My husband Mark and I may be spending too much time talking about issues related to addiction and recovery, as it has lead to a series of double takes in recent years...

A friend told me that a computer geek she works with is a member of SCA.  "You're married to a geek.  Are they all into that kind of thing?" she asked.  I gasped, thinking she was talking about Sexual Compulsives Anonymous, a 12 Step recovery group for sex addicts.  Was she asking if sex addiction was a geek thing?  Um, no.  It turns out she was talking about the Society for Creative Anachronism, a group dedicated to researching and reenacting medieval European history.

I overheard someone talking about DA meetings and wondered for a moment if they were looking for recovery from their compulsive spending through Debtor's Anonymous.  It turns out they were discussing Dumbledore's Army in the Harry Potter series.

Mark and I went to the local library to return some books. Outside were return bins for quick drop-off of various materials: media, children's books and adult books. Mark paused in front of the book drop and said, "Oh! 'Adult books,' as in 'not children's books!' Not the 'adult books' we talk about in program." Truly.  You never know when you're going to come upon a pornographic library.  Best to be vigilant.

When I first started blogging, a little over two years ago, "God" was not part of my spirituality.  The word still smacked of the old school God of my youth: that wrathful, angry-looking old white guy on the Sistine Chapel roof.  I was hated that image of God so furiously, that not only did I not believe it was possible for him to be in charge of the universe, I couldn't even stand to use the word "God," lest people think I was somehow in league with all the negative images it conjured up for me.

Still, I found, as my journey progressed, I did need a word to describe my spiritual center and God seemed to be a good one: an excellent, if potentially inaccurate, shorthand for what I was holding to and what was filling me up.  I took a step toward reclaiming God by purging that word of all I felt it was not, but I never did get around to saying what my God is to me.

In part I delayed writing it because my vision of God is always growing and changing, flickering in and out, hard to pin down.  But in part it's because, who can capture God?  Even one person's limited vision of God?  Wouldn't it be like offering up one snapshot of myself and calling it the whole of me?  Yet while a snapshot may capture only a fragment of one moment in time, it's still something and many snapshots together tell a kind of story, like the little snapshots that are my blog posts begin to fill out some rough outline of me.

So, for kicks, for posterity, for one little piece of the puzzle, to round things out a big more, here are some of the things my God is to me (today):

My God is an idea, a set of principles.

My God is evolution.  My God is physics.  My God is the scientific method.

My God is both the Buddhist truth of impermanence and science's truth of the first law of thermodynamics, which states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed.  Everything changes, yet the same energy continues in some new form.

My God exists like love exists, like beauty exists, like kindness and compassion exist.

My God is love and beauty and kindness and compassion.

My God is in all living things.  My God is the energy of life: the heart beating, the neurons firing, the breath.

My God is in the connection between people, between all living things.

My God is in starlight and bones and dog-earred pages.

My God is the voice inside me that knows what to say, the part of me that knows what is right.  And it does not matter to me how this happens or what causes it to be, only that it is.

My God is truth.  My God is my truth.

My God is my best writing: the dark, astonishing part of me the words come out of.  My God is in this blog, if not fully in this single post.

A little less than a year ago, I moved my blog to its own URL, and when I did so, I had the opportunity to reread many of my old posts as I updated broken links (still not all fixed, by the way). As I did, I noticed that, whether I wrote about them explicitly or not, I could see the phases I went through, like rings on a tree: here was the fire that burned my bark; here was a season rich with rain; here was mild and pleasant weather; here was the drought that left me parched. With each ring, my focus became a little bit more clear and I got a little bit better at knowing what material I could share with a large and diverse audience in a healthy way.

When I first started blogging, I shared much more broadly than I do now. I wrote about my extended family and my friends (most of whom didn't know about the blog). I wrote about situations I was struggling with and people with whom I was angry. I shared my opinions about politics and celebrities. I speculated about sex addiction in the news. I tried to answer any and all questions ("try" being the operative word, as I'll admit that some of those questions are still sitting in my inbox, waiting).

But gradually, as more people started reading and as I grew and changed myself, my focus changed. I felt less comfortable putting friends and family members out there without their knowledge, even when I was focusing on my own response to them or telling my story as it related to them. And I found it less and less helpful and healthy to share my current struggles, emotions or opinions in such a broad forum. I still do from time to time, but I do it less often and less pointedly than I once did.

I began to recognize that when I get a tight feeling in my chest as I'm writing — when I vent, or rant, or try hard to get a good laugh, or struggle to find a way to change people or force them to understand me — I'm likely to feel awful afterwards. I started to key in to when I heard that critical little voice in my head saying "but..." or "you're wrong" or "you're crazy." I'd notice how I'd fuss and fuss to get the words right so that people wouldn't "misunderstand" me, knowing what I really wanted was to be able to use my words to bully any difference into submission. And almost inevitably my anger or uncertainty or sarcasm or desperate need to have everyone agree with me would trigger someone, which would in turn trigger me.

In 12 Step we talk about sharing our "experience, strength and hope." That is: what happened to us in the past, how we got through it and the hope and faith we now have for the future. And as I look at those tree rings of writing drawing in over the years, I notice that the focus I'm moving toward is exactly that: experience, strength, hope. When I'm able to share from that place, even if I'm ashamed of what I've done and scared (often very much so!) of how people will perceive me, I'm able to feel good about what I'm doing. In moving away from focusing on others or on my resentment and anger or on the things (and people and opinions) I can't change, I'm more likely to be of service to others, to make progress myself and to do no harm.

But never fear, since I'm about progress, not perfection, I'm still likely to slip up and be a smart ass or gossip or boss people who are being wrong (that is, anyone who doesn't agree with me). You know, just to keep things entertaining.

I dashed in the door,
sat down at the computer
and found they're all gone.

When Mark and I were at the very beginning of our relationship, moving from a flirtatious friendship into love, he signed off some early little love note "a thousand ships for my beautiful." Now who was I to resist a suave Helen of Troy reference to my powerful, intoxicating, doomed and dangerous, mythical beauty? (If I were that woman, I would have married a different kind of man.) But the name stuck and for years that was what he called me: "Beautiful... My Beautiful..."

It meant so much to me that he saw me that way: that whatever I saw myself as, or other people saw me as, I was his Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman who ever lived. So, at some still early stage in our relationship, when we were making silly promises to one another (we seem so young when I think of this), I asked him, if he ever were to be with someone else, to find her some different pet name and keep mine sacred. Of course, he promised (so seriously and sincerely), I would always be his one and only Beautiful.

The years went by, we got married, and I assumed "Beautiful" was safe, mine forever. And more than that, I thought other words were safe: words like "you're so special" and "I love you." But five years after our wedding, knowing something was wrong but not knowing what, and desperate to track down the source of my discomfort, I installed keystroke tracking software on our computer and saw some of those sacred words (along with our credit card numbers) given easily and freely to women who were known only by their suggestive screen names. And when the precarious towers of addict lies came tumbling down, I learned of other words, left casually for other women.

That old life of mine, in the fantasy of the Matrix, had been consumed with the quest for knowledge, for proof, of some objective factual truth. I sought to know by installing tracking software, by checking phone records, by holding an ear to Mark's lips to catch the words he mumbled in his sleep. But the answers I found only left me wondering all the more what was real. How could I know "I love you" was real if he could say it to a woman he met on the street as easily as his partner of over a decade and the mother of his children? How could I know "special" was real if the barista at Starbucks was hearing the same? How could I know "beautiful" was real if it applied equally to me and a tiny, pixelated video image in a chat box? If the man I trusted more than anyone I'd ever met could deceive me, how could I know anything that anyone says is real?

The truth is I don't. I can't. Not really. I can't see into Mark's mind and heart (or anyone else's but my own). I can't ever really know that his current words (or anyone else's) aren't another vast charade about to come crashing down on me. So my journey now plumbs the next question, the one that came when the answer to that old question broke me: How do I live with not knowing?

I know I can try to take back the words, like so many roses, petal by petal, over time. I can learn to look at Mark's actions — at the fact that, nearly six years after disclosing his sex addiction, he has grown and changed dramatically and that he's still here working — and I can take a leap of faith from there. I can trust in his commitment to his recovery program and through my own I can learn to see myself as beautiful, special, loved and wanted, always, and regardless of what happens. All those things I have done and am doing, but it only takes me so far. Not all the way to a new Beautiful.

But sometimes I glimpse it. Sometimes I can see it resting serenely in the unknowable: in a deeper, grander reality, something that goes beyond facts. Sometimes, when I'm able to see every individual moment of my life — the joyous and the painful ones — as just the way they ought to be, rather than as good or bad, sometimes then I see how my life can become my own Helen of Troy. My own Beautiful.

My son Austen, like many other autistic individuals, does not like (or understand the purpose of) many of society's little pleasantries. He balks at words like hello, goodbye, please, sorry and thank you; anything that can appear in a conversation as part of a rote pattern rather than a unique communication. This can seem rude, especially when it comes to words like "sorry" and "thank you," which are supposed to convey emotions of regret or gratitude. It seems (at least to the neurotypical world) that if someone doesn't say "thank you," they don't feel thanks. That certainly may be the case at times, but Austen's difficulty in grasping the meaning of these stock phrases has made me realize how often I toss them out because it's what is expected, rather than because my own emotions are in line with the words.

A few days ago, Austen was picking up a bit of ribbon next to where our cat was sitting. The cat took this as an invitation to play, batted at the ribbon and scratched Austen's hand. It was a tiny scratch but Austen cried bitterly for fifteen minutes, stopping occasionally to inspect his finger and breaking into fresh tears each time he saw the thin red line on his finger. I sat next to him stroking his back and waited until he was composed enough to accept a bandaid. As soon as I had him settled, Janie and her friend Valerie came running into the room. Janie had fallen down and scraped the palms of her hands as she tried to catch herself. This was the time for saying neurotypical things like "oh, I'm sorry you hurt yourself" or "can I see your hand, please?" Austen's conversation didn't go that way, of course, but it was just as sincere.

"Let me see!" he said. Janie held out her palms. "Oh, you need two bandaids!  It's bad that you need two. See, I have a bandaid too. Kitty scratched me and I cried and cried. But good that you're not crying so much like I did. And you know what else is good? Valerie doesn't have any bandaids! Good that she didn't get hurt." I realized that all the things society wants to hear were there: "How are you? I'm sorry you got hurt. I empathize.  I'm glad to see you're going to be ok." But there was something else there that we don't usually celebrate: "You and I may be hurt, but let's be grateful that someone else we love is safe and well." In seeing the specific situation rather than tossing out the generic words I might have, Austen saw something that I would have missed: an opportunity for gratitude.

Of course, there are situations in which he does use the expected words (if in unexpected ways), and they're all the more meaningful for their rarity. A few months ago, I caught a stomach virus from Janie. I started to feel ill at the end of the day; Mark was on his way home and both kids were with me. On my way to the bathroom as the first wave of cramps and nausea hit me, I let the kids know that I was feeling sick like Janie had been, but that I was going to be ok and that Daddy would be home soon to help me take care of them. When Austen heard me vomiting, he asked from outside the bathroom door, "Do you have the throw ups, Mama?"

"Yep. I sure do, sweetie," I said.

"Oh, bad that you do," he said, and I heard him walk off. A few moments later, he wedged something into the door frame. It was a card from the board game Sorry!.

He said, "I put a Sorry card there for you, because I'm sorry you have the throw ups."

"Oh, I love that! Thank you so much, Austen." And that thank you, as I think Austen knows, didn't really feel sufficient to express my gratitude.

In a recent business meeting at my COSA group, we gathered to discuss a possible change in our meeting script. The script had been adapted from scripts from other meetings, including meetings for addicts, and contained a portion where we have a moment of silence and prayer for the "addicts" in and out of these rooms. And the question came up, "If we are supposed to be focusing on our own codependency and our own recovery, why is the focus in the script on addicts rather than the friends and family members affected by addiction?" It was interesting problem to consider.

Some people thought we should add "codependents" to the script to keep it clear that we were focusing on our own recovery. Some people thought addicts covered us anyway, since they saw codependency as a form of relationship addiction. Some people didn't consider themselves codependents or addicts, but were in the meetings to heal from the effects of someone else's addiction. Some people preferred the term co-addict, since it addressed both the codependent and addictive aspects of their own issues. The one thing that was clear was that, while we are all working on our own issues, the common bond that holds us together is how we are dealing with those issues as they relate to someone else's sexually compulsive behavior. In the end, the script changed to "addicts and codependents," although that still was not universally satisfactory.

I had a similar issue come up recently on my blog when a reader asked why I bill it as being "married to a sex addict" if I should be focusing on myself and my own recovery. And that's actually something that's occurred to me as well. But I struggle with the same problems of language and identification that my group struggled with when discussing our script. In order for me to accurately describe my problems in a way that will allow me to reach out to others who are struggling through the same things that I am, I have to define myself, in part, by my husband's issues.

If I simply say that I'm codependent, I don't provide enough information to help people who are struggling specifically with issues related to their relationship with a sex addict. In fact, if I define myself as codependent, a lot of people who are new to (or completely unfamiliar with) recovery won't have any idea what that means. However, if I define myself through my husband's problems, it puts the focus on his addiction in a way that seems, well, actively codependent. In recovery from codependency, we're stuck in a bit of a circular trap: we try to move away from using other people to define us, but because the problem is that we have used other people to define us, in some way other people will always be part of the definition of our problem. In the end, I've left my tag line as is, because it's brief, descriptive, clear and accurate. I am married to a sex addict, and it is that relationship that informs my own recovery.

As of this moment, I have a backlog of 283 messages (and 608 Google Alerts) in my e-mail inbox. (Maybe there's one there from you!) So, I've decided that rather than writing today, I'm going to try to dig through at least some of that virtual clutter.

While you wait for me to finish, you can feast your eyes in envy on the lovely piece of art that will soon be gracing my "home office" (ok, a corner of my bedroom where I have a chair I sit in with my laptop). The multi-talented marta slices up drafts of her novel to create this new kind of art from her words. You can take a look at this and other pieces at Words Are Art.

When I was younger, my best friend Vickie and I used to hide under the stairs in the basement of my house and whisper curse words to each other in an elementary school act of defiance.

"Asshole," I would say, and giggle.

"Shit," she would whisper back, covering her mouth to stifle the laughter.

"Fuck," I'd return, snorting with silent mirth.

There was a glee in being together and saying things we could not say to anyone else. The words were forbidden and somehow dangerous and powerful, but they didn't carry the same meaning for us that they did for adults. We couldn't speak them in front of others in the light of day, so we whispered them to each other and the spiders, bonding in the dark safety of our secret clubhouse under the stairs.

As I grew, I learned what the words meant and saw the power they had to shock and offend, to convey a violence and passion that scared me and the rest of society. And I stopped saying them, even whispered in secret. They were bad words, dirty words, that only stupid and morally bankrupt people (my father exempted, of course) said. And I was a good girl.

But gradually, I began to find a balance. I'm a writer, so I don't want to say I realized that these words are "just" words, but I did realize that they are not "bad" words; they are words. In banning them from my own life, in remaining silent or whispering them under the stairs, I was giving them undue power over me. I could recognize the power they have to shock and offend others, but I wanted to own the words, and to make the decision of when and whether it was appropriate to use them without myself giving moral weight to their use.

I've been thinking about those words recently in relation to some of the new words I've come to use in my life and in my writing: addict, autistic, codependent, special education. I've found that society at large has come to see these words as shameful, dirty and imbued with a negative meaning. And in a way, this blog has become something between my balancing point and my modern adult hideaway, my safe place under the stairs. I can use the words here to bond with other people who, for the most part, understand them the way I do, without the same moral weight or judgment that society brings. I can say the words I can't always say out loud in my own life and feel not only less alone, but distinctly closer to others. And sometimes I can even giggle about them.

And it makes me think of some of the other words that people used to whisper under the stairs: words like breast cancer or left handed or interracial marriage. Maybe someday we as a society won't "accuse" people of being alcoholics any more than we accuse people of having cancer, because alcoholism truly won't be seen as a moral failing but as a neurological disease caused by an interaction of genes and environment. Maybe someday we won't see autism as uniformly sad and pitiable, but as diverse and individual in its liabilities and benefits as any other aspect of the human race. Maybe someday the world at large will grow up and learn to use the words as words: as a way to communicate and understand. Until then, I'll gleefully shout them here, and I won't be alone.