1. Admit that everything is horrible and out of control.

2. Accept that no god of anyone’s understanding will step in to fix it. (see historical genocide, natural disasters, Donald Trump.)

3. Turning yourself over to any person or entity will only reduce what’s left of your free will. (see religion, social media, and advertising.)

4. Admit that you are fucked up and that in large part it was your childhood experience that is to blame, along with your genes.

5. Accept your failures and forgive yourself. Ask forgiveness where you deserve it but don’t be surprised if you don’t get it.

6. Look to thinkers you respect for the wisdom you need to keep going. Try Camus, Sartre, Schopenhauer, George Orwell, Doris Lessing, Fran Lebowitz, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, or Hermann Hesse.

7. See a professional if things get too rough.

8. Accept that you have caused harm but that you are human. Try to do your best going forward.

9. Every day, try to think about someone else and try to do one small thing to ease someone’s burden, even a phone call to someone who lives alone.

10. Realize how repetitive the 12 steps of AA are! Fucking hell! Enough guilt already!

11. Continue to think about other people, since reflecting on your flaws is an endless loop created by brain chemistry gone awry.

12. Reach out to others in your despair! They too know that everything is horrible and out of control! Ask for and offer comfort! Look to art when your brain hurts or your heart aches. And have a drink if you feel like it. I’ve just discovered Flaming Margarita’s and they are amazing!

There is nothing worse than feeling powerless.

Mothers always believe they have the power to make things okay for their children. If they scrape a knee, you know how to make it better. If they have a fever, you know how to lower it. If it’s something worse, you know how to go to the emergency room. If they hate a teacher, you arrange a meeting.   If someone steals their bike, you get it back. Whatever the problem is, you solve it.

If your child jumps of a cliff, you vow to make sure he’ll survive. If he’s not breathing, you still believe you can blow life into his lungs and bring him back.

Then, you keep pretending you have the power to punish the negligent or to force an apology or to find a grief group or to sleep soundly, or to hang on to your friends, or to get anything done that needs doing. But you are powerless.

Then after six months you ask the ex-husband if you can have some of your child’s belongings from before he got hurt but the ex says No, sorry.   BUT, you say to him, but this but that, but I’m the Mother! No, he’s not ready because he’s too busy because he doesn’t trust you and   anyway he’s going away for Christmas, just No. Sorry, but no, he simply can’t.   He’ll “look through” the stuff but not now and not with you.

A hundred years ago, I married a rigid controlling person who was wrong for me in every way except for the fact of our beautful son, and now I am powerless against his need to say no to me.

This is why I could never accomplish Step One. I can’t accept that I have no power, even when it’s so painfully and irrevocably obvious.

When I saw this picture today, I was transfixed.   When I saw Connie Culp on the news tonight, I was stunned.   As “the nation’s first face transplant recipient,” here’s what she said:

Don’t judge people who don’t look the same as you do. Because you never know. One day it might be all taken away.

After smirking at photos of celebrity plastic surgery, I have to take stock of myself.

Imagine going through life without your face to depend on. Your face is everything! It’s the thing that stares back at you in the mirror, the thing you present to other people to communicate with them, to charm them, to placate them, to seduce them, to project who you are or who you’re pretending to be.

Without your face, you have to give up all that. You have to rely on your actual Self. You have to have inner resources that I can’t even imagine.   You have to have courage.   Connie Culp was shot in the face and lived through it. She has lived through the experience of being called a monster by kids who were frightened by her face.

And now she has appeared at a press conference, in order to help persuade potential donors that face transplants matter.

If only we could always remember how lucky we are, instead of thinking about our skin problems!

Schopenhauer’s advice for dealing with the problem of existence is to rely upon art, compassion and resignation.   I think that gratitude is a good idea, too, even if it sounds like preachy 12 step crap.