The Wisdom To Know The Difference Part 6

The goal of this exercise is to help you learn how it feels to simply be aware of painful sensations, to perhaps get a sense about ways in which you can act in your life even with pain present.

Reflecting on the Sweet and the Sad What's really at the bottom of this acceptance/avoidance problem? Simply this: sweetness and sadness very often, if not always, live in the same house. Think about it for a moment. If you cared about nothing, nothing could cause you pain. You need to care in order to feel pain.

We want to close this chapter with an exercise that has come to mean a lot to both of us. It's called the Sweet Spot. It's a little meditation you can do with a partner about a moment when you knew sweetness in your life. Both you and your partner will have a sweet moment in mind when you begin. After spending some time reflecting on your moment of sweetness, each of you will take turns expressing about your moment of sweetness to the other. The job of the expresser is to just express-not to explain, justify, or make any sense. The job of the listener is merely to appreciate-not to sympathize, encourage, or reinforce. Get it? Just noticing, accepting, not judging.

The funny thing about Sweet Spot is that, when people do it, they very often end up crying. Nothing about this should come as a surprise. Same house, remember? We could have just as easily called it the Sad Spot, because our moments of greatest sweetness are very often etched through with things that are terribly sad. And what's the moral of this story? If you don't open your heart up to sadness, you're likely to cut yourself off from sweetness at the same time.

(A word of caution: the directions we give for the Sweet Spot below are, frankly, too short. It's a meditation on a moment, and it's something that, if you were sitting in the room with Kelly, would feel dramatically different than it will if you read the directions and follow along. So, we're splitting the difference: the directions below are an edited transcript of an exercise like this that Kelly has led in the past. You can get the idea of Sweet Spot by reading them, and you may have a good experience by just approximating them with your partner by taking turns. If you can, though, you should download the audio record of Kelly leading Sweet Spot that we've made available at nhpubs.com/9288. It's there in MP3 audio that you can easily add to your portable music player or listen to right in your web browser. He walks you through the whole exercise during the course of the recording. This is really how we recommend experiencing the Sweet Spot.) Sweet Spot

Get yourself a notebook and a pencil or a pen. Allow yourself to sit comfortably-maybe with your feet on the ground. Just gently, gently let your eyes close.

I'd like you to begin by noticing the different sounds in the room. Imagine that you have a sort of checklist. Begin with the most prominent sounds, and just as you notice them, imagine that you check them off the list. See if you can listen for smaller, more subtle sounds. You might hear the sounds of vehicles outside or the sound of a jackhammer way off in the distance. If you listen carefully, you might hear the sounds of people around you. Breathe.

Begin to draw your attention to your own body. Slowly begin to notice the place where your body makes contact with the floor, with the chair. And breathe. Notice especially the little places where you can feel the transition in that contact, the very edges of the place on your back that's touching the chair. See if, in your mind's eye, you can trace that very edge. See if you can begin to notice the very small details in sensation that tell you this part is touching, that is not. And breathe.

And now I'd like to draw your attention to your own hands. I'd like you to start to notice the temperature of your hands. Maybe you can notice that some places on your hands are a little warmer than other places. See if you can notice the little details of sensation of those transitions from places that are a little warmer to places that are a little cooler on the skin of your own hands. And breathe.

See if you can notice the sensation of your blood pulsing in your hands. Notice just where in your hands you can feel that. Now I'd like you to take just a couple of nice slow breaths where you notice the details of the inflow and outflow of your own breath. Let your lungs fill completely and empty completely.

Now I'd like you to imagine that in front of you there is a file cabinet. Now imagine that you open the drawer and reach in and withdraw a picture-a picture of you during that sweet moment. Let yourself draw that picture up from the file cabinet and feel it in your hands. Let yourself look into that face of yours in that picture and let yourself notice the details surrounding you. Notice the look on your face. And now I want you to imagine as if your awareness were some sort of liquid that could be poured into that you in that picture. So imagine that now you are beginning to pour into the skin of that you in that picture at that very moment. See if you can let yourself emerge in that place at that particular moment. You can imagine opening your eyes in that place and kind of let yourself see what you see there. Let yourself notice the sensations that you feel on your own skin in that place. If you're imagining yourself outdoors, perhaps you feel a slight breeze. If you're with someone in that picture, you might feel the warmth of his skin against you, the scent of her hair. Let it be as if you could just breathe that moment in, as if each breath just filled you with the sweetness of that. Let it be as if every cell in your body can feel what it is to be in that place.

Just take a moment to luxuriate in that presence. And now I'm going to ask you to gently, gently let your eyes open. Let yourself settle into that moment of sweetness. Allow the moment to keep pouring over you like water from a jar.

When you're ready, I want you to gently, gently begin to write down what you're experiencing, what you're seeing as you let yourself fill up with this moment of sweetness. Hear, feel, and see that sweet moment. Stay with it. Keep writing. Keep going until your hand cramps or you feel like you've run out of things to write.

Now I'm going to ask you to stop writing, but see if you can just let that sweetness continue to pour from you. I want you to notice if you felt any urgency while writing to explain yourself, any push, any effort. I'll ask you to gently notice that and let go of that effort. Now keep writing below. Just let it come from you. Just let it flow.

Once again, gently, gently let yourself go still. Put down your pen or pencil. Keep feeling that moment of sweetness. Now I'm going to ask you to gently close youreyes for just a moment. Stay with your sweet moment. Just let yourself see it. And let yourself be poured into that moment until you can feel it in your very skin and your breath. And then, when you're ready, just gently, gently open your eyes. I want you to go gently as if you were walking through a forest. If you walk very quietly, you might see things that you would miss if you hurried. And when you're ready, let your attention come back to the room.

Accepting the Fact That Thoughts Are Just Thoughts You've covered a lot of ground. Of the six facets of psychological flexibility, we've now introduced you to three. What's up next is the idea that you can learn to hold the stories that make up your experience of the world lightly, that you don't necessarily need to believe everything you think. In ACT, we call this defusion, and it is the subject of our next chapter.

AA and the Gift of Acceptance

Acceptance is a huge part of AA. One of the most frequently quoted stories from the AA Big Book is from the chapter ent.i.tled "Acceptance Was the Answer": And acceptance is the answer to all my problems today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing, or situation-some fact of my life-unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing, or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment. Nothing, absolutely nothing, happens in G.o.d's world by mistake. Until I could accept my alcoholism, I could not stay sober; unless I accept life completely on life's terms, I cannot be happy. I need to concentrate not so much on what needs to be changed in the world as on what needs to be changed in me and in my att.i.tudes. (AA 417) You may find yourself sitting in an AA meeting and hearing the short version: "And acceptance is the answer to all my problems today" or an even shorter version, where the member simply says "page 417." If you hear "page 417," that means that acceptance might be a good direction to look in your life. This line has been repeated for generations in AA. In fact, you might hear a real old-timer at AA say, "Page 449" and then pa.s.s with no further comment. If you do, they are still reading out of an older edition of the book where the same line occurred on page 449. This story has stayed relevant and meaningful for many, many alcoholics.

And in AA, just as in ACT, acceptance does not mean liking, agreeing, wanting, or cosigning in any fas.h.i.+on. Acceptance does not mean sit like a lump and do nothing. If you think that, listen to the AA sayings like "G.o.d provides the vegetables, but you have to do your own cooking." Why do they say that? They say it because AA is an into-action program. They are affirming a faith that what is needed for the creation of a life worth living is available to us and that steadfast nonacceptance blocks access. Notice that page 417 is not saying that all fault lies with the one it refers to. What it is saying quite directly is that "I need to concentrate not so much on what needs to be changed in the world as on what needs to be changed in me and in my att.i.tudes." This is not the same as saying all is fine with the world. It is rather a prescription for focusing attention.

The flip side of acceptance is often resentment. Resentment is one of the long-smoldering versions of nonacceptance. As the old AA saying goes: "Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other guy to die." Sometimes we nurse resentments for years, decades even. Sometimes the resented person does not even know about it, but we do and suffer the cost. The AA Big Book has some very remarkable things to say about resentment. "Resentment is the 'number one' offender. It destroys more alcoholics than anything else" (AA, 64). It goes on to say, in the fourth-step inventory of resentments, that "this world and its people were often quite wrong. To conclude that others were wrong was as far as most of us got. The usual outcome was that people continued to wrong us and we stayed sore... . We began to see that the world and its people really dominated us. In that state, the wrong-doing of others, fancied or real, had the power to actually kill" (AA, 66). Many people spend years grinding over and over the wrongs committed against them. We often feel compelled to justify our resentment. If we can get anyone to listen, we try to enlist them to join us in the resentment. Look closely at your own resentments and see if it is not so. See if it is not the case that, even in the midst of a well-enjoyed rage over a resented wrong, the "victory" is short lived. It is also worth noting that all that effort spent on whether the resentment is justified or not gains us little. They are suggesting in the above pa.s.sage that resentments fancied or real had the power to kill. They may not literally kill, but they most definitely kill living. The Big Book suggests, among several other steps, that we view these wrongdoers as sick and suggests we offer them the same regard we would offer a sick person, even though we do not like their symptoms. This does not mean that we should stay in sick situations. Sometimes leaving is the healthiest thing to do. However, leaving in kindness does as much to take us from a sick environment as leaving in anger. You can choose to leave. You do not require anger and resentment to justify leaving.

The above also does not mean that you should suppress angry or resentful feelings. As we have said elsewhere in this book, suppression is a losing strategy. Keep working on your life, gently turn your attention to growth, and resentment will take care of itself. Those thoughts will come and go. However, if you nurse them, they are more likely to come and stay. Like birds, you cannot keep them from flying over your house, but you do not need to help them build a nest in the attic. In fact, resentment is only a prison to the extent that it organizes our life activities. Consider this fact. There is almost certainly a jail in your town. Does the jail have to disappear for you to be free? No, it does not. You are free when you are free to walk in and out of it. The key to being free of resentments is to stop actively nursing them and instead to adopt the posture taught in the 12 steps: "Love and tolerance of others is our code" (AA, 84). When we say love and tolerance here, we don't mean feeling love and tolerance. We expect feelings to come and go, like weather. But we can act in loving and tolerant ways even on the days when the feeling is far away. Don't fake it. Embody it. Embody love. Embody tolerance. As is the drumbeat of this whole book: practice, practice, practice.

The Serenity Prayer is heard at almost all 12-step meetings around the world and echoes the importance of acceptance in 12-step recovery: "G.o.d, Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

When we are in the middle of a battle with the world, it can be very hard to distinguish between what we can and cannot change. A bit of stillness, a bit of perspective, and a bit of acceptance can make it easier to sort that out. The AA Big Book even suggests that alcohol itself is not a battle we want to fight. "And we have ceased fighting anything or anyone-even alcohol" (AA, 84) It is a paradox that even things we can change need to be accepted as they are first.

Just like with perspective taking, meetings are a great place to practice acceptance, practice love, practice tolerance. Meetings are also a great place to notice the harmful effects of nonacceptance. It is easy for nonacceptance to distract us from important life tasks. If you are trying to use AA as a source of support, try to let it be someone else's job to straighten AA and its members out. You will find plenty of flaws and flawed people in AA meetings. Don't let your objections to those people keep you away from the resources available there. In a certain way, you can think of AA meetings as a testing ground for living in the world. If everyone in the world has to think just the right things and say just the right things in order for you to live well-good luck with that. Use AA as a place to practice patience and tolerance for human frailty. If you do, you just might find that you are simultaneously learning to practice a bit of patience and tolerance for yourself.

5.

Holding Stories Lightly Here's a concept for you:

All of us are whole people and not life-support systems for a bunch of brains.

Brains are really marvelous instruments, but like a gifted child who has been praised too much, they get this obsession with being center stage. They don't know their own weaknesses, or perhaps know them too well, and they swell up in order to compensate, like giant puffer fishes.

You laugh! But just think for a minute about the kinds of thoughts that spill out of your brain at any given moment: I'm a terrible person. I'm a much better person than him. If only I had gone to medical school, my life would be perfect. Why did I waste all those years in medical school, when I could have been a circus clown? Her sandwich is bigger than mine! Why does the sandwich guy hate me?! It goes on and on and on.

Our brains are specifically designed to impose order on the world, arranging all of our thoughts and perceptions into more or less arbitrary categories and, when the information to connect the categories isn't already known, making up what's missing. The good news is that these big brains of ours put us absolutely and undeniably at the very top of the food chain. If you get eaten by a bear or a shark before you finish reading this, it will be because you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, not because the bear or the shark had anything on you in the way of cunning, adaptability, technology, or problem-solving skills. The bad news is that these big brains also incline us to suffer, to suffer over the fact that we suffer, and to suffer over our suffering at the fact that we suffer-not just any time, but often. Whew!

One of the more common general a.s.sumptions of psychology over the last sixty years or so is that irrational or distorted thinking is the cause of many bad feelings. This might be true. And it seems like a pretty good idea that, if your inaccurate thinking is a problem for you, the correct solution to the problem is to start thinking more accurately. The problem is, though, that the attempts to get people to control, change, suppress, or manage the contents of their thoughts have generally been unsuccessful (as we discussed at some length in the last chapter).

Getting into the business of managing your thoughts or feelings, including attempts to boost your self-esteem, in order to live most effectively is a little like managing clouds so you can live most effectively. As we mentioned in the discussion about self-esteem, there may be some level of cloud cover that's optimal for you: not too gray, not too much blazing sun.

Fortunately, there's an alternative strategy for dealing with unruly thoughts. Instead of trying to control and change the content of your thoughts, in this chapter you're going to learn how to hold very gently the stories about the world that your mind tells you-no matter what they are, no matter whether they are true. The more technical name we have for this aspect of psychological flexibility is defusion, which is a made-up word that refers to the way you can keep yourself from "fusing" with your thoughts much like your tongue would fuse to a frozen flagpole if you licked it on the coldest day in winter (we're just guessing about that last part-one of us lives in the South and the other in California.) If your thoughts are like clouds, defusion is something you can work on that will allow you to live your life in both heavy cloud cover and full sun.

(Note: since we think all of our thoughts are, to some degree, part of the ongoing conversation we have with ourselves to tell the stories of the world as we experience it, we're going to use the words "conversations," "stories," and "thoughts" more or less interchangeably.) The Stories We Live By Pretty much everyone on the planet has some kind of self-limiting conversation with him- or herself. Our goal in this work is not necessarily to make the conversations go away. We do not know how. Sometimes people spend a lot of time trying to decide if the stories contained in these conversations about ourselves are true or not. We are less interested in whether stories are true and more interested in whether they are helpful.

Take the stories that come to us from folklore. One of Aesop's fables tells the story of a man who was ill and dying. His sons began to fight and argue among themselves. The man asked for a bundle of sticks to be gathered. He had one son try to break the bundle of sticks. Try as he might, he could not. He then asked each son to take a single stick and to try to break it. They all did so easily. This story isn't true. It is a fable. But it's a very helpful story. The story tells us something about the value of unity. The story gives us advice. The advice is to hold less tightly to our differences, to turn our attention to what unites us, and to notice the strength in that act. The story of the boy who cried wolf for attention usefully reminds us to be thoughtful in crying out for help. The story of the ant and the gra.s.shopper tells us to be frugal and hardworking, even when times are good and we're feeling flush. The importance of these stories lies not in whether an ant actually talked to a gra.s.shopper about being hardworking (we're guessing not). Rather, it lies in the usefulness of the stories, the ways the stories help people move ahead in their lives.

And what about the kinds of stories you tell you about yourself? Are they true or not? Are you, in fact, a bad dad? Do you pull more than your share of the weight in the office? Are you actually the stupidest student in your cla.s.ses?

From our perspective, the correct answer to any and all of these questions is "Who knows?" And an even more useful follow-up question would be "Who cares?" Unlike the categorically untrue fables we just mentioned, it's hard to imagine any useful ideas coming out of any of these maybe-true, self-limiting stories. Are you a bad dad? It probably depends on whom you ask. And regardless, "being a dad" is a verb. It describes action. Your action. In this very moment-and the next and the next-you get to do something that reframes the entire question. Are you the stupidest one in cla.s.s? You know what? You just might be. Someone has to be the stupidest. But why did you enroll in cla.s.ses to start with? To form opinions about your smartness or lack thereof, or to learn something? Do you speak up, partic.i.p.ate, and reveal your stupidity of the moment? Or do you remain silent and allow yourself to stay that way indefinitely? The truth of the stories you tell yourself isn't really all that important. The issue is the extent to which you let those stories, true or false, get between you and a life well lived.

And what if your story is something like "I'll never be able to stay clean" or "I've been a drunk for twenty years, and I'm going to die a drunk." You see where we're going with this?

Wilson's Wager: Betting on You The seventeenth-century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal had a wager about the existence of G.o.d. If G.o.d exists, he figured, you have a lot to gain by believing as much and living a pious and virtuous life-namely, you gain eternal life and a heavenly reward after you die. On the other hand, if G.o.d doesn't exist, you really don't lose all that much by believing anyway. On the other hand, if G.o.d does exist and you don't believe-well, let's just say there will be consequences. And if you don't believe and it turns out you were right, well, you get lucky: no eternity of torment for you. And there is the added wrinkle that you have to bet. In this wager, you can't abstain. You have to lay your money down on the table. If you put Pascal's wager on a chart , it looks something like this: Why are we talking about Pascal's wager? It seems that there's a kind of wager involved in how much belief we invest in our self-limiting stories.

If you have a story about yourself that may or may not be true-that you are the stupidest person in your cla.s.ses, say-what are the consequences of a.s.suming the story is true in the event that the story is or is not true? If you a.s.sume you're the stupidest person in your cla.s.ses, you might sit in silence through discussions, you might not bother studying for exams, and you might not seek out extra help to learn the course material. Why bother? You're just plain stupid, and all your struggling and striving are just time and effort down the drain. You're going to fail anyway. And you do fail, even if it was possible that, with time and effort and help, you could have succeeded.

But what if you a.s.sume you're not stupid? Maybe you make appointments with your instructors for extra help. You might spend more time in the library or sitting in study groups with your cla.s.smates. You might speak up and partic.i.p.ate more in discussion. And you know what? You just might fall flat on your face in the process and get ridiculed. Face it: calculus is hard, chemistry is hard, and there were a lot of battles in the Hundred Years' War. But you also might succeed, and there just has to be something of value to be found in that attempt.

So let's call this little problem Wilson's wager. It looks like this in a table: If you bet yes, you either win or you lose. If you bet no, you either lose or you lose. We bet yes, because no is always a losing bet. From where you are right now, the rest of your one and only life stretches out in front of you. No one knows how many days you have left. No one knows what might be possible for you to do in the time you have left. If you're reading this book, chances are that you've had problems with alcohol or drugs for some time. You might want to quit, or you might want to get your drinking or using under control. And for one reason or another, you haven't been able to do it. Can you? We don't know. You don't know. And each day for the rest of your life will give you only part of the answer.

If you've had serious problems with substance use, what price have you paid? Have you lost jobs, friends, partners, children? Have you hurt yourself or hurt others? Have you had moments when the best you could do was to lie very still in bed with the covers pulled over your head? If your life's a mess right now, you might not be able to imagine the extent of something extraordinary happening in your life. Your best-case scenario might involve staying alive until this time next year. Right now, what seems totally out of reach for you? A steady job, a home of your own, a loving family, a profession? It all seems so out there that you don't dare let yourself even dream and wonder about it.

And this is where Wilson's wager comes in. You can choose to a.s.sume that something extraordinary can happen in your life. You can do whatever it is that might make it more likely that this something could happen. Baby steps, we're talking here. Tomorrow, if you can't get out of bed, maybe you push your feet over the side and onto the floor. The day after that, maybe you can stand up. And when your time is up, the plain fact is that you might not make it. Like the prayer says: "Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change." Some forces are beyond your control, and you just might not overcome them. If you a.s.sume that something marvelous can happen-it might. And if it does, well, there is nothing more to speculate about here. If everything changes, you get a new set of problems and challenges to overcome. It is life, after all. But you'll be someplace you chose to go, and that freedom alone is enough to justify the effort.

Or you can bet against yourself and a.s.sume that nothing extraordinary can happen. If you do, and that chance really was there for you, you stand to lose everything-your one and only life and all the richness that could be a part of it. If you bet against yourself and, it turns out, you were right all along-well, you get the satisfaction of being right while your life crumbles around you.

The purpose of Wilson's wager is not to give you hope (and certainly not to give you false hope). The purpose is to give you the advantage of being a savvy gambler at the tables of life: your odds of winning are substantially higher if you play than they are if you sit out the game.

What would it look like if something extraordinary could happen in your life? Write it on a piece of paper and tuck it into the pages of this book or into your wallet. Whisper it to someone you love. It doesn't matter if it does happen. It matters only that you a.s.sume it might.

Sunsets and Math Problems?

Are you getting motion sickness from all the twists and turns in this chapter yet? Good. Linearity is overrated in our opinion. Holding on tightly to the story that things really do run from point A to point B in an orderly fas.h.i.+on is only a good way of convincing yourself that you understand something that's probably always just slipping out of your grasp. So, quick, look at the following expressions and do what comes naturally to you (no, this isn't a trick question-just humor us for a minute): 5 x 2 12/4.

144 (41 33) x (16 + 19) Okay. Good. Don't think too much about it. Now, look at the following expression and do what comes naturally. Again, no tricks intended: Okay, so what did you do in the first section? Chances are that you solved the first two arithmetic problems without effort. You maybe even knew off the top of your head that the square root of 144 is 12. Then, maybe, if you were getting sick of the whole thing, you saw the more-complicated fourth expression and you thought, to h.e.l.l with this. You solved the problem of math problems by skipping them. Problem solved! Or you're a math prodigy, and you did it in your head. Or you got calculator or a pen and paper and you figured it out. One way or another, you dealt with each of the problems-because this is what you do when you're presented with a problem. You deal with it.

Now how about the picture of the sunset? What did you do with that? Did you solve it or figure it out? Nope. You looked at it. Granted, it was just a picture on a page or a screen, so you probably didn't stare at it for a long time in a state of amazement and wonder. But if you were standing on a Bahamian beach, with the trade winds blowing through your hair, staring into a sky that was on fire with scarlet and gold, you'd stop and appreciate it until the scene faded into night.

So, which are you? Are you a math problem or a sunset? That's right. We're not being funny. Are you-and everything about you-something that needs to be figured out? Solved? Do you even think of yourself this way? Have you ever had someone in your life that you just needed to figure out? Have you ever been someone else's problem to be solved? Whose problem to be solved have you been? Have you been a boss's problem to be solved? A teacher's problem? A spouse's problem?

Look, you're a born problem solver, whether you think of yourself that way or not. Look at what you did with those math problems. If you've been struggling with drinking or drug use for a long time, you've probably tried to solve that problem too, in a whole bunch of different ways. And how has that worked for you? You're reading this, so it's likely that it hasn't gone so well. You've tried hard, for a long time. And what would it mean if there was really no problem to be solved in the first place? What if you could just let the whole struggle go, just open your hands and let it drop to the ground? If you could do that, what might you be able to do with that energy you're not spending trying to "fix" something that was never really broken in the first place?

The Story of Me Being a Drain on the Universe

Here is a story about a "me" I thought I was and finding out, on my knees in a bathroom in Spokane, Was.h.i.+ngton, that there was a whole world that could not be seen from inside that story about "me."

Back in the winter of 1985, I was ever so slowly finding my way back into the middle of living. I had spent years living out on the very cusp of living and dying. Do you know that place? I was really just waiting to summon either the courage or the apathy to die by my own hand (but never quite finding them). Or, my more active strategy, secretly hoping that I would die by some bad turn of events-a beating, a shooting, a car accident-and living in a way that made those things very likely.

The first job I got when I got sober was working at a group home for folks with intellectual disabilities for four dollars an hour. The folks who lived there had to have profound disabilities and most had other factors that made them hard to place. Many had survived years in inst.i.tutions, the enormous human warehouses our society built to house (or maybe store is a better word) people with these problems.

Just in case this starts sounding at all n.o.ble on my part, you should know that if someone had offered me a more prestigious and better-paying job, I would have taken it without hesitation. I did not give up wealth or recognition to take this job. No one was offering me a better job. No one. I was thirty years old and had never had stable employment in my life. I took the four-dollars-an-hour job because that was all I was qualified to do.

I worked mornings-early. I would go in and get the guys up and get them ready to go to the sheltered workshop. Because of the level of disability, occasionally the guys would soil themselves during the night, and then it was my job to help them clean up.

I remember with great clarity, early one morning, that dark-before-the-dawn winter of '85, being on my knees in that bathroom. All blue tile up the walls, hot water pouring down, and I remember the feel and the smell of that soapy, steamy air, and I am on my knees was.h.i.+ng s.h.i.+t off of a guy's legs. And down there on my knees, it came to me, that if you could not wash the s.h.i.+t off your own legs, and someone would do that for you, that would be a good thing.

I spent many years dead certain that I was a drain on the universe. Getting near me would wear you out and cause you damage. The closer you got, the more damage you would take. Mostly people did not realize it until it was too late, but eventually they always did. That was the story I inhabited. I had evidence-a wake of broken relations.h.i.+ps and personal failings trailed out behind me as far as the eye could see.

But there on my knees, in that steamy bathroom, I found myself useful. I had not known that I could be useful. And I cannot express how much it meant to me on that day, in that bathroom, on my knees, finding myself useful. And, now, remembering it all, my eyes fill with tears of grat.i.tude. I have a special debt to intellectually disabled folks. Not an unwelcome debt, but one that I carry gladly. These folks with profound disabilities let me know that I could be useful. It was a gift of immeasurable magnitude delivered in the last place I would have expected to find it.