The Party Ain't Jumpin' Like It Used To

When my best friend Tara and I were living together in New York, before I started dating my husband, she went through this weird period where she became obsessed with mainstream hip hop. What made it weird was that, up until that point, she listened mostly to obscure indie rock and pretty much hated any song on the radio. But during that time, Hot 97 and Power 105.1 were blaring pretty much constantly from her bedroom. We lived with this guy who was also a music snob, and it bothered him to no end. He'd beg Tara to explain her bizarre obsession, but she'd just smile enigmatically and turn up the music.

The music annoyed me a little at first, but after months of hearing it, I started singing along and, after a while, I'd join Tara in her room for dance parties. (Lot's of grumbling and eye rolling ensued from our roommate.) After a while, the hip hop obsession faded and Tara went back to the music she had always listened to. Still, a lot of little inside jokes are still going from that era, like saying "Bank Amurrrrica" (from Chingy's "One Call Away") whenever we drive past a Bank of America, or laughing about how some lame-o guy serenaded me with Snoop Dogg's "Beautiful" on our first and only date.

Today, I got a surprise package in the mail from Tara. Inside was a homemade CD and a note. The note said, "Here's some music from a really fun time in our lives." I popped it in my computer, and sure enough, it was a mix of crappy-crap hip hop circa early 2000s! One of the songs was Usher's "Let It Burn," which describes perfectly the ambivalence of letting go of a toxic relationship even though you still love the person. So I'm adding "Let It Burn" to "Margaux's Mix" that I've got going here. Also, I was so touched and stoked to have received that CD and I wanted to share some of it with ya'll. (Above is just the song, not the official video. The video had content that could potentially be triggering to sex addicts and their partners.)

Practice Makes (Contentedly) Imperfect

Last night, a couple members of my step group and I were philosophizing about the steps. We were talking about how so much of the internal change we experience after each step is out of our control, and that, therefore, it’s futile to stress over whether we’re doing the steps “right.” Still, even though we knew this, we all agreed that it’s often difficult to keep our perfectionist tendencies in check. Then someone who’s working the steps for the first time shared a tool she’d been using to be gentle with herself: “I just view this journey through the steps as my practice run.”

When I heard her say the word “practice,” something clicked. I started thinking about yoga, which I’ve come to see as a metaphor for life, and how what my classmates and I do every time we step onto the mat is referred to as a “practice.” There are no yoga performances, pageants or competitions. Each week, we twist our bodies into various shapes and pay close attention to our breath with no end goal in mind. We do it for the sake of doing it, for no reason except to connect with the present moment. But still, something changes and improves over time. That something, however, is not that we progressively get better at each pose, that we edge closer to peak performance each week. Instead, we progressively get better at accepting our imperfections and limitations. We accept that the pose that was strong and precise yesterday might be wobbly and sloppy today. We accept the differences in focus and energy from session to session. We accept non-linear change. We accept that practice is truth, performance is myth.

Read the rest of this post at The Second Road...

I Get So Tired Of Working So Hard For Our Survival

At the beginning of yoga class tonight, the teacher asked us to each set our own personal intention. She does this a lot, and usually I set my intention around general spiritual principles like "letting go" or "acceptance" or "unconditional love." Tonight, the first thing that popped in my mind was "some sort of healing between my husband and me." My practice tonight was really rejuvenating and I sweat and I stretched and I shook, and by the time we began to wind down, I felt like a two-ton load of tension had been lifted off my body.

As we were settling into Savasana, the corpse pose, shifting and fidgeting in an attempt to find comfort, the teacher remarked that it's the most difficult pose in yoga. "The hardest thing to do is to just let go and relax when you feel like there are a million other things you could and should be doing." Normally, I wouldn't have thought much about her comment, but since I kept going back to my intention, I thought about how difficult and scary it has been to let go of my marriage and to not think about the million things I could and should do to try to bend it to my will. Thinking back to my last blog post, I realized that right now, I'm in Savasana. It hasn't been at all easy to find comfort. Letting go has been a process fraught with squirming and shifting and fidgeting, but little by little, I continue to sink in and trust that I'll be supported. And little by little, I've been finding peace.

When I got home, I took a nice, long soak in the tub and listened to the radio. As I was washing my hair, Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes" came on. It seemed really strange that some deejay would be playing it, considering that it's circa 1986 and you just don't hear it that much anymore. It also seemed really strange that it would come on tonight, considering that it was Mark's and my first-dance song at our wedding. It had taken us a long time to choose our song, and we selected "In Your Eyes" mostly because we both loved the scene in Say Anything where Lloyd Dobler blasts it on a boom box outside Diane Court's window. (Soooo romantic. Sigh.) I had never paid much attention to the lyrics, even though I had heard the debate over whether it was about Peter Gabriel's love for Rosanna Arquette or if it was about an intense religious experience he had.

After listening more closely tonight, I'd personally like to think it's about both--about a person's spirituality and human love growing in tandem. (Lyrics here). I also like the fact that it seems to be about a person who's lost and runs away and doesn't know what to do until all the person's instincts suddenly return and "reach out from the inside."

I'm not quite sure what all tonight's events put together mean, if anything at all. But for some reason, I wanted to write it all down and share it. Enjoy the video!

Just For Today

Today, a blogger pal of mine was wondering out loud whether I’d continue writing here and, if so, in what capacity. I told her that I purposely didn’t officially sign off when I was feeling sick of the blog because something I’ve been learning in my recovery is to avoid promises of “always” and “never.” As I’ve been becoming more aware of my feelings, I’ve been learning that feelings come and go. I’ve been learning to replace “always” and “never” with “Just For Today.” What’s right for me this minute, day, week, month or year might not be right for me in the near or distant future. All I can do is pay close attention to what my soul is calling for, and answer that call. So, while writing here wasn’t what I needed a few weeks ago, I’m now feeling the pull to write here again and I’m yielding to it. However, I’m not going to make a commitment that’s set in stone (X amount of posts a week, for example). When I set those sorts of expectations for myself, I just wind up feeling stressed and fuzzy-headed. Instead, I’ll keep this blog open, knowing that it’s always here when I feel like writing.

As I was reflecting on the blog situation, I realized that the “Just For Today” philosophy also explains how I’ve begun to view my husband’s and my separation. Right now, I don’t feel like being around him and he doesn’t feel like being around me. For a few months after we first separated, I denied those feelings. All I could think about was our commitment and my expectation that we find a way—any way—to get this shit straightened out, stat. But as the months went by and I began to be more honest with myself, I realized that my soul was calling for a time-out from the relationship. I listened, and gave myself permission to stop forcing myself to work relentlessly on something I no longer felt like working on.

But, just like I did with this blog, I’ve been avoiding promises of “always” and “never.” I don’t know whether one day in the near or distant future he or I or both of us will want to pick the relationship back up. I’m honoring the feelings I have now, and I’m under no delusion that,with the way things are looking now, the future seems to hold a lot of promise for our marriage. Therefore, I don’t spend my time holding out hope, and instead all of my energy goes toward moving forward in my own life, not moving forward in my marriage. However, I honor the fact that we're still married and, therefore, I'm not doing anything that goes against that, such as dating other people. (In turn, I'm honoring myself--after all, the reason I separated was to give myself the space to get my head together, without the outside noise of any relationship).

Still, I’m open to whatever feelings and situations might arise later on. There’s no way of knowing where my path will lead me and where Mark's path will lead him, and whether or not those two paths with once again converge. Ultimately, my Higher Power will be the one who decides the fate of our partnership. Fortunately, because we’re legally separated, there’s a deadline for that decision and letting go won’t lead to procrastination. In my separation, I’m right where I’m supposed to be.

Enough About Us, Let's Talk About Me

I stopped writing on my blog for a while recently, mostly because I had so saturated myself with the subject of sex addiction that I began to feel that if I wrote or read one more word about it, I’d puke. This feeling of being fed up to my teeth coincided with a sense that I had finally arrived at a point in my recovery where it was all about me. Sex addiction was my husband’s disease, and I was done focusing on my husband. I knew I had my own serious issues and that I still needed recovery, but I was thinking that maybe what I needed to fully extricate myself from my husband’s issues was to drop out of S-Anon and join a group like CODA, where it was all about codependency and not codependency by proxy.

Read the rest of this post at The Second Road...

Hands Are Shaking Cold

I'm sort of missing this blog right now, but I don't have a lot of time to write, so I'm going go half-assed and offer up yet another cheesy pop video, this one courtesy of my friend Tara, who knows that I seem to be compiling a playlist unofficially titled "Songs That [Could Be]/Are About Addiction." This one is called "Move Along" and it's by a band called All-American Rejects. It's about a person, apparently an ex-lover, who's decided to "move along" rather than face her issues (lyrics here). I kinda like it--it's catchy. Oh, and something worth mentioning is that I think the lead singer is seriously hot. It's been a long time since I've been attracted to anyone or felt the least bit sexual (not that I'm objectifying this guy, but you know what I mean). It's kind of a big deal.

Quiet

I've had a few people check in with me recently, pointing out that this blog has been pretty "quiet" lately. I'm not completely sure why, but I just haven't been all that motivated to write here over the past month or so. It's not that I'm isolating or that I'm feeling depressed--in fact, it's the opposite. I've been spending a lot of time with friends, and I've been busy searching for jobs, doing yoga, going to meetings, working the steps, and enjoying the gorgeous summer weather.

I've also been noticing a gradual internal shift lately. Even though I was intellectually focusing on myself, it wasn't until recently that my recovery wholly became all about me. Up until the recent past, I spent a lot of time trying to understand sex addiction, psychoanalyzing my husband, deconstructing our relationship and separation, and generally just trying to understand what the fuck had been happening during the years I was in this relationship. I'm not quite sure how it happened (and maybe my grasping for the words to explain is why I've been hesitant to write here), but I feel like I've arrived at a place of peace and acceptance for where I am. I now know for certain that I made the right decision in separating from Mark, and I feel completely prepared to accept whatever outcome results from that decision.

With that acceptance, I've been noticing that I've been wanting to distance myself from the topic of sex addiction. It's not that I want to deny that it exists and that it was the catalyst for my recovery, it just doesn't occupy my every waking thought anymore. Instead, I've been focusing on deeper layers of myself--emotions I've kept buried, childhood experiences, past relationships, and my true wants and needs. But most of all, I've been focusing on living--appreciating the people around me, enjoying nature and staying in the present.