False Narratives and Peanut Butter

I’m grateful for a dramatic sunrise. I’m grateful for the ball bouncing my way. I’m grateful for seeing the catastrophic stories usually aren’t true. I’m grateful for a Friday morning. I’m grateful to be sober today.

song of the week:

Well, some weeks I have a long and complicated history with the sotw and sometimes it’s pretty much a whim. This goes in the former category, but first a quick word about the song that was going to be the sotw. The originally intended sotw was an all-time favorite and a long-denizen of the “basketball” playlist:

I really love this song and it much more has the “Friday jam” feel to it. It also has my actual last name in the lyrics in kind of a funny way. It’s also a great song for exiting the subway at Times Square, which I do multiple times a week. The gigantic throng of subway-exiters at Times Square then must crowd into relatively narrow stairways (have you been to a slaughterhouse?) for the ascent to the surface. The tussling and games of stairway chicken are very essential parts of becoming a New Yorker, as is coming to love the breeze pushed out of the tunnels onto the platforms just before the train arrives during the muggy summer months.

Sorry for the digression. Why isn’t “Hotstepper” the sotw? It’s now the soundtrack for a Starbucks ad, that’s why. Complete with the stereotypical grandma wearing hip hop clothes from the 1990’s, bopping along to the beat. If you know me in real life, you will eventually hear me say, “I’m DTC.”¹ Well, Starbucks, I’m not DTC and every time I see that ad I feel a little sad and a little angry. Why don’t you start playing “Peg” on the grocery store soundtrack, while you’re at it.²

Originally, originally, the sotw was going to be this classic:

Except that I hated this song so much. It was the bane of this 8th Grader’s existence when it came out in 1975. And this song was everywhere, literally everywhere. My mom’s car, the radio next to my bed, my friend’s mom’s cars—well, it was on the car radio a lot. The exaggerated “whoa, whoa, whoas” are kind of funny now, and the super dramatic, but somewhat confused lyrics:

I wish I’d never met you, girl 
You’ll never come again. 
Feelings 
Whoa Whoa Whoa 
Feelings 
Whoa Whoa Whoa
Feelings 
Feelings like I never lost you 
Feelings like I’ll never find you 
Again in my life. 
[repeat the “Feelings Whoa Whoa Whoa Feelings” part].

And then I was going to segue right into the topic of feelings, what exactly are they and why are they so bad for you?³ But seriously, going back to the sotw, “Don’t Wait Too Long,” this song was best enjoyed when one was socially unencumbered, let’s say, and spending all of their available time at a select group of bars and restaurants, sitting alone at the bar, engaging in witty banter with the bartenders and watching the rest of the world spin by. I’ll get sober when the time is right.

One of the consequences of growing up in the 1970’s, and also going to rehab a bunch of times, is that I’m super-familiar with the song “Desperado,” and the idea that one eventually ends up riding the fences alone in the rain, when one pursues the life I was pursuing. I think the main goal of my drinking was really to not feel things. At the beginning, I liked how it made me feel cool and dangerous, but when I hit my drinking peak (and life-nadir) it was mostly to escape from my feelings. Feelings of shame, inadequacy, fear, insecurity, guilt, self-loathing, more fear and insecurity, loneliness, sadness, despair and then some more fear.

Between the pandemic and getting sober, I had a lot of time to think, in a lot of detail, about my feelings. There is that phrase in therapy about sitting with your feelings, which sometimes makes me think about being stuck sitting in the bathroom. Same kind of idea, at some level. Anyway, I found “sitting with my feelings” to be an excruciating event at first. I always found my own emotions to be somewhat overwhelming and the idea of voluntarily “sitting with them?” No thanks.

But the pandemic and the isolation it spawned, and with me moving to NYC, generating more isolation, well, it was hard to avoid sitting with my feelings. At first, this provoked a fair amount of actual panic. My days would begin in the pre-dawn darkness, waking to a stomach already gurgling with raw fear. I felt so alone, had these gunshot, gutshot moments where I realized just how alone I was, how what I did on a day-to-day basis didn’t matter to anyone. I felt like I had ruined my life and was now playing out the string in splendid isolation, my own Elba. This was my come-uppance, what I had earned with my reckless ways.

Some days, it was a real struggle to get out of bed. The fear spreading from my churning stomach, turning my arms and legs to heavy weights, panic infecting my thoughts. I’d sometimes throw up in the bathroom and collapse back in bed, exhausted and defeated. I’d lose entire mornings this way. Whole days sometimes, spent brooding over my fears and imagining all of the catastrophic things that were awaiting me.

These were feelings that I was having. I regarded those physical sensations as proof of the narrative in my head, all was lost, I had burned every bridge, I was condemned to a sad, empty life at the end of an apartment hallway, just like I had imagined as a kid.

Then one morning, battling the familiar queasy stomach and the rising tide of panic, I saw that I had English muffins in the fridge, I toasted one and put peanut butter on it. I ate it as the sun was coming up and I made this stunning realization: It fixed the churning in my stomach and my head even stopped the catastrophe-imagining for a minute. I did the same thing the next morning and it worked exactly the same way. I do it every day now. Is a toasted english muffin slathered with peanut butter a secret weapon in the war against fear and insecurity?

Maybe. But here’s what was happening: The hamsters in my alcoholic brain run faster when they have a story to tell. Aimless and meaningless turns of the hamster wheels, generalized anxiety, let’s call it, well, it just doesn’t match the excitement of generating a waking nightmare and then letting those horrible feelings wash over me. So, when my alcoholic brain started getting the distress signals from my stomach, well, this over-hyped, “I’m all alone and no one loves me and my life will never get better,” narrative was just the thing to spin out to explain the horrible feelings in my stomach.

My alcoholic brain composed a terrible story to explain the physical sensations. It was a lie and all it took was peanut butter to fix it and set the world right. Now, there are times when I do feel very sad or lost or whatever and it’s in response to real world events, but those feelings pass. When I let those feelings bounce around a little, when I ask myself why I’m thinking or feeling whatever, the answer usually presents itself and it usually has the effect of calming the once virulent fears. The waves still.

Feelings end. That was one of the great realizations of my recovery. No matter how intense or hard, feelings pass. These days, when I conduct my gentle interrogations, the answer that usually comes back is fear. There is still a lot of fear running through me, my responses to most situations are fear-based and lots of my negative-feeling emotions are also outgrowths of fear.

I came to see that much of what I labeled as “feelings,” and regarded as things that weren’t changeable and maybe shouldn’t be, was simply a false narrative produced by my alcoholic brain. The terrible things I imagined mostly never happened. The terrible things that I assumed other people thought about me, actually never crossed their mind. The fact that I was actually loved and cared for by a number of people was something that I just couldn’t recognize or feel.

Of course, the narrative my alcoholic brain wrote called for one thing: Drinking. I do think that alcoholic brains actually create a set of “feelings” that make drinking the ineluctable answer. That stew of regret and shame pairs really nicely with Sauvignon Blanc.⁴ It was studying the Big Book and working the Steps, particularly the inventories of Steps 4 and 5, that helped me see how the narrative that I lived and that drove my drinking, was simply false. The proof was presented anew every time I let the feelings float around and gently probed their purpose. They were there to promote the false idea that all was lost and to suggest a route to a place where those feelings of loss could disappear for a few hours.

I nearly ruined my life running from my fears, from myself. I lost a lot and a lot of people who didn’t deserve it, got hurt pretty badly. Those are valid regrets and I carry them around with me. But the rest of it is a false flag operation, a slightly mistuned alcoholic brain misinterpreting the signals, yet again, trying to recreate the glory days of my drinking. I watch the machinations in my head like I watch an episode of the Coyote hopelessly chasing the Road Runner. I laugh at the folly, grimace at the part where he sees the ground approaching and also the rock above him. But I know it’s not a true story now.

The 1000 Deaths of Wile E. Coyote

Battling the false narratives produced by my brain is probably the fundamental struggle of my recovery. Replacing those narratives with the worldview supplied by working the Steps and outlined in the Big Book has led not just to sobriety, but actual happiness, comfort and ease.

Sobriety has been about finding my true self and identifying the false narratives, and then laughing at the ridiculous grandiosity and general overblown-ness of my fears and feelings. The Big Book identifies self-honesty as one of the critical elements of sobriety, and it was that burgeoning capacity for self-honesty that let me finally see the truth about my life. The self-honesty I developed working the Steps let me finally see that my life was really pretty good and didn’t require drinking.

That, and maybe a shit-ton of peanut butter.

Happy Friday.

1. Down to Clown. I’ve been saying this for almost 20 years now, despite an order of prohibition obtained by my children. I’m also supposed to never say “chillax.”

2. This has already happened. Listen closely the next time you’re there or at the mall.

3. Maybe I wasn’t going to say it exactly like that.

4. Sorry, I know I’ve used that line a lot.