I’m grateful for a beautiful Christmas morning. I’m grateful for Bach playing, a fire burning and a peaceful heart. I’m grateful for rebirth, renewal and redemption. I’m grateful for the love of so many people. I’m grateful for Kringle from Racine. I’m grateful to be sober today.
Merry Christmas! You may have an idea from the Gratitude List about what exactly is going on over here on Christmas morning. I’m not going to lie, it’s pretty pleasant. I’m also going to tell you that I’m alone. I was also alone for Thanksgiving. This is not a bid for pity nor a declaration of hermitude.1 It was a function of circumstances and schedules; when one has older children with a variety of “homes” to visit at the holidays, well, this kind of thing is inevitable. Do I wish I was waking up this morning to a houseful of family and the noise of tearing paper and thank you-s? Of course, and I’m lucky to have had a lot of that and to know that there will be plenty more of that in the future.
One of the things I used to say over and over to justify explain my drinking, and, more importantly my inability to stop, was that I just couldn’t stand being alone. My overwhelming fear of being alone seemed like a sufficient reason to continue the activity that was ironically contributing the most to my alone-ness. Alcohol is pretty good at obscuring the fact that one is pretty completely alone. I laugh out loud now at the idea that I ever thought alcohol was a cure for loneliness; that I used to believe that drinking by myself at the end of a bar somewhere was somehow less lonely.
Loneliness is a topic I’m really interested in and I’ve been reading this great book by Olivia Laing, “The Lonely City,” which is a fantastic examination of ideas about loneliness and art.2 I’m drawn to the topic because I think I’m a fundamentally lonely person. I don’t mean that in a bad or tragic way—I just have always felt a sense of “apart-ness” from other people. There could be a lot of reasons for that, but not sure they matter that much. I’m just often more comfortable being by myself and observing.
What’s interesting is the evolution of my thinking on the topic. As a kid, as a teenager, I spent a lot of time alone. I also had friends, played sports, a social life that I was constantly being punished for, and was on the debate team. I had a part-time job at the Iowa City Press-Citizen. I also had a solitary life that I didn’t share with anybody. I didn’t take friends along on my used book and record safaris. My friends weren’t really interested in exhaustive searches for John Coltrane albums (worse, when I was looking for classical music!) or reading Faulkner in the basement of the Haunted Bookshop. Well, I was also not so interested in having that be my brand. I kept the album hunting and the nocturnal visits to the only jazz club in Eastern Iowa and the excessive reading to myself. That needed to be a secret.
Why was that? That’s the interesting thing—pursuing my own maybe eccentric interests was fine until feelings of shame were introduced into the equation. I speak often of my Des Moines Register paper route. Want to know how this eleven-year old spent his independent contractor earnings? On a membership in the Military History Book Club and buying and playing board-based wargames.3 I was initially pretty excited to share my enthusiasm for these pursuits, but quickly discovered the power of ridicule. I learned the lesson that having interests and pursuits like those necessitated keeping them on the down-low, to avoid further such contempt and ridicule.4
Like Adam and Eve suddenly realizing they weren’t wearing clothes, I knew I had things to hide. That’s how shame crept into my life and I think shame is one of the fundamental drivers of addiction. The secret life grew to encompass more and more and when I discovered alcohol (or did it discover me?) I realized that drinking was something of a miracle antidote both for the burgeoning feelings of shame in my life and the equally rapidly-growing sense of alone-ness. Something they should maybe mention on the label of bottles of Sauvignon Blanc:
Drinking a lot of this will increase feelings of shame over time and will eventually result in complete isolation.
Drinking works great to temporarily interrupt feelings of shame, but it apparently works on the same principle as borrowing money from loan-sharks. There is going to be a much, much bigger tab coming due very soon. You can drink your way into this whirlwind and keep up for a bit, but it eventually wins. Every single time. Then you get the chance to feel the shame and isolation you’ve feared for so long and without the buffer that has been very necessary for a very long time. This is called, in the literature, the “jumping off place.”
This is not to suggest that my drinking was because other kids were mean to me. I’ve come to understand the problem was that I was not able to accept myself, was afraid to express myself, thought that showing the real me was an invitation to disaster and humiliation. I drank to help cope with all of those feelings. Sure, what people say and do plays a role in the development of our emotional lives, but I’m the Editor-in-Chief and get to decide what goes in or stays out. If I let other people’s stories determine my life, well, that’s kind of on me. As long as those were the stories I published, well, I needed to keep drinking.
Becoming comfortable with being alone has run pretty much in parallel with my sobriety and it has been an evolving thing. While I was drinking, my fear of isolation and aloneness was one of the things that kept the Circus in business. When I tried to stop drinking, the isolation and aloneness I feared so much was now visited upon me in abundance. Being alone became the price I had to pay for all of the years of not being able to control my drinking. The sentence that was imposed on me for being an alcoholic. Author’s Note: It was impossible to stay sober during the pendency of this sentence.
When I washed up in New York in 2020, I was pretty alone and it was still the bad kind of alone. That was part of the transformation, I became not only willing to believe in a power greater than myself that just might be able to restore me to sanity, but also, that I was valuable, as-is, to that higher power. The only way I could be of value, of service to that higher power, was first to reconcile with myself just who we were and how we were going to run things going forward. I had to recognize my own value, to myself and others, to my higher power, before I could be of service to anyone, even myself.
At that point, I was probably just too tired and too alone to be anyone but myself. And then people started showing up, in the most improbable and fantastical ways, and the message they delivered, over and over, was that I just needed to be myself and the right things would happen, the right people would show up.5The right people would even love me. And that's what happened. I started to see that being myself did not necessarily lead to a sentence of solitary confinement, and certainly didn't require any more drinking. In fact, it was just the opposite. I stayed sober for the longest period in my entire life.6
I’m excited to see my kids when they arrive tonight and tomorrow. It will be lovely. And Christmas morning here by myself is really beautiful. My own personal view is that there is a light in all of us, and that light comes from whatever power it is that organizes the Universe. When I’m connected to that power, to the light already resident in me, I’m overwhelmed with feelings of peace and contentment, happiness and fulfillment. I’m happy at the prospect of happy things in the future and happy and confident that this particular moment, even if it involves me being alone on Christmas Eve and Morning, is constructed exactly as it should be, as it needs to be. There is no shame, no isolation, just me recognizing that when I look carefully I can see the right things are happening everywhere in my life.
I love Christmas. I love the feeling of peace and quiet. I love the way the colored lights look on my Christmas tree. I love the memory of my grandfather’s scratchy off-key rendition of “Silent Night” at the Midnight Christmas Eve service. I love the image of a welcoming light with mysterious power in the distance, shining out on a dark night from an open stable door.
There are big chunks of this journey that can be lonely and overwhelming, but once you see that steady, love-filled light in the distance, you realize you’re never really alone. Recovery has been about finding my way back to the person I was meant to be, to the life I was meant to lead. That seemed like a tough, lonely trip with very uncertain prospects until I started to realize I had some pretty groovy company along for the ride. Fortunately, he’s funny and has pretty good taste in music.
Merry Christmas.
Thanks for Letting Me Share
This may not be a word—but maybe it should.
She also wrote a truly fantastic book called “The Trip to Echo Springs: On Writers and Drinking.”
I replayed WWII a number of times on the Ping Pong table in the basement, also hypothetical conflicts in Europe in the 1970’s between NATO and the Warsaw Pact.
Funny, the formulation of damages in a defamation case often includes instances of “shame, contempt and ridicule.”
And sometimes leave when it was time.
Keep the streak alive, Baby.
My take from this is that our purpose is to come to love the person and the life that we are living, right now. Merry Christmas!
Merry Christmas!