Quiet

Rest can be productive. These are wise words from a fellow in my recovery program. I am on day four of resting do to being ill. I know I could push through it, but I believe that listening to my body and actually partaking in rest is the wiser thing to do. It has taken several days, but I have finally reached a place of peace within myself. I suffer with low self-esteem at times. I allow my body image, or how much I get done in a day, to govern my sense of self-worth. But I am more than that. I am a spiritual being seeking a physical experience and a physical being seeking a spiritual experience. I certainly can get lost in the physical experience and forget to seek out a spiritual one. Being restful, reading, meditating, and listening to nature these last few days has me connecting to a deeper spiritual self.

I came from a busy childhood. In some ways it felt like we were always running. I learned to build a self-worth based on performance. As a teen I was an athlete and a runner. I attended private schools, and my grades were important. I was reminiscing about a program I attended freshman year in high school titled Leadership Development Institute. LDI’s for short. It was with YMCA. I also was in a program called Earth Service Corps through this camp and organization. These were extra curricular activities and I really thrived in these environments. School was hard, and I did well, but outside of school in these programs, that led to more programs in later years, was where I felt fully alive. Life was so promising. I had no clue to the hardships I would face with mental illness later in high school and college.

There was a place that I experienced rest and peace in my childhood and teens. I live there now, on Lopez Island. As a family we came up to our home here on the weekends to take a break from the city. After several days of resting, I can hear the quiet from this rural island on my deck and out my bedroom window. When I visited in my early life, I always slept very soundly. The contrast of quietude is profound when you visit from the city. I could always be myself here. In our house on Lopez, I had a closet full of ordinary clothes as a youth, and it did not matter how I looked. Having settled in after 16 years of living here full time, I can easily resort back to early programming. I can lose that sense of rest and peace. As an alcoholic, I can turn anything into an obsession. Even after leaving work in 2016, I have continued to obsess about volunteering and working out at the gym. I can obsess about my chores. Somewhere hidden in these obsessive thoughts, I struggle with a sense of self-worth. The noise of accomplishment arrises in my being. And I forget. I forget to be one with the serenity of this place where I live.

I am experiencing that now. I have quieted my mind by taking some days off. My partner says I rarely take a day off. Living with a disability and being in recovery, one would think I would do this more often. I still manage to obsess about being busy. Rest can be productive, however, and right now I am feeling this in the core of my being. Being active in recovery, and living in a slow and quiet environment, I can embrace this rest. Processing trauma, stored anger and rage, suppressed grief and shame, all require us to be in tune with our bodies, and to seek out a spiritual experience. In the last couple of years I have resigned to committing to a life of full-time recovery. I have decided to not pursue publishing, and to not do volunteer work. I have decided to remain unemployed and out of school or classes of any kind. I attend meetings every day. I show up and do service work within the program. This is another kind of work, because it is fulfilling, and I do not become triggered into obsession. I reflect and talk about in these meetings, what I need as a person in recovery from both mental illness and addiction. I only regret that I have not been seeking this way of life since my twenties. For a long time, I worked, went to school, and tried to achieve. I could have accepted sooner what the universe was trying so hard to tell me. I deserve to take time and space for recovery. I am growing leaps and bounds now that I have finally decided to do this.

The young person I was, working for the YMCA, is still in me. I have not forgotten them. Sometimes, I look at my face in my Zoom meetings, and I ponder at how old I am and how I got here. My grey shows, and I am two decades older than some of my peers. I admire how they found recovery so soon in their lives, but I truly ‘do not regret my past nor wish to shut the door on it’, as the promises say in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. I cherish my life and how hard I have tried throughout the years. I have learned to love myself and all I have experienced and been through. There is no reason to compare myself to anyone, because I am learning to love and accept myself with every fiber of my being. I accept my past, present, and future. As I embrace the quiet of this island and rest in peacefulness, I can stretch this healing acceptance even further into my bones. Existence just as it is is sacred. I do not need to be anything more or less… just me, right now, right here, listening to the birds and ravens, absorbing the first days of summer on a quiet island.