I’m grateful for an excellent meeting. I’m grateful for seeing something new every time I look closely enough. I’m grateful for brief moments of clarity. I’m grateful I can make myself laugh. I’m grateful for the way light attaches to the right things. I’m grateful to be sober today.
We had an excellent meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous last night (hint: you’re invited) and we covered a lot of Chapter 3, “More About Alcoholism.” To be sure, from the title on down, it’s not the flashiest of Big Book chapters, but as we were reading it and then discussing it, I ended up thinking about another time I went to a meeting and read almost that exact portion of the Big Book. It was October of 2016 and I had just emerged from my first stint at sleepaway rehab.
Not to be grandiose, but I was good at rehab. I had lots of trenchant comments. I could be funny; I loved punctuating my own jokes at dinner with a quick rimshot on the formica table in our private dining area, exclaiming, “thank you, I’m here all month.” hahaha. I have no idea what I was trying to accomplish there. I went to the lectures, took tons and tons of notes, poured out my heart to whomever would listen—but mostly about how shitty my situation was, not about what needed to change with me.
I’ll be honest. I went to rehab because my girlfriend broke up with me. We had spent a week on vacation where I secretly drank (not an easy task) and then celebrated the end of our lovely trip by getting really drunk and picking a fight over the phone a day later. I don’t even know about what. She sent me the name of a psychiatrist she thought I should try. Desperate to get her back, I scheduled an appointment. He sized me up pretty quickly, he had a really disarming, authentic Texas twang to his voice and he told me about 35 minutes into our first session:
You know what you need to do, don’t you?
I said, “yes, but I really don’t want to.” Actual response. He paused for a long, long, long time, like two seconds, and then said, “but you know you have to.” I remember physically slumping in my chair in the den of his Georgetown row house, “yes, I know.” He made a quick phone call and left me to make the arrangements on my own, which I did later that afternoon from the bar at the Commissary. I remember sitting at the bar, guzzling Sauvignon Blanc, because there literally weren't very many tomorrows left, I was going to rehab. It was late August, and the rehab counselor was on the phone explaining the many benefits and perks of the Grandview program—private dining, spacious accommodations, flexibility to continue working and pretty much unfettered access to one’s devices.1 I would surrender myself that next Saturday morning.
I graduated rehab a day early and was released back into the wild on another Saturday morning. My plan was to drive to my sort-of-still girlfriend’s house for the balance of the weekend, where the new, dramatically improved, sober me would be on display and available for re-commitment. All of my profound insights and learning and reams of self-serious notes bought me about 45 minutes of sobriety on I-83.
I contemplated my many rehab learnings over a glass or three of horrid pinot grigio at the Chilis that afternoon. No, I didn’t. I can remember thinking, “what the fuck,” as I took the first swig of that awful wine. I didn’t really think about anything after that. I think they were playing a lot of Journey songs.
My arrival at the girlfriend’s house took us immediately to that nether world where we had lived unhappily for quite a while. Her being pretty convinced that I was drinking, me being very convincing about how I was not. One of us was being honest, one of us was not. It was like our own version of the Cold War—her probing for weaknesses in my story, chances to see where the narrative and the “facts” didn’t add up. Me, literally, becoming a double agent, willing to betray people who made the mistake of loving me, all to serve my secret allegiance to drinking. I really and truly went through life manufacturing “time in the black,” time where I could secretly and safely indulge my daily routine of maintenance drinking.
It was a week since my release from rehab. I was telling my girlfriend that I had something like 40 days now—-just like Noah and Jesus in the Wilderness, I joked. I didn’t have 40 days. I had two. It was Sunday afternoon and I was trying really hard to not drink. I was literally coming out of my skin that weekend, I had walked about 72 miles and had smoked at least a pack of cigarettes. I’d awaken at 3:30 or so in the morning, done sleeping and awash in anxiety and fear and the absolute conviction that my life was a complete fucking disaster and getting worse and darker every single minute.
I couldn’t sit still, I couldn’t tolerate the thoughts that spun through my head almost every moment of every day. I’d pull on clothes and head out to walk around the neighborhood in the dark, smoking and listening to music, knowing there really wasn’t any place for me to go.
That afternoon, I looked up meetings and found a Big Book Study at the Dupont Circle Club—this was before Zoom, so that was my option for a meeting on Sunday afternoon. I went and sat on those semi-padded catering chairs in the back room of the second floor and we went around the room reading the Book. We read the story of the jay-walker that day.2
Our behavior is as absurd and incomprehensible with respect to the first drink as that of an individual with a passion, say, for jay-walking…On through the years this conduct continues, accompanied by promises to be careful or to keep off the streets, altogether…But the day he comes out he races in front of a fire engine, which breaks his back. Such a man would be crazy, wouldn’t he?
Big Book, pp. 37-38
I remember my reaction being something along the lines of “what the f***, how is reading this stupid book supposed to deal with my very complicated life.” And what the f*** is that about the “jay-walker?” I had very good reasons to drink, it wasn’t some kind of blind obsession where I would put myself and the things that mattered to me at needless risk over and over again. My drinking was deliberate and purposeful and necessary. See, that’s what sets me apart from you very superior-looking people of AA.
And that’s the thing, I thought the people at AA meetings were giving me superior looks but no one ever said a truly negative thing to me in AA. Trust me, there are plenty of people in AA that I disliked on sight, because I knew from the way they looked at me, that they knew I was a dishonest piece of shit. No one in AA ever said that or challenged me or told me not to come back or said anything even close to unkind to me. I knew I was guilty and supplied all of the judgmental narrative myself. Of course, none of it existed in the real world. Knowing what I know now, a lot of the old timers, to the extent they noticed me at all or thought about me, probably just felt sorry for me. Most of them had been right where I was now—I just wasn’t willing or able to let that particular set of facts seep in yet. I couldn’t see them announcing their long, completely unobtainable lengths of sobriety as anything but a rebuke to me. My alcoholic ego had not yet been dropped into that vat of molten, super hot stuff:
I don’t remember if I drank that Sunday afternoon or evening. I think I did. I know I didn’t see myself as the jay-walker yet. It would take a few more years and a lot of heartbreak before I was able to finally figure out that they had been talking about me, after all. Not the folks in the meetings, the folks I thought were judging me and who probably would have been happy to be my friends, no, I mean the folks who wrote the Big Book. When I was finally infused with enough desperation-induced willingness, I saw who the words were intended for. And, finally, I let them in. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.
The words in the book didn’t change, I did. The words in the book were what changed me.
Hands down, the hardest thing to give up in rehab is one’s phone.
I’m sorry, not my favorite metaphor. Not exactly the story of the “Prodigal Son,” is it?
Such a powerful post - wow! "The words in the book didn’t change, I did." 🙌
Have an awesome day! We are grateful for your honesty and insight!