Addiction has to do with it-ain’t-easy. It is dis-ease. Dis-ease has to do with not being at ease; not being comfortable with something, with life maybe.
All of these thoughts occurred to me when Sr. Labonte said to me for the first time, “You know, of course, that alcoholism is a disease.” Well, of course, I didn’t know that, and I was hesitant in buying that notion. But, gradually the idea that alcoholism is a disease did sink in and I accepted it. This was long after my father had died and long after the trembling nights when he’d arrive drunk and my mother would be very upset and they would fight and I would be very afraid that life was coming to an end.
Many of my relatives have not been comfortable with life; have found life difficult and so in part I have also found life difficult and have my own addictions, to chocolate, for instance and to relationship and the desire for not being alone, and coca cola. Addiction is an unquenchable thirst.
I grew to be very angry at my Dad over stuff that happened during our lifetime together; I was ashamed of him, of me, of my mother. The days of my childhood felt like life lived under a cloud, was dark and conducive to bone-crushing depression.
Addiction is delicious and ease-inducing and soft and comfy and like a hot fudge sundae or really, really good sex; it’s an ice cream cone with jimmies and oozing chocolate mouse doused in a hot chocolate pudding. Yum!
Addiction is films 24-7, cold beer and pretzels and getting fat, fat or staying thin thin with cocaine or heroin; feeling like it’s a party all the time. And isn’t life just that, a party where you feel free, free, free and un-responsible? Let me eat what I want to eat; that’s what I live for, a fattening, overstuffing, tasty, but only for a moment, meal!
Addiction leads down the road to the nothing that comes from nothing and all that presses down from life like judgment and anger and feelings of failure and feelings of inferiority and superiority and not meeting one’s goals and dying, dying inside with self-disappointment.
Addiction is a seeking for some relief from all the pain of self denigration and feelings of not belonging and feelings of never feeling like one could belong; the utter hopelessness of it all; it’s just too much to think.
And I am going out right now to get a double chocolate chocolate muffin with diluted hazelnut combined with decaf coffee!
Actually, I had a juicy naval orange instead! Whew!
DeAnn Louise Daigle AWW by phone 3/4/08
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
The Person I Was Meant To Be
Ta rum, ta rum, ta rum, ta ra ra ra ra ra rum…. We danced the Mexican Hat Dance for Madame Beaulieu. I was meant to dance, to sing, to recite poetry. That’s all.
In Soldier Pond, Madame Beaulieu was the post mistress and the choir director for Sacred Heart Church. It seems I was in the choir from the time I could hold my head up and walk. I don’t remember even being in church as a young child when I wasn’t in the choir upstairs in the back of the church and facing the sanctuary and altar.
I also wept at Pere Desrocher’s homilies. He loved the Virgin Mary and could wax eloquent in speaking about her and how she was our heavenly mother. She loved us as unworthy as we were; she would always be present to us in our sorrows and our joys. We could turn to her.
Vers l’autel de Marie,
Marchons avec amour.
Vers l’autel de Marie,
Donnez nous un bonjour.
…
We sang in French, we sang in Latin. He was called the crying priest. He would get so rapt up in his words about the Holy Mother of God that I wept too. I wept and I didn’t care that the girls around me noticed. I was completely caught up in his words.
There would be choir practice after Mass and I would stay to sing some more.
And after school we practiced at Madame Beaulieu’s home in her parlor where she had a piano just off the front entry of the yellow house where all the mail boxes were located.
All the little children gathered in the parlor to sing and to dance in preparation for the minstrel show that was held in the church basement. I don’t recall what time of year it was, but I feel it was an annual event. And on this particular occasion we were rehearsing the Mexican Hat Dance; skipping and twirling. I would be singing my solo – Open Up Your Heart And Let The Sunshine In.
It took several years it seems before I would discover that the words in the song were not mothers never lose and fathers never win. The words actually were smilers never lose and frowners never win.
By then the demons had been established; they’d taken up residence.
DeAnn Louise Daigle year-end writing retreat morning 12/27/07
In Soldier Pond, Madame Beaulieu was the post mistress and the choir director for Sacred Heart Church. It seems I was in the choir from the time I could hold my head up and walk. I don’t remember even being in church as a young child when I wasn’t in the choir upstairs in the back of the church and facing the sanctuary and altar.
I also wept at Pere Desrocher’s homilies. He loved the Virgin Mary and could wax eloquent in speaking about her and how she was our heavenly mother. She loved us as unworthy as we were; she would always be present to us in our sorrows and our joys. We could turn to her.
Vers l’autel de Marie,
Marchons avec amour.
Vers l’autel de Marie,
Donnez nous un bonjour.
…
We sang in French, we sang in Latin. He was called the crying priest. He would get so rapt up in his words about the Holy Mother of God that I wept too. I wept and I didn’t care that the girls around me noticed. I was completely caught up in his words.
There would be choir practice after Mass and I would stay to sing some more.
And after school we practiced at Madame Beaulieu’s home in her parlor where she had a piano just off the front entry of the yellow house where all the mail boxes were located.
All the little children gathered in the parlor to sing and to dance in preparation for the minstrel show that was held in the church basement. I don’t recall what time of year it was, but I feel it was an annual event. And on this particular occasion we were rehearsing the Mexican Hat Dance; skipping and twirling. I would be singing my solo – Open Up Your Heart And Let The Sunshine In.
It took several years it seems before I would discover that the words in the song were not mothers never lose and fathers never win. The words actually were smilers never lose and frowners never win.
By then the demons had been established; they’d taken up residence.
DeAnn Louise Daigle year-end writing retreat morning 12/27/07
Something I'd Missed
So terribly unfair it seemed to me then, that I should miss out on my high school proms; I’d helped to decorate for the senior prom; the theme was “Shangri La.”
I was painfully in love from a distance and way too shy to let it be known. What I would have given to go to the prom with Bobby Gowan!
So unfair; some girls got to attend proms even when they were freshmen. And here I was a senior and I was going to miss this special senior prom – my own senior prom for which I’d helped to decorate. I tried pretending that it really didn’t matter, but it did.
When the song “To Dream The Impossible Dream” came out and was in the play “Man From La Mancha,” I was so deeply moved by it that several years later I would read the book Don Quixote by Cervantes. There must be something in this story that would touch me, I thought. The song touched me deeply.
To love pure and chaste from afar. These words touched me deeply. I loved every boy I’d loved in that way – “from afar.”
To try when your arms are too weary to reach the unreachable star. This is my quest, to follow that star no matter how hopeless, no matter how far. To dream the impossible dream, to reach the unreachable star.
It was so beautiful, so painful, so magnificent. Later, I saw the play – a musical here in New York City. I got goose bumps when the song was sung on stage, and yet in the story, that this dreamer, Don Quixote, should be in love with a prostitute seemed to me incongruent and even repulsive until the actor sang the song “Dulcinea,” and it was the way in which he perceived this woman as perfect and beautiful just the way she was, without her having to change at all; his perception made her beautiful. And I longed for someone to perceive me beautiful, and I cried.
DeAnn Louise Daigle AWW by phone 1/29/08
I was painfully in love from a distance and way too shy to let it be known. What I would have given to go to the prom with Bobby Gowan!
So unfair; some girls got to attend proms even when they were freshmen. And here I was a senior and I was going to miss this special senior prom – my own senior prom for which I’d helped to decorate. I tried pretending that it really didn’t matter, but it did.
When the song “To Dream The Impossible Dream” came out and was in the play “Man From La Mancha,” I was so deeply moved by it that several years later I would read the book Don Quixote by Cervantes. There must be something in this story that would touch me, I thought. The song touched me deeply.
To love pure and chaste from afar. These words touched me deeply. I loved every boy I’d loved in that way – “from afar.”
To try when your arms are too weary to reach the unreachable star. This is my quest, to follow that star no matter how hopeless, no matter how far. To dream the impossible dream, to reach the unreachable star.
It was so beautiful, so painful, so magnificent. Later, I saw the play – a musical here in New York City. I got goose bumps when the song was sung on stage, and yet in the story, that this dreamer, Don Quixote, should be in love with a prostitute seemed to me incongruent and even repulsive until the actor sang the song “Dulcinea,” and it was the way in which he perceived this woman as perfect and beautiful just the way she was, without her having to change at all; his perception made her beautiful. And I longed for someone to perceive me beautiful, and I cried.
DeAnn Louise Daigle AWW by phone 1/29/08
Always Adrift
"Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes." – Carl Gustave Jung
I find compelling that what is done authentically on the outside must come from within. This kind of philosophy embraced by the transcendentalists among others, such as the psychoanalyst, Carl Jung, gives me hope along this way of most always feeling adrift.
All that beneath-the-surface stuff left me very unsure about my existence and my place in the world, as if I were missing what is essential. And, like so many in my generation, I did seek answers from the outside even though this split existed within me – that I felt drawn inside.
It feels like it’s pretty much remained thus with me – not that there haven’t been moments when I did feel I had the essential, and that life was promising, and adventure awaited me.
I’m always searching, questioning and wondering about the what-ifs of life. It’s often difficult to just be.
Never-the-less and not without some measure of angst, I managed to climb Hedgehog Mountain, a swollen hill in Mapleton, Maine where a woman I befriended years ago invited me to climb it with her. She lived rather primitively with no running water and only the bare bones of a house where she and her mother resided. Ella worked with me at W. T. Grant Company in Presque Isle, my first official full-time job as a young adult. I was eighteen. I would work there two years. The women I worked with were like so many mothers to me. With them, I was made to feel special and free. Among them, there was camaraderie with teasing and laughter that gave me a sense of wellbeing.
Not without angst, I managed a real hike up a mountain when I was twenty-four with David and some of his fellow students and professors from MIT. Together, we climbed Mt. Lafayette at the northern end of the Franconia Range in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, part of the famous Appalachian Trail.
Not without angst, in my early to mid-thirties, I hiked and climbed mountain trails in southwestern Maine and once again in the White Mountains of New Hampshire with sisters from my community; and in summers spent studying theology at St. Michaels I managed to hike in northern Vermont.
And now, not without a modicum of angst, and it growing less, I happily climb the sidewalks of New York City from the East Village to Central Park and sometimes beyond.
Except in rare moments, I feel too restless to allow nature to be the inspiration it used to be when I was too young to know a lot of things; and just a little later, even when it seemed – even to me – on the surface of things that I could have relaxed enough to allow nature in, I remained unable to do so.
DeAnn Louise Daigle 12/10/07
I find compelling that what is done authentically on the outside must come from within. This kind of philosophy embraced by the transcendentalists among others, such as the psychoanalyst, Carl Jung, gives me hope along this way of most always feeling adrift.
All that beneath-the-surface stuff left me very unsure about my existence and my place in the world, as if I were missing what is essential. And, like so many in my generation, I did seek answers from the outside even though this split existed within me – that I felt drawn inside.
It feels like it’s pretty much remained thus with me – not that there haven’t been moments when I did feel I had the essential, and that life was promising, and adventure awaited me.
I’m always searching, questioning and wondering about the what-ifs of life. It’s often difficult to just be.
Never-the-less and not without some measure of angst, I managed to climb Hedgehog Mountain, a swollen hill in Mapleton, Maine where a woman I befriended years ago invited me to climb it with her. She lived rather primitively with no running water and only the bare bones of a house where she and her mother resided. Ella worked with me at W. T. Grant Company in Presque Isle, my first official full-time job as a young adult. I was eighteen. I would work there two years. The women I worked with were like so many mothers to me. With them, I was made to feel special and free. Among them, there was camaraderie with teasing and laughter that gave me a sense of wellbeing.
Not without angst, I managed a real hike up a mountain when I was twenty-four with David and some of his fellow students and professors from MIT. Together, we climbed Mt. Lafayette at the northern end of the Franconia Range in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, part of the famous Appalachian Trail.
Not without angst, in my early to mid-thirties, I hiked and climbed mountain trails in southwestern Maine and once again in the White Mountains of New Hampshire with sisters from my community; and in summers spent studying theology at St. Michaels I managed to hike in northern Vermont.
And now, not without a modicum of angst, and it growing less, I happily climb the sidewalks of New York City from the East Village to Central Park and sometimes beyond.
Except in rare moments, I feel too restless to allow nature to be the inspiration it used to be when I was too young to know a lot of things; and just a little later, even when it seemed – even to me – on the surface of things that I could have relaxed enough to allow nature in, I remained unable to do so.
DeAnn Louise Daigle 12/10/07
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