Very early into my Jewish conversion journey, while we were discussing my problematic family history and the problems that led to in my adult life, my rabbi posed a question that floored me. He said, “What if there isn’t a problem? What if the only problem is that you keep thinking there’s a problem? None of us are as perfect as we’d like to be.”

My substance-abusing siblings in childhood led to me in a codependence 12-step group as an adult–not to mention years of anger, knee-jerk emotional reactions, and control freakiness. After a few years, I had finally reached a plateau in my step work where, for the first time, I found myself able to reach out to others in a healthy way and begin to make peace with my past. At the time, my rabbi’s idea that maybe there wasn’t a problem wasn’t an idea I found legitimate.

It took me a while to see his point. It wasn’t that there wasn’t a problem. The point was, there’s always a problem. Everyone has a problem. Life is a problem. From time to time love is a problem, family is a problem. Nothing’s ever perfect or meant to be. And that’s okay. That’s normal, the baseline of life. In other words, I spent most of my adult life making a problem out of the fact that I had a normally problematic life.

I’m not the only person ever to have had a screwed up childhood, to have taken a long time to figure out how to manage the aftermath of it, or to have ended up in a recovery program. Nor am I the first person to be fatter than I want to be, or, at times, lonelier. I don’t have the license on making less money than would be convenient for my creditors, or on being less responsive to my friends than would be helpful to their needs or my heart. It all comes and it goes. Some days, and some moments, are better than others.

An important Jewish lesson in the past few months for me has been the instruction on how to perform tikkun olam, or repair of the world–a central Jewish concern, found in the Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers) tractate of the Talmud, the central text of Rabbinic Judaism:

It is not your duty to complete the work. Neither are you free to desist from it.

The instruction concerns how we should live with others on a shared planet. But to my mind, it equally applies to how we should live with ourselves. In both cases: don’t fret because problems exist and you can’t fix them completely; just make sure you’re doing your best to solve them. Being part of the solution is a commandment. Knowing the whole solution and every solution, that’s God’s job.

The more my rabbi’s question sank in, the more I realized how much of a project I had made out of not having a perfect life. That doesn’t mean I desist from working through the emotional damage of my childhood. It does, however, mean I don’t need to feel broken about it for the rest of my life. It was with this realization that I found the permission to finally let go emotionally on my Jewish journey. Worship and prayer, getting more involved in synagogue life, and making friends at temple all started to click the moment I stopped criticizing myself for not being able to wave a magic wand and fix all my life problems.

Over the years, there are many avenues I’ve followed down to try to gain a sense of wholeness, peace, and for want of a better term, un-brokenness. Many places I’ve looked for a solution to all my problems. Relationships. Buddhism. Moving back to New York. None of it has been very successful or has lasted for very long. It was the surprise of my life to find my long-sought sense of normalcy in Judaism.

Funny thing, Judaism doesn’t actually solve any of my problems, which had been my former litmus test for a normal life. It does, however, offer me guidance on how to live an ethical yet normally imperfect life in a normally imperfect world. It helped me to stop obsessing about the destination and instead–as long as I do my best–to be okay with the journey. And with myself.

How perfect is that?

(Photo credit: Devyn Caldwell.)

Grousing about being awakened at the crack of dawn on a Sunday aside, I’m still a pretty happy person. Somewhat neurotic, sure. Some things never go away, especially for ex-New Yorkers like me. But as this amazing year has taught me, there’s a lot more to me than I ever realized–or at least than I ever felt brave enough to let out. I have a lot to be thankful for, and lately I’ve been pretty publicly grateful. I know that’s been off-putting to a few people. To those folks I say: how do you think I feel?

No one would label me a morning person, so it’s no surprise that I drove my morning-joyful Rockford friend up a wall Sunday morning by grousing at being shifted to a north-central Illinois Starbucks while he went to work before, I’m sure, even God had gotten out of bed. He’s Christian clergy, so I suppose it comes with the territory, though seen in that frame it makes perfect sense I feel most at home in a Jewish denomination with post-evening-rush-hour services.

Notwithstanding sitting groggy-eyed in that Rockford Starbucks where this post began, I remain uncharacteristically unflappably content–at least compared to how I felt about life at the beginning of this year. It’s hard to describe how titanic yet simple it felt the morning four months ago when I decided to stop fighting against my life and start embracing it instead.

I had always been afraid of letting go of my fear of the world. I fought against it my whole life, not knowing what I was really trying to protect myself from were the toxic adult family members who helped raise me. I eventually gave in and stopped going to war with my life because (thanks to three years in these rooms) I finally came to see the unnecessary devastation I was leaving behind. My heart couldn’t take any more if it. I was sure I was going to drop dead once I gave in, but there wasn’t much choice anymore. Instead, by the end of the day, the sense of growing ease and peace in my life was palpable.

That led to a lot of amends and healing, and that led to my Jewish journey. All of it led straight into places inside of me I never knew existed. It’s not as if suddenly here’s this pain-in-the-ass blogger talking about love, and joy, and God. These things have always been in me, and I’ve always known it. I’ve just been too afraid to act on it, to let it out, to let my actions be guided by it. I was afraid it wouldn’t make much difference. I didn’t want anybody to know (drumroll)…who I really was.

To borrow a line from Robert Frost, as it turns outs, that has made all the difference. I’m not suddenly some new Michael Doyle. (Though you may have noticed, I’m taking my name back–Mike was shorter to write in a blog sidebar, but to friends I have always been Michael.) I’m just, finally, the Michael Doyle I’ve never let you see before. He’s actually a pretty nice guy.

Yeah I know. The whole thing sounds kind of trite, and I admit from time to time in the past few months having to just stand back and ask myself, “Who in the hell are you and what have you done with Mike Doyle?” On the other hand, it has been a lot easier to deal with life–problems and setbacks and stresses especially–by taking a decidedly different approach to them.

I’m happy. There it is. My life is full of confusion and stress and uncertainty at the moment, and I could complain about it all. But so is everyone else’s. That, I really don’t need to tell you, is life. But I’m still happy. There’s a gratitude I’m in touch with now about, really, all of it, that leaves me in awe on an hour-by-hour basis. It took a long time to get here. I intend to revel in it.

I’m reminded of a saying featured in the movie, Akeelah and the Bee. It was mis-attributed to Nelson Mandela, but it really comes from Marianne Williamson. It reads in full:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we’re liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

And if you didn’t drown on the sickening sweetness of that quote, get used to it. Because I’m living in the middle of it.

Happy, happy. Joy, joy.

Everything in its time. Calamity, sadness, inspiration, healing. The experience of my life in the weeks since I turned 40 was a time long in coming. Nine years ago this past weekend, calamity befell my hometown and in sadness I left it behind. I hadn’t yet begun to see the wreckage I was leaving behind in my own life. Not just nine years ago, but every single day since then.

The anniversary of September 11th is such a potent time for New Yorkers. The hole in the Gotham skyline still hasn’t been healed, and if recent tirades from all sides are any indication, after all this time many of my fellow natives still haven’t found a path to peace about it all. Time and again I’ve rehashed my 9/11 story on this blog, even recording it for national posterity. So I suppose a part of me still lives frozen in time on that day, too.

I recently spoke to my best friend in this lifetime, Peter Morley, after three years of silence on my part. Together we shared the awkward yearnings of our teenage years and the twenty-something headlong rush into real life. But we hadn’t talked since my failed, highly codependent attempt to move back to NYC in 2007. Hearing each other’s voice, it was like a moment had passed. A heartbeat. The blink of an eye. Yet one tinged with the knowing that three years of life had irretrievably happened, too.

Six decades ago, Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote that Shabbat, the Jewish sabbath, contained all of eternity in one day, if only man would stop and take notice. But slowing down enough to take reasonable notice of the finer points of creation historically has never been the forte of New Yorkers. Least of all this one.

Eight years ago, when I found Chicago, I thought I had left all my problems behind me. Five years ago, when I met a gifted photographer, Devyn, I thought he was the answer to all the same problems that had inexplicably crept back into my life. Three years ago, when Devyn left for New York without me, after I stopped blaming him, I finally had my first inkling that maybe the world wasn’t out to get me. Maybe I was really out to get myself.

Seventy-five years ago, Bill Wilson and Dr. Robert Smith founded Alcoholics Anonymous. For the past three years of the recovery journey from codependence that began with Devyn’s departure, I’ve silently comforted myself with the thought that at least I wasn’t a drinker. Having arrived in 12-step in 2007 with a newly minted belief in God (which took me completely by surprise one day), I always figured I had a head start on the steps since I already had a “Higher Power” to rely on.

Taking your recovery journey for granted is a great way not to recover, though. Buddhism, my adopted tradition of the past four years, would suggest we concentrate on this particular moment in time, instead of living with our heads in some fairy-tale tomorrow. It instructs, with good reason, that the only point of personal power is in this moment. But while trying to live in the moment, it’s generally best not to live with your head in the sand, too.

Then again, it can be a good way to bottom out. Last year, my 39th by human reckoning but laughably immeasurable by the standards of infinite time, I stepped up my lifelong practice of trying to defend myself from the ghosts of my past by doing battle with innocent people in my present. From last year to this one, the bridges I burned personally and professionally went up in flames at breakneck speed.

Then last month I turned 40, and a funny thing happened. Everything changed. I can’t say how and I can only attribute the ‘why’ to the power of 12 steps. But one day not long before my birthday I let everything drop to the ground. Deep inside, I finally let it all go. In one moment that seemed to come from nowhere, I realized my responsibility for my own actions.

I began to work my remaining “nuts and bolts” steps, eight and nine–the healing steps. They’re the ones that call you to recognize and amend for your hurtful behaviors perpetrated on those you’ve loved (and lost) and befriended (and enmitized) throughout your life. For three years, I never understood the point of these steps. But very quickly, the value of doing them (and my amends will take a lifetime of doing) became clear. Realizing for the first time in my life that I actually understand and care about the emotional impact of my actions on others introduced to me to a growing humility and–finally–a waning sense of shame about my past.

Even with amends, some friends remain lost, and some hurts can never be fully repaid. But I know in my heart it would be very difficult to become the person again who set such hurt in action. I know I’ve caused a lot of hurt with my blog. How many people have I thrown under the bus over five years in these virtual pages? How often have I blogged at the expense of others? On September 1st, Outsidein interviewed me about my lessons learned as a local blogger. Last week when the interview ran, it served as a mea culpa to my online community:

Ok, folks: what is the #1 lesson Chicago Carless blogger Mike Doyle has learned in his 5+ years of blogging about Chicago, ADHD, blogging, not driving a car, technology and all aspects of his personal life? Hint: it’s not about managing his ADHD, nor is it some tip about how to come up with blogging ideas year in and year out. And it’s certainly not what you’d expect if you’ve ever spent some time reading Doyle’s blog. Give up? Very well. Here’s what Mike wants all you bloggers and wannabe bloggers to know:

“Don’t be a dick! Please, please, please quote me on that.”

And they did. And you know what? I really don’t want to be that blogger any more. In place of the selfish anger and punishing shame, I’d much prefer the sense of humility, other-directedness, and God that I have consistently felt in my life since my heart turned around. I was thinking about this, rolling it over in my mind, during a 30-minute ride on the Brown Line. When I got to my stop I realized it: I wouldn’t be a Buddhist much longer. For four years I’d done a torturous calculus to try and make my belief in God fit into my God-silent Buddhist practice. That practice brought me a sense of my center and a great understanding about the ever-changing nature of the world, but if I was going to maintain my emotional sobriety–if I was going to continue to recover–I knew I needed something more.

Even before Devyn left, even before I came to believe in God, I found myself searching for a religious practice. A fellowship of people with some common belief about life and perhaps about ways to make the world a better place. I knew that fellowship would never be a Christian one. I was raised Roman Catholic and even as a small child knew that I would never be a believer. Christianity has great beauty in it, but it has never spoken to my heart. A lifetime of Eastern spiritual beliefs eventually led me to Buddhism. Now I knew something inside was leading me on.

Last week Rosh Hashanah arrived, a holy time of great importance to many close friends of mine. For the first time, the holiday felt relevant to me, too. The ten “Days of Awe” from the arrival of the new year marked by Rosh Hashanah to the day of atonement of Yom Kippur are the most important on the Jewish calendar. During them, God opens the Book of Life and decides whom to inscribe in it for the next year. Judaism’s highest holy days are all about taking stock, making amends, and embracing life instead of pushing it away.

There are other things I find personally relevant, even touching, about Judaism. A tradition that doesn’t see doubt as sin but, instead, supports the right to wrestle with God and struggle with faith. The experience of the Divine in the mundane. The reliance on study and conscience. The importance of taking care of each other here on earth. The mission of tikkun olam, to “repair the world.” The family-centric holidays and rituals centered on deepening the everyday sense of God.

The covering of the challah before the meal on Shabbat eve so you don’t hurt the bread’s feelings when you bless the wine first. I smiled a long time over that one.

After that Brown Line ride, it took me a day to realize Judaism spoke to everything I have felt my entire life about God and wanted to believe about man’s relationship to his fellow man. It was a realization that felt like coming home to a home I never knew was mine. It took me a month of soul-searching to decide to begin a new and wondrous journey. I have, I hope, half a life left to take it.

Last week, I told my Conservative-raised childhood friend, Barbara, about my interest in converting to Reform Judaism. Although it’s unusual, I told her I’d probably be one of the rare Reform Jews who wants to wear a kippah (the skullcap most non-Jews know by the Yiddish word, yarmulke.) There’s no religious law about wearing them and Reform Jews generally don’t. But the idea is that a kippah on your head reminds you of your conduct, humility, and God.

Barbara suggested I consider getting one and wearing it alone while I study to see how it feels. A Chicago friend lent me one soon after and I wore it in private while studying to see how it felt…

And it felt like me.

Not so long ago, I remember laying down and sobbing for an hour, mourning that I didn’t have a religious tradition to return to in my past. Even so, the idea of choosing one almost overwhelmed me. Just because it feels right in an inexplicable way, makes me feel like I’ve discovered something about myself that has always been there waiting for me to find it, how can I know that I’m making the right decision? A decision that will set into motion months of formal study and a commitment to both a tradition and a people?

I made peace with my decision when I read these words in Daniel Gordis’ famous essay on Jewish spirituality, God Was Not in the Fire:

“There is no one specific faith-claim we have to make in order to start. And it is never too late. All we need is the desire to led Judaism take us on the journey.”

I have that desire.

When the shofar is sounded on Rosh Hashana marking the beginning of the Days of Awe, the third blast is called the Teruah. A staccato series of nine notes serving as an alarm, a warning to move onward with the work at hand. Nine years on from 9/11, I don’t have any more tears. I came to Chicago to try and escape my sense of loss at that awful event. I’ve lived every year since then perpetuating a sense of loss in my life by pushing everyone dear to me away. No more. I’m ready to make peace with my past–all of it–and move on. I consider my decision to do so my own, personal warning shot across the bow of my former blindness about life.

It took me 40 years to get to this point. I’m humbled when I think of the time I’ve wasted. But when I think of the love I feel in this moment coursing through my life from the people I share this planet with past and present, I am awed.

So to old friends who have been there from the start and new friends I’ve met along the way, L’Chaim! To life! This time next year, with help from a power greater than myself, may I have maintained my emotional sobriety for my sake and the sake of our relationships with each other–relationships which I treasure more than I can express. May I recall standing on the outside of my life looking in as a distant memory. And may I learn to love the phrase, “Yes, I was born Jewish, to Roman Catholic parents.”

But next year seems an eternity away. Right now it is enough that in this moment and in my own skin, I know I am finally home.

(Photo: “This better not be going on your blog.”)

When Overly Frank adopted olderly Ryza from PAWS Chicago earlier this month, the cuddly interaction between Oklahoma expat and 11-year-old feline made me realize how much I’d been taking my own lifelong companion for granted. His life, that is.

Camões never saw the now-ongoing love-fest coming. For nine years, my Portuguese-monickered danger cat and I have been through a lot together. So many apartments. So many times around the futon chasing a ball of string. So many broken Christmas tree ornaments.

Our relationship is like my ADD attention span, the times I really focus on him come and go like the weather. He deserves more. I do too. Trouble is, my family history doesn’t have a lot to teach about long-term relationships.

It’s no surprise I recently shared with friends the realization that I have no idea how to enter and sustain adult relationships. I call it “The Lonely,” the place I end up inside myself when I’m trumped by my ADD and my codependence. I sit there waiting for my Higher Power to lead me to more stable ground and remind me that the true definition of love is not something I learned in childhood.

Growing up in New York, I never knew my father–either one of them. Not the Irishman with my last name in the black-and-white portrait who allegedly died six months before I was born. Sure as hell not the Puerto Rican border hidden away in the family album with Brillo hair and crooked fingers not at all unlike my own.

A native Manhattanite, my Spanish mom married the Irishman and moved to Queens to get out of her own family’s house and find independence. That’s probably why she raised her kids white-bread American, never teaching us the language of her birth. Imagine her surprise when the Irishman dropped dead of alcoholism in 1964 and a short while later her mother came to retire in the attic apartment.

You’d think she’d have already learned to roll with the punches when she went to the doctor suspecting cancer in 1969 and learned of her unexpected pregnancy. She’d later tell me she cried knowing that it wasn’t a terminal illness responsible for her bodily changes.

By the time I was born–six years after the Irishman died–my brother and sister, both a generation older, were already in the advanced stages of drug abuse and alcoholism. My mother should have known better than to entrust them with the secret of my origins, but given the Irishman’s own addiction, she already had a long head start on codependence, herself.

But my Spanish mother was Catholic enough to feel ashamed at having a child out of wedlock, so a family and a neighborhood were sworn to silence. She sent the upstairs border with whom she had shared what would turn out to be the last sexual experience of her life away and put a dead man’s name on my birth certificate.

I wouldn’t learn the familiar man in the family album was my real father until the age of 24. When the truth finally came out, my mother told me she never loved my father and, after all, my brother and sister weren’t ready for a new one, anyway. She also told me they’d been blackmailing her with the knowledge of my origins for my entire life, seeking money, approval of their eventually uninterrupted drunkenness, and silence for illegal actions. (I remain to this day the only person I know who can claim to have played as a pre-teen on bales of pot hidden in the family house by my sister’s drug-dealer boyfriend.)

When my mother died in 1996, shortly after I fled the family household for the sober urbanity of Brownstone Brooklyn, I thought that was that. Before the funeral, out of resentment at how they had manipulated our mother, I hadn’t had a discussion with my siblings in years. And even then, the closest my sister got to talking to me was the heckling she did from the first pew while I was delivering my mother’s eulogy.

Still, in my mother’s death, I thought I had finally escaped the clutches of my emotionally devastating family environment. As regular readers of this blog know, however, it would take many years of soul-searching, a move across country, and a lifetime of failed relationships for me to realize how damaging my upbringing had actually been.

Damaging enough to keep me from looking for my real father until my thirtieth birthday. Social Security death records told me I’d started my search eleven months too late. Digging through my mother’s effects shortly after, I came across private notes he sent to the woman who didn’t love him. I don’t remember how long I sat there reading and re-reading them.

In my father’s handwriting, they all made one thing clear: he loved her. But he was shut out. He eventually moved to Orange County, California, where he died in Santa Ana on September 29th, 1999. His name was Angelo Oropesa.

Before she died, my mother told me every time she looked at me, her breath was taken away by how much I resembled him. The few photos I have of Oropesa show him with children–my unknown half-brothers. From time to time, I poke around the Internet, seeking them. I probably always will. I doubt I’ll ever find them.

Last week, I went looking again. That search proved surprisingly fruitful, if in an unexpected manner. I ran my own siblings’ names through the Social Security death index.

I learned my sister has been dead for three years.

I doubt she ever let herself be happy. I doubt up until the end at the age of 56 she was ever sober for long. And I doubt my brother was sober enough to try and find me to let me know. I’ve spent many years building an information isolation from the two of them to protect me from their madness. Still, I’m eminently Google-able.

What really strikes me about my sister’s death, though, isn’t the late notice, but the lack of emotional impact the news has had on me. I feel sad that I don’t feel sad at her passing. The most I’ve been able to muster is a sense of sorry when I picture how she must have lived the rest of her life. At one time, I loved her dearly. But I made peace with the destruction my family inflicted on itself a long time ago. And I let go of them a long time ago.

Eventually, no doubt, I’ll find my brother in those death records. In the passing of my family members, what’s truly remarkable is how resilient their ghosts have been. I wish I had the same ability to let them go, too.

Much as I wonder how well “Michael Oropesa” would have fit the face at the top of this blog.

(Graphic: No matter what you do, sometimes life is just a B-side.)

J.J. Abrams’ new Star Trek movie taught me a thing or two about life over the weekend. Sometimes the second time around is not as good as you think it might be. And Vulcans will be Vulcans.

I saw the “rebooted” Trek film with Mikey the Stickler, a friend to Pastry Chef Chris who I hit it off with during a few Tuesday night coffee klatsches at Lido’s Caffé in Oak Park. I don’t wonder why––when we get together, you could write a book about the similarities in our behavior. Bitches Who Bitch Too Much comes too mind as a  prospective title.

We’d been meaning to hang out for a couple of months. But life seemed to keep getting in the way, as Mikey had a habit of reminding me. “You’re too busy with your guy,” was a refrain I heard regularly. Sure, what I was mostly too busy with was obsessing over my former guy, not actually seeing him, but Mikey didn’t need to know that.

A free Sunday–and my thorough dumping by said guy–was as good enough a reason as any to finally break our Waitresses-song-worthy string of missed opportunities and actually hang out with each other. We met up before the movie at Lido’s, Mikey taking the same seat opposite me that Sonny had occupied the night before. In my meager defense, I guess I had been hoping for a second chance.

“I wanna hear the whole story,” Mikey said, almost simultaneous with his butt hitting the seat below. I obliged, and told him about Saturday’s two-hour meeting with Sonny, only the second time I’d seen the man I gifted with Mold-A-Ramas since he did an unannounced disappearing act the day after Easter.

In retrospect, I should have told Mikey to wait for the movie version.

I really thought I’d like the second coming of the Star Trek franchise more than it turned out that I did. Gorgeous actors, great sets, fabulous action, tons of new backstory–the new film has it all. My favorite part was the unexpected love intrigue between a certain Vulcan troubled by feelings he kept trying to hide, and a persistent human who kept trying to reach out against logic’s seemingly insurmountable odds.

But there was other logic in the film, faulty logic concerning time paradoxes and black holes and bad science that I would have expected more from a Star Wars film than from a story out of the usually better-crafted Trek universe. It made everything seem a bit too contrived for my tastes. I was disappointed the screenwriters took the easy route with the story.

Sitting in the darkened auditorium on Lake Street, imagine my surprise to realize I was reliving the same story from 24 hours before. I let Mikey in on my sense of déja vu after the move, over barbecued chicken and pork at his seldom-seen Forest Park abode.

“I know how bad my decisions can be when I’m not in recovery,” I said.

“You’re as crazy as I am, that’s probably why we get along,” Mikey replied.

“No argument,” I agreed. “But I’ve never told anyone that maybe I need to be alone for the rest of my life because the stress of my job makes it hurt too much to let anyone in. It was like opposites day on the Electric Company. I saw the feelings dancing there in his eyes, but everything else about him was all Vulcan. He’s afraid to let anything out anymore.”

Mikey thought for a second. “You know, I can be really mean to the guys I date. The last one hasn’t gone out with anyone else since me, and that was ten years ago.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” I told him. “That could be because he’s a big drunk and his father hates the government and calls TV the delta wave, too, you know.”

“True,” Mikey replied, as he slipped a handful of ice cubes into his wine glass.

I continued. “I sat there and felt like I was a cartoon character and he was an unhappy artist with a big, fat eraser, just rubbing me out, swipe by swipe. It’s one thing to think you’re only up against up against your own demons. It’s something else entirely to be told by the guy you loved that he’s made a decision to be alone for good.”

“You think he’ll be able to pull that off?”

“You ever hear of anyone who’s made a decision like that and lived a happy life afterwards? Priests don’t count, for obvious and growing legal reasons.”

Mikey smirked but didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. Plain Jane, the oddly aggressive counter clerk at Lido’s had said it all earlier in the afternoon before Mikey’s arrival.

“It’s too bad for the two of you,” she said. “You think you’re doing the right thing running away from people, but then you wake up ten years later, ten years lonelier, and you’re me.”

I stood there, astonished at her candor. Her voice began to quiver as she went on. “And you’re putting on a happy face, and you’re feeling dead inside,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “And it’s too late to do anything about it. Jesus, I wouldn’t wish my life on anyone…”

As the hardest woman I know fell into my arms and wept in the back of Lido’s Caffé, much as I had done the night before with her coworker after I left Sonny’s company, I really had to wonder. About Jane. About Sonny. About me. All these lonely people, where do we all come from?

And where do we go from here?

(Graphic: A weekend in the sun…the hard way.)

“…Landshark.”

An old 12-step adage says no matter how willingly you’re off the wagon, sometimes recovery comes and finds you. One day you’re sitting there in your living room wrapped around your addiction of choice when you hear a knock at the door. You peer through the peephole and there’s no one there. But you could have sworn…

Pastry Chef Chris has a saying for how I behave when I turn away from my codependence recovery. “We can’t talk to you when Tasmanian Michael comes to town,” he told me recently. “We want to tell you how you’re acting, but you won’t listen. You just spin faster and faster and we all have to step back. No on can ever get through to you until Tasmanian Michael goes to Bermuda.”

I’d love to pretend Tasmanian Michael doesn’t exist, but I’ve woken up one too many times to find his bags gone, a fifty missing from my wallet for cabfare to O’Hare, and a line of friends banging on my front door ready to wring my neck. “What did I do?” is seldom a good question to ask of others at times likes these. It just tends to make them raise the torches and pitchforks a little higher. You’d think I’d have learned by now.

Trouble is, for codependents, you rarely know the damage you’re doing to the people you care about most until it’s already done. And usually irreparable. That seemed to be the case when my boyfriend of two years, Devyn, told me if I didn’t leave his apartment he’d have me removed physically as we broke up the hard way in 2007.

In hindsight, it was the best thing anyone ever did for me. Sometimes a painful dose of reality is all that can snap us back into it.

“No one enters these rooms from a happy place.”
Last weekend, my program friend Russian Roulette laid it all out for me. “No one enters these rooms from a happy place, Michael,” she told me over a mouth-blisteringly hot eggplant parmigiana sandwich in Lakeview. “But it’s always good to be back.”

Before you enter recovery, you wonder why your life seems to be a series of such not happy places. The day, shortly after Devyn left, when I came across the list of codependent tendencies on the Internet, I sat on the floor and cried. In that blunt list of behaviors I browsed on a laptop screen, I saw my life reflected back to me.

• I minimize, alter or deny how I truly feel.
• I perceive myself as completely unselfish and dedicated to the well being of others.
• I judge everything I think, say or do harshly, as never “good enough.” 
I do not perceive myself as a lovable or worthwhile person.
• I value others’ opinions and feelings more than my own and am afraid to express differing opinions and feelings of my own.
• I put aside my own interests and hobbies in order to do what others want.
• I accept sex when I want love.
• I believe most other people are incapable of taking care of themselves.
• I attempt to convince others of what they “should” think and how they “truly” feel.

I control. I try to control anyone who gets close to me so I won’t be hurt again, like I was as a child. It wasn’t until I was 24 that my homebound mother finally told me the man in the black-and-white portrait who died before I had a chance to know him wasn’t my father after all. My brother, John, and sister, Patricia, both a generation older, knew him as their father before he died from alcoholism. Six years before I was born.

By the time my mother found love again, she wasn’t ready to re-marry. My real father wasn’t ready to wait around for her to change her mind. And, as they entered their twenties, my brother and sister were already advanced-stage alcoholics and drug addicts.

No one is born codependent. I was born like all children, with a need––and a right––to be loved by the adults in my life. How else can children learn to love themselves? What becomes of those children when the adults in their lives ignore their innocent needs for emotional, psychological, physical well-being?

Sitting at the dinner table at six years old, I remember asking my mother why John’s girlfriend, Mary, was sleeping in her mashed potatoes. In grade school, I was used to my sister sleeping it off on the kitchen floor. In junior high school, when Patricia stabbed Mary with a steakknife and brought the bloody object to my nephew, Little John, born with fetal alcohol syndrome eight years before, screaming, “Look! I just killed your mother!”, I wasn’t even surprised.

When I finally moved away from home to Brooklyn at the age of 25, I felt a sense of liberation. I was finally free of the madness. I remember telling friends, “I feel lucky I made it out without becoming an alcoholic myself.” I was proud of that fact.

Little did I know.

“They say you called 911…”
These past few years in Chicago, I’ve often turned to my hip-suburban-chick friend, Val, to help me gain perspective on my life. We’re like two peas in a lonely pod. After each one of my Windy City boyfriends has walked on, she’s told me, “I wish I could tell you how not to close off your heart after this, but I don’t have an answer to that, myself, anymore.”

During my eight years in Brooklyn, I hadn’t yet put the pieces together. Every boyfriend I had ever known had left me, never the other way around. It was always their fault. They didn’t fulfill my emotional needs, they didn’t love me enough, they didn’t care what I wanted. It hurt less to let everyone else take the blame. Though it sure made it hard to understand why my friends were always urging me think about things a little more deeply.

When I entered recovery after Devyn’s departure, I thought I had it made. Not happily made––no one wants to think they’ll need to attend support meetings for the rest of their life. No one wants to think they’re that broken. But made enough to find some serenity in my life.

Whether you’re addicted to control or Ketel One, thinking easy happiness is just around the corner is a great strategy for falling off the wagon. Meeting the unconditionally warm-hearted Pastry Chef Chris sure seemed like I didn’t have a care in the world.

When he broke up with me last May, he told me, “I can’t be with you, but I’m going to be there for you. If you need someone to talk to after your meetings, I will be there.”

Roulette is right on the money about how we find our way back to recovery. I cried my way back to the rooms, but in gratitude this time. For the first time, the one I had hurt most of all––other than myself––remained in my life. I had to be getting somewhere.

I hoped so. Codependence is a cyclical beast. Not only does it keep bringing you around to the same place of emotional devastation in your life, but each time the damage is a little bit greater.

If you’re not careful, eventually you just don’t have the heart to get on that carousel anymore. I imagine that’s what John C. was thinking last year the evening he didn’t show up for our recovery meeting. He had talked me down from many personal ledges in the off-and-on-again year I had spent in the program.

They say he called 911 so his family wouldn’t have to find him with the gun still in his hand. I don’t know whether Colleen called 911 too, a month later. In shock, I had already run as fast as I could away from the rooms. And away from myself.

“Do you feel lucky, punk? Well do you?”
But as codependents, round and round we go. Oh, the joy of meeting the delightful, dancing Sonny.

I bet you can fill in the next part of the story.

In heartache, I always seem to arrive back where I started: sitting in a 12-step meeting next to a recently released rehabber. Who smells. Wondering what on earth I have in common with the troubled souls surrounding me. At least, until they start sharing their stories. And with every description of the heartbreak they’ve created in their lives, I hear them telling me my life story.

Last week, as I heard others detailing pain that could easily be my own, I was moved a little deeper. I cannot explain why, but I knew it was time, finally, to continue the work I began two years and three heartaches ago.

I took the weekend, sat down, and worked Step Four. I wrote down an inventory of my copendent behaviors. I wrote in detail, putting down all the ways I could see them in myself and all the ways I had hurt the people in my life. I didn’t pull any punches. I wrote for three days. I made sure to detail my strengths and positive behaviors, too, so that I ended up with a fair appraisal of the man I guess I’ve never really known. Thirty-five pages later, for the first time in my life, I could finally see the balance of who I am.

There was no denying my patterns of control. There it was before me, over and over, cutting across every love, platonic, and work relationship I’ve ever experienced.

There was a sickening realization, too. As denial slipped away, so did the fiction that my copendent behaviors only come out when I’m stressed or unhappy. Or ever switch off at all.

My inventory was clear. I have only one way of interfacing with other human beings–the way I learned in childhood. The way that may progressively kill me.

Oh, God.

“I accept your apology.”
The last thing I wanted to do was hold that awful realization inside me, alone. Step Five is what it is for a reason:

“[We] admitted to God, ourselves, and another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.”

Telling God was easy, the Universe and I have been on good terms for a long time. Telling myself was a lot harder. I had no idea how I was going to tell another person.

Out of nowhere, I emailed Devyn and told him I was in recovery. That evening, for the first time in two years, I saw his name appear on my caller I.D. Two hours later, we both finally had closure, and forgiveness. And he told me to stick with it.

On Wednesday morning, I sobbed for an hour before I left the house to meet with a minister whom I know and trust. I was better composed as I sat before him for an hour and read him my inventory. Every tendency. Every hurt. Every discovery in it.

Unlike some other 12-steppers, I did not feel “bulletproof” when I was finished. Mostly, I was left with a punishing sense of, “What now?” Keep it up? Work the steps? Let go and let God?

If there’s anything I hate about recovery it’s all the aphorisms that are bound up with it. That morning after Step Five, I didn’t want to hear another pithy saying. All I wanted was some iota of hope for the future.

“You have to believe we are magic.”
Sitting in a secluded corner of the Lurie Garden at Millennium Park, I thought about the work before me. I watched the field of flowers in front of me fade into the soft shadows of sunset and asked God to lead me forward.

Even for all the damage I’ve wrought in my life, I happen to love the life I lead. I love my friends. I love those with whom I work. I love my opportunities. I love my viewers. Is it possible I am not merely the sum of my codependent behaviors? Can I finally come to love me, too? Can I finally learn to stop leaning on my past and grow up?

I sat quietly and shared it all with God. I did not expect an answer.

As I got up to leave, someting strange in the Shoulder Hedge caught my attention. Ever since Millennium Park opened, this border row of trees surrounding the Lurie Garden has been criss-crossed with a system of metal trusses. They were there to give support to the newly planted, young saplings, so that they would have a chance to survive the harsh Chicago weather and grow.

It took me awhile to comprehend what I was seeing. My eyes passed across the whole Shoulder Hedge, from end to end. I didn’t know whether to smile or cry.

The supports were gone. Not one was left. I suppose the trees didn’t need them anymore. They had finally grown mature enough to stand on their own.

I couldn’t help but think of the sage words shared by an unexpectedly wise woman from another time:

“You have to believe we are magic, nothin’ can stand in our way.”

I don’t know what the future holds, but from where I stand, maybe I have a shot at home free after all.

One step, two step, 12-step. I can grouse and complain, but denial will get me nowhere, especially when the river I’m walking across is in Chicago. Over the Wabash Bridge I go to my coffee-office this morning, mulling what room I’ll be sitting in later this afternoon, and why. Thank God it’s codependence and not alcoholism. (Warning: Although that would explain the shaky camera). Someone pass me a Smithwicks…

(Video: …Soon I’ll be walking across the floor.)

(Click the HQ button for a higher-quality video. RSS subscribers, click here to view the video on CHICAGO CARLESS.)