Tag: alcohol

San Francisco as the epicenter of loss: Part II

Posted on by kathleenmc1953@sbcglobal.net
Untitled (Burning Skull), 1987. Keith Haring: The Politcal Line. deYoung Museum, San Francisco. 2015.
Untitled (Burning Skull), 1987. Keith Haring: The Politcal Line.
deYoung Museum, San Francisco. 2015.

For those of us who weren’t ill, AIDS gave us a new and better reason to live.

The 80’s were a time of death and resurrection in San Francisco. Those of us who had survived the nihilism of the late 70’s felt lucky to be alive. We had to either get wise quickly or be carried away with the rising tide of illness. The recovery movement in San Francisco was born.

It’s easy to forget but half the city seemed to get clean and sober in the 80’s. It became clear to many of us that using drugs and alcohol clouded our judgement and facilitated our indulgence in activities that could compromise our health and our lives. We had to wake up quickly.

And we did.

Alcoholics Anonymous was never so popular, particularly in the LGBT community. During most of the 80’s the clean and sober contingent of the Gay Day Parade was overwhelmingly the largest. It was usually placed at the end of the parade so that onlookers became participants, marching into the end-of-the-parade festivities at the Civic Center as part of the fold. Just as, in the 70’s, you were a nobody if you didn’t indulge in substances, in the 80’s you were on the fringes if you did.

Most of our friends who found out they were HIV positive, if they wanted to preserve what was left of their health, stopped or severely limited their use. And, for the rest of us, getting high was incompatible with helping our friends who were ill. Narcissism had given way to altruism.

We also learned to appreciate life. We were still young and, as we saw many of our friends dying, we experienced what older people do when their age cohort begins to succumb. This has a profound effect on you. You really understand that life is finite. You get on with things. Your mundane concerns seem, well…..mundane. It occurs to you that you might want to do something meaningful with your life.

This period of time truly shaped our lives. Several of us became therapists and social workers, other friends became nurses. All of us, no matter what profession, volunteered and fund-raised.

My best friend, Dannie, was still alive and well. We continued to plan trips and travel together. And then one day on a trip to Vancouver Island by ferry he turned and said to me, “Kathleen, I’m HIV positive”.

This was 1989 and became the closing salvo of the decade for Dannie and me. It had taken awhile but now he was in the bullseye of the epidemic. The skeletal figures, oxygen tanks, experimental treatments and hospices would no longer be one circle removed.

Dannie’s health would deteriorate in slow motion in a few short years….

Resolution strategy refinement

Posted on by kathleenmc1953@sbcglobal.net
Getting back on track
Getting back on track

You’ve had time to think about what is important to you to change. You’ve implemented a strategy to change. Now it’s time to look at how your overall goal matches your needs and how your strategy is working.

It is easy to assume that making a resolution is the heavy lifting and that everything will fall into place as the year goes on. However many great resolutions go by the wayside because we are not willing to re-evaluate what we are doing and how we are doing it. I will give you an example.

Often people want to stop a certain behavior, be it abuse of drugs or alcohol, overeating or smoking. Let’s stick with the example of smoking cessation for now. You’ve made a resolution to stop and now it is the end of January. You may have quit for a few days but now you are right back to smoking the same number of cigarettes that you had been before the New Year.

There are two questions to ask yourself at this point:
1.) Is this the right goal (stopping smoking) for me?
2.) Am I going about it in a realistic way?

For certain behaviors, of course, there is no question that stopping will be beneficial. Smoking is one of those behaviors. So the answer is yes to the first question. It’s the second question that can make or break the achievement of your goal and if you are not open to re-evaluating things then your resolution will be very difficult if not impossible to achieve.

Say your strategy was to quit cold turkey. Many people are successful with this strategy. Many are not. The research shows that the more strategies you use to stop smoking the more likely you are to be successful. So you do some research on your own and find out that your preparation to achieve your goal was limited since it only provided you with one strategy. Your willingness to rethink things allows you to TRY AGAIN with a number of other strategies.

One of my mantras is: THINK, PREPARE, DO, REFINE. And then do it again…and again… This persistence is how change happens.

Allow the month of February to be your time to refine the implementation of your goals. No one does anything the way anyone else does. We can learn from the research and other people’s experiences but each of us has to fine tune how we get to where we want to be.

Happy changing!

DISCLAIMER
This information is for educational purposes only and should not in any way be considered a substitute for professional help. If you feel that you need immediate assistance please call your local psychiatric emergency services.