The Right Way to Pull a Weed
Finding self-acceptance in a soybean field
I’m grateful it’s Friday morning. I’m grateful for the cinnamon rolls across from the office. I’m grateful for see what can be. I’m grateful for seeing my part. I’m grateful to be sober today.
Song of the Week:
Well, I feel like this might seem a bit of an abrupt departure from the usual musical ethos here—and perhaps it is. I love this song. It is not reflective of anything going on currently in my life, however, it has in the past. There may have been a time, earlier this century, when I maintained a playlist entitle “No, I’m Not Bitter.”1 If such a playlist existed, this song was likely on it.2
I will also tell you, it kind of fit this alcoholic’s vibe pretty cozily back in the olden days. Things mostly befell me. Like Esau, I continually felt as though my birth-right was being mis-appropriated, again and again. I should have gotten this, I wasn’t recognized for that, this was taken from me. So, a song blaming someone else (very, very, very justifiably) for the ruination of life paired really exquisitely with a shimmering glass of flinty sauvignon blanc.3 Also, who can fail to respect the way they come up with a rhyme for “furnishings.” I’m sorry, I think it’s better than Shaggy’s rhyme for “incarceration.”4
When I think back to my life in the olden days, in the days when that playlist (if it existed) was constantly egging on my resentments, but in a really catchy way that I enjoyed listening to, the drinking at the “end” of the day was a huge relief. It was certainly relief from the strain of “other people,” but it was mostly relief from the way I thought, the way I obsessed about what I thought was wrong with my life, why I wasn’t accorded my due. Drinking was a very excellent antidote to the mix of anger and fear that flowed way too freely through my veins back then.
When I think about my life, earlier this century, in those terms; when I can more confidently identify the feelings that ran the show back then, I can also very clearly see why I couldn’t stop drinking. While alcohol certainly fueled those very same feelings, there is definitely a symbiotic aspect to that, those feelings came from my own deep feelings of shame and fear—feelings that were about myself. What I thought about myself.
I drank to escape what I thought about myself.
When you phrase it that way, you can see why just stopping drinking isn’t going to be a long-term solution. I know I say this next part quite a bit, but it’s because this is one of the most important concepts in recovery (I think):
the road to recovery is paved with self-acceptance.
I’m not sure that I’ve come up with the best phrase, but you get the idea. I think my drinking took root in my insecurities, self-judgment, even self-hatred. There was a period of time in the early 1970’s, way back last century, when I was employed (by my uncle) to pull cockleburr and other weeds out of his soybean fields. I did this by hand, I don’t remember if we had gloves and we (my brother and I) each received $1 per hour for this hand-curation of multi-acre soybean fields in July. Yes, it was also hot.5 The point of this digression about semi-forced agricultural labor: You had to pull the weed out by the roots if you want to do the job right.
The Pirate Balcony Garden is hanging in there—it’s been a little chilly here in NYC and some items still seem a bit fragile. I lost some too-early planted Basil and the replacements haven’t done much yet. Even in that small domain, weeds manage to appear (I live twenty floors up!) and they take hold quickly and stubbornly.
Given my professional expertise in weed pulling, I’m going to tell you that the quick, severe yank maneuver will produce the top of the plant, but will not dislodge the roots. If you wanted to do a quality job of weed pulling, you had to actually take a bit of time, wiggle the plant a bit to loosen up the roots and then pull, adjusting the level of tension and the direction depending upon where one felt resistance, as you feel the root bundle coming free, you exert more pressure, even but forceful and, et voila—you have extracted a weed from the soil that will not regrow. That’s why they were so broke and I was so paid in the field of weed-pulling.6
It turns out recovery is kind of similar. There’s a new sponsee in the house and I’m reminded again about how powerful are the lessons taught by sponsees. Not that it’s a reverse lecture thing, it’s that in hearing their issues and concerns, I’m reminded not only of the time when I shared those same feelings, but what happened in my life to change that. Self-acceptance is near the top of that list.
I told NS (new sponsee) to read page 417’s mini-essay on acceptance and think not about what it meant about other people or the outside world, but applying it only to himself, what would it mean?
And acceptance is the answer to all of my problems today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing or situation—some fact of my life—unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place or thing or situation as being exacty the way it is supposed to be at this moment.
Big Book, p. 417
This often gets discussed at meetings as involving feelings about other people, and the idea is that acceptance is a form of surrender, passivity as in “people are going to do what people are going to do.” But of course, it’s not about other people, it’s an entirely self-directed and focused exercise.
I need to concentrate not so much on what needs to be changed in the world as on what needs to be changed in me and my attitudes.
Big Book, p. 417
It’s one thing to graciously forgive and “accept” one’s tormentors, but “accepting” my own set of faults and defects? That was beyond my grasp for a very long time; in part, because I didn’t understand what the exercise was; in part, because I was a stubborn alcoholic with a pretty substantial faith deficit. But self-acceptance, even self-love if you want to go overboard, is what finally moved the needle for this alcoholic.
It doesn’t mean presenting the world with a take-it-or-leave-it proposition, it does require progress in lieu of perfection. But it means accepting there are things about myself that are just things about myself; quirks that came out of the mish-mash of dna and environmental factors that produce such wide disparities between us, but also the commonalities. There are negative traits, to be sure, things that I wanted to and needed to change. I don’t think of these as defects, I think of them as negative traits or thinking patterns and I know there are things I can do to minimize and then change them.
But, that doesn’t mean going to war with them; grabbing hastily at the top and trying to execute the noxious weed that has been driving the drinking and the using. Because I will tell you as a professional weed-puller how that turns out.
Someone’s going to have to wrestle with that weed again.
It takes time and patience and steady pressure to extract the weed, the negative traits, the damaging and self-destructive ways of thinking. That process, by itself, is a profound act of self-acceptance. The next profound act of self-acceptance is understanding that the job will never be completely done, some traits, some thinking patterns that reflect fear or anger will persist, grow back, no matter what effort is made. Last, self-acceptance involves treating feelings, reactions, expressions with compassion, while waiting for them to pass again.
Because they always do.
Happy Friday
I like saying it that way better, it seems longer ago. Also, why don’t people say things like, “that’s so last century?”
Other songs that could have been on this semi-mythical playlist were “Everything She Wants” by Wham and “That’s No Lady, That’s my Wife,” by Lyle Lovett. I had nothing, literally nothing to do with the lyrics or the title of that song.
No, I don’t miss it, but it was very beautiful once.
But it’s definitely Number Two.
These should not be construed as complaints. My aunt and uncle had married right out of high school and there was a certain laxity about staying at their house, also I was taught how to chew tobacco and got to drive my uncle’s Dodge Charger in the fields where there had been hay. Also, reckless driving on country roads.
Is this even a pun I should apologize for?