How to Grow Up by Michelle Tea Page B

to destroy me, but something that wanted to build me up.
    The chant didn’t “fix” me, of course; it was just one more tool I had to use in the lifelong task of dismantling my scarcity issues. There were others. In my support group I started meeting with a woman who had more time sober than I had. In her I was able to catch a glimpse of the sort of person I might someday become if I managed to keep dodging the lures of booze and coke—she seemed healthy, in body and in spirit. Having established her sobriety, she was able to deal with other issues that had been festering beneath her drinking. Alcoholics don’t emotionally grow when they’re using; once we get it together, we realize that there’s a whole banged-up psyche that needs our loving care. And one thing we were both dealing with was money issues. It’ssomething a lot of alcoholics have to face up to once they’re sober, even people with middle- or upper-class backgrounds. Nobody makes good financial choices when they’re blitzed all the time. Chances are you can’t hold a good job, and you’re spending all your cash on booze and drugs. You wake up in the morning vaguely remembering a trip to the ATM, even though your wallet shows no sign of such activity. You do absolutely nothing to plan for any sort of future, because the only future that matters is when you can have your next drink. My friend’s basic alcoholic money issues were compounded by the fact that in her own early sobriety she fell prey to a secondary shopping addiction. In the wake of this mess, paying bills became terrifying, a morass of self-loathing, disappointment, and frustration. But a year or so of wrestling with her alcoholism had taught her all sorts of magical tricks. At bill time, she started pulling an empty chair beside her at the table and asking her idea of God to sit down and keep her company while she faced her fears.
    I know some of you are throwing up in your mouth right now. These methods may be a bit too deep in woo-woo fairyland for the more logical hard-asses out there, the word
God
too triggering. I respect that. But the idea that she wasn’t alone while staring down the barrel of her checking account gave my friend a glimmer of relief. Enough to lick the damn envelopes and get the checks in the mail.
    At this point I had enough time in 12-step programs, and had followed their advice with enough dogged desperation, that I could see that they were working. I just felt better. I wasn’t as freaked out or stressed out. There is this phrase about people whocome into 12-step culture and get super blissed out when they find it working for them: the pink cloud. I was super duper on a big pink cloud. At heart I’m really a hedonist—I just want to feel awesome, all the time. For a while, drugs and alcohol helped me achieve that. Now that using had stopped working, it looked like this new world of self-investigation and higher-power communication was doing the trick. I thought about how my friend invited her HP to bill time, and wondered how I could come up with a similar trick to help me with my own money issues.
    For me, the money terrors came when I was purchasing something I didn’t need, which in my austere mind was anything outside rent, electricity, and Internet, plus maybe a few cans of beans and a sack of rice. Chills ran up my spine as I brought a seven-dollar bar of Fresh soap that smelled like the armpits of tree sprites to the register. My stomach would plummet as I walked the frock I’d found on the Urban Outfitters sale rack to the counter. I’d break out in a sweat as a cashier rang up a stack of books.
They’re books
, I’d scold myself.
You can
always
buy books!
Once, in the bathroom of a soul food restaurant in Tacoma, Washington, I sat on the toilet and read a poster taped to the back of the stall door. It was a cheesy thing listing ways to have a happy life, the sort commonly