Brave New Kitty

Since Peggy died on September 29, I’ve been struggling. Jim and I have both been struggling. We’ve been sad (of course), but mostly we’ve been kind of…flailing. Feeling lost and purposeless. Like nothing was ever going to be okay again. I’ve been thinking a lot about my own mortality, trying to come to terms with it. I’m at the age now where I don’t feel invincible anymore. A woman I know, my age exactly, just had a double mastectomy. I keep thinking about people I’ve known or heard of over the years who’ve died awful, untimely deaths, about the fear in their eyes and their lives so unfinished and the terrible injustice of it all. I keep seeing symptoms of serious illness in every part of my body; since I tend to carry my emotional stress physically, this wasn’t hard to do.

This morning, I woke up feeling like everything was back to normal. My body felt sound, my psyche, excited about the day. Things to do, places to go, people to see. A life to enjoy. The sadness and dark thoughts haven’t left me, but they seem to have taken a back seat to the mostly enjoyable tasks of daily living. I’m not sure why I feel better, or why today, what happened, or even how to think about it. But the phrase “you have to act your way into right thinking” occurred to me, because I think on some level, that’s what I did.

“Acting your way into right thinking” is a phrase I first heard in AA meetings many, many years ago. I don’t know where it originated. In AA, it basically meant that you were supposed to do what’s in front of you to do, or do the next right thing, whether you wanted to or not, and eventually your wrong-headed thinking would follow the behavior and become right-headed thinking.

In retrospect, I can see how such a mentality might be used to make people do something against their will if they could be convinced that it was the right thing to do. I’m sure many AA critics will frame it like that. But that was not my experience. My experience of acting my way into right thinking was overwhelmingly positive. I can’t speak for all AA members who’ve found solace in this adage, but I know that I used it to act on what I knew rather than what I felt, when what I felt was self-destructive.

Most people, addicts especially, I think, have a pretty good idea of what’s self-destructive and what isn’t. But they aren’t always good at getting themselves to do what’s best, because it’s hard, or it’s scary, or it’s foreign, or it’s just easier not to. A life philosophy that includes “acting your way into right thinking” is helpful in getting through these struggles. I suppose in most situations, the trickiest part is being honest with ourselves about what’s going on; this is why it’s important to seek counsel in making big decisions (and the idea behind “sponsorship” in AA).

I think the biggest error people can make with acting their way into right thinking, especially in a masculine-oriented organization like AA, is self-flagellation; of being too hard on themselves while going through the process. We try to conquer feelings instead of embrace them. We think if we don’t “fix” bad feelings quickly enough we’re doing something wrong. We can find myriad ways to feel bad about this process if we want to. It’s incredibly easy to do.

Being too hard on yourself is a common pathology of a predominantly masculine approach to life. This makes sense, as the masculine type tends to react to threatening events with harsh discipline (just look at the repercussions of not believing in Jesus or Allah!). While this hard sell can be useful in certain situations, such as creating an army or running a business, in the realm of emotions, all it does is hamper our growth by squelching that which ought to be encouraged: self-acceptance, curiosity, tenacity, and the like.

So let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water. If we’re able to temper the urge to beat ourselves up, there is gold to be found in the process of acting our way into right thinking. If we can introduce the more feminine principles of tolerance and understanding, we can learn a lot, for acting our way into right thinking is one way we become deeper, more sensitive, more caring, more complete emotional beings.

The key word here is “process.” Going through any emotional upheaval is a process that we must learn to, on some level, be comfortable with. The more we can accept the inevitability of upheaval in our lives, the more we’ll be able to glean from going through it. The more we can forgive ourselves for not being the way we think we’re supposed to be, the more we open ourselves to growth, unfettered experiencing of our emotions, and the ability to accept life on life’s unalterable terms.

I think all those years of acting my way into right thinking in AA became kind of a default outlook for me, and it brought me through the process of grieving Peggy’s death. Not in the sense of meeting obligations and carrying on despite how I felt (although that was part of it), but more in the sense of not fighting my feelings and being patient enough to let them happen until they, well, stopped happening. I felt off, sad, depressed, anxious, and didn’t know what to do with myself for about three weeks straight. As much as I disliked being in that place, I knew I had no choice but to just be there. I’m not saying I knew this consciously, or had a conversation with myself about it. In fact I’m saying the exact opposite: that I stuck it through and came out the other side without trying to force anything or be any different because, somewhere along the way, I’d embraced this idea of acting my way into right thinking. I allowed the feelings to occur, dealt with the repercussions of them, and didn’t try to change them. And slowly but surely, the feelings began to turn into something more positive.

It’s tempting to do anything but this, to distract ourselves in any way possible from painful feelings. Sometimes, perhaps it’s even necessary in order to get through something–temporarily. But we have to, at some point, deal with our feelings. Otherwise, we lose something. We lose part of who we are. We become hollow inside where those big feelings are supposed to be. We become less whole instead of more so. We wither. And I think we lose the capacity to experience joy fully, too, because it’s a yin-yang: you can’t have one without the other.

I haven’t done a perfect job with my grief, but I do feel good about letting myself experience it and letting myself be in that dark place without too much self-flagellation. And I wish I had a better way to tie up the “right thinking” with the “right feeling,” which is what this piece really seems to be about. But I don’t. I know they’re intimately related, though, so I guess I’ll leave it for you to figure out.

If you come up with anything, let me know.