The interesting thing about the show from a recovery perspective is that Mark Benford is a recovering alcoholic, sober for seven years and active in AA.  And the show actually gives a better perspective on what 12 Step recovery is like than most.  Mark has a sponsor, goes to meetings regularly and makes phone calls (well, to his sponsor at least).  And he isn't fixed.  He hasn't had a drink in seven years, but he's still working his recovery and still sees, quite literally, the possibility of a slip: he sees himself drinking in his flash forward.

However, his wife, Olivia, is not working an Al-Anon program.  She doesn't go to meetings or have a sponsor, but she does keep tabs on Mark's sobriety, including anxiously questioning his sponsor for details.  In one of my favorite scenes so far, Mark's sponsor, Aaron, is at the Benford's home helping with a repair while Mark is out of town.  Olivia overhears part of the conversation and then stays to listen in as Aaron encourages Mark to make time to find and attend a meeting during his trip.  Mark is stressed out about his work and he's away from home (both triggers for drinking), so a healthy check-in with his sponsor and a reminder to go to a meeting are just perfect; it's one of the most realistic moments in TV recovery I've seen.  But Olivia, like a lot of people outside of 12 Step recovery, sees meeting attendance as something that happens to fix what has already happened, not as positive preventative maintenance, and is scared that this means Mark is drinking again.

For the most part, it seems that she's counting on him not to drink, and as long as he doesn't, everything is fine.  She has sworn she will leave him if he ever drinks again, and the twist is that, while he's drinking in his flash forward, in hers, she's living with another man.  (I suppose we can assume she held to her boundaries.)

What's missing from the show, and is not something I'd expect to see on TV because it's not charged with drama, are the changes that come to all areas of our lives in recovery.  The people I know who have worked a 12 Step program for as long as Mark and his sponsor have become steeped in program language and ideas.  The longer recovery goes on, the more (for the most part, for most people) there seems to be talk of things like God, gratitude and faith, and the less there seems to be of blame and anger.  But serenity is not nearly as much fun to watch as addict drama like throwing chairs or storming out of rooms (which the show has aplenty).  So while Flash Forward may show an accurate picture of some parts of recovery, it still fails to show its heart and soul.

It started off innocently enough years ago. She would forward me the usual stories warning me that I should watch out for snakes in McDonald's ball pits or people out to steal my kidneys or serial killers who would lure me out of the house using a baby's cries.  And I would research each item and send back the Snopes.com link to everyone on the mailing list, politely informing them all that this was another urban legend, please don't forward.  I was going to shine the light of white hot truth and logic upon these horrible misconceptions put an end to this wretched chain now.

But of course, I didn't stop them.  The e-mail messages continued to arrive, unresearched.  ("Whatever to your research, Ms. Smartypants.  I totally know someone who knows someone that that happened to!  So there!")  It was annoying and frustrating to know I hadn't fixed this particular problem, but still I knew it didn't matter so very much.  So people stopped traveling or letting their kids go into ball pits or helping the odd baby who showed up on their porch (what were the chances?).  Was the world really going to end if that happened?

Then the political messages started coming.  Need I repeat them?  I'm sure you remember well enough the smears and falsehoods about your preferred candidate that passed through your own inbox.  Those messages I took more seriously, spending my days on FactCheck.org and refuting misinformation point by point, with anger and sarcasm.  After all, now we weren't talking about the merits of fast food play areas, we were talking about elected officials and positions on issues that were really going to affect our lives.  Surely now it was important that I set people straight, make them see the error of their ways and change?  Still, when I pointed out that John Kerry didn't actually cite the wrong Bible verse in a speech, it didn't suddenly make people like him any better.  (I know, it was hard for me to believe too.)

Then there were the endless messages about vaccines causing autism, having caused my son's autism, not a word of which I have ever or will ever believe.  But the studies and the arguments did nothing to stop the "information" from coming.

Then came the flat out conspiracy theories.  The moon landing was faked!  Elvis is alive but Paul McCartney is dead!  The British Royal family are shape shifting reptilian aliens!  Microsoft advocates killing New York Jews through secret messages in its Wingdings font!  (I am really not making these up.  Someone else did.)  These I found I couldn't respond to because, well, how do you prove the Queen of England is not a shape shifting reptilian alien?  But I did inwardly fuss over (but never quite settled on) how to voice my mental health concerns in a way that would fix things.

Enter recovery.  I am powerless over other people's behavior.  I am powerless over their thoughts and opinions.  I am powerless to change them and fix them and make them do things right, see things right, be right.

Finally, most recently, after a period of silence imposed by lengthy lack of computer access, came word that not only do vaccines cause autism, they also don't cure disease.  (Apparently, smallpox was not eradicated by vaccines but by improvements in nutrition, sanitation and health.  Yep, our healthy modern world caused it to spontaneously disappear, even in poverty and famine stricken locations where people drink the same water that is used for bathing and sewage.  All of which makes me shudder to think about what kind of unhealthy lives my parents must have been living if they spent their childhoods in fear of contracting polio.)

And I really don't want to let this one go.  Because there are so many things that trigger my own fear and anger: from serious consequences to our group immunity to disease (because when people fear vaccines, they get sick, and yes, they die) to the implication that my son would be better dead than autistic to (yes, now we get to the heart of things) my plain, old codependent anxiety in the face of someone else's reality.  It's that same feeling of disorientation that I would get when my husband would very calmly, at the height of his addiction, tell me something completely crazy and seem so rational about it that I'd be angry and frightened at the same time that he could possibly believe it was true.

I know the person passing this information along is living in a whole different reality.  I know there's nothing I can do to change her.  I know I need to let go and let God.  I know the best thing to do is to cut her out of my life.  And yet, my first and deepest impulse is to throw myself wholeheartedly into making her crazy stop, thinking that really, this time, if I can finally make it work, if I can chase down and stop every arrow of delusion that's been shot out into the world, that's what's going to stop my crazy.  And ping!  That's me shooting my own arrow of delusion out into the world.  I wonder if it will hit Elvis, wherever he is?

Photo credit: Photo by shadowfax the second on Flickr

My husband and I were having a discussion once about life, the universe and everything (not the book, although we've been known to discuss that too, but actual life, the universe and everything) when he told me that, for him, God is in choices. And I just loved the way he put that. (Darn that man for doing what people are always doing with my thoughts: summing them up much more succinctly than I can.)

You see, I believe that when I am open to God (the universe, my higher power, the light within myself, the divine, call it what you will), I see reality more clearly. I see beyond the artificial limits and constraints my mind puts on situations, and I'm able to recognize and pursue alternative solutions. (See how much more pithily he did it?)

Or to use (as I'm prone to) a sci-fi movie metaphor for the way I see things: think of the climax of one of the greatest movies ever made: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Kirk and Khan are flying their spaceships around trying to kick the crap out of each other. Khan is using his super-intelligence to do some galactic scale ass whooping and Kirk (as usual) is in trouble. But in the end, Kirk is able to get the (literal) upper hand because he can think in three dimensions, while Khan (long trapped on the surface of Ceti Alpha Five) thinks in only two. It seems like a ridiculous premise that the super-intelligent Khan could forget, while flying a spaceship, that he could travel in any direction (even up and down!). However, it does allow God to be on the side of the Enterprise (so to speak, since my God is not on anyone's side), and a strangely lovable Shatner to gain the advantage over the sexy Ricardo Montalbon in battle. And after all, don't even the most super-intelligent of us sometimes forget we have other options because we're so used to doing things the way we have always done them?

Of course, you might say that in the Star Trek scenario, any one of Khan's crew could have yelled, "Hey, Khan! Don't forget that these ships fly up and down!" And Khan would have taken that into account and made a different decision. Then Kirk would have died a more respectable death than the way he was eventually (pointlessly) written out. (Oh, don't get me started on Kirk's demise in that Next Generation crossover movie! Sigh!) But in real life, having someone tell me that I have the option to make a choice doesn't actually make that choice any more real or available to me.

Why? Because we each live in our own Matrix of beliefs and assumptions. (Yes, I am pretty sure I have no way of explaining my spiritual vision of the universe without resorting to science or sci-fi metaphors.) If one of you all tells me, while I'm still living in the virtual reality world of the Matrix, "Hey, stand up on your own legs and breathe," I'll mutter, "I am, dumbass!" Because I don't know I'm in a bubble; as far as I know, I am on my own feet, breathing. It's that connection to God (or inner knowledge or call-it-what-you-will) that lets me start to see beyond the constraints I've placed around myself.

I'm on a journey -- toward growth, toward truth, toward a sustained connection with that God of mine -- and at every step, every fork in the road, every moment, every decision, I am doing the best I can with the knowledge and resources (physical, spiritual and emotional) I have available to me at that particular moment. I may look back and think, "If I knew then what I know now..." or "I should have...," but the truth is that I didn't know those things then or have the strength or see those choices from where I was at that moment. I could only have done something different if I were a different person, in a different place, than who I was and where I was. So every choice I make, odd as it sounds, is the best choice for me at the moment I'm making it.

And bringing this back around to Silda Spitzer, who started my thoughts in this direction: Silda Spitzer is a real-live grown-up, adult, big-girl-panties-wearing woman. If the decision to leave was truly available to her and she made the decision to stay, I may not know the reasons or may not have made the same decision myself, but I have to respect her decision.

If her choices were constrained by where she has been in this life and by who she is now, if she was unable to stand up to pressure or unable to see her needs as separate from Eliot Spitzer's or unable to see the difference between what she wants and what she is supposed to do, then that's where she is on her particular journey and I have to accept and respect that. No one can tell her what the Matrix is, and no one can force a red pill down her throat. If she was constrained by an inability to see other options as valid, maybe going up on a stage in front of the whole world by her husband's side is her way of taking the red pill she needs to escape into the real world.

So, the way I see it, the right thing for Silda Spitzer (or anyone else) to do is the thing she, as a unique individual, wants to do, and what she, as a unique individual, is capable of doing within the constraints she lives with at that particular moment. And the best thing I can do right now, as a woman, as a feminist, as a human, as the unique person I am at this moment, is offer my support and respect for the journey she is on.

Of course, I know that if you have a different set of beliefs about the world than I do, you certainly won't agree with those the last three paragraphs. But agree or not, what I really want to know is, how do you all see the world? Free will? People's choices? If you post on your own blog, let me know. (And feel free to use sci-fi metaphors so I can understand it.)

Mark and I lived most of our lives in the Matrix; we were born in it, grew up in it, met each other in it, were married in it. For over 30 years, our brains tried so hard, and failed, to make sense of what was wrong with our world.

In the Matrix, we had not just a happy, but a perfect marriage; we were ridiculously in love (total strangers would comment on it), we communicated well, we never fought, we shared the same interests, we had frequent and fabulous sex. Intellectually, emotionally and sexually we were a perfect match. Everything was perfect, yet something was a little off.

There was a receptionist at work Mark became friends with. I would never have bothered; as far as I was concerned, there was just nothing interesting about her. But I believed Mark saw in her the beauty that is in each of us. That's the way he was. He'd strike up a conversation with anyone, anywhere, and develop a quick intimacy, even when he didn't have anything in common with them or didn't share their interests. He was just so much nicer to everyone than I was. So, he would go to lunch with her, he and I went out to dinner with her, and he went to dinner at her house when I was out of town.

This friendship was one of the splinters in my brain. I could feel it there, something off, something not right. But as hard as I worked it, I could not figure it out, not within the bounds of the Matrix. By all appearances, Mark had to be interested in the receptionist sexually: there was no basis for a friendship. Yet he couldn't be interested in her sexually: there was no basis for attraction. Friendship is based on common interests, mutual respect and well, liking one another, which didn't appear to be the case in this friendship. But then sexual relationships outside of marriage are the result of having and unhappy marriage, a sexually unappealing spouse or someone more appealing outside, which wasn't the case either. The receptionist wasn't physically attractive, I was. And there was no way he would risk losing our perfect marriage for someone so unworthy, someone who wasn't as attractive, as kind or as intelligent, someone whom he didn't even like and so couldn't possibly love. It didn't, and couldn't, make sense from inside the Matrix.

Mark and I escaped from the Matrix together one night. I had to figure out why the world didn't make sense, and so did he. Sitting on our sofa, facing each other, we swallowed our red pills and were yanked, breathless and gasping, out of our happy, warm dream into the sunless ruins of our real world.

That perfect life was a fantasy, not reality. Mark hit on and flirted with and had fantasies about and had sex with women outside our relationship from the moment we met; women he not only didn't love, but didn't even like or respect. He didn't do it because he didn't love me; he did it because he didn't love himself. (That misunderstanding was what kept us both trapped.) All those female "friends," all the ones I couldn't see the worth in, he didn't see it either. They were objects, ones and zeros, part of the fantasy world that surrounded us.

Addiction is a disease not, as most imagine, of intense craving or enormous lack of willpower, but a disease of fantasy. Those of you who have escaped from the Matrix know the feeling: the feeling of having lived in an alternate reality where things appeared right but felt wrong, the feeling of having been ripped from that to see the world as it really is, a world you could not conceive until you saw it. And those of you who are still in the Matrix, when Mark and I meet you, we will just look at each other and, doing our best Laurence Fishburne, say, "You think that's air you're breathing? Hmm..."

Plus, I am so not your weepy artsy drama film chick; I am an absolute sucker for special effects and big budget, sci-fi, action movies. You won't see me being dragged along reluctantly to the latest superhero movie (or, shudder!, staying at home and watching a film with subtitles). I'm the one at the front of the autograph line (AKA the line of nerds) at the X-Files convention beaming because I got a hug from Mitch Pileggi. (Oh, yes I did!) Well, at least I was that person in my pre-kids days...

All of which means that I was bound to consider The Matrix one of the greatest movies ever made. It has Keanu Reeves and special effects?! What the hell more could you want in a movie? I'll tell you what: a fabulous metaphor for addiction! And that is what truly makes The Matrix something I push on even my poor unsuspecting artsy film friends (who take about three weeks to decompress from all of the violence). I have never, in any medium, encountered as elegant a depiction of what addiction is really like. Addiction is being in the Matrix, being involved with an addict is being in the Matrix. Recovery is discovering how to live in the real world.

If you haven't seen The Matrix, I will give you time to go watch it now before I elaborate. Go ahead. I'll wait... It's Spring Break and I have two kids on my hands, so I'm not going to be able to finish this post until tomorrow anyway.