A Friend’s Response to Rep. Akin.
I’m a bit at a loss as to how to introduce this piece. After Todd Akin’s reprehensible comments about rape and reproductive freedom, much of twitter and the blogging world reacted with anger. So often, political anger seems feigned and agenda-driven. Not this. Today I was approached by a friend who was looking for a place to publish her own response, her own story.
Infactorium serves many purposes for me. One of the things I’ve always wanted to do, but have not yet done, is occasionally to allow it to serve as a platform for people who have their own stories to tell, about trauma, about recovery, whatever form it might take.
So here is the first Guest Infact.
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The year I was 9 was pretty shitty for me. I’ve managed to block most of it out. I can remember some of the highlights, or in this case, traumatic events.
I remember the house falling off the foundation because of the rains. I remember my dad almost throwing my mom off of a 3rd floor balcony in an alcohol fueled rage. I remember my brother being really sick. I remember living in the neighborhood next to the projects. I also, and perhaps this is the thing that has formed most of my life because it happened to me, remember almost being raped by my friend’s older brothers.
The friends that I were close to during this period of life were all brothers and sisters. They were a little feral, and there was very little supervision that I can remember.
It was a Saturday afternoon, which meant that I pretty much went to the library and wondered the neighborhood, mostly trying to go work on the treehouse everyone was helping with. I had chosen to go to the treehouse because it was a sunny day. When I got to the treehouse, I saw the older brothers. Older than me, but not too much older, and one of them was in my grade, so he probably was held back at some point. I asked them where their sisters were, and they came to surround me. I’m little, so they easily were 5 or so inches taller than me. They circled me, like I was prey.
I don’t really remember the conversation too much. I remember something about them thinking that they decided that they needed to try this sex thing, and they kept talking about exactly what went where, and they were planning on taking turns. One of them had grabbed my belt and pushed me into the dirt. There was a hole dug in the ground where my ass went, and I couldn’t just roll over to get away. And they held me down. And they were laughing. And my jeans made it down to my knees. They pinned my legs to the ground. And I was pushing back and screaming every moment of this. And as the younger brother started to put his hand on my stomach, the older one stood up and started laughing. The things that I remember most are him laughing, and how white his teeth were.
I was a precocious 9 year old. I knew that this was wrong. I knew how sex worked, but I was still young enough to think that you could only have sex if married. Is 9 too young for it to be considered attempted rape? Was this a run through?
Laughing at me was probably their big mistake. Instead of pounding on this kid with my miniature hands, I started trying to push myself up. As I reached around trying to get purchase on the dusty, dry ground, I managed to get a hunk of sandstone. It was triangular, a few inches thick, and I could get a good grip on it.
I didn’t watch myself hit him. I swung my arm in a large arc and connected with the orbit of his left eye. He immediately stopped moving, and started crying in pain. His brother quit laughing. A steady stream of “Oh my god, you let a girl hit you.” and “You ok?” went from one boy to the other. I stood up and wailed the rock at the kid on the ground. I pulled up my pants, and ran back home.
And then I hid in the basement and cried for hours.
I’ve never told this story before. No One. No family, friends, therapists. This is something that shapes me. I was almost raped. Sure, I was young. And I’ve always felt that had I told my mom, it would have been dismissed with nothing more than a plea to quit playing with the boys, and that boys will be boys. (If I had a dollar for every time I heard that growing up, I’d have more money than Apple).
I feel that in spite of the shit that has been handed down to me by humanity, I turned out pretty well. I know what I can take, what I can’t, when to be strong, when to ask for help, and when to kick ass. Friends of mine haven’t been so lucky. I’ve been the one on the phone telling a friend to go to the hospital because she was raped. I’ve been the one to take all the knives out of her house because she was irrevocably and undeniably mentally injured by this. I may not have done myself any favors for never telling anyone, and I may have even hurt myself, but these were choices I made, and while I will never be certain that they were the right ones, I am certain that I made these choices of my own free will. If anything, this whole experience taught me that choices are fucking hard and I am as strong as I choose to be.
The reason why I’m telling this now, is because I heard something that was so offensive to me, that I needed to respond. Generally, I let idiots wear themselves out. Representative Akin, every rape is legitimate. No one has the right to do anything to my body without my permission. *Even Legislators*
Mr. Akin, you were right on one thing, we, the females of the species, do have a body that will ‘try to shut that whole thing down’. You know what the most important part of my body in that process is? It’s my brain. So here’s what I do: I call people out when I hear bullshit. I reason, I fight, I learn. I don’t make someone feel bad about themselves for something that they didn’t do. I smile at the people that escort the planned parenthood patients through the onslaught of pro-lifers. My brain helps me make choices. So you should respect that we have a mechanism to regulate the aftermath of such a wretched experience. You don’t get to make my choices for me.
I am a compassionate, loving, respectful human being, you should endeavor to be the same.
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Opening Salvos in Grant Land.
So, the grant I’m writing is going to involve diabetic eye care, and computer simulation techniques. My pilot focussed on diabetic retinopathy, but for the full-scale grant I want to include other diabetic eye conditions as well. Essentially, all ophthalmic complications of diabetes. It’s a health services grant, so I’m not actually looking to design interventions for the disease, or change surgeries or anything like that. I’m looking at policy and access. How can I improve means of providing care for diabetic eye conditions?
Now, I’ve written a preliminary aims page, which has a couple of paragraphs of background, a paragraph describing my pilot results, and how those results agree with other results in the field, and a justification of the seriousness of the problem (that needs to be better). The aims page also had three specific aims. But as with my pilot, they’re not hypothesis based yet. They’re descriptive. I’ll need to re-organize them to fit the narrow-minded, unimaginative model of exclusively hypothesis driven medical research if I expect to get this funded.
Ok. Slash bitter. My next goal is to head towards gathering some collaborators. There are some people in my medical system who’ve done diabetes and eye care research before. I’m reaching out to them, a couple of ophthalmologists, an epidemiologist, and an implementation researcher. These types of people will be needed to help me do a couple of things: collect expertise in the fields that I don’t know enough about. I may recruit an endocrinologist as well to consult on the basic advancement of diabetes.
This process of assembling talent is critical to making the grant work. The agency I’m applying to will essentially not consider any grant that doesn’t have a large group, based in various institutions, with a wide variety of expertise. That’s good for a lot of reasons: it assures that the ideas will be well-tested and have diversity of thought behind them, it prevents insularity. But it’s also kind of silly for a few reasons: it prevents high impact but risky research driven by individual investigators with novel ideas.
So I’ve reached out to four individuals, and heard back from two who are interested in at least looking at my aims and talking about the grant. One big name diabetes researcher turned me down. But that’s ok. I’m looking forward to this process. I think that I have a strong possibility of getting this idea turned into a highly fundable grant. I’m already exhausted just thinking about it.
Relinquishing the Internal Agony.
Somewhere around today, three years ago, I quit smoking. As with alcohol, I started smoking late in life, by comparison with most smokers. I was a junior in college before I smoked regularly. I started by smoking a pipe, and then filterless turkish cigarettes, and cigars. But like most addicts, I soon descended to simple, mass-produced cigarettes. I was a smoker of Winston Lights. I bought vaguely into the “no additive” campaign, hoping that maybe they were a tiny bit less awful for me than cigarettes with “additives”. This is nonsense, of course.
I smoked for about 15 years, from the time I was 20 to the time I was 35. Although, I did once quit for about a year, year and a half, when I was 26. I started playing a lot of soccer, had a really great girlfriend, lost some weight and generally felt pretty good about myself for a year. None of it lasted. I don’t remember why I began smoking again. It doesn’t really matter. When I went to rehab for alcohol, I made a half-hearted attempt to quit smoking at the same time, using Chantix. But all the other inmates smoked. And I wasn’t devoted to it. All I wanted was to be free from alcohol. I wasn’t ready for anything more. I was so defeated by liquor that any additional burden was too much.
So it would be a year and a half after I quit drinking before I quit smoking. And I no longer remember for certain the date I quit smoking. It was the 17th or the 18th, or maybe the 19th of August, 2009. I bought some Nicorette. I had tried and failed a couple of times the previous months. I decided that I would allow myself to smoke a cigarette or two in the following days if it was too hard. And I did. I smoked one cigarette on my way home from work that first day. That was my last.
I didn’t tell my wife or step-son I was quitting. They were not supportive. I mean, obviously, they liked the idea of me no longer smoking. My wife had quit the previous year. But they were dismissive and incredulous. I was told I couldn’t do it, whenever I talked about it. Then I was excoriated for not having already done it. Much as she had once said about alcohol, my wife accused me of “choosing cigarettes over her.” I understand where that comes from in her. I get that sensation, that thought process. But it was wrong, and it hurt. I couldn’t understand why they’d tell me I couldn’t quit, when she had, and I’d already quit alcohol. It felt mean-spirited.
Obviously, my experience in quitting cigarettes was greatly different from my experience quitting alcohol. Nicotine isn’t mind altering in the same way as alcohol. It doesn’t cause cognitive and motor impairment the way inebriation does. But it is a powerfully psycho-active drug. I don’t know the science. I bet that BabyAttachMode or Scicurious or Drugmonkey does. I know that going without nicotine made me angry. Really, furiously angry, and irritable, and short-tempered. So I alleviated that, some, and the cravings, some, with the Nicorette. Which helped. I will not endorse their product, of course, I don’t know if I might have succeeded in other ways. But I did use it, and I am no longer a smoker.
So, quitting smoking was, for me, fundamentally different from quitting alcohol. I did not have the ability to attenuate my use of alcohol. When I tried, I failed, spectacularly, over and over again. Because as soon as I put any alcohol in my body, I lose the ability to regulate how much more I consume. This wasn’t true of cigarettes. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not one of those people who can have one cigarette, once in a while, and have that be the extent of it. I know people like that. I hate those people. You know who you are.
But I was done with cigarettes. I really wanted to be healthy. I was so exhausted with myself. Even a year and a half into sobriety. I had never had a sweet tooth as a kid, or a young adult. But when I quit drinking, it arose within me, malevolent. And so there I was, sober, but mildly obese, eating huge amounts of candy and cake to satisfy these unbidden sugar cravings, and smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. I wasn’t making the progress in my life that I felt I truly needed to make.
I was still killing myself.
This is what most of my mental health issues come down to. At the core of me, there is thing that does not want to live. A thing that loves pain more than comfort. An ouroboros, in persistent, cannibal rage. The thing I drank to slake. The thing I bled to feed. The thing that breathed the smoke from my lungs. I take strange pleasure in ruining myself.
Giving up addictions is in some way the process of starving that beast into submission. To do that, I had to learn to look at life as thing worth having. I needed to see contribution as meaningful. Relationships as nourishing. I needed to learn to value health. Learning those things, embracing them, is astonishingly painful. Because to do it, I had to learn why I was the way I am. All the reasons that pain and hate and shame and fear and rootlessness satisfied me in ways that comfort and companionship and love and accomplishment and connection didn’t. I had to face the long gauntlet of my past.
Caring about life is a conscious effort for me. I work at it. Being willing to embrace friendship and sociality is difficult. But I have decided that I don’t want to be lonely. I want to experience life the way I think so many of my fellows do: by working for good things. To be useful and happy. And to do that, I have to be willing to let go of my precious, precious agony. The pain that drove me. The pain that I loved. The pain that I still love.
Navigating Fear.
The last several days at work have been very stressful. I’m in a peculiar situation. I am simultaneously running out of funding, and being presented with opportunities too numerous to engage with all of them. I have excellent prospects for additional funding right now, even though it isn’t much in terms of a dollar amount. I have a conference call in about 90 minutes with a health care institution which is, I think, very likely to offer support somewhere between $50K-$100K to do a project for them over the next year. Which is fantastic. That will support my salary enough to justify my existence, and get me started on an engineering project which will have very cool research implications.
Then, 90 minutes after that, I’m sitting down with a couple of professors at Local Research University (which is still trying to put together the funding for a position for me) to discuss how I might aid them in emergency department analyses and modeling, at which I’m something of a specialist. I’m excited to meet these guys (I have already met one, and guest lectured in his class). Then, right after that, I’m meeting with a couple of local collaborators about a nicotine dependence NIH R01 submission that they want a systems/simulation aim for.
That’s today. Then there’s the R01eq being scored at the end of August, the Big Idea R01eq I wrote about yesterday, a potential opportunity to serve my institution directly through QI, the potential job in Singapore, the potential job at LRU, and the five tenure track professorships I’ve applied to. Something is going to end up working out. I think. I hope.
So it was a good time, yesterday, to be reminded of what actually matters in my life. I showed up to my men’s meeting to discover that it was my turn to talk. I’d signed up to speak four or five months ago, I think, and forgotten all about it. so I had to sit down and make up about a twelve minute talk on the fly. Which is pretty easy for me. I can talk about myself for a long time if no one tells me to shut the hell up. I told my story, from my first drinks when I was five, to present day. Many of them had heard it before, and most people in the room have known me for almost three years anyhow, since I began going to that meeting.
There were a couple of new guys there though, including a guy who was only about 36 hours of his last meth high. I can’t begin to tell you how grateful I am that I never got into drugs. Sure, I smoked pot a few dozen times, and I did some Xanax that was prescribed for anxiety in ways that were not strictly written on the bottle. But I was a nearly unadulterated booze-hound and little more. I loved to get drunk.
I talked about what I need in life, and how to apply the principles of AA to my life as a researcher, my fears about my job. I talked about how I need to keep the program first. Because if I stop talking about alcohol, I’ll start to disrespect its power. Then I ‘ll start to miss it. Then I’ll start to want it. Then I’ll start to drink it. And then I’m fucked. I’ll be dead, literally. I do not expect to survive a relapse.
So despite having professional challenges right now, I also have reams of opportunity and potential. I’m going to be fine. I’m just going to be scared first. Well, I can cope with fear. Fear is how I react to uncertainty. But I react to fear with prospective action. I’m making moves. I’m reaching out. More importantly, I’m reaching in. The strength and courage to do all of this is within me, and in the systems that support me. I am not alone. I am a raft on an ocean of fortitude.
Preparing to Write the Big Grant.
So. Now I am preparing to write my big grant. This will be the follow-up to my current pilot grant, which is essentially an R03, though not an NIH mechanism. I’ll be writing the R01-equivalent now, which in the agency I’m applying to is a 4 year, $1.1M dollar mechanism. I don’t think I’ll need all that. I’ll probably write it for three years and about $750K. It’s about developing a tool to examine health care delivery for diabetes patients. I’ve been sitting in my office staring, tweeting, trying to formulate the essential ideas so that I can come up with an aims page to distribute to potential collaborators. There are a couple of people with interesting expertise that I am in the process of approaching, but I am still in the nascent stages.
So, I was awarded my pilot basically, I think, because it was totally novel. No one had done anything like it before, anywhere. And I’m now in the process publishing the results from it, which were promising. It’s a difficult process, especially because the full professor who is supposed to be acting as a mentor to me has totally abdicated his role. I’ve gotten essentially no help from him, and expect to get none as time on the grant expires. Essentially, he’s a name. He’s a big, fancy name, but just a name. Calling him a co-author is kind of a joke. He’s recently told me he doesn’t have time to review the manuscripts, and to just submit them.
I’ve decided to submit to diabetes journals, because the simulation journals don’t seem interested. I am decidedly lacking in effective mentorship with respect to journal selection. My work is very inter-disciplinary, and as a result, many different genres of science are theoretically appropriate. However, it’s therefore quite possible for any journal to tell me that it belongs in another sub-field journal, in a big circle. Which can be frustrating, and demoralizing. I usually get several desk-rejects prior to finding a journal willing to review.
However, I am confident that the work will eventually get published. And when it does, I’ll have excellent preliminary data, results, and publications from which to demonstrate that I’m worthy of the big grant. Frankly, this would be a wonderful type of project for the R21 mechanism (2 years, $275K), but my institution isn’t eligible for NIH funding. Which is too bad, because I’m still Early Stage Investigator qualified, and would be New Investigator qualified, and would therefore be strongly competitive for such an award, I think.
*Edit, per Doc Becca (donate!): R21s do not consider ESI/NI status.
But I am not eligible for NIH funds, and so I have to work within the frame of what the funding agencies I am eligible for provide. I think I can get this award. It’s just a matter of doing some strongly hypothesis driven engineering, which is still slightly foreign to me. Engineers usually design things to specifications, rather than working with hypotheses. However, those things can be seen as opposite sides of the same coin, in practice. I just have to come up with a clean way to formulate the project, with a testable condition that separates success from failure.
I’ve actually written one of these before, as co-PI. My last effort was scored, but not funded, and we made a wholesale revision and resubmitted. That study section meets at the end of the month. If it hits, then all of my job woes are over for four years. But that will not stop me from writing this grant. Because I’d still need more time covered, and this grant is my own Big Idea, that I am dying to develop. This is the reason I’m doing this, and not looking for a job in quality control.
So, unless I move to Singapore, or get offered a sudden tenure track position (that happens, right?), you can expect to hear a lot about writing this grant. Hopefully, I’ll be documenting the trials, tribulations, joys, fears, and eventual triumphs of winning my first solo R01 equivalent. Stay tuned. It’s gonna be ugly.
Irrevocable Change.
There are changes mounting at my work that cannot fail to sweep me up with them. This place is beyond dysfunctional. It is nonfunctional. I am not going to get in to the long list of financial atrocities that have been committed here. But it is a place that, despite having research as one of its principle missions, does not have any apparent interest in providing an environment for researchers conducive to the furtherance of that goal. The staff is laced with incompetents, and the administration is choked with ossified, stultified fools.
Now, one of the last good people is leaving. This person has had my back for quite some time, and given that I’m almost certainly about to have a gap in funding, without him here, I think that my job will be ending soon, despite the fact that I’ve been objectively among the most productive researchers at my institution, but in terms of funding and output. And I’m willing to bet that that will mean nothing to the people who run the place. Because they don’t care about quality work. That is profoundly evidenced by the sort of people they place in positions of responsibility over research.
If you were to be given the task of destroying a research department, you could not do better than this administration. And so I am stepping up my search for another place. While I’ve heard nothing from Singapore yet, last night I submitted my CV and cover letter to four different open faculty positions around the country, including one in my current city. I am submitting to schools of public health, and health administration. While I don’t have formal education in those fields, that is where my experience lies as a researcher, of course.
I am hoping that I will find a forward-thinking department, interested in applying simulation methods to public health, perhaps where I could create and teach a class in systems. There’s some despair here. I am afraid that I will shortly find myself unemployed. That could happen as soon as October, though I believe that I have until April. We’ll see. I’d be lying if I said I weren’t afraid.
But I know how to deal with fear. If I don’t have a job, I will increase my meetings. I will apply to many positions. I will land on my feet. I’m going to be ok. There’s no question of that. Eventually. But I am afraid. Life is scary. For everyone. It’s easy to become myopic and selfish when I’m afraid. I need to remember to slow down and focus outward. Do the things I can do today. Be patient. Strength and Courage.
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UPDATE: I discovered that I’ll be able to hold a few dozen thousand dollars in reserve past October 1st. This means that I’ll have protection, and it will surely protect me until April, by which time I think I’ll have new ideas about what I’m going to do next. Huge relief to know that I will not be doomed in six weeks.
Acceptance.
I have to accept that there are a lot of things about being a sober person that most normal people don’t understand. Whether it’s scientists who study addiction being unable to connect with the disease at the root level, or friends who can’t appreciate that prolonged abstinence isn’t the same as being cured, or people who don’t understand that processing my needs and responsibilities and obligations through my sponsor isn’t a judgement on their importance and influence upon me, I am met with resistance to my sobriety in many ways, often from unexpected angles. I grew up without a stable frame. I bungled my way through young adulthood by doing what I thought was best, most of the time, despite being a drunk. Sometimes it worked, usually it didn’t.
Now, I have built a framework for living that allows me to be healthy, more often than not. I remain mentally ill. But I have a consistent and robust scaffold upon which can be hung the trappings of life, of progress. I know what I need, most of the time, to do in order to proceed in a healthy way. And the real key of this system is that it provides for me, not rules for knowing the right thing to do, but guidelines for when I don’t know what the right thing is. That generally starts with my sponsor. When paths are unclear to me, I go to my sponsor to help determine what the right thing to do is. When a path seems too clear, I go to my sponsor to make sure I’m not missing some obvious pitfall.
There have been people who have taken exception to this behavior. I’ve been told it’s insulting to consider my sponsor’s advice when someone wants me to take a particular action, and I hesitate. Some people assume it means that I trust my sponsor more than I trust them. But that’s not what it means. It means I trust my sponsor to have additional and meaningful perspective to contribute over what I am capable of seeing by myself. But I know sometimes, people will not accept that explanation. And so I have to accept that they will not understand me.
One thing I have learned in sobriety is to stay out of fights that are not mine. I just generally have nothing to contribute, and my interference will make things worse rather than better. In general, unless I have a personal stake in something, I will not get involved unless asked by a person who does have a personal stake. And even then, I may not. It will depend why I’m being asked, and what outcome they can expect me to help them achieve. When I was a child, hell, when I was an adult, I was always wedging my nose into other people’s business. My mother’s constant refrain to me was “MYOB”. Mind your own business. I’ve finally learned to do that reasonably well. And yet, I’ve found resistance to that. Many people often try to ensnare me in things which are not my business. When I refrain, there are often hurt feelings.
I just have to accept that. I have learned that even how people think of me is not my business. People have their own reasons for their feelings. All I can do is act in a way that I believe I can live with. While informed by the best possible advice from people who give me advice not because of who I am, but because of who they are. My sponsor advises me not because he cares for me and wants me to be happy (though he does), but because it is part of the program of sobriety that he works, that allows him to live the best possible life of his own.
The same is true in dating. I have been rejected by women when they discover I’m in recovery. I’ve seen women (and presumably there are men too… I haven’t looked for them.) who will simply not consider anyone in recovery. That hurts me. A lot, actually. If I were the same person I was born, but had never gone through the annealing of alcoholism and recovery, I would be a far, far worse potential companion than I am. I needed a brutal, excoriating crisis to temper me, and teach me how to interact with other real humans.
But I have to apply acceptance here too. Other people are allowed to make their own decisions in life. And if I think those decisions are foolish, destructive, unfair, cruel, or simply wrong, it is not my business to repair them. Because I can be wrong too. It’s nothing but arrogance to assume that my way is the best way. And it’s only going to bring me grief to rail against someone else’s decisions for themselves. People get to make their own decisions. And they don’t need to hear me tell them I think they’re wrong. No good is served that way.
Being my own person, being honest about who I am, what I need, what I can do and what I can’t, and letting other people be their own people, and make their own mistakes and decisions, is bound to ruffle feathers sometimes. Usually mine, sometimes theirs. I hate it when people are unhappy with me. I have been trained from birth to try to please people. But in the program, I have come to understand that sometimes, that’s what’s going to happen. I have to accept it. And I cannot succeed in life if I surrender my own autonomy and my own agency to cater to people who may never be pleased with my efforts.
People are how people are. In my experience, people rarely change. I know that most alcoholics don’t. But I believe that I have. I have been changed, from without, but engaging with something bigger and more powerful than me. From within, by working as hard as I know how to be different. By recognizing that that means lifelong investment, not transient effort. And it means accepting both that some people will not believe I have changed, and others will not like the ways I have done. Both of those are painful. But they simply are.
The $1100.68 Saga.
Well, it’s no saga yet. There’s a company in New York that owes me $1100.68. Let’s nevermind why. It’s a legal debt. So, as people who owe money usually do, they sent me a check. And I deposited it. And it cleared, several days later. Now, it has been withdrawn for insufficient funds. Complicating this is the fact that my facebook account was hacked yesterday, and even though the email I used wasn’t associated with my bank account, I did use the same password. I know, stupid stupid.
Now, I think the facebook hacking was purely coincidental. If a malevolent entity had gotten control of my bank account, they could’ve just transferred a bunch of money out. It seems like taking the money via a transfer would be more straightforward than faking some weird insufficient funds scenario on a single check deposited a week before. So I think that the facebook hack is a red herring. But I can’t be certain. I do know that no other funds were stolen. And I went ahead and changed the passwords on every account I’ve ever had. (The most secure password? NONE. They’ll never expect it!*)
So now I’m in a bank feud over who owe what to me. One bank says it was refused for lack of funds. The other says there were plenty of funds in the account. Somebody’s wrong. Or something. I’m owed $1100.68, and I intend to get it. But here’s the amazing thing: I’m not that upset.
First of all, of course, I’m not going to miss any meals because of this. Even though that’s a lot of money, I have a good job and a nice home and I’m solidly middle class. So while no one likes to be out a big chunk of cash, it’s nice to have the perspective that this does not actually impact my financial circumstances all that much. It’s easy to get bent out of shape looking at a big number, and I’m glad that I can stop and recognize my circumstances, and be grateful that I’m not in a position where this represents my food or rent.
Second of all, I’ve learned patience some. I am still an impatient man (generally a redundancy), but I am capable of exercising my program about it. Being impatient brings me grief. This will get sorted out. I am pleased that I know how to pause and recognize that things get taken care of in their own time, not instantaneously, at my demand.
And in fact, while I was writing that last paragraph I got a call explaining that the reason the check wasn’t honored is that there was some kind of physical problem with the check itself, and the bank chose to not honor it rather than risk fraud, apparently. Abundance of caution and all that. I suppose it makes sense to temporarily inconvenience a customer rather than give $1100.68 to the wrong person. They’re going to fix it with a wire transfer.
So that’s the whole story, I hope, of the Very Little Saga of the $1100.68.
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*This is not, in the strictest sense of the word, true.
Online Connections.
I’ve been blogging about recovery since December of 2009. I’ve been pretty regular about it, and I don’t think more than three or four days have gone by without a post of some kind in all that time. With a few notable exceptions (Furtheron, Syd, and Mary C) however, I never really made connections in the sober community online. I’ve gone and commented on a lot of sober blogs. And received a few back. But for the most part, I was greeted by a lot of silence in the online sober community. I don’t know why. It’s a thriving community, and there’s generally a lot of interaction.
For some reason, Infactorium never generated a following among them. Maybe because I wrote about things other than sobriety too. I don’t know. Then, once upon a time, I stumbled on to Drugmonkey’s blog, and commented, and he “blogrolled” me. There was a brief flurry of attention to my old blog, from the science community, but it rapidly faded. But that was how I encountered Doc Becca. She started reading Infactorium, and to my knowledge never stopped, including occasional comments.
Then, a few years later, I finally joined twitter, when I got utterly sick and tired of facebook. I discovered that there is a truly robust community of scientists, and that I fit in there reasonably well. Now, to tell the truth, I never really feel like I fit in anywhere, other than at a good meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. Whether interacting online or in person, I often feel like I am just on the periphery. Unwelcomely trying to edge my way towards the center of the crowd. Uninvited and generally an outsider. In AA, we call that “feeling other”. And it’s common to many, probably most, of us. One of the reasons we drink is to quell that feeling which is so alienating and disquieting.
But the science community on twitter is a special place. People there, half anonymous, half with identities disclosed, write, and share, and participate, despite having enormously different career stages and disciplines. Many of us blog in addition to tweeting, and the community is almost uniformly positive. Science can be a jostling, competitive, hostile place, like any other. So far, it seems, the community of scientists on twitter that I’ve found has avoided those pitfalls.
And so Doc Becca is one of my oldest online friends. I’ve been reading her blog for almost three years, and watched as she’s gone from being a post-doc to now being a funded assistant professor, apparently poised to do great things in neuroscience. I’m envious as hell. She’s also about to get married. I’m slightly less envious of that, given my own recent history of divorce, but I am supportive of people being happy.
In AA, there’s a saying that, “Whenever anyone, anywhere, reaches out, I want the hand of AA to be there. For that, I am responsible.” Through that network, that system of connections and principles, though astonishingly disorganized, millions of lives have been saved, reclaimed, and lived well. Not just those of the alcoholic, but those of their families, business partners, and the strangers that we otherwise impact when we drink. Systems of anonymous strangers can do good in each other’s lives.
So, I’m hoping that my other system of half-anonymous strangers might do a good thing too, something that transcends the cocktail-gathering atmosphere (which I love!) at twitter. I started a PayPal account to give Doc Becca and her husband-to-be a little gift. I’m calling it the Doc Becca Wedding Cake Fund, because that feels like a reasonable goal, with regard to the amount. We’re up to $180. If you know Doc Becca, and want to donate, please do! She’s a wonderful member of the community, and she’s done so much for it, like the Tenure Track Advice Aggregator. Donations will be kept anonymous, unless you’d like to be identified, and are made with a secure PayPal account. There’s about two months before the wedding, and I’d like to send her the gift with a couple weeks to spare.
I have traveled around and met up with several people from twitter in the real world. I’ve gotten so much there. I want to give something back, something tangible, that celebrates one of our own. I want to contribute. In the real world, if a friend were getting married, I’d be giving a gift, or going to the wedding, or at least sending a card. Well, it’s the 3rd millenium. Twitter is the real world, for a lot of us. Let’s do something.
Loneliness.
Over at Scientopia, Doc Becca has an evocative post about loneliness in the modern world. She’s a new assistant professor in a new city, separated from her fiance by distance. Her description of her plan to marry, and then part the next day to live in a different city from her new husband is among the more desolate heartscapes I can fathom. Long distance relationships are excoriating to me. Relentlessly abysmal, no matter how wonderful the brief unions are. I don’t mean that to sound pessimistic for her. I am obviously very happy for her, and hopeful and supportive. Hell, I’ll pitch in for the commute to see love thrive.
I’ve been less lonely lately. I’ve been spending time with friends. I’ve been spending a lot of time working with someone new to the program, and that’s blossomed into a friendship I truly hope will be life-long. It’s incredible to see how people grow and develop when released from addiction. There is very little we can’t do, sober, sane, and motivated. It is always risky to become invested in people who are new to the program, to sobriety. But it is a risk I am willing to take, every time. Because so many people took it for me. Because when it pays off, the rewards are astonishing.
But most nights, I am home alone. I eat peanut butter sandwiches and drink skim milk for dinner, probably four nights a week. I watch TV and read, sometimes work, and interact with little boxes of endlessly scrolling text on twitter. People I’ve come to know and care about, despite having never seen their faces, never heard their voices. Despite, like in the case of Doc Becca, not even knowing their names. And sometimes, those little prisms of text erupt into real world people. I’ve met seven people in real life that I’d only ever met on twitter. Each of them was friendly and engaging and enjoyable to spend time with.
I get good socialization in AA. My men’s meeting is full of people my age and older, who act as friends and role models. But I don’t spend a lot of time with them outside the rooms. Essentially none. My Sunday meeting is co-ed, and I am really well respected there, for some reason. When I spoke there last month, people were incredibly complimentary in their post-share comments. It made me somewhat bashful.
I like having time to myself. But I would like to have a partner. Romance is a wretched wasteland, it seems, of distance, and logistics and frustration. To steal a line from the soul-shattering film Magnolia, delivered by the impossibly brilliant William H. Macy: I know I have love to give. I don’t know where to put it.
Infactorium 