Daily Gratitude List 11.3.22
Choices
I’m grateful for getting to watch a truly gorgeous sunrise. I’m grateful for being able to look at what happened. I’m grateful for a mid-week visit to the farmers market. I’m grateful for flashes of inspiration and confidence. I’m grateful to be sober today.
I’ve discussed my kind of bizarre writing process before— it may actually involve more walking than actual “writing.” That’s how I “write,” things slowly coalesce in my head while I replay the stories and think through them as I walk. I say “think through” them, but I’m coming to realize it’s more “feeling through” those stories again and that is not always so pleaseant.1 Seeing my drinking career through the spy motif has been in my head for a while. Oh, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s yesterday’s Gratitude List (“Spies Like Us”):
The adult version of me took complete responsibility for my decision to live life like a spy. The choice I thought I had made to conceal and protect what was most important to me: drinking. I’ve never really told that part of my story before and revisiting that young secret agent really stirred up a lot in me.
The process of recruiting agents, “assets,”2 usually involves identifying and exploiting vulnerabilities. It’s not a very pretty or kind process and it often involves luring someone to cross a line they may not have even known was even there. Once that line is crossed and the subject realizes they are now complicit, how much they now have to lose, well, that’s when the trap closes and no one has too much of a choice after that. “Choice” is the funny word. People often like to describe addicts and alcoholics as people who make “bad choices.” For sure we do, lots and lots of them. I am coming to see those “choices” as symptoms of my addiction, not the cause of it.
Sure, I made that choice to drink that first drink, take that first hit of weed way back in 1977 or 1978. I had no real idea when I was 15 or 16 or 17, that “choice” meant enlisting in a lifetime of deception in service of the terrible secret. I only knew that from the time I first started drinking, it was something that was “necessary” for me, not something I did for fun. Drinking for me was kind of how I imagined eating without taste buds would be. It’s something I had to have. I was convinced I couldn’t navigate the world without it.
It turns out the terrible secret I kept for 40 years wasn’t so terrible after all. It also wasn’t that much of a secret by the end. What was terrible was the way I lived for those 40 years. Already weighed down with the crushing shame and fear of being an alcoholic, that 17 year-old didn’t really make a choice, didn’t really have a choice. Looking back on him, touching him again, I just found it kind of heartbreaking. So alone, so lost and so young. I have a ton of respect for him; he took on a pretty heavy burden and carried it for a long, long time. He was resourceful, never quit and was so brave. I sure did carry that weight a long time, but it turns out there was always a way back home.
Thanks for Letting Me Share
Yes, I, too, would like to know the difference between “thinking” and “feeling.”
The use of that word ought to tell you most of what you need to know.