You Can Get There From Here:
Part 12

Barry Buss

After becoming sober, I bounced around a bit professional, eventually landing in Nashville, TN in 2018 to develop a new junior tennis academy. It was a bold move.

Being new in town and knowing all of two people, I did what all middle-aged single people do. I went to the app store on my iPhone and downloaded a dating site.

Fortunately for me, a lovely spirited woman from Iowa just happened to have relocated to Nashville about the same time I did and she downloaded the same app. And as our profiles appeared to one another, we both swiped right, resulting in a dinner date.

On one of our first dates, she came over to watch the final of the US Open. Turned out, she didn't know the first thing about tennis, had no idea who Roger Federer or Serena Williams was. Well, she does now.

On another of our early dates, I took her to Ascend Amphitheater in Nashville to see Phish perform. During one of their longer spacier jams, she leaned over and asked me if I lost a lot of sleep wondering why I was single if I took my dates to hear such music.

And we shared a hearty laugh that night...

It's been said in recovery if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. Well, on September 10th, 2021, I married that woman. And her awesome 4 kids and our two dogs and a beautiful grand baby with likely ten more to come. I'm finally safe to love again. Nothing in this life has ever felt better.

All my life, I've been a hippy jock from the beaches of California with politics often to the left of Karl Marx. But today I live in Franklin, Tennessee, one of the reddest districts in all the land with my wife Twyla, a Republican from Iowa and we listen to country music all day all the while living an hour from Alabama. How the hell did that ever happen? I'm an addict. I'm a planner. It's what I do. But I couldn't have planned this in a million years.

But I have a tight family now, something I've always wanted more than words could tell. And I think back on my time when I was deemed an unfit parent before ever becoming one. Now I have 4 beautiful stepchildren who buy me gifts for Father's Day and introduce me as their Dad. And if you'd have told me at some of the lower points in my life that someday I'd have ten years of sobriety with a wife and kids and dogs surrounded by love all day every day, I'd have told you you can't get there from here. Well, you can.

You can get there from here.

In my desire to wrap up all the loose ends of my life for this book, I thought of re-engaging tennis one more time. To maybe work real hard, get in great shape, and get some closure from this maddening sport. But that would have been more of the same grandiosity I've spent the past 10 years healing from. I don't need to do anything grandiose. And even if I did, it's not going to make a difference in my life or make me special. My greatest victory in tennis has been to finally be able to let it all go, to no longer need anything from it.

To once again, just let it be...

Tennis provided too many highs and lows, something I need to be constantly on guard against. Today I manage my Bipolar living the mostly controlled existence. I take no medications to manage it nor will I ever. I've learned to modify my daily routines to such a degree I've all but eliminated the swings in mood that came with being too active.

I'm in bed by 1030 religiously, I nap every day. I'm awake at first light to write. I am obscenely disciplined, often to a fault. I've created an invisible bubble around myself, staying safely in my lane with guard rails all around. It may make me more self-absorbed than any normal person should be, the constant micro-managing of the self can be all-encompassing. But I must always be checking my moods. My energy, my pacing, striving for balance between work, rest, and play. What it lacks in spontaneity, it more than makes up for in sanity. For I no longer have any margin for error. My daily rituals have become as important to my survival as my breathing.

As Winston Churchill once said, if you're going through hell, keep going...

Well, I did, and I got through it. And I refuse to risk anything to pull me back down, though don't think for one second my mind doesn't go there. Every time I have a good day hitting the ball, I start thinking about playing tournaments. When Phish announces their tours, I'm immediately plotting out how to go on the road for a week. But then I come to my senses. Maybe I'll see Phish if they pass through town. Maybe not. Today, I do couch tour, watching the shows online from my living room, and I dance like nobody's watching, because they aren't. It's safer that way. I can't afford life's highs anymore. Playing a tennis tournament would be no different.

Which leaves me my Father.

People hurt each other often by having different needs. And most people aren't very graceful about not getting their needs met when and how they want them met.

So shots got landed, with both of us winning some rounds. But after all the shouting was over, if you went to the judge's scorecards, there would be no arms raised or winner crowned. We both lost far more than we ever bargained for.

And all of life's uncertainties played out in my struggles, partly because he shared so little about himself with me. He never discussed what kinds of problems he wrestled with or how he felt or what it meant to be a man. So I had to figure it all out for myself and only now do I have any sense of what is right. My Dad's way of raising my brothers and me left us all saddled with fear, weakness, and a general feeling of self-contempt. And as my life has unfolded, I've had to sort through those feelings all by myself.

And that's where abandonment comes in. Mostly painted as abuse, it can also be an opportunity, to have to navigate one's way through life all alone. The faster you embrace your fate, the quicker a course of action gets made. For nobody is coming to save you when you're abandoned. That's the whole point, your providers are incapable of protecting you. It's a dangerous life, the fear can cripple you. Certainly fertile soil for a growing array of neuroses. If your parents can discard you, why ever trust another human being?

I wanted my Dad so badly to protect me, but was that ever a possibility? I wanted him to protect me from myself, from my self-destructive impulses. I wanted him to save me from the scourge of addiction. No small order, to save another from self-destruction. Yet I lived with the burden of not being able to forgive my parents for being so oblivious about my alcoholism that was so deeply impactful to my life.

And if my Dad could see me now, could we hash it out? Could we have an honest father-son exchange? What if it failed completely? What if he denied my reality of past events? Could we have accepted each other's version of the past?

I'd liked to think I could, for I truly am an entirely different person today. And I would lean on my Recovery.

Sobriety, my Northern Star, guide me this one last time...

And in the final tally, man is a hero, and man is a villain, and somewhere in all the idealizing and demonizing and the black and white of youth a nuanced grey appears, that he was just a man doing the best he could with the limited tools he had.

And I reached that conclusion through my recovery. I've healed the broken parts of myself and I'm proud to wear that Scarlet Letter. A bold red H for Healed.

For my life was spared by an Amazing Grace. As I sit here on the eve of ten years of sobriety, at once amazed I could stay sober a day, now mesmerized I ever lived the way I did. And I reflect on the myriad of fellow sufferers I crossed paths with over the years. Were they rescued? Were they blessed with miracles? Were there saints in their lives saving them too?

I can only pray that they too were gifted the grace of sobriety and sanity as I've been.

Because it can happen. We do get better. No matter how hopeless we may feel, you can get there from here, you can have the life you always dreamed of having. My sitting here typing you these final words is living proof of that.