I’m grateful for a little more snow. I’m grateful for really excellent coffee this morning. I’m grateful for waking up smiling. I’m grateful for internal pep talks. I’m grateful for the quiet. I’m grateful for the things that needed to happen. I’m grateful to be sober today.
I hope you’re not looking for something cogent or compelling this morning, I’m feeling pretty scattered—but in a good way. I wrote about the rhythm and patterns of my depression a bit ago and I’ve been trying to make a lot of observations.1 This annual pass through February and March is always so rugged and I can see now how the pattern doesn’t change too much. To be honest, when I see the Groundhog come out of his hole, I know it’s about time to head for mine.
It’s hard to really accurately describe what depression feels like. There are a couple of revelatory books—I highly recommend William Styron’s Darkness Visible. Reading that book was when I started to realize the insanely negative thoughts that spun through my head were not a reflection of the real world. They were actually more a function of some fucked up circuitry in my brain and the effects of a lack of light during the Winter. That was revelatory because it allowed me to glimpse the idea that these crazy thoughts were not all mine.
I started to notice these thinking patterns waxed and waned—which gave me a little more freedom from them. But until I was able to see that, I was ruled by those patterns and my annual transit through February made the whole Mercury in retrograde thing look pretty trivial. The confluence of whatever it is that causes depression also made me feel keenly aware of the huge hole in the center of my life. Not that I was able to express it like that at the time. At the time, it felt desperate and incomprehensible. The level of fear and feelings of alone-ness were off the charts, I would try to describe the feeling as “coming unglued,” everything that had given me comfort, my outlook on life, the idea that things would be ok, everything that held me together, all went flying out the door with a scornful,
“how could you ever have been so stupid as to believe that things were okay or that people cared about you, or that you thought you were worthy of love or affection. Look at you.”
Me in Conversation with Me (February)
Those are false thoughts. The voice of the serpent, if you like getting biblical, reciting the endless litany of sins, shortcomings and failures. One of the things that made me an OG Alcoholic was the quality of my lies to myself. My alcoholism was driven by clearly false thoughts, like, “this isn’t such a big deal,” “people need to calm down about this, it’s actually ok,” “AA is for the hard cases, thank God, I’m not one of those.” Or, “this isn’t hurting anyone,” “this isn’t hurting me,” and the worst of all,
“I can’t live my life without drinking.”
Actually, that last one is true. I couldn’t live my life while I was drinking. Whatever it was I pursued all of those years, it definitely was not the life I was meant to lead. I can see how the terrible, desperate thinking that eventually turns black and poisonous—usually right around Valentine’s Day—drove my drinking. Back then, the logical conclusion to be drawn from the toilet-y swirl of thoughts in my head was that I was an irredeemable fraud, a huge liar, someone who had done nothing but spawn and spread deceit and disaster. Of course, I was alone. Of course, no one understood me or wanted to. I didn’t want to either and drinking was a great accomplice, the incredibly seductive Bonnie leading Clyde to that inevitable encounter with his own consequences.2
Anyway, things are magically better. The fog started to lift this weekend and I knew Spring was here. This has been the most important learning for me:
These thoughts are not the truth and they are temporary
I’m more able to see these episodes as passing storms, as opposed to the cosmic passing of justice upon my alcoholic head. This shift was the consequence of working with a really good therapist, an ability to finally be honest with myself, and, critically, working the Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. It was the work around Steps Four through Seven, in particular, that allowed me to see that these thinking patterns (the Big Book calls them “character defects,” but that sounds harsh to me) weren’t accurate expressions of me, they actually more accurately represented the distance I had traveled away from me. I was able to finally see how those patterns had driven me to conclusions and behavior that made no sense in the cold, dispassionate, sober light of day.
If it helps to think about it like software: There was some fucked up bug in the OS and the unique combination of routines running and changing resource allocations led to some unexpected failure in the bit chain. Boom, the software starts producing illogical, nonsensical results. Or, what used to be called the “Green Screen of Death.” Alcohol was my frantic escape key—the thing that was supposed to allow me to gracefully back myself away from the cascading failures to the safety of the blinking C:\>_ prompt. Haha, that never, ever actually worked.3
Anyway, things are better. It’s March 14th and it’s snowing here in New York City. The C:\>_ prompt is there—blinking away and telling me it's time to get back to work--and it's not because the escape key worked this time. It never did.4 Nope, this is the product of the necessary reboot. That crazy spinning stuff my brain does while it's waiting out the Groundhog's forecast for Spring, well, that's exactly what it is and I know enough now to see it for what it is. I know it's ok to hunker down and eat Chinese food and wait for the system to reboot. Because it always does.
I’m watching the wind whipping the snow past my window. It’s cold and blustery and pretty gray out there. The folks I can see on the street are hunched over against the wind and definitely not enjoying their walk to the Q stop on 86th Street. The Groundhog did predict this, almost on the button, on that cold Thursday morning six weeks ago, but you know what, I’m ok waiting out the Groundhog and the snow—Spring arrived for me a couple of days ago—just like it always does.
I know the Big Book prefers the whole “Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde” formulation. But this still rhymes and I think Bill would have preferred it had he been able to see the fantastic movie with Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty
Ok—that’s a long time ago. Yes, I was an alcoholic back in the MS-DOS days, too.
Other buttons that don’t work: the “close door” buttons on elevators. I used to represent elevator manufacturers. Think about it for a second.