Daily Gratitude List 10.18.22
Walking Through Anniversaries
This Saturday, October 22, 2022, I’ll have three years of sobriety. This has not been an easy week. I remember when I celebrated my first year, the one that took me about ten years to get.1 I qualified at a Zoom meeting from the sober house and just remember having this surreal, “I can’t believe I have a year” feeling all day long. That year had been a complete shipwreck of a year and I was mostly astonished that I had made it.
Click the picture to read “The Sinking of the Vasa”
Last year, I would compare my anniversary to the feeling I had when I walked into High School the first day of being a Junior. I had a fair amount of swagger, definitely knew the deal and my way around and just wait until next year! This is that next year and I don’t really have a triumphal feeling. For sure, I’m happy and grateful and know the magnitude of the miracle that has already happened. But there is an awful lot of uncertainty about what’s ahead and it’s the first time in my life that I haven’t really known what was coming next.2
The other thing that makes this hard is that October 22nd of 2019 wasn’t really a triumphal day. I was cornered and outmaneuvered by someone way smarter than me. Coincidentally, my last drinks, the evening of October 21, were here in New York at JFK Airport—which is kind of fitting in a number of ways. I had been secretly drinking since the spring of that year and it had gotten pretty bad.3 I was closely supervised on October 22nd and that included checking to make sure I was taking Antabuse like I said I was. This was not a moment when I somehow gained mastery over myself and my addiction and all of my flaws and weaknesses and took that first step into the light.
My girlfriend knew I was drinking and knew that if she made me take my Antabuse, I couldn’t. Boom. That simple.
Of course, the next several days were not so pleasant, as I had to walk through a few days of secret withdrawals. Another downside of being a secret alcoholic.4 I'm coming to understand how all of those traumatic events from my decades of drinking live on inside me, even the ones I caused. Especially the ones I caused. Those feelings begin to pulse a little stronger around the anniversaries and I think that's a big part of my ambivalence and diffidence these days. Don't get me wrong, I'm so grateful and I marvel every single day at the miracle I'm living. But a lot of really bad shit happened to a lot of people before October 22, 2019 and so my sobriety date has a reckoning feel to it as well.
That’s ok, because what I know is that this is the path of freedom. I’ve never had more feelings of contentment, of peace, than I've had over the last three years, but I also know there is still a lot of work to do, a lot of reckoning and releasing. Maybe I’m a bit of a curmudgeon, but my sobriety date doesn’t feel like a birthday to me5—it’s way more complicated than that. For sure, it's a day that marks the beginning of a new life for me, but it's also a little like visiting a cemetery and paying respects to everything that had to happen and had to end. I think it's important to remember what came before the sobriety date, because that makes me even more grateful for everything since that day.
Thanks for Letting me Share
I remember my first temporary sponsor telling me way back in 2011 that it had taken him ten years to get his first year of sobriety and I thought, “That is very, very f***** up.”
I think that also turning 60 this Fall adds to the degree of difficulty.
Seriously, the real barometer of my alcoholism was my willingness to drink Sauvingon Blanc with pancakes, and I was back to doing that.
“No, nothing’s up, I just get super sweaty and my hands shake sometimes. Don’t yours?”
As I just mentioned, I have one of those coming and I’m not particularly thrilled about it.