I’m grateful for the way my keyboard clicks. I’m grateful for a quiet night. I’m grateful for seeing what needs to change. I’m grateful for the things that don’t. I’m grateful for a trip to the library. I’m grateful for the pushes when I feel stuck. I’m grateful to be sober today.
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This is intended to be the second part of “Loneliness and Sobriety” and the first part is right here if you haven’t seen it yet: Loneliness and Sobriety, Part I.
I think it is shame that connects loneliness and alcoholism. While the first definition of “loneliness” in the Oxford English Dictionary is the tautological “the condition of being lonely,” it’s striking how quickly the word evolved from describing the objective state of being alone to one expressing a deeply felt need, the existence of a hole. The secondary definitions of “loneliness” in the OED:
2. Uninhabited or unfrequented condition or character (of a place); desolateness; 3. the feeling of being alone; the sense of solitude; dejection arising from want of society or companionship
I love the way the OED includes pithy examples of usage; this is is George Elliot in Silas Marner, cited in the definition of “Loneliness:”
“The eccentric habits which belong to a state of loneliness.”
What I struggle with here is the negativity of the definition, and I struggle with it because I think I’m fundamentally a lonely person. I don’t mean that in the sad, treacly way it sounds, I think it’s a really important part of who I am and how I see the world. I could use different words, like “solitary” or “quiet” or “lone wolf,” but even those more prosaic words still connote the absence of something; happy company or noise or the rest of the pack.1
I was always on the periphery. My earliest memories are of standing a bit apart and watching other people. Maybe my earliest memory is of the day my baby brother came home from the hospital with my mom. I can remember standing in the front yard, watching my dad spring from the Blue Dodge Dart and zip around to help my mom and my new brother get out of the car. I can see that moment so clearly, but I was already watching, I was already a safe distance away observing. I think the memory sticks because it was the first time I noticed feeling apart from other people.
We moved around a lot when I was a kid and that may have contributed to this sense of “apartness,” but I think the seed had already sprouted on its own. Nothing had happened to me, this wasn’t the consequence of something traumatic or some kind of an omission by someone; I just think it is just who I am. That’s why I struggle with the negative aspects of the word “loneliness,” with the negative aspects of leading kind of a solitary life. And don’t get the idea that I’m completely anti-social, a hermit; I’m not. I have a pretty active life and I enjoy spending time with other people. I also very much enjoy spending time with myself.
Do I think always being alone is a great thing? No. There are lots of times when I wished pretty hard that I was with someone, or was sharing something I just thought or saw with someone. There are people who were in my life that I really miss—I certainly don’t see the condition of being alone as being completely positive. But for this alcoholic, letting go of the idea that being alone was somehow shameful, itself a character defect, was an important part of my recovery. Olivia Laing wrote:
Loneliness feels like such a shameful experience, so counter to the lives we are supposed to lead, that it becomes increasingly inadmissible, a taboo state whose confession seems destined to cause others to turn and flee.
The Lonely City, p. 25
Part of my solitariness comes from a genuine bafflement around other people. Sometimes, I feel like I just don’t “get” people, that I’m constantly misunderstanding their intentions or what they are trying to communicate to me. I tend towards observational mode because I’m gathering intelligence, trying to figure things and people out, before I do something dumb or make a mistake. But my solitariness, my lonely perspective on life, is also a positive attribute, I think it goes hand-in-hand with my creative impulses. I basically always wanted to be a writer, I think. I started writing stories in the first and second grade, started a journal in the third grade.2 I think the same qualities that kept me on the edge looking in were also what animated my writing.
I love and share a lonely perspective on life and that is probably why I was always very drawn to Edward Hopper’s paintings. To me, there is always that highly observational, reconnaissance-natured element to his painting. But there is also no shame in his work:
I love that painting. Some might describe it as “bleak,” or “desolate,” or “empty,” but there is a negative connotation in all of those descriptions. I really don’t see it that way. I look at this painting the same way:
Maybe it’s the paperboy in me, but I feel like I always enjoyed seeing the world best when everyone else was still asleep, when I was the only one there. I didn’t find that dejecting, I found that thrilling. The feeling I get when I stand in front of these paintings is the same sense of excitement and possibility I got from standing in an enormous room filled with card catalogs. It is not a negative feeling.
Like Adam and Eve realizing they didn’t have clothes, at some point, I realized I wasn’t supposed to spend as much time alone as I did. I came to realize that being alone was a bad thing and indicative of some probably much more serious character flaws—otherwise, I’d be around other people all the time, right? A big part of my enthusiastic, teenaged drinking is that it made it possible and more comfortable for me to be around other people, but the more potent aspect of alcohol was how it killed off those feelings of shame. I think we alcoholics are actually engines of shame run amuck—-and I think so much of our behavior is driven by fear and shame. Unfortunately, alcohol is the perfect elixir for that.
Somehow I went from being a pretty happy person who just happened to enjoy a lot of alone-time, to someone who needed to medicate the critical absence of people in my life. I began to feel very deeply that my being alone was because there was something wrong with me, something that just repelled other people, some secret handshake they taught in school on a day I was absent, it was evidence of a shameful collection of character defects that correctly placed me on the outer edge of polite society.
Somehow, I managed to convince myself that sitting at the end of a bar somewhere drinking Sauvignon Blanc and watching sports or cooking shows while I drank by myself was somehow less lonely than the solitary life I had been living. Does that even make sense? No—it doesn’t. However that lie got generated, it was pretty quickly adopted as part of my orthodoxy; drinking by myself was the antidote for loneliness. My near-constant relapses were “triggered” by my loneliness.
Hitting bottom is the ultimate expression of “alone-ness.” I think that’s why it’s so completely horrifying to so many people, the realization that we are finally and truly alone in our alcoholism is often the thing that has enough force to impel people down the steps into a waiting church basement. I was very, very alone when I hit my bottom. I can remember waking up in the morning and realizing that if I disappeared from the face of the planet, it would be awhile before that was noticed. That thought induced a free-fall feeling in my stomach that lasted about the time it would take to cover the 22 floors to the street. That’s a sad desperate thought and it’s not the consequence of being born with a solitary outlook on life; it’s the consequence of drinking alcoholically for 40 years to “correct” that solitary outlook. That makes me feel nuts to say, because it is nuts. That is the kind of insane thinking that our disease drives. That I needed to fix something that was a fundamental part of me.
My realization at the bottom, the thing that helped me find my way out, was pretty closely aligned with the concept of “acceptance” outlined on page 417 of the Big Book: That there were no mistakes in my Higher Power’s world. If I was some way, then it was because that was how I was meant to be. My path out of the depths of active alcoholism has largely been forged by acceptance; acceptance of myself, of the disease that afflicts me, of the path that is meant for me. My sobriety has been a function of coming to accept the person I was, the person I was meant to be, the person I was before I tried to fix things that didn’t need fixing with a tool (alcohol) that roughly never works.
I wasn’t broken. I didn’t need to apologize for or explain who I was. I certainly didn’t need Queen Kim Crawford’s help to make myself feel whole. I just had to be the person I was meant to be and live the life I was meant to lead. I’m not exactly sure what that entails yet, maybe the turn-by-turn directions show up later? Until then, I listen to songs like this when I talk my long, lonely walks:
And then this happens:
Thanks for Letting Me Share
To be honest, I am very much okay being described as a “lone wolf,” and I think there is a very important distinction between being a “lone wolf” and a “one-man wolf pack.” Although, the latter does come closer to the sense of completeness I’m trying to talk about.
No, I don’t have it anymore, but I remember that the initial entries were about my love for a girl named “Rebecca,” I think she moved away in like 1971 or something.