My Year of Dreams
Centring the sweet in sour times
Above: the Beyonce approach to life.
Friends, it has been a year. A YEAR. An annus horribilis littered with difficulties that have piled up so high, I have struggled to see over the mountain of detritus.
If you’ve been following along, you may have inferred that it has been a chaotic year. This is mainly due to my on-off relationship with someone who is newly sober, someone I love dearly, and it has been a bumpy, bumpy ride. I suppose I should’ve expected it during the first year of sobriety but hey, my area of life experience is addiction – not recovery. My ride seems to be getting smoother, thanks in large part to AA/Al-Anon and couples therapy, but much remains to be seen.
Several events occurred in this past year, which I write about briefly here, that triggered old traumas. If you have any sort of addiction in your closest relationships, you’ll know what I’m referring to. Addicts of all types create chaos wherever they go. That chaos isn’t always directly linked to substance abuse. There were years when my parents were completely sober and instead lived out their chaos in the form of incredibly messy financial decisions and their snowball effects. Police, too, tend to be more present in your life simply because addicts tend to have relationships brimming with conflict. Even if your relationship with the addict is relatively conflict-free (or so you tell yourself), they likely have plenty of other relationships that aren’t.
It was June of last year when I started to realize my life was spiralling out of control – not due to my own actions per se, but to my obvious inability to control anyone else’s. I guess these things come to a peak in summer because I live in a cold climate, which means people are indoors for most of the year. The warmth only really hits starting in July and continuing into August; by now, the heat is winding down. It’s a short summer and everyone tends to overbook it. I certainly do and last summer was a whirlwind of travel and camping and binges and treatment and conflict and massive anxiety.
The chaos subsided, briefly, before re-emerging in fall and then again in winter, fatally so, tearing apart my life. I spent February and March in shock, April trying to physically recover from the effects of anxiety, and May trying to sort logistics out. The closer it got to summer, the more relapse and conflicts occurred. But this time, therapy had better prepared me and I was able to keep my anxiety in check.
Here we are, nearing the end of summer. When I look back on this past year, I’m amazed at what I went through. I have ENDURED and somehow, I have emerged intact. When I look ahead, I can see at least another year of instability. But instead of seeing it that way, well, I’m going to take my mountain of lemons and start making some lemonade.
This year ahead of me, this is going to a year of turning points. I feel it. I know it.
This is my annus mirabilis, my year of dreams.
One of the (many) things I’m learning right now is to trust that everything will work out. This is an entirely new outlook for me; I haven’t trusted that things would work out since I was around age 14 and starting to suspect that things actually weren’t working out. My parents developed a habit of never giving anything without strings attached, which makes you develop a habit of never accepting anything and relying only on yourself for whatever you need.
One of the (many) problems with not trusting that things will work out is it puts you in survival mode, always scheming, always anticipating, always worrying, always hoarding resources for the day your life explodes. Well, my life did explode and I’m on the other side with resources intact and then some. I’m less worried about hanging onto every last bit I have because life is demanding so much of me. I’m more willing to trust that I’ll figure something out, no matter what happens. I’ll figure it out because in a way, life is on my side: each failure had an upside nudging me in a direction of growth.
So lately, I’ve been focused on giving up trying to control others – on simply trusting my relationships and the people around me instead of trying to force things to happen. I’ve been focused on moving through the world more intuitively instead of rationally. And here’s the key: when you do this, you’ve got to be okay with the outcomes if nothing works out. If you’re okay with those outcomes, you simply won’t be disappointed.
This is my “anything goes” moment. For much of the next year, I’ll have little tying me down. And while yes, that’s unstable, it’s also . . . liberating. It started with my son’s trip to the Olympics, which his father planned many months ago just for fun. He’d always wanted to do it, so he did. It continued with booking another trip to see family on the West Coast. I always intend to see my family more but it’s one of those things I don’t follow through on – until I did, because my father died.
In early summer, I’d spontaneously booked a trip with my boyfriend to Western Europe in the fall. After many conflicts, I had no idea if he was still going to go but I was determined to no matter what. I trusted that if our relationship were meant to survive, he’d make his way there. And he is, we are.
My ex-husband decided to plan a family Christmas trip he’s always wanted for our child and despite misgivings about travel at that time of year, I said sure, I’d go. I didn’t worry about what my current partner might think. I didn’t vacillate, weighing one person’s needs against another’s. I just felt what I needed, what was best for me (making memories with my child), and said yes.
My mother invited me to travel with her in the spring, which I normally say no to because nobody triggers me like my mom. But this may be the very reason why Al-Anon has come into my life now: to make it possible for me to spend time with my mother and not instantly feel like I’m chewing aluminum foil. So I said yes, tentatively.
Are you sensing a theme? There’s a lot of 'yes’es. Most are something I wanted to do at some point but failed to follow through on . . . until now. Some are things I might’ve once seen in a negative light, but now simply trust they’ll be rewarding; I’ll find the good. Saying yes is a bit like living out my dreams, and you can see what my dreams are. There’s a lot of focus on the relationships that matter to me. There’s a lack of worry. There’s a generosity of spirit I didn’t have before. There’s a lot of support, behind the scenes – a lot of network building (many different forms of therapy, frankly). And there’s a lot of room for some wonderful things to happen. Relationship conflicts aside, I’ve already had the most fulfilling summer I can remember having in a very long time.
This is my reward for giving up control. This is my lemonade.
If you’ve been following along on Substack, you’ll know that I’ve been working on this change in attitude for quite some time. Funny enough, Al-Anon also encourages such change. When you give up trying to control others, How Al-Anon Works: For Families and Friends of Alcoholics reports, there’s a big payoff: over time, situations that would’ve once given rise to any number of negative attitudes begin to pass almost unnoticed. We may even find something in these situations for which we become grateful.
I’m not a believer, but I accept the possibility of some unifying power of life (after all, quantum mechanics gets very weird and seems to obliterate the laws of nature. Mushrooms, too, will remind you to be humble about what you think you know). And that’s where you put your trust: somehow, in some way, the power of life will take care of you. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy because in going through life this way, in opening yourself up to possibility, you end up taking care of yourself.
Given my nascent trust that things will work out, I remind myself that I’m the author of my life. So this year, this year of turning points, is when I:
stop ruminating, stop keeping my thoughts inside, and start sharing
stop telling the story and write the story
stop analyzing the relationship and feel the relationship
stop obsessing over the options and actually take step 1, then step 2, and so on
stop waiting for a plan and start living in real time; my choices will become clear.
Finding the sweet in the sour is a sort of superpower. It’s a recipe for contentment over worry, for satisfaction over disappointment, for hope over despair. If you’ve ever watched that reality television series Alone, you’ll know that outlook is everything when it comes to enduring hardship. But why just endure? Think about how much sweeter it might be to embrace the hardship, give it a ripe squeeze, and let the opportunities and gifts spill, drop by drop, into your cup.
This is my year of dreams.
For more positive vibes, which are rare around here, see:
So much food for thought, here. Al Anon philosophy is very much like Buddhism. Letting go of control is the first step to freedom.
Thank you for sharing your struggles and your victories. Very inspiring.