Daily Gratitude List 10.19.22

Have I Got a Bridge for You!

As you can see, there is some amount of playing around with formats and what-not going on here.¹ If you have opinions, I’d be very interested in hearing them. Otherwise it’s chimp-on-a-typewriter time and we’ll see how long it takes to get to “King Lear.” Speaking of chimps, you probably don’t know this about me, in fact, I’m almost certain you don’t know this about me: I have a collection of “Lancelot Link” memorabilia. Now, you’re googling “Lancelot Link.”²

I like to joke about pitch meetings I wish I could have seen. Like the meeting where someone proposed a pirate-themed casino on the Las Vegas Strip; I’d just like to hear people in suits talking about a pirate-based business. Here’s one I’d really like to hear:

“It’s a children’s television show about spies, but performed by chimps! Kids love spies, kids love monkeys. Monkeys in trench coats! We’ll be printing money.”

That semi-mythical pitch meeting led to this:

The other children’s television shows of the era were also pretty strange: H.R. Puffinstuff, The Banana Splits. There’s not research on this, but I’m surprised that anyone my age who watched those shows regularly managed to avoid substance use disorder.

In much the same way those shows got approved, I ran some pretty ridiculous pitches past the investment committee in my head—and a bunch of utter nonsense got approved by them over and over. Things like:

“Other people are way worse and look, we’re still managing to keep all of the balls in the air, we don’t need to stop drinking”

or

“I need to stop, but this is not a great time to stop drinking. There’s a lot going on and I don’t really have the focus to devote to it. Hmmm, what would a good sobriety date be…”

or

“All I have to do is take a naltrexone, wait about an hour and I can drink as much as I’d like. I can drink my way to sobriety—it’s science!”

or

“This isn’t really hurting anyone but me, so people should just chill the F*** out.”

or, the most pernicious one and the one that was the hardest to expose:

“There’s no way I could ever stop drinking.”

The funny thing about sober anniversaries is that while they are connected to a miracle, they are also connected to the bottom. Literally, the worst time in our lives. It’s still too soon for me to be able to put a birthday candle on that. I think the “bottom” is the moment when you realize that you’re about as far away as possible from the person you were meant to be, the life you were meant to lead. I think the desperation that flows out of the cracked vessel of your life at that moment allows you, well, actually forces you to finally be honest with yourself. That’s how it worked for me. When I had burned through everyone who had cared about me, destroyed every connection and made sure to obscure my path so that no one could find me, I was finally left with myself and there was no way to avoid the truth in that moment. Like those movies where they prop someone’s eyes open to force them to watch some horrible thing, that’s what happens at the bottom.

I finally realized drinking was nearly done destroying my life. I had driven away everyone. I had burned everyone and was on the way to finishing the job on myself. The path I was on led exactly nowhere but oblivion. I’m not sure my bottom was a singular moment in time. I think my bottom was a collection of thoughts, conclusions, events, feelings that somehow coalesced into the realization that:

Half Measures [had] availed us nothing. We stood at the turning point. We asked His protection and care with complete abandon.

Big Book, p. 59

That was probably the first time I was completely honest with myself. In part, because these words had been ringing in my ears for about ten years:

Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program, usually men and women, who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves.

Big Book, p. 58

In Chapter 1, Bill wrote that willingness to believe in a power greater than himself was all that was necessary to make his sober beginning. I think there is another thing that’s necessary: finally telling yourself the truth. I think both of those things happened at the bottom for me. When everything was stripped away, when I had lost nearly everything and everyone, it was no longer possible to avoid the truth, it was no longer possible to keep investing in my dubious pitches, keep believing my own lies. I finally saw that maybe working the Steps, putting my faith in a Higher Power might be a better answer than my crazy half-baked propositions. That’s how it finally worked for me. Did I mention that I’ll have three years of sobriety on October 22nd?

Thanks for Letting Me Share

1. I’m too lazy to try and find out if “what-not” officially has a hyphen.

2. I can only hope that you take reading this that seriously.