Self-acceptance

Central to being Sonia is self-acceptance.  I read about self-acceptance in the AA Daily Reflections book:

"I pray for the willingness to remember that I am a child of God, a divine soul in human form, and that my most basic and urgent life-task is to accept, know, love and nurture myself. As I accept myself, I am accepting God’s will. As I know and love myself, I am knowing and loving God. As I nurture myself I am acting on God’s guidance.  I pray for the willingness to let go of my arrogant self-criticism, and to praise God by humbly accepting and caring for myself.”

To remain sober it is necessary to be of service to others.  But you cannot be truly of service to others if you do not love yourself, are not of service to yourself.  Drinking alcoholically is intrinsically self-destructive.  My drinking was self-destructive to the extreme.  Lots of people come into the program and get sober right away or shortly after, some of us go through years of relapsing before we get sober.  I strongly suspect that one of the reasons I have relapsed so many times is that I have a strong penchant for self-destructiveness, because I’m much more comfortable with suffering, which is familiar, than with feeling well, which feels odd--I haven’t really felt that I deserve to feel that way.  I have plenty of other self-destructive traits, which need to be removed from my life just like alcohol was.  The most urgent task in early sobriety for me, has been learning to take care of myself.  Like many an alcoholic, I’ve had trouble with eating properly, personal hygiene, beating myself up over small things, negative thinking and so on.

On the topic of self-nuturing, one day when I was in psychoanlysis, working on the issue of not feeding myself even when extremely hunger, but happily eating if fed (so not anorexic), I mentioned the issue to Hervé, who I’d just begun seeing.  He looked at me thoughtfully and replied: “Imagine you are holding a baby which is hungry, and you are that baby, what would you do?”  I immediately visualized throwing a baby to the ground and shouting: “I don’t want this baby.”  No wonder I have such trouble feeding myself!  I’ve been throwing myself to the ground, and rejecting myself, for years.  To come to believe that I am a child of God, whose “most urgent life-task is to accept, know, love, and nurture myself,” takes a giant leap of faith for me.  Maybe it doesn’t have to be one giant leap.  Each day, it takes a concentrated effort on my part to take care of myself in so many ways that I can’t possibly concentrate on acquiring them all at once.  Baby steps, I must remind myself constantly, baby steps.  Through prayer and taking these baby steps on a daily basis, I will be able to make that leap gradually, I will come to fully come to believe that I am a child of God.  When I can fully accept myself, and be truly of service to others, all will be right.

An Audience

Now that I’ve established the need not only to start shooting again, but to find an audience for my work external to an intimate relationship, I’ll have to start exploring to see where that audience could be.  It’s not necessarily through the obvious places such as galleries and museums or book and magazine publications, as I discovered during my trip to the Arles Photography Festival.  Several years after I left Loïc, I mentioned to him some disparaging remarks that had been made about my work, by someone who's opinion I didn't respect but it'd gotten to me all the same.  He was so upset that he gave me the money to go to the annual photography festival in Arles and have my work read by professionals.  When I got there, the city was bustling with photographers, many of whom were sporting Leica cameras slung over their shoulders, critics, gallery owners, and publishers. We photographers literally had to scramble and run to get in line to sign up for readings before all the places were gone.

Reading after reading was a disappointment, as readings of my work by the French generally been.  One critic told me that I couldn’t put a horizontal next to a vertical, a blurry image next to one sharply in focus, and so on.  Another insisted that I should take all of my photos with the same focal length.  Another told me that I had to start with a clear pre-defined concept, such as taking all of my photos from 50 cm above the ground.  None of them adressed my work itself, there was no discussion of the images, no dialogue.  I would’ve been entirely frustrated if hadn’t been for a German woman who worked for Leica Magazine, who loved my work and wanted to publish it, but then said unfortunately she couldn’t when she found out the photos hadn’t been shot with a Leica.  I spent the rest of the festival just enjoying the exhibits.

At the train station on the way home, I struggled with my suitcase, barely able to lift it over the curb to the sidewalk even though it was light, due to a bad hip, and then sat down to wait wondering how on earth I’d manage to get it up steps to the train station.  Then I saw a young Algerian man sporting a sweat suit and white athletic socks approaching, and I told myself that surely he would offer to help, which he did.  That was fortunate because there was a long flight of stairs up to the station and another down to the tracks.  As we walked to the train, I told myself that surely he would want to sit next to me, wondered how long I would enjoy his company, and then told myself that he’d ask to have sex in the toilets--which he did end up asking once we were in the train.  He was boisterous and talkative with everyone who was waiting.  His company however was not quite what I expected.  We bought beers, took our seats and began a lively discussion.  It’s rare to find an Arab who drinks, so it wasn't surprising that he was drunk before he’d finished his second beer.  The conversation became loud enough and intimate enough to scare all of our fellow French passengers out of the wagon we were in. (We were offensive because conversations in public here are kept are spoken quietly, and don't include intimate remarks especially not propositions to have sex in the toilets, and the repartee that followed.)

The young man, who’d been in Arles for a temporary construction job, had a lot of astute opinions about the festival.  When he asked to see my work, I got it out, and he looked through it carefully, making interesting remarks about each image.  When he’d finished looking through it, he asked in conclusion: “Where’s the father?”  That made me laugh hard, because I’d been in psychoanalysis for about three or four years before my psychiatrist asked that question.  This young man had seen it in just a few minutes of looking through my work.  In response to his question, I pointed to the multiple light scars on his wrists, and asked: “Where’s yours?”  “You’re quick.”  Two more young Algerian men got on, and he told them about my work, so we all looked through it together, and got into an interesting disucssion about it.  The photos were friom a series I'd made while walking around the streets of Paris.  The young men started talking excitedly about walks they could take me on, and subjects they could point out.  And so the trip to Arles brought it home to me that your audience isn’t where you’d expect it to be.

Being Sonia

I’ve been in Palma for a few days now.  Being here makes me feel slightly odd: suddenly all of my time is free and I feel a need to fill it with a creative process.  And this reminds me of the void I’ve been feeling these past years (I can’t count them) during which I’ve done very little creative work.  Since I returned from Palma to Paris last, I’ve been almost entirely focused on recovery from alcoholism--which is in itself a creative process.  I haven’t had many activities other than going to meetings, doing my step work and working with my sponsees.  My feeling is that it would be best for me to spend at least the next year focused on recovery.  I’m impatient to get back to my my photography and writing but I can’t put them in front of my sobriety, because as they say, if you put anything in front of your sobriety you’ll lose everything.


At first when I heard people talking about putting your sobriety first, I didn't get what they meant. Then I let my work become more important than getting to meetings and doing my step work, and pretty soon I wasn't going to meetings at all--which is a dangerous place to be. And then I had a boyfriend who was insistent that I put him first, as soon as I gave in an started skipping meetings, I relapsed. Relapsing is scary because it can be fatal. For a long time I heard that, and thought it didn't apply to me. Looking closely at the nature of this disease, and at my own drinking history, I can see death as a real possibility if I continue drinking. It can be difficult for me to juggle other activities with my sobriety, so I'm working on finding a balance. There was a period when I was blogging a lot, taking a photo class and other classes, and just generally trying to be more active while going to meetings, but I ended up going to fewer meetings. What I need to do is continue to put my sobriety first, while pruning back my other activities and keeping them focused on my creativity. 

When I arrive here, that sense of being busy that I have in Paris lifts.  There are hours to fill each day even though I continue going to meetings and doing my step work.  It definitely feels like vacation.  Probably mostly because there isn’t a sense of purpose and direction that’s given by all of the things to get done in order to get my life pulled together, and which tend to stress me.  Peter doesn’t get that I’m on vacation here.  I wish he did, because then he'd understand that much better how much I appreciate these trips. To him my free time here is an extension of my free time in Paris--it’s all of the time because I don’t work.  He works hard and he works long hours.  His company owes him a month off for all of the overtime he’s put in this year.  I guess it doesn’t really matter how he perceives my time and my use of it, it’s just that coming here makes me think about it.  It makes me feel like I should be putting better use to my time in Paris.

In the program, we we remind each other and ourselves when we get stuck that you can start your day, week, month, life, over any time.  Each time I come here, I become deeply relaxed, feel balanced, and full of energy, and I make big plans for starting over.  But there’s a big difference between making plans, and starting over.  Plans are for the future, they aren’t about being here in the moment.  Last winter when I was here, I spent an entire night awake in bed, tormented by a sense of failure, counting all of the years I had not been doing my photography, thinking of all the opportunities that had been missed, feeling that alcoholism and bipolar disorder had robbed me of my life.  Self-pity is something that alcoholics can ill afford: “Poor me, poor me, pour me a drink.”  So I went to the other extreme and spent a second night wide awake in exilieration, with a new sense of hope, planning out and visualising a number of series of photos.  I panned out how many images I could make per year, how many series I could complete.  I was going to make up for lost time!  The plan was too monumentalm and in the year since then, I haven’t made any progress on my shooting at all.  First I need to make my objectives realistic, and then use another program tool, which is to break up a seemingly insurmountable task into a number of smaller surmountable tasks.  Even that can be easier said than done.

I’ve been trying to overcome the seemingly insurmountable task of starting my photography over again, by telling myself to simply pick up my camera and take a photo of any old thing without worrying about whether or not it’s good or bad.  And that’s really easy to do with digital photography, but that doesn’t seem to be quite the right way for me to go about things though, because I freeze up.  Just the same way I freeze up when I’m depressed and someone suggests taking a walk.  When you’re deeply depressed that seems impossible.  Just getting out of bed is terribly difficult.  When you’re lightly depressed, however, with some effort, it’s possible, and it lifts your spirits.  But even when only lightly depressed I get stuck because I need a goal, a place to walk to.  For me, taking random photos is like taking a walk without a goal.  (Not that I haven’t spent years taking long walks around the city, but for now I’m having a hard time visualising a starting point.)  When I walk around Palma, I look around perplexed, unable to find any sources of inspiration.  I am going to start my “day” over by finding some inspiration, a creative goal for this trip.  It’s night time now.  I’ll do night photography, from within that, I can find a theme. I don't need any particular destination, I can just step out into the street and start walking.

I was in stasis for a long time while drinking. Since I became sober there has been slow but steady movement and growth.  When I feel fully alive, in movement, is when I’m involved in the creative process.  That is what gives purpose to my life.  Involved in the creative process, I am here now.  Spending hours in the darkroom, enjoying watching a print appear and perfecting it, or shooting, completely absorbed by each shot, until I’ve got the one I know is it, and yet continuing to shoot. I become mesmerized, and I'm living in the moment.  While being in the creative process keeps me in the moment, it also gives me a sense of direction, of purpose, and of meaning. Each moment gives birth to another.

A central part of my marriage with Loïc was the aesthetic language we shared.  We communicated playfully, intimately, and deeply, by sharing the aesthetics of objects, works of art, music, nature, and etc.  The summer after I left him, we went on vacation together.  There wasn’t any question of getting back together, we simply didn’t know how to go on vacation apart.  One day at the beach we spent hours enjoying looking at the complex patterns of the waves advancing and eddying on the sand shimmering in the sunlight, and the patterns they created with the different colors of sand.  It was a shared meditation, similar to the meditations I do while shooting.  Our vacations were filled with moments like the day on the beach.  With our idiosyncratic aesthetic language, we could express a wide range of emotions and feelings.  

Loïc was my audience.  For quite awhile before I got my galleries, he was the only person with whom I shared my work.  Whenever I’d spent a day of developing and making contact sheets, he would come home from work, glance through them and point out the best shot with lightning speed.  If he hesitated between two shots, it was between the same two I’d hesitated.  In that case, we could we would dialog and compare the two with each other and consider how they fit into the body of my work as a whole.  When I left the marriage, I knew that I would miss our aesthetic dialog terribly and perhaps forever.  That prospect alone made it incredibly hard to leave.  

It’s interesting that my hopes of seeing Takeshi again made my hope of doing my photography again soar, since Takeshi is the only person besides Loïc with whom I’ve shared an intimate aesthetic dialog.  The hope of seeing him again must’ve triggered the hope of having such a dialog again, when I’d thought that it was almost certainly lost for good.  Now that I’ve lost the hope of seeing Takeshi (not that I’m sure I won’t, but I’m certainly not counting on it, and I can’t imagine his being a regular part of my life) I’m back to feeling that that sort of partnership is certainly lost for good.  After twelve years without a partnership, I find it terribly hard to believe that I will ever find one. (In fact, I'm convinced that I'll spend the rest of my life alone.)  Before I met Loïc I didn’t need to have an aesthetic partner in order to do my photography, it was a solitary endeavor.  Now I wonder how I will carry on without a partner.  It seems like doing my creative work and having a partner shouldn’t be connected, and yet they are, in my mind.  What I need to do is to seek out a broader audience.  Not that I didn’t before, but it wasn’t a necessity.  I need an interlocutor.  Even if my creative endeavor is to be solitary, without an interlocutor it will be sterile.  Human endeavors are meant to be shared.

This journal began as I flailed about looking for a man, like a person who doesn’t know how to swim, over their head in water.  This journal was about reconstructing myself, my life, but the focus was finding a man.  At the time I couldn’t articulate or define what it was that I was looking for.  I vacillated between just wanting casual sexual encounters, light relationships, and a serious long-term relationship, without even defining what exactly I was looking for in a relationship.  That didn’t get me any further than trying to take walks without destinations or photos without objectives.  Now it occurs to me that I was utterly lost.  I had set off in the wilderness with a map but no compass.  Instead of being about my creative process, about reconstructing myselfm my voyage became about finding a man.  I had become confused about my destination.  For about a year I did work on a creative photo series, and then when my creative work floundered, I clung onto commercial work. Then all of the equipment that I’d worked for years in order to be able to purchase was stolen, which was at about the same time as when my divorce went through.  I couldn't work, couldn't take photos, and I plummeted into a deep depression.  That depression has since lifted, but I haven’t yet started taking photos again.  I will start tonight.  I do intend to go back to posting some of the older sections of this journal on meeting men, and meeting men may well come up in new posts, but my focus will be on recovery and creativity.

For years I defined myself by my work by my work.  I couldn’t conceive of living without shooting.  These last years have proved that I can: I continued to eat, breath, sleep and wake up, and do things, but then I didn’t really feel fully alive.  I have been lost.  Laurence Gonzales writes about being lost and the sense of self in his book Deep Survival.  His working definition of being lost is: “the inability to make the mental map match the environment.”  He writes: “Admitting you are lost is difficult because having no mental map, being no place, is like having no self: It’s impossible to conceive because one of the main jobs of the organism is to adjust itself to place.  That’s why small children, when asked if they are lost, will say, ‘No, my mommy is lost.’  The sense is: I’m not lost; I’m right here.  But without a mental map, the organism can’t go about its business and rapidly deteriorates.”  In the topography of myself, I was a photographer, I had camera equipment, I took photos, made prints, and worked as a photographer.  When I no longer did or had those things, I became unclear of where I was and hence unclear of where I was going.  Even before then, come to think of it, my sense of self had been shaken down to its roots by the physical and especially psychological abuse in my marriage.

Since then, through the process of recovery from alcoholism, I’ve begun gradually to gain a sense of my core self, based on who I am rather than what I do, on being rather than action.  This is all new to me. Gaining a sense of myself wil continue as I continue to work through the steps.  A Buddhist friend recently told me: “Being Sonia is a form of meditation.”  That really struck me.  Practicing the art of being myself as a form of meditation.  Funnily enough, when I think back through my life to high points where I felt particularly myself, I always felt at one with my environment, with nature, and more often than not I was feeling deeply meditative while taking photos.  So even there, in my sense of being myself, there is action.  In any case I continuing the practice of being Sonia is a lifetime job, and being Sonia is enough.

Hung over

When Takeshi didn’t answer my email, I plummeted down from the lofty skies of hope.  At first, with the help of the tools in the program and discussions with friends in the program, I “turned over” the situation, accepted that it was completely out of my control....I accepted that I shouldn’t try to control the situation by contacting him again directly or indirectly.  Acceptance is crucial for an alcoholic because we try to control alcohol when we’re drinking, and we use alcohol to try to control ourselves, our emotions, and people, places, and things with disastrous results.  once sober, this reflex to control things isn’t suddenly lifted.  It’s hard to stay in a state of acceptance--you have to keep working at it actively.  It’s easy to slip out of it and have to work hard to get back into it.  I’m mourning a years long dream of love, and a sudden and unexpected vivid dream of participating in that love as a woman similar to the healthy young woman I once was.  I’ve been going through the process of mourning out of order, I went from acceptance to anger--anger at myself.

From acceptance, I slipped into trying to control the situation by trying to imagine all of the reasons why he hadn’t answered.  I can try to guess why he didn’t answer, but I can’t know, and act in accordance of that knowledge--I can’t try to control the situation.  But I can take it out on myself.  I kept imagining the worst case scenario--that his wife had intercepted the email (it was an office email address), which made me feel like a total fuck up.  I spiralled down into a negative abyss, calling myself names such as idiot, stupid, fool, and so on.  At first the name calling was really harsh because one of my dearest friends asked if I really wanted her opinion.  I repeated: “I’m a fuck up,” I’m a bad person” even though I’d declined her opinion knowing that it would have a strong moral overtone.  I needed to talk through my feelings, and not to be judged, but just her offering her opinion was enough to open up the door to self-flagellation.  Fortunately, all of my friends from the program listened without judgement, they suggested positive words to replace the negative ones with, for example; “stupid” became “courageous.”

Thank God for fellow alcoholics, they can listen and help in a way that others can’t.  We have shared experiences in both drinking and sobriety, so we speak the same language.  When you first get into the program, you have no idea that you’re in for a long slow physical, emotional, and spiritual healing process.  You’re just trying to find a way to not drink.  In some ways I’m still a toddler as far as emotional sobriety goes.    I relapsed because I was having difficulty processing my emotions about not hearing back from Takeshi, but at least instead of relapsing on booze, I relapsed on watching re-runs of TV series compulsively.  For that reason, I know that I’m not ready to be in a relationship.  An emotional entanglement could lead me dangerously close to a drink.

After falling from hope to its nadir, I was emotionally hung over for I don’t know how many days.  Long enough to get completely out of touch with day to day reality.  I awoke in the mornings as sluggish and fuzzy as if I’d had a hard night’s drinking.  I zoned out in TV land.  The other day I started watching TV series re-runs early in the morning and watched all day and all night till 9 a.m. the next morning.  It felt like I was drinking on a hangover.  There was no high, just relief from the symptoms.  TV had worked like alcohol: it shut up those negative voices.  It took reaching that extreme of watching straight through from one morning to the next for me to realize I had to take a peep out at reality.  When I did the negative voices returned.  I started calling myself names again.  This time, mostly fool.  Fool to have held onto that dream, fool to get my hopes up, fool to have gotten in touch with him, fool to think I could become as happy, healthy, and creatively productive as I once had been, fool to have sent that email.  A fool for love.  How many love songs use the word fool?

Seeing the quagmire of negativity I was in, I crawled out of it as quickly as I could.  (Sitting there enjoying the view doesn’t help anything.)  I got back to replacing negative words with positive ones, until the negative words shut up, and back into a state of acceptance, which has allowed me to get back to living in the day, in the here and now.

Actually, I’m not a fool for dreaming of re-becoming the woman that I once was.  Of course I can’t return in time--I’m no longer slim and athletic, my bipolar disorder is not going to go away, and the deep psychological wounds from which I’ve been healing have left scars.  Though once fully healed, those wounds could become a source of strength.  I know many recovering alcoholics whose experience and recovery have given them tremendous strength and wisdom.  They have gone through living hell, and are living lives beyond their wildest dreams.  If that’s true for countless others why not for me?  For a brief moment, I felt sad that I had no more dreams.  I was dangerously close to self-pity, which is an ugly place that puts you dangerously close to a drink: “Poor me, poor me, pour me a drink.”  So I returned to the here and now of acceptance, of living in the moment as it is.

Here and now It’s a new day, a sunny morning.  I’m off to a meeting and then off to work with a newcomer to the program.  There’s nothing like working with others to get yourself out of your own head!