Daily Gratitude List 10.26.22

Walking Back In

I’m grateful for all of these cloudy mornings. I’m grateful for a super busy day. I’m grateful for finding something that I thought had been lost. I’m grateful for glimpses of the path. I’m grateful for the things that got me here. I’m grateful to be sober today.

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I love foggy, rainy weather like this. You may not be surprised to learn that I was the Captain of the Safety Patrol at Ernest Horn Elementary (the “Fighting Hornets”). On rainy days, we could go to school first and collect one of the super cool official Safety Patrol rain slickers and wear them to our posts. Something about these kinds of days gets me excited. It’s also possible that it may have something to do with my pretty firm conviction that I was probably a Labrador Retriever in my last life.¹ I often refer to this kind of weather as “Lab Weather.”

Anyway, I thought there might be some cool pictures to be had around the Central Park Reservoir looking towards Midtown, what with all of the cool fog. There was more fog than I thought and before I knew it, I was catching sight of the Guggenheim and realized I was almost back at 90th street and hadn’t seen any of the skyline.² I’m not sure that was entirely on account of the fog, I was also pretty pre-occupied and doing what I do a lot—listening to a song and sorting through the memories and what-nots that pop out and yesterday they were about relapses.

I think relapses are the signal example of the insanity of alcoholism. I can’t put good numbers around my own, but I have 13 one-day chips, meaning there were 13 times when I walked into a meeting and announced I was starting over. Those are not pleasant memories. The feelings of shame and disgust and fear and hopelessness are still overwhelming when I think about those days and my stomach still churns a little when I hear the words, “And now for the most important person in the room…”

Bill W. was the Relapser-in-Chief and I think his phrase, “incomprehensible demoralization” is the most apt description of how relapses feel, and not just for the alcoholic. For the folks who love alcoholics and addicts, the cycle is completely mystifying. Things are getting better, there’s this palpable sense of relief, color is coming back to faces, trust and hope are coming back. I always notice that people’s eyes start to sparkle again. And then it’s gone. Often with no warning, no obvious trigger, no real explanation. Bill W. thought there was a “Point of No Return” for alcoholics:

At a certain point in the drinking of every alcoholic, [they] pass into a state where the most powerful desire to stop drinking is of no avail. This tragic situation has already arrived in practically every case long before it is suspected…We are unable, at certain times, to bring into our consciousness with sufficient force the memory of the suffering and humiliation of even a week or a month ago. We are without defense against the first drink.

Big Book, p. 24

Here’s what I think that means: No alcoholic can actually ever stop drinking. One of the things that I’ve realized during these three years of sobriety is that the Program didn’t work for me until I stopped seeing it as being about stopping drinking. The equation that described me in the olden days required drinking—it was a necessary term. When I tried to simply pull that term out of the equation, to just stop drinking, well, the whole thing collapsed. I learned that when alcohol is part of the foundation of your life, there’s not really a way to just extract it and only it. It’s more like Jenga: Go ahead and try pulling that one piece at the bottom out.

The Program that Bill devised recognized the entire equation needed to change; My job wasn’t “stopping drinking,” I had to build a life that wouldn’t require me to drink. “Building a life” might be too active a way to describe it. The first Three Steps are about recognizing the futility of the previous exercises and seeing that the solution to our internal wars and strife lies in allying ourselves with a greater power. For me, that has involved a disturbing amount of letting things happen and giving up the very dearly-beloved idea that I can control things and alter outcomes. Like Shaggy the Yoga Instructor frequently points out: “You can’t choose your outcomes in life, but you can choose how you will experience them.”

I think a lot of my relapses were simply hopelessness and fatigue. We all know about the pink clouds of early sobriety and the excitement and relief that comes with the building day-count. Those rare instances when I could go to a meeting and honestly claim 30 or 60 days of sobriety were so powerful, but not nearly powerful enough to combat my very well-entrenched disease. Relapsers are often considered people who just don’t get it or don’t want it badly enough.

I think that is badly misinformed. I don’t know of a truer expression of the desire for a new way of life than going to meetings when you perpetually only have a day or two of sobriety.

I went to a meeting last night with a friend who wants to come back in and it reminded me how hard this all is. There aren’t puppies and rainbows at the end of a relapse. On the occasions when folks actually make it back in, you can see the toll on their faces, the grim determination where the laugh lines used to be. I know that looking back up at the mountain I’ve already climbed a few times is pretty demoralizing, there is a real sense, “I just can’t do this again.” I was at that point when I moved to New York in 2020, clinging to 10 or 11 months of sobriety. I knew that I didn’t have another push up the mountain in me.

Coming back in requires a boatload of hope and faith and defeat. It requires true courage. Coming back in requires letting go of the idea that you can do much about what’s coming next. It’s finding the courage to let go of just about everything and trust that if you follow your heart, it will take you exactly as far as you need to go that day. I don’t advise looking up or looking back, the point is accepting that I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be today:

Nothing, absolutely nothing happens in God’s world by mistake. Until I could accept my alcoholism, I could not stay sober; unless I accept life completely on life’s terms, I cannot be happy.

Big Book, p. 417

For sure, it’s a long road and the destination often seems illusory, like a mirage in the desert. Walking that long, hard road is how I realized the destination really didn’t matter, it was the walking that produced an entirely new way of life. The gifts aren’t at the end of the road, or at prescribed intervals, rest stops or anniversaries, as it were. The gifts of sobriety are in the walking, and particularly, in the walking with other alcoholics. Fortunately, I love walking.

Thanks for Letting Me Share

1. I’m not an expert on the mechanics of the whole past-life thing. I think I was probably a pretty good dog and then did something really special, like saving a drowning child or pulling someone out of a burning building and got “promoted.” I don’t have a prediction for the next one, yet. I’m going to repeat, I think I was a very good dog.

2. I feel like there is a rule that you’re never supposed to have just one footnote. No, really, I think that’s an actual rule..