way it is giving up.

It is giving up on everything you've tried before. It is giving up on what you think you know about your relationship to your Substance. It's giving up on the idea that willpower alone is enough.

And it's giving up on that hold you think you have. That illusion that, other than this one little problem you have, you're basically pretty sane and put together and therefore you don't really have to change the way you think, or the way you live like the rest of these people. That insistance that you may have a problem, sure, but you're not really like these other people, you're not really an addict, you just have a little problem, you're really just here to listen and, you know, you'll take what speaks to you, but "there's no way they're gonna change me."

And yes, that is scary. Because we all want to believe that we've got it figured out... that we've got at least something figured out. Usually, for most people, the only thing that will get you to admit that you really need to change something fundamental about yourself and your thinking is when you've really hit a bottom.

Now, a bottom doesn't have to involve losing consciousness in a gutter. It doesn't have to be a hospitalization. It doesn't have to be losing your family or home, or a public humiliation. Your bottom is the moment you are brought to your knees, figuratively, or occasionally literally. It's the moment that you realize that what you're doing, how you're living, the way it's going, is simply not working. It's the moment when you are forced to admit that maybe you don't know everything. That this is more than you can handle. Sometimes, it is a very drastic situation like what I've described above... but really, it's just that place where you finally reach the limit of your tolerance.

Your bottom is a terrible place to be. It is scary and it is painful. But it is a blessing. Because when you hit bottom, you're forced to re-examine your assumptions. If you are an addict, and you don't hit bottom, you can go on spinning your wheels forever, thinking you can do what you can't, and you may never find your true strength, and take back your life.

Yes, this admission of powerlessness, this giving up, is in fact the end of powerlessness. It is the end of slavery to suffering. You see, the fact is that we are all powerless. Every single one of us, whether we're addicts or not. The Serenity Prayer applies to everyone. Being powerless doesn't mean having no choices. It means taking a breath and admitting that there are some things that you cannot change even if they are things that should be changed. It is letting go of the need to believe that you should be in control of those things you really can't control.

That's not giving up. That's not cowardice. That's just basic humility.

And once you admit powerlessness, once you let go of the things you cannot change, you find that you have the strength to change the things you can. And suddenly, you are no longer powerless. You've just got a really really big ally now.

I am powerless over my eating disorder.

Today, I am 8 months abstinent from my eating disorder.

Thank God for my powerlessness.

God Sent Me Failure. Thank God.

2010-08-30T09:56:00.000-07:00

In May, I failed.

I failed my Talmud class. I was already on academic probation from having withdrawn from one of my Bible classes and taking a fail in Biblical Hebrew grammar. None of these classes were hard. They were quite easy, in fact. I was often bored. (That's me getting defensive... I see it, I'm calling myself out on it, and this tells me that I have to write about intelligence and academics later.) I failed these classes because I often didn't go, and because I didn't do the homework.

No passive voice. They were my actions. This is what I did. This is why I failed my classes. Because I simply didn't do what I had to do in order to pass. Going to class wouldn't really have done me any good in the state I was in. Doing my homework and writing my papers probably would have, but at the time I really felt like I couldn't. I often couldn't get myself out of bed, and when I could, I felt like I couldn't move. When I did manage to sit down and do school work, I always felt good. Really good. If I had just pushed through and done my work on a schedule, it probably would have helped significantly with my depression and anxiety. But part of me, the larger part of me at the time, couldn't push past that initial hump to get myself started and moving, to build the momentum to keep myself going. There was some memory problem, just like with abstinence. When you lose your abstinence, it doesn't matter that while you were abstinent you felt so much better... you forget how to be willing. You wallow in it. That's why we need Program and Program people to hold us accountable, to relate to, to demonstrate to us what is possible.

When I realized that that was it, I'd failed, I wasn't going to be able to pull it out like I'd always managed to do in the past, I was devastated to the point of suicidal thoughts. I was pessimistic about my prospects for recovery, seeing as how nothing ever really seemed to get significantly better for me. I was afraid that, since I couldn't hack it as a rabbinical student this year and I saw no reason to believe that I would ever really get better, that meant that I'd never be able to hack it. I was seriously doubting whether or not my life could have value or meaning if I was unable to finish the semester successfully and continue in the program next year.

Through all of this my teachers and Rabbis and deans and the administration were all very kind and helpful and supportive... but it wasn't enough. I just couldn't get out from under the depression, which seriously strained my closest friendships, causing some of them to fall apart, which made things worse. I had begun OA which, obviously in the grand scheme of things was helpful, but in the short term made things worse, as I began to strip away unhealthy coping mechanisms on which I'd been relying. As a result, I'd had even more difficulty coping.

During that hellish week during which my therapist basically told me I was not allowed to be alone, I went to speak to one of my teachers who shared with me an experience that he'd had in his early days of 12-step work. I won't share specifics right now, but the end result of that conversation, though it took a little while to sink in, was that I saw in him the possibility of recovery from even the darkest places. What got through to me about what he told me was the similarity between what I was experiencing and what he described having experienced, and the fact that he is now doing, essentially, what I want to do with my life, and doing it happily and successfully.

What this teacher helped me to figure out during this time was that failing this semester may be the best thing that has ever happened to me. Had I pulled through, I would have just kept going. I would have uprooted again, gone back to Israel, changed therapists for the 5th time in as many years, and possibly would have ended up killing myself one way or another.

So what I've come to believe is this, and you can laugh at me if you want, but this is how I have to understand the events of the month of May: God has been gracious enough to stop me in my tracks and prevent me from moving forward until I can learn to be kind to myself and stop taking on the role of my abusers. For the first time in my life I've stopped completely and made my treatment and recovery the absolute first priority of my life.

I'd never realized just how much I hated myself. I always knew that I didn't like myself very much, but really, I never realized just how much shit I was piling on myself, how much I was beating myself up, how much pain I was putting myself through. That's why I have such problems with clinginess... I have never believed that I had any worth except when someone else is telling me that I do. If that constant reassurance that someone loves me and will always be there for me is removed, I have to sit with myself. And when you're sitting 24 hours a day 7 days a week with someone who hates you, of course you're going to feel like nobody loves you, no matter how many friends you have. Having had a reprieve from that torture, it's amazing to me that I lived like that for so long, that I managed to survive it. I guess you don't really fully realize how much pain you're in until it's lifted, if you've lived with that pain for as long as you can remember. I just pray that God will continue to help me keep myself out of that place.

For the first time in my life, I'm truly optimistic. For the first time I am happy, without the terror of the inevitable descent back into the dark. And for the first time, I am able to have a bad day, and still do the things I need to do without crashing, driving myself back into a major depressive episode. I know that I can't get comfortable here... I can't get complacent. This is not a cure, it is a daily reprieve. It is not a gift, it is a grant. A gift is freely given. A grant is contingent on your continuing the work. My recovery is contingent on my continuing to work the steps, going to meetings, praying and facing myself and God with rigorous honesty. And I know that I can. I can do this for myself.

Because I am worth it.

Suffering, and a Loving God

2010-08-26T21:08:00.000-07:00

Again, my inspiration comes from Mr. Sponsorpants. I was reading through back entries under the category "Came To Believe." A little over two years ago, he wrote about his neighbor Mary, a bubbly, 80-something-year-old Hungarian woman with a number tattooed on her forearm.

The questions of evil and suffering are, for obvious reasons, ones with which the Jewish people have struggled for millennia. The psychological stages of and reactions to trauma can be observed in the history and literature of our people... self-blame, self-pity, self-righteousness, remorse, depression, anger, hopelessness, aggression, paranoia...and a lot of us, a LOT of us, are terrified of talking about God. I am a rabbinical student in a liberal Jewish institution. I am unusual among my cohort in that I have been trying to talk about God almost my whole life. When I tried to bring up theology with my classmates this past year, I found that nearly everyone was extremely reluctant to engage in discourse. Some admitted to not believing in God at all.

If you engage with the idea of God, then you have to address the question of human suffering... of Jewish suffering. For intelligent, modern-minded, liberal Jews, that can be a terrifying prospect. For aspiring clergy, it is perhaps even more difficult. We will one day be out there in the world, in a pulpit, or in a classroom, or in a hospital, and we will face people looking to us for answers, for the "inside scoop" as it were... and they will be people with lives, with history, with experience, with pain and suffering, and/or they will be skeptical, hostile, unwilling to believe anything but a perfect answer, and, oh God, what if we say the wrong thing and because of us they come to see Judaism as irrelevant superstitious mumbo-jumbo? It is so much easier, I suppose, to sidestep the issue of God, and to focus instead on psychology, on the workings of Jewish law, on the sociological elements of religion and its healing powers, and to carefully avoid questions of The Divine, to treat it as irrelevant.

Since I found Program, I have finally found an arena where I am truly encouraged to find a working concept of Higher Power to turn to through my own struggles and suffering which, though nothing to compare to Mary's experience, is nevertheless very real and, I would venture to say, somewhat deeper than that of, let's say, the average American in my socio-economic range, broadly speaking.

I have recently spoken to two other friends, both classmates from a Yeshiva I attended in Israel, one of them currently also a Rabbinical student in another school, about how one can understand a loving God. Both of these friends are also people who have experienced, and continue to experience not insignificant suffering in their lives. What I have come up with at this point, after years (albeit not that many put in perspective... I'm still rather young) of struggling with anger and questions for a God Who never seemed to respond, defining and redefining my idea of the divine to fit the reality I knew, from the impersonal to the intimate, from the benevolent to the wrathful to the indifferent... after going through all of that and more and back again, this is my understanding:

The world cannot be perfect. It cannot be free of suffering. If it were, nothing would move, and we could not exist as the beautiful complicated storytelling beings that we are, that God loves. God doesn't desire our suffering, God desires our lives, our presence, our existence. That is why God created us... out of Love of What We Are, what God made us... imperfect, and driven by our imperfection.

The role of God in our lives is not to eliminate the source of our suffering. That simply wouldn't work. Why? Because then The World wouldn't be The World. What God can and does do for us, is to hold us through our suffering, to comfort us like a parent hugging the child who has just received a vaccine and cannot understand why she was just stuck with a needle. God can inspire us to bravery in the face of suffering. God can inspire us to strive never to cause suffering, our own or anyone else's. God can show us the way to love one another for the Image Of God that each of us is, thereby making the world a better and less painful place.

These words may sound trite in the face of a camp survivor's experience. Put me in a concentration camp and see if I hold on to my faith and inspiration, you might be saying. But, I have spoken to others of my experience... of growing up with an angry and abusive father and an alcoholic mother, of the things I endured as a child and that still haunt me today, of deep lifelong depression, bulimia, an inability to form healthy relationships... and they have marveled at my survival, even in my worst states of depression.

And now, having found my loving and benevolent Higher Power, having a daily reprieve from my addictive illness, I find that I have found reprieve and relief from the tortures of depression and self-loathing that have plagued me literally for as long as I can remember... that is since around the age of four. It is my sincere wish that I may be able to bring this idea to my Rabbinate, and to my people, to my classmates and colleagues, congregants, co-religionists, and not to have it viewed as uncritical, Pollyanna-ish, unintelligent, or worst of all, un-Jewish.

For a good portion of my life, the meat of my relationship with God was an angry confused struggle. And at the time, that was what it needed to be. But it is not a simpleton's act to realize which struggles are valuable, and which are just habit.

Managing a Diseased Mind

2010-08-25T09:16:00.000-07:00

I have to take a moment to say how in awe I am of Mr. Sponsorpants. He's been sober in AA for a long time and he's had the time and experience to really internalize the program, but... DAMN he's good! I'm reading along and watch as he catches his character defects as they come out in his writing, and he calls himself on them. It is amazing to see, and so inspirational. It gives me hope for myself.

Calling myself on my own bullshit is on my mind today. It can be confusing sometimes, observing your own thoughts, actions, reactions, and trying to examine them with honesty, searching for your own dishonesty.

*movie break*

Dr. Rosen: You can't reason your way out of this!
Nash: Why not? Why can't I?
Dr. Rosen: Because your mind is where the problem is in the first place!

*/movie break*

A couple of months ago I did something ill-advised, and smoked marijuana. It was the first time. I'd smoked hash a few times... well, three times to be precise... while in Israel (that's over two years... that is the entire lifetime extent of my illicit drug use), and had been largely unimpressed. I was at the home of the friend who had given me my first hash in the Holy Land, and I figured, well, what could it hurt.

Famous last words, right?

It took a few minutes, and suddenly I noticed that the world seemed to be spinning, like when you're dizzy... but something was different... it wasn't my vision that was spinning, it was time. It seemed to be moving backwards in chunks like... well, like reading music with lyrics in Hebrew: the music is read left to right like English, but Hebrew is right to left, so the Hebrew is written under the music staff, syllable by syllable, backwards.

I was suddenly terrified.

Ok I thought, it's ok... you're scared and that's ok. It's ok to be scared, think about what you know about marijuana... they talk about paranoia. Therefore, this is not anything too out of the ordinary. You're ok, but you're scared. What do you do? Think about Program... what does Program say? Ask for help. It's ok to ask for help. How long has it been? Are your friends still really there? Of course they are, you haven't gone anywhere, you can still see them and hear them, you're just stuck inside your own head because you're under the influence of a psychotropic substance which is causing fear and time to wash over you in waves and... have you asked for help yet? I can't remember... dammit, that's a problem... ok, so now you know that you're getting distracted from what your actions are or have been, so... oh no, does that mean that I'm not in control of my actions? No, no I'm in control... but if I can't remember what I've done or haven't done, that means that I might have done anything a minute ago and not rememb... have I asked for help yet? Ok, concentrate, G. Concentrate. Open your mouth and ask for help. Hold onto this moment, move only forwards and say the words...

"Becky? (names changed) Becky?" I hear her respond through the fog. "I'm not really doing so well. I'm not ok."

I had no idea how long it took me to get those words out because I was struggling with my own mind, observing my compromised mind *with* my compromised mind.

How Program is that?

And you know what? I used Program to get me through that, because I recognized that, just as I could trust Program when I couldn't trust myself when it came to food, I could trust Program to keep me grounded when my mind was compromised. As long as I stayed focused on Program and taking the next right action, I wouldn't be in danger of doing anything too stupid, or at least too dangerous, and I could accept whatever embarrassment I might incur while trying to get myself back. I repeated the Serenity Prayer, I called Program people (without leaving messages, cause God that would be TOO embarrassing... except... for that one message I did leave for that one person which *was* embarrassing... but that's part of a whole other big story with that person...) until I got ahold of someone who said the Serenity Prayer with me, kept me company, talked with me about God, reassured me that I was ok, that I was going to be ok, that God still loved me, and that I was doing the right things.

I'm never smoking pot again.

Anyway, I got away from the main point: calling myself on my own bullshit.

I suffer from major depression which is at times severe and debilitating. I display symptoms of PTSD. I am bulimic. These are things that had complete control of my life until about 3 months ago. When I could not get out of bed, I really COULD NOT get out of bed. During a depressive episode, I was ill. I was in pain. I couldn't function. I always had tears in my eyes. And I felt horribly guilty and weak, like a goddamn whiny little bitch who was making excuses for her laziness. I could not accept that I was powerless over my disease, that I couldn't push through, white-knuckling it till the end of the school year, and make it successfully. By the end, I was suicidal. That was my bottom.

That bottom was the point where everything got turned around... an angel came to me in the form of a teacher of mine who is a recovering alcoholic who shared his story with me. I realized that God had been speaking to me and I'd not known how to listen until then. God had brought me to this bottom in order to teach me that I needed to stop. Stop, and accept, and take care of myself. Let myself be ill, let myself acknowledge the pain I was in, and let myself rest and heal. To not put myself in a situation where I was going to feel guilty for being unable to do certain things. Recognize that, for right now, it's ok to be incapable, to ask for help, to make no apologies or excuses for my condition, to treat it like any other illness or injury. To take time off.

I moved in with Mom. I told my parents that I was not going to have a regular job this summer, that I'd take babysitting and animal-sitting gigs as they came and do my best not to be entirely a freeloader, but that I needed to take the summer to chill, to focus on treatment and recovery, and to take the coming year to do my learning in a low-pressure non-credit, non-grade-based environment, to build myself up again gently.

They saw I was serious.

Now the summer is ending. I've not had a major depressive episode since I left school. I've had bad days, the longest stretch being 4 days of intense sadness and resentment in a row... but I have stuck with my Program, and have been blessed with a daily reprieve from my eating disorder, and from depression. Now I am stronger. Now I am capable. Now I can take on responsibility.

And... I keep screwing it up.

Ok, that's unnecessarily harsh. I don't have to say I'm screwing it up... I don't always do it right. And it is something I need to face up to. I make excuses. I justify laziness, inaction and procrastination. I tell myself that it is ok to forgive myself for what I don't do perfectly.

That is true... but I have to always be honest about my effort.

*radio break*

Garrison Keillor: There's only so much you can do- but you do have to do that much.

*/radio break*

I am still sick. I always will be, I suspect. That is something I have to accept. I have a chronic TERMINAL illness... 2 of them, in fact. Bulimia and depression are both incurable, chronic conditions*, and they are both deadly. But both are manageable with treatment. I am in treatment. I am responding well to treatment. I am managing. And the best way for me to relapse into both of these spiraling death traps is to use them as excuses for not living my life, now that I'm in remission, so to speak.

So if my mind is where the problems lie, how can I hold myself accountable? How can I observe my diseased mind with my diseased mind and be honest with myself when the whole problem is in the place where honesty and dishonesty reside?

Answer:

Ask for help. Pray. Reach out. Make calls. Go to meetings. Tweet. Write. Remember that isolation is a breeding ground for this illness precisely because being shut into my own diseased mind allows the disease to grow and take over. I need to partner with God in holding myself accountable, in letting the clean air into my infected mind, scrubbing regularly with disinfectant soap, maintaining my mental diet and exercise routines, and remembering that, while the only person that can be held responsible for my treatment is myself, I cannot rely on myself and get along without the treatment.

With practice, maybe one day I'll have it down as well as Mr. Sponsorpants.

*I am not suggesting that no one ever fully recovers from or is cured of either bulimia or depression. For my own recovery process, however, I find that it is important to accept the possibility of lifelong illness as the given reality. It is how I, personally, am able to manage it One Day At A Time with as much grace, dignity, acceptance, and serenity as possible.

Intense Day, Part IV

2010-08-24T16:39:00.000-07:00

After the shopping excursion... well, between shopping excursions there was "lunch." Lunch was schav. Schav is cold sorrel soup. We ate it with pickles, and a dollop of yogurt. That was it. It wasn't enough. I knew it wasn't enough. But I didn't say anything. I don't know why. I think I was feeling a little insecure about breakfast, and more worried about dinner. I was preemptively and passively restricting. And... oh, it's just hard around my dad. Just like everything else. Around Dad, you just want to show that you can. Can... anything. Stay awake. Master hunger. Hold your liquor. Handle spicy food. Walk faster. Make do. Whatever it is. You don't want to show weakness. If this is what lunch is, you don't want to say "I need something more."

Later on, we came back from the second round of shopping, the meat run to the kosher market, and it was time to start cooking dinner.

If Dad's in the kitchen, you stay out. That's what we all figured out when we were young. The problem was, if Dad wanted you in the kitchen to help, you could not refuse. It was like being summoned to the inquisition chamber. No way out.

My sister came to visit me the second year I was living in Jerusalem, the third year I was not speaking to my father. She told me that she's been at my father's for Passover, and that he started to throw a tantrum and started yelling while they were cooking for the seder. My sister didn't say anything. She took off her apron, walked out of the kitchen, kissed our stepmother, and walked out of the house. My father chased after her as she walked toward the train to go home. He yelled at her to come back. He caught up with her and she turned to him. Calmly, she said "I will come back if you calm down and stop yelling. Not before." He started yelling at her and she turned and continued walking. He got the message and caught up with her again. he said "I'm sorry I yelled. I would like for you to come back please." She said ok and came back. When she told me this, I thought the Messiah had arrived.

So it was time to make dinner. I've learned how to maneuver the kitchen, Dad-style. Stay out of the way until instructed to do something, do that something efficiently and use common sense, ask before taking initiative, keep your eyes and ears open, always be ready to jump or duck. The Ward came into the kitchen and Dad invited her to help out. He asked her to drain off the cutting board on which he'd just cut some tofu. She took the board to the sink, poured off the water and started rinsing it. "Nonono, I said drain it, not rinse it! I need it dry, not wet!" She was startled and didn't know what to do. I told her it's ok, just bring the board back to the table. She did and said "Ok, I'm staying OUT of this kitchen!" She went to find my stepmother.

I can't describe what it was like to see that happen.

This morning I asked The Ward how she gets along with my dad. She said he's ok, but she feels like he doesn't like her. I asked if he loses his temper. She nodded emphatically. I told her that it's not personal. He really does like her, he has told me so. But, I told her, he's used to people who are a certain way, act a certain way, talk a certain way, and doesn't always react well when people are not what he expects. I told her that he used to be even worse with us growing up, that he used to be a very angry person and that he is a lot better than he used to be. I did't way anything about the violence. I didn't say that he beat my mother. I didn't tell her that I didn't speak to him for three years. I assured her that he likes her and wants what's best for her.

Later, dad drove me back to my mother's apartment. We started talking somehow about the old neighborhood, our old friends, old babysitters... I mentioned one old woman who my parents had taken in to live in our basement when she'd fallen on some sort of hard times, it was never really explained to me. She sometimes babysat us, and she was just as abusive and irrational as dad, if not more so. I asked why he'd left us with her and he suddenly got very agitated. "Oh, no! That was not me! I didn't want her in the house!" I immediately regretted bringing it up. Another thing he could pin on my mother. Another gap in my past revealed, another piece of the puzzle to make me question my memory, wonder about what my mother's role was in everything.

That's enough. I'm grateful that I can see as much as I can now, that I can know at least that it was not my fault, that I'm stronger than I used to be, that I can hold myself together and look at these things, these behaviors, and measure my response.

Time Keeps On Slipping

2010-08-23T23:02:00.000-07:00

I should be asleep. I need to get to sleep earlier. I need to wake up earlier. I need to say my prayers and have breakfast earlier. I need to get back into the rhythm of a normal person's schedule and stop being on a sick or lazy person's schedule... that is no schedule.

I'm greedy about time. I want time to myself... time to just goof off, to zone out in front of the TV, to do anything or nothing, to lie half-asleep on the couch, to think about doing all of the things I want to do but not actually do them. When I'm presented with a task or a time-bound obligation, resentment flairs. This is MY TIME to waste. I don't want to use it to clean or cook or pray, even though I fing doing those things enjoyable... I don't even want to use the time for things that I *want* to do. I don't want to use it sleeping at night. Sleep is a waste of time I could be wasting by doing *nothing* and I'll be damned if I'll let any important or enjoyable task or activity steal my time that I could otherwise spend...

looking in the refrigerator.

*sigh*

I still haven't finished writing about that day, and there is still more to write. And now I have... oy, such an intense weekend to write about...

Maybe I don't need to write it out. Maybe it's enough that I was able to share it with one person. I'm not a writer, I'm not a reporter, I'm not duty-bound to write any of this stuff out.

But...
but...

You know, I wanted to be a writer when I was a kid. There were 3 things I seriously wanted to be: first I wanted to be a singer. From as early on as I can remember, singing has always made me happier than anything else in the world. Somewhere along the way though, when I was very young, I got the idea into my head that it would be a sinful waste of my intelligence to pursue a career in performance. Singing I could always do, I didn't need to do it for a living. Then I wanted to be a writer. Writing was the only way I could express anything because only the paper would stick around to listen to me. When I wrote things, people read them. When they were reading, they were listening. And sometimes, when they read what I wrote, they would look at me and say "Now I understand, G. Now I understand." That was all I ever wanted... to say what I needed to say, and to have someone listen. And for some reason, when I wrote things, people wanted to read them. They told me I was good at it. I could take those connections that flew around my head and make them come out on the paper in pictures of words, creating a whole new meaning, showing reflections and echoes between places and times that others didn't seem to find so easily until they read what I saw... if I was writing, I was never really alone.

Then, the Rabbi thing. Which, you know, has the potential to kind of combine the other two along with the more important elements of clergy, like... oh, you know, counseling, teaching, officiating, that sort of stuff.

Anyway, time. Time is now. Now is time for bed.

I have been through hellish triggers recently.

I am 237 days abstinent.

I had some hairy moments with the alcohol, but I'm holding in there as well... I'll talk more about that later.

Also a friend has been keeping me honest about my daily prayer obligations. I'm not doing a daycount there, but it's been... well, not quite a week, but longer than I've gone for a long time hitting all the day's services. I'm extremely grateful to him. :)

And I can go to bed knowing that I am getting well.

Intense Day, Part III

2010-08-18T11:46:00.000-07:00

Eventually, Dad came down and he, The Ward and I got into the car to go to the Big Grocery Store. Dad was going to supply all of the food for the time that DF and I would be staying together in the house... I could have basically whatever I wanted.

Now this is where I start to wonder if I'm just making up stuff to be triggered by. Sometimes it seems that I have the mind of a storyteller, or a poet. There is something about the way that I think that makes and exaggerates connections between people, places, and situations, makes symbols out of everything. It makes for good scriptural analysis. It also makes for a lot of neurosis.

Here I am, with Daddy in the grocery store. Daddy's buying the food, but this time, when I say "Daddy can I have this?" the answer is almost guaranteed to be "yes."

Here I am, surrounded by food, and I can have whatever food I want. Enough for about 2 weeks.

Here I am, with an opportunity to stock up for free.

Hello.

My name is G.

I am a recovering bulimic and compulsive eater who has been thrown into the cage with the tiger.

I am a survivor of child abuse who has been thrown in with that tiger too.

I am a poor student with a well-off father who has been struggling for independence through abuse, depression, bulimia, PTSD, co-dependency... for three-and-a-half years, I made it an absolute boundary that I ask nothing of my father financially. That I take no support from him. That I accept no loans, nothing that would make me dependent upon him, either financially or emotionally. My mother, who is not nearly as well-off as my father is, has shouldered the burden of making up the difference where I couldn't make ends meet, and for this I feel supremely guilty. He's the one with the money. He's the one who mistreated us. He's the one who should pay, in so many ways. Not her.

But... my father...

well, ok, I don't know if it's fair to talk about "my father" in this context, because "my father" is not my father. "My father" is the mental construction of my father that exists in my mind, that was built by the years of manipulation and abuse, that is not made-up yet is not factual either. He/It is all of the pain and associations that come up and out of the memory of my childhood, adolescent, teenage, and adult selves, as I perceived him at all of those times, and how those perceptions got mashed together to form a complex, contradictory, and confusing whole when I look at him now.

And I have no way of knowing when it is fact and when it is just fear.

The father I fear is manipulative. The father I fear uses any opportunity to latch into me, emotionally, financially, any way possible. The father I fear would take advantage of any weakness on my part to get control of me again, to get me back to the point where I do not know how to say no to him, to where I will accept anything he throws at me, figuratively or literally, to where he can pretend that he's the good dad, because look, he's still got his kids doing things with him, and doing what he says, and he gets away with everything he did.

This all comes up because of a simple grocery shopping trip. This is how my mind works. This is insanity.

It helped that we were shopping not just for me but for The Ward, and therefore I had motivation outside of myself to keep the eye on nutrition. Otherwise, I don't know how I could have been present at all for the process.

This is where I have to stop right now.

I'm having a good day. DF and I are going to a ballgame later. I've got the house to myself. The demons are not in the house, they are in my head. I can enjoy having a house for now.

God, Suffering, and Redemption

2010-08-18T07:49:00.000-07:00

I started looking for God when I was 7, after my family was in a car accident. I don't want to tell the whole dramatic story blow-by-blow since that is not the purpose of this post... basically we were driving on a winding mountain road and Dad missed a turn. We fell off the road and tumbled down the side of the mountain about 50 feet where we landed almost-but-not-quite-upside-down against a tree. Miraculously (and I DO MEAN miraculously... the rangers who showed up eventually to clean up the mess had taken their time in getting there because they assumed we were dead: "No one EVER survives that fall!" they said...), aside from very minor scratches and bruises, no one was injured. It was my mom and dad, myself, my 9-year-old sister and my 4-year-old brother. All just fine.

While we were down there on the side of the mountain waiting for help to arrive, Mom said that we should say Shema. It made me uncomfortable and I refused to do it because I wasn't sure why we would. When we got home, we were to bentch gomel, that is, to have an Aliyah and say a prayer of thanksgiving for our narrow escape. Again, I didn't get it, and didn't want to be a part of it- but that was when I was sort of introduced to the idea of God having something to do with bad things happening or not happening to people. But a little later, I think still around the age of 7, when I asked my mother "what is God?" she responded "God is an idea." So I started trying to figure out this idea. That was what got me into theology.

In my early teens, something became newly apparent to me: my father was physically abusing us. He was perpetrating child abuse, and we were child abuse victims. It wasn't new behavior (though it became more violent as we got older) but the realization that getting hit wasn't normal and acceptable as I'd always sort of assumed it was, was (forgive the pun) quite a blow. I'd always had a sense of the injustice of Dad's arbitrary tantrums and punishments, the fact that there was no way for me to defend myself against either his accusations or his hands, but I'd always also assumed that there was nothing to be done about it, that I must somehow be wrong when I thought I didn't deserve to be hit, maybe even crazy, that there was something wrong with me because I was apparently so very bad even when I was trying so hard to be good, as good as I could possibly be, as good as anyone could be... Up until that point, I had thought of God as The One Who Understood, the invisible Presence that knew that I was trying so hard, the One Who Listened when I cried, and to Whom I could voice (or rather think) my confusion, and silently pray to understand what I was doing wrong, to make me better so Dad wouldn't yell and hit me and my sister so much.

When I realized that it wasn't ok, that my behavior hadn't justified the method of punishment for all of those years, when I was finally told that, no, I wasn't that bad, that he was wrong, that my initial sense of injustice had been correct, it threw me for a loop, theologically. What could this possibly mean? Who was the God Who I'd thought I'd known? To Whom had I been silently appealing for understanding and guidance? Who was this God Who had created this world in which I could be so mislead for so long, so twisted from so early an age as to believe that I deserved everything bad that was ever thrown my way? I began to think of God as the abusive father figure Whom I could not escape, against Whom there could be no appeal, no reasoning. Who could bring a case against God for injustice? God is the ultimate arbiter of justice, after all. At the age of 14 or so, I became Job... I didn't stop believing in God, I didn't curse God, I was just baffled and upset and afraid... if this is God, then what was right? What was justice? How did this work?

After a year of this was when I met a professor of Theology at the school where I am now studying to be a rabbi. This rabbi took me under his wing and changed my approach to theology. I found a conception of God that was philosophical and abstract in nature. I no longer had to ask why God allowed things to happen because that no longer had to be the kind of God I believed in. It was a huge comfort and relief to see that there had been other Jews who had had the sorts of troubles with God that I'd had, and had been able to reconcile their world to a concept of God that could go with it, and not make them crazy... even if they were called crazy, or heretical, or atheists. I understood why Spinoza and Maimonides and others could deal with such an impersonal and abstract God. It allowed me to look and the world and at my Jewish practice as rational and driven by this-worldly purpose. It allowed me to distance myself from a God that allowed pain and suffering while not resorting to the cop-out of angry atheism.

I stayed in this theological mindset for about a decade. It started to shift when I began to study in Yeshiva. I'd wanted to go to rabbinical school since I met this rabbi, my theological mentor, but 10 years later, I felt that I needed more Jewish education and a better level of Jewish practice than I had before diving in. I made a decision to set aside the philosophy and questioning in order to absorb as much practical Jewish knowledge and practice as possible. I was coming to Yeshiva to learn and to do, not to ask... I'd been asking my whole life. This part was about training.

As I learned and practiced, though, it became more than just practical training. Diving into classical texts, praying three times every day, finding myself surrounded by other Jews, by the holy sites of Jerusalem, by the piety and humility of my teachers and especially my Rosh Yeshiva, I began to talk to God again. I began to ask God questions again. I began, for the first time, to ask God WHY? I began to scream and shout and be angry with God. I began to cry to God, to pray to God, to beg God for some understanding, some way of making Midrash of all of my experience to make some sort of sense, to give me some idea of how the pain I'd been subjected to, the abuse, the bullying, the loneliness, the depression, the bulimia, could or should be used to benefit me or others. Sometimes I felt like I was getting answers. More often, I felt like I was being laughed at, mocked.

This year, something huge happened. In talking with a friend over dinner, the subject of eating disorders came up. This friend mentioned a 12-step fellowship for people with eating disorders. I was reluctant at first, but recognizing an opportunity of an outlet to share and vent in an appropriate context, I came back to this friend and asked to be taken to one of the meetings they went to. I was immediately and warmly welcomed and accepted. I was told that, in this fellowship, love was unconditional... because God's love was unconditional. I was suddenly surrounded by people... people who knew suffering and loneliness, many who had very similar experiences to my own... who could talk seriously and with intelligence, sincerity, and sophistication (and also humor) about a Higher Power Who Loves Us, listens to us, talks to us, comforts us, and restores us to sanity. Some were religious. Many were not. Many were Jewish, many were not. We met mostly in churches. Sometimes individuals mentioned specific names for their Higher Power, including God, Jesus, HaShem, Force, Spirit, The Group, HP... but in essence we all meant the same thing: a Power Higher than our individual selves, that is personal, benevolent, and loving. Through my participation in this group, I have found a sort of spiritual training that I have never encountered before. I have learned a new way of thinking about God in my life, and of listening for God's voice and guidance. I have found new and deeper meaning in everything I thought I knew about Judaism... I've found a way to look for and find the primary principle of love behind every law and practice that I follow, every text that I encounter.

I have found this for one reason: because I was taken in by a community that had a interest in teaching me how to look. And now, my primary purpose in life is to demonstrate the possibility of a joyful and loving relationship with God to everyone I encounter, and more specifically, to bring it back into Judaism where I feel it is lacking. I needed to find this God when I was young, but I didn't know how to look. If I can teach one person how to find God when they need it, then I've redeemed my entire story.

Intense Day, Part II

2010-08-16T20:02:00.000-07:00

After breakfast, dad laid out the plan for the day, two grocery shopping trips with a break between them for lunch, "goofing off" and going to a playground. He had some things to take care of before we were to head out, so he went upstairs leaving me in the dining room with my stepmother. In the course of conversation, she mentioned that people had mentioned to her that it looked like I'd lost weight.

"That may be true," I said. "I don't weigh myself, so I really don't know, I try not to think about it."

"Yeah, I know. I know that's an issue for you," she said. "I mean, I see you all the time so I, you know, didn't even really notice until other people pointed it out. I hardly ever weigh myself either. It drives me crazy."

I lived with my father and stepmother for a little over a year between 2003 and 2005. I lived on the third floor of their house where the girl who is living with them is now. It is practically its own apartment with a bedroom, sitting room, bathroom, and even a small kitchen. It was an ideal environment for my disease. I was living with my father of whom I was still terrified, who still had complete access to my person and my space, and yet I had enough privacy to purge with absolute impunity.

Sitting there, in the dining room of the house where I lived with my disease at its height, my stepmother talking about weight loss... perhaps I should have been able to keep it to myself in that moment, but it felt like I had to tell her. It wasn't to make her feel bad, it wasn't to be accusatory, but it felt like the right time to tell her, something that I wanted her to know.

"You know... I'm... I'm not sure if you know this. When I was living here, I was weighing myself obsessively."

"You said... yeah, you told me about the bulimia, yeah."

"I mean... I was weighing myself something like 15 times a day."

"Oh, really?"

"And... I was purging every day. More than once a day."

"Oh..."

Then...

I need a better phrase than "The girl who is living with my father and stepmother." She's got a name, and she's a great kid, and I don't want to talk about her like she's just some random person. I toyed with referring to her as "my father's ward" even though it's not technically accurate, since there's no custody involved. Still, it's either DF or The Ward. I think either will do.

She came down the stairs, and the conversation ended.

I spent yesterday with my father because he and my stepmother are going on vacation. While they're away, I'm going to be staying at my father's house and supervising the girl who's living with them, monitoring her food, enforcing curfew, making sure she gets to bed at night and gets up in the morning, etc.

This is where I have to stop tonight. And we've only just gotten past breakfast.

I am grateful for my abstinence. I am grateful for my Recovery friends. I'm grateful for my baby cousin. I'm grateful for my sponsor.

Tomorrow, thank God, I have a meeting to go to.

Security

2010-08-16T12:53:00.000-07:00

The baby is asleep (the cousin I'm babysitting). I'm so glad I've gotten to hang out with him every Monday for the past 6 weeks. He's such a happy little guy, and there's no better feeling than having a baby fall asleep in your arms. When I'm with him, I feel like I comprehend the word Serenity. So often when I need to feel secure, I imagine myself enveloped in God's (metaphorical) arms like a child, completely safe, completely loved. Being those arms to another, feeling completely depended upon, giving that care and love is somehow very comforting. Perhaps it is that, knowing how I feel toward him, knowing that I love him and would do anything to protect him, knowing that there is no chance I would ever allow him to fall from my arms, I feel more secure in feeling that, if I feel this way toward a child who isn't even mine, how much more so is it reasonable that my Higher Power, my Creator, fells this way toward me?

When I have my cousin in my arms, there is nowhere else I'd rather be. That is the time I can feel truly and fully present in the moment.

Babies should be listed among the Tools Of Recovery.

Intense Day, Part I

2010-08-15T20:52:00.000-07:00

I got to my dad's a little after 11 in the morning. I had a lot of trouble getting to sleep last night, so I slept rather late. Would have been better to have gotten there earlier, since he was making breakfast. I've been eating too many late breakfasts, it's not really the best way to stay abstinent. Still, 11 is before noon, it's not horrible.

Walk in, on the table is a plate with three cheeses... real cheese from the farmers market. Beautiful, smelly, crusty, moldy, buggy, delicious looking cheeses.

"I got some real nice cheeses," he says.

"I see that," I say.

"Do you eat these kinds of cheeses," he asks, referring to the level of kashrut I observe these days. "They were all manufactured in the US..."

"...In terms of kashrut, yes, I eat these kinds of cheeses," I say. "But... cheese is dangerous."

"You mean in that it's fattening?"

"I mean in that it's addictive."

I did take a small piece of each cheese to have with my breakfast... pancakes, dad-style. Small pancakes made with yogurt. I took four and started nibbling on the cheeses. I watched my dad cut off chunks of each wedge and relish them as his wife scolded him for eating fatty food.

My father is a fat man. He is not morbidly obese or anything, he's not a fleshy giant with floppy arms, he's not even particularly out of shape. He does lots of walking and bike riding, not as a workout but as recreation. But he is fat. He eats too much, especially fatty foods, and he's not particularly healthy most of the time. He has joint issues and high blood pressure and has recently developed diabetes. He goes on diets and loses some of the weight he carries around in that big belly of his, but he always gains it back.

My father is currently housing a girl, a 20-year-old kid with developmental disabilities, whom my stepmother has known since she was very young through the Big Sister program. This girl, who was in foster care when my stepmother met her, recently lost her adoptive mother to a brain tumor. She had been living in another state down south, and now she's come back up here, where she has some family, but is living with my dad and his wife. They have taken her in because they can provide for her much better than her family can, and because she can learn more about... well, a lot of things, living with my dad and stepmom than she can with any of her family.

When she came back up here, she was malnourished. She doesn't know anything about how to eat, she doesn't know anything but instant processed food, she doesn't know what real food tastes like or looks like or how to prepare healthy meals for herself. My father, among other things, is teaching her how to eat real food.

my father.

My father...

my father raised us very well in lots of ways. We grew up well educated, well cultured, well mannered, well spoken, with an appreciation for good art, good music, good theater, science, history, literature

and food.

My father was a very angry man. My father flew into unpredictable rages. My father...

my father...

My father is raising a new daughter. She is not actually his daughter so with her he has boundaries. Also he has mellowed with age, with divorce, with remarriage, with having his daughter stop speaking to him for 3 years. My father no longer hits. My father rarely yells anymore.

My father will not burst into this girl's room screaming incomprehensibly about some offense real or imagined, perpetrated by her.

My father will not grab this girl by the neck and beat her about the head under the streetlight in front of the house for not responding when called.

My father will not call this girl a pig for eating too much, nor will he hit her for not finishing the food on her plate.

My father will correct this girl's grammar and speech, criticize her kindly, slowly wean her off the junk food she is accustomed to, teach her what he can.

I need to stop now. I'll write more about today later... maybe tomorrow. Right now, it's too much.

Right now, I accept that I am powerless over people, places, and situations. I am powerless over the past. I am powerless over triggers. What I can do... is take care of myself, be nice to myself, be gentle with myself, and be proud of myself for getting through this day with my abstinence and sanity intact.

More will be revealed.

Insecurity

2010-08-14T22:49:00.000-07:00

I had a babysitting gig tonight. The parents got home earlier than anticipated. The mother says with a smile "So now you have the rest of the night to do... whatever young people do in this town." It was around 9:45.

I laughed and said "What is it that young people do? I certainly have no idea!"

Walking home with my babysitting earnings in my pocket (nothing else since I got to their apartment before Shabbat was over) I passed a number of nice looking bars with nice looking people, hip, chill, unpretentious young middle-class folks it seemed. It occurred to me that perhaps that is what "young people" do in this town. I mean, among other things. This town certainly has more to do in it than drink, but if you're looking for a Saturday night social scene, any of these places would have done nicely.

I turned my head to look into every one of these nice-looking chill airy bars that I passed. Busy but not packed, populated by relaxed people chatting and laughing... everyone I passed I considered just walking into and ordering a whiskey. No harm in that, I thought. I've eaten reasonably today, I wouldn't be drinking alone, and my sponsor keeps telling me I should get out more. I'm a young person in a town full of other young people and full of places for young people to congregate. It's not as though I'm lacking opportunity. Why don't I just go in?

I passed them all by. I couldn't do it. I don't know how.

What does that mean, I don't know how? I know how to walk into a bar... it's easy. You just... walk into a bar. Priests ministers and rabbis do it all the time in jokes. I've spent plenty of time in bars, in 4 different countries, even. Five if you count a hookah bar and if you count the Palestinian Territories as a separate country... but that's not a conversation we're going to have right now.

The problem isn't even that I don't know how to go into a bar alone. I've done that as well. When I've done that though, it has always been with unhealthy intentions. I walk into bars alone when I want to drink for the sake of drinking, to forget about something, to distract myself. I went into a bar alone after my sister's wedding. I went into a bar alone on the evening of a New Year's Day when I was lonely and depressed. I didn't go to be with people, I went to be with a drink and some noise. A drink is safe. People, strangers, those alien beings who seem to know how to live in the world and walk around confidently and who all seem to have friends and to be thinner and prettier than I am... they are scary.

If I walked into one of those bars, part of me says, I'd be intruding. Even if I walked in determined to be confident, I'd end up feeling bad about myself. I'd sit at the bar, order a drink, and then stare into it, because what else would I do? I'm certainly not going to risk going up to someone else and starting a conversation. If I can't expect myself to do that, how could I expect anyone to want to do so with me? Even if someone did strike up a conversation, what do I have to talk about? All I ever talk about is Judaism, as my sponsor is fond of pointing out. Judaism and 12-step. Not the best casual bar talk. I'm a nerd. A geek. I'm not normal. I'm not like all those other people out there. I don't know how to dress like them or walk like them or talk like them, I'm not cool enough, I don't stand out, I don't know how to wear makeup or Jewelry well, I don't have any piercings or tattoos, I'm not BoHo, I'm not Hipster, I'm a sad lonely neurotic religious chick with an eating disorder and an IQ too high for her own good.

Therefore I can't walk into a bar.

This is what was going through my mind as I walked home from my babysitting gig at 9:45 on a Saturday night through a young hip neighborhood full of nice night spots.

What. Is wrong. With me?

A friend of mine says that her sponsor tells her never to end a program call, even if it's just a voicemail message, on a low note. Never end with a problem, always end with a solution. Always live in the solution. What's my solution?

First of all STOP THINKING SO DAMN MUCH! My God, it is so NOISY inside my head it's a wonder I get anything done at all! This has always been a problem for me.

Second. I must realize, acknowledge, and internalize, that other people are Just People, like me. They are not better than I am. They are not worse than I am. They're also just human, just getting along like the rest of us. I'm not as different as I think I am.

Third. If I anticipate disappointment, I am 10 times more likely to end up disappointed than if I choose to live in the moment. If I walk into a bar, I have to go with the intention of being in the atmosphere of the bar, in the company of the people in the bar, and enjoying a drink in that company. These are the experiences that I can expect to have, and if I have a pleasant interaction on top of it, then I'm blessed, but I should always have the intention of experiencing the moment for whatever the moment brings.

Finally... if I'm unhappy with some aspect of myself, only my own actions will change that. If I'm looking to dress with more style and flair, I need to figure out a way to do that rather than whining that I'm not cool enough. I should find a friend whose fashion sense I admire and talk to her. Get some advice. If I don't want to spend Saturday nights alone obsessing over how I can't walk into bars, I have no shortage of friends in this town. I should actually call some of them up and ask if they want to go out for a drink. I AM allowed to do that. People DO like me, they DO enjoy my company and conversation, even if I am unsure of why.

Really, I just need to choose to believe. Just as I am working in Step 2 to believe that my Higher Power can restore me to sanity, I need to work to believe that I am capable of being a social being. That is part of being restored to sanity.

See, this is me sharing the message, not just the mess.

Humility and Religion

2010-08-11T21:43:00.000-07:00

Wow, I'm on some kinda blogging streak this week...

Also, I decided it made sense to have a glossary so I wouldn't have to debate whether or not to write as I speak (usually mixing in Hebrew and Yiddish words, especially in religious context) or make myself clear to my non-Jewish readership (such as it may be) but feeling unnatural and convoluted in my writing.

Today's post is about religious conflict. Fun stuff.

Let's start at the beginning... well, no, let's start at a beginning: The Clinton-Mezvinsky wedding. This was the subject of my d'var Torah this past Shabbat at my shul. Before I begin, let me explain something about myself and how I practice my religion:

I am Jewish. I hold by The Conservative Movement of Judaism, as I understand it, because it it what makes sense to me. I also happen to have been raised in this Movement, but my current practice and philosophy has changed since I was a child and is in many ways different from that of my parents. I believe that Jewish law, halacha, is binding upon each individual Jew. I believe that a Jew, halachically speaking, is someone whose mother is halachically Jewish at the time of their birth, or who undergoes a kosher conversion. I believe that, since it is against Jewish law for a Jew to marry a non-Jew, it is obligatory upon Jews not to do so, and not to facilitate such an occurrence.

I also believe that we are commanded to love all Jews, even those who do not uphold or adhere to the law. Further, I believe that we are commanded to love all people, and that to be a "Light Unto The Nations," a "Holy Nation," a "Nation of Priests" necessarily entails our living and demonstrating three principles above all: Love God. Love your neighbor. Pursue justice.

Now here is where the conflict arises... it is a question of humility.

Humility is a Jewish value. It is high praise indeed to be referred to in Judaism as a humble person. It is said that even God practices humility... I just wish I could remember the text that my teacher brought to show this. I'll have to ask him and bring it here when I find it. Humility is also essential to my Program. The only way I am able to stay abstinent is because I try to remind myself daily of how little I know, and that I must remain teachable. I must remember that my job is to trust in God and God's will for me and for the world, and to remember that I do not have all of the answers.

So... here's where my humilities collide. On the one hand, my humility in my religion very often means trusting in the Tradition, setting aside my personal biases in favor of the Law and the Text and the Rabbis, learning what I can and waiting for the Truth to come to me, to realize where the value lies in something that might initially seem distasteful to me... realizing why I should adhere to a law that is particularly inconvenient, why the seemingly ridiculous minutiae of Shabbat observance makes sense, what makes texts which, on the surface, are contradictory, fit together with a little Midrash and why that process is good, and how it can be understood as The Word Of God... my holding by the binding nature of Jewish law is an exercise in humility for me. It is my challenge to the comfortable easy "well this is how I feel and this is what I want" attitude which is so seductive in our society. It is acknowledging that God has a will that supersedes my own, that what *feels* right is not always what *is* right, that sometimes you cannot understand until you get down to the *doing.*

Of course, the other side of this coin is that everything I stated above constitutes a belief system... a belief system to which I strongly adhere. On the inside, it is a practice of humility. From the outside though, it may seem like an arrogant certainty. I am studying to be a rabbi. A rabbi is a teacher. In order to teach something, you must have something to teach. We no longer have prophets, it is the rabbis who carry the prophetic message to the people. I have been already blessed with the opportunity to do more study of Judaism and Jewish law than your average Conservative Jew can even dream of... and I've only been at it seriously for 3 years, and I have another 5 to go at least before, God willing, I am ordained. I have some knowledge... I know some things that they don't.

Marc Mezvinsky, a Jew, has married Chelsea Clinton, a non-Jew. They were married in an interfaith ceremony where clergy from two different religions, a Reform rabbi and a Methodist minister, co-officiated. This is something that Judaism forbids. For a person who doesn't believe that Jewish law is binding, they're likely not going to care about that... though even the Reform Movement's main Rabbinic body, the CCAR, advises their clergy not to co-officiate with non-Jewish clergy in performing marriages. For someone like me, who does believe that Jewish law is binding, I have to look at this marriage, and I gave to say that it is forbidden, I believe, by God's law for us, the Children of Israel, the Jews.

So. Love God. Love your neighbor. Pursue justice. Above all. Do I condemn Jews who do not adhere to Jewish law? Nobody is a perfect adherent to Jewish law, even the most observant. Nobody knows everything about Jewish law. Not everybody has been given sufficient reason in their life to believe that Jewish law is binding. This is reality. This is understanding that other people live different lives. This is knowing that I don't walk in other people's shoes, have their experiences, fully understand their thought processes.

This is not me congratulating myself on how tolerant and accepting and open-minded I am... this is rather something of which I have to constantly remind myself. When you take the time to study very intensely in Yeshiva, and then you come back to the real world, it is very easy to be very intolerant. I know I was after my first year of study. When I first stepped into the Beit Midrash of my Yeshiva, one of my earliest lessons was one of humility: the realization of just how little I knew, and how much there was to learn. Stepping out after a year and coming back to visit home and my community, that humility was flipped on its head. Here I was, only a year of study, knowing that if I studied nonstop for the rest of my life I would still not know all there was to know, even all I wanted to know about my religion. And here I was suddenly thrown back into an environment where the people around me didn't have even that... and didn't care. Not only didn't they have the learning, not only didn't they know, they had NO IDEA even what it was they didn't know. And it didn't even matter to them. It tore me apart inside. I didn't know how to handle this new reality, how to live in such a community after spending a year with a learning community, a group of people who learned and grew Jewishly alongside me, who helped each other along in coming to understand the vast richness of our tradition. Suddenly I was in a barren soulless wasteland. How was I to cope?

I have since calmed down. I have come to be gentler with others and with myself, trying to teach wherever the opportunity arises for me to do so, if it is wanted and welcomed. I have worked hard to get better at accepting people where they are and celebrating what they, what we have rather than lamenting what they, and I, do not. All that said, I am not willing to do or say certain things.

I am not willing to disregard Jewish law, to say that it is unimportant, ever.
I am not willing to say that I think someone is living in accordance with Jewish law when I truly believe that they are not, based on my learning.
I am not willing to perform an action that is in violation of Jewish law for the sake of pluralism.
I am not willing to say directly that it is ok for a Jewish person to violate Jewish law. What I will say is that Jewish observance is a journey that we all travel at our own pace according to our own abilities. The best any of us can do is to be as honest with ourselves and with God as we possibly can, and to try our best to do what we hear as God's will. If we live with honesty and integrity, we are on a path of holiness, and God always loves us no matter what.

I have my understanding of what my religion dictates. That understanding is not my own invention. It is based on the learning I have been blessed to receive from many wonderful teachers, who in turn learned from their teachers, and so on back until God only knows how long ago. I work very hard at using the language of humility when speaking of my religion, but I also have to take a stand at some point and admit that there is a limit to the boundaries of Judaism. In many ways Judaism is about boundaries, about distinctions. Many call this exclusivism, tribalism, elitism. Arrogance. That may be true in some ways, to some people, and in the way some Jews practice and speak of the faith and the peoplehood. Personally, I believe it is about something else... about having the humility to admit that you don't understand everything, that those who came before had wisdom worth listening to, and that we do dishonor to ourselves and to our predecessors by forgetting who we are and where we came from.

I don't know... I just don't know. Sometimes I feel as though my even having any sort of belief or boundary is grounds to be accused of arrogance and small-mindedness. But if (future) clergy can't have beliefs and faith and principles, then where have we gotten ourselves to?

Claiming My Seat

2010-08-10T22:07:00.000-07:00

Since I've been in Program, I have questioned sometimes whether or not I am truly an addict.

For some people, it is very clear. They take a bite of something, and there is no stopping them. They have to not take that first bite. They are addicted. They can identify the substances to which they are addicted and they must make the choice to stop consuming them, to abstain. That's the kind of addiction that OA was founded to address.

I am bulimic. I have been purge-free for almost two and a half years. I have been binge and starvation free for 223 days.

Years before I ever purged, I used to burn myself.

I would sit in my room, usually in the afternoon after school with the lights off, Aaron Copland playing on my CD player, a scalding hot pot of Jasmine tea, and a bunch of candles. I would sit on the floor and try to let the music take me. Sometimes it wasn't Copland... sometimes it was Mozart's Requiem. Or Fauré's. Or Simon and Garfunkel. Whatever it was, it had to be something that could take me somewhere else. To the mountains, or Long Island Sound or that place that pieces written for the Requiem Mass take me. I'd sit with the scent of the tea, the gentle glow of the candles, the dark, the music, and I'd try to be somewhere else for as long as I could. And when the pain started to come back, I would drink some of the tea, feeling the heat scalding my lips, my tongue, the roof of my mouth... the tea was always very weak at that point. Very weak and very hot, that first cup. I'd finish the cup and focus again on the music. My teapot held five cups full of tea, and as I went through the pot, each cup became progressively cooler and more fragrant and bitter tasting. Each cup served its own purpose, the first for the burn, the last for the bitter, only the middle of the five truly for pleasure.

When the tea was gone, and the music failed me again, I turned to the candles.

Initially, it was just pouring the wax. It was just like stepping into a very hot bathtub... I'd pour the wax onto my hand, into my palm, over my fingers, breathe deeply and focus on the heat, on the tensing of my muscles as my body reacted to the pain I was relishing... relishing because I didn't have to be there anymore for the real pain, the stuff that was inside, the feeling of fear, of being trapped, of having no control, of misery, despairing of the possibility that it would ever be better, that my parents would stop fighting or divorce. That the day would come when I didn't have to worry that any moment the door to my room could swing open to reveal a father practically foaming at the mouth as he reached out to grab me or my sister. That the adults would ever listen, ever step in and do something, ever help. That Mom would ever stand up for us. That anyone would ever love me enough to help me, to take me away. That anyone would ever love me with all of my crazy. While the hot wax was pouring over my skin, that all went away. For a minute or so.

My pain threshold increased. Pouring on the hands no longer worked. I started snuffing out the candles with wet fingertips and pressing the newly extinguished candle end into the crook of my elbow. Over and over and over I did that. When that stopped working, I would blow out the candle and press it against my arm with the wick still smoldering.

From this stage, I have scars. Only three are still really clearly identifiable, and you wouldn't know they were there if you weren't looking for them... I can still find them all, though. There is shame there... I was careful at first, using only wax, specifically because we are commanded not to mark our bodies. I didn't want scars, not out of vanity, but because I cared about keeping religious law. Came a point though, of course, when the pain was bad enough that I stopped caring about scars.

Nevertheless, not long after I started scarring, I stopped. I snapped out of it, somehow. I think. I don't remember when that was... it was in high school, but it may have stopped after Dad finally hit me for the last time, hurting me badly enough that it frightened my mother and she finally took a stand and threw him out.

Was that an addiction? Or was it just an escape?

The purging... well, that was more complicated. I told myself over and over that I wasn't going to become bulimic... I would purge a few times, maybe once or twice a week for a month, and then snap out of it and be fine for 4 months or so. Then it would start again. But I had it under control, I thought. Until the time between purging months got shorter and shorter, until I was purging twice every week, then three times, then every day, then multiple times every day...

In many ways it was the same impulse. It was something I could control. The eating I could not. Not because of any particular food, but because I didn't know how to stop, how to know when I stopped being hungry. I never did, never in my life. I didn't know the difference between being hungry and wanting to eat, or eating out of fear. When I was young, until the age of 7, I was underweight, so Dad would hit me if I didn't finish everything. I learned to eat quickly out of desperation until I didn't know how to eat slowly and not take seconds. Then I didn't know how not to raid the refrigerator. I couldn't just stop myself, couldn't just tell myself "no." I could only take control afterwards, punishing myself, relieving myself, redeeming myself, until I couldn't stop that either.

I purged for the first time in 2000. I purged for the last time in 2007. The first time, I was 18, and in Spain. The last time, I was 26, and in Israel. Somewhere in between in America I had a year free of purging. I thought it was over, I'd beaten it, kicked it. Then I lost it.

I came into OA in December 2009. I had not purged in about one year and 9 months. I was still abusing myself with food, though. I was going for long stretches, semi-intentionally, of not eating. Then I would make up for it. I would starve myself when I felt ashamed. I would stuff myself when I was self-pitying. When I was sad or lonely, I would drink.

Am I an addict, or just a self-abuser? An escape artist?

I was reading this post by Mr. SponsorPants tonight. And you know... it kicked up some insecurity about my seat, as it were, in the rooms. Am I really an addict, or just someone who CAN do it with willpower and just WOULDN'T? Is my bulimia really an addiction or just an escape? Am I claiming a seat that isn't really mine to claim? Maybe I just did this to myself and don't deserve the help of a fellowship designed to help those who are really sick, not for people like me who are just self-pitying lumps of woe, whining about our awful childhoods.

The Only Requirement For OA Membership Is A Desire To Stop Eating Compulsively.

*deep breath*

Hello.

My name is G.

I have not eaten compulsively in 223 days.

I have not binged.
I have not purged.
I have eaten three meals every day.
I have not starved myself.
I do not snack.
I do not take seconds.
I do not leave unreasonable spaces of time between meals.

I have done this by

Going to meetings.
Working with a sponsor.
Having and sticking to a plan of eating.
Making phone calls.
Doing service.
Writing.
Reading 12-step literature.
Meditating.
Choosing to have a relationship with my Higher Power.
Praying. Praying desperately.

I was not able to do this at any point before in my life. I have never been able to control my relationship with food. I, alone, am powerless over food. I am powerless over food.

Hello, my name is G, and I am a recovering bulimic, among other things.

This is me, claiming my seat.

One ____ At A Time

2010-08-10T14:22:00.000-07:00

This past weekend has been all about Time.

I had occasion to reach out to a recovery friend. In the process of writing to him, I gave myself some good advice about staying focused on the present moment, and doing what needs to be done in that moment. As soon as I hit "send" I picked up my prayerbook and prayed the afternoon service, something I've been having a lot of trouble keeping myself on track with... that is, my 3x daily prayer obligation. I did it because it was the time to do it, and it was the right thing to do in that moment, which was where I was.

The next day at synagogue, it was the 90th birthday of the mother of a long-time congregant, a woman who has known me since I was born. Her daughter, who was my sister's best friend when we were very little, and whom I haven't seen in many years, was there. She has a daughter now, who looks just like she did in my earliest memories of her. 4 generations of women, from pre-war germany, to Israel, to Brooklyn, to New Jersey. Natural Jewish generational evolution.

I gave a sermon, something I haven't done in my congregation since my bat mitzvah, 15 years ago. Another congregant, who made the announcements after the service, said "I remember when G. was born!" My synagogue is really the only thing from my childhood that hasn't disappeared or fallen apart.

I organized a reunion on Sunday of friends from what we lovingly refer to as "nerd camp." At least one of the people coming I hadn't seen in 15 years. It was quite wonderful, but Saturday night I couldn't sleep. I was thinking about the next day, and I was nervous. I was thinking about how I'd always thought I'd be better put together by this time of my life. I thought I'd have accomplished more, put more of my past behind me. I started thinking about all of my setbacks, my failures, the memories I wanted to hold on to and the ones I wanted to lose, all of the people who've gone out of my life, all of the stuff that I've accumulated in the process of trying to hold on to a past that was largely unkind...

Memory became very important in my early teens. I don't know if I had such an obsession before then, I just know that when I started to recognize that I was being told that my memories of what was happening at home were wrong, I started desperately needing to hold on to what I remembered, to what I knew. The scariest part was that I found that when I tried to recount events as I remembered them, my memory would get fuzzy. I would become physically tired trying to tell the story, and the harder I tried to remember, the more uncertain I would become of the truth. I started writing things down. I started keeping things. I needed to remember as much as I could about everything that happened to me, good and bad. When I realized how fragile memory could be I became terrified of losing it, any of it... terrified that I was or would go crazy. Now, I don't know how to let go. Not of people, not of behaviors, not of memories, not of stuff.

I sat up in bed at around 4 a.m. with the realization that I needed to do something in that moment to keep my sanity. I did something I haven't done in months, and picked up my copy of For Today. I opened to August 8th and saw there at the top of the page this quote:

"They that reverence too much old times are but a scorn to the new"- Francis Bacon

I mean seriously, are you kidding me? This stuff would never work as fiction, no one would believe it.

I need to take my own advice. One day at a time MEANS one day at a time. Sometimes that means one hour at a time, one minute at a time, one second at a time. It means just being here and now and DOING what needs to be done here and now, no matter what. It means learning how to let go, learning how to forget the forest sometimes, and just look at the tree in front of you.

It means stopping. And praying.

Wrath and Comfort.

2010-07-24T19:49:00.000-07:00

Today was Shabbat Nachamu, the Shabbat of comfort after the period of rebuke that leads up to Tisha B'Av, the day commemorating the destruction of the Temple.

Today was also the day we read Parshat Va'Etchanan, the Torah portion in Deuteronomy in which, among other things, we read about Moses pleading with God to be allowed to enter the Promised Land to which he has led the People Israel, traveling with them for 40 years through the wilderness. And God... God said no.

My classmates are heading off for their year in Israel. I, because I need to take time to work on my recovery, because I, and the people who love me, are afraid for my life if I uproot again and place myself in an overly stressful situation, because my depression became frighteningly debilitating this past year- for all of these reasons, I am not going to Israel. I am taking the year off from school to study in a Yeshiva and work on my treatment and my Recovery Program.

Today, we see different faces of God. We see a wrathful God, the God Who warns the people that they must wipe out and destroy the idolatrous inhabitants of the land, destroy their alters, smash their pillars, cut down their sacred trees, and burn their idols, lest they lead us astray to the worship of other Gods. God's wrath will be kindled against any who go astray, and they will be destroyed forthwith.

We also see the comforting compassionate face of God. The God who lovingly says Be comforted, be comforted my people. The first word of the reading from Isaiah which we read after the Torah, is comfort, Nachamu. It is repeated twice. Nachamu, Nachamu Ami. It's almost as if God is taking us in God's arms, stroking our hair, telling us it's ok. The time of service for your sins is over, God says. Your guilt is paid off. It'll all be okay now.

The other day a friend, an OA fellow, called me in a bad state. In addition to her eating disorder, she suffers from obsessive compulsive disorder, which makes it difficult at times for her to observe the letter of Jewish law. She was upset because she had gone to rabbi after rabbi, and not one of them could give her comfort. They could only tell her that she was breaking Jewish law, and instruct her in the "right way" to observe. She was convinced that God was furious with her and hated her.

When I told her that God loves her no matter what, she burst into tears. No one had ever told her that before. No one whom she could believe, anyway.

The face of God that we see on Tisha B'Av, for most, in most commentaries, is the angriest, ugliest, most wrathful and frightening face of God that we ever see in our tradition. This is the God Who destroys God's own Holy Temple and exiles God's own beloved people from the land which God promised to them. This is the God Who punishes and does not forgive. This is the God Who leaves and won't come back.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer said "Comfort the troubled, and trouble the comfortable" I don't know where, but I remember hearing this quote long ago given as the place of religion in the world: religion exists to comfort the troubled and to trouble the comfortable. My friend needed comfort, and all she could see was wrath. Religion had become a burden, a dangerous burden for her.

This is what I believe: I believe that God's wrathful face is not intended for those who face wrath on a daily basis. This is what I told my friend. God's wrathful face is not intended for you, I said. What is intended for you right now is God's face of mercy, of compassion, of love, and of comfort. Tisha B'Av for you, I said, is not a day for cowering before an angry God, but rather a day for remembering how crucial is love in our lives and in our world. A world, a life without love, is only pain and destruction. And for those of us who have had so much pain, who have been so badly hurt, who are so troubled and have so much trouble loving ourselves, the face that God wants us to see is the face turned toward us, radiating light and love upon us, guarding us, watching over us, and giving us peace.

I am not going to Israel right now. Over the past year I feel that I have begged and pleaded to be allowed to do so... I tried to hard to push ahead with my studies, to tell myself and my teachers that I would be ok, that I'd pull it out in the end as I always do, just trying at the very least to scape by with a passing grade in each class so I could stay in step with my classmates, go to Israel with them, keep pushing, keep moving, even though I was dying inside.

God said no.

In the weeks after my spectacular failure, I was convinced that God hated me, or was at least angry with me, or maybe was mocking me or laughing at me. I wanted to die. I wanted to kill myself. I could feel nothing but pain, could do nothing but cry, wanted nothing more than to not exist.

Now I know that God is infinitely gracious, compassionate, and loving. God stopped me in my tracks so that I would open my eyes and realize that I couldn't continue like this. God brought me down to this bottom so that I would realize that I was falling, that I'd been falling my whole life, and that I had to make a change in order to start climbing... indeed, to realize that climbing was possible.

Different people at different times need to see different faces, hear different voices of God in order to receive the message that is intended for them. Part of the job of a Rabbi, I believe, is to have the awareness and sensitivity to see which face and which voice is appropriate for the person seeking our counsel. It's the responsibility of clergy, those who are studied in the sacred texts and the theological traditions of our faiths, to share in the work of revealing God to those whom we serve.

I am grateful to have learned this.

Today's Test

2010-07-23T12:33:00.000-07:00

I'm being tested today.

There is a person in my life, a friend, a schoolmate, a fellow in OA, with whom I am in a very unhealthy friendship dynamic. He holds me at a distance and tells me it's because his sponsor says to. He tells me the parameters within which I am permitted to communicate with him, and then he keeps changing them. He says it's because his sponsor says to. He tells me that he will not respond to this or that form of communication, and then he is inconsistent about it.

Bottom line, he is unilaterally controlling the nature and frequency of our interactions, and using his sponsor as an excuse. He says it's because something about me triggers old resentments and puts his abstinence in jeopardy. He won't tell me what, though. Meanwhile, what he is doing triggers all of my abuse and abandonment issues and puts my abstinence and mental health in jeopardy.

I'm hurting right now. I'm angry and I'm upset. I'm sad, and I can see this could easily send me sliding back down into the depression I've been holding off so well over the past month and a half or so. I don't know what to do.

I'm being tested.

I know I need to not allow this to affect my sense of self-worth. This person's actions have nothing to do with me. They are his issue, not mine. Part of me says that the best, indeed the only thing to do at this point is to tell him that, despite the fact that he claims he still wants to be my friend, that this is not a friendship, and that if he cannot be consistent, I am going to take a stand for myself and end our relationship here, with the hope that one day we will be able to re-engage in a healthy interaction.

But this person is someone whom I know in multiple contexts. He is more than just this one aspect of how he is treating me. He is a wonderfully wise, kind, and empathetic person. He radiates a kind of spiritual energy that is irresistible... in that department, he has what I want, and I want to learn from him. He has a beautiful soul and brilliant ideas, and when I speak to him about religion and spiritual matters, I feel understood, and I feel positively challenged. The idea of losing this person from my life is just too painful to bear.

I am being tested.

What is the next right action? Which aspects of this relationship amount to codependent behavior? How much of it is genuine? How much is just me falling into my old patterns of allowing myself to be abused? As much progress as I've made in not letting anyone else determine my sense of value as a person, I find that I am still so affected, so hurt by his actions, that I feel that I'm actively thinking about him in an unhealthy way. I have too much invested in him... and then I rationalize that he really is worth that investment. He's special. He's so special. But then, so was every other person I've allowed to mistreat me.

I'm being tested and I don't like it.

Not Fasting

2010-07-20T13:46:00.001-07:00

I sat in the office that morning with a full belly and a guilty feeling. I was sitting opposite the dean of the Rabbinical school in which I was enrolled. It was a fast day, a day on which observant Jews do not eat or drink anything from sunrise to sunset. One of the "minor fasts," not the big 25 hour fast of Tisha B'Av or Yom Kippur, but rather the fast of Esther, which commemorates Esther's days of fasting and prayer before confronting her husband the King of Persia to plead for her people, my people, to be spared. It was a fast which, as a rabbinical student, as an observant Jew, I should have been keeping. But I was not. For the first time since I started keeping all of the minor fasts, I was consciously disregarding one.

It's not that fasting is hard for me. On the contrary, it is far too easy. It was a pont of pride growing up, a sign of adulthood, when you were finally able to keep a fast all the way through. You practiced from the age of 10 or so, going as long as you could control your hunger before running next door to the synagogue's community building where, in one of the classrooms upstairs, the live-in custodian made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the children. You had to have it down by the time you were 12, because every year after that, fasting was required of you. No more sandwiches, no more excuses.

It happened gradually, I think. Learning to deny that I was hungry until I believed it became a regular exercise for me. There wasn't any one specific cause that I can pinpoint, no event that I can isolate as being the impetus for mastering my hunger. It was something that was encouraged implicitly at home, not to be a slave to routine or to your natural impulses. It was a virtue to have control of yourself, to eat a meal when someone else determined that it was mealtime, not to have a meal when, or because, you were hungry. I would tell myself that I was practicing for Yom Kippur, that I would be glad of it when that time of year came around again. How easy it will be to fast, I thought. When everyone else is cranky and hungry I'll be completely fine and in control, thinking about repentance, not about my stomach. I started skipping lunch. Who needs lunch? Besides, the other students threw trash at me in the cafeteria. The library was better.

I sat in the office across from my Rabbi-Dean, remembering how, for years, after the Yom Kippur fast was over I would go with my family and most of the shul regulars to the R family's apartment to break fast with all of my favorite foods, smoked fish, bagels, kugel, deviled eggs, unable after the fast to stop myself once I started eating, taking plate after over-piled plate of delicacies, eating past the point of stuffed before even realizing it. This was the exaggerated version of how most days went for me. Often the only meal I ate was dinner, which would follow an after-school afternoon of incessant snacking, sneaking food from the refrigerator, justifying my actions based on the fact that I'd eaten practically nothing until then. Two or three helpings of dinner would follow.

I sat across from the Rabbi thinking about how, for years, after stuffing myself at break-fast, I would sneak away to the R family's bathroom and vomit up the food again before going home with my family. I did the same thing after each Passover Seder. The two poles of the annual circle of holidays, the two new years, on the one you purge your soul of sins, on the other you purge your house of leaven... me, I just purged.

I told the Rabbi that I was not fasting. I told him that this was the first time I was intentionally not fasting. I told him that my feelings about this were mixed. He told me that, just like a diabetic, my disorder made it dangerous for me to fast, and any rabbi would agree that not fasting was the right course of action. It felt so wrong, so incongruous. I didn't feel sick. When people are given a medical excuse to not fast, usually it is because fasting is too hard for them. For me, since it was too easy, it felt like I was cheating.

Fasting has come to be very meaningful to me. I realized just how much so while I was living in Jerusalem. On Yom Kippur, I attended a service which was Modern Orthodox, but had a strong Hasidic and Kabbalistic focus. For the first time in my life, I witnessed, and participated in, singing and dancing on the Jewish Day of Atonement, a somber day for most observant Jews. At first I was uneasy about joining in with this practice to which I was unaccustomed. As the fast progressed, however, I felt my inhibitions falling. My feet started moving, I swayed back and forth, and it was as though a veil was lifted. I tied my tallit around my neck and climbed between abandoned chairs to join the circle of dancing women. I was in the company of my community, the entire Jewish people, singing and dancing our praises to the Eternally Merciful Lord Our God Who, year after year, forgives us our sins and permits us to continue in this world, out of nothing, for no reason, other than God's Divine Love for us, for each of us, God's children, God's reflection on earth. I was beyond the need for food. I was nourished by The Eternal.

There is something else, though... something that lurks beneath, something that has nothing to do with spiritual nourishment. It is the opposite, in fact: the high of restricting. The sense of control, of competition against the self, the feeling that, as I am fasting, I am winning. It is that sense of pride when, though the fasting period technically has ended, I stay in the sanctuary for the evening service, thinking "I could maintain this indefinitely." And it is what inevitably follows: the loss of control, the unbridled consumption triggered by that first bite. It is the shame that follows, and the overwhelming need to empty the stomach of the evidence of this failure, the purge.

Today is Tisha B'Av, the day of mourning which commemorates the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. I have been instructed by my Rabbi not to fast. It is difficult. Each bite is taken guiltily, and at the same time, with a feeling of relief. I'm doing what I need to do in order to care for myself, to not punish myself as I've done for so much of my life. I'm not in competition with my body, not trying to master it, to beat it down, to make it submit to my will, or rather my willfulness. I'm working to love it, to love me, in accordance with God's will.

I've lost something in losing the ability to fast. Maybe one day my disease will have less power of assertion over my life and I will, if it be the will of God, be able to experience fasting as it is meant to be experienced, as I came to understand it that Yom Kippur day in Jerusalem. For now, I need to work a little harder to achieve that which the fast is supposed to facilitate, to stay focused on the day and its meaning.

The rabbis, in discussing the reasons for the destruction of the Temple, which we commemorate today, do not cite the cruelty of the Roman occupation, geopolitical history, empire building, failed revolutions. They cite senseless hatred. They tell a story of gossip and cruelty, lack of communication and dishonesty, grudges and revenge, and indifference on the part of onlookers as the reasons that our Temple and our holy city were destroyed, and we were exiled from our land.

What is the Temple really? A building? A practice of worship? A pilgrimage site? A center of economic stimulus? Yes, all of these things, historically. But the Temple more fundamentally is a picture representing that for which we strive-- the unification of heaven and earth, the reunion of God to God's people, the unity of all people in praise, labor and love. What destroys that? Baseless hatred. Whether we are talking physical-literal, or transcendent-metaphorical, it is hatred that brings about destruction. Lack of love, blindness to the Other, to the Self, the I, in each individual, that makes life tragic. It is blindness to the transcendent Truths, to Martin Buber’s model of I-You human relationship, which leaves us blind to God, the ultimate Thou, and causes God to hide God’s face from us, leaving us broken and abandoned and starving. Framed in these terms, you have the metaphor glaring at you from right there in the tradition: the Temple is destroyed because of Sinat Chinam, baseless hatred. Tisha B’Av is the day on which we remember what happens when we forget how to love. And so we fast and mourn, and we remember that we must love each other… because lack of love brings about destruction, heartbreak, unbearable pain.

In working the 12-steps, one is to make a searching and fearless moral inventory of oneself. One is to seek out their own feelings of resentment, jealousy, anger, and see how these shortcomings have led us to behave badly toward our fellows. One is to take down a list of those whom they have harmed through their own shortcomings and, regardless of the other person's behavior, strive to make amends to that person. In 12-step, we strive to have love and compassion for every single person we encounter, because when we forget how to love, we turn back to our destructive behaviors, be they with food, alcohol, narcotics, gambling, sex, whatever our disease.

Fasting is symbolic. It is a vehicle by which we are supposed to gain more insight into our spiritual condition. I need to accept that it is a vehicle that is not currently available to me, that to fast would be antithetical to the purpose of this day. Today is a day on which to remember destruction that we may learn how not to engage in it. We remember hatred that we may always remember to love.

That must include Self-love.

My Abstinence, My Religion

2010-06-16T00:23:00.000-07:00

Today marked five and a half months of abstinence from my eating disorder, as currently defined by my plan of eating laid out for me by my sponsor. Sometimes, when it comes to day counts, I feel guilty because my plan of eating is not particularly restrictive. Eat three meals. Don't binge, don't purge, don't kill anyone. That's the basics.

How have I stuck to it? I made additional rules for myself. I eat no more than one plate of food for a meal. I don't take seconds. I don't snack.

These additional rules... these are how I understand my food plan. These were not laid out by my sponsor. My sponsor has not given me portions by which to abide yet. He has not given me meal times. He has not forbidden snacks. Just the basics: Eat three meals. Don't binge, don't purge, don't kill anyone.

Have I had a snack in the past five and a half months? Yes. I've had a few snacks. A yogurt or some fruit if one of my meals was inadequate and I feel that my blood sugar is low. If someone has brought me a small piece of chocolate or a cookie, I use my judgement. I turn these over to my sponsor, to make sure I'm keeping myself in check.

In many ways I'm lucky. It turns out, I don't truly have any binge foods. I was really afraid when I started this program that I was going to have to give up pasta or cheese, two foods that I've always had a lot of trouble stopping myself with, ever since I was very young. I realized though, when I had clearly defined parameters, I was able to stay within them. I remember the first time I cut a piece of cheese off the block for something I was making for a meal and I didn't take another piece to pop in my mouth. I looked at the rest of the cheese and I said "That is not my food." And I put it away. I was amazed. I was amazed that I was able to do that. And it is all with the help of God.

But not only in the way you probably expect.

I grew up keeping kosher, that is, abiding by the dietary restrictions of the Jewish religion. For someone who didn't grow up with it, the laws of kashrut seem very complicated and restrictive. When you've known nothing else since birth, it is an easy concept to grasp. This is food that you can eat, this is food that you can't. The lines are clearly drawn, and there are some things that you simply don't even think of eating... or even some things that you would eat at one time or in one place that you wouldn't imagine eating at another time or place. I can eat steak at my mother's house, but not at any local steakhouse. I can have a glass of milk, but not until 3 hours after I've finished eating the steak. These are restrictions which have never been problematic for me.

So when I feel lonely or bored and the urge to munch on something starts creeping up on me, or if I want to take another portion after I've finished what's on my plate, I can tell myself "This is not your time to eat" and I can listen.

What is more difficult is getting myself to eat when I'm not feeling inclined to. Refraining from something is comparatively easy next to actually doing something. I have to force myself sometimes to make those three meals. It is my biggest challenge, making sure I get in three discrete sessions of eating something that could be reasonably called a meal before I go to sleep. This is an area where I still need a lot of help and prayer.

I am supposed to pray a fixed liturgy 3 times every day. My religion mandates it. I have been lax about this. I'm not happy about that. Two and a half years ago, I was praying every day without fail. Two and a half years ago, I was also hardly eating, and periodically purging. Now, even if the mealtimes still aren't great (something to work up to), I don't let a day go by without making sure that there are three meals in it. No. Matter. What. The prayers have fixed times. I can't make them up like I can the food by creatively spacing meals. I think the trick is going to be linking the two. I pray that God will help me to work this out.

Whoooo Are You?

2010-05-09T04:15:00.000-07:00

I'm learning how to compartmentalize. Slowly. That is in large part what this space is about. This anonymous space and my anonymous Twitter account are my fledgeling attempts at masking myself and being "appropriate" in my real-world non-anonymous interactions.

I was discussing with a friend last night, after stating jokingly that "actors are the opposite of people" (a quote from Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead) how unsure I am of who my brother is since he's an actor, a very good actor, and very easily assumes a persona for the person he is with. My friend said "Well, we all do that to some extent, don't we?"

Well, I suppose that is what normal healthy people do. At least, this is what I am lead to believe. I see that this is how most people function. Most people don't reveal themselves very easily. Most people have personae that they show to the world except in the most intimate moments with a close few. Well, one thing I've never been accused of is being normal. This is not the way I operate naturally. Somehow, for some reason, I never learned to make a mask. I never learned how to present myself without showing myself.

When I was a kid, I remember being rebuked by my parents and older sibling for being too honest. "When people ask 'how are you' they don't want the truth!" I was frankly disgusted. That this was the reality of the world was too horrible a thought to bear. If someone asked me how I was, by God, I wanted to tell them! I wanted to believe that they cared... I needed to believe that someone cared. I was desperate to be heard, to be known, to be understood. I was looking, searching, screaming for help. When someone recited that simple social pseudo-inquiry, it was a hint, a shadow, a possible opening for someone to give a damn.

But no, I was told, it wasn't true. They weren't asking because they gave a damn. They were asking because it was polite. And it was polite, in turn, to lie. Don't say that you're sad. Don't say that you're lonely. Don't say that you think your family doesn't love you. Don't say you're afraid to go home because Dad is probably going to throw a tantrum and start hitting. No one wants to know. No one cares.

But that didn't stop me. For some reason, I never learned. I couldn't. Like I said, I was desperate. I had to keep being honest, keep being myself, keep telling the truth, keep looking for that person, somewhere, someday, who would care.

Still looking.

I'm still haunted by my childhood. The empty space where I was never sure I was loved. Convinced that my siblings hated me. Bullied in school. Abused emotionally and physically by my father. Emotionally abandoned by my mother. And I am still in a lot of pain day to day. I'm working on it... I am working hard, very hard, to recover, to pull myself up and out of it, to learn how to live a life separate from the nightmare that occupies such a large part of my mind, depression, memories, loneliness... I'm learning how to smile through it. How to show a mask.

And frankly, a lot of the time, I'm disgusted by it. Because I hugged a friend yesterday and involuntarily began to cry because the physical affection touched that unmasked me, the part I'm working so hard to keep hidden, to beat down and back and out of sight because it's not polite, because when she shows, she chases people away. She is frightening to people unaccustomed to pain and honesty and vulnerability which turns out to be almost everyone. I have this space in which to write and I have my Twitter account on which to share because in the spaces under my real name, I have to pretend to be happy, stable, oddball only in the quirky fun ways, not in the ways that show the storm inside.

It's not that I want to be defined by the storm... I want desperately to be rid of it. If I could flip a switch and be rid of the pain and the memories I would. But whether I like it or not (and, no, I don't) they are part of Who I Am. A big BIG part. Without knowing that part, you don't know me. And I want to be known. I need to be known.

Unless you know me, you can't love me. I need to be loved.