I’m grateful for a really great day. I’m grateful for excitement, hope and opportunity. I’m grateful for appearances out of left (or right) field. I’m grateful for a soft breeze and excellent coffee on the balcony. I’m grateful for loose-leaf, grid-ruled notebook paper. I’m grateful to be sober today.
We began reading “Into Action” last night at the “Anyone Anywhere” Meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous.1
Part of the conversation coalesced around this very poignant passage:
More than most people, the alcoholic leads a double life. She is very much the actor. To the outer world she presents her stage character. This is the one she likes her fellows to see. She wants to enjoy a certain reputation, but knows in her heart she doesn’t deserve it.
Big Book, p. 73
I think someone used the word “heartbreaking” to describe that and I agree. I can see that dynamic at work in my own life and am coming to understand a pretty complicated set of emotions around it. One common thread in alcoholic stories is the sense of “apartness.” You hear alcoholics talk, over and over, about having a sense of not belonging, not fitting in, not getting other people, feeling alone and feeling misunderstood or just ignored. I think that perspective is present in a lot of alcoholics, it was in this one.
I think everyone presents a stage character to the outer world. I think we present a stage character to ourselves (well, I did). There is always an aspirational element to how we want to appear in the eyes of others. When I was bouncing around elementary schools, I latched onto the importance of presenting a likeable stage character. I’m not sure how the next part happened, but I began to believe that people preferred the actor version, over the real me. To be honest, I did, too.
That split, the decision to move into the more presentable, showier shell, required leaving the old shell behind.2 I think that widening gulf, the delta between the actual me and the stage character, generated some pretty intense and unmanageable feelings. Like, I said, I discovered that alcohol, specifically drinking by myself, was a magic elixir for those burgeoning and unwelcome feelings. Drinking suddenly made that chasm not matter. Given my own feelings about the “real me,” seeing him get smaller in the rear view mirror was just what needed to happen. Me and drinking hit the road and turned up the radio.
It’s the last part of that last sentence, “knowing in her heart that she doesn’t deserve it,” that actually is heartbreaking. The knowledge that the whole thing is a sham, that none of it was true and that everything would come crashing down one day is tough to carry around. I knew from the time I was 18 that I was living a double life, in the service of her majesty Kim Crawford.3 I’ve written about that before:
Spies Like Us (daily gratitude list 11.2.22)
That, “knowing we don’t deserve it,” is also at the heart of the 3d resentment printing operation. This alcoholic believed his own hype to a great extent, when other people didn’t buy into the “stage actor” version as enthusiastically as I thought they should, well, there was a problem. When those kinds of “problems” rose to an appropriate level, there would need to be a trip to the bar. I’d drink the chasm away again and dream about a world where I would finally get my due.
Well, funny thing, I did finally reach that world. I think some people refer to it as the bottom. I think it’s when the gulf between the person I actually was and the alcohol and ego-propelled, stage actor version of me reached its maximum. At that point, things begin breaking apart, the Tower of Jenga falls,
Life becomes unmanageable.
It’s just no longer possible to run both of those lives anymore. I think the bottom is so horrible because it’s the first real instance of self-honesty in a long, long time. It’s meeting someone I ran from for a long, long time; someone I really did not relish seeing or catching up with. But that’s when recovery began for me. The brutal self-honesty that arrived at the bottom is what ignited the change, inspired the necessary willingness. I think the bottom is when you realize you are the maximum distance away from the person you were meant to be. I think recovery is the path back to that lost person.4
This is one of those switches the Big Book and the Steps seem to somehow flip. I think the self-reflection and self-appraisal that the Steps facilitate helps us realize something else we’ve been wrong about the whole time:
That person actually did deserve it.
To be honest, and if it helps you to think about it this way, the Tuesday night meeting is kind of like a book club, but without the wine.
I know we jump around a lot and I’m sorry for suddenly being talking about mollusks and arthropods and what not. I know there’s a Monty Python bit about that but couldn’t find it. Sorry.
Note: I didn’t drink sauvignon blanc as a teenager, I just like the way that sounds.
If you prefer a more sophisticated, Jungian discussion of integration, cool. I tend to look at in Boy Scout terms—how do we find that lost mf’er?