I’m grateful for sleeping in a little. I’m grateful for a clean kitchen. I’m grateful to almost be organized for Xmas. I’m grateful for seeing what’s really around me. I’m grateful for a cloudy, rainy day so I can get things done. I’m grateful for the feelings of peace and contentment. I’m grateful to be sober today.
It’s kind of hard to believe that Christmas takes place this weekend. I will tell you what I’ve told people for several weeks now when asked about my level of holiday preparation, “I think I’m in pretty good shape.” Well, it turns out that is not exactly true. I was organizing and making lists yesterday and realized that there are huge yawning holes in the gift inventory. I also don’t have a plan for what everyone is being fed, and, as I said, I think Xmas is this weekend. One of the many underrated gifts of sobriety is the sense that things will likely work out, that nothing too terrible is likely to happen this weekend.
That stands in stark contrast to the way my mind used to work. I saw catastrophe and disaster lurking in every single decision. I will tell you that this made it hard to make decisions sometimes. I really see how these detrimental thinking patterns took over and created the perfect environment, a perfectly curated diorama of emotions, to showcase how well drinking worked.
I think we alcoholics actually learn how to maximize the rush from drinking, learn how to make the wash of brain chemicals that comes with those first couple of drinks just completely perfect. We infuse our addictions with rituals and anticipation because that heightens and lengthens the effect and we have brains in which those effects are already pronounced. I think that’s how addiction works, more or less.
My own view, unaided by medical science, is that part of the work of sobriety involves replacing the cheap, abundant, highly destructive versions of the brain chemicals released by drinking with ones that are healthy and sustainable. I think of it, probably incorrectly from a scientific point of view, as replacing bad sources of dopamine with good sources of dopamine. Part of the problem is that you can do a lot of f****** yoga and meditation and you’re still going to come up way short against a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc after an argument with my ex.
That’s why a strategy that focuses on helping someone “stop drinking,” isn’t always very effective. A card that tells me the telltale signs of a relapse tucked in my pocket is never going to stop me from walking into a bar and having a drink. It never did. I knew that I suffered from the delusion that drinking would either minimize the bad feelings or enhance the good ones. I know that idea came from a serpent with a forked tongue. It didn’t matter. When you build a life that pretty much requires that you drink, the thing that has to change is the life you built. You have to stop drinking to do that, but stopping drinking will not accomplish the renovation by itself.
Change is a hard thing and I think there is a misperception about what has to change in recovery. Way back in 1955, Dr. Ruth Fox recognized that an alcoholic was someone who “from his first introduction to beverage alcohol, uses it as an aid to adjust to his environment.” That’s why simply taking the bat out of the alcoholic’s hands isn’t going to work very often. Sobriety comes from building a life, maybe re-building a life, that doesn’t require drinking to navigate. That’s a very different order with a very different timeline and a very different process. Telling someone over and over again that they need to stop drinking, can’t they see what it is doing to their life, to the lives of the people who love them? Yes, we can see all of that and it just makes us want to drink some more.
Holding my eyes open to consequences wasn’t how I got sober. I got sober when I realized the equation of my life, even with alcohol involved, no longer produced valid results. Maybe that’s the mathematical “jumping-off place,” and it does impel a choice. I finally had the right mix of desperation, grief, exhaustion, despair and hope to let my life start changing. I said it that way on purpose, because it began by simply being willing to believe there was a force in the Universe that might be capable of restoring me to sanity. If there was courage involved, it was in opening that door and letting whatever was going to happen next, happen. And then letting the thing after that happen, too. I started to see that a life focused on aligning myself with this mysterious, indescribable force worked out way better than the one I used to run.
That’s how I got sober. I end every one of these gratitude lists with “I’m grateful to be sober today,” because I am. Saying that reminds me to be grateful for a life that doesn’t compel drinking anymore. I think every time I say that, the reign of the crazy king who loved Sauvignon Blanc and sowed chaos and dysfunction throughout the realm, recedes farther from view. The prospect of him returning from exile seems more remote every day—not impossible by any stretch, but less likely for sure. He gets farther away, becomes more irrelevant, because the life I’m building just doesn’t need the only thing he really ever had to offer.
Thanks for Letting Me Share