Dublin and Perspective

Some of you may only be interested in what I have been doing.  Some of you may be interested in what I am learning.  This post is a bit lengthy. Apologies.  My goal was to write everyday,  but it has been a crazy weekend and that didn't happen. Here is a summary of the past few days and I broke it into two parts so you can read only the parts you are interested in or you can read it all!

WHAT I SAW

Day 1:  I started the first day by getting a new tattoo.  Very small and discreet, it is an Irish saying that means "Be good to yourself".  I love it, now I just have to learn how to pronounce it.   Irish is a language that is resistant to phonetic pronunciation.  It is on my arm, though, so I need to be able to tell people what it says when asked…😂.  I then met friends who hired a tour guide and we walked Dublin, starting with Trinity College.  Established in 1592, it has quite the history. 

Trinity was  well known for their anatomy school.  But, in order to study anatomy, you need bodies.  Scientists and students could freely take the bodies of criminals, but everyone else was off limits.  This led to a shortage of bodies.  So the career of "resurrectionist" was born.  They would attend funerals and after the mourners left the burial, they used a tool that would drill down into the fresh earth, grab the corpse by the nape of the neck and bring them back to the surface.  One woman, once resurrected, still had her wedding ring on and the grave robbers decided she didn't need it anymore.  In trying to cut off her finger to liberate the ring, she "woke up".  Medical science was not the best at determining if one was actually dead at that time, and people were often buried alive.  This led to a new practice of tying a string to a corpses hand and if you woke up and found yourself buried at the wrong time, you could pull on the string which was tied to a bell at the surface.  If the bell rang, they would come dig you up.  This is where the phrase "saved by the bell" originated. 

The other story I found fascinating was the Irish potato famine of 1845.  The five year famine killed approximately one million Irish either from starvation or famine related disease,,  In 1847, the worst year of the famine, the Choctaw tribal nation  in Oklahoma heard what was happening from an Irish soldier.  It was just 16 years after the Trail of Tears where their own nation had lost so many in a similar fashion.  The Choctaw Nation raised $170 and sent it to the people of Ireland for relief. In 2020, the people of Ireland read a story about a GoFundMe campaign that was set up to help the Navajo and Hopi tribes severely impacted by the pandemic.  The people of Ireland raised $5 million dollars to send back to the tribal nations in the United States to help them during their time of crisis.  The world may feel like a vast and lonely place, but even before the internet, we were all connected.  I just loved this story. 

Thursday night I headed to St. Patricks cathedral for a candlelight concert featuring songs from Fleetwood Mac.  In Denver, the candlelight concert I attended was a string quartet of Taylor Swift songs.  Soft and gentle and befitting of the venue.  This was a full on rock concert!  They were good, but I couldn't help wondering what the walls of the cathedral would say if they could talk....

Day 2: I took the train to Malahide and toured the town and Malahide Castle before our Friday evening event.  The town is beautiful and I wish I had more time there.  I didn't have time to do the tour of the castle, but the grounds were amazing.  Then I started the Hola Sober weekend (see below). 

Day 4: We took the bus from Dublin to Glendalough, a "monastic city" established in the 6th Century.  The scenery of Ireland is amazing - green and lush and so many cute sheep!  I was on the bus with a friend who is American, but now lives in England.  She told me that when she first moved to England the only thing she wanted to do was take pictures of the sheep - they ARE cute.  However, she soon realized that she was not the first "newbie" to arrive and take non-stop photos of the sheep.  We had a good laugh over behaving as if we had never seen a sheep before and the allure of "foreign sheep".  Glendalough was PACKED (it was Sunday) so not entirely peaceful.  But walking beautiful grounds knowing that people have been walking those same grounds for SO many years is humbling.  Again, I wish the stones and the trees could talk…. 

WHAT I LEARNED 

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are - Joseph Campbell

For the past two years of my life, I have been connecting with women from around the world on weekly Zoom meetings.  We have shared our lives, our stories, our fears, our hopes, our secrets, our souls.  We have been talking about what it means to leave our addiction to alcohol behind and do what we can to find ourselves, to chart a new path, a very unfamiliar path, a path to home.  A path to ourselves. 

This weekend I met many of these women.  I was able to give them a real hug, to see more than their just their beautiful faces in a Zoom square.  There were women here who had never been to a meeting or had attended but never turned their camera on for fear of being "seen".  I have not experienced such joy in a long time.  There was laughter and love and dancing and tears and community - that thing that everyone needs, but we all deny ourselves because we believe we can "make it on our own".  It was truly magical.

One thing I have learned over the past two years is, camera on or off, most of us are afraid of being seen.  Of being our authentic selves.  We live in fear of what we are capable of becoming.  I don’t believe this is limited to women or to people in addiction.  I think it is a very human condition.  We are taught from birth how to fit it, how to behave, what to look like so we don't stand out, how to conform.  I took those expectations to heart.  Anytime I stepped outside my perception of the box that had been drawn for me, tried to step into my authentic self, I believed I would fail.  How can you ever possibly fail at being who you really are?  Yet I believed that if I showed my real self, I would not be accepted. 

There are many forms of addiction.  The ones we perceive as the most damaging to our physical self and the lives of those around us are alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, food.  Others that may not be perceived as being as harmful, but are equally damaging are work, sex, gambling, shopping, tv, exercise, gaming,  social media, etc. I believe any activity you participate in to escape from being who you really are as you put on the mask of being who the world thinks you should be, is addiction.  Yung Pueblo says it best, "I was never addicted to one thing.  I was addicted to filling a void inside myself with things other than my own love."

I head to Greece later today for the next leg of my journey.  While I am in Greece, I will celebrate three years of sobriety.  It has taken me three years to even start to learn about who I am and what I believe I can be.  Makes sense.  It took me 59 years of trying to live up to everyone else's expectations while ignoring my own to become who I thought I was.  Changing my perspective will not happen overnight.  But weekends like this, where you can literally see people blossom in front of your eyes, fill me with hope that  if I keep putting one foot in front of the other, anything is possible.  Being who  I dream about, not who the world thinks I should be.  My life, my dream.  And I think I want to dream big. 

Have a beautiful Monday.  More from Greece, assuming I have decent internet….🥰🤞