Guest of Reality

When I was early in recovery, I read a story by Swedish author and Nobel Laureate, Par Lagerkvist, which really captured the essence of my life. The story was titled Guest of Reality.

It wasn’t so much the content of the story, though it was an autobiographical reflection on his youth and his exposure to death at an early age, a circumstance I had been exposed to in my own life with the deaths of both my beloved grandfather and my baby brother by the time I was 10, but rather it was the title that caused such identification for me.

I have always struggled with reality, in one form or another, either creating a puffed up version of it in my own mind or choosing not to see it at all. As a child, much of my time was spent developing what one could only call an alternate reality, one in which I was oblivious to those around me, one in which I thought, after all the pain in my life, I could no longer be hurt.

As I grew up, I quickly recognized how helpful alcohol and drugs were in maintaining and, in fact, expanding that alternate reality, one that now included additional categories of girlfriends, bosses, colleagues and friends.

Each category had to be kept separate, however, as each saw a different side of my “reality,” one which I never wanted the others to see. It was like juggling a bunch of balls in the air, hoping they would never cross-pollinate, and the idea of all these different “realities” coming together was ultimately so frightening that I pretty much stopped socializing all together and kept to myself.

As a guest, I guess I was never very good. In fact, I was the kind of guest who would break something by mistake and then try to put it back together without ever saying anything, hoping, perhaps, that you would try to sit in the chair I had just broken and it would collapse, making it your fault and not mine.

When I was a kid I set a fire in the garbage can of the guest bedroom of my godmother’s house, where I was visiting for the weekend. At my grandmother’s house, to her great dismay, I carved my initials into the wooden door leading down to the basement. And at a friend’s house I once threw up behind a chair in their living room and never told anyone about it.

I’ve gotten more familiar with reality as I’ve lived a sober life over the past 31 years, however there are still days when I’m not tethered too tightly to it. Some days feel simply overwhelming, as if I were walking through a dream; and some days seem to be happening just beyond my reach, as if the action and the soundtrack were ever so slightly out of sync.

Truth is, I still don’t know just what reality is. It shifts sometimes and modulates. It is deeply personal, yet universal. It is, on occasion, almost impossible to comprehend. For me, it’s like God.

As it says in AA’s Eleventh Step, regarding maintaining conscious contact with God, “Now and then we may be granted a glimpse of that ultimate reality which is God’s kingdom. And we will be comforted and assured that our own destiny in that realm will be secure for so long as we try, however falteringly, to find and do the will of our own Creator.”

So, ultimately, as a guest of reality, I suppose I ought to be as respectful as I can—and at least offer to clean up the dishes after dinner.

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