Up until now, I've been working on this journal from a mental blueprint--the same sort of quasi-outlining I employ with everything I do.
Call it another symptom of my controlling/perfectionist streak--if that is the case, it's a symptom I'm thankful to be aware of at this point.
Awareness, after all, is a powerful thing; the ways it comes to us are mysterious, ambiguous, amorphous. But in the end, when we know it's there, it's voice is a pure voice that tells us no lies. In that way, awareness is a lot like love--in that way, awareness is love. And while it is always from a place of ignorance that our greatest injustices make themselves known, the possibility of awareness is always present if we are brave enough, strong enough and fortunate enough to welcome and keep it.
Awareness is always shining, even when we can't yet see it--we are all promised the potential of awareness. Just as, even during the pitch black of night, we are promised the coming of the sun. In our hearts we know it'll be there for us in the morning when we're ready for it to rise.
Yep.
I'm going to allow myself to derail here for a bit, if you haven't already noticed.
This is not the next topic or idea I had "planned" to work on--as a matter of fact, this entry will touch on several topics that I will return to later (the relationships between love/acceptance and awareness/ignorance, for example)--but it's the entry that's coming out of my fingers as we're sharing this moment together.
It's an entry for the ending of this year and the beginning of a new one. A new year, a year of moving on as we all do--a year that does not mark a new life, but a new awareness towards an old one.
So strap in folks, as I've strapped myself in here, with my orange juice and my cigarettes close at hand. You can move your chairs closer to me for this one, if you'd like: for while all of these entries are for me, about me, this one is for you as well. About you.
This is a thank you to the ones I'm fortunate enough to be thanking. And so, yes, this' gonna be a long one.
So, please, move your chair in a little closer to me. Get comfy. And let's share another moment, you and I.
Saying that it took 26 years for me to realize that I'm alive may be a bit too maudlin or melodramatic for even my own tastes; so, I'll settle for the less epic but still entirely horrible scope of justifiable truth--for those 26 years I spent the lion's share of my time and energy running away. I ran away into songs and stories, into make believe and making due with the things I didn't know how to change--all the things that, ultimately, I didn't believe could be changed.
And yes, I ran away into booze. As time stretched out, I ran away into those bottles until my legs were too tired for leaving and I was too lost to find my way out even if I had the strength for walking.
Over a life time of drinking, over the past five years since my father passed and my drinking escalated, over these last two years when my rampant alcoholism crushed out nearly every spark of my essence, I existed in a state of ignorance. Imprisoned, I remained ignorant to myself as a man, as an artist, as an alcoholic and as a person who loves and can receive love--I remained emotionally stunted, my vision narrowed to the point of blindness, my ears deaf to anything I did not want to (or, more so than that, at that time could not) accept.
Acceptance, the ability to comprehend what is and is not "right" for oneself and for others, sets the tone for the development of a person's inner world. It lays down the fundamental basics of not only who that person is in the present, but the parameters determining who they can be further down the line.
Consequently, this capacity for awareness also plays a defining role in that person's ability to develop relationships with others--and of the quality of these relationships.
Over all the years of my drinking, I never accepted my alcoholism. Over time, as it happens with all alcoholics, I no longer liked what it did to me--the sort of sub-human creature it would make me into, by way of my distorted thoughts and distraught actions.
But accept my alcoholism? Confront it? I could never stare my addiction straight in the eye without reserving the right to blink, the right to look away and stare into some distant, empty corner. My way was the way of running away, and so sometimes this empty space would be a song or a story--and that's horrible enough, an injustice enough to those things--but most times this corner was a person who cared for me. I'd run away into them to escape myself and then wonder, usually when drunk and belligerent, why that wasn't enough to take the weight off of my heart.
While my friends and loved ones could look at me and see a person they cared for, a person with traits or qualities that they respected or that resonated with them, I could not look them in the eye and honestly accept or reciprocate those things. I tried to, I wanted to; but in their eyes I saw my own and in my eyes I saw that need to run away.
Three weeks ago, I went down to Ol' Kentucky to spend some time getting to know my uncle, his family and my aunt and her significant other. It would seem appropriate, within the context of this event, for me to have used the word "reconnect"--that I spent a week "reconnecting" with my family. But that term, as correct as it may seem, would only be appropriate if we were talking about someone other than myself.
There was never a real connection there--aside from familial ties and holiday pleasantries, there was nothing present to reestablish.
Hell, I was never able to completely love or accept myself. The friends who knew me best, the ones I spent the most time with, were always kept on the other side of the barrier I put up between myself and my addiction; between myself and the world as it is.
In light of living with this, living like this, what was family? What does that word even mean? And does that word exist as anything other than just a word--did it have some meaning besides what the dictionary tells us?
Did love?
How about life?
Anything?
For a very long time, my answer to all of this was no. Of course not. Family are just people you see during the holidays, love is something that I wanted to feel but couldn't believe in and life is only a jail sentence.
I couldn't feel love because it did not exist--not in the sense that the songs and stories tell us. That wonderful, energizing, transforming force--that undying light.
That love, all of that talk, was just a fable--a story to make children smile--and it only existed as an abstract concept.
As you can tell, and as I've mentioned in an earlier entry, every definition of love that I'd ever felt or intuited before confronting my alcoholism and myself came with the cost of promised and acceptable pain. This is how I came to view love as the child of two volatile, unaccountable alcoholics--this is how I needed to perceive love to be able to love my parents in any capacity. And this is the love that I lived, that I considered to be valid; I carried it within myself and into every friendship and relationship I've ever had.
That's a sad thing to type. A sad thing to accept. It's not that I offered these people that I loved, that I loved in my way, a box of nothing. If that were true, I don't think there would be so many tears that come along with my looking back.
What I offered time and again was an incomplete gift; a story half-written, a song half sung. There were makings of something meaningful there, bits and pieces that felt right or rang true, but there was no certainty to any of it. None of the confidence that comes with the finishing of something, of completing it as best you can and knowing that you did the best you could.
I offered love, my incomplete version of love, and accepted love as I could then. But there was no true synthesis between the two--my version of love expected too much and was never satisfied with what it received in turn. I was inconsolable and so was my sad version of love.
The knowing that there were fundamental pieces missing, and the knowing that I did not know how to put them in place, frustrated me. My childhood depressed and damaged me and all the alcohol enraged me. I'd lash out at the ones I loved, casting the blame on them with drunken words and drunken actions; I was staring into that empty corner again.
An empty corner is a fine place for an incomplete person to bide in--a fitting place for the undone. But when that corner became my life and not my illusory refuge, when Hell plainly revealed itself to be Hell and not a vision of salvation, I began to make the first stumbling steps towards the mirror. There were no other eyes left to blame for my life, there were no other eyes left to see my own in--there were only my own, and this was fine; looking into those eyes without blinking was a duty long overdue.
Going down to Kentucky was very meaningful for me, very special. It was wonderful to begin to know my family as people, not as Uncle David, or Aunt Cathy, or Cousin Hannah--but as actual people; as Dave, as Cathy; to lay aside the masks I was taught to wear around others by my life's circumstances and by myself. To let myself be known as myself and to know others in that same honest, real way.
Essentially, to look myself in the eye as I looked into their own.
Once awareness comes to us, once it comes to us fully realized and we look into its eyes and see that they're our own, there is no going backwards. Somethings, once done, can't be undone. The same can be true of understanding; somethings once we know them, once we feel them, can never be unlearned. They can be disputed, we can feel hesitation and uncertainty at times, but that awareness stays with us like the sun. It'll always rise in the morning--all we have to do to remember that is look out the window and see ourselves in the light.
I can see myself now. And I can see more than myself. I can look at a friend and smile, knowing that they may be here forever or gone tomorrow, but that either way we're well met on this road.
I am an alcoholic, and being able to accept that as true lets me know in my heart that so much of what I spent my life running from was not. Alcohol is a mind-altering substance; it can be said, if speaking poetically, that it also alters our hearts. And both the mind and heart of one who is young is as pliable as sculpting putty and as fragile as a breath.
I fell into a pit very young and lived there very long. I tried to decorate it as best I could, inject a little life into all the death, but a pit is a pit no matter what's hanging on the rock walls.
And a pit is a prison, lets not mince words. It's a lonely hole. Some folks may come and visit, but when they've had enough of the dark they know the way back out. They're only visiting, after all; they don't own the hole, they don't live in it as we do.
The fact that they come back after their first taste of this dismal place should mean the world to us--and, sad to say with what comes next, in many ways it does--but all the still it makes us angry to see these people come and go.
Free.
And so, even though we love them as best we can, we want them to stay. We want them to stay with us very badly, down in this horrible hole.
After a time words and sentiments become grasping, desperate hands--and we drag down the ones we love. Because for us, leaving is not an option. What they are capable of doing, venturing out beyond the pit we call life, is not within our power. The sun is there, it's still shining, the promise of awareness is there, still shining, but our eyes aren't ready for it just yet. That light would dissolve us, like a ghost, like the revenant spirit haunting our own lives that we've become.
What I'm saying is that an addict in active addiction cannot stop for themselves. At least this addict couldn't.
No matter how much the ones who loved me wanted me to, no matter the expectations, the bonds of love and friendship, a drug addict cannot stop for themselves.
And I would not have either, if it weren't for the ones in my life who I love--for the remembering of them, as best I could in my addiction; for the memory of what they meant to me whispering beneath the alcohol. For the beginnings of acknowledging that time-honored recovery adage, "We don't just hurt ourselves with our addiction."
Each one of you, in your own way, gave me a two-fold gift when you gave me your friendship and love: you also gave me the potential for awareness, you gave me the motivation to move towards sobriety. Your lives having touched mine planted the seeds, sowed the soil alongside time, and enabled more than a damaged, depressed drug addict to grow out of this soul.
And now, sober, it is my responsibility to myself to maintain this gift. To play every card in my hand to keep it. I do this for myself: I have no life otherwise. No sanity. But is that selfish? I don't believe so. Because, in keeping myself, I'm able to share myself with others--with all of you, who shared so much with me.
Thank you.
For those who love me now, thank you.
For those who loved me then, thank you.
For the ones who shared thoughts and words with me, thank you.
For the ones who shared tears and dreams with me, thank you.
For the ones I could never break or wear down, but who I hurt all the same, thank you.
For the ones I drove away as I drowned my own heart, thank you.
For the ones realizing now that they never really knew me, thank you.
For the ones who know now as they knew then, that what they knew was that they knew me all too well, thank you.
For the ones who call me an old friend in this new day, thank you.
For the ones who call me family, from near and from far, thank you.
For the one who called me her first love, thank you.
For all the past, thank you. And thank you for all the future. But mostly, thank you for the now.
Thank you.
My name is Zane Neumann, I'm an alcoholic with tears in his eyes. And both of those things are A-OK.
Call it another symptom of my controlling/perfectionist streak--if that is the case, it's a symptom I'm thankful to be aware of at this point.
Awareness, after all, is a powerful thing; the ways it comes to us are mysterious, ambiguous, amorphous. But in the end, when we know it's there, it's voice is a pure voice that tells us no lies. In that way, awareness is a lot like love--in that way, awareness is love. And while it is always from a place of ignorance that our greatest injustices make themselves known, the possibility of awareness is always present if we are brave enough, strong enough and fortunate enough to welcome and keep it.
Awareness is always shining, even when we can't yet see it--we are all promised the potential of awareness. Just as, even during the pitch black of night, we are promised the coming of the sun. In our hearts we know it'll be there for us in the morning when we're ready for it to rise.
Yep.
I'm going to allow myself to derail here for a bit, if you haven't already noticed.
This is not the next topic or idea I had "planned" to work on--as a matter of fact, this entry will touch on several topics that I will return to later (the relationships between love/acceptance and awareness/ignorance, for example)--but it's the entry that's coming out of my fingers as we're sharing this moment together.
It's an entry for the ending of this year and the beginning of a new one. A new year, a year of moving on as we all do--a year that does not mark a new life, but a new awareness towards an old one.
So strap in folks, as I've strapped myself in here, with my orange juice and my cigarettes close at hand. You can move your chairs closer to me for this one, if you'd like: for while all of these entries are for me, about me, this one is for you as well. About you.
This is a thank you to the ones I'm fortunate enough to be thanking. And so, yes, this' gonna be a long one.
So, please, move your chair in a little closer to me. Get comfy. And let's share another moment, you and I.
Saying that it took 26 years for me to realize that I'm alive may be a bit too maudlin or melodramatic for even my own tastes; so, I'll settle for the less epic but still entirely horrible scope of justifiable truth--for those 26 years I spent the lion's share of my time and energy running away. I ran away into songs and stories, into make believe and making due with the things I didn't know how to change--all the things that, ultimately, I didn't believe could be changed.
And yes, I ran away into booze. As time stretched out, I ran away into those bottles until my legs were too tired for leaving and I was too lost to find my way out even if I had the strength for walking.
Over a life time of drinking, over the past five years since my father passed and my drinking escalated, over these last two years when my rampant alcoholism crushed out nearly every spark of my essence, I existed in a state of ignorance. Imprisoned, I remained ignorant to myself as a man, as an artist, as an alcoholic and as a person who loves and can receive love--I remained emotionally stunted, my vision narrowed to the point of blindness, my ears deaf to anything I did not want to (or, more so than that, at that time could not) accept.
Acceptance, the ability to comprehend what is and is not "right" for oneself and for others, sets the tone for the development of a person's inner world. It lays down the fundamental basics of not only who that person is in the present, but the parameters determining who they can be further down the line.
Consequently, this capacity for awareness also plays a defining role in that person's ability to develop relationships with others--and of the quality of these relationships.
Over all the years of my drinking, I never accepted my alcoholism. Over time, as it happens with all alcoholics, I no longer liked what it did to me--the sort of sub-human creature it would make me into, by way of my distorted thoughts and distraught actions.
But accept my alcoholism? Confront it? I could never stare my addiction straight in the eye without reserving the right to blink, the right to look away and stare into some distant, empty corner. My way was the way of running away, and so sometimes this empty space would be a song or a story--and that's horrible enough, an injustice enough to those things--but most times this corner was a person who cared for me. I'd run away into them to escape myself and then wonder, usually when drunk and belligerent, why that wasn't enough to take the weight off of my heart.
While my friends and loved ones could look at me and see a person they cared for, a person with traits or qualities that they respected or that resonated with them, I could not look them in the eye and honestly accept or reciprocate those things. I tried to, I wanted to; but in their eyes I saw my own and in my eyes I saw that need to run away.
Three weeks ago, I went down to Ol' Kentucky to spend some time getting to know my uncle, his family and my aunt and her significant other. It would seem appropriate, within the context of this event, for me to have used the word "reconnect"--that I spent a week "reconnecting" with my family. But that term, as correct as it may seem, would only be appropriate if we were talking about someone other than myself.
There was never a real connection there--aside from familial ties and holiday pleasantries, there was nothing present to reestablish.
Hell, I was never able to completely love or accept myself. The friends who knew me best, the ones I spent the most time with, were always kept on the other side of the barrier I put up between myself and my addiction; between myself and the world as it is.
In light of living with this, living like this, what was family? What does that word even mean? And does that word exist as anything other than just a word--did it have some meaning besides what the dictionary tells us?
Did love?
How about life?
Anything?
For a very long time, my answer to all of this was no. Of course not. Family are just people you see during the holidays, love is something that I wanted to feel but couldn't believe in and life is only a jail sentence.
I couldn't feel love because it did not exist--not in the sense that the songs and stories tell us. That wonderful, energizing, transforming force--that undying light.
That love, all of that talk, was just a fable--a story to make children smile--and it only existed as an abstract concept.
As you can tell, and as I've mentioned in an earlier entry, every definition of love that I'd ever felt or intuited before confronting my alcoholism and myself came with the cost of promised and acceptable pain. This is how I came to view love as the child of two volatile, unaccountable alcoholics--this is how I needed to perceive love to be able to love my parents in any capacity. And this is the love that I lived, that I considered to be valid; I carried it within myself and into every friendship and relationship I've ever had.
That's a sad thing to type. A sad thing to accept. It's not that I offered these people that I loved, that I loved in my way, a box of nothing. If that were true, I don't think there would be so many tears that come along with my looking back.
What I offered time and again was an incomplete gift; a story half-written, a song half sung. There were makings of something meaningful there, bits and pieces that felt right or rang true, but there was no certainty to any of it. None of the confidence that comes with the finishing of something, of completing it as best you can and knowing that you did the best you could.
I offered love, my incomplete version of love, and accepted love as I could then. But there was no true synthesis between the two--my version of love expected too much and was never satisfied with what it received in turn. I was inconsolable and so was my sad version of love.
The knowing that there were fundamental pieces missing, and the knowing that I did not know how to put them in place, frustrated me. My childhood depressed and damaged me and all the alcohol enraged me. I'd lash out at the ones I loved, casting the blame on them with drunken words and drunken actions; I was staring into that empty corner again.
An empty corner is a fine place for an incomplete person to bide in--a fitting place for the undone. But when that corner became my life and not my illusory refuge, when Hell plainly revealed itself to be Hell and not a vision of salvation, I began to make the first stumbling steps towards the mirror. There were no other eyes left to blame for my life, there were no other eyes left to see my own in--there were only my own, and this was fine; looking into those eyes without blinking was a duty long overdue.
Going down to Kentucky was very meaningful for me, very special. It was wonderful to begin to know my family as people, not as Uncle David, or Aunt Cathy, or Cousin Hannah--but as actual people; as Dave, as Cathy; to lay aside the masks I was taught to wear around others by my life's circumstances and by myself. To let myself be known as myself and to know others in that same honest, real way.
Essentially, to look myself in the eye as I looked into their own.
Once awareness comes to us, once it comes to us fully realized and we look into its eyes and see that they're our own, there is no going backwards. Somethings, once done, can't be undone. The same can be true of understanding; somethings once we know them, once we feel them, can never be unlearned. They can be disputed, we can feel hesitation and uncertainty at times, but that awareness stays with us like the sun. It'll always rise in the morning--all we have to do to remember that is look out the window and see ourselves in the light.
I can see myself now. And I can see more than myself. I can look at a friend and smile, knowing that they may be here forever or gone tomorrow, but that either way we're well met on this road.
I am an alcoholic, and being able to accept that as true lets me know in my heart that so much of what I spent my life running from was not. Alcohol is a mind-altering substance; it can be said, if speaking poetically, that it also alters our hearts. And both the mind and heart of one who is young is as pliable as sculpting putty and as fragile as a breath.
I fell into a pit very young and lived there very long. I tried to decorate it as best I could, inject a little life into all the death, but a pit is a pit no matter what's hanging on the rock walls.
And a pit is a prison, lets not mince words. It's a lonely hole. Some folks may come and visit, but when they've had enough of the dark they know the way back out. They're only visiting, after all; they don't own the hole, they don't live in it as we do.
The fact that they come back after their first taste of this dismal place should mean the world to us--and, sad to say with what comes next, in many ways it does--but all the still it makes us angry to see these people come and go.
Free.
And so, even though we love them as best we can, we want them to stay. We want them to stay with us very badly, down in this horrible hole.
After a time words and sentiments become grasping, desperate hands--and we drag down the ones we love. Because for us, leaving is not an option. What they are capable of doing, venturing out beyond the pit we call life, is not within our power. The sun is there, it's still shining, the promise of awareness is there, still shining, but our eyes aren't ready for it just yet. That light would dissolve us, like a ghost, like the revenant spirit haunting our own lives that we've become.
What I'm saying is that an addict in active addiction cannot stop for themselves. At least this addict couldn't.
No matter how much the ones who loved me wanted me to, no matter the expectations, the bonds of love and friendship, a drug addict cannot stop for themselves.
And I would not have either, if it weren't for the ones in my life who I love--for the remembering of them, as best I could in my addiction; for the memory of what they meant to me whispering beneath the alcohol. For the beginnings of acknowledging that time-honored recovery adage, "We don't just hurt ourselves with our addiction."
Each one of you, in your own way, gave me a two-fold gift when you gave me your friendship and love: you also gave me the potential for awareness, you gave me the motivation to move towards sobriety. Your lives having touched mine planted the seeds, sowed the soil alongside time, and enabled more than a damaged, depressed drug addict to grow out of this soul.
And now, sober, it is my responsibility to myself to maintain this gift. To play every card in my hand to keep it. I do this for myself: I have no life otherwise. No sanity. But is that selfish? I don't believe so. Because, in keeping myself, I'm able to share myself with others--with all of you, who shared so much with me.
Thank you.
For those who love me now, thank you.
For those who loved me then, thank you.
For the ones who shared thoughts and words with me, thank you.
For the ones who shared tears and dreams with me, thank you.
For the ones I could never break or wear down, but who I hurt all the same, thank you.
For the ones I drove away as I drowned my own heart, thank you.
For the ones realizing now that they never really knew me, thank you.
For the ones who know now as they knew then, that what they knew was that they knew me all too well, thank you.
For the ones who call me an old friend in this new day, thank you.
For the ones who call me family, from near and from far, thank you.
For the one who called me her first love, thank you.
For all the past, thank you. And thank you for all the future. But mostly, thank you for the now.
Thank you.
My name is Zane Neumann, I'm an alcoholic with tears in his eyes. And both of those things are A-OK.
