A Decision Finally!
So, after languishing for months in the inbox of an editor, I have received reviews for a paper I wrote on the topic of research policy. They were strongly positive, with all reviewers describing the work as “interesting” and one even saying it could have “far reaching consequences”. Which is really cool for something I cooked up in my spare time for fun.
The official decision was given as “Revise and Resubmit”. Usually (but not always) that means that the editors believe it is meritorious enough to warrant publication, if the issues identified by the reviewers can be addressed. And I can absolutely address these reviews. I feel confident that this will be published, and I am hopeful that it will make a contribution to the literature on research policy.
For the first time, I feel like I can commiserate with my biologist and chemist colleagues who are asked for new experiments in their reviews. My reviewers have asked me to upend my research design and make wholesale new experiments, produce new figures, and conduct different statistics. Now, because I’m working in simulation, this will take me a few days, rather than the weeks or months that it might take to satisfy reviewers in other fields. Nevertheless, it’s still a large ask.
But it’s an interesting ask, and I think it will make the paper stronger. I’m feeling positive and confident. I think this is going to make a tiny difference in a small part of the science world. It’s exciting. This is not my professional work. This is just something I did because of interest I acquired through conversations over on twitter.
But science giveth, and science taketh away. Nothing means anything until an editor says “Accept as is”. We’ll see what the future holds for this little project.
Results are Results.
I’ve been working out with a personal trainer once a week for a month now. And I’ve been going to the gym and running a total of about five days a week for 4 months. I’m putting in a lot of miles, and doing a lot of calisthenic type work and lifting (not huge weights, but medium weight for a lot of reps, that kind of thing). Obviously, like with all things, I’d love it if I were suddenly to look like Tim Howard in match-fit condition, but that ship has pretty much left Westeros.
After a month with my trainer, I have officially made no detectable change. My body fat % is down two tenths of one percent. My measurements are all identical within the margin of error. I am not making obvious progress in any way. And you know what, that’s ok. Because one way I am making progress is in my time and distance on the road when I run.
I can now routinely run sub 27-minute 5Ks. I can routinely run sub 60-minute 10Ks. And I have run a half-marathon (unofficially) at under a 10 minute per mile pace. These are incredible accomplishments for me, and I’m very pleased with them. I’ve worked very hard for years now on achieving these goals. And as I’ve improved, I’ve set new goals. And I believe that unless I am injured, I will accomplish those too.
I’m going to sign up for the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington DC next October 25th. Well, I’m going to enter the lottery. If I get in, I’ll run it. I asked my uncle, and if I get in, I’ll have a shirt made with Phillip’s Marine Corps picture and run wearing it. A year is easily enough time to train up for a marathon. From where I am, I could probably do it in 10-12 weeks with a disciplined approach.
But the real results that matter to me are my metabolic numbers. My A1c is 5.5. And for a forty year old, overweight man with a strong family history of type II diabetes, that’s spectacular. My cholesterol is normal, my blood pressure is normal. None of that was true 5 years ago. I am, objectively, younger than I was about half a decade ago.
The only thing of concern is my fasting glucose, which, at 99, could definitely be better. Very high end of normal range. Which tells me that if I weren’t working out as hard as I am, I’d be at much greater risk for developing diabetes. But really, my risk of developing diabetes is basically 100%. My goal is to postpone and control it. And putting miles on my feet will do that.
Results are results. It doesn’t really matter where I get, as long as I stay halfway fit and uninjured. What matters is that I strive. Fight like hell for the next mile, the next step, the next hill, the next race. Every day, I give what I’ve got that day. I’m not ashamed when it’s less that what others have, or less than I had the day before. Because when I give what I’ve got today, then usually, tomorrow, I’ve got something a little more.
Doing Emotional Work.
I tend to operate at high levels of anxiety. I think this comes as a surprise to no one who knows me, even just online. I fear that sometimes this comes across as pointless drama, but in actuality, I’m regularly feeling deeply concerned about at least two or three aspects of what I consider to be my core identity. Home, career, relationship, family of origin, health, social interactions. I’m nearly always distressed about a few of these in one way or another. The one central aspect of my life that does not trouble me is my sobriety. There I fell centered and stable.
Recently someone I care about told me that they were relieved that I didn’t freak out over a minor issue. I found it jarring. And they were right to expect me to: I have in the past and I will again. The difference, this time, is I had advance warning and knew what to expect. So I didn’t freak out because even though the plan was a little anxiety-provoking, things went according to plan. I’m often like a panicky investor: it’s not bad news that’s the problem, it’s unexpected news. But I was a little distressed that my anxiety provoked a negative reaction in someone I want to feel positively towards me.
I have never been the picture of mental health. If I had a portrait in the attic, it would be of a drunken lunatic, terrified and hollowed, callow, vain, obsessed, and picking at scabs. I suffer from at least two mental illnesses and possibly three or four. Of these, I think two are pretty solidly in remission. But my anxiety is not. And I need to do something about that.
I used to take Xanax. I like Xanax, but I can’t take it anymore.
When seeking answers to mental and emotional issues that trouble me, I use tools I learned in psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, and Alcoholics Anonymous. My anxiety is usually related to something real: there is a leak in my house; I have more work to do that I think I can get done by my deadlines; I have made an ass of myself among my friends. I need to look at where in my mind those distresses nestle, to begin their work of causing me to fixate and ruminate.
Usually it relates to feeling safe. To the fear of losing something I enjoy, like a relationship or a place to work or live. Separating my anxious fantasy from my reality is difficult for me. The first difficulty is just recognizing that I am catastrophizing, or that my anxiety may not be in line with the gravity of my real-world situation. Once I’ve done that, I will often vacillate rapidly between feeling silly, self-comfort, and embracing the anxiety.
Sometimes there’s a behavioral solution. Meditate. Bathe. Run. Sometimes I simply have to endure it until the circumstances change. I used to drink, or take (prescribed) pills. Now, I will talk to a sponsor. Or simply try to engage more deeply with the calmer places that hide inside me during times of stress. And one way or another, I manage the anxiety without going completely insane.
But finding a way to not become anxious in the first place? I am still working on that. And I don’t know the solution there. It may simply be beyond me. And that’s ok. I have the right to experience my world the way I do. I would like to experience less anxiety, but that may not be an option for me. It is not how I feel that is the problem: it is how I respond to my feelings. And there, I have power.
What Have I Done Here?
I’ve been blogging for coming up on 6 years. Countless hundreds of pages of mostly crap, spun out over more than half a decade of sobriety and various life events. A divorce. A career involving two jobs a thousand miles apart. Some academic successes. Some failures. Physical and emotional changes. A new romance. Life.
But I don’t know what I’ve done here. Is this a thing? What is the structure of a blog? What is the value of this archive of occasional murmurings? I never kept a diary. I only write because I hope people read. I hope I have something to contribute. I like contributing to things. To what?
Sobriety? I have been told I’ve helped a few people in that regard. And I hope that that’s true. I like helping. But sobriety is an individual journey. and the successes of others belong to them, not me. I cannot claim credit for anyone’s recovery, nor would I want to. But I do like the idea of being useful.
Science? I’m barely a scientist. And it’s plain I don’t belong among the professional biomedical scientists who are actually doing important work that gets cited and drives human understanding forward. I am quietly making a few small inroads into using computer modeling to improve healthcare delivery. Maybe I’ll make a difference in the literature. Maybe people will try my ideas. Probably not. But what I report here is not of any obvious value to me to the scientific community.
As an engineer, the most important thing is to contribute to my local environment. I’m doing that. My efforts are being adopted and my hospital is improving based in part on the work I’ve done. But I don’t really discuss that here.
I started blogging to try to chronicle my life in recovery. My journey in sobriety. Slowly, that mission crept and ramified. I began discussing politics, science, fitness. The river of my internal monologue fractured into many small streams. Until none, I think, is large enough to slake any thirst. This is the Okavango. My words reach no sea.
I write because I write. Because I hope to connect. I feel like a can strung to a limp cord.
On Beyond.
Yesterday, in a fit of madness, I decided to see what would happen if I ran half a marathon and then just kept running. I was going out for what was supposed to be 10 miles, and I just felt really good. It was a cold, very windy day. I found myself running into 30 mph gusts. Leaves and dust blew around, but the city was clean from Saturday’s long, hard rain. So when I reached the turnaround point (The Killing River Crossing), I bypassed it and kept running into the hinterlands. Not too much further, just about a mile and a half, lest I be so far from home I could not return under my own power.
When I did turn around, I had the tailwind the whole way home, sometimes in exhilarating gusts that literally had me yelling “wheeee!” at one point. After the 12 mile mark, it became difficult. The last mile was a grim, pounding trudge. But I ended back home, having gone 14.4 miles, in less time than my last half-marathon took. I use Runkeeper to track my runs, though I’m not especially fond of it. It tends to read about 2.3% longer than I actually go, when compared against a measured course. It read both the Pittsburgh and Philadelphia half-marathons at 13.4 miles.
So, using 13.4 as my guidepost, I ran the half marathon yesterday in 2:06:33. I won’t consider that my personal record though. That remains at 2:17:49. Not knowing the precise distance isn’t enough to update my record, not for a long run. Regardless, I think it’s fair to say that I’m within striking distance of a two hour half-marathon. And that I can stretch out beyond the half-marathon and run further. Not much further yet, and I’ll be losing some weekly distance in the winter, now that it’s getting dark at 5pm, and I hate running in the cold dark.
But first I have the next half marathon in three weeks. I’m not setting a time goal. BB and I are simply going to get up and go running. My little sister will be there to cheer us on. Hopefully, we will be fit and happy and it will feel like a nice jog in the park. Of course, it’ll be November 23rd. It might be snowy or rainy or colder than Titan’s poles. I’m not a weather badass. Rule 9 does not really apply to me. But I’m trying to apply Rule 5 enough that maybe someday it will.
At this point, I think it’s safe to say that I’ve decided to run a marathon in 2015. At least, I’ve decided to purchase a registration and train for one. Not sure which yet. Mount Desert Island is a possibility, but it’s pretty hilly. Chicago is supposed to be a great course. Philadelphia is fast and flat. New York is big and prestigious. Tucson is downhill and my dad lives there.
It’s almost exactly four years since I started trying to be physically active in a systematic way. I was fat and tired and lonely. I didn’t want to be those things anymore. I started by doing what I could, and it wasn’t much: 10 push-ups and 30 sit-ups a day. Shortly thereafter, I started walking, and then jogging, after work. Slowly, I improved.
I’ve said before, the only thing it takes to be good at something is being willing to be bad at it for a few years (barring exceptional circumstances, of course). That’s how I learned the piano. That’s how I learned to cook. That how I’ve become a distance runner. I was no good at any of those things when I started. And I slowly, slowly got better at them, because I was willing to tolerate being lousy. Being slow. Having middling results. And by not aspiring to become the best in the world. But simply wanting to be better than I was the day before, more often than not.
Instant gratification is awesome. I love getting a massage or eating a sundae. But I have spent my life working on long slow projects, sometimes (in fact usually) longer and slower than necessary, to achieve ambitious goals. And I think that I have, more often than not, succeeded at that. I am not one of those people who can conquer mountains effortlessly. I have to work. But I am not so bad at working, in the long run. I procrastinate. I lollygag. And I eventually finish what I start. Right now, it looks like, I’m trying to finish a marathon.
Denial.
I received an interesting email from a friend today who writes about the recovery and substance abuse industry. She asked me why I thought that places like Huffington Post, and Salon, and Substance.com are so reliably anti-treatment, anti-12 step, and even anti-addiction as a concept. Obviously, I wish I knew, and I wish I knew how to fix it. All I can do is speculate.
One of the things we talk about in AA is that it’s ok that people outside the program don’t get it. We don’t need you to get it. And most of the people writing about substance abuse, and studying addictions, and developing treatments are not addicts or alcoholics. Most of them don’t understand how if feels and what it means to be an addict. That does not mean they have nothing to contribute.
Enormous strides in treating alcoholism and addiction have been made by people who have no personal history with the disease. We know now how to prevent lethal seizures in alcohol detox, for example. We have ways to block uptake of opiates. All kinds of medicines which assist in treatment and recovery. And that’s a good thing. But medicine alone cannot treat addiction, because real recovery requires the engagement of the addict to progress and prevent relapse. Unless the individual is engaged, they will accept no medicine. And if they are engaged, once through the initial detox, they need none.
But the denial that addiction even exists? That’s a peculiar state of denial. I can understand the denial of one’s own addiction. I did that for years. But to deny that addiction exists, as some on the alternative-medicine left do, is fundamentally foreign to me. There’s a great difficulty in getting good evidence about effective treatment for addiction. But there is no difficulty at all demonstrating that addiction exists in humans and other animals.
At the core, I don’t think this is about addiction. I think there’s a strange complementary nature between the anti-science right and the anti-medicine left. And I think both are probably about hope, and about searching for control in a world that defies us. When we are confronted by terrifying things that either science insists are happening or that medicine cannot cure, it is seductive to decide that science and medicine must be wrong, rather than our world is huge and horrifying and uncontrollable.
Autism seems like a devastating diagnosis. So if I believe my child will not develop it if I don’t vaccinate, if I believe I can assert control, then that seems like a rational thing to do. And if my fear is substantial enough, and my need for control powerful enough, then I will be recalcitrant to the truth that vaccines and autism are entirely unrelated. Similarly, if climate change threatens my way of life, my economy, my cultural identity, and my fear and my need for control are enough, I will search for anything I can cling to that says I don’t need to change.
Hope and fear are useful tools. There are reasons we can experience them and they serve us in myriad ways. But they can become toxic when they become paralyzing. They can lead us to making terrible decisions that fly in the face of the truth. That then can combine with defensiveness, or arrogance, or greed, to produce phenomena like “Rolling Coal”, or the vaccination rate in some southern California enclaves dropping to levels normally associated with war-torn failed states, or bans on research into gun violence, or homeopathy for cancer.
In recovery we work to examine how our fears and our assumptions and expectations drive us. Now, I’ll make no claims about how recovery impacts a person’s politics, but in Alcoholics Anonymous we do have, right in our literature, that we are not doctors, and that listening to physicians is appropriate in recovery. Though, many will claim that the spiritual aspects of 12-step programs are no different from homeopathy. And that’s fine. They don’t need to get it. As I’ve written here many times, I think there is absolutely nothing magical about the spiritual aspect of AA, and I am not a spiritual person. But these concepts are useful tools for recovering from specific aspects of addiction. At least, my manifestation of addiction.
I am not an “evidence-based” stickler when it comes to medicine, because I have seen what passes for “evidence” in many cases (read everything by Dr. Trish Greenhalgh, right now.) and it’s disturbing what scientists and physicians will declare constitutes evidence, and then how they’ll apply it in deeply unscientific ways. And I believe that in many cases, the plural of anecdote in fact is evidence, because we lack the capacity to study outcomes in a metrizable way.
But we should not deny or ignore evidence where it exists, and is good. And there is no better evidence in any field of medicine than there is for the fact that vaccines are safe, and have saved millions, maybe billions, of lives. Just as there is ironclad evidence that the climate is warming. Nor should we ignore obvious truths simply because we don’t know how to perform a randomized controlled trial on them.
But mostly, I think so much of this denial stems from feeling frail and hopeless in the face of enormous, implacable nature. Nature that does not care what we want, and is not aware we exist. But upon which we have profound impacts regardless of our intentions or beliefs. We are thirsty and dowsing. Any drops of water we find feel like confirmation we looked in the right spot. But often, there is a river just beyond the knoll where we could simply kneel, and drink.
Stuck in Acceptance.
One of the core elements of the program of Alcoholics Anonymous is the Serenity Prayer. I’m sure everyone knows it, but for reference:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.
It actually goes on from there, I’m told, and has additional verses. But for sobriety, those three lines have all the important messages. Alcoholics, as a rule, tend to rage against the things we cannot change, trying to correct them over and over, failing, and developing toxic resentments that end up ruling us, driving us to try to drink them away. Resentment is more poisonous than alcohol. And so learning acceptance, learning to relent from steel grip on rage and simply allow the world to have its way is a powerful tool in our recovery.
Acceptance is the bane of madness. My house leaks. The new door will be more than $2000. This is after many thousands of dollars of plumbing and mold and electrics work. Such is life. I can accept it. I’m in a position to be responsive to these demands, and other courses of action which I might have taken would likely have further disrupted my peace of mind and likely not have resulted in the kind of satisfaction I fantasize about. By focusing on acceptance, and thinking through my circumstances, I can come to peace about the situation, and shed my resentment.
But just as the prayer goes on, so must we. It is possible to get stuck in acceptance, and not move forward in life. Another common character defect of alcoholics (and many others) is to wallow in victimhood. This can masquerade as acceptance fairly easily. We can tell ourselves, “I accept where I am in my life, and I must accept the things I cannot change.” And not actually examine if we have the strength and capacity and opportunity to change our circumstances. This can rapidly become a kind of indulgent self-pity. Poor me, subject to forces I cannot contend with, unable to make progress.
This is especially troublesome for us when we truly are legitimate victims of circumstances beyond our control. Health issues, societal structures, family problems, crimes. These are real things that we cannot control which cause disruptions and difficulties which we must learn to accept if we are not to swim in a morass of resentment. To live freely, we must come to acceptance with real problems.
But there comes a point when we need to step beyond mere acceptance. We need to relinquish our victimhood and take up our courage, and change what we can. At some point, even the most serious and legitimate affronts become wallows that we languish in if we do not move ourselves on. And we cannot blame others for seeing us as perpetual victims – and for their diminished sympathies – when we do not make efforts to rise above the difficulties in our lives. Acceptance of our circumstances is crucial to sobriety, to serenity. But we do not end there.
Change takes courage, and investment, and labor. And once we have accepted our misfortunes, it is time to overcome them.
A Resolution in October.
I am a goal-driven person. That’s how my ambition manifests. I often think, when imagining taking on some new project, that “I don’t want to die without having done it.” That’s how I felt about writing my symphony, a work still unfinished. I will work on it again one day. I think I’ll finish it. I will probably never publish it (I don’t have the slightest idea how one publishes music). But I’ll finish it. Probably.
Lately, my goals have been professional, and relational, and physical. Professionally, I am achieving the things I set out to achieve. I’m advancing at work. My papers are getting slowly-but-surely published in venues I’m pleased to have them in. I’ve been promoted and my work is well received in my institution. Soon I will have employees who report to me, and my influence will be even more pronounced here. Other people who are moving up the chain of management are invested in my efforts. I’m excited.
My relationship is blossoming. I feel less and less like this is an appropriate venue to discuss it. But I am feeling more closely and more intimately connected in a romantic partnership than I ever have. I feel grateful and fortunate to have someone understanding, supportive, exciting, ambitious, adventurous, and thoughtful to share my life with. It’s more than I deserve. It’s far, far better than I’ve earned.
My physical goals have become prominent for me. Mostly, these revolve around running. This weekend, BB and I ran a total of 12 miles, 5 Saturday and 7 Sunday. We took the pace easy and I was very pleased that both days felt like a nice jog in the park. Other people are no longer expected to be impressed with those sorts of things. I remain gobsmacked that I was an obese alcoholic pack-a-day smoker and now I can run 7 miles and it’s a nice easy jog in the park.
The last goal I set about running was that I would run a half-marathon without walking any of it. I did that. I’ve done that twice now. Lately, I’ve been running faster, and my slow runs have been feeling easier. I’m improving dramatically. Part of the reason is that I’m working harder at running faster, part of the reason is that I’m going to the gym and working with a personal trainer. I’m trying hard to avoid the fate of my father, who never managed his diabetes, and had a debilitating stroke.
So. I’m setting a new goal. I said I wasn’t going to run a marathon, and I still might not. But what I have found is that I really appreciate having organized races to prepare for, because they keep me from slacking off. So I’ve signed up to run the Philadelphia half-marathon just before Thanksgiving, and the Virginia Beach half-marathon in March. But those aren’t my goal. A goal must be bigger than repeating something I’ve already done.
So here’s my goal for 2015: I will run at least 4 competitive (i.e., organized races) half-marathons. If I do decide to run a full marathon, then that will count as two. While I’d love to run one under two hours, or something like that, I’m not going to set specific speed goals. Not here anyway (BB and I are working on running faster, but we haven’t set a specific pace we want to hit. The number “2:10” has been thrown around for Virginia Beach. If we hit that, I’ll be happy.).
That’s the goal. 52.4 competitive miles in 2015. Which means probably at least 10 times that number in preparation. Right now I’m running about 18-20 miles a week. That’s plenty to stay fit for half marathons, with a brief ramp-up for the weeks before race day. But if I’m going to run a full marathon, I’m going to need to push my weekly mileage out to at least 40 shortly before the race.
So here we go. Run like hell.
Why Spirituality?
One very important aspect of recovery is the “maintenance of our spiritual condition”. Now, as a person who is not religious and not even particularly spiritual in any traditional sense (though I used to be), I have to consider deeply what that means. Why do we associate sobriety with spirituality? How does that help me recover? The idea that “God strikes us sober” is useful to many people in recovery, and I support that where it is useful to individuals. But it is not a concept that has ever been relevant to my own journey in sobriety.
To me, spirituality is a concept more nebulous and less… supernatural. I find spirituality to be very natural. I think it’s an ordinary aspect of the human condition. Spirituality is one of the natural ways we try to find our place in the world, in society. Spirituality is, to me, about connectedness and awareness of things larger than me. About seeking accordance and harmony between what is inside me, and what it outside. Arranging my mind to be in a state of peace with the things in the world that I cannot change.
I don’t pray. But I see no reason that prayer is incompatible with a deityless nature. I am fond of the aphorism that prayer is not about influencing the thing prayed to, but rather about influencing the thing doing the praying. As such, I see prayer as little different from meditation, or simple mindfulness. When I attempt to find a quiet space in my mind, in my heart, in whatever my soul is, I am doing something like prayer. I am consciously attempting to bring my self into alignment with the world as I understand it.
This helps with sobriety because being serene is a crucial tool in abstinence. Many of us drink to quiet raging waters in our spirits, in our consciences. Maintenance of our serenity deprives our addictions of leverage to drive us back toward inebriation. Because alcohol is anesthesia to me. It soothes inflammation of the soul. At least, that’s what my mind tells me. That’s what my addiction wants me to believe.
And so engaging with our concepts of spirituality provides us with an alternative balm for crises of mind and heart. I believe that that is a nearly-universal thing that humans do, and that it is to our credit that we do. Looking to God, to Nature, to spiritual abstracts for solace and comfort is not a sign of weakness or delusion. It is engaging with a natural process within ourselves which – for some of us – demonstrably improves our mood, resilience, and ability to participate in normal society.
Which – for some of us – materially aides our efforts to remain abstinent from artificial intoxicants which plague us and drive us to behave antisocially. We claim spiritual progress. I understand these things differently today than I did before. And differently today than I will in times to come. But today, I believe that spirituality need be nothing supernatural to be real, and tangible, and useful.
Feeling Other.
One characteristic that is common to most of us in AA is the sense that we feel “other” from the mainstream of society. We don’t belong. We don’t get it. We don’t feel comfortable participating in ordinary social and societal situations. We feel outcast, downcast; belittled and degraded. We seek ways to feel less like this.
Alcohol helps. In the beginning, alcohol helps. We start to find ways to participate. We feel less like peeling off our own skin when we’ve had a drink or two. There’s a reason alcohol is called a “social lubricant”. We feel in dire need of anything to help us feel less like we are stuck, frozen, embarrassed, and out of place.
I think a lot of people who aren’t alcoholics have the same anxieties and discomfiture. And I think alcohol often helps them feel like they fit in too. But for us, we alcoholics, alcohol is a very temporary solution. Because even as it allays our own toxic discomfort, it siphons it off and distributes it to others. People become uncomfortable around us.
We drink too much. We behave unpredictably and inappropriately. Alcohol frees our baser instincts. We act out socially, sexually, physically. We feel powerful when we’re drunk, in the beginning. We feel compelled to drink more. We do. We abandon, or are shunned by, those who do not drink like we do.
And so the drug we took to address our isolation becomes an isolating feature of our lives. We drink more to overcome it. As we do, we are further marginalized. Eventually, loneliness is the dominating landscape of our existence. Alcohol fuels depression and humiliation. It gets worse.
In recovery, this sense of otherness has to be addressed. We need to find communities that adopt us, embrace us. Alcoholics Anonymous is one such community. Where we come together, castaways from the same shipwreck, and understand what we’ve been through. How we debased ourselves and earned condemnation. We dedicate ourselves to moving back towards life, while remembering why and how we lost our purchase on it in the first place.
But we may feel that otherness still, in other environments. I do. I feel useless and isolated an enormous amount of the time. In communities that are supportive and embracing. I try desperately to fit in, only to find myself feeling flung ever further from the center. I fabulate vile scorn from the most innocuous behaviors on the part of those I’d most like to feel accepted by. Invented cordons blocking me from social hierarchies I’d like to ascend.
I find myself despising the things I said I wanted. Succumbing to spirals of relegation. Letting grow derelict gardens I once thought I’d carefully tend. Because I cannot see myself as belonging there. I am not a tiller of that soil, that earth where good things grow and kind people celebrate the flourishing of one another’s labors.
I cannot sit among those whom I would sit among. I am not of them. My desire to contribute opinion and influence in those venues is just gonging on the wrong beats.
I have discovered how not to drink. I have discovered places where I belong. But I have not yet learned to be satisfied contributing in places where I understand the rules. Where I’m part of the bedrock. I reach out to prove I belong part of larger communities and howl to make myself heard when I don’t know what I’m saying. While my thoughts are ill-considered and poorly defined. Undefendable.
I don’t know where I belong. But wherever I am, it seems, the answer is, “Not here.”
Infactorium 
