Broken

I’ve been dancing around the topic of domestic violence since I first began this journal, it has remained hidden in the shadows.  I've needed to talk about it and at last I’m ready to talk about it.

Loïc and I were still in the honeymoon stage of our relationship when we moved to Japan.  One day in the first months we were there, he went with me to a professional photo lab that had done a batch of prints for me which were washed out grey machine prints, not the handmade professional prints I’d expected, and I didn’t want to pay for them.  Instead of initiating a discussion with them, he flipped a switch, and went into a shouting rage.  I’d never seen anything like it before in public.  The poor Japanese, for whom any conflict is anathema, were trembling with fear.  As we walked out of the shop, I told myself that when, and not if, he turned that violence against me it was going to be physical and extreme: “Get out as quickly as you can, before anything happens,” I told myself.  However, leaving a relationship which is really wonderful, and potentially, but not yet violent, isn’t easy to do.  So I told myself to do it while the memory of this event was still vivid in my mind.  

I’d always told myself, as everyone does, that if a man were violent, I would leave.  Some woman, perhaps especially well-educated professional women think: “It will never happen to me.”  What nobody knows is what they will actually do versus what they think they will do.  And I know from having been attacked more than once, that knowing how you handled an extreme situation once doesn’t indicate how you’ll handle it a second time.  Anyway, I couldn’t leave Loïc immediately because we were still living in the hotel which has company was paying for, and I had no money of my own.  I’d found a job, but there was a two month delay before it started, and once I started working, it would take months to save up to get a place of my own for airfare and shipping.  And then there was the question of where to go.  My belongings were all in France, and I preferred the idea of returning there than to the US, but I didn’t have a work visa for France, but then I didn’t have a clue what I’d do in the US.  Most of all I wanted to stay in Japan, but the obstacles to doing so were enormous.  There was time to think it through, or so I hoped.

When I mention that my ex was violent, most people assume that it was in the heat of an argument, and when I say: “No, not at all.  Usually we weren’t even arguing,” they reply: “Oh, well then was he an alcoholic?”   “No, he was a tea toatler.”  From what I’ve read on domestic violence, what it always comes down to is the issue of control.  The first time Loïc was violent it cold-blooded and pre-meditated.  Clearly, he had an agenda, as I was able to observe in later incidents where he tried to assert his superiority and power.

Loïc worked into the wee hours of the night and on weekends, whereas I worked a light schedule, so naturally I was in charge of all household duties, and keeping the apartment tidy.  He started leaving his socks around and snapping at me to pick them up, which caused some discord because while I was happy to clean, I felt he could pick up his own socks, and that he was leaving them around deliberately.  When we went to bed each night, we each folded our clothes and set them down on our sides of the futon.  One night he ordered me to put my clothes in the closet.  When I pointed out that his clothes were also next to the futon, he said we weren’t discussing them, we we discussing mine, and then ordered me again to put my clothes away.  When I said I wasn’t there to follow his orders, he lept up, pinned me down, and began pounding his fist on my head while pulling my hair upwards, creating a torsion in my neck, which threw it out of line.  It was excruciatingly painful, worse than any pain I’d experienced, worse than when I’d been attacked by two men and had my head kicked in with a steel toed boot, because the beating went on and on.  He just wouldn’t stop.  I screamed and screamed as long and loudly as I could, afraid for my life.  Still he didn’t stop.  “Why haven’t the neighbours come?  Why haven’t the police come?  It’s a five minute walk from the police station to here, they should be here by now!  They’re not coming!  Will he ever stop?”  When he did finally stop, it really was a good five minutes that he’d beaten me, but with that level of pain it seemed like a hell of a lot longer.  All he said afterwards was that it was my fault, because I wasn’t French, a French woman would have been more obedient.  I seriously doubt that, but it wasn’t a random excuse.  The beating was a gambit to gain control over me by instilling fear into me.

I went into a severe state of shock that lasted for a good week and then transformed into a profound depressive state that made it nearly impossible to think through my situation.  I was half way around the world from both my homes, didn’t yet have any friends with whom to talk, and I didn’t contact my parents because I was sure that they wouldn’t be helpful.  The only person to whom I spoke of it was my osteopath.  The next time I went in for an appointment to work on my bad hip, he looked at me and asked me what had happened to my neck.  It was amazing that he was able to see that from across the room.  Embarrassed, I replied that I’d taken a bad blow to my head during karate practice.  He approached, took a good look at my neck, and said: “No, someone took your head and twisted it around.”  We didn’t talk much more about it, he just switched to working on my neck instead of my hip.

I’d had tinnitus, a ringing in my ears, since I was thirteen.  It started the same day my migraines started, and has never stopped since.  It’s said to be in your ears, but I hear it as localised in my head not my ears.  Anyway, after the beating, it became horribly loud, erratic, and unbalanced to the side that the beating had been on.  To this day it is louder on the left side of my head. But something much deeper down inside myself broke.  I can’t say what exactly, I just have the word “broken” to describe it.  I’ve healed a lot since then, but “broken” is still there, the healing is not complete.

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!

Hope

Just over a week ago, I woke up in the middle of the night and began praying fervently for God to lift my obsession with drinking (which has been hounding me lately), when suddenly I prayed for Takeshi to be sent back into my life.  I have no idea what made him come to mind at that moment--he hadn’t been in my thoughts recently.  During the two years I lived in Japan, we were very close and spent a lot of time together, gradually discovering what our feelings for each other were, without ever  expressing them verbally.  He's extremely discrete even by Japanese standards, and we had to be terribly discrete  because he's married and I was there with my ex, their desks faced each other at work, and most of the time we spent together was under the watchful eyes of colleagues.  We were discrete enough for our friendship to be accepted and respected by their colleagues, who always made sure that we were seated next to each other at office dinners, which were quite frequent.  (My ex, who didn't have as strong of a grasp of Japanese culture, blatantly chased after a Japanese woman in front of me, and got pulled aside and balled out by his colleagues, which infuriated him because he thought it wasn't any of their business, even though it was since it's a group culture.)  The last day that Takeshi and I spent together was in Tokyo, we were on our own, and when we met he was trembling visibly, I could feel his desire to reach out and touch me, and it was hard for me not to reach out to touch him.   It was a glorious sunny day and he took me for a long stroll through a park where lovers were lying on the grass entwined in each other's arms, we lingered a bit watching the lovers, then took a small path through a wooded area.  At one point we stopped to appreciate the sensuous beauty of entwined tree roots growing across a small path.  After a long dinner, we parted.  I was amazed that what hadn't been spoken for such a long time, had finally been expressed without words.  Where were we going with this friendship?  Shortly after, while I was in the States  for a visit, a catastrophic change of plans occurred.  My ex had packed all of our boxes for our move to Tokyo, and the movers were on their way when my ex got a call that his client had gone bankrupt, his job in Tokyo was off.  He gave me five minutes to decide whether to move back to France or the States.  The last thing I wanted was to leave Japan, and to make it worse I didn't even get to say good bye.  It was very recent that my ex had been violent for the first time, beating my head in so severely and for so long, that I thought he was going to kill me.  The only way that I knew to get out was to get to Tokyo, where I'd built up enough of a network to get my photography work going and get away.  I knew I would get little or no help from my family.  Tokyo meant freedom and independence, a chance to re-build my life.  Tokyo was also Takeshi's home.   I could build my career, get myself safely away from the violence of my ex, and Takeshi and I could spend the time that we needed to spend together.  In one short phone call all of that was gone, my life took another direction.  I was devastated.

I've spent years trying to track Takeshi down by internet, I even asked my ex for help tracking down his Japanese colleagues, and my karate master's translator tried to find a way to contact Takeshi from within Japan, without success.  Once I’d found an internet site that I was sure was for the office which Takeshi and his wife ran, clicked on “contact,” and sent a short message to which I received no reply.  So although our love ever remained present in my heart--as if it were yesterday that we’d seen each other--I was losing hope of ever finding him again.   In the middle of my prayers, I jumped out of bed and surfed the net once again looking for Takeshi, found the site for a colleague's office, got Takeshi’s number, and within a few minutes we were speaking on the phone together!  God had answered my prayers immediately!  Takeshi and I were stunned to hear each other's voices.  The first thing he said was that he missed me a lot, then he added that he was ten years older now, so I reminded him that I am too, actually it’s been almost twenty years, and then he said he gets to Singapore and Shanghai for his work, but can’t come here.  He’s extremely discrete and indirect when he communicates, so for him that sounds like a quite direct way of wondering aloud if there's a way we could see each other.  Immediately after we spoke, he sent a short email, so I'd have his email address.  I replied with an email that was for his eyes only, and after a few days had gone by without a reply, became frantic that his wife had seen it, since it was an office address.  Had I created a horrible mess after all of these years of being discrete and patient?  Did he simply not know what to reply?  Finally I sent a quick email asking if he'd received my first email.  And then I called but got his wife on the phone, so I can call again without raising suspicions, if I haven't already done so.  It's been more than a week now with no reply, so I'm no longer hoping for one.  It would be difficult and complicated for us to get together, but perhaps not entirely impossible.  First we would need to see each other, spend some time together before we could know what we want now.  I have no way of knowing what's going on in his life today, how he's feeling about his marriage, and if he would want to get out of it and be with me, and what professional hurdles he would have face if that were his choice.  A few years after my return to Paris, Takeshi was here on business.  He ran from the elevator to the front door and kissed me on the lips when my ex couldn't see.  I knew then that our feelings were still the same, but what about now, so many years later? 

The first days after we spoke, I was on a pink cloud, filled with joy and an overwhelming sense of gratitude.  I was filled with joy at the prospect of communicating regularly with Takeshi, and a great sense hope about getting my art photography going again.  The conversation with Takeshi filled me with a tremendous sense of hope, hope of being together with him, hope of doing my photography in Tokyo, hope of being the woman he knew and admired (along with some scars and maturity of course).  I felt that I could finally pick my camera back up, and start creating my artwork once again.  Once I've created the images which are already in my mind, I can make an internet site, get in touch with clients in Tokyo, go back, work, and get to spend the time with Takeshi.  Knowing the market here, I have no feeling of hope for a second chance, but the Japanese have a different sensitivity and openness to my work.  If I stay sober and do the footwork, I could be there in as soon as two year's time.  I've been feeling condemned to a life hemmed in by mental illness and poverty, a life in a tiny room, with minimal financial means, and just the hope of doing a bit of creative work which I might not even have the strength to share.  Since I spoke with Takeshi, I no longer feel condemned to bare survival.  I never would have guessed that the hope of seeing Takeshi once again would also give me this sense of hope in myself again.  Can I maintain that sense of hope, even if I can never see him again?  Why is that sense of hope linked to a person?  I'll have to do the footwork for getting together without knowing what he's feeling now.  Can I maintain a sense of hope?  About a year ago, while I was in Spain on vacation at my brother's, one night I suddenly got a strong sense of hope that I could get back to my photography and exhibiting.  I spent the night awake, imagining photos that I would take, new series that I would create.  Upon my return, I realized that my plans were manic and grandiose--I wanted to catch up for all of those years lost to drinking and bipolar disorder, to create the work that I would've been able to create had I not been ill.  I reduced my goal to completing just one series of images, only to discover that I still couldn't get past my photographer's block.  

When my ex beat me up so badly, I felt like something profound had broken in me.  When the state of shock wore off, I plunged into a deep depression, and began drinking as if there were no tomorrow.  And yet somehow I managed to continue to do my creative work, sometimes sporadically, but I was doing great work.  Later, while living in the room I renovated, a series of events led to my feeling broken again.  Actually, that feeling of being broken had never left.  The beating altered me permanently.  (Those feelings of being broken will be the subjects of other posts.)  The second time I felt broken, was when I lost all hope of getting back into galleries and doing my artwork again.  Humpty dumpty?  All of this reminds me of the process of getting sober.  You can pray all you want to get sober, but if you don't do the footwork, it won't happen.  You have to go to meetings, work with your sponsor, do the steps, take action.  When you first get sober, you start seeing how insane your thinking and actions were when you were drinking, when you remove alcohol from the equation, the insanity is still there, which is what working the steps helps lift.  I still have a lot of insane thinking and behaviours.  It's okay with me that it'll take a few years for me to try to get to Tokyo, because I'm in the middle of working the steps more in depth than ever before--I won't feel ready to be with someone until my insanity has been lifted.

In meetings, I've heard people refer to god shots.  I was never really sure what they meant until yesterday morning.  I checked my email and then called a friend from the program, we talked about my difficulty with accepting this new situation with Takeshi.  It's a Third Step situation, one that I have to turn over to God (or to the Universe if you're more comfortable with that term), because it's completely out of my control.  I don't know why the Universe put us back in touch with each other now, only that it did.  At the end of the conversation, my friend asked if there was anyone in Japan who could get in touch with Takeshi discretely in order to find out if he'd received my email.  "No," I replied: "There's no one."  Right after we hung up, I checked my email again, and a message had just arrived from my karate master's translator.  We hadn't been in touch with each other since he'd tried to track Takeshi down.  God shot.  God winked at me with a message of hope, just when I thought there was no way to get back in touch with Takeshi discretely, I got a message from a man who could do it for me.  I won't ask him for help now.  First I'll take the actions I need to take in order to get my life pulled together, to get out of  the ruts of my insane thinking and behaviour, to do my creative work again.  That is to say, to re-become the woman Takeshi knew, and the woman that I would like to become today, which I must do for myself.

Change

The theme of today’s meeting was change.  Getting sober puts you through massive changes, and in order to stay sober you have to continue growing, so you’re constantly in a process of change.  It was a great meeting with a lot of interesting shares.  As I was listening, it suddenly occurred to me that during the long years I spent years I spent in a very physically and psychologically abusive relationship, staying drunk didn’t drown my sorrows in the way people think--that you forget, the pain I felt was acute, but alcohol was the only tool I had for coping.  And as long as I was drinking, I couldn’t change.  I couldn’t ask myself, how do I, Sonia, feel about being treated this way?  And what can I, Sonia do about it?  Do I want to be treated like shit?  No.  Well what can I do about it?  

I shared about this thought in the meeting.  Afterwards, two men came up to me to talk about my share, and one suggested that I do my entire 4th Step on men.  It had occurred to me recently, that the in 4th Steps I’ve done so far, I’ve left out men in my resentments list, and that it would me necessary to deal with those resentments when I get to my next 4th.  I’m going to follow the man’s suggestion to make my next 4th entirely on men, though I’ll include my mother.  When I was married, I constantly made the freudian slips of saying “mon mari,” when I meant to say “ma mère,” and “ma mère,” when I meant to say “mon mari.”  For some reason, I mixed my mother and my husband up easily when I was speaking French.  If my husband had been exactly the same man, but we’d been in an English speaking environment, it would have taken years to figure out the connection between my husband and my mother.  Anyway, you can see why I’m including her in my list of resentments against men.  It’s not a purpose of this blog to explain the 12 Steps, but a brief explanation of the 4th will help here for those who aren’t familiar with the Steps.  The 4th step is likened to a shop taking annual inventory.  You go through the goods and see what should be kept, and what should be pitched.  I like to think of it as a gigantic spring cleaning.  Listing your resentments towards individuals, groups, and institutions, etc. and going through those resentments with your sponsor, helps you let go of them.  Letting go of them is essential, since resentments are the main thing that lead an alcoholic back to drinking.  That’s how I understand it at this point anyway.  It’s a major healing process, and an emotional one at that.  Going through resentments intellectually, on own, and even in therapy, hasn't helped much. 

During the chat with the two men, I mentioned for years that I thought I had a healthy level of self-esteem, even a high level of self-esteem, but that it was based purely on my photography, writing, and other achievements.  It wasn’t until I got out of my marriage and was going through counseling at a center for battered women, that it dawned on me that I had little or no sense of self-esteem, based on who I am, just being me, and not on what I do.  At the center, I took a psychological test for self-esteem, and “failed” it with flying colors--I’m a walking, breathing, door mat.  I remember my father’s surprise when I mentioned a bit about my marriage to him, he couldn’t believe that I, who had always been fiercely independent, and very rebellious, could have ended up so obedient.  I'll be exploring how that happened in upcoming posts.

What I need to do now, is what I’ve been avoiding doing since I began this blog.  While I’ve been avoiding writing about the abuse I went through as a child, I’ve been feeling like it’s imperative for me to do it, for myself.  This is what I wrote about a week ago that gave me an emotional hangover--a bad migraine: one of the people who was abusive to me was Peter, and in part I’ve been afraid to write about the way he treated me because he has changed dramatically, much more than ordinary people do. He generally handles discussions, disagreements, and arguments quite maturely.  And because aside from employees of the French government, such as my psychiatrist, psychologist, and payee, and from my sponsor and other members of my alcohol support group, he’s the only person who’s really fighting to help me today, who’s really ready to be there for me, who takes care of me.  He respects how hard I’ve tried to work over the years, and how gets how much I’ve struggled with bipolar disorder, and for my long fight with alcohol, which he has really searched to understand..  He wants me to move to Spain because he would like to be able to help more when I’m not doing well.  He flies me over twice a year, sets out breakfast, and my lunch which he’s prepared, cooks dinner, and loves to take me out clothes shopping....Staying with him is like staying in a 5 star hotel.  So I feel like a traitor in speaking about the past, but the problem is that it continues to be the present for me--I can see that in my relationship patterns. I’ve been reliving repetitive, destructive patterns, that I really need, and want, to break free of.  

When I was about seven or eight, Peter started pinning me down and beating on my breast buds, which was excruciatingly painful.  I was to small to fight back or get away, so I told myself I’d be stronger, I’d win, by not crying, not showing the pain.  As I got a bit older, that continued and he began to taunt me that my younger sister would get her period first, would have bigger breasts than I, and also that she was cut out for motherhood, whereas I was not.  My sister and I remember my mother joining in on the taunts about my breasts and motherhood.  If she didn’t also remember, I’d have a hard time beleiving it was really true.  Now some people might see this as being less serious than incest, since it was my breasts rather than  my genitals which were mauled, because the aggressor was a sibling rather than an adult, and because the abuse was as much or more psychological than physical.  Interestingly, in studies of battered women, the relationships start with a pattern of the man psychologically abusing the women, and belittling is one of the common forms of abuse.  A man can start with a woman who has self-esteem,  lower it and lower it, rob her of it, until she reaches a point where she doesn’t feel she deserves any better.  The results of the psychological abuse are often, if not generally, more destructive than the physical abuse, unless the physical abuse becomes life threatening. The belittling of my femininity has made it difficult for me to asume.

I firmly believe that what Peter put me through, put me in a position to be vulnerable to predatorial men.  It contributed to my not to be able to say “No!”  Even when I was shouting it loudly inside of myself.  It made me not be able to stand up for myself when my ex-husband had been putting off having children until the point where it would soon be too late. I dress up in feminine clothes now, but I feel like I’m in disguise.  Even my ex-husband, who knew me and got me better than anyone else has, would be shocked to see me disguised thus.  Shortly before I left him, I changed my hair color, bought sweat pants with a feminine cut, and started wearing nail polish.  He was worried that I was going through an identity crisis, which I was.  Peter’s abuse with my was definitely incestuous, although we never had sexual relations.  While he denigrated my femininity and glorified my sister’s, he abused her sexually.  While the ways he abused us were different, the results are remarkably similar from what I can see.  Though she will be telling her own story, in her own time and place.  When you shut up about incest, it propagates like an untreated cancer, and your chances of recovery are unpredictable.

I was eleven or twelve when  it became clear that something was disturbing my sister, and she was unwilling to talk about what it was, my mother who was to go on to become a therapist, instructed me to have my sister over to my room for therapy sessions.  I was supposed to get her to reveal the secret that was troubling her.  I felt bad because I couldn’t get my sister to talk, and I had no clue as to how.  My mother must’ve put two and two together, but gone into massive denial--otherwise why ask a child to play therapist rather than taking your child to a real therapist?  She didn’t want to know.  While writing this paragraph, I have repeatedly mistyped me and my.  I’ve been writing me instead of my, (and I think writing my instead of me?) for at least the past thirty years.  I have to be constantly vigilant to correct the mistake.  I wonder if it has something to do with my sister, after all this paragraph deals with her.

When I was thirteen, I went into a major depression overnight.  One day I was a “happy” kid, and the next day, I couldn’t stop crying, I got tinnitus which is a permanent and constant source of discomfort, and I started getting severe migraines on a daily basis.  The treatment available for migraines was primitive at the time: caffeine pills and high doses of aspirin.  By the end of the year, I had an ulcer, perhaps due at least in part to all the aspirin I was taking.  I was required to attend school but usually the teachers took one look at me and sent me to the nurse’s office.  I saw a parade of neurologists, ear doctors, and other specialists.  At the end of a the year, I went to see my pediatrician with my mother.  They had a long discussion in my pediatrician’s office behind a closed door.  Then my pediatrician came out and announced to me that the cause of my migraines was my guilt over having known about my brother’s incestuous relationship with my (me/my, again) sister and not having told.  I was outraged because I had learned of the incest through my mother, and I was convinced that my migraines were my own problem--not somebody else’s.  Then my pediatrician told me she couldn’t treat me any more.  I told myself that I wouldn’t let un-based guilt get to me, but it did.  Ever since, people have pointed out that I apologize for things over which I have no control, or had nothing to do with.  Right down to the weather!  Peter who was fifteen at the time, was kicked out and left to fend for himself, which I thought was a poor solution and terribly unfair.  I found myself trying to help my sister however I could.  For example, when she was having self-image problems, I convinced my mother to enroll her in a modelling school and agency.  Which probably wasn't the best solution--I was too young to have her well-being placed on my shoulders in the way it was.

The reason I was blamed was that when I was told of the incest, I was asked what I knew of it.  What I told them was that when I was six or seven, Peter invited Ingrid and I over to his room to play a game: we were going to make a porn film and he was going to be the director and we were to be the stars.  Uncomfortable with the idea, I left, but Ingrid stayed.  She’s a year and a half younger than I am, so would have had that much less of an idea of what a porn film was than I did.  When I was twenty-eight and back home for a visit, at dinner,  my father brought up how it had been my fault.  I was amazed that they hadn’t dropped the charges after all these years.  

When I was about forty-two, I ran across a bit of information in the press, which said that in the US in the 60’s, all of the porn came from Sweden.  Immediately I thought of that game, and the fact that Peter must have been introduced to porn by an adult, and probably by an adult who had abused him.  Quickly I deduced the family friend who was the most likely suspect, and called Peter to ask him if that man had abused him, he confirmed the abuse with some reluctance, which I can understand, since I still have my fond childhood memories of him.  When I called my mother and told her, she said that when we were children the man had been accused of pedophilia, but that everyone had told each other that pedophiles don’t strike in middle class families, they strike in the working class--that there kids were safe even if he was a pedophile.  They’d asked Peter if he’d been abused, and he denied it.  When the man had to go to court, my father, a lawyer, successfully defended him, apparently convinced by my brother’s denial.  When I told my father the truth, he was horrified.  But maybe they still blame me, who knows?  It’s still easier.  My mother still insists regularly that she would have prevented my marriage if only she had known, but she did know--I’d called her asking for help and telling her in detail.  Only to be met with the same denial that we were met with as children.

The thing is that when Peter was kicked out of the house, I felt strongly that it was neither the best nor a just solution.  Even though I didn’t know yet that he too was a victim, I knew that while at the time all of this story began he was too young to have any idea of all the potential consequences of his acts, he was tried as an adult.  He hadn’t been a good parent, but he had certainly tried, at a time when my parents were absent.  The abuse didn’t just stem from the abuse he’d undergone, but also from our parent’s emotional negligence.

When we were young, my  father had to put in long hours at the firm, and my mother abandoned ship when I was eleven or twelve.  Years later, she said that at the time she’d just wanted to get into a car and drive as far away as she could.  What she did instead was get a job with a long commute, and spend her hours at home in the garden.  (Not to say that she was present before that--my sister and I remember her as being very distant, not touching us, and the terrible loneliness we felt)   Peter, as the eldest, did his best to step in and take on my mom’s role.  I don’t say my “parent’s roles,” because my while my dad was around, it never occurred to us to go to him for help.  Her voice and opinions drowned out his.  He doesn’t have the dominant, controlling, and bullying personality that she’s got.  (Oh, now she’s sounding like my ex-husband!)  We kept telling Peter that we didn’t need two mom’s, and telling her that we didn’t need two moms.  He of course wasn’t in a position to take on her role, so that may explain why he was very bossy and often violent.  The bigger he got, the scarier he got.    Ingrid, Kristian and I each went individually to our mother, pleading with her to intervene, not knowing that the other had gone, only to be told that we were “ganging up on him to get him in trouble.”  We were met with a wall of denial.   Although I tried my best to be a model student, I made sure to get into trouble once a day, knowing I would be kept after school, miss the school bus home, and have to spend a lot more time getting home by public transportation.  It was a way of staying safe.

I often tell myself, “Lot’s of people have rough childhoods.  Was that all that happened?”  No it wasn’t, but it was enough for me.  It’s been twelve years now since I left my ex, and I’m not ready to be with someone else.  I need more therapy to work through childhood trauma and the abuse in my marriage. I also need more sobriety--I learn as much through the program as through therapy--the two serve sometimes different but always complimentary goals.