Digging Up Bones

I’m grateful for a bright, warm, sunny morning. I’m grateful for what’s in front of me. I’m grateful for the first strawberries from the garden. I’m grateful for seeing the real challenges. I’m grateful for not being where I used to be. I’m grateful to be sober today.

Before I dive in, after a one-week Independence Day hiatus, the “Anyone Anywhere” Meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous will be starting at 7pm tonight. We’ve changed the format a little bit and are hoping that you’ll join us.

Not all of my shame stems from drinking. I’m going to admit there was a time in the late 1980’s when I very much enjoyed the music of Randy Travis. I grew up in Iowa and spent a lot of time listening to country music. My grandmother always had the radio on, so that was a steady dose of Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash and Loretta Lynn and so on. I really, really love the titles and some of the lines.

Who wouldn’t want to be “living on Tulsa-time,” especially during a bitter divorce: “I’m going through the Big D and I don’t mean Dallas,” which neatly segues to “All My Exes live in Texas,” to “That’s No Lady, That’s my Wife.” I’m a sucker for a good love story, especially if it involves truckers and motels, I’m not sure there is a better one in music than Garth Brooks’ “Papa Loved Mama.” I don’t want to ruin the story, but the best line is clearly, “He never touched the brakes, he was shiftin’ gears.” Move over Shakespeare, here’s some real unrequited love that ends very badly: “Mama’s in the graveyard, Papa’s in the Pen.”

Wow, sorry about that, I guess that tapped a gusher. I just wanted to share how these old Randy Travis songs kind of encapsulated this horrible project I started over the weekend. But before I get to that, this is a really great line:

But on the other hand, 
there’s a golden band, 
to remind me of someone who would not understand, 
On the one hand I could stay and be your loving man, 
But the reason I must go is on the other hand

Here finally is the song that started all of this. It was called “Digging Up Bones,” and like Randy Travis, “at night, I’m settin’ alone, I’m digging up bones, exhuming things that’s better left alone.”¹ That’s a little dramatic, I spent a lot of time reading my old notebooks and journals. Here’s one thing I found out:

I was a huge alcoholic.

I mean, seriously. I have the notebook from my initial Fourth and Fifth Step and it reads like f***ing Bill W’s ridiculous example from the Big Book, where he resents “Mr. Brown” because “he told my wife about my mistress.” (Big Book, p. 65). I remember reading that the first time and thinking, like a lot of this stuff in the Big Book, this is kind of stupid. How can you write nonsense like that down and not see how deluded you are? Bill, even I can see that you’re just really f***ed up, glad you got sober and all, but that’s not my situation at all.²

I think a lot about time travel, and there’s a problem I’m still trying to figure out, but that’s a longer term thing. I realized journals are a form of time travel, and don’t involve any of the space-time paradoxes that can plague the real thing. So, let’s go to November of 2012 and my first Fourth and Fifth Step.³ To set the stage, I was freshly divorced, living in DC’s Logan Circle neighborhood and had been drinking every single day for a long, long time.

My dad had connected me to a friend of his in the Program and he became my first Sponsor. He was a brilliant professor specializing in an incredibly esoteric field and a huge alcoholic. In one of our first meetings, he told me it had taken him ten years to get his first year of sobriety. I thought to myself, and maybe wrote down something like, “ten years to get sober, that’s f***ed up.”

FYI: My sobriety date is 2019.

He took me through the Steps fast and in November suggested I join him at a monastery near Dubuque, Iowa for a few days and complete my Fourth and Fifth Step. I keep throwing that around like everyone knows what it is:

Step Four. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

Step Five. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

Like the Big Book suggests, I went through and listed out my resentments towards the people in my life It’s comical and sad to read it now. Every entry for every person, or group of people has lines like this to explain my resentments, my anger towards them and everything:

Judged me...
Didn't respect me...
Didn't appreciate me...
Hated me...
No Respect...
Superior
Didn't recognize me...

I’ll write more about the experience at some point, because I think the way Brother Xavier framed the Fifth Step was really lovely. I didn’t stay sober for very long after this, it’s possible I drank at the airport on the way back to DC. I just don’t remember. The fact that my first trip through the Steps didn’t produce sobriety for me wasn’t because of faulty design, it was all in the execution.

The fundamental problem was that I hadn’t actually done the first three Steps. I had read them over and over and had them recited at me. I agreed when people told me I was powerless over alcohol, that my life was pretty f***ed up, that it was clear that I needed to find a way to grow more spirituality in my life. We had blurred through the first few Steps, because as many people do, they think it’s simply a matter of agreeing with the words written on the page, nodding one’s head while reading the passages that describe us, even writing that in the margin over and over:

“Me!”

I couldn’t stop drinking. Even though I agreed with Steps One, Two and Three and had bared what I thought was my soul over a weekend doing Step Four and Step Five, and then Six and Seven, do you really, really want to get better? Drop the rock! Cool. Then I drank.

I know why now. I didn’t realize you actually had to do all of the Steps—not just agree with them and highlight them in the book. Sometimes, people refer to the first three Steps as involving a “reckoning,” and I can go with that. To me, reckoning is about navigation, not just confronting and acknowledging the ugly, maybe very lost, situation and saying, “you’re right, that’s f***ed up.” I think it’s about finding the way home and setting a course.

There is a ton of self-analysis and lots of self-knowledge being gained in those old notebooks. I can see now why it wasn’t enough to get me sober back then. There was so much anger flowing through those pages;

“I do things to get people to dislike me, hate me, resent me—because that matches the way I feel about myself.”

A lot of what I wrote back then just leaves me feeling really, really sad and sometimes it’s breathtakingly obvious. Like this gem:

“I drink so that I can control life—there isn’t much risk sitting on my favorite barstool.”

Sound familiar? Here’s Dr. Ruth Fox writing in 1950:

The primary addict, from his first introduction to beverage alcohol, uses it as an aid to adjust to his environment. From the outset it is for him a magical substance. Only through the use of intoxicants can he achieve a state of psychological harmony."

Alcoholism, p. 142

I believed pretty much everything I was told, lectured and read. The hard part was actually applying the principles to actually change my life. The biggest problem I faced, the dragon I had to slay, was not drinking, it was the life I had constructed that required drinking. Changing that meant more than nodding my head while I read a dusty old book or listened to alcoholics at meetings.

Realizing there was actual work to get done was what changed things for me. Treating recovery like a project that mattered to me and working at it. Making lists, writing exercises to explore history and different feelings and ways of looking at things. Reading, re-reading and wringing every bit of meaning I could from the Big Book. Working with other alcoholics and having the power I feel as the Steps work in my life get increased by the examples I see other alcoholics changing their lives. That’s not trudging or miserable, that’s beautiful, even on the really hard days.

Reading those old journals took me back to a really sad, hard time. It’s hard not to let those old feelings out of the cage, but those old feelings don’t really fit anymore. When examined carefully, they turn out to be anachronistic relics from a pretty tough, dark time. They seem foreign in a way and that’s the power of writing it down: I can see how much things have changed. And those pages show me how I got here.

1. The words get a little weird, especially when he find’s his ex-wife’s negligee in the closet, so it’s more of a cut and paste thing. Take what resonates and run away from the rest.

2. I would put quotes around that, but it’s reconstructed fragments of many conversations I held with myself, so there’s not a contemporaneous record. Except for when I wrote things like that down obsessively and put quotes around them in my journal. Like I was talking to someone else…

3. There’s even a Randy Travis song for that, too: “There was a time when she was mine, back in 1982.”