Teach Your Children

When I was a teenager, there was always some sort of girly magazine somewhere in my house. The now defunctYM or CosmoGirl! would come in the mail or I'd pick one up for a flight to which I hadn't bothered bringing a real book with actual substance. 90% of the content is mindless entertainment. Sexual mishaps! The best night creams! 28 weird sex tips involving a set of silverware! Vests!?

However some of the articles featured were actually relevant to my romantic/relationships/sexual education. One article actually began with a quiz, and not a stupid "Lol which red panda r u this week based on your mom's astrological sign?" but a quiz asking for my experiences with children and if I'd hypothetically be interested in having them in the future. It was fairly short, nothing I needed to take a prep course for. And my results were unenthusiastic: maybe.

I absolutely love kids. One of my favorite things to do with my nephew is to "answer" a banana and hand it to him saying "it's for you." I'm sure he's so sick of it by now and I like picking on him with his opinions about the world around him, mostly the wrong information kids receive about certain stuff. When I was home for Thanksgiving, he was adamant that Ken (Barbie's Ken) was the same person as GI Joe. After some further insistence and some back up support from my mom, Laszlo still wasn't convinced that the army ranger and Barbie's boyfriend were from two entirely separate universes.

It sounds incredibly exhausting to have kids. Both of my step-siblings have kids and I've tried to be around as much as I can in Seattle while they're growing up. They're all under the age of 8 and at varying degrees of communication and exposure to the outside world. Laszlo has discovered YouTube and Maddy asks me to chase her. Emily can't speak much at the moment but she likes eye contact and high-fives. Their development has been cool to watch, and I love them dearly. But within the last eight years or so, I've decided that this enjoyment is best felt as an aunt and not a parent.

In short, I'm not having kids.

As I said above, it sounds incredibly exhausting to have kids, and I know what I'm like when I'm exhausted. I practically become a child myself when I've hit strenuous periods of overwhelming stress and the subsequent aftermath. If I could boil my stress down to a few factors, they're definitely immigration, bureaucracy, finances, and my mental health. If just one of these goes into awry, at least one other will follow until I'm contemplating my entire living situation. For instance, getting let go from my job last month sent my mental health into a spiral, which led to applying for jobs in UlaanBaatar. Eventually I caught myself mid-fall and recovered, but it took a while. I was never so low at a point where I felt like drinking, but at one point, the thought of picking up seemed more plausible than dealing with the inclement blow of losing my job. Is having kids just because I'm expected to or have the biological capability worth blurring the lines of my sobriety when things get tough?

I think about adding kids to that equation. Not even plural, but any living human younger than me. It feels selfish to say that I want to conserve my time and energy for myself but it's not necessarily a bad thing. I've chosen to live my best life, which I know sounds like I pulled straight from a 22-year-old's Pinterest board, but it's true. I also don't want to compromise the quality of life of someone else because there are indeed times where I cannot handle my own shit, and they don't deserve that.

You know, this bullshit.

Speaking of quality of life, my shit genetics are also a huge part of my decision. Diabetes doesn't run in my family, and before you make a joke like "hhhnnnuurrrr it's because no one runs in my family," please know that extending this disease to another human is not a type of guilt I want to feel. We already bring kids into this world without their consent. No microscopic embryo can hold up two middle fingers to an ultrasound to give its plea for non-existence. But imagine knowing that the person you're bringing in to this world may end up with the same difficulties that you currently live with or that may have ended someone else's life. It seems incredibly cruel to me. Having kids should be the best part of your life, not a regret or a burden.

There are varying studies about Type 1 and the likelihood of your offspring developing the same disease. Some studies place it around 8%, and others place it as high as 25%. Keep in mind these are just my genetics alone, not paired with someone else's who has the disease in their family, as well. I know what I go through on a daily basis to not die. I encounter extremely misinformed people who, at no fault of their own, have ingested information from the media that "diabetes" is synonymous with obesity, poor lifestyle, amputations, no exercise, food choices, etc. They hardly ever differentiate from Type 1, 2, and the two other types that affect people, so all of the misinformation gets lumped into one disease which everyone thinks I have. Type 1 used to be referred to as "juvenile diabetes," as it was mostly common in children, sometimes as young as six-months. But with factors of exposure to viruses, Epstein-Barr Syndrome, and other autoimmune disorders, adults can be diagnosed into their 40s. I was diagnosed at 22, roughly six years after I had mono, a virus which stems from contact with Epstein-Barr. Doctors I've spoken figure that my body started attacking itself around this time, but the symptoms of my pancreas giving out and no longer producing insulin didn't develop for a few years.

As of now I've been diabetic for 8 and a half years. Managing the disease has become second nature for me and I have to be incredibly in tune with my body to make sure everything is operating according to plan. I'm always on manual mode to ensure my body can function the same as a person without diabetes. The process is exhausting, frustrating, time-consuming, embarrassing, and difficult to navigate bureaucratically. The reason I'm handling it well (most of the time) is because I was diagnosed at an age where I could effectively communicate and use my entire vocabulary to describe different feelings or the difficulties I was encountering with my doctors, parents, and friends. A six-month-old child doesn't have that same luxury, therefore creating an entirely different path of stress for parents to navigate with a diagnosis. I don't want to do that to a child or myself.

Not to mention the financial burden behind it. There have been so many times in the last eight years where I've felt like a financial burden due to my disease. Knowing it wasn't my fault and wasn't avoidable didn't make it any easier. I didn't ask for this, so why am I paying for it? But not just paying for it, why am I paying so much?

To give an idea of what the financial costs associated with diabetes are, here are a few numbers for you:

• Between 2001 and 2015, the cost of insulin rose 585%. 

• Insulin is the sixth most expensive liquid in the world at $9,600 a gallon. 

• In 2013, diabetics in the United States spent more on their diabetes medications and supplies than the NFL and NBA spent on advertising combined. 

If you wanted to know how staggering the numbers are when it comes down to treating diabetes, that's what it looks like. I'm of the belief there will be no cure. It's become a joke in the diabetic community, only five to ten more years!  If there's no cure, they keep making money off of us. If we have diabetes and want to live, we have to pay. Bringing a child into the world to possibly take on that burden seems like a death sentence, and if the price of insulin keeps rising, it may very well be. I know I've harped about it on here before, but the movie Arrival got to me in a lot of ways. It didn't only affect me as a language nerd, but it also struck me as someone who has the ability to change the course of life for someone else and ultimately know I could have done it differently. Arrival  has been out since 2016 so I'm not going to do a spoiler alert because you had your chance.) Amy Adams has a daughter and at one point in the movie, we learn her daughter dies from an incurable disease. However, Amy has the ability to see time in a non-linear fashion as a result of communicating with the Heptapod aliens. Before she even has the child, she sees that her daughter will die from the disease at a young age. She knew the outcome of her life and her daughter's pain and demise, yet she went through with it anyway.

I can't be that person.

Initially I thought the decision to go childless was easy. I've presented myself with all the evidence, it makes sense, and there won't be any drawbacks. But the only thing I'm hung up on is the opportunity to name another human being. Most of my family's pets have had human-ish names: Jake, Elwood, Gracie, Edgar, Rocky, Cosmo, and Patrick. Patrick came with his own name and the rest were a family effort which took a number of days to come to an agreement. I can't have a kid just because I want to name something, someone. When you're growing up and you get a new puppy for Christmas or find a stray kitten there's a whole "well, what should we call you?" process. It's exciting!

Sometimes their name is an indication of their physical appearance. But most newborns usually look the same. There's no striking characteristic which will sway you one way or another about a particular label or comment on your child's appearance. But with humans, names aren't facts or statements. I had a short list of names I really liked, nothing complicated or tough to spell. I like them still, but at the same time they aren't names for pets; they are names for people.

Josephine.

Vivian.

Cedar.

So I feel like I've had to abandon this little list. They aren't terribly rare or elusive, just an extension of me and what I feel connected to. But choosing to knowingly make someone's life more complicated, arduous, or tragic, isn't worth a name. I know I'm making the right decision.

Plus if I ended up with twins I would fucking lose it. So there's that, too.

Czech and Date

I first used Tinder in 2015. I had just moved back to Seattle from Minneapolis and I wasn't really sure of my relationship status at the time, so I hopped on the app with a notoriously simple UI. After a few cautious swipes I got a match! My first match! What should we name our kids? What will he think of a color scheme containing seafoam and taupe?

After some further investigation, I discovered my future husband and I had around 60 friends in common from Facebook. Of course, he was a comedian.

Tinder is such a mystery to me because I've seen people use it like a sperm donor donation guide but also in a hot-or-not rating system way just to innocently pass the time. None of the matches I ever made came to fruition. The furthest I got was moving from the app to text messaging with our real phone numbers. No movies, no dates, no walks along Alki. A daily "hey how's it going" turned into a weekly "what are you up to this weekend?" I wasn't crazy determined to meet anyone every time I've used Tinder, and I spent most of my time swiping left to find people I know and giggle over how they chose to represent themselves through six Instagram pictures and their recent Spotify artists. 

Honestly, meeting someone from Tinder sounded like a lot of work.

Are they going to like me? I'm leaving the country soon so I could ruin his life. I'll ruin his life. I'm running out of foundation. Is this guy worth scraping the bottom of the tube with a q-tip just to give off the illusion that my skin is decent?

I'd rather stay home and watch Brendan Fraser movies with my cat (this ended up happening a lot). 

For the first three months I was in the Czech Republic, the only person I thought of was myself. Initially this idea is selfish, but when transitioning to a post-communist country with a lot of people who have been through some shit, I had to make sure I was doing okay before I even considered romantically invited someone into my life who may have very different societal ideologies than myself. I redownloaded the app and edited my profile with more recent pictures and a few notes about my eating habits (cheeseburgers), my drinking habits (there isn't one), and my love for sitcoms (not that there's anything wrong with that). But even after ten minutes, I could tell my main issue would be the language barrier. 

Most people here who are under the age of 30 speak English to some degree. It is now taught in primary schools as opposed to German or Russian. The more profiles I went through, the more I realized that I'm either going to have to find someone who speaks English or I'm going to have to learn Czech very quickly. I'm very sparing with right swipes, so any dude who I became interested in superficially had to meet a certain set of criteria: not all of their pictures should be of them drinking, they need at least one photo someone else took of them, no gym selfies, and they had to indicate they spoke at least some English. After a few minutes on the app, I saw a popular pattern emerging among Czech men:

(I accidentally swiped left on a couple of these goobers so I'll update if anything happens.)

If you guessed "men on vacation wearing sunglasses," congratulations! Most of the profiles I saw had an absurd amount of men traveling and being active. If you swapped all of these pictures out with American girls who recently studied abroad for all of two months, there would be zero difference. I shied away from making contact because I think I was intimidated. I know myself well. I don't surf. I don't mountain climb. I don't go to places where I can't at least buy a snack. I like being comfortable and where there's no threat of large crowds or riptide or bees. There is a residual fear of not being able to connect with any of these people because I like movies and writing and typically things that involve being indoors for an extended period of time. What am I going to talk about? How I found a good Russian cam rip of Isle of Dogs or what subreddit deserves more attention?

I only had one successful match where the conversation lead to WhatsApp and eventually a date at a teahouse. He looked like a young James Spader and majored in astrophysics. In his spare time, he's working on getting his pilot license and spending time with his family. English wasn't his first language and my first instinct was to correct his actually pretty decent grammar, but it was so harmless and cute I almost couldn't take it seriously. And that's why I think I'm largely unsuccessful with dating apps: I can't take them seriously. 

Every profile becomes a joke to me. By the end of my perusing I've given half the guys ambiguous Slavic accents and butchered their English while they talk about the differences between good and bad dinner rolls. Tinder has now replaced Reddit as the "hmm what else can I do" entertainment portion of my evenings. It's incredibly mindless and I only login after I'm convinced I've read the entirety of the internet. I forget I have Tinder. I open it maybe once a month, and each time I open it I have to reacquaint myself with the conversations I left dangling or the five guys named Martin and the three guys named Ondrej or the couple of guys named Pavel. I'm also convinced there's only seven Czech names for men and that's why I can't keep any of them straight or differentiate them from one another.

I wonder if Tinder is worth my time because it slowly came to feel like a chore. I became more content with continuing to spend time with myself than muster the effort to meet someone who may not understand me, both emotionally and linguistically. James Spader understood my jokes and we texted a few times after our date, but we haven't talked in maybe two weeks. Things fizzled out and I think neither of us saw the point of carrying it out any further. I also have my own suspicion he lost interested when he found out I don't drink or go clubbing. The only thing in common was our age. It was tough to build a cultural connection in such a short time, but maybe it was for the best. I always feel safer when I'm alone. The act of procreation is really popular here, and I don't mean the euphemism for sex, I mean actually procreating to make children, so the older generation urges the younger to make offspring. I can't even start my job, let alone a family. What I'm getting at is that I don't know how I'll measure up to Czech expectations of how life is supposed to proceed. I'm on a very different unpaved road and I'm not trying to rush into anything. For now, Tinder is only a source of entertainment, a digital carousel of traveling millenials and Adidas tracksuits. I'm not desperate. I think the only person I need right now is me.

"Lord, beer me strength."

I've been sitting on this post for a while because I'm not sure how to address certain things without getting a lot of flak for them, but fuck it. 

I haven't been to an AA meeting in almost six months. Part of this is due to the geographic isolation of Brno and the lack of English speaking meetings. When I first arrived, I made a call to a number listed for expat meetings and discovered that because so few people attended, it eventually disbanded. Like many websites in the Czech Republic, the directory hadn't been updated in a few years. Larger cities such as Prague, Vienna, Warsaw, and Bratislava are more likely to have more than one English meeting since they have larger populations than Brno and many English speaking expats have chosen to settle in those places. So if I'd like to attend a meeting, the closest one is almost two hours away. 

I live in an alcohol dominated culture here in the Czech Republic. This wasn't my intention upon moving here because let's face it: if I'm going to relapse, this was a really expensive way to go about it. Czechs drink more beer than any place else in the world at roughly 43 gallons per person per year. If you lived here during the 13th century and stole hops, your punishment was death, and Pilsner style beers originated from the Czech city of Plzen. People often drink their beer out on the streets due to lax open container laws, and there's multiple pubs and restaurants specializing in the nation's obsession on every block . Drinking seems to be a way of life here. I'm not sure if it's solely based on alcoholism, but it's definitely conjoined with celebration. Christmas and Easter markets feature mulled spiced wine and different styles of Moravian lager. Even older pagan traditions incorporate more modern styles of liquid celebration, the next one being on the 30th of April where an effigy of a witch is constructed from straw and then burned to the ground to welcome the season of spring. Moravia, the historical country where Brno is located, is infiltrated every year by tourists looking for good wine and cheer, both of which are usually absent in their home countries.

To be honest, it hasn't bothered me that much. My obsession to drink is gone but I'm still very aware and alert of my surroundings. I can't let my guard down at anytime and I need to stay attentive if I'm going to maintain the current spree of not fucking up my life. I've turned down drink tickets at shows and no one seems to care if I ask for water, even though it is almost always served in a beer mug. After a show a while back, a few people outside were smoking a joint and they asked if I wanted to smoke. I politely declined and he said "I didn't know people could be sober from marijuana." Everyone's definition of "sober" is different, but I sluffed it off with "Well if I smoke then I'll definitely drink." They got a laugh out of it, I got a laugh out of it, and I continued on with my night. It would be silly to move to another country and think you're not going to encounter any kind of drinking or drug culture, but a short absent minded change of heart can quickly deter things from the path I've chosen for my life to take.

During my sobriety (I no longer use the term "recovery" because it makes me feel my decision to abstain from alcohol makes me weak, helpless, and powerless), there have definitely been a few evenings or circumstances which have led me to grit my teeth and feel like I am really in need of a meeting. When these moments arose, I was quick to talk with a sober friend or just message someone who supports my sobriety. I know what my triggers are, everything from old friends to sunflower seeds, and sobriety allows me to continue being sober, as redundant as that sounds. The reason I haven't been to a meeting in six months, or gone four hours out of my way to attend one, is because I have learned to cope with life's unfortunate circumstances as they come up, something the AA program draws you away from.

I first started going to meetings when I was in rehab because at the time, I didn't have a choice. All of the addicts and alcoholics would sit in a cafeteria and a former resident of our program would come in to discuss the "only three ways" of staying sober: going to meetings, getting a sponsor, and working the program. I was scared out of my wits. I certainly couldn't go back to the life I had barely maintained of drinking every day and destroying everything in my path, and if these people were speaking the truth, I needed to hike on those paths, too. My life depended on it, as I thought. 

My nickname in college.

I was in rehab for 21 days. Upon being released into the wild, I started attending one or two meetings a week depending on my schedule. At all of these meetings, this three-pronged approach of attending meetings, getting a sponsor, and working the steps was echoed throughout all of the rooms. But one narrative particularly stood out. Time and again, I encountered people (and I'm going to paraphrase because I still respect the anonymity of the program) who would say something along the lines of "You know I've tried to get sober eight or nine times now and this program really works. You gotta keep coming back and work the steps and get a sponsor and find your higher power." The problem with this statement is that the same person would say this every time between those eight or nine attempts of getting sober. Newly sober folks are thrust into the realm of Alcoholics Anonymous without even being asked what sort of path they would be interested in taking to sobriety. It's assumed that AA works as it's popular and many people who don't have the resources to go to rehab or treatment can attend for free. 

I've read the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous twice, once when I was "forced" to get sober at age 16 after I was caught for under age drinking and again when I entered treatment at 27. I underlined passages that made sense to me, or sentences that resonated with the person in me who really wanted to be sober. Little quips and phrases are common in the book and "The Program," as in there's always a proverb to accompany every problem someone brings to the table. Tough time staying sober for the long haul?

Take it one day at a time. But things are so complicated and I'm worried about drinking!

Easy does it. There are even entire chapters dedicated to atheists and women as they weren't equally represented in AA and were completely inferior to the white men who wrote the book prior to the last World War. I came into AA skeptical. As an atheist (that's probably the most pretentious way I've ever started a sentence), I don't believe in a god, gods, or anything that can assume a consciousness and change the direction of my life so that it becomes significant to me. My viewpoints aren't particularly militant and I don't go out of my way to address them unless I'm asked. The idea of finding a "Higher Power" didn't sit with me well. If I don't believe in religion or have a faith of any kind, how am I supposed to apply energy to something that is supposedly going to help me stay sober? 

One of AA's popular credos is "Well, your Higher Power can be anything. It can be a doorknob!" Which...doesn't sell that point particularly well. Later I'll be instructed to turn my will and care over to this doorknob "as I understand it" and expect it to alleviate me of the perils of alcoholism, a scientific problem in need of a scientific solution. I don't understand god because it doesn't exist for me. For a while I even tried making Jeff Lebowski my literal High(er) Power to no avail, just to see if I can really buy into what Bill W was attempting to do for people like me. Clearly AA didn't take other subsets of society into account when creating the literature pushed on people from the very beginning. I was getting uncomfortable following the program. Another popular AA motto is "fake it til you make it," and if you know me at all, I don't fake shit. In a way, I was expected to not only "check my beliefs at the door" and to follow a path to sobriety which I was told was the only path from the beginning. I couldn't see any correlation between 11 of the 12 Steps of AA and me staying sober. What did me divulging my entire sexual history, my fears, my wrongs, and my resentments to another person have to do with me drinking? What did me giving up my power and assuming powerlessness to a program keep me sober? What was the scientific evidence behind any of this?

Overtime, I started going to meetings less and less. I came to realize I didn't have to be dependent on AA to stay sober. As long as I was keeping myself busy, not isolating, and not putting myself in risky situations, I had this sobriety thing on lock. AA masks its acceptance of all people due to the Third Tradition (there are 12 Traditions, as well): the only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking. So in short, if you want to stop drinking, AA has a seat for you. However, if you have any disbelief in a Higher Power or have no interest in getting a sponsor, the judgement in that room will be paramount to any shame you've ever experienced. I was told I would drink if I didn't have a sponsor, and I haven't had a sponsor for two years. People knew I was skeptical of many different aspects of the program except for one, being AA is where I can meet other people like me. Unfortunately there aren't many other arenas I can navigate that can accommodate the same groups of people. Cruising the subreddit r/stopdrinking helped, and staying in touch with the sober people who did accept my different points of view also helped. 

So the less and less I came to meetings, the more and more people stopped talking to me. I had met numerous friends through the program over the 18ish months I was attending. I met people my own age, people who grew up in houses just down the street from me, and people who were adamant that following the Big Book was the only way to achieve sobriety. It seemed hard for people to understand that there was more than one path to achieve the same thing. AA isn't a one-size-fits-all program, and while it got me off on the right foot, it abandoned me in the long run. Even though there was a chair figuratively saved for me at every meeting, it was clear I wasn't welcome if I didn't strongly believe in the fundamental tenets. Watching people come back to meetings after they relapse was one of the most cringeworthy experiences I've ever had. Someone in the program would have a few months of sobriety and then come back to a meeting a while later and announce they only had a few days, or a week. The judgement in the room would become suffocating, face after face of growing, unanimous disappointment in someone who had they "came to meetings, got a sponsor, and worked the program" would have remained sober. In AA, there's a response to everything. "Well he worked the program but he didn't really try."

Only going to one meeting a week won't guarantee sobriety!" "The book says 'half measures availed us nothing' so of course they aren't sober -- they didn't follow the steps correctly!"

I knew I was socially cut out from the program and the people I met when I had my going away show in September. I had two previous sold out shows when I was producing One Laugh at a Time, a show featuring sober comics in whatever capacity as long as they were committed to sobriety. The sober community saw it as a chance for fellowship and enjoying comedy at the same time, and it was great to have people like me on the same line up. For my going away show, I had my favorite Seattle people perform with me on "Liz Czechs Out," the show that inspired the naming of this blog. I advertised for about a month and I was able to have it at the club I spent most of my time at. The crowd was reserved but fun and the other comics gave me a card before the night was over. After the show I thanked friends, family, old boyfriends, and former colleagues who came to celebrate my coming adventure. The audience filed out of the club and I finally had a moment to catch my breath, and that's when I realized that not one person I had met in AA during my two years in Seattle came to my show. 

The program that was supposed to free me of resentments was only creating them. Sometimes I meet sober people and they assume I'm in AA just based on the fact I'm sober. I don't trash the program or speak negatively of it to their face, but I politely imply I was able to find help for my sobriety elsewhere. One guy in Brno messaged me a while back after finding out I was sober. We exchanged some pleasantries but in the end, his tenacious attitude about AA was extremely off putting. He messaged me a while back asking "Still sober?" under the guise of care.

Yep, I'm still sober. I live an environment not conducive at all to sobriety yet I've fallen asleep every night without the use of alcohol. I show up on time 20 minutes early to everything, and I know when to separate myself from situations that might make me uncomfortable. I keep myself busy with writing, working, learning, and staying in contact with people who accept me for who I am, the beliefs I have, and the methods I choose to support sobriety. AA fronts itself as an all encompassing program, but after enough meetings and experience, I ultimately felt alone. I feel alone here in Brno sometimes, but this was me choosing to be alone. We all chose to be sober, so who cares about how we get there as long as it's the common end result?