I Take What I’m Handed, I Break What’s Demanded

I have a fundamental mistrust of Instant Pots.  The kitchen appliance that sold like Cabbage Patch Dolls in the Christmas of 2017 and can supposedly produce a tender, juicy pork loin in thirty seconds or less.  How is it able to accomplish this, you ask?  Because an Instant Pot is just a pressure cooker in a prettier, more elementally stable outfit.  I don’t care if it only takes five minutes to boil twelve eggs that will slip out of their shells easier than a prom queen out of a poofy dress—when I think of a pressure cooker, my mind immediately goes to a steel bomb, shaking and agitating the glass jars within it, while also spewing steam through a whistling, rattling valve.  I’m sure my father was just being overprotective, but we were told to stay away from the kitchen when the canner was on the stove.  Even when used properly, the pressure cooker was an incendiary device on the verge, libel to detonate and send shrapnel and Ball jar lids blustering in every direction.

                I’ve watched many starry-eyed brides in bow hats tear away creamy, floral wrapping paper to reveal their shiny new appliance and I wince.  Underneath the clean buttons and chrome finish, I see a remarketed  death trap.  Asbestos.  Ford Pinto.  Instant Pot.  The statistics may be slim on the percentage of “deaths by domestic beet-canning accident,” but I also think that it’s good to be weary of anything described as “miraculous.”  When a person or event is said to be the product of a miracle (or insanely good luck) I lean toward the old explanation of “preparation meeting opportunity.”  When a device is described as miraculous, I lean toward the explanation of it being only a slightly improved pipe bomb.  …then again, that’s also true of miraculous people.

                If all human beings functioned well under pressure, then there wouldn’t be any alcoholics or addicts.  But we don’t.  So, there are.  Just because we, as addicts, have learned to fasten our lids and withstand intense pressure without a quick release, does not mean we are exempt from exploding.  Don’t let the meditation, serenity prayers, yoga, patience, and new “lease on life” fool you—we are still human beings with rushing adrenaline who can’t always handle being backed into a corner with a deep breath and a platitude.  We have our breaking points too.  Recovery helps us learn our triggers for drinking and using, but it doesn’t enlighten us to our adjacent triggers for anger, agitation, and panic. 

                Last weekend, we took Steele on his first trip to the beach—something my mother has been dreaming of since before he was born.  Or conceived.  Actually, I think she was fantasizing about taking her grandchildren to the beach back when Maren and I were Steele’s age… Steele loved it.  Which is actual luck because there is no preparation or opportunity when it comes to a toddler’s perception of the world.  Even though he enjoyed the many facets of a beach vacation, a wet, sandy two-year-old is still a two-year-old.  There were smiles and giggles, but he was playing to the brink of exhaustion and he was dealing with a new list of things that he wanted to do that he was being told he could not do: pet the seven foot shark swimming under the pier, stand in the ocean without a life jacket, swan dive into the hot tub, resurrect the snow cone that melted three hours ago that he just remembered and wanted to finish.

                My mother has Dalai Lama-level patience when it comes to Steele’s tantrums, and she explains it to me the way her Gram explained it to her: “Children are just little people.  They have likes and dislikes.  They feel uncomfortable when their needs aren’t being met, they just don’t know how to tell us what’s wrong.” 

                My mother and her Gram are correct that a fit over losing a potential pet shark or a melted snow cone are rarely about the shark or the snow cone.  They were incorrect in their implication that only children throw tantrums over little things that are indicative of much larger needs that are left unmet.  Temper-tantrums decrease as we get older because we start connecting the dots of what is really bothering us.  Am I that angry? Or am I just mildly annoyed and also hungry?  Adulthood is curbing the anger, eating a Cliff Bar, then re-evaluating the situation and realizing that the passive aggressive email from your coworker is not worth responding to. 

All passionate responses are survival impulses.  We’re born with them.  Rationale and communication skills come later.  … for the most part.  There are still recesses of the human brain that tell us to react like a startled young soldier and fire off a shot without aiming.  But its never for no reason, even if we don’t quite understand what the real reason is.  When I was a drunk, I acted impulsively and irrationally quite often.  Not just when I was drunk and had no control over my mind, my mouth, or any of my other faculties—I acted irrationally and impulsively when I was not drinking too.  Being sober meant feeling overly uncomfortable and vulnerable and I wanted to claw my own skin off.  So, I would do and say whatever it took to procure and consume booze.  When I look back on the insane excuses I would invoke and the wild accusations I would hurl at other people, I am bewildered and horrified.  Then I remember that, at the time, getting drunk felt like a necessity for my survival and my outbursts are less confusing, but still fully horrifying.

We meditate.  We find serenity.  We bite leather straps and pinch the meat on our forearms—whatever it takes to get through a high-pressure moment without breaking.  We get really good at it.  My mother isn’t the only one in the family who can Dalai Lama their way through a hellish fit.  Being sober doesn’t mean that you realize that life isn’t as bad as you thought, and drinking isn’t necessary.  Being sober means realizing that life is way more difficult than you thought (because you were drunk for all the bad parts) but also realizing that you can power-through the worst moments like a champion AND drinking isn’t necessary.  I can breathe through someone screaming at me.  I can breathe through massive disappointments.  Not only can I breathe through signing divorce papers, I can do it with a polite smile and then tipping his attorney’s paralegal the customary $10 for notarizing them.  Because of those sizable psychological victories, I am quite surprised by the small moments when I do hit my limit and shatter like twelve jars of stewed tomatoes. 

Over the long weekend, I had a few short tantrums of my own that were competitive with Steele’s.  Also like Steele, I was snapping over seemingly little things and becoming emotional to the point of tears in moments that did not warrant excessive emotion or tears.  I was taking small comments personally and letting them simmer in my mind all day.  I could have chalked it up to the combination of multiple long car rides, feeling supplemental in a crowded condo, and a particularly heinous case of PMS, but that’s just not like me.  Not lately.  Those excuses are unfair to the people (mostly one person) who felt my wrath, and I would be belittling myself if I claimed that I thrashed in insecurity for days because of some minor annoyances.  I’m an adult so I ate a Cliff Bar, reevaluated, and asked my therapist to fit me in for an interim appointment.

I recounted each incident for her; the ones where I just barked and the ones where I bit.  She agreed.  It didn’t sound like me at all.  I was baiting attention and dissatisfied with the lack of reaction, I was slipping into some kind of defeat, and I was getting aggressively defensive because of it.  If passionate impulses are rooted in survival, and I had food, water, and shelter, then what exactly was threatening my survival?  It was a mystery to her and I both until I confessed something that I was reluctant to even admit to myself.  The long weekend concluded with a concert in Wilmington, NC, and by that point I felt like I had been in a flailing freefall for five days straight.  I had caged the anger I suppose, but it left me talking just to talk—just to fill the silences.  Trying to force moments and feelings that should happen on their own but weren’t happening. 

As I walked through the venue in search of caffeine, I couldn’t ignore the abundance of alcohol.  It seemed that there was a bar every five steps, taunting me in my pursuit of a Diet Coke.  I was never tempted to drink—it was never that kind of fight.  I can breathe through that too.  But I did long for a way to feel like anything or anyone but myself in that moment.  For five days, whatever I am, who ever I am, just wasn’t enough.  And that is a terrible feeling.  The kind of feeling that makes newlywed women with potential get drunk in their closets every night just to feel worthy of doing the laundry and the dishes. 

So, there it was.  My life was never threatened, but my usefulness in this life was questioned.  The stars all aligned for some harsh comparisons and I detonated.  I’ve fought hard to be the things that I am, but my worth only shows in library basements and lecture halls.  Put me in a resort condominium with the few people whose opinions I actually care about, and I begin to shrink faster than Alice on shrooms.  In my personal pressure cooker, I’m not a lawyer, not a grandchild-giver, not employed fulltime, not the person who always picks up the tab, not my boyfriend’s ex-wife, not the person my nephew runs to first—not with mommy and Emme available—not a person that anyone else needed for anything.  Unless you consider that my step dad needed someone to make a dent in the case of cookies he bought at Sam’s Club, because I did do that.

I hate that I snapped at people and I really hate giving in to melodrama, but there is always a silver lining—or at least a lesson to be learned.  I’m not a huge fan of capitalizing on sobriety as an accomplishment, but this time, it was.  I could have drank myself useful, and wanted, and successful, and lovable, but I weigh my consequences instinctively and it will never be worth it.  If I feel like I’m falling short, its only because I desperately want to be better and to be more for the people around me—I’m just not there yet.  Going forward, I need to learn how to patch my weak spots.  I need to figure out how to be ok with existing as a work in progress when I am still a work in progress.  If I find myself talking just to talk, then I need to yield when spewing nonsense and only speak when I have something relevant to say.  Or, find someone that gets pleasure out of my nonsense.  Despite hitting a breaking point, it is nice to know that I’m not just a sober robot.  I’m still a human, with human insecurities, human likes and dislikes, and even with all the turmoil of awkward silences and PMS, I can get through the hardest moments without drinking.