About 5 years ago, I was diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis and prescribed a weekly injection of some brew aimed at taming my allegedly overactive immune system. Later, the docs had me sitting in an infusion chair for 8 hours every six months or so.

I didn’t like the idea of strange chemicals swirling inside my corpus, and they had some weird side effects, so I rebelled for a couple of years, got off the meds, and avoided my rheumatologist. The disease advanced and began to attack other parts of my body.

On a solo camping trip one fall, I began to experience severe eye pain. By the time I got home, I couldn’t open my eyes. An emergency visit to the ophthalmologist revealed that my arthritis had “melted” part of the cornea in my left eye and could possibly take aim at something more vital. Back to the Rheumatologist it was for a mild tongue-lashing and another 8 hours in the infusion chair.

When COVID hit, I rebelled again, refusing to navigate pandemic America with a heavily compromised immune system. It was during that time that I quit drinking and began to experience a common side effect of the NA life: extreme sugar cravings. At the time, I didn’t realize that there was a correlation between sugar and immune system disorders, and my self control has never been stellar, so I replaced my booze habit with a different one, for a little while.

I’ve never had a great relationship with sugar. It’s everywhere, and makes things taste really nice. But when I quit drinking, something happened to my psyche, similar to what happens to spoiled children when a reasonable adult forces a few boundaries on them. I began to question other areas of my life, including this new relationship with sugar. A few months into my NA journey, I decided to put some massive boundaries on this habit too.

I immediately noticed a tangible shift in my joint/eye/etc. pain.

As with my alcohol journey, there have been some cheats; some days I say “screw it” and pound sugar like a good average American, and always hurt the next day. If I do that for a few days, I’ll experience eye pain again, get scared, and take a few days off. Consistency’s always been difficult.

No offense to the world of Rheumatology professionals, but in my almost 5 years of being an arthritis patient, I’m wondering why nobody mentioned that too much sugar can screw with your immune system. Sure, I’ve heard that a proper diet can help, and I’ve tried that, but nothing has affected my lowly state like saying a hearty “Quack YOU!!!” to the white stuff.

It makes sense. Sugar’s good for nobody. Humanity has spent 99% of its existence far from the intake that we perpetrate today. Our bodies aren’t used to this; pounding sugar on a daily basis – like we all do – isn’t something we’re genetically accustomed to. Go figure that the problems it can cause are legion: weight gain, depression, sleep problems, bad moods, cancer, inflammation, general discomfort, and others are listed by many as common side effects of the average American’s excess sugar intake, said to be 77 grams per day.

If you do the math, that’s 60 pounds of sugar a year, or 112,420 calories.

If you’re trying to get in shape but fail to put a big clamp on this, you won’t get far. One pound of body weight is equal to 3,000 calories.

Our average yearly sugar intake equates to 37 pounds a year.

Ugh.

When I quit booze, I didn’t notice any significant changes; I lost a little weight and my mood improved a little. But the benefits of quitting sugar have been much more tangible. I immediately lost about 10 pounds, slept better, and maybe said a forever goodbye to the infusion room.

What’s more, saying no to yet another monkey on my back has further convinced my spoiled self that I’m the one in charge: I don’t need a bunch of external garbage to feel happy, and unneeded consumption isn’t the way toward the life I’m looking for.

But the hardest thing about quitting sugar is similar to the hardest thing about quitting booze. Not only is it everywhere, it’s in the places where I tend to have the most fun: watching movies, road trips, hanging out with kids/family/friends. Those are dear to me, and have always been attended by a sugary drink or some other heavily loaded sugar bomb. How can I have fun if I’m not simultaneously eating/drinking sugar?

I’ve heard many people say that their addiction is the only thing they truly love. That’s been true for me; the hardest thing about beating these relationships is the sense of life that’s associated with them. Laughter, connection, hope, etc. all have intimate ties to booze and sugar.

But I’ve been off booze for almost a year now, and that connection is not nearly as strong as it used to be. Not so for sugar. If I can get some distance from it, I’ll begin to imagine life without it, much more convinced that it’s not a need, and that it might just be keeping me from the life I’m looking for.

For now, that box of sugary cereal that I bought for the kids is calling my name. Lash me to the pole, for I cannot resist her (Lucky) Charms ™.

Photo by Jamie Albright on Unsplash

It’s a long story, but last October I decided to take a year off from alcohol. There have been a few cheats since then – maybe the “no” in this title should be in quotes – but 99% of this “no” booze chapter has been free and clear.

Because I was a moderate, regular drinker, the NA life has been interesting. Along the way, I’ve learned a few things and, from time to time, will be penning some observations.

This morning, I’d like to recount the tale of a large meltdown that happened yesterday, and an important insight that followed.

One of my kids struggles with math. She doesn’t have any cognitive barriers that we know of, but she gets impatient and very frustrated when she runs into a difficult problem. Last year, she got a little behind, so I decided to work with her over the summer.

It’s been brutal.

Yesterday, we forgot to do math in the morning and ended up sitting down around dinner time to knock it out. She wanted to get it done before she ate (I hadn’t eaten either), so we sat down to what I thought would be 30 minutes or so of work. She got frustrated, then sat in silence and wouldn’t respond to my expert math teaching skills. When I tried to push her, she’d fuss at me, and/or shove the computer away, and/or a few other things that I read as disrespectful.

This is a huge trigger for me. When folks of any age show me the slightest whiff of disrespect, I have a hard time responding like an adult, especially when I’ve spent the entire day with kids and haven’t eaten anything.

Hangriness is just as real for adults as it is for kids.

I’m not sure where I inherited this particular trigger. I’ll tell you that it runs in my family, and that I know few people who can adult well when disrespected. Either way, I didn’t show up well last night.

A meltdown followed.

For me that meant sending the kid to bed early without dinner, grabbing a beer, and heading out to the garage to feel sorry for myself.

There have been a few moments in the past 9 months when it’s been really hard not to drink: when everyone else is partying, when I’ve spent an hour or so in the summer heat working on the Jeep, when I get really bored, and, worst of all, when I’m triggered.

In these moments, life seems hopeless, like it’ll never change. Everything is wrong and I feel like the victim of some cosmic conspiracy. An eternal loser. The only thing that might bring a little hope is a glass of whiskey.

It’s true by the way, when we’re triggered, nothing calms us down and returns us to reality faster than a good dose of alcohol.

I ended up throwing my beer, really hard, at the ground, splattering it all over the garage and myself. Thankfully it was NA beer so I didn’t smell like I’d been drinking all day when I went back into the house.

I offered the kid a second chance and some food, and we started over. Within 30 minutes I was as calm as I would’ve been had I drank, and we spent an hour knocking out a problem that I had to research before I could solve it.

Wanna see it?

“21 is 37% of what number?”

Talk about being bad at math…

Anyway, as I later processed all of this with Elaine, I suddenly realized something about the way I get triggered when someone disrespects me, something that might be true about all triggers.

We don’t heal from them unless we walk through them.

The fear, hopelessness, frustration, and victim-ness that come in our most triggered moments has to be experienced if we have any hope of turning the heat down a little bit. It sucks, but this might be just another area of life where we’ll have to hurt before we heal.

I don’t mean to judge anyone who drinks their way through a trigger, I’ve certainly done it oh so many times. Almost did it last night. But I’m wondering if booze doesn’t insulate us from something that’s fundamental to our healing.

We all have triggers, and we need to find a way to ultimately get rid them. That’s impossible of course, but we can at least head in that direction. Maybe choosing to walk through the hell that comes part and parcel with our deepest triggers is the best way forward.

Sounds fun, yeah? Who doesn’t love a good walk through hell?

 

Photo by Yosh Ginsu on Unsplash

Years ago, a friend had just had their home remodeled. It was amazing – completely gutted and renovated from top to bottom. Sadly, the newest homes aren’t perfect, and my friend found great disappointment in the manufactured flooring that flexed up and down a bit. It seemed to affect the entire experience.

I can relate, constantly finding a similar great disappointment in my house. It has tons of flaws that have somehow come to define the whole thing. The block we live on, for example, is populated almost entirely with rental properties. There are cars everywhere, like someone’s constantly throwing a frat party. In addition, the people who built our house weren’t exactly top-tier craftsmen; it creaks and groans regularly, giving it a cheap-ish sort of feel, especially when I compare it to other, bigger, newer homes.

When we first moved in, everything was amazing; the newest, biggest house I ever lived in. 6 months later, everything went back to normal; the house became just another house and one more item on my ever-growing list of things that can’t seem to live up to my expectations.

I could list many things that have disappointed me in these 55 years of trying to find the life I’ve always wanted: career, relationships, money, oh so many material pursuits, etc.

If I could impart one piece of wisdom it would be this: we can’t get away from disappointment. No matter what we pursue, or what our hopes and dreams are, disappointment will follow us into them, like an old, scraggly dog that you can’t get rid of.

At the same time, we need it. The life we’re aching for doesn’t happen unless we experience disappointment with some regularity.

If experience makes one an expert, I have a black belt in disappointment and would like to share a few things it’s taught me over the years.

The Currency of Heaven

Nobody’s truly pining away for a bigger house, or a dream career, or that perfect marriage. There’s nothing wrong with pursuing those, but the biggest disappointments I’ve suffered were those rare moments when I got my hands on something I’d always dreamed of. They didn’t change my life like I thought they would, and they certainly didn’t make my desires go away. In most cases, getting more things and climbing higher ladders just made my desires worse.

What the human soul is dying for is much bigger, much more eternal than the stuff we think we want. So, we shouldn’t be surprised when the cosmos, like a frustrated parent trying to convince her teenager that the latest pair of Air Jordans really isn’t that big of a deal, says no.

Confused as we can be about our desires, I’m convinced that when we reach our deathbed chapter, we’ll be more in tune with what we truly desire than at any point in our life, and it will have nothing to do with “the next thing.”

We’ll be thinking about people. Our best memories will revolve around and be intimately tied to our closest friendships. What we’ll want more than anything else is more of that. Closeness. Love. But we’ll have to get to the end of ourselves to realize it.

So go, young conqueror, grab all the brass rings you can, but if you fail to make human intimacy at least an equal priority, you’ll regret it.

Fortunately, we’ll never find ourselves in a place where friendships aren’t available. We might not always get to hang with the cool, pretty folks, but we can always make a friend, or get closer to the friends we already have.

If that sounds boring to you, it might be that you’ve never gotten close enough to understand the power of human intimacy.

Either way, if disappointment is the mortar, people are the bricks.

The cosmos has placed no boundaries here, save the disappointments that herd us toward a deeper relationship with humanity.

Western Thankfulness

I once watched a documentary about a tribe in Africa where the men (all married) adorned themselves and danced for a woman who would decide on a winner, then have with him one night of tribally sanctioned hanky panky.

But because there can only be one winner, about 20 guys went home disappointed.

One guy in particular had high expectations that he would be chosen but was forced to return in shame to his every day, hum drum marriage. It didn’t take him long however to remember the bride of his youth, the person committed to him like no other. In short order, according to his post-contest interview, his life with her took on a glory it didn’t have before his pursuit was redirected.

I doubt the guy who won went home the next morning with a deeper appreciation for his marriage. That’s how it often works; brass rings, higher ladders, more stuff, and new experiences seldom leave us in appreciation of the life that we’re too often trying to ditch in the hopes of finding something a little less hum-drummy.

Many, many times, disappointment has forced me to stop running and take a deeper, much more appreciative look at what I have.

The Right Us

Only a select few of us will win. We’ll be a huge success at business, or become someone everyone wants to hang out with, or find a bunch of money, or whatever. The rest of us, i.e., 99% of humanity, will have to wade through a much more mediocre existence.

A big chunk of mediocrity’s victims will feel like losers because, though the winner’s books were studied hard, we just couldn’t make it work. That’s bad because, in western culture – our movies, music, discourse, etc. – mediocrity is failure.

So it is of utmost importance that we at least elevate ourselves above the mediocre, to find a way come hell or high water to distinguish ourselves above the mailman, or the waiter, or the guy who collects our garbage, or whoever else we labeled “just needs to aim higher.”

Around this spins the Western cultural idea of “losers” and “winners,” a caste system based on income and/or accomplishment, one that ignores the weight of a human being and renders null and void the peace and hope that comes from appreciating what we truly are.

I’ll tell you from experience that when you live in this back-alley dumpster it’s impossible to have a healthy view of yourself. Without this, you’ll either spend your life feeling like a loser, or scratching and clawing for something meaningless because you don’t want to be like all the other losers.

My career disappointments in particular have forced me to reconsider; reminding me over and over again that I’m just like everyone else, and everyone else is just like me. My attempts to distinguish myself above others have been little more than a rejection of the unconditional greatness that we all possess, while my disappointments have conspired to teach me something that I couldn’t have learned otherwise.

If nothing else, I’ve learned in my many years that no matter what I pursue, disappointment is coming along for the ride, always there to redirect me toward what matters most.

 

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash