Building Cases...
A day in others' briefs
We Start Building Cases Against People, Then Against Our Program
In this current iteration of my steps, I’m still on Step 4. I’ve been on this deeper, more difficult version for over a year. It’s tough to describe why I’ve put it off, but to distill it into something simple: I’m very ruled by resentments. I love control and i have unrelenting standards both for myself and for others. And failure to adhere to these standards often results in resentment. You brake before you put on your blinker? Resentment. You act discourteously in public? Resentment. In fact, I’m somewhat of a legal expert when it comes to rationalizing, arguing if you will, why a behavior I resent is morally unacceptable. A veritable Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law, if you will.
I build secret, never-filed cases against people for series of behaviors I find unacceptable. I try to be zen and devil-may-care but to deny my interest in affecting others’ behaviors is to deny something that lies so deeply within me that it’s practically me. At my most zen, I would have striven to say “to each his own” in a very libertarian fashion, but I’ve come to terms with the fact that I just. don’t. believe. that. Life would simply be better if everyone was as good at driving or manners or fairness or working as I am. Eudaimonia would rain from the sky and we’d all be rich and in shape and happy. Instead I’m stuck in introvert hell (but without the depression and probably with 45-60 points lower of an IQ than the chart shows).
What I have gotten better at is letting things go. A recent 6-month long run-in with exogenous hormones (under the watchful eyes of professionals) calmed me down and re-aquainted me with not only the concept, but the practice of controlled folly. I’ve realized that not a lot of things truly matter and that a deep focus on the things that do takes me out of my resentful, demanding ways. I can sit back and work and not watch others do things that displeases the whiny little control freak i have inside of me.
So what do you do when You, Attorney At Law rears his head?
I recently got into a pickle that, even anonymously, I can’t talk much about. So we’re gonna talk about it, and what an “old timer” in my home NA group said about the situation. We’ll spend about a paragraph speaking in innuendo, then we’ll get into it.
I recently tried to let my sponsor in on my non-wifi wifi money (What is wifi money?). I got, for lack of a better word, a gig from a mutual friend of mine and my sponsor’s. That gig went extremely well for me. But it went middling-to-badly for my sponsor. He didn’t quite do the job he set out to, he got in trouble with our financier, made himself the target of ire from those we hired at times, and promised quite a few things that never materialized. It was bad. And this situation, for a good deal of it, put itself between him and me and the mutual friend who “got” me the gig. Okay, innuendo over.
Endo. Ha HA! Almost over. So when his part of the gig was over, what did I do as I tried to put out fires and play nice between him and our mutual friend and the financiers and others? I built resentments toward everyone in the scenario:
-Sponsor did this
-Financier did this
-Mutual friend did this
-None of them communicated about any of it, then they stopped communicating
Did I crack the whip and give them all their Come To Jesus moment as a team? No. Could I, without risking the project? Also no. So the cases built as the communication-through-conduits got more and more misinterpreted through every new conduit’s lens and went into the telephone game that threatened to ruin the project.
So what is my instinct as an addict still relatively new to recovery? Isolate. Not difficult as my roommate is out of town for Christmas and the rest of the project can be completed largely using emails like the below image.
I decided, so that I wouldn’t have to see my sponsor or our mutual friend (who was, in my mind, 90% responsible for all the miscommunication and, thus, the animosity between my sponsor and our financier), I wouldn’t go to our home NA group for a few weeks. Just show up to my day job, come home, try to be productive, and keep up that routine for a while.
That lasted for about 4 days. In those 4 days, I had no interest in sleeping, eating, exercise, or doing anything productive. I would literally stew in my resentment when I wasn’t at work, sitting there thinking about how angry I was and how wrong everyone else was and how if they all could have just gotten on the same page everything would have been fine but instead i’m the child of divorced parents who hate each other and who use me to communicate their odious anger about each other’s varied ignominies.
I was a wreck. It took just 4 days for my mental and physical health to nosedive into nothing. I started breaking out, I revisited some old unproductive habits, and I had racing thoughts, despite being eminently aware of the below post.
Objection
That’s when I got the text: Time for a sponsorship family meeting. My extended sponsorship family (except my sponsor and his sponsor, because they have families) gets together once a month to have a longform meeting where we can talk about anything in our lives, get stuff off our chest, be there for one another, and just hang. Before I even got a chance to skip one homegroup, I was gonna be telling this story to everyone in my “extended family” in NA. But something stopped me.
A guy who shared ahead of me in that meeting, not even knowing what i was going through, shared the header of this post as part of his share: We Start Building Cases Against People, Then Against Our Program, and that’s what keeps us away and sick. One of my great faults is that I am almost annoyingly self-aware, and pretty quickly after I do something do I realize its wrongness or rightness or ramifications. This time, however, I needed a hint as to what I was doing. When I heard this part of his share, I realized what I had been doing all this time since the bulk of the gig had ended. Controlled folly kicked in.
I realized, in essence, fuck it. Let it all go. I did my part, and my part went well, and the people I was finishing things up with weren’t a part of the drama everyone else was embroiled in. So why let resentment get in the way of my recovery, or at least the biggest thing I do each week for my recovery.
Guilty
The people who are angry at each other are still angry at each other. They know they did wrong both to me by putting me in the middle and to each other. I’ve put my foot down and said “don’t talk to me about each other, only about the project,” and my resentments have largely dissipated into nothing. So while i’m in the very middle of step 4, during which your resentments all come to the forefront of your mind, I get to learn this apropos lesson. And I didn’t plan any of it.
Next time I write will be about resentment, again. I guess the lesson here is yet another in the recovery community about how resentment will poison you.