Planet Me
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| 10/6/2006 |
“What’s that noise?” I’ll ask my wife.
“What noise?” she’ll ask back, a knowing look on her face, somewhere between bored and irritated.
“Hang on. There it is again. That tapping sound. Come on, don’t tell me you don’t hear that.”
Scenes like this happen all the time in my apartment – and beyond it.
In sobriety, I have become curiously – and irritatingly – aware of the world around me. I’m hyper-conscious of every little thing. If I’m in a restaurant full of people, and a customer is being moderately unpleasant to a waitress four tables away, I’ll instantly pick up on it. And be made screamingly uncomfortable. The world has become, for me, a place where something is always just about to go wrong.
It’s not just my hyper-consciousness of all the little noises and irritations that go on in the world that’s the problem. It’s my perpetual confusion as to how I react to them. Is the neighbor’s TV set on too loud? Maybe everyone in New York apartments hears their neighbor’s TV set. But then, maybe they don’t. Maybe it’s really super loud, and I’ve been a fool for not saying something about it earlier. Etcetera, etcetera…
What a change from the old days. Back then, if anyone was concerned about a noise problem, the odds were good that I was the cause of it. And it wouldn’t be a matter of some minor little tapping sound either.
Take – among many, many possible examples – an evening back in the late eighties, shortly after my discovery of The Cult’s song “She Sells Sanctuary.” That night – or morning, as it was probably around one or two AM – I was playing it for something like the tenth time at extremely high volume, when there was a knock on the door of my apartment. A loud knock.
“Who’s that?” I said to my girlfriend, surprised and somehow scandalized that someone would be at the door at such a late hour.
It was, not surprisingly, our neighbor – a woman of about seventy.
“Turn that God forsaken racket down or I’ll call the police!” she howled when I opened the door.
I placated her somehow, and shut the door. Just minutes later, the song was on again, once again at top volume. God, what a great song! How had I never known about it before?
Bang, bang, bang! The door again.
“You answer it,” I said to my girlfriend. Then I ran off and hid in the bedroom.
Looking back now, I marvel at evenings like that. It wasn’t that I wanted to bother anybody. The fact was, back in my using days I was basically what I am now: a reasonably nice, reasonable considerate person. The last thing I wanted to do was disturb someone in the middle of the night.
The problem was simply that I was living on a different planet from most of the people around me. A planet called… Me. If I wanted to hear “She Sells Sanctuary” ten times in a row at two in the morning, the simple fact was that, from my perspective, it had to be a good idea. How could it not be if I wanted to do it? When I’d suddenly discover – astonishingly – that I was being a nuisance to someone, the news would always hit with the force of a revelation. What was this other person doing on my planet?
Early on in my stay at rehab, my counselor once said, as a kind of wistful aside: “Every now and then I really miss not giving a f*ck.”
I didn’t know what he was talking about back then, but I do now. In sobriety, I suddenly find myself on a planet practically bursting with other people. They’re everywhere I look – breathing, eating, talking… existing. Where the hell did they come from? And how am I supposed to co-exist with all of them without having a nervous breakdown?
The fact that there isn’t a simple answer to this question is evidenced by the amount of time the Steps, and all the 12-Step literature out there, spends talking about… other people. In fact, if you take the “Me” Problems and “Other People” problems out of recovery literature, there’s really only one other subject left.
And, of course, that third subject – God – is where the problems presented by the first two get solved. I won’t pretend for a minute that I don’t miss that strange, almost mystical sense of self – that sense that Planet Me really was the center of the known universe – I used to get when I drank. And I also won’t pretend that I don’t sometimes wish – like my councilor at rehab – that I could escape from this vexing consciousness of others I have to suffer from all the time. But at the same time, I also know that that sense of being the center of the world, wonderful as it was in certain ways, was also, ultimately, the product of a warped perception -- just as my consciousness of others is today, at least in its more extreme moments. The un-warped truth lies somewhere between these two extremes. A truth that can be found through connection to God or a higher power that lets me see the infinite value both of myself, and of all those other selves out there as well.
“The falsehood and evil of egoism,” wrote the Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, “by no means consist in the fact that the egoist values himself too highly, credits himself with absolute significance and infinite worth. In this he is correct. In every human being there is something absolutely irreplaceable, and one cannot value oneself too highly. Failure to recognize one’s own absolute significance is equivalent to a denial of human worth; this is the basic error and origin of all unbelief. If one is so faint-hearted that he is powerless to believe in himself, how can he believe in anything else? The basic falsehood and evil of egoism lie not in this absolute self-consciousness and self-evaluation of the subject, but in the fact that he unjustly refuses to others this same significance.”
In other words, there’s nothing wrong with me thinking I’m the center of the world, the inhabitant of my own personal planet. I am! All I need to do is remember that everyone else is, too.
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