I’m grateful for the first bit of snow this winter. I’m grateful for cold weather. I’m grateful for seeing how things were in the beginning. I’m grateful for crazy ideas. I’m grateful for a certain coyote. I’m grateful for a new iPhone case. I’m grateful to be sober today.
Here’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately, and now given the nature of the precipitation we residents of NYC (at the least the ues) received overnight, is also super timely:1
Do we really think all snowflakes are different?
I’ve had this jammed down my throat since I can remember, and you have to say it in kind of a sing-songy voice, “every snowflake is different!”2 I don’t think it’s true. Think for a second of the staggering number of snowflakes involved in even a dusting, the numbers get really big, really fast. Snowflakes get created out of the same materials, in the same conditions and at the same time, and you are going to tell me that in all of recorded history there have never been two snowflakes that are alike? Sorry, you’re going to need to make that putt. Seriously, we have identical twins, matching pajamas and you can throw six sixes in Yahtzee way more often than the astronomical odds involved in every snowflake being unique.3
There is snowflake talk in AA, but it’s usually more in the in the self-confessed, “I thought I was a snowflake” vein and is used to express ego-deflation most commonly. I used to think I was so special, so unique, but now I realize I’m not a snowflake, just a kind-of-broken alcoholic like the rest of you. Except I don’t think that’s right and I’m going to flip and take the other side of this argument.4 I think there are a number of varieties of alcoholics and addicts. Why is this important? Simply put, recognizing the variety in the disease is important in determining the variety of the recovery.
The Big Book starts classifying alcoholics in Chapter 2, “There is a Solution.”
“Moderate drinkers” are those who could quit drinking if given a good reason for doing so. They like it and may overuse it from time to time, but are able to stop if they want to.
Type Two is a “hard drinker [who] may have the habit badly enough to gradually impair him physically.” This drinker can stop with a compelling reason, but it will be difficult and may require assistance.
Type Three? Our huckleberry and my personal favorite, the OG Alcoholic:
But what about the real alcoholic? She may start off as a moderate drinker; she may or may not become a continuous hard drinker [see Type Two above]; but at some stage of her drinking career she begins to lose all control of her liquor consumption, once she starts to drink.
Big Book, p. 21
The next paragraph describes me, and a lot of my snowflakey-alcoholic compadres:
Here is the fellow who has been puzzling you, especially in his lack of control. He does absurd, incredible, tragic things while drinking. He is a real Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde. He is seldom mildly intoxicated. He is always more or less insanely drunk. His disposition while drinking resembles his normal nature but little…He has a positive genius for getting tight at at exactly the wrong moment…He uses his gifts to build up a bright outlook for his family and himself, and then pulls the structure down on his head [ummm, the family, too] by a senseless series of sprees.
Ibid.
I’m not going to ask for a show of hands on that one. Here’s my point, we alcoholics and addicts suffer from the same disease and it produces startlingly similar behavior and thinking patterns in a very wide range of people. But ultimately, it affects every one of us in very individual ways and our recovery has to recognize that. We all got here in different ways and the walking-out part needs to reflect that. If the notion that recovery is really about recovering the person you were meant to be and living the life you were meant to lead, well, that sounds kind of individual, doesn’t it?
Chapter 8 of the Big Book, “To Wives,” is often and correctly skipped in Big Book study groups. Let’s just say the language very accurately reflects the gender identities and dynamics of the 1930s. However, there is a classification of the kinds of alcoholic husbands that I think is both funny and a little useful:5
Husband One:
Your husband may only be a heavy drinker…His drinking may be constant…Sometimes he is a source of embarrassment..He is positive he can handle his liquor, that it does him no harm, that drinking is necessary in his business…a good number will become true alcoholics after a while.
Husband Two:
Your husband is showing lack of control, for he is unable to stay on the water wagon, even when he wants to. [important distinction]. He often gets entirely out of hand when drinking…He is worried at times, and is becoming aware that he cannot drink like other people. He sometimes drinks in the morning and through the day also, to hold his nervousness in check…We think this person is in danger.
Husband Three:
This husband has gone much further than Husband Number Two…He admits he cannot drink like other people, but does not see why. He clings to the notion that he will yet find a way to do so…You can be quite hopeful of a situation like this.
Husband Four:
You may have a husband of whom you completely despair. He has been placed in one institution after another…Sometimes he drinks on the way home from the hospital…Perhaps he has had delerium tremens…Maybe you have already been obliged to put him away. This picture may not be as dark as it looks.6
Big Book, pp. 108-110.
Not exactly Mystery Date, is it? Why is this important? The variety of the disease and the staging are part of what determines what will work and what won’t. It’s a disease, remember? For the in extremis alcoholic varieties (Husband Nos. 3 and 4), well, you folks are going to require the full-boat spiritual awakening if you want to get better. But the rest of you, maybe you’re not that far gone, maybe you still the faculties to limit the damage and maybe you have a moderate case of the disease. Maybe three-quarter measures would be enough?
I don’t mean to engage in dangerous thinking or encourage people to strategize about their return from Elba to the world of semi-controlled drinking. But I do think that we are all different, that this disease manifests itself differently in each of us and that the process of recovering oneself has to be individuated. We can all use the same tools, the same process, the same recipe, the same book; but what we create and what we recover will necessarily and very happily be unique.
The idea that there is only one way to do this; that AA is a rigid, one-size-fits-all, Monolith that has a weird effect on the monkeys who sit around it? Well, that just doesn’t survive a reading of even the most avoidable, deservedly least read parts of the Big Book.
I’m looking out on the thin dusting of snow on my balcony and it’s pretty for sure. Does it matter if the snowflakes aren’t infinitely unique? What does matter is recognizing that while we all have the same disease and managed to find our ways to the same dark places, the path out has to be unique, it has to reflect the individual, what’s in their heart and how they got lost in the first place. Believing that there is commonality in snowflakes doesn’t make a morning snowfall any less beautiful, but the inherent uniqueness of every recovery is a kind of beauty that doesn’t melt in the sun.
Thanks for Letting Me Share
You can get on my wrong side by saying that “Relapse is Not Part of Recovery” thing or by misusing the word “timely.” If you send me an email with “Timely” in the subject line, I’m going to take that as a self-congratulatory comment on the appropriateness of the moment when you hit “send.” If you wanted my immediate attention, well, words like “urgent” are good for that. Timely = Urgent.
Yes, I am sounding bitter about my nursery school experience. I believe it was the Mother Goose Nursery School in Valparaiso, Indiana. Not like I’m going to write a Yelp review or anything.
I love snowflakes and snow. I’d just like to be able to talk about them honestly.
Technically not an argument since there is only one keyboard here. Note: I reset the keyboard dictionary on my phone earlier this am to eliminate the arguments with autocorrect. (Would it have been funnier if I had mispelled autocorrect?)
I’ve left the “husband” part in because I think it’s funny—obviously, these classifications can apply to all of us.
I may not have been married at the time, but I eventually leveled up to Husband Four.
Keep the Faith!
I’m not really sure of the original intention of the snowflake saying. I’m beginning to think that individuality is over rated, and that human being is a shared endeavour.
There’s something more fundamental that binds us: the experience of knowing that we’re alive and not really knowing why and having a mild panic about it every morning when you wake up and remember who you are (that’s my very unsexy definition of the human condition.)
So sure, *maybe* all snowflakes really are different (it only takes one apple to be misaligned!) but snowflake singular doesn’t make much of anything let alone snow.