I’m grateful for a completely stunning morning on the pirate balcony. I’m grateful for finding peace, even on the stormy days. I’m grateful for crazy ideas. I’m grateful for courage and listening to myself. I’m grateful to be sober today.
This is an exciting day, and not just because it’s Wednesday. It’s the return of Breakfast with an Alcoholic!
This episode, XXXI, which will be released later today, features Sean—an alcoholic who also appeared way back in Episode 7!1 I’m not going to give too much away if I say that Sean did “okay” on the Alcoholic Lightning Round. We talked a lot about the role of spirituality in recovery, which dovetails pretty nicely with the newest feature, “3 Things.” Yes, this is very similar to the “5 Things” that was a regular staple in the Sunday Gratitude Extravaganza. This week it’s “Three Things I Learned About Spirituality in Recovery, and you’ll hear me, Jane and Sean address that. Also, this feature is very much intended to promote discussion, participation, etc among you, the very dear subscribers to this newsletter.2 So, if you’d like to contribute your own “3 Things,” that’s why our Higher Power invented discussion boards.
I hope people understand that I’m going to make good on my threat to start marching through the Steps here as a way to celebrate my anniversary month, but really to keep me focused and moving things along in a productive fashion. As part of that, I’m still soliciting volunteers for the inaugural 8-week Zoom “Introduction to Alcoholics Anonymous, the Big Book and the Twelve Steps.”
After I hit the publish button yesterday and saw the immense number of typos and weird errors, well, I immediately went to fix it and was horrified, but I also was a little concerned that when I talked about “thinking my way out of it,” that I was somehow taking credit for things that I’m pretty sure fell well beyond my pay grade. What I meant or mean about “thinking my way out of it,” was simply creating a logical construct that moved me along the necessary waypoints on the trail to recovery. Meaning, I had to come up with a personal philosophy of recovery.
The thing I say about recovery being about finding the way back to one’s self, well, I actually believe that. The fancy psychiatric term might be “integration.” I think so many of us found alcohol to be a really excellent way to drape or disguise the stuff we didn’t want others to see, which in my case, was kind of the core of who I was. For me, a significant part of recovery has been rediscovering that person. The part that makes me super uncomfortable is the part where I say something schmaltzy about it being about inviting that person home. But that’s actually how I feel.
Second, I needed to establish a goal for my recovery. For many, many years, I misunderstood the mission and thought the mountain I needed to climb was giving up alcohol. I tried to live a life that required pretty substantial daily alcohol intake, without the alcohol. In those days, actually years, I’d spend the mornings plotting out how I wasn’t going to drink that day. Lining up sober activities like sandbags when you know there’s a flood coming. Literally, the lists I made in the morning were about how I was going to fill up all of my time with those good activities, leaving no time for the bad. I guess my recovery strategy boiled down to this: I was going to cut off the oxygen for my addiction; smother it with a pillow of sobriety.
It turns out it’s hard to do this to yourself.
For me, alcohol and the connected thinking patterns were so ingrained, there was no amount of sober stuff I could do that was going to solve the fundamental problem: Me. After the meeting, after the phone calls with the sober fellows or the Sponsor, I was left with me at the end. That version of me didn’t know how to excise alcohol from my life. Actually, this version of me might not either, but that’s okay because I changed the goal and the questions I was asking myself.
I think the real goal of sobriety is to build a happy, productive, meaningful and sustainable life. This is not a neighborhood of semi-identical McMansions; your version of that and mine might be very different. This may be controversial, but I’m not even sure that complete abstinence ought to be everyone’s goal, or maybe not the goal at the beginning. It needed to be for me, but I think a big part of Step Work was figuring out exactly what were the problems in my life and in the way I saw myself and then setting about changing the things I could.
I really believe the point of recovery and sobriety is to find happiness. Working the Steps, particularly Steps One and Two, requires each of us to formulate what it is that we believe about the existence and nature of a higher power. But it goes beyond that, I learned that working the Steps was also about discovering and defining what it was that made me happy and identifying the attachments to things and ideas that didn’t. Because the attachments to things in that latter category were problems that were very efficiently addressed by drinking.
I think recovery is not ultimately about replacing the time I spent drinking with a schedule of sober events and recovery-based activities. For me, it was replacing drinking with happiness and love. Now, here’s another tricky spot. This is not the same as saying, “I’m going to stop drinking as soon as all of these problems in my life get solved.” Once I have the right job, the right place to live, the right separation agreement with my ex, the right girlfriend, the right car, the right amount of recognition at work, well, then I won’t need to drink.
No, this is very different and more existential. Is there a higher power that animates the world around me in a mysterious way that I will never actually comprehend? If so, what does this higher power expect of me? I don’t think I was born with some ultimate purpose or main mission programmed into my brain. One of my beliefs about the nature of the Universe and the Higher Power that has some role in running it, is that they very much value efficiency. If you think about the job of Higher Power of the Universe—well, there’s a lot of stuff to do. When you’re confronted by that kind of massive scale, efficiency, applying the right tool for the job becomes absolutely critical.
I think all of us evolve, some of it according to plan, some of it a response to random events, and one of the central exercises of life is trying to discern how we can best put ourselves to use in the world. I don’t have scientific proof for this, but I think the closer I get to discerning that purpose, the happier, the more satisfied I am with life. My dog Kayla loved picking up the newspaper at the bottom of the driveway every morning. She’d hold her head high as she trotted back up the driveway, Washington Post firmly but gently gripped in that Lab mouth and that tail was very proudly wagging. She knew that she was doing something that I valued and she knew she was super good at it. That’s a big part of happiness, I’ve learned.
Replacing drinking with happiness and love seems like exactly the kind of vague, aspirational recovery advice that I railed about yesterday. And if that was all I had to tell you dear subscribers, it doesn’t give you much to go on, does it? Except that is exactly what working the Steps accomplished for me. It helped me see where I actually was more likely to fit in this world, where I could most be of service to others and to myself.
I didn’t understand all of this when I started. It took me a long time and a lot of relapses, a lot of failure, a lot of pain for a lot of people. The pain, the sadness, the unhappiness were guideposts and showed me the things I needed to explore, not anesthetize. That helped me see the real problem with my life:
It was me and how I viewed myself in the world.
When the self-dishonesty falls away and you finally see yourself, that moment can be jarring and some people call that moment, “The Bottom.” For me, that was the moment when I realized I was the farthest away from myself that I could be. But that horrible moment is also when I finally saw where I could go from where I was:
Up and Out.
Things are far from perfect in my life. There are some very serious challenges staring me in the face, but I wake up sober and happy in the morning. Not necessarily humming a jaunty tune and having birds land on my shoulders happy; not necessarily shouting a gushing, “it’s great to be alive” as I rise from my bed happy. I wake up knowing the challenges, feeling the fear, but also believing that things will be ok, that at the end of the day, I’ll have gotten what I actually needed. That’s what recovery and AA and working the Steps did for me.
It’s also true that recovery and AA and working the Steps may be why it’s been nearly four years since my last drink. That is, by itself, just an f****** unbelievable thing, if we’re going to label things correctly. Sobriety wasn’t about finally winning a campaign against drinking or the number of non-drinking days I’ve racked up, it was about finding happiness and the path back to myself.
I’m not actually moving to Roman numerals. They get cumbersome fast.
I’m not using “dear subscribers” in a North Korean way.
I can’t decide if “happiness” suits my recovery, but the absence of unhappiness probably does. Contentment is too mild a word, and serenity, well that’s still a goal. But a lesson for living the good life, a way to silence the overblown anxieties, resentments, and fears in my head, yes, working the steps has helped in a way nothing else did.