The Blind Leading the Blind

I’ve been pondering a career change. Although my part-time job in the call center of a Toyota dealership is very fulfilling and I have helped many customers make the critical choices between a Corolla or a Camry, Hybrid or gas, I’m not sure I’m really being challenged.

I’ve been researching becoming a Life Coach. I’m assured by many on-line resources, who want to take my money to teach me to become one, that it is a real profession and of great worth to the population in general. But how would I coach someone to get a life when I don’t have one of my own? Would this just be the blind leading the blind? (Hence the title of this blog post.)

If I’m going to help others follow their dreams, I better get some closure on mine. That’s what I’m thinking.

I had been looking at going back to school to become a real counselor but, sheesh, it takes years and I’m already old. Besides I have no money which is part of the impetus for a career change.

I thought about supplementing my meager income with a stable and satisfying job as an actor. We all know this is a lucrative career. Why, in my hey-day as a professional actor in Seattle I made up to $50 a week doing 7 shows a week of “Leave It To Jane.” Surely with inflation that has gone up to $55 a week.

Those two great ideas are based on life-long dreams that may not be as life-long as I thought. When is putting aside a passion, such as acting, not a sign of failure but a sign of maturity? I’ve never been accused of maturity so I’m not sure what it feels like, but I have felt failure. Are they different? Does maturity suck as much as failure? If so, I’m sticking with Peter Pan and refusing to grow up. Oh, who am I kidding, a 60 year old Peter Pan is shockingly sad and I could never fit in those green tights now anyway.

When is it all right to admit to oneself that you will never, ever move to NY, live in a dinky studio and study with Uta Hagen?  Is it okay now that Hagen is dead? Can I finally admit the real reason I never went was my pathological fear of cockroaches? When can I stop beating myself up for being a scardy cat and a big, fat wussy?

I never followed those dreams. Not to any conclusion. How could I possibly charge someone to let me guide them? To what? A part-time job in a call center?

Still, I wonder if I do have something to offer, if only as a cautionary tale. I could pull out all my press clippings (all three of them) and show them my videos of my fabulous career in Community Theater and scare them into taking a giant leap into their lives. Look what will happen to you if you don’t. Gives me shivers just thinking of the likely impact.

John Lennon once said that life is what happens when we’re making other plans. And it is true I have been alive these 60 years and I was doing stuff. It might not have been in a straight line toward a stated goal but some of it’s been fun. I guess. And I have had some truly wonderful moments in my life, not all of them centered on my kid.

I’ve been asking myself, what have I done that has given me great and lasting pleasure? I can think of two things, other than being a parent, which is the greatest S and M in life.(Should be "fiftey Shades of Parenting")

The first is watching sponsees flourish. I have had the supreme honor of working with sponsees in Al-Anon guiding them through the 12 Steps. Most of them never finished but three of them have. All three of them have vastly more pleasant lives than when they started. Not just pleasant –really fulfilling. They are happy and when they came into the rooms they were broken. 

Of course, being a sponsor is a spiritual position. I was not speaking with my own authority but that of the 12 Steps and a Higher Power. Still, I showed up every week, sat in the rooms with them, usually over more than two years, and helped. I did help. What a joy it was to help people who wanted help. I had tried to “help” all my friends and lovers over the years and their standard response was “piss off.” But these three women showed up, notebooks in hand, ready to take the next step, literally and figuratively. If I died now this would be my greatest achievement.

I also had a shining moment in the summer of 1990. I had started a small summer stock company in the coastal town of Newport, Oregon. We were in our second successful year of producing family friendly fare for the tourists and townies.

Because of a production I had seen of “The Miracle Worker” at my high school (thank you Kathy Paladino) I have loved that play forever. I never got to act in it but I decided to direct it that year. Would summer theater goers want to see a dramatic play after their Neil Simon? It turns out the answer was a resounding yes as every performance sold out. I had a great cast (thank you Annie Kaiser) and I think my love for the material shined through.

After a performance a grown man –in his 40’s probably –walked up to me. He was crying. He took my hand and thanked me for the play. It had moved him. To tears. And to take my sweaty summer hand. He thanked me. For directing a play I loved. He had been moved by a 50 year old play about a 100 year old story. No, it wasn’t Broadway. No, I didn’t make very much for directing it and the actors made even less for performing in it. But what a gift! To me.

Maybe I do have a little insight into following your heart. Maybe it’s not a grand plan but those decisions we make day to day just because our heart wants to. We don’t receive money, property or prestige. We get something better. We grow a soul.

Is that enough?

And the Winner Is ....

.

I saw a new movie last night, “The Spectacular Now”, and I don’t want to turn people off to the movie, it was well-acted and nicely done but it fucking pissed me off! Seething drive home. Mumbling to myself in my sleep. Cranky morning coffee. That pissed off.

It’s from a best-selling book so it wasn’t the filmmakers fault that the story sucked big donkey balls. And the writer got a lot of things right; the codependent young woman played by Shailene Woodley will break your heart, but they perpetrated a cardinal sin in my book –they over-simplified the huge problem of teen-age alcoholism.

I don’t want to give too much away but I probably will so if you’re going to see this movie stop reading here and come back after you’ve seen it. I’d love everyone’s comments on this one for sure.

Their first mistake was that the word alcoholism or alcoholic never occurred. Although it was clear that the main character’s (a young man with an impossibly cute name) boss was aware that he was drunk most of the time he never mentioned treatment. Although the mother had been abandoned by an alcoholic and her son had already crashed their car once, the kid still had a car and seemingly no consequences for his behavior. The first girlfriend left him because he couldn’t make future plans but it was clear she knew he was a drunk and a bad influence on her. She uttered the best line in the movie when she told him she had decided to only do things that were “good for her”. Bravo! But she was a minor character.

The character of Amy – the real love interest- drank with him, drove drunk with him, and enabled him even after he almost got her killed. These are the girls I wish the movie had tried to reach. The fact that many people love alcoholics is not the problem. The problem is that loving one can kill you.

 Hey, I was one of those girls. I would do anything if someone popular and cute wanted to be with me. I forgave everything. I rationalized the most obvious and disturbing behavior. For instance, on one of our first dates my now ex-husband drank four Long Island Ice Teas. FOUR! Red flag, anyone? Anyone?

Did I leave him? Confront him? Not a bit. Instead I rationalized my way into a drunk man’s car. Why not? I had spent my entire childhood driving with a drunk man. My mother never threatened to take a cab or his keys. That wouldn’t have gone over too well. So she dutifully got in the front seat, put us girls in the back and even though Daddy had had several martinis’ at dinner explained to us that he could “hold his liqueur.” 

I don’t think my Mother felt she had a choice. She had no job, no means of support for herself or us. She had no credit cards and her family had all died. Where would she have gone? No one in our idyllic suburb talked about these things. Men drank. Period. It was Mad Men in the little city.

But I did have a choice, so what was my problem? My problem was that I was a raging, untreated, unrecovered co-dependant of the first degree. I had a black belt in denial and a P’hD in justification. I was so desperate to be wanted by someone, to be chosen, that I never walked away.  We children of alcoholic homes are never the center of attention. It is always, always the alcoholic. Toby Rice Drews in the marvelous “Getting Them Sober” series calls them our Tin Gods. Nobody knows how to hold the spotlight like an addict. Nobody. Cute kids didn’t stand a chance.

My mother and father modeled for me an enmeshed marriage; intense, passionate and destructive. They fought to the point of violence and my father left on a regular basis. But he always came back and this is what kept my mother hooked. He needed her. He wanted her. He chose her.

The joke on all of us who felt chosen is that an alcoholic never choses anyone or anything over the booze. It does not happen. By the time I did wake up to my ex’s drinking we were engaged. I had lost two of my best friends who refused to be around him and I had been warned by everyone. One friend told me “I think he’s going to hit you one day and I can’t be around to watch it. Again.” She’d already seen me be emotionally beat up and tossed to the curb too many times. I was self-destructive and it hurt her too much to be around it.

  

So I told him I wouldn’t marry him until he went into rehab. So he did. Wow! Such a feeling of power! This man wanted me so much, loved me so much, he would give up drinking just to be with me. Man, was I CHOSEN!

What I didn’t know was that I had entered into an unspoken contract; he gives up booze and I give up everything else. Our marriage and his sobriety lasted as long as the world revolved around my Tin God. His problems, his desires, his feelings. But when I dared to take my eye off the ball and go to graduate school, the drinking began and now it was all my fault. So he told me. So I believed. So my father told me. So my mother believed. I refused to subjugate my needs to his and that made me a very bad wife and unworthy to be chosen. So he chose someone new. And I chose to take the wake-up call.

My first sponsor in Al-Anon told me that he had loved me as much as he could which was, sadly, not much. She also told me he had only chosen me because I was as sick as he was and when I decided to get better he had to choose someone sicker than me. That made me feel better. A bit.

I went to a divorce seminar at the church I was attending and I’ll never forget a very important thing I learned there; that there are tangible things we lose in a divorce (money, homes, sex) and intangible (status, self-esteem, love) and that the intangibles are the hardest to recover from. You can get more money, a new house, another lover but it takes a long, long time to get over being “un-chosen.”

So back to the movie. They do hint at her need to be chosen in a mean but true thing the alcoholic boy tells her. It was something along the lines of –you would have gone with anyone who noticed you. 

Yup.

 Like a puppy in a pound, I’ll be loyal –and blind –if you will just choose me.