Moving with Grace was never a term I thought much of at any time before getting sober. I mostly attributed it to ballet dancing or swans. However, in recovery, I sometimes hear people use the word “grace”. People usually say they try to grant themselves a little grace when they are living through a difficult time. As of late, I have been thinking about how the word applies to me in my first year of sobriety.
By definition grace can mean a refined and elegant movement, courteous goodwill, or to honor something with one’s presence. It also holds theological significance. In this case it means to be in God’s favor. Though I am not religious, I can see how all four of the definitions could serve someone in recovery. Basically, grace, by any definition, is a good thing.
Throughout most of my life, I have been uncomfortable in my own skin. It’s not that I have felt I was born in the wrong body, but that I was born into the wrong circumstance. I never felt like I really belonged anywhere or that I fit anything perfectly. When I was a little kid, I hated my name. I wanted to be named Raul. Though I am not sure why that is, I did have two cousins with that name, and when I went to the video store I always saw a movie called “Eating Raoul”. I think it just sounded interesting. Brian always sounded plain and boring. Never mind that I looked like a white kid with blonde hair and blue eyes.
I also taught myself break dancing. This was odd since we lived in a tiny, cow poke town in central California. Break dancing was just beginning to enter the zeitgeist everywhere else, but Ione was at least 10 to 15 years behind. I remember watching the movies “Breaking” and “Beat Street” and wanting to be a part of a break dancing crew. Spoiler alert: it never happened. I was the only kid I knew that could dance this way and if I’m being honest, I probably wasn’t at a competitive street dancing level. Unless, of course, that street was in Ione California.
I moved around a lot and didn’t really get involved in any group activity until I was 8 or 9. In competitive sports I was never a stand out athlete, but I did play. But I didn’t love sports. I liked them, though it never seemed like a mutual like. I don’t think I really loved any activity until I began theater in high school. That was the first time it felt like something fit. However, it was so late in my youth that I didn’t really know what to do with that love. I performed quite a bit for a few years, but by the time I should have made a move to create a strong foundation, my foundation for alcohol took root first. After that, nothing grew.
Though most of my growth was to be put on hold for alcohol, it’s not like it didn’t serve a purpose. I had felt lost my entire life, and drinking made me feel less alone. It numbed all of those feelings of not being true to myself. However, I stopped nurturing that love and desire to perform, and spent nearly all of my free time on drinking. The problem, however, is that I couldn’t stay drunk all the time, so when I was sober, I felt off balance. It felt like everyone was watching me and I felt clumsy.
I felt like I was not moving with grace, like an oaf or some sort of ogre. I became so self-aware that I would sometimes measure the way I swung my arms or I would make sure I was walking how I though a “cool” person would walk. It didn’t feel natural because I wasn’t walking how I walked, I was walking how I thought I was supposed to walk. This behavior began to bleed into just about every aspect of my life. I began to measure everything I did and I would curse and seethe at myself for making the smallest of mistakes. I was my own warden.
The only real salve for this inner judge and the outer slave was to drink. When I drank I didn’t feel this anger for myself and I didn’t feel so insecure and clumsy. I didn’t feel so outside of my own body.
So, when I finally decided to really give sobriety a try, I was at the end of my rope. I simply didn’t think I knew who I was. – I had no idea. I actually expected to find a completely different person after committing to recovery. While I am not quite the same person as I was when I started, I can tell you that the person I was looking for was right before my eyes the entire time. I just refused to look at him.
Moving with grace, for me, means to move freely as myself in my own way regardless of what people think. There is an elegance and refinement to that. Moving with grace is to be good to myself and be good to others. It means to bring honor to myself and my name by acting in accordance to what I believe is important. No, I have not changed my name to Raul or have I joined a break dancing crew in New York, but I’ll always consider it an option.
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