I’m grateful for a really lovely weekend. I’m grateful for a train trip. I’m grateful for letting things unspool. I’m grateful for peace and contentment. I’m grateful for a rainy morning. I’m grateful to be sober today.
It’s a rainy morning here in New York City. This is a good thing on many fronts. Number one—I have quite a lot of strategery to be doing.1 Number Two—I possess a very swanky umbrella that will likely be involved on a meander to the undisclosed coffee shop later this morning. I’m coming off a really lovely weekend with my daughter and her husband and it’s moments like these that sometimes show just how much things have changed.
I’m going to summarize: I put my daughter through a lot. I’ve written about some of it before, but she definitely saw more than her share of the dishonesty, selfishness and just general loutery that attended interactions with the active alcoholic me. When I moved to New York, she was skeptical. How did I think I was I going to stay sober living in New York? How did I think I was ever going to stay sober? Why now?
These are all really good questions and they are borne of the complete and utter mystification that we alcoholics and addicts produce. Our continued use in the face of ever-escalating losses and injuries to others defies comprehension. “Why would they do that?” “Why don’t they stop drinking? Can’t they see what it’s doing to their family?” Or the one I’ve heard a few too many times:
I guess you love drinking more than you love me.
That’s a tough one. It’s one hundred percent not the way this alcoholic ever thought, but it’s also completely understandable that this would be the way the civilians would feel. How could they not? We alcoholics think we’re defying gravity most of the time we’re drinking. We think those pesky problems, caused by us, magically float out of everyone’s mind once we get a few drinks under the belt. You know, the way that works for us. Hahaha. No. The civilians seemed to remember those things, no matter how hard I tried to drink-erase their memories, too.2
The truth of the matter is that the central element of the disease of addiction is the inability of the addict to control their use. This is the first “illusion of control” that has to be released and it is neatly summed up in the First Step:
We admitted that we were powerless over alcohol and that our lives had become unmanageable.
I wrote about this not so long ago:
Given my strategery side-hustle, I’m often engaged in contemplation of things like “change of control” provisions in complicated agreements. The central premise of this kind of a provision being something like this: “I’m cool doing this deal with you, but if someone else buys you or something, then maybe I want out of the deal.” In a corporate context, that can be a pretty reasonable request. However, I’m here to tell you, this approach does not work in one’s personal life all that well.
When I look back, I see how frequently I attached conditions to all of the relationships in my life. I had all sorts of secret “outs” built into the agreements, hidden traps that would free me to declare a breach or just terminate the whole thing and walk away. All of these things were expressions of control and the problem was that exercising those options often required a fair amount of drinking to quell the anger and hurt and shame that always boiled together in those days.
It is the illusion of control that helped drive my drinking. This was my view, and it was like the view of just about every other alcoholic out there:
Most people try to live by self-propulsion. Each person is like an actor who wants to run the whole show; is forever trying to arrange the lights, the ballet, the scenery and the rest of the players in his own way. If his arrangements would only stay put, if only people would do as he wished, the show would be great.
Big Book, pp. 60-61
When I rolled triumphantly into New York, fresh from my successful campaign to drive the last remaining stragglers out of my life, I finally realized, not that I was at the “bottom,” I still had options and resources. No, what I had lost was the ability to control anything or anyone else. That’s what happens when you push people away hard enough, you lose the ability to control them. Or at least, the continued efforts are very, very pointless. When you have removed yourself from every situation that involves other people, well, there’s just not much left to control.
If you ask me today, “Hey, TBD, what’s the biggest change in your life since getting sober?” I’m going to say,
I learned I can’t control things.
That seems simple, but it was at the core of my addiction. Trying to root that out, well, that was like a horrible scene in too many movies where the tough guy tightens his own tourniquet and then digs out a bullet with a rusty, dirty knife. It was so tenacious because it was driven by fear. When I realized I had no control, that’s when the tide of fear becomes overwhelming, but when it washes over you and you’re still ok after it’s gone. That’s when it starts to turn to freedom, to sobriety.
I had been living at the sober house for about ten days in the Fall of 2020 and I was laying awake one night, the sounds of First Avenue thrumming away in the background. I was doing my own non-4th Step Inventory, the one where I was listing all of the mistakes and horrible things and trying to imagine just how dire the coming consequences were going to be. This process, a little bit like a magical incantation, was how I created the perfect conditions for a very relieving drink or fourteen of sauvignon blanc. I’d whip myself up in a frenzy of self-criticism, catastrophication of the remainder of my life and then roll around in bitter regret. Things will never change. Things will never get better.
These were the thoughts that used to ring in my ears as I walked down Fourteenth Street to one of my spots. Or drank in an airport bar or a hotel or whatever.
That night in the sober house, I noticed something interesting. The playlist of regret I was listening to was having no effect on me. I was tired, but relaxed and sleepy. The thought that kept popping into my head was, “things are going to be ok.” I realized I’d made it through that day and had a decent chance on tomorrow. I felt peace and contentment, because I realized there was literally nothing I could do except approach tomorrow on tomorrow’s terms.
You could say the Second and Third Steps are a little like negotiating an M&A deal—there’s definitely going to be someone new calling the shots at HoldCo, and it isn’t me. I don’t have an earn-out, not much in shareholder rights and there is for sure, no change of control provision. Did I lose out in the titanic corporate battle for my soul? Nope. I finally recognized that I had been negotiating with the wrong aim in sight. There is only one deal point worth having, and more importantly, only one deal point I can actually perform. The Big Guy called it out for me a couple of weeks ago as I was walking by a construction site on 86th Street.3 It’s why there is no need for change of control provisions or any of that other nonsense. There was only ever one thing that mattered in that deal:
You held on to you.
I have a side-hustle in strategery.
Is drink-erase the opposite of dry-erase?
This is honest. Acknowledging what is needed. You are courageous 🫶