Since You Asked

She goes on to say, “Your next question poses a bit of a stickier wicket: If people expect to be invited to a wedding, they are usually basing that expectation on previous written contact, such as a Save the Date Letter, or an invitation to a pre-wedding party such as an engagement party or a shower. In other words, in order to have an expectation, it must be based on something concrete. For the supposed guests to call and ask if the invitation was lost depends upon how firm that basis is.”

Aha, I thought to myself. That’s the crux of the matter: You must have some concrete reason to believe that you are supposed to be invited to the wedding. In the personal example I recounted in Friday’s column, I had been told by someone involved in the planning that I was supposed to be invited.

So that seems to be the key. Mere friendship itself may not be sufficient basis to believe you are invited.

“Yes, if the invitation were lost in the mail,” she continues, “the supposed guests would be reasonable in expecting a follow-up inquiry, from the hosts, i.e. ‘I have not yet received your response? Did you get the invitation or was it lost in the mail?’

“Yet, these guests could be correct in assuming that if they get no invitation, they’re definitely not invited, end of story … if the basis for their expectation is weak, and merely a vague verbal mention some time ago.”

So there you have it.

Thanks, Ann!

Now on to other pressing matters.

Dear Cary,

I’m very confused right now. I’m a college student with one more year to go. All of my life I have been the overachiever in my family. Straight A’s, full scholarship to college, but I have also been the cold, smart, cynical bitch. I met a guy in high school, and we have been together since I was 17. I’m almost 22 now, so he’s pretty much the only real relationship that I have had. I have opened up to him about everything: my abusive past, my inability to be close to other women, my issues with being biracial and all that good stuff. He was my rock, but he is the complete opposite of me. He smoked weed, didn’t finish high school, didn’t hold a steady job, and has been in jail now for almost nine months, with a possible two-year sentence.

On the other hand, I feel like he was the first person that I could be more than that bitch with; I could be myself without fear of it being beneath the image that my family has of me. I don’t know what to do. I’m sure in my mind that I should leave him because being with him spells out a life of taking care of him and his mistakes, but I get to play the martyr role. Being without him means not having to deal with all that drama and immaturity, but I don’t know what I’d do without even the thought of him being there.

He really was all I had at one point, and now I feel horrible for even mentioning leaving when I know that his friends have abandoned him, and his family is too busy to sustain regular contact (he’s jailed in a different state). Now, there goes that confusion: At one point in our relationship, he was leaving me every weekend to go to other cities to try and make his “rap career” work. But it was a bust. I knew he was being foolish but didn’t want to crush his dream. He would put his rapper cousin and that crap before me, even though I’d fund his trips when he was broke, and now, I must confess that I secretly am glad that I was right; they would and did abandon him when the going was tough.

I know that this guy has all the signs of a loser, but love and fear of abandoning someone else, especially when they need someone, has me paralyzed. I just don’t know what to do. On top of all this, if we do stay together and he comes home, what the hell should I tell my parents? I know that they thought that he was beneath me, and I hate to have that theory proven.

Confused, But Not Really?

Dear Confused,

I do not think you are so much confused as you are afraid. You know what to do; as you say, “I’m sure in my mind that I should leave him because being with him spells out a life of taking care of him and his mistakes.”

There. You said it. It’s clear. It’s true. It’s just sad.

So how do you do this thing that is necessary but sad? You do it with dignity and grace and strength. Where do you get that dignity and grace and strength? Different people find grace and strength and dignity in different places. Do you go to church? Do you go to the ocean? Do you put on some music? We all have our ways.

So that is my answer to your basic question: You need to cut this man loose. Now I would like to elaborate on some ideas that I have.

Consider this: You have done well in college. In college you learn to study.

Studying is not so different from meditation. In meditation, you are sitting quietly somewhere. But you are not concentrating on a problem or taking in information; instead you are allowing the mind to wander freely, in the hope that, once off-leash, it will settle down after a bit and become calm.

In other words, when you study you are sitting quietly studying. When you meditate you are sitting quietly not studying. Meditation has benefits for one who has suffered abuse and thus may have anxiety and be in a period of crisis. So that is one thing you can do: Use your study habits to develop a practice of meditation, which will help you arrive at answers to some of your problems (you will sit quietly and answers will come to you).

I also think that good study habits in college can be adapted to what you might call “self-study.” Self-study is like meditation except your mind has an active goal. Its goal, you might say, is to acquire a competent and thorough knowledge of yourself — as if, for instance, you had to pass a final exam on yourself. You must know all about yourself — and not your opinions about yourself but facts that can be supported with evidence. You study yourself as you would study any other subject. You take notes. You organize your notes. You memorize dates.

In so studying yourself, as in studying any subject in college, you learn the system, how it works, what are its components. For instance, you must gather the facts related to this abuse. Not just feeling but facts. What exactly happened, and when. Now, this is where often a psychotherapist is of great help, because some of these facts are too difficult to recall in solitary tranquility; they break the tranquility with their volatile, painful content.

But even if you need to engage a therapist for this work, you are ahead of the game, because you are good at sitting and studying.

In your case the most basic understanding you are likely to acquire is that early abuse distorts your later behavior. This is probably what has been going on. In avoiding thoughts and feelings you indulge in certain behaviors that otherwise you would have no need of.

In that way you are turning away from something. If you are cutting yourself or taking pills or banging your head or indulging in compulsive sex or drugs or bingeing or purging or any of the many private activities we do to avoid feeling things — or if you are becoming the perfect overachiever who yet feels uncomfortable and inauthentic in her own skin — this is a response to discomfort that has its roots in abuse. That is how the system works. There is perhaps also a part of you that feels wild and out of control. This is the part that you do not show to your family. This is the part of you that finds solace in being with your boyfriend, who is also wild and out of control. This wild part of you is also related to the abuse; it is the emotional equivalent of the impulse to run; it is symbolic flight.

So the way to change that, I am thinking, is to, by studying yourself, gradually learn to see the abuse without an overwhelming emotional response, to regard the memories internally without acting, which is very much what you do when you sit and study a subject. You do not study algebra and find yourself wanting to put a needle in your arm because the truth of the algebra is too emotionally taxing. You just learn it. You learn the algebra as distinct from yourself. So this is a study in the algebra of your self. Consider that you are the text you are studying. You are the system of knowledge that you yourself are acquiring; in a sense, through self-study, you acquire yourself.

I know this is taking things a little far, but that is what I do in this column: I take the simple things and I take them far beyond where we thought we were going. I push it. I go to the edge for you. So I imagine that in the course of self-study the culminating project is that you tell your story. That is your assignment in this particular class. You tell your story and come to regard yourself as an innocent. You come to recognize particular feelings that come up during the day and learn to regard them with courageous and level clarity. You learn to admit them to consciousness as echoes of something that happened long ago that can be mourned but not changed. You learn to sit with it and know what it is and not flinch from it, and to say, I was abused and the effect on me was that I acted out and in acting out I made certain choices and now I am undoing those choices and learning to make new choices and it is not easy but I know I will survive and prosper.

And in getting better you have, in a sense, constructed a new, stronger self, a responsible party who is looking out for you. And what is the first thing this responsible party does when she encounters your life situation? She looks at that boyfriend of yours and says, That guy is not in your best interests. That guy is harming you and this has to stop.

Now you are there. You are there for yourself. That is how you get better.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

What? You want more?

I like to do things that are stressful to the kidneys such as drink coffee, get drunk now and then, trip on plants that are metabolized by the kidneys and liver (this is part of my spiritual practice). Do I say nothing and hope that, come March when she’s testing possible donors, we are not a match? Or do I strain the friendship by admitting to her that I have misgivings about my promise?

Willing Initially

Dear Willing Initially,

You did a good thing. You offered to help.

You may or may not be a compatible donor. But you said these words out of a genuine spirit of generosity and kindness. This is a pretty amazing thing about human beings — that we are inclined toward helping each other. It’s a good thing.

It may turn out that you are a match, but it’s statistically unlikely. “In the case of cousins, your chance of being identical is 1 in 16. In the case of a friend, then your chances vary depending on how common your HLA is,” according to this helpful booklet from Stanford’s Program in History and Philosophy of Science and Technology.

In either case, having second thoughts doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. To donate a kidney is a big thing and it’s natural to have second thoughts. So wait until it’s time for all the potential donors to be screened, and get screened, and then deal with it once you know if you’re a potential donor.

This question and answer page from the University of Maryland Medical Center is very informative. As is this one. 

Give yourself some credit. You spoke out of an impulse toward compassion and selflessness.

If you are indeed a match and you can’t go through with it, no one will fault you for it. But your initial impulse shows you have within you the capacity to help. It’s a precious thing. Think of the worldwide effect of such impulses, if they were carried out millions of times over. Think of the things we could solve if we honored these selfless impulses and our societies were organized to realize them. Think how much needless suffering could be stopped.

You say you use psychedelic plants as part of your spiritual practice. Perhaps one of these trips you can inquire of your spirit guides what is the right thing to do. But you needn’t decide yet. Wait. More will be revealed.

I am very eager to have babies with the man I love. With us now moving, kids are on the back burner because we won’t have health insurance until one of us lands a job with benefits. We had been trying to get pregnant until the decision to move was made because I have decent benefits with my current hateful job. (One of the reasons I haven’t quit, the other main one being that I’m trying to hold this job out till we can move.) I really want kids soon; I have wanted to be a mother since I was 5. But the stress of life and my failing body seem to want other things for me. I had injured my back at work and now am in physiotherapy to heal it, yet I’m still obligated to work my full shifts. Those eight-hour shifts literally drain me. I haven’t had a period in 3.5 months (my doctor insists it’s stress-related). And most recently, my pap test came back with abnormal cells on my cervix. No further tests have been done, but my doctor thinks my back, lack of period and abnormal cells are at least partly because of too much stress. Hard not to be stressed when all these symptoms have made me worry and fret even more about never being able to have children! The more that I worry, the more stressed my body becomes. The more symptoms of the stress I experience, the more I worry. (A huge catch-22.) One of my worst fears is to end up being barren.

On to my other issue. My fiancé and I both smoke marijuana regularly. I will note here that we do not smoke cigarettes at all, nor do we drink alcohol very often. Although I have heard that it can prevent couples from conceiving, I only “slowed it down” when we were trying to get pregnant. My fiancé seems to have his usage under control. He is able to use on a part-time basis and not every evening and every weekend. I am a different story altogether. I use (abuse) marijuana for stress. I rush to get home after work to have the bad memories of the day dissolve into higher thoughts. I am not high at work, but evenings and weekends are full of my usage. It’s the way I’ve taught myself to deal. Although I don’t think marijuana is an “evil drug” that “leads to other drug usage,” I know that I am misusing it. I have never felt the need to try any other drug (besides alcohol and caffeine). But I barely even notice the effects any more. Despite that, I can’t imagine quitting it altogether. I know that if I were pregnant I would not smoke at all, because there is another human being involved who would be affected by it.

But without marijuana, how would I deal with life’s stress? Plus there is some part of me that feels like marijuana is not bad. You ought to know that in my family, a few other people smoke marijuana. My aunt and cousin probably use it once daily, and my mom and brother once or twice a week, and my dad on occasion. While they never permitted any drug usage as a teenager, I found out and smoked with family after turning 19. Obviously this is a huge part of the reason why I can’t seem to convince myself that marijuana is “bad.”

This new city will not have any marijuana contacts for my fiancé and me, and it is my plan to stop smoking when we move. But really, I don’t want to stop at all, and I feel like I’m lying to myself by thinking that a new city will stop me from finding a way to do it. Plus, my fiancé is moving first, and we will be apart for a month (we’ve never been apart for longer than 10 days in the past four years). I know that with him gone, I will want to smoke even more. Especially because I feel like I want to get as much smoking in before I “can’t” anymore.

I know several people who use marijuana more than I do and who firmly believe that no one can get addicted to it. I guess I’m not so sure about this, but I would like to believe it because then I’m just a hippie and not an addict. I worry about the usage affecting the physiotherapy on my back, but since we aren’t trying to get pregnant, I still smoke whenever I want to. My fiancé knows that I smoke too much, he knows that I KNOW that I smoke too much too. But month after month he still brings it home for us. I have tried to quit before, asking him to keep it all hidden and out of sight. This always fails, because I will find it and sneak some or bug and bug him to get it out of hiding for me.

I don’t think I can stop until he stops bringing it into the house and we get rid of all the marijuana paraphernalia that is around our place. If my fiancé doesn’t want to quit with me, I would be disappointed. But as long as he kept everything out of our house and cars, I think I could do it. I really do want children in the long run and better physiotherapy results in the short term. What do I do?

Moving and Shaking

Dear Moving and Shaking,

You are using marijuana to relieve stress.

Stress is your problem. Whether you stop smoking marijuana or not, you need to learn more and better ways to relieve stress.

Start doing tai chi; start doing yoga; meditate; take naps; breathe deeply a lot; do biofeedback. If you are doing any of these activities already, don’t conclude that since you’re doing it a little it must not work. Instead, do it more.

You may need higher doses of yoga to get relief. Also, if you are consuming lots of caffeine, see about cutting back. Try substituting some herbal teas for caffeinated beverages now and then. Notice the difference. Especially in the afternoon, cut out the caffeine so you can get a better night’s sleep.

You will notice things about yourself this way. You will notice the different qualities of consciousness that arise from various techniques. It will be entertaining and interesting. You will notice a gradual improvement in your ability to go through life in a relaxed, worry-free way. Unpleasant activities like work and dealing with power-hungry blockheads will go more smoothly.

During this time, you might want to experiment with not smoking for a time. Pick an occasional time when you are stressed out, and instead of smoking, do 15 minutes of meditation, or some tai chi or yoga.

Don’t try to quit all at once, especially not on your own. Just learn some better relaxation techniques. Take it easy. Look for gradual improvement.

Once you’ve found other ways to relieve stress, you may not feel so fearful about the idea of quitting marijuana for good. Try going without for a few days at a time and see how that goes. You can always smoke. But experience what it’s like to handle life without it. Try to get accustomed to that feeling. You may feel slightly on edge, but take a deep breath of fresh air instead of a hit of weed.

The thing is, whether you call yourself an addict or not, changing habitual behavior is hard, and it’s especially hard to do alone. It’s hard to do without a program. It takes time, effort and support, and there are ups and downs. So I wouldn’t recommend trying to stop smoking marijuana on your own, or just with your fiancé.

As you say, for a variety of reasons, you are going to want to quit. So what I’m suggesting is that you prepare, in these ways, for the day when you will need to quit. I’m sure marijuana gives you other things besides stress relief; it probably gives you a heightened sense of the beauty of life, of tastes and sounds, and of general well-being. These things you may need to seek out in life; I find that there are other ways to feel these momentary highs. Seek them out.

For quitting things, as you probably know, I favor the 12-step method because it has added benefits: It helps you get your life together and is a lasting program of living. It is a community. It works for a lot of things.

When and how you quit is up to you. I can say that based on experience, it is definitely possible. You can quit and lead a normal, happy life, when you’re ready to. My bottom line is just that A) You should acquire new stress-relief methods first, before trying to quit, and B) what was B? Oh yeah, B) Don’t try to quit on your own. If and when you do decide to quit, do it with a group or a program behind you.

And, hey: Good luck. You sound like really nice people and I wish you the best in life. And say hello to the kids when they come. And say hello to the mountains.

Yeah, I know this isn’t all my fault, that it takes two to make a bad relationship, and all that. And certainly there are women — most of them — who wouldn’t even look my way. Great for them. But for those who are willing to look my way, don’t I have a basic human obligation to keep them safe from my horribleness and inevitable failures? Without exception I say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing or just collapse.

So. Given that I contribute nothing to the world but disappointment and misery, and I can’t control my desire for companionship and attention, shouldn’t I just kill myself? Isn’t that the moral thing to do at this point?

A Dangerous Nothing

Dear Dangerous Nothing,

You, my friend, are exactly perfect the way you are. You’re not a moron!

Look on the bright side: You have a technique. Don’t wait to show her your bumbling, fumbling, weak and incompetent side.  Spill your soup on her now! On the first date. Roll your car over your own foot and have her take you to the emergency room. Come out of the bathroom with tape all over your face. Why? Because a person with tape all over his face looks funny!

It’ll break the ice. She’ll thank you for it!

Pour it on  about what a loser you are! That’ll get her going about how you just have low self-esteem and you’re being too hard on yourself.

If you are asking women to marry you and promising to fly them in your private jet to your villa in Portugal and saying you’ll pick them up at 8 o’clock sharp the next morning and then you are not showing up, then women are going to bed thinking about your private jet and then not getting to ride in it. That’s bad.

You should slap yourself in the face once very hard if you are doing that. Then you should force yourself to sell your imaginary private jet at a loss of millions of imaginary dollars.

But killing yourself wouldn’t make any sense at all, and it wouldn’t make anyone happy, not even you.

Besides, there are worse people.

Thanks!

Dear Cary,

Hmmm. I won’t write this like a writer, more like the utterly confused person I am. I’ll sum up. I’ve been with BF/husband (I didn’t want to get married, he did) 15 years. He came with three daughters, all filling pages of the DSM. One is bipolar, one BDP, one ADHD etc., etc. At the time I was 30 and had just lost both my parents very suddenly, I was making a lot of money, had inherited some and was really trying to pretend nothing had happened. We were great. I still think he’s the funniest human I’ve ever met and that we share that thing all good couples do: We think we’re better than everyone else. Fast forward. His insecurity has dogged us from the beginning. Had I been more aware and noticing, I would likely have run.

Three years ago we lost our dog. He was our child. The one thing we had together. It was bone cancer and it was awful. It probably triggered for me the memory of losing my parents so quickly — I went a little nuts. I had an affair, I left, I ended the affair. I was so fucking sad I couldn’t stand it. I drank a lot.

Meanwhile, I’m a writer. Literary, but not totally insignificant. I’ve been sober for about four months, and working desperately to finish this new book I have due.

A week ago I learned that he was setting me up, saying, “Your phone rang and it was a blocked number, is there anything you want to tell me?” All this involves cappuccino and serious face. When I realized he was making it all up, I lost my mind.

I can’t take it anymore. Every day is a prosecution. There’s more, of course. A lot. I tiptoe around him, he’s angry most of the time and his three grown daughters don’t want to talk to him without a therapist in the room. He’s brilliant and tricky and there is no way to win. I can’t fill the black hole anymore.

And why now, besides the obvious? I’m sober, I’m working, this book is good … why would he tear it out from under me? I know it’s not conscious, but it’s incredibly twisted.

I love him, and we were better than everyone else, but he’s killing me. Dead.

Tormented

Dear Tormented,

You’re four months sober. You’re going to have to take this on faith. Nothing else matters. Nothing is going to be the way it was. There is nothing to do but stay sober. This other stuff will get sorted out later.

Four months sober is its own special condition. It may manifest as confusion or certainty, clarity or dullness, energy or lethargy, high or low, but it is an edge; it is a liminal state out of which a strange future is being born.

You can afford to slow down now and not try to figure everything out or fix everything. It wouldn’t help anyway. Your old fixes won’t work. Well, they might seem to work for a while, but the point is that you need to abandon them because they will not lead you where you have to go now.

No matter whether you finish the book or don’t finish the book, stay married or get divorced, as long as this sobriety goes on day after day you are going to reclaim your life, your childhood, your spirit. You are going to see and feel things that were formerly only a dull buzz or murmur. These dull murmurs of being will provide the sinews of a new construct. It will not be the you that you envisioned when you were busy envisioning yourself. It will be different. But it will be authentic and thus suffused with the energy of life.

Imagine looking at what your husband is doing and not needing to do anything about it.

You will shed many illusions. You will shed the illusion of being better than the rest of us — beneath which has secretly lain the illusion that you are worse than us. These troubling illusions of separateness and hierarchy will go away and you will be reunited with humanity on an even footing.

Guard your sobriety as you would guard your life.

Your husband and others will attempt to get back the old you who would engage their craziness. Observe this from a safe distance. Don’t engage their craziness. Stay safe in your four months of sobriety. Finish the book. Take long walks.

Your husband has lost you. You are no longer entertaining him in his madness. So he is reaching out to you. He is trying to get you back.

Don’t go there. You will just have to stand firm.

Guard your sobriety as you would guard your life. Finish your book. Take long walks. It will start to make sense.

I do want to marry and have children. Thus I’ve spent a fair amount of time on self-reflection, either on my own, in a therapist’s office, or on the phone with my sister. I’ve spent several years sifting through the finer details of my relationship with my father — yep, he’s emotionally distant and critical, has an on/off problem with alcohol, you know the drill. So now, I have all this knowledge about me, about my relationship with my father, about why I play the role that I do in my relationships, etc., etc. I’m grateful for this knowledge. However, I want this knowledge to do something for me, because, frankly, I’m really starting to bore myself.

Knowing what I know, how can I, or anyone, for that matter, truly change? How do I stop making the same old choices, drawing in the same old men, putting up with the same old crap?

Sincerely,

Ready for Change

Dear Ready for Change,

I only know one thing about this. When you have had enough then you will change.

Have you had enough? Have you truly had enough? Are you stumbling, blind and desperate? Are you lying on the sidewalk? Have you fallen to your knees and cried out to anyone who can hear that you cannot go on one minute more?

Then you will change.

Until then, you may acquire new skills and insights that alert you to your behavior. You may make better decisions. You may abort certain activities. You may begin to see the patterns in your life with greater clarity. You may become more cautious. You may get better at evaluating potential mates.

But you will not change in any fundamental way until you reach a breaking point. This breaking point may not be dramatic or even visible to others. It may be quiet, a moment  when something shifts inside. You may not even realize it at the time. But a transformation is not an adjustment. It is a shift.

Many desire deep, fundamental change, yet it is elusive. Certain life-changing experiences bring us to our core selves, or force us to make certain leaps — leaps of faith, leaps that take us out of the ordinary and expose us to a more authentic and searing experience of the self. But how does that happen? How can we make it happen?

I don’t think we can make it happen. But there are things that seem to predispose us to it.

Having a fatal flaw can be a blessing. Facing it may bring about the change you long for.

For me it was alcoholism.

That is all I know, personally. I have only experienced this once, when my alcoholism brought me to a condition in which I was willing to do the 12 steps. But people have adapted the 12 steps to other conditions. It seems reasonable that certain psychological conditions would produce the same hopelessness and despair that drive people to do the 12 steps.

Those of us who have found lasting help through the 12 steps can usually point to one defining moment. Such moments are usually preceded by years of difficulty and numerous attempts to change without experiencing any major disruptions in life or having to entertain foreign and sometimes empirically questionable notions. What happens in these moments is qualitatively different from the acquisition of new life skills or psychological insights. We had acquired life skills and understanding and insight but still could not stop doing what we were doing.

So I would suggest if you want such an experience that you entertain the notion that you might be one of those people for whom the 12 steps might work even though you do not seem to be an addict. I have heard people speak of being so demoralized by their behaviors that they “hit bottom” with codependence, sex, anger, etc.

It makes sense. It’s not my story, but it makes sense. Why should alcohol have a special place in the mechanics of human transformation? Why would the universal human experience of hitting bottom and reaching out for help and finding a new way of living be confined to addicts? The history of religion and consciousness shows otherwise.

The important point is that transformation is not acquisition; rather, it is loss. We do not pick up new tools for living first; we first abandon what has served us so far, and in that moment between abandoning what has brought us this far and stepping into a new vessel is a moment of profound terror and joy.

That moment of terror is what distinguishes transformation from mere adjustment.

Since you have are standing at a precipice, I suggest you look into the 12 steps as they have been applied to problems of relationship and family. Al-Anon is a group that started to help the family members of alcoholics but has now been found useful for a variety of human problems.

But the steps are just activities; the results can often seem miraculous but I continue to believe that change begins with some ineffable human shift, whether you call it raw desperation, ego deflation, a moment of clarity, incomprehensible demoralization, seeing the light … it doesn’t matter so much what we call it as long as we understand what we are talking about. So the problem remains: How are we brought to this point? How do we arrive at it? Can it be precipitated, like inducing birth?

Perhaps you will be brought to this point by continual meditation on your problem, or by continuing therapy, or by a sudden realization; perhaps it will come to you as nothing more than a passing thought that has lasting resonance. I urge you to begin with the 12 steps and see where that takes you; doing such activities, if nothing else, seems to keep us attuned and alert to the necessary moment, whenever it arrives, and it always arrives in its own time.