"I" Statements vs. "You" Statements and the Continuing Drama of the Blog Comments.

In our most recent Group Conscience meeting for my Nar-Anon, we discussed a need to clarify our stance on feedback and crosstalk in our meetings. While it’s rare that these events occur, there are some folks who have felt criticized or felt like other group members offer advice that is unhelpful and unwanted. We have been noodling through some ways to clarify the wording, and I volunteered to take our Opening Statement and add a few sentences that clarify what we mean by “We do not give advice, dialogue, debate, or crosstalk” in our meetings.

Read more at The Second Road.

Really. Read this one. Especially if you feel inclined to tell me what I should do with my life or how I should think or feel about my marriage. It will help us to communicate better.

No.

Our meeting this evening covered a lot of things, but I heard myself saying something that I'm not sure I'd articulated before about my boundaries. I don't know if it's a good rule or not, as it is rather subjective...but it's working for me now, kind of.

I have to set a boundary with my husband when whatever it is that he's asking me to do will make me feel resentful. Instead of looking outside of myself for what is right or wrong, and instead of looking at him for what will or will not piss him off, I look at me.

For instance, we crossed paths when I was about to leave to go to my meeting tonight. He wanted me to take him somewhere to buy him some food. It was a small request, but it hit me wrong. I'm broke, and I don't want to buy anything extra for him, especially not something that I wouldn't buy for myself. I don't want to buy him food and bring him back home and make myself late to my meeting. I want him to go to the meeting. I want him to want to go to meetings, generally. My instinct is to do whatever it is he asks me to do; however, the combination of all of these elements would have turned into a resentment for me. It was better to say, "No." It's not because it's wrong for me to buy him food, or because I don't want to enable him, or because it's not the program thing to do...it's because it won't be right for me, not now.

We bet each other over something silly a few weeks ago, and I lost. The penalty for losing is a ten minute backrub, and he keeps asking for it. I keep avoiding it. I love to touch him, to rub him, to be close to him...but something about this backrub business keeps raising a thorough, definite "No" from me. I think it's the way he frames it when he asks, with something like, "But you said you would!" or "But you owe me!" Immediately, I think of all the things he's said he'd do. I think of all the things he owes me that I'll never get. I say "No." It's probably not the right thing to do, not to keep my word, and to deny myself a moment of intimacy with him; but if my first instinct is resentment, I've got to say no right now.

I do wish, though, that there were a more concrete way to articulate where my boundaries begin and end. Some of my boundaries have become quite clear to me, and I think they are clear to him, although he challenges them sometimes. I can't let him use my car, ever. There's no wiggle room and no wavering. The answer is no, all the time. Other things, though, like, "Will you rub my back?" or "Will you buy me some fast food?" change depending on the day. If I'm feeling loved and appreciated, then the answer is more likely to be "Yes, darling, I'll do whatever you want." If I'm feeling like I've been taken advantage of or lied to, then the answer is more likely, "No."

I also wish there were a way to articulate to my husband that these boundaries are necessary for our marriage to survive, or for me to survive in this marriage. At a certain point, if I had continued giving and giving and giving like an ever-flowing teat of love and money and car and forgiveness, I would have had nothing left inside of me. That's not something he seems to be able to hear, though. He hears, "No," from the lips of the woman who, for the longest time, was his biggest supplier of "Yes."

Or maybe he can. I don't know. Maybe he's reading this, and I'll be in big trouble for writing about my feelings on the internet again. Gross.

If you're reading, my love, please stop. I love you very much, but I want you out of my head. It makes it hard to think. It's like trying to walk through the house with the dogs under our feet.

Diving Into The Wreck.

I looked up this Adrienne Rich poem to send to a friend after a conversation we had reminded me of it, and a few lines spoke to me, answering for me one more time what I'm doing here, writing all my privacy on the internet for everyone to see. For those of you who have asked, who continue to ask, here's Adrienne Rich explaining why I'm here:

I came to explore the wreck.

The words are purposes.

The words are maps.

I came to see the damage that was done

and the treasures that prevail.

A Major Award!

I've gotten a little behind in my blog prizes lately. It's a good problem to have, though...that embarrassment of blog riches. I wanted to make sure I posted this one, though, because it is from the one, the only Dirty Bitch Society, which I like to think of as Cunt Face's cool older sister.

Thanks, Babz, for the recognition. I love you, and I'm proud to have mesmerized you, you filthy dirty bitch!

Blog Junky Quiz.

82%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

San Antonio Dating

Look! It's one of those clever quizzes with a nifty junky badge featuring a demon syringe!

Breaking News!

My husband still acts like a drug addict!

I wonder how long it will take before this stops shocking me?

We've had a few really great days between the two of us, even with the mess of the Stray acting a fool. He's been almost normal-seeming...loving, tender and interested in looking towards the future, becoming a better man, a better husband. We've had moments over the last few months where he seemed to "get it," but never this sustained level of sanity over a period of several days. It seem(s)ed like real growth.

And I'm trying to keep my expectations in check...so he went to two meetings, and even participated in one...that doesn't make him "fixed," much as I might like to indicate that he's fixed with my post labels. I know this...

Today, however, was supposed to be his first day at work. He slept all crazy, up and down, up and down. We woke up this morning, and he went to check his email, and he screams, "FUCK!" He'd gotten a notice that the shop wouldn't be open today, and he should come in tomorrow.

Suddenly, he switched gears and became all emotional and clingy and needy of my stuff and wanting me to change my plans for the day and weird and pissy and addicty.

I'm wondering if that's going to be his default, baseline emotion for times of stress (and even mild stress...he can start the job tomorrow) forever? Or will it get better, if he keeps up the meetings regularly and keeps trying to grow...maybe he will nip that shit in the bud. The whole look on his face changes...and it makes me respond really badly, too. I go into "NO" mode...no matter what he has to say, when he looks and acts like that, I say, "NO! NO! NO!" and I go into another room. I hide upstairs. I ignore him and fume.

I guess I'm answering my own question...and already, he's resolved the problem of having nothing to do today by calling a friend to ask him to come pick him up, and he's acting satisfied.

Sometimes, writing here is like processing for me...I don't know why you folks read it...it's kind of awful writing, or at least really different writing from what I think of as good writing. The process is all apparent. It's often unedited. I begin in one space, and I end in another, and I work it out as I go. It's like looking inside a head, which isn't like looking at good writing.

Blogging's weird.

Fuck It.

I'm breaking the rules. I didn't give Scout a Rockin' Girl Blogger award because I though MPJ would want to give it to her, as they were having some kind of electronic affair. However, Scout wants an award, and MPJ has been neglectful.

So that's right, Scout, I'm stealing you from MPJ. Muahahahahaha! Here is your prize! I'm emailing you right now!

Rockin Blogger Girl!

I won a prize! A blogger prize!

It might be one of the nerdiest things I've been excited about in a long time, but, I am a nerd. The mistress of Stay At Home Motherdom issued the award, and I'm very excited about it! Her blog is one I look forward to as a source of hope, wisdom, and inspiration. I found her in my early days of blogging when I'd surf Technorati for other addiction and recovery-related blogs, and hers was one of the first that I started reading on a regular basis. There were a few folks who I found that made me feel like I'd joined a real community, almost as if I'd found an online meeting with a conversation I could contribute to whenever I wanted.

In the tradition of great blog awards, I now get to pass them on to 5 others that I enjoy. She's already tagged my cyber soulmate MPJ, and I guess I have to leave that adulterous Scout for MPJ to tag...so my 5 Rockin' Girl Bloggers are:

1. Real life BFF and tragic poetess extraordinaire, the one and only Long Vowels, who is the first of my real-time friends to catch blog-fever with me. She rules the universe, and if you could see her, you'd know that she's hot. She's a fantastically strange poet, and she shares my affinity for hopeless romance. I love her dearly and passionately, TJW+LV=BFF4EVA! Peace NYCLIUBrooklynNEWJerzJOO!

2. EgyptReality was another of my early favorite blogs, and one I've neglected to visit lately. She's a passionate, young recovering addict from Egypt, and her blog is a tulmultuous blend of culture, recovery, women's stuff, and all kinds of yummy blog goodness. Check her out.

3 and 4. Married To An Addict and Married To My Ex are my blog-sisters. Our lives overlap in these strange and tragic and predictable ways. Ladies, one day, we should meet for coffee. I bet we could talk for hours and hours and hours.

5. From sex to news to scandal, the Dirty Bitch Society is a fun blog for dirty bitches to visit. Take a moment to check it out. The dirty bitch is on my daily reading list.

Why I Blog.

I got tagged by Miriguy to list the 5 reasons why I blog, and then I've got to tag 5 of you guys. At least I think that's how it works...

So here's my reasons:

1. After the Needle-Finding incident, I felt like I was just about to burst with words. I've always been a poet, so I tried writing poems. I wrote one or two, but it didn't really let the floodgates open the way I needed them to. I felt like I needed to be telling a story, and I have no experience with memoir/essay/fiction, except academic essays. I thought, one day, that I should start a blog, and then I did. The floodgates opened.

2. At first, I was just saying a bunch of crap about my life. I started figuring out ways to mess around with the formatting, and I added widgets and took them away, added and rearranged links. Then I discovered Technorati and started reading about ways to market your blog, and I discovered Google ads (I've made a big $12 so far! Keep clicking, my friends!), and just updating, growing, and re-arranging the site itself has become something of a hobby. It kind of feels like gardening...I like to experiment with different ways to make my stats jump, like by using Stumble Upon. Strangely, I get the most big jumps on posts that have nothing to do with addiction (such as the underwater tigers pictures from a few weeks back), but I get the most comments on the personal posts. It's cool, though, because I like mixing it up, sticking in things about my life and me with stuff that is news-worthy or that I think is interesting.

3. After the blog started to grow, I started making some new friends through the site, many of whom became regular readers/ commenters. I like to interact with them, and this is the forum where we chat. It keeps me coming back!

4. I'm in front of a computer all day at work. I'd kind of run out of fun internet things to do to fill the time when I'm not writing or researching for an article. I'd stalked all my ex-lovers and my lover's exes through Myspace and Friendster and Facebook and all the rest, I'd read blogs, I'd played online games...I'd done it all. Blogging has become my new internet-passtime, and it's actually made me feel a lot healthier about my relationship with my computer.

5. I want to be a rockstar, of course. I want the paparazi to follow me and take pictures and point and say, "LOOK! It's the Junky's Wife! She's passed out in her Porsche! She's going to rehab! Oooh look! Is she pregnant?" I want to be on the cover of Us magazine.

Duh.

So, now it's time to tag 5 of you. This is the easy part:

MPJ: You're it!
Scout: Stop messing with my woman!
Vowels: Don't be lame! Play geek games with me!
Married To My Ex: Your turn!
Wayward Son: Carry on!

When Blogging Goes Awry

So I posted about my scandalous blog incident earlier today, and it got me thinking: I bet there are lots of instances when bloggers' lives get messy because of blogging. My girlfriend Jeni kept a blog through her Friendster account about sex and men and body issues and all kinds of juicy stuff, and she finally made it private after it got passed around the law school.

I'd love to hear others' thoughts about situations when blogs about people's personal lives get a little messy.

I have come to love this form. As a writer, there's not much better than having an audience that talks back. It gives me a space, a group of readers that I'm starting to know well, and a topic that keeps me writing and writing and writing. I love it, and in spite of my efforts at keeping things anonymous, I've still run into a little trouble. If you've had similar experiences, share them! If you have advice or ideas about the subject of what to do when real life meets e-life, tell me that, too.

Talk to me, people!

Disappointment Of A Failed Search.

I'm a downer, huh? I just took a gander at the search strings that can lead you to The Junky's Wife, and it's pretty fun...and I want to apologize for the boner/buzzkill. Once again, I'm stealing ideas for things to write about from MPJ. My own list kind of surprised me, though, because I'm not sure how some of these queries can lead you to me. Maybe, if I look long and hard enough at the ways people are finding me, I can figure out something important about myself...you attract what you are, right? And so I can read the search queries like tarot cards. Let me know if you can figure out for me what they mean.

These make me chuckle:

• "beautiful tatas"
• "i hate my fucking wife"
• "i hate my fucking husband"
  
• "bad wife" + "quotes"
• "sexy and nasty"
• "marriage"
• "scandalous"
• "paranoia was right"
• "squalor hoarding"
• "do the dishes"
• "morphine addiction makes skin look bad"
• "junky home spiritual nature"
• "fuck tonight"
  

But some of them are sad. The one about preconception lead to my site 19 times. I am sorry I didn't have an answer for her. I wish there were a way that I could contact the poor woman on the other end of that query, reaching out to the blind, cold internet to find someone to reassure her that her baby won't be born addicted to heroin even thought its father is. I picture her 6 months pregnant, frantically Googling next to newly found needles. Or the few that begin with the phrase, "Help me."Here's the list:

• "effects of heroin addict father preconception"
• "fault addict codependence overdose"
• "my husband's dead from a heroin overdose"
• "daughter took mother's oxycontin pills"
• "help me my husband is a heroin attic"
• "wife give up career"
• "addict relapse spouse what to do"
• "downward spiral"
• "please help me with my son's heroin addiction"
• "cure for sores on face from crank"
• "trying to live" + "heroin addict"

These are from the folks trying to figure out new and exciting ways to get high. Sorry for the buzzkill, folks:

• "how to make a opium pipe"
• "what does a speedball feel like"
• "safe?" "methadone and oxycontin"

And these are just inexplicable:

• "sex under water"
• "lesbian kiss"
• "coke whore video husband dealer pay wife"
• "kneel and jerk off for wife"
• "want a baby" + "craigslist"

Housekeeping!

I did a little spring cleaning on the blog. Let me know if you love it or hate it. I've gotten a few complaints about the black. From working in publishing and with tattooists, I've always heard that black "makes the colors pop." And making the colors pop is a good thing, so we often use black backgrounds for boldly colored images.

Do you love it? Do you hate it? Are you a web guru who wants to design me my own special custom blogger template? I want RED because my natural inclination when given choices about colors is to choose RED, or black, or red and black. But maybe white is nice, too. It's easy on the eyes, I suppose.

Peopleized

I've been playing with Peopleized the last few days, and it's a lot of fun. It's something of a social networking site, but one of the ways you interact with folks is through interviews. So you find someone interesting, send them an interview request, and then send them your list of questions. I've found a few people whose blogs I read regularly and interviewed them.

You can see my first given interview here. Go play and make friends with me! We can ask each other skanky questions!

The Junky's Wife In Print!

This blog will be featured in August in the San Diego Reader, an alternative news weekly. The articles are originally from this site, with some revision on my part to meet word counts and revisions on the part of the editors to get rid of excessive ellipses, cursing, and sex-talk...so while it's not new material, I'm stoked. I'm even going to get a little pocket change for it! To celebrate, I'm going to visit my favorite blogs and click on the Google Ads. I'm not telling who I'm visiting, but if you notice a big bump in your ad clicks today, thank The Junky's Wife for buying you come coffee with her click-loving.

P.S.

Pigs make me happy. That's why there are pigs. They please me.

Podcast!

Check out this cool new Podcast Thingy! I've very excited about it, and the computer doesn't even seem to pronounce things horribly.

Click here to listen! You can download it to your Ipod! Yay!