"Recovery"

Life is hard.

Sometimes life gets really rough and it's not any one thing that puts you (me) over the edge, but the fifth, or tenth, or forty-second thing in a row where you finally snap and no one quite understands where it came from. It's kind of like overtraining in that way. How can you put your finger on the one workout that made your knee hurt? You can't. It just happened. Wherever I've worked I've been known as "moody." Goodness knows why people continue to put up with me, but I try to do my part to keep it under control by stomping off to stew in private until I eventually get over it and there is no need for confrontation. Every once in awhile someone will interrupt me in my private sullenness. It's like they stepped on a landmine and don't know what hit them.

I don't know how I get away with it, but I try to apologize sincerely and articulately enough and then paste a big smile on my face and make fun of my temper. Really good people (especially men) can chuckle at my "hotheadedness."

This week not one but three of my coworkers were the unsuspecting victims of my vitriol. I was in rare form and had to do a lot of mental acrobatics before I could see another point of view and apologize. What the fuck is wrong with you? I ask myself frequently. I'm surrounded by a group of the most positive and driven people I've ever met, and they never seem to throw cell phones across the room (my housemate says I should be a commercial for Apple for the number of times my phone has survived this treatment) or tell each other to fuck off. I can't imagine how I'll ever adjust healthily to the pressure and responsibility of being my own business.

But the Flying Spaghetti Monster has a way of reminding you what it's all about sometimes. And He has a twisted sense of humor.

Late fall 2006

I woke up on Saturday to a Facebook message from the psychotic (not an expression, really psychotic) ex in Spain. I hadn't seen the girl in three and a half years and hadn't heard from her in about two. I had told her some time in early 2008 that I didn't want to hear from her until her life was sorted out, and since there was no way that that was ever going to happen, don't bother contacting me with your lies either. The profile picture that she'd chosen was a close-up of her middle finger and the message was to-the-point. "¿Es difícil mantenerse recta en bicicleta cuando estás borracha? Aún me debes mucho dinero, vigoréxica." (Is it hard to stay upright on a bike when you're drunk? You still owe me a lot of money, [and then something like] you exo-rexic bitch.")

Usually when someone picks a fight with me I can feel my face flushing, my blood pressure rising, and adrenaline spreading on the sides of my tongue, but this just made me simmer. For half a second I wanted to respond that I'd been sober for all but two months of the three years and seven months since she'd seen me, and that clearly she was as fucked up as the day I'd left her to rot alone in her apartment. Obviously this was a clear case of drunk and coked out facebooking if there ever was one.

A little history about the psychotic (no, for real psychotic!) ex:
At various points before and while I knew her she was diagnosed as bipolar, borderline personality, bulemic, clinically depressed, obsessive compulsive, paranoid schizophrenic, sociopathic, and batshit crazy. She'd fried her brain completely with hash and spent six months in rehab (where she even tried smoking goat shit to get high), then went out and got hooked on coke on purpose. She'd had multiple psychotic breaks (including one when I was there). She was 33 years old and her parents still controlled her bank book and made her take a piss test every Monday and Friday. She gained 40 pounds in the year that I was stuck with her. She was a hot mess. She dragged me down with her.

May 2006

When I met her, I wasn't drinking and was training like crazy for a half ironman that I never got to do in Portugal. I was traveling all over Catalonia almost weekly for biking, running, and swimming events. She hated that. She hated being stuck in the apartment by herself. All she used to do all day was sit in bed smoking cigarettes and staring at the wall, and when I was out doing my thing, she had to do that alone. We would rent movies, and then I would wind up watching them alone because she preferred to stare at the wall than follow the plot of a movie. It was fucked-up shit.

She could have come along on my adventures, and occasionally she did but I always regretted it. She came to the Pyranees with me for a bike race and slept the entire 8 hours that I was riding, even missing the finish. She came to the finish of a half marathon in Tarragona, stood there for 5 minutes and decided it was too crowded. Then she went home and when I didn't show up right on time she called the Tarragona cops to see if I'd died. "The people I was seeing cross the finish line looked terrible. I figured that if you were behind them, you must be dead," she told me. Once I ran the Barcelona Marathon, which passed within a block of the apartment. She didn't even get out of bed to watch. Instead she'd spent the night doing coke behind my back because she knew that I wouldn't get out of bed to bug her about it.

Later she admitted that she purposely got me back drinking so that I wouldn't leave to work out so much. She thought I was addicted to exercise, and wanted me to just act normally already (which meant partying like crazy, chain smoking, and eating crap food). She told me that exercising that much just wasn't healthy. Another time I bet her dinner that she couldn't run a kilometer without stopping. We went to the track and she did it, but her lungs hurt for two days afterward. Her conclusion: running (not smoking) is bad for your lungs.

Since her parents tracked every penny she spent, we came up with an arrangement whereby I would buy all the drinks and she would buy all the food. Of course she didn't tell her parents that she was drinking, and instead told them that I was having a tough time and couldn't afford food. They would tell her terrible things about me, and she actually began to believe them. I began to dread every time she went to see her parents because she would come home and rail on me for a day or so about things that had only the slightest resemblance to reality. As she got fatter and fatter and her parents started to criticize her, and it also fell to me to buy the junk food (I was eating less and less at this point because I was drinking more and more). She would eat until she was sick. Once she ate two hot dogs and a giant bag of pork rinds in one sitting. When she went to work the next day, she felt sick to her stomach. They demanded a doctor's note before sending her home, so sent her to the company clinic where the nurse asked if it was something she ate. No... she lied. Then she came home and ate the same thing that night and had to go through the same routine at work the next day. She was the most addictive personality I have ever seen.


Meanwhile, as she got crazier and crazier I became more and more trapped in the apartment. I was even afraid to leave for work because she would pitch such a fit every time I tried to walk out the door. She frequently begged me to call into work and stay home drinking with her. I couldn't sleep. I was hardly eating. My drinking would start with breakfast (or in lieu of breakfast) and go into the wee hours of the morning. I couldn't write in the morningsbecause my hands would shake so badly. I woke up every morning with a feeling of impending doom because I didn't remember what I'd done the night before and I was afraid of what might happen today. More and more I was stuck in that bed staring at the wall too. The only hope I ever felt was when I thought about escaping and getting sober. That thought was why I got up every morning.

Winter, early 2007

When it was all unraveling so quickly that neither of us knew what to do with ourselves, she admitted, "I had no idea that you had such a problem with alcohol. I thought you were exaggerating about being an addict. I mean, how could you be if you stopped on your own and exercised so much? I had to go to rehab for 6 months to quit hash. But you really have a problem." Now neither of us knew how to stop it.

One night about a week before I finally left, she went to her parents' house and I came home from drinks with a friend to a particularly evil look in her eye. "I cheated on you," she said.

"Oh?" I asked, disinterested.

"When you were home for two weeks I went out and found a guy and I fucked him in our bed all night for free coke." She'd never even been with a guy before. It all sounded like the most terrible night ever for her. I had no pity, only disgust for her.

"Well that sucks for you," I said. I really could not have cared less.

When I moved back to the States, I was so happy to be free that it gave me the fire in my belly that I needed to sober up on my own and the willingness to go out and try anything. I beat my mind into submission, and that fire took over a year to finally die down to the point where I felt like I could really touch it. My "Recovery" was from alcohol, but it was also a second chance at life and I understood how precious it could be to go out and see the world. But that was almost four years ago. Life changes. You forget.

That Facebook message brought everything back, and suddenly life looked bright and shiny again. That morning I laced up my running shoes and made it out for the first trail run I'd been able to squeeze in all week. I ran the most direct (but also steepest) route up the tallest mountain on the peninsula, and found that I was able to run almost the whole thing. The trail starts in a eucalyptus grove, the moves up the side of the mountain through manzanita trees with views of waterfalls and the steep ridges next to me. Then you tromp through the brush and onto the sandstone as the brush gets thinner and the trail gets thicker and you pass old hermit caves and skeletons of half-century-old car wrecks. At the top I could see the bay to the east, the ocean to the west, Half Moon Bay to the south, and past San Francisco to Marin to the north. It made me furious that I'd even had to argue about whether this was healthy or not.

After my run, I showered and met up with a client/friend to go to the rock climbing gym. At one point I fell off the wall and collapsed onto the mats in a fetal position, which got us both rolling on the mats and laughing hysterically. We climbed until my rhomboids exploded and my forearms were so useless that I couldn't even tie my shoes. Sure, I'd spent the afternoon sitting there staring at a wall, but then I'd gone and climbed it.

My life may be hectic and I may be barely keeping it together most of the time, but that's because I'm trying to cram so much in. Despite many of the speedbumps I've encountered, I have pretty much the greatest life there ever was. Even on the shitty days I have at least one moment where I look around and think, I am so lucky that this is really my life! And look at the cool shit that I get to do with it! I've gotten to ride my bike over the most famous mountains in France, done an Ironman in Mexico, driven cross-country as part of a RAAM crew and saw the sun set over the Grand Canyon and the sun rise over Monument Valley the next day. I have the endurance to run for hours through some of the most beautiful landscapes in the world, and within an hour I can ride from where I work to a 2500' mountain top. And people pay me to play with them all day. How many jobs can you say "fuck" in front of a client?!

I wish that I could take all the bright, vibrant colors of my life and put them up against the dingy yellow cigarette-stained colors of the psychotic ex's life and rub her nose in it. I wish I could take the full magnitude of it, bottle it up, and spray it in the middle of an AA Meeting and scream, "FUCK YOUR 'PROMISES,' HAS A MEETING EVER GIVEN YOU THIS?!" I wish I could drag Lindsey around on my shoulder for one single day so that she could see what is possible when you just get out of your own head and let opportunities come to you. But most of all, I wish I could just figure out how to shut up that little voice in my head that compiles tiny imaginary tragedies to compound them on one another and tell myself the story that my life is drama. I like the Epictetus quote, "It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters." And then there's the Martha Washington quote reminds me that it's the stories I tell myself about my life that are what matter: "I have learned that the greater part of misery or unhappiness is determined not by our circumstance but by our disposition."