Are You There H.P.?

The grad school rejection letters have started rolling in and I've been thinking about life and my career and where I live and who I love and how far away my family is and how much my chosen gay family means to me and the future and all those things that make me go fucking bonkers.

In the 12 steps, they encourage you to do the footwork and surrender the results. Which means, it's cool for me to want to go to grad school and it's great if I can apply to grad school (without engaging in my addiction), but I shouldn't get too attached to the idea of going to grad school. Or going any particular place. Or feeling like it needs to happen this year. Because that is my self-will and as an addict, I rarely know what is best for me. There are crazy voices inside my head that tell me to do really self-destructive things, like try to distract or kill myself with all sorts of substances and activities. So it's best if I just let God, or whoever my Higher Power (H.P.) is in the moment, run the show. Because although I think I know best, I often don't.

My friend Dana told me that "control is safety to the anxious mind." As someone with an anxiety disorder, those words really hit home. I like to be in control of everything, I definitely think things would be better if I was running the show. As a liberal-arts-college-educated-vegetarian-dyke, my morals are clearly superior to most other people's in America. However, sadly (or maybe luckily) for me, I am not God, I am just one person in the universe and most of the time things don't go the way I think they should.

So what to do? A wise older woman told me that there is always a Plan B. I might really like Plan A and think that is the plan for me but that might not be the plan that the universe has for me. And whether I like it or not, the universe's plan is going to prevail. Since control is an illusion, surrender then just becomes a matter of being willing to be with whatever arises and dealing with my emotions as they come up. Looking back through my life I can say that the plans the universe has had for me are often better than my plans. Damn it. So I am just trying to be ok with whatever happens with this whole grad school thing because attachment leads to suffering, right Buddha?