Here’s a song…

…that seems to sum up how I feel this week. R.I.P. Michael.

Back on the road

I met my sponsor today for the first time in about a month. The meeting was arranged last week and at first I believed I would only be with him long enough to sack him. As tonight got closer I was less sure about doing such a drastic thing, and by the end of our hour together he was still my sponsor. We talked honestly about my difficult month; I didn’t think he would have a clue how to respond to my problems but he was quite understanding. He was angrier than I expected when I told him that I had sacked my sponsees and given up one of my service commitments. He can see that I haven’t been in the best frame of mind to give others advice, but he is definitely of the school that says I need to help newcomers to aid my recovery. I agree that I was selfish last week in my actions, but what’s done is done now and we have to move on.

I’m still not entirely happy with his sponsorship. After separating today I knew he would be going straight to meet his partner who would be hearing all about the questionable decisions I’d made. I don’t want Clive to know anything about my recovery – I don’t like Clive and I don’t think he is well placed to judge me. My sponsor and Clive have been together a long time and there’s nothing I can do about the fact that they talk. Clive is the main reason why I’m not happy with my sponsor, and I don’t know whether I will be considering sacking him again in a month or so. For now I’m holding off from making another dramatic decision. I can’t promise that I will pick up the phone and make more of an effort with my current sponsor, but I will try.

Funnily enough in the café this evening we were two tables away from a group of people I knew very well. There was Dean, Colin, Amanda and Andy, the little clique that has nearly driven me away from gay AA many times. A year ago I was right in the middle of that clique. Since then I’ve felt so many different things about all those people. It’s swung wildly from love to hate, jealousy and envy to admiration and pride. I don’t know quite how I feel about them any more. They’ve never done anything wrong and probably have no idea how much their behaviour has affected me this year. They always were and always will be ‘the cool people’, and I don’t believe I will ever be one of them again. They can cope with looking and sounding good all the time – I can’t. As I was leaving the café with my sponsor Colin asked if I would be coming to the meeting later. I said ‘no’ automatically, to which Colin responded with mild disappointment. Perhaps he is really concerned about not seeing me in meetings any more, but I have moved on. I stopped going to that particular meeting after I finished the tea commitment there in January as I simply couldn’t cope with it any more. It’s one of those meetings where the crowd and the sharing is exactly the same every week. Clive practically owns it. I felt that it was threatening my sobriety, and since I broke away I haven’t looked back. In a similar way I’ve broken away from Colin and Dean and all those former friends who I used to idolize. This is what life is about: change and moving on. Friendship groups come and go. Thankfully there are meetings away from that little coterie where I can go and see different people that I like better.

Over the weekend I saw James again for our second date. This time I went back to his place and we had a long night of fun. He’s good in bed, as am I: I’ve learnt a lot in a year. The next day was mostly spent recovering. We sat on the sofa in front of the TV with his cat and two dogs until the evening when he cooked a delicious roast dinner for me and his flatmate, who had just shown up after a full night and day of clubbing. The flatmate was not the friendliest of people. He was noticeably tense and very quiet, probably due to a comedown from the cocktail of drugs that he’d taken to stay at the club until Sunday afternoon. Before he arrived I was getting on very well with James; after that there was an atmosphere in the room and I started to want to go home. After dinner I finally left, unsure what was going to happen next with us. I still liked James but upon examination I couldn’t remember the spark that had initially attracted me to him. A lot of reasons not to see him again suddenly popped into my head, his smoking habit and my dislike of his flatmate being the two biggest reasons. Back home I remembered that I was trying to think less about things so I firmly put it to the back of my mind, deciding to think about it again only when absolutely necessary.

Since the weekend James has stopped writing about me in his facebook status updates, a worrying thing. Last week he couldn’t stop raving about me to his friends. I knew that excitement wouldn’t last – in a way I’m glad he’s stopped telling the world about me because it means the world doesn’t know my business any more. But it could also mean that James is losing interest. Let’s face it, the sharp drop in attention that I’ve been getting can’t mean anything good. For a while on Sunday night I was upset about the sudden change, before remembering how many times such a thing had happened in the past with different men. I know the pattern now, I know that this is the way things go for me. I don’t need James to be in love with me – my life will carry on just fine without him should he choose not to be a part of it.

Of course it’s a shame that I’ve wasted yet another weekend on something that probably isn’t built to last. A week ago I really liked James. I guess what’s happened is that we’ve got to know each other and found that we’re not so compatible. To be honest, I think I’m getting to a stage where I don’t want to waste any more time finding guys that I am compatible with. There are so many other areas of my life that need sorting out, I think dating and relationships may need to take a back seat again. If I could somehow date without all the worrying and obsessing then it would probably be fine, but such a best case scenario is highly unlikely, isn’t it? All that time I spent with James over the weekend I could have spent at home writing, reading, meditating, praying, even looking for jobs. Having a boyfriend isn’t going to get me out of this rut that I’ve been in for five years, I’ll still be stuck at home with no money and no freedom. At the end of the day, to stand any chance of really changing my life I need a job. I’ve known that for a very long time, but this week I think I’ve come a bit closer to accepting it.

When it comes to writing I know I have talent, but simply relying on that would keep me here at home for years. Realistically I have a much better of chance of regaining my independence with a normal paying job. So I have to forget boyfriends and throw myself back into the career search properly. I’ll keep writing for the evenings, but job searching has to be a daily priority. As ever, I can’t do anything about the fact that I lack the experience most employers want. It’s an extremely tricky catch 22 situation, because of the global recession and the insane competition that I face with every job I try for. But I don’t have the luxury of being able to relax and give up the search. I am sick of being dependent on my mother at the age of 26 and so I must put my heart into finding anything that will change the situation. If that means I have to go back to long term celibacy then so be it. I’m certainly not going to miss all the anxiety that romance has brought me this year. When I’m in employment perhaps I’ll be able to look at SLAA again. Until then, AA recovery will be the easiest kind of recovery for me to do. I have my two or three weekly AA meetings that I like and feel comfortable in – finding that base in SLAA is going to take more time and energy than I can afford to give at the moment. I wish it didn’t have to be so but it is.

Thought-less

On Tuesday I went to my home group planning to quit my commitment there so I could be free either to try other meetings or leave AA altogether. When I got to the room I saw my friend Billy and we had one of our great chats, and I started to feel less like abandoning the meeting completely. I sat through the meeting listening intently and managed to share about my dramatic weekend near the end. Afterwards I felt significantly better than I had for several days, and decided not to hand my literature commitment in after all. The group were going for coffee as always – I declined their invitation, knowing I was still potentially shaky. I’ve started to think that it’s going for coffee religiously after meetings which has caused so much of the problem. Not that there should be anything wrong with routine socialising, but for me I simply think it’s always going to be difficult. Perhaps this means I will be ‘isolating’ more than I should be, or perhaps not going for coffee every single week doesn’t have anything to do with isolation, but is rather a decision to look after myself. Only time will tell.

Therapy on Wednesday was great. We used up half the session talking about what had happened on Saturday to make me consider throwing sobriety and my life away once again. The therapist conducted a fairly detailed interview with me about the particular incident after my second home group at Notting Hill, where I was at the café and felt left out of the group for one reason or another. My beliefs about myself and my friends during that incident were examined thoroughly, and it turned out that all the old assumptions about people not really caring for me were there. Not for the first time I lapsed into this old mindset where the world seems to hate me and I hate the world and I can’t interact with anyone or anything or a normal level. I was heading into that mindset before the meeting started and at some point some kind of event triggered the full onslaught of depression.

Once I am in that mindset it is very hard to get out of it: it’s like being swept away by a tidal wave. Realising that it’s the depression tends to begin the process of getting better, but it always takes a long time for the feelings to entirely wear off. All the work I’ve done in AA has caused a shift in perception, of course, so that I can now see it more clearly when it happens. And therapy has provided a forum for me to go deeper into it; the causes are clearer, as are the solutions. In the second half of the session we talked again about the ‘perfect nurturer’ that I am supposed to envision every time depression or anxiety comes over me. I was able to see the benefits of this technique as soon as it was suggested to me, but it has not been easy to begin implementing in my life. This week I am supposed to be visualising myself being protected and soothed by this perfect nurturer as part of my meditative practise; on day two of the regime I am already experiencing heavy doubts, feeling like there’s no point in even trying any more because my negative brain keeps getting in the way.

At the very end of Wednesday’s therapy session we briefly talked about the doubting voice in my head that seems to be present nearly all the time, especially when I am trying to do things that stand a chance of improving my life. That voice has been louder and more present than usual in recent weeks; every attempt at meditation has been dogged by it. This is the voice of my experience, of all that pain and misery, the voice of so-called reason that tells me nothing can ever get better for me because I am just a sad, angry person with too much baggage.

After therapy the voice was in top form as I went to meet a date called James in Islington. We’d met the night before on a gay dating website and felt a mutual attraction which urged a prompt real life meeting. James is not like most of the guys I’ve dated in the past: he has osteoarthritis and has to use a wheelchair most of the time. I did not find this offputting in the slightest as I was more interested in his looks, which I found very appealing as soon as I got there. We drank coke and chatted in a pub for a few hours, and I wanted to rip his clothes off for most of that time. I found him fairly easy to talk to as he did most of the talking (this has always been the case with most people I meet). I would have quite liked to go back to his place that night but he insisted that we wait until the second date, which I found refreshing.

Since Wednesday the doubts have slowly crept in – of course they have. We’ve talked most nights online and he seems very keen to talk about what we’re going to do in bed tomorrow night after we’ve meet again. We’ve linked as friends on facebook and at least five times he’s mentioned how amazing I am in his status updates. I wouldn’t mind if I’d known him for a year or something, but it’s only been a week. I suppose I should be grateful that I can actually have that effect on someone, but something about it doesn’t feel right to me at this stage. I so want the kind of encounter that’s going to last; already I have a feeling that this one is going to be as short lived and pointless as all the others. In a month’s time when he knows what I’m really like he isn’t going to be posting romantic compliments in his status updates every day, is he? I know he’s not because I’ve seen men do this before. They get excited in the first week or two, then after that once the dust has settled and they’ve got to know me it’s like I never existed. I’ve seen it happen so many times.

I shouldn’t be surprised or upset that yet another encounter is heading the way of history’s dustbin after burning way too brightly too quickly. I knew there was a chance that this would happen given that I chose to find a date on the internet again. Unfortunately there isn’t any other place where I can find dates so easily. And I’m not ready to stop dating yet. I’ve met some great guys on the internet in the past. Not many, but some.

I know I’m overthinking this tonight. Tomorrow might be great. It might last after tomorrow. No one can know. I’ve written about it endlessly, time and time again over the years, how relationships baffle me, and they continue to do so. There’s no formula or set of rules to determine whether an encounter is going to be a success or not (I refuse to use the word ‘relationship’ when I can avoid it now - I think it’s been far too overused where I’m concerned). I’m worried that James is way too keen on me already, but is that really a reason to give up on him? I’m concerned that he might lose interest after he’s been allowed to shag me, but I can’t know that for sure. Perhaps what should really matter is whether I want to see him again or not, and at the moment I think I do. The doubting voice in my head, which comes from the place where my illness is, wants me to worry about James all night until I hate him and then I hate myself and decide to stay in tomorrow and drink again. That’s what the illness wants. I have only recently realised how cunning and clever it can be. What I’ve struggled with for a very long time is the question of how it can be me and not me at the same. How can I hear this voice which speaks with my voice but is not actually telling me things that are for my own good? How on earth did it get there and become so powerful, so convincing?

The crucial thing is that I’m doing something about it now, I’m listening to it whilst keeping my distance from it for the first time. I haven’t quite decided how I’m going to approach AA from now on, but I will be going back. I still have friends there and they still mean a lot to me. I imagine that some of those friends who were unfortunate enough to read the things that I wrote the other day might be quite upset with me now. That worry is one of the reasons I feared going back to AA, because people might be angry with me, they might be thinking that I have no right to be in meetings any more. Again, I’ve overthought it to death. What I have to do is move on. And stop thinking.

All the wrong reasons

It has been a very difficult weekend. Something happened on Saturday and I have barely had a moment of mental peace in the fallout from that. What has emerged very clearly from the whole messy thing is that I am very angry, still. Who or what I’m angry at keeps changing every few minutes. The important thing is that I’m angrier than I’ve ever been and it’s not going away. I should be talking to a sponsor about this but I’m not. I should be sharing about this in a meeting but I’m not. Instead of doing what I ’should’ be doing I am being naughty for the first time in my recovery. I’m sitting at home planning my exit from AA; I’ve given up one of my service commitments and will be handing the next in tomorrow. I’m going to phone both my sponsees later to let them know that I can’t sponsor them any more. And tomorrow morning after the court case I will be sacking my sponsor. After that, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I should go straight to a new AA meeting that I’ve never been to and start again building up a social circle for myself. If it’s gay AA that I’m angry at then I don’t have to go to another gay AA meeting. There are over 600 meetings in London every week; I should be able to find somewhere else to go where the resentments and the jealousy won’t be an issue any more. But I don’t want to do anything that I ’should’ be doing at the moment. I want to say ‘fuck it’ to everything and everyone and leave all responsibility behind.

Why am I so angry with AA today? It saved my life two years ago; it’s given me friends and memories and a program for life. I’m angry with it because I don’t seem to be getting from it any more what I used to get from it two years ago. Maybe I’m not putting the effort in that I used to, though that would be a strange conclusion to come to considering how much service I’ve done this year. I feel like I’ve done everything I can this year and it hasn’t been enough. I’m angry that I don’t get invited to things any more by so-called friends. I’m angry that I can’t share comfortably in meetings that I consider my home group. I’m angry that when it comes to problems other than alcohol, AA is ill equipped to give me advice. So I should go to another fellowship, SLAA perhaps, where there are different answers that might be more useful to me. But that just means more work, more effort, more time spent on a recovery that I don’t feel very enthusiastic about at the moment.

I want a break from the gay AA meetings in London, that’s for sure. I want a break from all those people who think they know me but don’t really know me at all. Individually I’m not resentful at any of them; as a group I can’t stand them any longer. On their own they’re all very nice. Together they bother me a great deal for some reason. Saturday night was not the first time I’ve felt excluded from a group in a gay AA meeting. I thought it was just because I needed to work harder at fitting in with the group. But I’m starting to think I’m just not a group person. Two years ago I thought that not being a group person meant I should throw myself into the AA ‘group’, to see if I could change that fact about myself. Today I’m not sure if there’s any group I want to be part of in AA. If I was to try different meetings and find a different group, that might work for a while, but what will I do in another two years’ time when I feel this way about that new social group?

This isn’t just about AA, it’s about the human race. I’ve never felt that I fit into the human race at all. It’s supposed to be different in AA, but two years of experience has shown me that it isn’t so different in AA really. AA is full of human beings, after all. Just like in real life, people in AA are fallible and hard to be around sometimes. AA is supposed to have all the answers if you just look for them, but the only answer I’ve found is that I’m a sick, hopeless case. Is that a place I really want to hang out in?

It wouldn’t be accurate to say that I’ve suddenly come to this conclusion overnight, though it might have seemed on the surface like I was totally in love with AA until last week. I think I was holding out hope for AA until last week. Today I don’t feel too hopeful. That might change tomorrow. I might wake up and realise how stupid I’ve been once again. But this certainly isn’t going to be the last time I feel angry at AA. I’ll come back to the realisation at some point that AA can’t give me everything I need. The fact will remain that even in AA I have to look after myself most of the time, and I don’t like that. I’m angry about the fact that to get any kind of attention in AA I have to act as if I’m falling apart. When I talk about the normal everyday things that are bothering me, such as being terminally unemployed and depressed, the best advice I get is that I need to grow up and get a job. Never mind that I wake up some days feeling like the world is coming to an end and I might be better off dead. At the end of the day, people are always going to be people, whether they’re in AA or not. I thought they could be different, but they’re not. People will always be unreliable, too wrapped up in their own problems to care about mine.

I’m sure I’m coming across as very selfish and petulant at the moment. I’m sure I’ll be told to stop being so childish and get a grip on myself. Do you know what, I don’t care any more. I want to be childish and petulant today. I don’t want to take inventory or hand anything over right now. I don’t want to go to a meeting, tell everyone how self-centred and full of pride I am then be asked along to coffee only to have to turn down the invitation because I have no money. Having no money in AA is just as status-negating as it is in the real world. Even in AA, if you can’t pay for dinner then you may as well forget about being invited to that sobriety birthday. Sorry to be so down on AA after two years of fiercely defending it, but I can’t help being really fucking furious today. This is the way I feel and I’m not going to hide or pretend that everything’s OK just to please people. I’m taking back my right to be a dissenting voice. I don’t know where I’m going to go from here, once I’ve selfishly handed all my commitments in and sacked my sponsees. I haven’t thought about whether a drink would be a good idea or not. It would probably be a terrible idea – I don’t need AA to tell me that.

Worse

Tonight I nearly had an alcoholic relapse. Not for the first time this year I’ve been having pretty strong thoughts about getting drunk. But this time it’s worse than the other times. I came closer than ever before to picking up a drink tonight. I’ve been looking forward to writing this blog for about the past three hours. I need to get a lot of shit out of my system. Sorry to those readers who don’t like profanities. I’m probably going to swear a lot tonight.

I came closer to a relapse tonight than I ever have in the past two years because I felt totally and utterly alone. I was at my home group in Notting Hill earlier, the place where I should have felt amongst friends, but for some reason I didn’t. I couldn’t share because it was a busy meeting, and for the first time there were no gaps in which I could open my mouth and say my name like there usually are. Everybody was jumping in very quickly tonight, so I ended the meeting without having said an honest word about the state that I was in. As always I joined the group for coffee afterwards, and I was able to sit with my new sponsee, who is very chatty and keen to talk about how excited he is about sobriety.

He was the only person I could really talk to at the café. Once he’d gone, I felt like an outsider in the group that I used to know so well. I was back inside that glass bubble that used to encase me at school and at college before alcohol came along. The voices in my head were very loud tonight, telling me that no one wanted me there at the café, they all had to be thinking that I was some weird freak intruding on their social space. There was absolutely no evidence to suggest that they were thinking this, but of course there was no evidence to suggest they were thinking anything else. I couldn’t jump into the conversation and give them the chance to prove my worst fears wrong. All I could do was sit there and feel like an idiot while everyone else laughed and talked and interacted around me.

I can’t give people the chance to prove that they like me, because after all these lonely fucking years I still can’t trust people enough. Even in AA, where I’ve been given so many opportunities to let go and trust, I remain that little bit distant from things. I don’t say ‘hello’ to everyone all the time; I don’t talk to newcomers or give my number out; I don’t share in that many meetings; I don’t get invited to AA dinners and parties any more. I haven’t quite got over the last remaining bit of social anxiety and so I feel as if I’m pressed up against the window looking in on everyone else in the middle of the AA bed, where it’s warm and cosy and ever so happy.

At times during the past two years I think I’ve managed to make it inside the central sphere of AA life, for instance when I was going to Dean’s place regularly for coffee and chats last year; when I went to Gavin’s place with the fabulous clique to play cards and listen to gay music last summer. There used to be lots of things like that happening; now there aren’t. Again tonight I noticed a little group going off for dinner - everyone else seemed to be asked along, except for me, even though I was hungry and could have done with a really expensive meal in a posh restaurant in Notting Hill. It doesn’t feel right to invite myself along to these things. Am I mad or am I really missing something here?

By 9 o’clock this evening I felt completely out of it and had to leave the café. I can’t understand why I’m beginning to feel like the loner in the school playground again, but that’s what’s happening. I desperately, desperately want to be part of the group like I used to be, but I don’t really know how to be part of it. I know if I was being more honest in meetings about what’s actually going on for me at the moment, I might feel less like a fraud when I sit with my sponsee pretending to be sane and normal. At one point tonight I thought that I’d probably be better off with him sponsoring me, and he’s only two months sober. That’s not a joke. I really don’t know what I’m doing in AA any more, where I’m going.

I’ve reached a point where something needs to change and it’s not changing. People come up to me all the time telling me how well they think I’m doing, how inspiring I am to them. I hate it when they do that because I think they couldn’t be more wrong. I’m not doing well at all. I might not be drinking, but something is very wrong with my life and with every day that passes the pretence gets harder to maintain. It’s not that I expect to be a happy bunny all the time – last year I definitely wasn’t happy, joyous and free every day, but over all life was better than it is now. This year I’m being forced to face up to things that I don’t like about myself.

It’s become clear how much work I still have to do on my addictions. Every day there seems to be another new problem to deal with. I’m not saying this to moan, I am just trying to be honest. The problems are not going away, they are  just getting worse because I have no fucking idea how to deal with them. I don’t know how not to be a sex addict, no one’s telling me. I went to a SLAA HOW meeting the other day and all I got was that you have to be celibate for the first twenty years or something. What fucking good is that going to do me? I’ve already done celibacy, and it’s driven me round the fucking bend.

So I left Notting Hill and went straight to Soho, the place I would feel naturally inclined to relapse in because I know how to get drunk there. It would be so easy to walk into any bar on Old Compton Street, get wasted, meet some guy and have random drunken sex to top the night off. I did it millions of times in the old days. Last night I had some kind of flashback as I was falling asleep which took me back to those days: I was in G-A-Y Bar, holding a pint in my hand and chatting freely to some older bearded bloke whilst dancing to Kylie. That would have been the best part of a drinking night out, the part where I’m drunk enough to talk to sexy strangers but not so drunk that I’m falling over and urinating myself yet.

I wanted to experience that again tonight. I realised in the meeting tonight that I miss going crazy in Soho; I miss standing in bars and talking to guys who might actually be interested in having sex with me. I don’t miss the hangovers, the embarrassing morning after recollections, the waking up in strange beds in random parts of London. But for a while tonight I thought I might be able to convince myself that none of those bad things mattered.

As I immersed myself in the Soho throng I really didn’t know if I was going to drink or not. I wanted the oblivion, the feeling of calmness and release that comes with inebriation. I knew a terrible hangover might be on the cards, but I wasn’t so concerned about that. A hangover I could probably deal with, I’ve done it so many times before. What I was really concerned about was the nearly two years of sobriety under my belt that I was about to throw away. If I was going to drink, that would be it, no more sobriety. I don’t think I’m one of these people who could go straight back to AA after a relapse. I’d know that in another two years’ time I would probably feel like drinking again. So there would be no real point in stopping at a relapse. It would have to be constant drinking until death. All or nothing. I’ve always known that. Tonight, when faced with such a massive decision I was really unsure what to do.

I got to the Duke of Wellington on Wardour Street, bought a coke at the bar and sat at a table on my own, giving myself some time to think. What I really would have loved then was being approached by some gorgeous older guy who offers to take me home and show me a good time. That didn’t happen of course. When I was drunk it seemed to happen so easily. In my two years of sobriety, it has never once been easy. Full of fear, insecurity and shame about my body, I can never come to any sexual or romantic encounter without a head full of noise and negativity. That would have been another reason to drink tonight. Drunk, I might have been able to make eye contact with someone who looked nice. Sober, I could barely look up from the table. After all this time, all this practise at being sober!

After ten minutes I felt desperate enough to send a very long text message to Spike, telling him where I was and what I was contemplating doing. I don’t know what I hoped to gain from this act of desperation. It was getting late and I knew he’d probably be asleep. I suppose in my fantasy he would have got on the phone to me instantly and told me that he was coming to get me. In reality, I got no response from him. If there had been a response, what could he have said or done to make any of it better? Really, what could have changed the fact that I felt so incredibly lonely I had to sit in a bar on my own drinking coke to avoid going home and being with myself?

That’s why I never pick up the phone to call people when I’m feeling that way, even in spite of all the talk you hear in AA about the mobile phone being a lifeline. I’ve never been a great fan of calling people at the best of times. Tonight I would have felt like I was just burdening people with my silly problems, and I didn’t believe there was anything anyone could say to make me feel better. I knew that I needed to find a way of making myself better. I either needed to get drunk, or go home and pray. Torn between two such unappealing options, I felt absolutely stuck. I resented the fact that I was so stuck, and then I resented myself for not being able to get unstuck. What a stupid fucking failure I am, I thought. How the hell did I get here? After two years, how is this madness still possible?

I haven’t helped my case in recent times by stopping my anti-depressant medication suddenly; nor have I helped myself by making a sexual dysfunction that I’ve always lived with into a big massive problem. I haven’t been communicating with my sponsor for a long time. I’m really fucking angry with my sponsor at the moment, to be honest. Ever since we finished the steps there has hardly been what you could call a relationship there. He hasn’t done anything wrong, as such. He just hasn’t done anything. I see him every now and then, tell him I’m fine then move on to speak with someone else. I don’t trust my sponsor any more. He wouldn’t know what I was talking about if I tried to broach the subject of sex addiction with him. He doesn’t have that kind of problem, apparently. And I still cannot stand his partner, Clive, who was there at the meeting tonight and who completely ignored me, as he has done a few times recently. I don’t blame him, I’ve been ignoring him too. I gave up feeling bad about that tonight. We don’t speak on each other’s wavelength and that’s all there is to it. I need a sponsor. But I haven’t got a fucking clue who I’m going to ask. I can’t think of a single person who I want to put my trust in right now.

I didn’t drink tonight. After finishing my coke I left the Duke of Wellington and got the tube safely home. Here I am now, feeling like the biggest loser in London. Wasting all that time and energy in preparation for a relaspe that was never meant to happen. What was the point in all that? Why the hell did I go to Soho tonight? I just wanted to get away from this life, this head for a while. What I’ve realised this year is that I am still incredibly angry about what’s happened to me in life, and that anger is going nowhere. I’ve written about all of it in this blog, and that’s great, but I haven’t been sharing about it in meetings because they’re all so fucking busy and you barely get the chance to open your mouth before you have the yellow card waved in your face to tell you to wrap up.

I feel like I’ve been let down by so many people in my life and what hurts the most is that I cannot do a thing to change that. People are fallible and my heart is broken by that. My mother, who I love to bits, is a co-dependent emotional cripple who cannot take too much reality without falling apart. I continue to need her to make everything all right for me, and she just can’t. My father isn’t able to be in my life very much because he doesn’t know me and I don’t know him and I don’t blame him for that, but it’s never going to change. I have to look after myself in the world now and I don’t really believe that I can. Doesn’t matter how much spirituality I read about or how much therapy I do – at the end of the day, I have to be by myself in this world sometimes and I don’t want to be.

I want some intimacy and tenderness in my life. I don’t expect love, romance or a long term boyfriend, but I want to be held sometimes by someone who really loves me. Upon careful examination it turns out that I’ve never had intimacy in my life. I’ve had boyfriends and romance, I’ve been told by various men that I am loved; but have I ever had real intimacy? Almost certainly not. I’ve never had real, authentic love where I know the person’s soul inside out and they know mine. What absolutely does me in tonight is that I don’t believe I’m capable of putting all the work necessary into the kind of relationship where those magical things might happen.

For a start I don’t know where the hell I’m supposed to meet someone authentic and real who I might be able to relate to on a level that isn’t purely sexual. Gay bars, saunas and sex clubs are full of physically beautiful men - it would have been very, very easy to find sex tonight. I strongly considered going to one of those places after leaving Old Compton Street but in the end I just couldn’t be bothered. I probably would have failed to get an erection again, and there wouldn’t have been any intimacy. Sex places are great for learning about what I like and don’t like doing with my body, but they’re not great for finding intimacy and tenderness.

A few weeks ago if someone had said to me that what I really need is intimacy and tenderness I probably would have scoffed, as I was still under the impression that intimacy and tenderness don’t exist. What’s changed my mind? I’m not sure. Someone mentioned those things in a step 11 meeting the other day and I guess it’s become my latest obsession.

See, I can’t think about anything without becoming obsessed by it. I don’t know where I’m supposed to find intimacy and it scares me that I’ll never find it and instead of putting it to one side like a normal person would, I’m obsessing about it to the point where suicide seems like an attractive option for shutting my head up. Because drinking again would mean suicide for me. At the moment it really doesn’t seem like the worst idea in the world. Picking up the phone or going to meeting to share all this stuff does seem like the worst idea in the world. How embarrassing it would be to have to admit in an AA meeting full of people who know me that I am closer to a drink than I’ve ever been. What’s Spike going to think of me in the morning when he gets my desperate loser text messages? He’ll probably feel sorry for me and not know what to do for me. And that makes me feel a whole lot worse about myself.

A conscious decision

Therapy was good this week. We’ve reached our quota of twelve sessions now; unexpectedly the therapist has offered me another four free sessions. Apparently that’s the standard practise when a patient appears to need extra time. I’m really glad I’m getting an extra four weeks, not least because it will give me another four sessions’ worth of opportunity to talk about the massive changes that are taking place in my life at the moment. Yesterday we talked a bit about my continuing struggle with sex and love addiction, before moving onto discussion of the imagery technique that is to help me deal with anxiety and fluctuating moods.

I was encouraged to go into great detail about this ‘perfect nurturer’ that I am to imagine every time I am in a mood that requires soothing. I ended up talking about the perfect mother figure, similar to my own real mother but without all the emotional baggage that has been so damaging to our relationship. I chose a mother rather than a father figure because we both know that I’ve always had a tendency to sexualise father figures. The therapist said something very interesting to me towards the end of the session: that when it comes to relationships with men, what I need, rather than ‘love’, is tenderness. What I take from this comment is what I’ve missed for so many years in all my relationships with men. I’ve strived to find the perfect love, the perfect sex, the perfect boyfriend in order to find the affection and tenderness that I think can only exist in that kind of relationship. When really I can find tenderness in all my relationships and friendships, regardless of whether they are sexual or not.

I sexualise all men who ‘look the part’, and this is the problem. I’ve become obsessed with a fantasy sexual and romantic scenario that can never happen because it is impossible. It involves the kind of man who is completely unobtainable; I’ve come to need and want that kind of man so much that I can only feel sexually aroused when I am thinking about him. With Spike the other day, the real underlying need for tenderness and care was confused with a need for perfect sex, love and romance which is simply impossible. Because it will always be impossible to experience that perfect fantasy in reality with Spike and all the other unobtainable men who seem to fit the bill, I become obsessed with them, I can’t stop thinking about them. I fall into a desperate effort to make the fantasy as elaborate and real as possible, so that for a while I can convince myself that it is actually real.

The fantasy works perfectly when I need to masturbate; acting out in that way feels so good that I have conditioned myself over years to gain a great deal of reward from it. Unfortunately there are not many other ways that I can get reward now. I can’t get reward from intimate human relationships because these are nothing like my fantasies on the whole. I can’t be with another human being in a relationship; I can’t listen to them, look at them, take comfort from them because my mind is constantly weighing up how close they are to my fantasy. For me, being in a relationship is like going on stage without my lines. I don’t know what I’m doing there, I have no idea what I’m supposed to say next, and my mind is constantly on that script which I’ve left backstage without memorising properly.

There is no script in human relationships, of course. This is what I am beginning to learn, and it terrifies me. I need to let go of my perfect, highly specific and elaborate sexual fantasies because they are taking over my life. I know that a real loving and intimate relationship would be far more nourishing for me, but without the script that my fantasies provide I don’t know how to function in any romantic relationship. I don’t know what to think, do or say in a relationship with another human being because I’ve never done it before. Every situation or problem that comes up presents me with a new dilemma and a new opprtunity to run away.

Letting the fantasies die is incredibly painful and it hasn’t helped my serenity these past few weeks. Even in the moments when I’ve been able to accept that this is the right thing to do, my head instantly wants to grab onto something else that I can obsess about. It keeps questioning what the next right thing is, where I can find that healthy relationship that will solve all my problems. I have a love addiction as well as a sex addiction, and so when I’m not focusing on the fetishistic sexual fantasies concerning straight men, I’m focusing on the perfect, gay romantic dream – the caring, compassionate boyfriend, the house, the car, the dogs, the kids - that logically seems like it could be good for me if it existed. But the truth is that these very different fantasies are two extremes that can never be achieved. They don’t need to be achieved. So what do I need? AA talks about finding the middle ground, and that sounds good, but I have absolutely no idea what the middle ground is, what it could be.

In recent sexual encounters I’ve found out surprising things about the stuff I like doing, stuff that doesn’t seem to fit into the image I’ve always had of myself as the passive, girly partner. With Gareth earlier this year I found I could be assertive and dominant when I wanted to be. I found that I could enjoy myself and be myself with another man for the first time, without neediness or rescue or forced intimacy. Everything just happened and developed in the way it was meant to develop. I won’t see Gareth again because he was too unreliable. I need a bit more than an unreliable once a month sexual partner. But the good thing is that it turns out I already know what I want and what I don’t want. I know that something natural and good can be found in the most unexpected of places. I know I can be myself in a relationship, and I know I can let things happen without questioning or planning.

So the next time I find myself in a relationship, the next time I think I might be falling for someone, I know it won’t be up to me to decide what happens. I can choose to be there or be somewhere else; I have control over some of the finer details of what happens on a daily basis, of course, but I don’t get to decide whether it’s love or not. And this really bothers me, the idea that I can’t make rules for a relationship. I can try, and I have tried many times, but it doesn’t seem to work with rules. There’s no way of explaining love intellectually. It just happens sometimes. It might never happen to me again. And I have to be fine with that.

This is all brand new stuff to me, though it feels so old and familiar in a funny way. It’s incredibly confusing, and I hate being confused. I’ve been in a constantly edgy state the past few days because I can’t work out all the answers. I can’t work out how I’m supposed to be happy. I’m worried about the fact that I can’t work out the answers, and I’m worried about the fact that I’m worried. My mind is constantly searching for a problem – it’s almost as if it doesn’t want to get better. I can see the solutions whenever I open my eyes, but my mind wants to stay in that problem. It wants me to doubt and question and analyze until I die. Ignoring my mind and looking to the heart for answers is completely counter-intuitive. Yet at the same time it feels like the most natural thing to do. Isn’t that strange? I feel completely insane today, yet at the very same time I know I’m more sane than I’ve ever been. I’m disturbed by this, yet at the same time I’m comforted by it. My worrying mind wants me to decide which I am, disturbed or comforted, insane or sane. It can’t stand the paradox of both things being true at the same time. It can’t stand the idea that things might not be black and white, that there might not be a right or a wrong.

Last night I listened to an amazing chair in a step 11 meeting, where a man with over 30 years of sobriety talked about listening to the heart, going against the instincts, letting the negative emotions and feelings pass by like clouds in the sky. Though feelings will always come and go, the perfect blue sky will always remain above them, eternal and beautiful. Underneath my emotions, thoughts, feelings, insecurities, resentments and fears there is a supremely intelligent life force deep down inside which I am tentatively beginning to access after 26 years of living up in my noisy, neurotic, egoic mind. That mind wants to feel upset and worried about the fact that I’ve failed to get out of worry and fear and anger for 26 years. It wants desperately to find a way of making the problem continue. I can’t afford to let the problem continue; I know the solution and by avoiding it I will only waste more time and opportunity to be of service in this world.

When I live in the solution I can help others, I can be creative and intelligent and at peace with myself. When I live in the problem, as I do nearly all the time still, I might as well be asleep. It’s probably no coincidence that I’ve had so many problems with sleeping patterns this year. Nearly every day I have found it hard to get out of bed before midday. That problem is a very real manifestation of the deeper problem that I am facing in life, namely that the fear and anxiety I live in almost constantly are keeping me asleep and away from the joy and peace of presence and awakeness.

I sincerely hope that what I have written tonight makes some sense, that my meaning comes across somewhere and I haven’t just posted a  rambling, random stream of consciousness. I’ve been trying to install proper routine in my days and part of that routine has involved listening to spiritual podcasts. I’m actually starting to sound like some of these podcasts; I think that’s a good thing. It’s also a very weird thing. Becoming spiritual is weird because it’s not at all what I thought it would be like. It’s not about finding a distant God in a separate realm, it’s about finding myself, my truth. Meditation is about listening to myself. When I hear myself properly, I hear God. That is where I need to be heading in life.

All the sex and love stuff is important, but it isn’t as important as finding myself is. As I’ve progressed on this journey towards finding myself I have naturally come across the sex and love addiction, because it is a part of me, but it’s not all of me. It’s a step on the ladder, a bump in the road. I can work out ways of living with it and remedying it; it can’t become the sole purpose and meaning of my life. I’ve become so anxious and off-kilter this week because I’ve allowed the sex and love stuff to become my sole problem in life. All of my attention and awareness is going into this one problem - that is what the illness wants to happen, of course. When I take my eye off the problem for a moment and remember how beautiful life really is, I find serenity again.

To sum up, I’ve been in a tense, anxious place the past few days (past 26 years, really) and now I’m trying to be in a spiritual place. The funny thing is, spirituality is one of the few things in life that you don’t have to try to achieve. It’s just that we’re so used to trying all the time – well I am, at least – trying to be something better, something more perfect, that not trying to be anything is very, very odd to me. When I’m not trying to be anything else than what I already am I realise that none of it matters, at all. The so-called problems I’ve described are part of my life situation, but they are not my life.

Today I was thinking back to my suicide attempt ten years ago, and I realised that if something were to happen and I died tomorrow, none of these problems would exist any more. I’m not saying that to be morbid or to imply that I want to die tomorrow: I want to live. Perhaps I need to live as if I’m going to die tomorrow, as if there’s no future. It’s just today that matters. Why should tomorrow matter? I’ve said it many times over the past few months, since I read Eckhart Tolle’s sublime ‘The Power Of Now’: that this moment is perfect as it currently is, and nothing needs to change. I’ve said it to myself and other people so many times but have never quite believed it. The lag between my head and my heart means that important truths take a while to sink in. Maybe it’s starting to sink in now, I don’t know. Ultimately it’s up to me what sinks in and what doesn’t.

Maybe

A couple of days ago I was mystified and intrigued to receive a friend request on facebook from someone called Spike who I’d never met or (to my knowledge) seen before. Seeing that he looked exceptionally cute in his profile picture I decided to accept his request, before sending a message asking where he knew me from. It turned out that he had mistaken me with someone else. I was naturally a little disappointed, having thought that he saw my profile and simply liked the look of me! We had a bit of a laugh about his mistake and got into a chat, realising that we actually had a lot in common. It emerged that Spike is sober like me, and used to go the gay meetings in London. We talked about people that we knew and found that we agreed on many things about recovery.

After a few hours I knew I wanted to meet him and was thrilled when he suggested going for coffee today. I noticed on his profile that he was in a relationship and my heart sank, before thinking it might be good to see if a really good platonic relationship could develop. Spike had said that there are no coincidences in life, and I thought he might be right: there had to be some reason why two people with so much in common would meet seemingly by accident on facebook.

When it came to today I was more nervous than I expected to be. Having looked at Spike’s profile pictures, I was absolutely sure that I would meet him and want to jump on him instantly. In some cases pictures on a computer screen don’t always do a person justice, but with Spike I knew before I met him that I was going to be very attracted to him, and I was right. We met in my usual haunt, Costa Coffee on Old Compton Street, the place where at least one member of gay AA in London can always be found.

The first thing Spike did was give me a big bear hug, and I didn’t want to let go. We then sat talking for an hour or so, about our lives, our families, our insecurities and the things we love. I was hoping he wouldn’t mention his boyfriend, but he did eventually, and I could tell then that I had no chance of breaking up a happy home. Not that I would want to anyway – I think even I’m too nice to do that.

After an hour Spike wasn’t feeling so well, having eaten something bad last night, and decided to go home, leaving me with another warm hug. As soon as he was gone I felt the need to cry coming on, and getting home became a matter of urgency so I could let the feelings out. Until then I was doing OK, I’d had a good time with Spike, but as soon as he was gone I felt like a really horrible person. Why? Because in the space of an hour I had managed to fall hopelessly in love with him.

Logically I can’t be in love with him because I’ve only known him a couple of days. But since when did logic stop me from getting into these situations? I feel like such a terrible person not only because I’ve allowed myself to fall headfirst into crazy, co-dependent infatuation once again, but also because he is in a relationship with someone else, and this is not what I need to be happening right now. It would be difficult for just about anyone normal; for someone crazy like me, it’s really quite dangerous.

Worst of all is the fact that Spike is SUCH a nice person. He probably needs this even less than I do. Who am I to think he’d even consider leaving his partner of over a decade for some needy kid like me? No, this is just the WRONG thing for me to be thinking about today. I’ve only just completed my three circles for my SLAA sponsor and already I’m going against them by allowing a stupid fantasy to carry me away again. I knew  my sobriety was going to be tested, but God, couldn’t you just wait a couple more years before doing this to me? Why now?

Anyway, I’m at home now, safe at least from any form of acting out. I don’t want to drink, I don’t want to look at online porn and I don’t particularly want to spend money killing my feelings in a sex club. I just want to be alone. I’ve got my home group to go to later, and I don’t particularly want to go. I should share about what’s happened today but I would just feel SO embarrassed. While other people at my stage of sobriety are getting on with their lives, forming healthy relationships, I’m still stuck at the hopelessly wishy-washy, romantic stage that I should have passed when I turned 18.

The thing is, this isn’t the first time this has happened to me, is it? I’ve lost count of the number of intense crushes that I’ve suffered from in AA. I’ve suffered from this tendency towards infatuation since the age of fifteen or sixteen. My feelings today were just as intense as the feelings I had ten years ago. For some reason, I’m not getting past this, and I just don’t know what to do. Should I see Spike again and pretend to just be happy with platonic friendship? Hope that the crush will die as soon as I realise how great the friendship can be? I’d love that to be the case, but right now the thought of yet another childish fantasy crush dying on me strikes me as very sad. I was talking about grief the other day, and it’s grief that I’m in right now: grief for another dying infatuation. The fantasy doesn’t want to die, and that’s why it’s so painful.

If there is any positive to be taken from today, and believe me, I’ve REALLY tried to find one, it’s that I am still capable of meeting men who make me feel anything. I’m not a cold hearted robot, I’m a human being, and I will always be one. I shouldn’t feel shame in that, though I do a bit. I guess if I can click with some guy I met randomly on facebook in such a big way then I can click with anyone, and maybe one day, one of these men will be able to reciprocate the attraction.

Decision

It’s been a productive and challenging few days, full of growth, I think (I hope). I spent most of Friday going through my ‘three circles’ with a potential new sponsor in SLAA. I went to his house expecting only to spend an hour or so there; I didn’t end up leaving until we’d been talking for more than four hours. It turned out that the task of identifying my ‘bottom line’ behaviours was going to be harder and more complicated that either of us expected it to be. I have a number of problems with sex and relationships, as we all know, and the roots of these problems needed disentangling. An addiction to fantasy seems to be my biggest problem, so acting out in fantasy was identified as one of my main bottom line behaviours. Acting out for me usually involves using internet pornography, therefore I can’t use porn any more (I always knew it was a big thing for me but I was completely unaware of how massive its impact was on my life).

My addiction to porn and fantasy has stopped me from being able to enjoy real human relationships – as long as I continue to indulge in the fantasies then I will be blocked from engaging with spiritual, loving connections. As I said, I really didn’t know this was a problem. Why did it suddenly become so important on Friday? Well, if I look back at the past year of my life more closely, I begin to see that every sexual encounter required me to indulge in a fantasy of some sort. I can never fully be there when I’m with someone; my mind always has to drift away to the land of fantasy to some degree for me to enjoy myself easily. Since I stopped taking my medication I have been masturbating nearly every day without fail, and on a purely physical level that has taken a lot of sexual energy away from real life encounters with men. My new SLAA mentor has advised me to stop masturbating, so that when I start meeting men again I will have more energy to direct into the experience. I can definitely see the point of being stricter with myself around masturbation, though of course it has been extremely difficult since Friday not to indulge my addiction secretly. The thrill of secrecy and the wildness of my fantasies are what makes it so appealing, so addictive if you like.

With alcohol it was so easy to get sober – I just had to stop drinking. With sex there are countless grey areas; sexual sobriety is not in the slightest bit clear cut. It’s up to me to decide how I’m going to be sexually sober. I can’t use porn any more, but that won’t stop my mind from drifting off into fantasy every time I see someone in the street or on the tube who I find attractive. My fantasies always take me in a very specific direction into the realm of fetish; all the years of living in that very specific fantasy have practically killed any natural enjoyment I might get from real life encounters which are nothing like fantasy. In real life there are bodily fluids, smells, hair, dirt, sweat, and all the issues of compatibility to be worked out. In fantasy there isn’t any of that, and I’ve spent so long perfecting my fantasy that I’ve come to need sex to be that way at all times.

The reason I was at my mentor’s house for so long on Friday is because we couldn’t work out my healthy outer circle behaviours. We were able to define with some confidence the bottom line behaviours that have ruined my ability to enjoy sex and function in relationships, but when it comes to behaviours that will lead me to those healthy relationships, it’s an opaque grey area that just can’t be explored intellectually or linguistically. I’ll simply have to go out there and find experiences and encounters that seem authentic and healthy for me. I won’t know what they are until I’ve found them. To an extent I’ve been looking for and finding these encounters all year. Every man I’ve spent time with this year has provided me with learning and growth, because I’ve done it all sober with my eyes open. Maintaining my sobriety, then, will be a good way of helping to maintain healthy boundaries in relationships. But I can’t just say what it is that would constitute a healthy sexual relationship for me. I’d love to meet someone, become friends and then become lovers, but that would be setting a boundary which excludes other potentially ‘healthy’ experiences from my life. As I found last week, it’s perfectly possible to meet genuine guys in sex clubs. I might not find someone to spend the rest of my life with there, but that might not be what I want or need at the moment.

So sex clubs and saunas are in my outer circle of encouraged behaviours now, because they provide safe spaces for me to meet men and have real fun in. I’m not saying that I want to spend the rest of my life in sex clubs – my circles can always change – but for now, they might be good for me. The only reason I might shy away from those places is to do with fear and shame about my body. There is no moral issue here – for some people they might not be good places, but for me they can and do provide opportunities for growth. I never went to a sex club in my life before this year, so it’s not as if this can be called an addictive behaviour at the moment.

After going through all that, it was nearly 6.30 on Friday evening and I had to go to work at the LGBT helpline where I’ve volunteered for the past year. I wasn’t looking forward to it because I still have a trainee shadowing me there, and I didn’t know if I was in the right frame of mind to take responsibility for someone else. Then I realised that it was probably the best time for me to do that kind of work, as I needed to get out of my own head and help someone else. Service has kept me sober this year, there’s no doubt about it. It was a busy shift in the end, and my trainee was able to take her first ever call, from a middle aged man struggling with his sexuality. She was very good on the phone; I was proud of her.

Yesterday was mostly taken up with training in bereavement counselling, organised by the helpline to help us deal with bereavement calls better. I’ve taken a few calls from bereaved gay and lesbian partners in the past year, and though I don’t think I’ve ever dealt badly with these calls, it was good to be given guidance in techniques, tools and theories about bereavement. It was a long day and I learnt a lot from it. As time went on and we learnt more about the symptoms of grief, I found myself empathizing with the case studies, and I realised that the depression I’ve gone through this year – all the depression I’ve ever experienced in fact – has been part of a grieving process. All this time I’ve been grieving for my lost childhood. That’s why I can’t get over it, because I’ve never allowed myself to grieve properly for it.

I knew that what I went through in childhood wasn’t my fault, I knew it scarred me and caused all the fear and anger that has held me back in adulthood - but I didn’t have the label ‘grief’ to apply to it. By giving it a label I know it’s not just me now. I know now that anyone who went through what I went through would experience the same grief as me, and I don’t think I’m mad any more. There’s no set timescale for anyone to get over their grief, it’s a very individual thing. There’s no right or wrong way to cope with it, either. I’ve coped with it by internalising my anger and hatred, as well as turning to alcohol and sex for validation. I think it would be fair to say that right now I’m just beginning to get over my grief, ten years after it started. I’ve spent an entire decade running away from it and fighting; now I’m finally facing it, and I’m starting to see above it for the first time. I feel like I’m emerging from a deep ocean and peeking my head above the water for the first time. I can see the sky and the stars now. I haven’t felt depressed for a moment this weekend.

After the training was finished I made my way to my regular meeting in Notting Hill where it was my turn to act as secretary. I felt peaceful and serene, for the first time since stopping medication. I thought I’d never feel serene again! That I can feel that way without any help proves that the work I’ve been doing on myself is the right work. Yesterday’s meeting was not much fun, unfortunately. The person I’d asked to do the chair was a good friend, and I thought I was doing him a favour by giving him his first chair (he’s been in the rooms for a year and hadn’t been the main sharer before). He was incredibly nervous when he got to the meeting, telling me he felt sick, and he had ten pages’ worth of notes to help him speak. I’d never seen that before! This made me feel nervous for him, and I prayed that everything wasn’t about to go horribly wrong.

In the end he shared well, going over his allotted time of twenty minutes despite thinking he’d only speak for ten. The sharing back from the room was full of praise and warmth – it turns out he’s helped a lot of people this year. That’s why I wanted him to do a chair, because I knew it would be a good experience for him. But I couldn’t shake my unease throughout the meeting. Once it’s started it doesn’t stop. At the end a new secretary had to be elected as my term is coming to an end soon. Unbelievably I’ve been doing it for a year. I knew it would be difficult to get people to volunteer because most of the regulars at the meeting had already been secretary in the past.

In the end we had to agree to call another group conscience for two weeks’ time. I felt silly and guilty for ending the meeting early just so we could have a pointless group conscience where no one got elected. I went for coffee with the group, though I had no money, and sat at the table with no drink while everyone sipped their coffee and cans of coke. I felt really exposed as a pauper; I had to leave after ten minutes. Not before a newcomer had asked me to be his temporary sponsor, though. I was shocked and flattered to be asked. Apparently I’ve been doing something right in the meeting, even though I feel like I haven’t.

So I have two sponsees now, which means I have to deal with this fear I have of using my phone. And I have to make a decision about my sponsor. I know the trust isn’t there with my current sponsor any more. I’d like to find a new one, though I still don’t know who I’m going to ask. When I had just one sponsee I was comfortable just thinking about it - now I have to take action. I need to see my current sponsor at least once more, as in nine days’ time we are appearing in court as witnesses against Ben, the psychotic alcoholic and drug addict who attacked us in a meeting last year.

I am not looking forward to the court appearance at all. I wish I didn’t have to testify against Ben, he’s just a sick person whose way I happened to get in last year. But it doesn’t look like the case can be called off now. He’s been charged with common assault against my sponsor and I was the only witness that night last August. I can’t believe how long ago that was. At the time it seemed to bring me and my sponsor closer together; now I don’t feel like I have a sponsor. What happened? I guess we stopped putting the work needed into the relationship after I finished the steps. When doing the steps the relationship is very defined and necessary, after the steps it has to change and evolve. I don’t know what it’s meant to evolve into. I guess I’m going to find out soon enough.

Dis-illusion

If I had to describe how I feel right now in one word it would be ‘disillusioned’. My life is not worse than it was a few weeks ago, but I feel worse on the whole than I have felt in ten years. I spoke with my therapist about it and he has confirmed that the kickback of stopping anti-depressant medication abruptly can last up to two or three months. The flattened mood I am experiencing at the moment is definitely unusual, even for me, and I take some comfort in the knowledge that it should get better in the next few months, though not much. I shouldn’t have stopped taking the medication so suddenly, I admit that now – but it’s too late to go back and I have to deal with the consequences now.

Last week the therapist gave me an exercise to do where I had to identify the sources of the critical voices in my head and the ‘rules for life’ that these critical voices installed in me. Today I read out the list of voices and rules that I had identified, then I had to think of reasons why these voices should be believed, then reasons why they shouldn’t be believed. We got as far as identifying the people responsible for bullying me during my time at school and the roster of negative beliefs that they gave me, and then we talked about the credibility that these people really should be given. In terms of credibility, it turns out that the boys I went to school with are only worth listening to because (in my opinion) they were more ’normal’ than me – they had better lives than me, they came from better backgrounds, had two parents as opposed to one, they were rich, had nice things, and they looked better than me. If I look at what they were actually like as people, their personalities and their core values, they have no credibility whatsoever. Without exception the group that I am thinking of were arrogant, ignorant, intolerant, homophobic, racist, sexist, lazy, unintelligent, cruel, unfair and bloody-minded. Worst of all, they were just kids. Today they are probably nothing at all like the people they were ten years ago, yet the beliefs that they installed in me all that time ago still stay with me.

Making all these negative judgements about what they were like ten years ago does not mean that I am blaming them for being really bad people. Part of me was worried as we did this exercise that we were picking apart the characters of a bunch of people who knew no better. The purpose of the exercise isn’t to shift blame, it is to highlight the fallacy in my beliefs. I’ve spent all this time believing I’m a freak and a bad person because I was told so by people who appeared to be better than me. I didn’t know any better, and they didn’t know any better either. On a moral level there is no credibility to what those people told me. But for years I’ve given them credibility because…well, on a superficial level, they seemed more credible than me.

The reason this is so important today and the reason why I’m spending all this time talking about it is because the beliefs taken from my school days are clearly the most important beliefs that I have to deal with now. All the depression, anger, sexual and financial problems that float around me every day are no less important, but they can’t be dealt with at the same time. Dealing with the negative voices in my head is as much as I’m going to be able to do during this course of therapy; I dare say that learning ways to live with the voices may bring me some way towards alleviating the depression and the anger.

For next week I have to identify the beliefs given to me by my mother and father, then I have to assess the credibility of their voices. I’m not looking forward to this exercise at all. It’s fine to be objective about the boys I went to school with because I haven’t seen any of them for ten years; being objective and detached about my parents is a completely different ball game. But I have to do it if I’m ever going to get better. When it comes to my parents, I’ve been given a bunch of negative beliefs about men and relationships, and I can’t move on without taking this objective look at them. If I’m honest with myself, the things that my mother taught me about the world were incredibly damaging; the effect of my father’s absence in childhood was equally damaging. No, they didn’t mean to damage me, but that hasn’t stopped me from carrying on with the negative effects of that damage, has it? I realised last year when I did step 4 (and to an extent long before that) that my parents aren’t to blame for anything that’s wrong in my life. But while the work I did in step 4 was good, it didn’t go far enough, I know it didn’t. I need to be objective and take stock once more. I don’t want to, but what choice do I have?

After therapy today I felt, not for the first time, as if my head had been scooped out, stirred around and popped back in. This does not mean that therapy is bad for me. A lot of people in AA have a negative view of therapy because it can make you feel worse than you did when you started. They espouse that view in meetings, completely ignoring the fact that the steps are very similar to therapy. Doesn’t step 4 make us feel worse than we did when we came into the rooms? In some cases it makes us feel much worse, and it’s no coincidence that a lot of people ‘go out’ on step 4. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing. Sometimes things have to get worse before they can get better. There are some things to be faced that haven’t been looked at for many years, as I am finding now.

I hold onto the fact that things are not always going to be this way for me. I know I’m experiencing withdrawal from anti-depressants; it doesn’t help that I’m dealing with really deep-seated issues and hang ups at the same time. It would have been much easier if I’d waited for therapy to finish before I stopped taking the pills, but in a way I’m glad I stopped when I did. It’s given us a chance to talk about ways of dealing with the really bad anxiety and depressive thoughts that would have come up much later on – otherwise I might have finished therapy thinking I was absolutely fine, not in desperate need of the techniques that the therapist is starting to teach me. One good technique that we’re exploring is an imagery technique designed to address the head-heart lag. By imagining my perfect nurturing, loving parent figure at times of extreme stress, I can get at the emotions in the body rather than just addressing the problem on an intellectual level. The work I did in AA was intellectual – it showed me the reasons why I needed to let go of my character defects. It appealed to my head, not my heart. Hopefully this new technique will get into my heart and my gut, and produce real change in me.

I made my way from therapy to the step 11 meeting in Soho, thinking I could do with the ten minutes’ silent meditation that they practise there every week. As usual I found it impossible to sit still during those ten minutes at the beginning, and the noise in my brain was almost unbearable. I couldn’t stop worrying about worrying, questioning what I’d learnt in therapy today and what difference it would really make in my life. At various points I managed to remember the techniques that the therapist had mentioned to me, and I forced myself to start listening to the room, thus bringing myself out of my thoughts and into present awareness. But all I had to do to slip back into negativity was take my eye off the ball for one second. I have a lot of hard work ahead of me: changing my thoughts and my outlook on life is going to take constant vigilance and practise. I’m like a newcomer trying to get sober again, only this time I’m trying to get emotionally sober. No one ever told me that at two years in I would be feeling this bad. I’ve allowed myself to feel resentful at that today, along with a lot of other things. Now I have to let go of that resentment and get back to the present task of maintaining emotional sobriety. I need to keep myself in the present at all times. I need to ignore the nagging doubts which keep telling me that the work I’m doing is useless because I will always be a sick person.

Here’s a song that’s making me feel better at the moment:

Impasse

The big question ‘is this it?’ has continued to bug me today, though I don’t feel so bad about it tonight. I’ve had a reasonably productive day, the highlight of which has been my home group in Notting Hill. Of course, before during and after the meeting I felt that moderate level of anxiety which doesn’t seem to want to give me a break, causing me to feel upset and irritable, two emotional states I am very used to. I ploughed on with my commitment to the meeting regardless, though I did feel a bit shaky when confronted with questions such as ‘how are you?’ Answering those questions is my least favourite thing to do simply because I never know what to say. I can’t be dishonest and say ‘I’m fine,’ but explaining how I really am in most cases would take too long.

When the meeting started I tried my best to listen to the sharing but increasingly felt myself drifting away, deeper into my negative thoughts and emotions. It took me until the end of the meeting to shake myself out of it and open my mouth; luckily talking about what was going on for me seemed to wake me up a bit, though as soon as I’d finished it occurred to me that I had just allowed a lot of random gibberish to pour from my mouth. I had intended to talk about depression, a phenomenon so difficult to pin down in words because there can be so many feelings associated with it.

Afterwards some members came straight up to ask if I had come off anti-depressants without my doctor’s knowledge; when I admitted that I had there were a few disapproving tuts, informing me that I had done something not very clever. I knew when I decided to quit taking the pills two weeks ago that I was doing something the medical profession doesn’t recommend, but I didn’t think it would have such a long-lasting impact on me, and it seems that others on similar medication are becoming concerned about me. This is the thing: I don’t want to be depressed, upset and angry all the time, but I don’t want to have to take a pill every night for the rest of my life. Why would I want to do that? One person tonight said that they’re recently back on anti-depressants after doing what I did last year; if I choose to go back on the meds I would exchange severe depression and anxiety for a bit of tiredness and impotence. There is a definite qualitative difference between how I feel now and how I felt a few weeks ago when I was still on the meds, so they definitely did what they were supposed to do (even when I thought they weren’t).

The tiredness and the lack of libido shouldn’t matter to me when making a decision about this. It’s the mere fact of being on mood-altering medication that seems to be the issue for me now. I thought I’d left the debating society when it came to whether one can be truly sober on medication or not, but obviously I haven’t. I can’t make up my mind what to do. I should really speak to my doctor about this but I get the strong impression with my particular GP that he just doesn’t care.

The other thing I can’t seem to deal with at the moment is sex and relationships, as always. I revisited a local sex club last night, hoping to find a handsome stranger to take me away from my troubles for a moment. That’s exactly what I found, and it was quite nice, if a little scary, what with the open nature of the club that we were in and the voyeurs watching us as we undressed each other. The man I found was my exact type in every aspect, all the way down to being American. He was a bit drunk, though, and he wanted to undress quickly, which led to me not being able to enjoy the encounter quite as much as I could have. In fact I found myself failing to maintain erection again, the exact thing which happened to me the last time I went to a sex club. It was so humiliating I could have cried. Knowing there were people watching didn’t help. I’d gone there to enjoy myself, to have sexy fun without all the expectations that the normal ways of meeting people place on me. I ended up feeling like a bit of an idiot, and I just couldn’t wait to get home.

We got our clothes back on and went to the bar to talk for a while. The handsome American, called Kevin, was surprisingly understanding about my predicament, telling me that he’d never have been able to do what I did at my age without alcohol in his body. We chatted for quite a while and it turned out that apart from the age difference we were fairly similar people. It might have been better if he wasn’t so drunk, but I saw genuineness and intelligence in there somewhere. He told me, like many others, that I was an incredibly attractive person bound to find someone who can make me reach orgasm one day. I still have my doubts, but the complete unexpectedness of our conversation has made those doubts a bit less than they were.

I’ll never see him again – it was a purely sexual encounter and nothing else – and I can accept that. What I can’t make my mind up about is whether I want to keep going back to sex clubs to see if I can meet similarly interesting men in the future. That I found Kevin last night doesn’t seem like a coincidence. He was nice, he was hot and he liked me a lot. If I can find that once I can find it again. But do I want it to be in a place where there are others watching every second of intimacy that takes place? I just don’t know. My therapist doesn’t think I should label all casual experiences in public as ‘bad’, and I can see his point. Just because I’m not going to see this particular person again (he has a partner in real life who he’s very happy with) doesn’t mean it was ‘immoral’; just because there were dark rooms and penises on display everywhere doesn’t mean it’s intrinsically unhealthy for me. It is what it is, nothing else.

What’s unhealthy is this obsession I’ve developed with trying to figure out what’s right for me. I know what I don’t want, and I’m quite capable of setting boundaries around most of those things these days. When it comes to what I actually do want, I feel hopelessly lost. I thought I wanted that man last night, but when it came down to it he couldn’t even make me stay hard. I thought I wanted Gareth, but the fact I haven’t heard from him since last week hasn’t upset me as much as it might have done. Guys like that fit into a very specific physical category which, while sexually arousing, doesn’t do so much for me any more. It does something for me, but I’ve become painfully aware of something missing in all of these encounters recently.

It would be simplistic and perhaps overly romantic to say that a spiritual or emotional connection is missing. I think I had a spiritual connection with Kevin last night, albeit a brief one. I had a spiritual connection with Gareth, albeit a wishy-washy and fragile one. I doubt I’m going to see Gareth again as I’ve started to think he’s just not good for me. He doesn’t reply to text messages, he’s always busy and I don’t just want to see him on Saturday nights.

So I don’t know what I want, and I definitely don’t know what I need. Perhaps I don’t want or need anything, but that answer just makes me more confused than ever. I must need something. But why? And how on earth do I find it? “Hand it over”, “let it go” both spring to mind…well, I guess hand it over is all I can do tonight.