Carl Sagan and I are sitting lotus in the middle of nowhere watching a supernova. This isn't serenity. Serenity would mean being at peace, feeling harmonious. No, Carl and I are watching the galaxy rend itself apart and letting entropy do the rest.
Step Two: Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
-Codependents Anonymous
One of the biggest problems for a codependent is having a God-complex. It's very easy, when you believe so little in yourself, to reshape something or someone; to make them into a god or goddess. Some people make themselves their own god and not in the "my body is my temple" sort of way. This is pure worship of the self, like narcissism on meth.
I created gods from the people around me. In CoDa, we learn that we have been doing this all our lives, that we have always made someone or something our savior because we came to believe that there simply wasn't anything worth saving in our own selves. In CoDa, we learn from the day we enter the dank church basements and fold out chair knights of the round that there is something greater than ourselves. The cool thing is, we get to choose what that happens to be.
Before I go into what my Higher Power (HP) is, I need to tell you where I am right now, what I'm doing right now in my mind. I'm on a rowing machine pulling and releasing to the cadence of steel and plastic grinding together. I create the tempo, I am the flow that I wish to experience. My eyes are closed, my breath is an indicator of my pace. In my mind, Carl Sagan and I are floating outside of Earth's atmosphere, watching Madagascar slowly disappear on a globe tilted at 23.5 degrees. Envisioning myself as relaxed and loose is one of the hardest things to do. I feel like I have to be moving or making some kind of gesture but we don't. Carl and I just float there and watch coronal mass ejections get sucked into the Earth's magnetosphere, creating auroras that bombard the earth with radioactive particles which are perfectly harmless.
In my mind, Carl and I talk. He's my HP. Carl is the one person I can go to no matter where I am and no matter what is happening. Have you ever tried writing dialogue before? It's difficult; trying to make things sound natural and to make them flow in the readers mind like they would in real life. Not here. Carl and I just talk. When I close my eyes and begin to row, the words come unbidden to Me/Carl.
I won't share our words, those are private and they belong to me and me alone. What I can share is the slow realization that there is something greater than myself that I can and choose to believe in. If I hadn't made this conscience decision, I think I might be dead by now. I can share the painful moments like when my HP told me how afraid I was of being alone. I can share the hope I feel when I know that I'm not alone and I can share the hot tears that stream down my face along with the sweat and exertion of rowing through solar winds guided by the ionic storm of a nebula bursting into life from the collective gasses and dust of a trillion billion dead star particles. I'm lucky that I sweat so much in this regard I suppose. Nobody in the gym can see what's really going on inside my mind. And that is the way it ought to be.
This is where I am; three different places at once. In the uncomfortable chair on a campus typing, a rowing machine in a gym, and floating in the ether with Carl Sagan.
So...why Carl Sagan?
Higher Power....that sounds quasi-religious to me, or at least it did initially. AA, CoDa, SLA, we're all winners. Those like myself who've had multiple addictions are called "Double Winner." This is a concept that, when heard for the first time, made me feel violent. Not so much anymore, dejected and humored if you can be both of those at once.
The thing about our HP is that we feel out what that is as we understand it. It took me a long time to realize I wasn't an religious person and even longer to feel like it was okay to admit to. G, my sponsor, is quick to remind me that, "we gotta be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater." Chuck the organized aspect of religion, it's a control scheme and one that works exceptionally well. Keep the spirit, the spark, the "I" that chooses to be here.
So at first it was gravity. The empiricist in me needed some kind of tangible HP. I sure as shit wasn't going back into a church and saying the Lord of the Rings Prayer ever again. I refuse to become a victim and slave to shame and guilt under the yoke of organized Catholic guilt. I needed to feel my HP. I wanted to feel the apple drop from the tree and land on my head. I held my arm out one day, straight and rigid, then I let it drop. Gravity. I tried jumping as high as I could. Gravity. I looked at the drooping leaves of a a tree in my backyard that sought a photosynthetic source of nourishment all the while cow towing to gravity's relentless pull.
Gravity was the edge from which I leapt into space. It's easy to divide us from the rest of the universe. We are here. Everything else is "out in space." I suppose that's why my time spent with Carl initially started just outside of the Earths atmosphere. I couldn't imagine leaving that Pale Blue Dot. Just like I couldn't imagine leaving behind all my gods and false ideals that I'd fervently held on to for so long; thinking they were what was good for me.
Our minds, as we age, go through a process called convolution. Our brains become more wrinkled, defined, and pocked with age. As we learn more, since there's only so much real estate in our skulls, the brain turns inward so as to continue to expand intellectually without 'poppin our tops off. That's why, when they looked at Einsteins brain, it was like a California raisin.
I bring up convolution because I feel as though the same thing is happening within myself but on a cellular level. Almost as if I'm absorbing the idea rather than simply intellectualizing it. Knowing how a motorcycle steers is one thing but to feel the gyroscopic pull of each aspect of the machine in tandem with the direction you look is another thing entirely. You have to internalize it, make it a part of you.
This was especially hard for me. I was so burnt out by religion that I couldn't quite make that leap yet. G said something simple, "fake it til you make it." So I did. I spent time alone, with my eyes closed or open just trying to...talk? Is that what I'm actually doing or is the idea of talking a representation of the process of cellular internalization? Maybe both.
It felt disengenuine at first and one of the hardest things I had to share on my support group was that I was an Atheist. I spent weeks gathering the nerve to say it and was sure I'd be ostracized afterwards. How little I knew about CoDa is obvious to me now. There were plenty of people like myself there, G included. I guess that's one of the reasons he and I click, we both believe in ourselves and something greater but we don't want to smell like frankincense and mer afterwards.
I just realized I forgot my donut in my car, bummer. I was really looking forward to that apple fritter....shit.
So I turned inward. I attempted to fake it and become so convoluted that my mind would look like a circus fun house mirror by the end of my recovery. But it doesn't work like that. We all have our own pace and limits for personal growth.
I was still drifting close to Earth, rowing back and forth on the machine...but I started to distance myself from the Pale Blue Dot. Weeks of rowing and I was floating in the Oort Cloud, surrounded by cosmic dust and Star Stuff 15 billion years old. One day, I realized I wasn't faking it anymore. One day I realized that I was genuinely asking for help when I was scared or feeling alone. One day, I took my second step in recovery and came to believe in something greater than myself.
That's what codependency really is about anyway; Us. Our actions, emotions, decision are means of controlling others to get what we want. I manipulated others by using anger, guilt, and charm. I thought that if I could make someone feel bad for me or fall in love with me then I could get what I wanted.
There's a great lyric from a band called Fear Factory that goes like this:
I am the thorn in your,
I am the thorn in your,
I am the thorn in your,
I am the thorn in your I.
That was my existence. Just Me in the most selfish ways possible. It's one of those paradoxical relationships because codependents give so much to help others but we do it to make ourselves happy. But after it's all said and done, there simply isn't a shred left for us. We've seen to our own destruction time and time again. I am the thorn in your I. It can go on forever. This cycle of fear, anger, obsession, and denial. They're all part of a codependent's balanced breakfast.
This creation of gods isn't new, I'm not the first and I won't be the last to do this. But I know now that I am guilty of it. Guilt and shame are two of the things I felt the most upon learning Step Two. I felt ashamed that I had let myself fall so far away from my own truths. I felt guilt because I had hurt so many people in the process. G was there to save me from yet another cycle of self-loathing. "Shame is thinking you are a mistake. Guilt is knowing that you made a mistake."
I didn't have to feel either one. Just like suffering I had a choice in the matter; I always did. Part of Step Two is taking the initiative to surrender (oxy-moronic isn't it?). Being willing to admit to something greater than myself was one was one of the hardest things to do. The idea that this universe was Ian-Centric was lodged firmly in place by the time I was in my 20's. Erasing all those old tapes, and throwing them in the garbage takes a lot of time but it is an endeavor worthy of our commitment and uncertainty.
It finally stopped at Carl Sagan because my HP was the Universe and who better to represent it than one of the pioneers of exploration outside our planet? That mean that everything was a part of my HP. I didn't have to pick and choose; there were no sacred or profane places. "We are all Star-Stuff" Carl once said before he died. It's true, we are all made from the matter withing the universe. That's a fact. It's Entropy and where else could we have come from?
Making the Universe my HP meant I was a part of my own beliefs, I didn't have to hope for images of Carl on pieces of toast, he's just hanging out wherever I go.
Carl and I are sitting lotus in front of a supernova, side-by-side. There is no pain here, there is no fear of floating endlessly in the abyss of an endless vacuum. It just is. Carl talks to me without effort cause he is me. He's the indicator of peace and serenity that is possible if I am willing to surrender another part of myself. Another bit of the Ian-Centric universe I wish I could control.
Bathing is super-heated helium and methane gas isn't bad at all. Now when I row, when I close my eyes, I still feel the occasional sting of tears in my eyes but I know there is someone sitting close by read to listen with intent. Someone to remind me to breath. Someone who loves me without condition and asks for nothing in return.
We learn to surrender to something greater than ourselves.
-Ian
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